Tiger Lillie (16 page)

“What?!”

Nausea literally begins creeping up my throat. But how can I tell her that? She seems so pleased with the idea.

“Lillie Pad, you’re going to look like Audrey Hepburn!”

Like that could ever happen! What a shame I can’t figure out this clothes stuff for myself.

“Did you like to play dolls when you were little?” I ask her. “Did you make their clothes?”

“Yep. In between beating up the neighborhood boys.”

Juney and Stefan complete their homework at the kitchen table, ruffling textbook pages and shuffling notes, asking questions about algebra and biology. Sometimes Pleasance fields the questions to me when she has too many pins in her mouth; sometimes she answers them herself.

“Should we have bagels or something in the conference room tomorrow morning?” I ask above the hum of the fabulous Viking sewing machine we bought when the business started.

“How about pastries? Don’t the English like sweets?”

Well…? “They
do
go better with tea, that’s for sure.”

Juney pops his head up from his books. “Maybe you should call Peach. Isn’t that his territory?”

The boy is so right.

Stefan jumps right up to get the cordless phone.

Pleasance has never told me where Juney and Stefan came from in the first place. She does such a good job at mothering, I wouldn’t dream of asking about the father of these boys. But I can’t help the fact that I wonder. And the fact that I just assume they’re illegitimate is horrible.

“If Miss Lillie would deign to get a cell phone, you wouldn’t have to bother, Stefan,” Pleasance says.

“I don’t mind, Mama.”

Good boy.

“Thanks, Stefan.” I throw a daggered expression at Pleasance. “It’ll be cheaper anyway.”

“You got that right.” Juney nods and smiles at me. And shoot, if Pleasance isn’t right! That special little spark of admiration gleams in his light brown eyes and it shoots off flares into mine before he looks down. Aw, bless that sweet boy’s heart. Now if that doesn’t make a girl feel good, I don’t know what does.

Of course, Peach has everything under control. I should have known.

By five o’clock the dress is basically put together and odds are it will fit perfectly. Pleasance informs me it’s time to go on home, and being the obedient person I am, I comply.

“You boys stay here,” she says. “I need to walk Lillie to her car.”

Oh no. A sermon cometh. I can feel it. I have no earthly idea why though.

Before I can grab the door handle, Pleasance lays a hand on my arm. “You white girls need to lighten up.”

“Huh?” That sure is out of the blue.

“Really, Lillie Pad. You are so hard on yourself. So you’re a size fourteen. Now where I come from, that’s just right.”

“You’re thin. And I’m a sixteen.”

“But I’ve got me a nice booty. And I’m proud of it, girl. Stop worrying about it. Just stop. You are a beautiful woman just the way God made you. You better stop telling Him He didn’t do a good job.”

“It’s easy for you to say, Bishop Stanley. It really is.”

“No. It isn’t. We all have our things we have to come to terms with.”

I cross my arms. “And yours would be…?”

“Look at the size of my hands and feet. Look at my face, Lillie, really. I’m very masculine-looking.”

“No…you’re not. You’re the most—”

“I’m telling you, really look.”

So, okay. I examine. She’s right.

She grins. “See? I told you so. But I don’t go around blabbering about it. I decided a long time ago to do the best with what God gave me. You’d be wise to do the same. You’d maybe begin to stop cutting yourself off at the knees, baby.”

“Oh, please, I don’t—”

“Get in the car. Just get your womanly, feminine self into the car right now. And tomorrow, when I dress you in something worthy of your femininity, I don’t want to hear word one from you, you hear? Go out and get a pair of winter white pumps this evening. You’ll be needing them.”

I just nod. But I think the whole conversation is Pleasance’s roundabout way of telling me to be quiet when I slip on the dress come morning.

“Pleasance? You’ve never told me about the kids’ father.”

“I don’t talk about it much. It’s painful.”

“Will you ever want to?”

“Why do you want to know?”

“Because you’re my friend, and I love you.”

She nods and inhales deeply, looks down. “He was killed in the Gulf War, Lillie.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Tell me about it. But he left me these children to carry on. Juney looks just like him.”

“He’s a good boy.”

“James was a good man. Anyway, maybe sometime I’ll tell you more about him. But it won’t be tonight.”

On the way back to Highlandtown, after visiting the massive shoe warehouse out in Hunt Valley, I tune into AM radio, and much to my delight Jaime Pickerson is riding some very high horse about something-or-other. I love that woman’s voice. Sounds like someone sprinkled coarse cinnamon sugar on her vocal cords and then rubbed them with a sun-dried washrag.

She’s talking about guns again. Every once in a while I run into her at the shooting range. More women than ever are buying guns these days, or so I’ve read. Well, at least they’re starting to get into the hands of sane people now. Still, I wonder how I’ll feel if I ever have to use one and I pray I won’t. It’s good to be overprepared sometimes.

“And by the way, listeners, I have an announcement to make! Brian and I eloped!”

“What?!” I scream, reaching for the cell phone I don’t own, the cell phone I thought I didn’t need, the cell phone whose absence I have lorded over the rest of this technologically dependent world.

“We leave for our honeymoon early tomorrow morning so Les Kin-solving will be…”

Oh man.

In communist Hungary the workers had a production quota set for each of them. They called it a
norma.

Poor Erzsèbet.

Every night she slogged into her shed knowing her paltry pay would be docked because she’d never be able to sort and clean that many bottles.

“Everyone equal,” Mom would say. “True. Everyone equally miserable and poor.”

“Some Utopia,” Dad would agree.

It worked like this: Some bureaucrat buffoon in the Ministry of Planning decided that in one shift a hard-working citizen could surely clean out some unbelievable number of bottles, some bureaucrat who’d never probably set foot in a winery, much less Erzsèbet’s winery in Sopron. And from then on, the wages would be set to that quota and her pay based on the percentage of the quota she fulfilled.

The Party of the People, by golly.

“No matter how hard I try, I’m the last in productivity on the list that always goes up on the wall,” Erzsèbet would complain to my mother each morning. And then she’d massage her own hands.

12

Lillie

“First round of business is the Pickerson wedding,” I say the next morning, exactly two hours before Remington and company are due.

“They’ve eloped!” Cristoff, darn him, blurts out before I can, the party pooper.

Peach scratches his belly as Pleasance slams a fist on the table and shouts, “What? I was up until three this morning cutting out fabric!”

“Do you know why?” Gert asks as she arranges teacups and saucers on the teacart she rolled all the way up Charles Street from their tiny row house down in South Baltimore just for this faux British occasion.

“Does it matter?” Cristoff sips his tomato juice and screws the cap back on.

I agree. “We’ve already spent a bucketload on this wedding.” The facade of our banks building comes to mind.

“What has she said about the balance on her account?” Peach asks.

“She’s on her honeymoon, remember?” Cristoff shakes his head. Cristoff has seen the books, the statements, the red ink in which we’re treading. We hide it from the others when we can.

I’m such a nincompoop. What in the world was I thinking when I called Pleasance and blabbered on about a little bit of funding, a little elbow grease, and so shall your success as a wedding planner come on you like a surprise inheritance from a long-lost uncle?

I feel hot. “I’ve got to get out of here.” And they let me go.

The black iron steps out back near the loading dock warm my behind, and I close my eyes in the morning sun. And I think.

So how long is too long? How long do you hang in there with a business waiting for it to get going? If I close up shop now, will it have been too soon? Will tomorrow have landed that big account?

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

The fact is, Stan Remington can save us. Really. But for how long? Who wants extreme weddings anyway? What a stupid, stupid idea.

Gentle fingers pull my braid to rest on my back. “Come back in, sweetie.” Gentle fingers pat my shoulder.

Oh, Cristoff.

I stand up and turn around. Why does he have to be so beautiful? Why will his love and care go wasted? And he takes me into his skinny arms and holds me close, tender fingers running over my cheek.

And I figure that maybe now would be a good time to cry. How did I, Lillian Elaine Bauer, Strong Hungarian Woman, find myself here?

“It was a bad idea from the start.”

“No, Lillie. We’ll make it work, baby doll, we really will.”

So I allow a few tears their due.

And Cristoff lets me cry. Because Cristoff knows me. Me.

One time, years ago, Cristoff said to me, “I wish I could love you, Lillie. Or rather, I wish I could be
in
love with you.”

There were times I wished the same thing.

Grandma Erzsèbet scrubbed floors down in Canton after she, Mom, Babi, and Luca arrived in Baltimore.

“It hurts the knees,” she sometimes told Mom when she’d come home after midnight. She’d kiss her eldest child’s face as she lay in the dark of the one bedroom they rented in a small boarding house nearby. “But it’s warm, Katherina, and the water is warm and I bought a little hand cream for myself.”

She bought a little hand cream.

I step into the conference room.

“You’re beautiful, Lillie! Look at her, Gert. Ain’t she something?” Peach wipes away a tear glistening in the spray of sunlight trailing through the conference room window. Bless that man’s wonderful heart.

“Well, call 911. I’m about to have a heart attack!” Cristoff runs over and touches my hair, the very same hair Pleasance pulled back in a subdued french twist. “We’ve got this contract in the
bag
sweetie!”

“Well, don’t tell me about it; tell Pleasance. It’s her doing.”

Like this is really me, you know?

I mean, true beauty doesn’t require an overhaul like
this.
Although, let’s face it, at least I don’t need collagen injections or facial reconstruction to achieve this. What we have here is the phrase
working the best you can with what you have
taken to a level I’ve never before experienced. The team on those talk shows could have done no better than Pleasance.

A cream sash at the waist adds the perfect touch, matching my new pumps.

And she stands there looking like some mentor character in one of those feel-good-movies-of-the-year when her protégée wins the race, earns the approval of the boss, or simply accepts herself warts and all, and all. “See, Lillie Pad? I am a miracle worker!”

And they all clap and I don’t know whether to be insulted or not. So I glance at my watch instead. “Ten minutes!” And I pick up my planner from the conference table. “Water on for tea?”

Peach nods. “As soon as we fall out.”

“Music?”

“Best of Bread!”
Gert says. “Peach told me those guys were big back in the seventies.”

Cristoff doubles over and excuses himself.

“I was thinking classical, Gert.”

“Oh.” She looks down.

“Don’t you have a cassette tape down there from Victoria’s Secret a few Christmases ago?” Peach asks, slipping an arm around her sizable waist.

Here he comes to save the day!

“I’ll go get it!” She scoots joyfully out on her tan walking sneakers.

“Swatches?”

“Got a bunch.” Pleasance.

“And, Peach, refreshments?”

“British tea things ready to go.”

I know better than to ask for a rundown.

Cristoff slides back into the room, composed but still the color of a lover’s rose.

“Floral? Set design, Cristoff?”

“All our past weddings and”—he holds up a portfolio—“I was sketching ideas all night.”

Examining the list in my planner, I say, “Okay, here are the possible themes we worked up. Let me know if I’ve missed any.”

And so I read down the list, alphabetized, naturally. You know, I work with a crazy group of individuals, which this list proves.

“Ararat: Climb Every Mountain.
This is a joke, right? Mount Ararat?”

“Theme, baby.
Theme”
Pleasance wags a finger. “Not actuality. And didn’t you say Stan got religion? A little Old Testament never hurt anybody. Except maybe the Canaanites.”

Quickly before Cristoff engages Pleasance in a theological discussion on the nature of God, I read the rest, ending with,
“Roll Over Beethoven.
Doesn’t that seem too, well,
sensual?
You know? I mean he is a rock star. They can make anything seem dirty.”

Pleasance looks at the ceiling. “Lillie Pad!”

“Well?”

Peach shakes his head. “It entered my mind, too.”

“Cristoff?”

“Me too.”

“How about
Get Bach to Where You Once Belonged
instead?” I ask.

“Whoa, Lillie!” Cristoff claps. “Honey, we must be rubbing off on you! That was creative.”

“Okay, five minutes to show time. Let’s go.”

And Peach hurries away to put on the kettle. And Cristoff runs to fetch the nosegay he assembled for the bride. And Pleasance just sits in her seat looking like the Queen of Sheba.

I run to the powder room to check myself out in the mirror. I examine the face staring back at me. Well, just go figure.

I’m not quite sure what I expected, but it sure isn’t
this
guy! Stan Remington, larger than life, messy-haired, leather-laden, fist-waving, lip-curling, pale-skinned performer extraordinaire, takes up less vertical space than I do! And Ursula Aitcheson, his myopic, concert violist fiancée hardly fits the description of “the woman who tamed a rock star.” I’ve never seen such sensible shoes in my life and that sweater must have been knitted before the Civil War. She lays her viola case on the table.

“I never leave it in the car. Temperature changes and all. I have rehearsal after this.”

“No problem.” I imagine her car and the description of her needs regarding said car being, “It gets me where I want to go.” I think of my car. “It makes me who I’d like to be.”

I hate myself.

I wish everything didn’t seem so horribly important. I wish I could just be.

Gordon touches my elbow. “Lillie, I’d like you to meet my brother Stan and his bride-to-be, Ursula.”

“A pleasure.” I try as natural a smile as possible and I have to admit, I feel like an idiot in my Audrey Hepburn getup. My normal fare would have been much more appropriate for this unassuming-looking bride. I know without a doubt my smile is a failure so I turn quickly and gesture toward the conference table. “Shall we have a seat?”

Stan removes his beret, revealing hair cut just like his brothers. The color, however, reminds me of birch bark, mostly white, with some dark brown hairs congregating in occasional groups. I guess everybody ages, but one simply expects rock-‘n’-rollers’ demeanors to coincide with their musical expression.

He must have detected a kind of quizzical expression on my face, because Stan Remington says, “I wear a wig on stage.”

Ursula nods. “He has a costume designer, too. Weirdest guy you’ve ever seen. And I’ve seen weird.”

Pleasance perks up. “Really? A costume designer? I figured bands had to have a method to their fashion mayhem.”

Stan widens eyes as blue as his brother’s. “It’s not what I got into rock-‘n’-roll for, sweetheart, believe me. But these days in the industry, nothing is left to chance. Same as in everything, I guess.”

“That’s what I think”—I jerk a thumb at Cristoff—“but Cristoff here, our floral designer, thinks every second involves a personal choice of some sort. Have a seat.”

Stan nods and sits down, first pulling a chair out for Ursula. “Now, that’s something I’ve been reading about a lot lately. This whole who-chooses-who in regard to faith.” He digs his elbows into the plum lacquer of the tabletop, his pitted, dissipated features flaring up under some youthful curiosity. “What do you think?”

Now being Episcopalian and all (and let’s face it, growing up with that Hungarian resolve), well, it isn’t easy to guess, if one knows anything about doctrine, where I should fall. But I don’t. I got hold of Calvin’s
Institutes
one day and there I went, much to Daddy’s chagrin, off into what he calls, “that fatalistic camp of self-professed automatons.” But what if Stan doesn’t feel that way? What if he suddenly says, “Well, actually, I was leaning more toward the whole freedom-of-choice bit, so I don’t think I want some absurd Calvinist planning the most important day of my life.”

Ursula relaxes in her seat. “I’m a Presbyterian.”

I practically scream, the relief so great.

Cristoff leans forward and pushes his binders toward the center of the table. “I’m Church of God.”

Pleasance’s eyes grow and she shakes her head. “Well, I’m not sure what this has to do with weddings, but I grew up A.M.E. Haven’t been to church in years though.”

“Peach is Catholic,” I feel the need to say.

“Peach?” Stan says. “Who’s Peach?”

“Our caterer. Devout man. Bristly, too. Like one of those prickly pears,” I say. “But sweet on the inside. He’s making us some tea.”

“Tea? Lovely.”

Now, I don’t know if it’s just me, but this rocker, who looks like some decomposition virus started eating away at him in the Great Guns glory days, saying words like, “Tea? Lovely,” just plain freaks me out. I have to hold in my laughter.

Stan sits back, comfortable. “Well, while we’re waiting for the tea, let’s talk about doctrine for a bit then. This is still so new to me. Now Gordon here, he’s been a faithful fellow for years now.”

I turn to Gordon. “Really?”

He points to his prosthesis. “Even have this to show for it.”

“Wow,” Pleasance breathes.

“No kidding,” Cristoff whispers.

Pleasance begins to fidget. Poor thing. She’s not all that comfortable with religious talk around strangers. “I made something of myself all by myself,” she’s said to me before. But she knows better than to change a subject a client has raised.

Well, an invigorating conversation ensues, Cristoff and Gordon on the free-will-of-man side of the court, Ursula and me lobbing our shots from the God-chooses side, having a marvelous time. Pleasance excuses herself after fifteen minutes to help Peach and Gert serve the tea, and I realize afresh I forgot what faith is all about. See, I always thought of my faith as simply salvation. Well, I’m promised salvation, future tense, salvation from the flames of hell. But faith is day by day, right? Faith is about this minute, this hour, this year, this lifetime. This sin, this fault, this stumble. Faith is about victory despite that, even though the victory is not your own. I look at Stan and Gordon, Ursula and Cristoff, and they seem so excited about this stuff. And they should be. But I haven’t felt like this in years.