Sister of the Bride (2 page)

When Barbara took her fingers out of her ears she discovered that the telephone in the kitchen was ringing. This was a welcome sound. The telephone might keep her from studying chemistry on a sunny afternoon just a little while longer. It had rung several times before she was able to reach the
kitchen and silence it by saying, “Hello?”

“Hello, Barby.” It was Rosemary, muffled and breathless, calling from across the bay. “Guess what? I've found someone to take my work shift and I'm coming home this weekend.”

This was not unusual. Certainly it was nothing to be so excited about. “You sound funny. Do you have a cold or something?” asked Barbara. Her fib to Tootie had been partially turned into the truth.

“No. I'm calling from a phone booth down at the corner drugstore. I didn't want to talk on the pay phone in the hall.”

This was strange. Rosemary usually made her calls from a pay telephone on a stair landing in Stebbins Hall, where she lived. There was rarely anything private about her conversation. “Why not?” asked Barbara, now picturing her sister in a telephone booth, her golden-red hair shining against its dark walls.

“Look. I can't talk all day. This is a pay phone and I have only twenty cents,” said Rosemary. “Just tell Mom I'll be home late Friday afternoon and to please have something besides meat loaf and string beans for supper.”

“All right. But why the excitement?” Barbara
knew her sister's excitement was caused by something other than her desire for a change from meat loaf and string beans, a once-weekly dormitory menu.

“Can you keep a secret? A big one?” asked Rosemary.

“Well…I can work at it,” said Barbara. “You know how women are.”

“This is no time to be funny,” said Rosemary. “Not on my twenty cents.”

“I can keep a secret,” promised Barbara.

“Barby, I'm going to get married!” Rosemary's voice was filled with joy and excitement.

Barbara was stunned into silence. Married? Her sister married? She knew Rosemary had become more sophisticated since she had gone away to college, but she had no idea…
married
. Why, she was only eighteen. She still had bands on her teeth.

“Are you still there?” asked Rosemary.

“Yes, I'm here,” said Barbara.

“Then say something,” pleaded Rosemary.

“But who are you going to marry?” asked Barbara, wondering if she should have known without asking.

“Greg, of course, silly.” Now that she had shared
her secret Rosemary's tone was light, almost gay. “Who else?”

Who else was right. It had been Greg this and Greg that every time Rosemary came home from school since Christmas vacation. Barbara should not have been surprised. But she was surprised. Rosemary had liked so many boys. Or men, as she called them now that she was in college. “You mean you're in love?” Barbara asked.

“Of course I'm in love!” Rosemary's muffled voice was almost singing. “Why didn't anybody ever tell me being in love, really, truly in love, was so wonderful?”

Barbara, who was in no position to answer, knew this question was purely rhetorical.

“My time is up,” said Rosemary hurriedly. “Remember it's a secret until I tell Mom and Dad.”

Barbara could not let her sister go. “Wait!” she cried desperately. “Borrow some money. Do something, but don't hang up!”

A moment of silence came over the telephone. “All right,” agreed Rosemary. “I see a couple of girls I know at the soda fountain. They ought to have twenty cents between them.”

“At least tell me when you're going to get married,” begged Barbara.

“June.”

“
This
June?”

“Of course.”

It was too soon. April was almost gone. May, then June. There wasn't much time. “When in June?” persisted Barbara.

“The tenth. That's between spring semester and summer session,” explained Rosemary, as if this made everything very clear.

“But what's that got to do with it?” Barbara wanted to know.

“We're going to summer session,” said Rosemary.

This was too much for Barbara to comprehend. “When are you going to tell Mom and Dad?”

“That's why I'm coming home this weekend.” Rosemary's voice lost its lilt and took on a worried note. “What do you think Dad is going to say?”

“Well…” was Barbara's doubtful answer.

“He seemed to like Greg when I brought him home for dinner that time during spring vacation,” Rosemary reminded her sister. “Except for that one argument, and I think he was just having fun baiting Greg. At least I hope so.”

“Yes….” The family usually liked the boys whom Rosemary brought home. They poked fun at some of them, but since Rosemary had gone
away to college they had liked most of the boys or, at any rate, had not found anything seriously wrong with them. They had been more critical when she was in high school. “But you know Dad…And Dad might have been serious about that argument. You know how he is about printing.”

“I know, I know Dad,” said Rosemary. “That's what's bothering me.”

Speculating on their father's possible reaction disturbed Barbara, too.
Marriage
. Till death do them part. It sounded so permanent. Their father was sure to feel that there was a big difference between asking a boy home to dinner and marrying him. She could not guess what his reaction might be, but she did know that if he disapproved he would not hesitate to say so and say so forcefully. She recalled that once when Rosemary had bought a cotton skirt with
L'amour! L'amour! L'amour!
printed all over it he had made her return it to the store. He said it made her look boy crazy.

“Say something,” pleaded Rosemary from across the bay.

“There isn't much I can say,” said Barbara. “You know he may go straight through the ceiling.”

“I know.” There was despair in Rosemary's voice.

“And Mom will say, ‘Now, now. Let's talk it over.'”
Barbara hoped she was offering some comfort.

“I know,” repeated Rosemary. “Well, I guess I'll find out soon enough, and I'll manage Dad somehow. Look, meet me at the bus around five o'clock Friday afternoon, and don't breathe a word to anybody. Promise?”

“I promise,” agreed Barbara.

There was a sudden wail from the other end of the line. “Oh-h! They're leaving!” The receiver was slammed onto its hook, and Barbara knew that her sister had dashed out of the telephone booth to borrow twenty cents.

Well. Rosemary engaged to be married. Barbara still could not believe it. Bewildered, she continued to stand with her hand on the telephone. Rosemary married to Greg…what was his last name? Aldredge. Dark, slight Greg. That was a bit of disappointment. Barbara had always pictured both her sister and herself marrying tall men. She searched her mind for every scrap of information about Greg Aldredge. She knew he had originally come from the East, because he had amused the MacLanes by his references to “out here.” Out here people were friendlier. Out here people were less conventional. That sort of thing. His family now lived someplace farther down the peninsula below San Francisco.
He was a graduate student, majoring in English and minoring in history. No, it was the other way around. His major was history and his minor English. He had a brother who was a premed student at the university and a sister who was a physical education major. He had an old car, and he had spent two years in the Air Force. This was all the specific information Barbara could summon about Greg. Except, of course, the argument.

Stunned as she was, Barbara could not help smiling as she recalled the talk at the dinner table the evening Rosemary had brought Greg home. Mr. MacLane, whose students printed the yearbook in the school print shop, had remarked that the yearbook staff wanted the names under the pictures of the graduating class printed entirely in lowercase type. Mr. MacLane, a man who pretended exasperation with the human race, was particular about capital letters, punctuation, and proper syllabification at the end of a line. Any student who divided En-glish into Engl-ish caught it from Mr. MacLane. He was famous for saying, “If you don't know, look it up” to his classes, and this earned him the nickname of Old Look-it-up MacLane. Naturally he was impatient with a yearbook staff that had such a notion as reducing capital letters to lowercase letters.

Greg made the mistake of mentioning the poet E. E. Cummings, who did not use capital letters or punctuation and often ran words together for effect. Of course this provoked an argument from Mr. MacLane. What if every author took it in his head to throw away the rules? What kind of books would we have then? Books that no one would read, that's what we would have. Greg felt that the printer's job was to print the text, not criticize the author's art. Not that he did not respect punctuation, you understand, sir, but…Mr. MacLane had a lot to say about the contribution of the printer to the art of bookmaking, and Greg had been silent or, anyway, had kept still.

“Sister, help to trim the sail. Hallelujah!” Gordy sang with a new chord, bringing Barbara back to the present. Still she did not move. Gay, popular Rosemary washing socks? Impossible. Now why did I think of a thing like that? Barbara asked herself. Marriage was not washing socks. It was love and moonlight and orange blossoms. Things like that. New dishes, new clothes, everything brand-new all at once. Oh dear, now she would never catch up with Rosemary.

And a wedding, Barbara thought suddenly, meant bridesmaids, flowers, parties, presents…
and she was going to be in on all the fun. The gloom she had felt after her walk home from school was entirely gone now. The secret began to well up within her until she felt as if she would burst if she did not tell someone.

“Jordan's river is deep and wide,” sang Gordy. “Hallelujah!”

I won't tell, Barbara reminded herself. I promised. Cross my heart and hope to die. Unanswered questions flooded her thoughts. Forty cents' worth of telephone conversation had not been nearly enough. There would be several bridesmaids, of course, with Barbara, the bride's only sister, as maid of honor in blue with a nosegay of pink roses. Or perhaps green with yellow roses. That would become a brown-eyed blonde. Barbara decided she must start reading the society pages to find out about these things.

Now in her imagination Barbara, maid of honor, was coming out of the church on the arm of a college man, who was attentive to her all during the reception. People were looking at them and smiling and thinking, What an attractive couple they make. Now she was waiting with the bridesmaids for Rosemary to throw her bouquet…she was
catching it…everyone was smiling and nodding. Of course the maid of honor would be the next bride.

Just then Mrs. MacLane startled Barbara by opening the back door and carrying in a bag of groceries. “Help me bring in the rest of the things, will you, dear? I'm late because I stopped at the Department of Motor Vehicles to pick up copies of the motor vehicle code for my ninth graders. They're all interested in driving cars, and I thought traffic rules might be something that would interest them in reading.” Mrs. MacLane taught three classes of slow students, of which the ninth grade English class was the most difficult.

“Sure, Mom.” Barbara was surprised that her mother had noticed nothing unusual. Her one thought, Rosemary is going to get married, was so intense, she felt it must surely be audible.

“Sister, help to trim the sail!” sang Gordy in a new experimental way that was almost a howl.

“Goodness,” remarked Mrs. MacLane, “I should think Sister would have that sail trimmed by now. This has been going on for at least a week.”

Barbara was glad to escape to the garage to pull a bag of groceries out of the luggage compartment.
As she did so, a can of cat food tumbled out and rolled down the driveway. This was Tuesday, she thought as she ran after it. Wednesday, Thursday, and then Friday. She did not see how she could ever keep a secret that long. But she had to. She had promised.

If the secret within Barbara had been written in music, this part of her day would have been marked
crescendo
. The news seemed gradually to increase in force within her until she felt as if she must shout, “Rosemary is going to get married!” While she set the table for dinner she tried to think of something else—school, her English assignment, Tootie, anything—but her thoughts always flew back to Rosemary and her wedding. A lovely wedding in June, with Barbara as maid of honor catching the bridal bouquet. Oh joy, oh bliss and a handsome best man, hallelujah, her thoughts sang as she folded the paper napkins in half. April, May, June, here comes the bride, hallelujah!

Mrs. MacLane, who was unpacking groceries in the kitchen, remarked, “The Safeway had another special on pork and beans. It's a good thing Gordy never seems to tire of them. And there was a special on cat food for that cat of his. I do hope Buster won't turn up his nose at this brand.”

Beans and cat food. Barbara felt a twinge of pity for her mother as she got out the greens and the wooden bowl and started to prepare the salad. There seemed to be no room in her soul for poetry since the school board, hearing that she had a teaching credential, had prevailed upon her to take over three classes of slow students. But then, of course, her mother did not realize there was going to be a wedding in the family so soon.

Mrs. MacLane began to pack the meat she had bought into the refrigerator, and Buster came running into the kitchen to rub against her legs and purr hoarsely. “Scat,” said Mrs. MacLane, and gave Buster a shove with her foot. “Wouldn't it be nice if people purred as charmingly as cats when they are hungry? Half the quarrels in the world would never take place.”

“Especially people like Gordy,” agreed Barbara.

As if in answer Buster stopped purring, fixed Mrs. MacLane with his crossed blue eyes, and
began to swear, as only a Siamese cat can.

“Speaking of Gordy,” said Mrs. MacLane, “he'd better feed this cat if I am ever to get dinner on the table. Gordy!” she called above the sound of the record player. “Come and feed your cat, so I can get dinner in peace.”

Gordy slouched into the kitchen. His mother looked at the tousled hair, the hanging shirttail, the sneakers without laces, and did not conceal her irritation. “Gordy, can't you pull yourself together? You look so untidy. I don't like to see you look so sloppy.”

“Aw, Mom, do you have to pick on me all the time?” Gordy asked. “No matter what I do somebody in this family is always picking on me.”

“Gordy, I'm not picking on you!” Mrs. MacLane snapped. “But there is no excuse—”

“Mother, you just said people should purr when they are hungry,” Barbara reminded her mother, as she finished the salad. “You'd better start purring.”

Mrs. MacLane laughed ruefully, and Barbara felt this was a good time to let her mother have the kitchen to herself. She went into the living room and flopped down on the couch, where she looked critically around the living room and dining room. The wedding would not be here. Rosemary would
want to be married over in Woodmont, the next town, in the church the family had attended since Barbara could remember. The towns of this county, the population of which had doubled and redoubled in the past twenty years, were so close together that it was easy enough to drive to the church of one's preference in a few minutes, even though it was in another town. This was what Rosemary would want to do. There was no question about that.

But the reception? The house was less shabby since her mother had gone back to teaching. The carpet was not quite a year old, and a chair had been reupholstered long enough for the newness to wear off that had made the other chairs look shabby by comparison. It was a comfortable house of no particular style or period. But would Rosemary want the reception here? Barbara wondered. She speculated about the cost of a wedding reception at the country club, even though she knew this was out of the question. Oh well, there was really no point in trying to plan the wedding until Rosemary came home.

Barbara picked up a magazine that was lying on the couch. She tried to read a story, but she was too wedding minded and the advertisements were
too distracting. Pictures of silverware made her wonder which pattern she would choose if she were Rosemary. Finally Barbara settled on a perfectly plain pattern that looked as if it could be inherited from someone's grandmother. It would go well with anything. Next, she selected two kinds of bath towels—plain blue and white, printed with blue roses—coordinated, the advertisement said, with sheets and pillowcases, also printed with blue roses. If Barbara were the bride instead of Rosemary she certainly would want to be coordinated. She read on. Refrigerators, washing machines, even detergents and scouring pads, took on interest in the light of Rosemary's news. Oh, but Rosemary was going to have fun. All that shopping…wedding presents…packages to unwrap. Barbara dreamed on until she was called to dinner.

She continued to dream of the wedding through dinner and only half listened to an argument between her father and Gordy. Gordy told his father that he was probably born with a C mind and, in that case, it was senseless to expect him to be an A student. His father pointed out that people who were born with C minds simply had to work harder. They often did better than A minds
who wasted their talents. And anyway, Gordy wasn't going to get by with that old C-mind argument in this household. He was a MacLane, wasn't he? That was enough.

Barbara was suddenly aware that she had been so busy daydreaming about the wedding and trying to keep the lid on Rosemary's secret that she had completely forgotten to mention her telephone call. “Oh, by the way,” she said, in what she hoped was an offhand manner. “Rosemary phoned this afternoon. She said to tell you she was coming home Friday for the weekend.”

“Just before midterms?” Mrs. MacLane expressed surprise. “Her appointment with the dentist isn't until a week from Saturday. Did she say anything else?”

I won't tell, I won't tell, Barbara thought desperately as she said, “She said please don't have meat loaf and string beans for dinner.”

“I like meat loaf and string beans,” protested Gordy.

“You like anything that will fill you up,” his father reminded him.

Who wants to eat meat loaf and string beans when she is in love? Barbara asked herself. Nobody. Love calls for strawberries and angel food
cake and meringue and possibly, for something more filling, cheese
soufflé
. Fluffy things.

“I know how monotonous dormitory food can be, especially in springtime.” Mrs. MacLane, who had attended the university during the Depression, sympathized with Rosemary's request. “I remember how I used to long for fresh asparagus and strawberries when it seemed as if we had been living on carrots and bread pudding all winter. I saw some fresh strawberries in the market today. I think we'll have them for a treat when Rosemary comes home, even though they are a little high yet.”

Barbara wished her mother had not mentioned the cost of strawberries. She would prefer to have Rosemary eating strawberries, oblivious of the price because she was in love. Sometimes her mother seemed positively earthbound by the details of living, but then she did not know she had a daughter in love. Not yet. Barbara rose to clear away the dishes and to serve the lemon meringue pie, which her mother had already cut. There were little beads of brown moisture rising from the meringue, causing Barbara to reflect that although her mother was a good enough cook, she would never be invited to go back East to take part in a Pillsbury bake-off contest.

“I don't think she should come home when she has to study for midterms,” remarked Mr. MacLane. “I don't care how much meat loaf she has had to eat at school.”

“Perhaps she feels she can get more studying done at home,” suggested Mrs. MacLane. “Sometimes it's hard to study with a roommate and her friends around all the time. What does surprise me is that she could tear herself away from Greg, the way she talks about him all the time.”

Barbara, who had served the pie, now took her place at the table. She was careful to keep her eyes on her pie.

“Who knows? Maybe they've had a fight. Maybe our daughter is coming home to mend her broken heart,” said Mr. MacLane jovially. “You know how kids are.”

The family ate the pie with the beady meringue in silence for a few minutes. Barbara tried to think of something to say that was far removed from the subject of Rosemary and Greg, but all she could think of was her walk home with Tootie Bodger, and she was not particularly eager to mention him. Her mother was always so enthusiastic about Tootie. He was such a nice boy, she said, in spite of that ridiculous nickname. Barbara decided that if
she absolutely had to, she would fling Tootie into the conversation to keep her family from asking too many questions about Rosemary, but only as a last desperate measure. She was beginning to feel worn-out from the excitement of her secret. Maybe by now she was too tired even to want to tell it. She hoped so.

People should keep their own secrets, Barbara thought suddenly. Rosemary had not been able to contain her secret and, to relieve her own crescendo feeling, had passed it on to Barbara who, according to the unreasonable rules of secrets, had to contain it or feel that she had betrayed her trust. It was not fair.

“Tom, do you think Rosemary is getting serious about this Greg? Really serious, I mean,” Mrs. MacLane suddenly asked her husband. “She has talked about nothing but Greg for months, and now they've been going to museums together. You know that isn't a bit like Rosemary.”

Gordy agreed. “A wienie roast is more her speed.”

If I were a character in a comedy, I would either choke on my pie or spill my milk, thought Barbara, who did neither, even though she would have liked to distract her parents in some way.
Perhaps this was the moment to fling Tootie Bodger into the conversation.

“I hope not,” said Mr. MacLane. “She's only eighteen, and she has three more years of college.”

“I know…” said Mrs. MacLane thoughtfully, “but girls get married younger nowadays. You know that. And a girl as attractive as Rosemary is bound to meet someone sooner or later in such a large school.”

“She had better buckle down and bring up her grades if she expects to stay there long enough to meet him,” observed Mr. MacLane.

“I wonder if Greg had anything to do with her poor grades last semester,” mused Mrs. MacLane. “Or was it the shock of finding herself one of over twenty thousand students after a small high school?”

“She's up against competition that is a lot stiffer than anything she has ever faced before,” Mr. MacLane pointed out, as he pulled a cigar out of his shirt pocket and took off the cellophane wrapper. He always settled back and smoked a cigar after dinner, and there was nothing his daughters could do about it. “Besides, why on earth would she want to marry Greg?” he asked in the jovial manner a cigar always evoked. “I doubt if he could support her in the style to which she is accus
tomed, and that style includes twenty-five dollars a month for the orthodontist. I'm certainly not going to support her after she gets married.”

“She won't be wearing bands very much longer,” said Mrs. MacLane.

Oh,
thought Barbara, nervously rolling the edge of the place mat between her fingers, this is
awful
. Now it was too late to throw in Tootie Bodger to save Rosemary. “I thought Greg was nice,” she said, and hoped her remark was not significantly conspicuous.

Mrs. MacLane considered Greg. “For one thing, he is older than Rosemary and has been in the Air Force. I think she finds that attractive.”

Mr. MacLane lit his cigar, shook the lighted match, and blew out a puff of smoke. “If it's age she wants, I'm sure she can find someone more decrepit than Greg.”

Oh, swell, thought Barbara miserably. Now he was going to start being funny. She was sure of one thing.
Her
husband, if she ever had one, would never smoke cigars. That was qualification number one. Positively no cigar smoking. Qualification number two: Be serious about his daughters.

“Barbara, get me an ashtray,” Mr. MacLane ordered.

“Sure, Dad.” Barbara was glad to leave the table even for a moment. She would have liked to excuse herself altogether, but the conversation had such a horrid fascination she could not bring herself to miss it.

Mr. MacLane accepted the ashtray. “A man's home is his castle,” he informed his family. “He has a right to expect ashtrays to be handy and salt shakers to be full at all times.”

“And never find nylons dripping in the bathroom,” prompted Barbara, hoping her father would elaborate on a man's home is his castle. This was a subject that could keep him going as long as his cigar lasted. The vacuum cleaner should never be run while the man of the castle was listening to the ball game. Telephone calls from other girls should not exceed five minutes. Anything worth saying could be said in that length of time. That sort of thing, on and on in a bantering way that had a serious undercurrent.

Mrs. MacLane, however, was not ready to let the subject of Rosemary drop. “I wouldn't like to see her get really serious about a boy when she is only eighteen. It seems so awfully young.”

“Rosemary married? That's a laugh.” Gordy, having finished the last crumb of piecrust, was ready
to join the conversation. “Remember that time she cooked the cucumbers, because she thought they were zucchini? The poor guy would starve to death.”

Mr. MacLane leaned back in his chair and exhaled a cloud of blue smoke. “Supposing she is serious about him,” he said good-naturedly. “That doesn't guarantee he is serious about her. She'll have to catch him before she can marry him.”

Barbara kept her mouth shut tight.

“E. E. Cummings,” said Mr. MacLane derisively, and Barbara could see that he was all set for one of those half-jovial, bantering conversations. “I would hate to see any daughter of mine throw herself away on someone who approved of writers who did not use punctuation or capitals. This fellow Greg probably likes
archy and mehitabel
, too.”