Authors: GINGER STRAND
The darkness of everything swirls beneath Margaret, threatening to suck her down. She takes a deep breath.
“Trevor!” someone shouts on the deck. “Look how big you’ve got!”
Of course he’s bigger,
she thinks without letting the smile leave her face.
That’s how it works. Time passes, and things change.
“Doug,” she says, walking toward him.
Upstairs, Leanne hears yet another person squealing over Trevor as she looks at herself in the mirror. The party has begun. This is it, except it feels unreal. All these people are arriving and standing around chatting, eating and drinking on her behalf, hers and Kit’s. She should be down there hugging aunts, kissing old family friends
on the cheek and remarking on how much their children have grown. Margaret is surely doing just that, helping Carol steer the party like a large ship while Leanne dawdles upstairs, acting like an adolescent.
She has always enjoyed the moments right before something happens. At home, with her store, it’s when she arrives, unlocking the door and firing up the coffeemaker she keeps for customers and employees alike. There’s something exquisite about that quiet time before the day has truly begun, before the first person walks through the door asking for pure wool yarn or an embroidery hoop. In those moments, the possibilities are limitless. The day could go in any direction, just as now the party could go in any direction. It’s like the beauty of a canvas before the first mark has been made.
Her life is like that, she thinks. It’s still a blank canvas, and marrying Kit is like drawing a line on it. It’s not irreversible—married people split up all the time—but once you’ve been married, you can never be truly unmarried again, only divorced. It sets a mark on your life that can’t be erased. She has never done anything that indelible.
Marriage should feel like a beginning, not an end. But every beginning requires there be an end to something else. Leanne looks at herself in the mirror. All at once she’s sick of seeing herself. The same straight brown hair, the same brown eyes, the same nose with a minuscule, almost unnoticeable bump on the left side. She’s not unattractive; she’s just bored. She pulls her hair back and twists it around, lifting it to the back of her head. Perhaps she should put it up.
“Hey there.” It’s Kit. She sees him behind her in the mirror, standing in the door of the bathroom in navy pants and a pale brown linen shirt. He looks nice. “Are you ready to go and face the crowd?”
“I’m sick of me,” Leanne says. “I want to be someone else.”
Kit smiles as he leans against the doorframe. “Do you want to be me?” he asks. “We could trade.”
Leanne considers. She looks from Kit to herself in the mirror. Would she want to be Kit? When she was little, she used to wish she
were a boy. She used to imagine how nice it would be to run that fast, to move so carelessly and lightly through the world. But in other ways, being a boy seemed like the worst thing possible. All that activity, all that compulsion to compete. Now she’s not so sure. Sometimes when she’s having sex with Kit, she tries to imagine that she’s the man and he’s the woman. It’s almost impossible to do.
“No,” she says slowly, as if it’s a real option. “I guess I don’t want to be you.”
“Why not?” He gives her an expression of mock injury. Leanne turns her back on the mirror and leans against the dresser, facing him. He has mirth in his eyes, and she tries to make her face match his.
“Because I’d still be stuck with me!”
Will emerges from his bedroom as Kit and Leanne are coming out of the bathroom. He steps aside to let them pass, then follows them down the stairs.
“Oh, here’s the happy couple!” someone cries.
Things are well under way. From the staircase, Will can see a cluster of relatives near the door. The front door is open, and Carol is nearby, chatting with a group of people who recently arrived. There’s another cluster in the doorway to the kitchen, and voices coming from the living room.
“Well, Will.” His brother, George, shakes his hand, which seems strange and vaguely awkward. “You’re finally getting rid of the last one.”
“That’s right.” Will nods and chuckles, as he will undoubtedly have to do a hundred more times tonight. Getting rid of his last one. He senses somebody standing next to him and thinks it’s going to be Carol. He’s surprised when he turns and sees Bernice.
“George, this is Kit’s mother, Bernice Lewiston,” Will says, “Bernice, this is my brother, George.”
“How lovely to meet you.” Bernice’s voice is a hard toffee, sweet but somehow unpalatable. She is wearing something wispy and colorful,
and has fastened her hair with a sparkly rhinestoned barrette. Will can’t help but keep glancing at the barrette. It seems wrong. It seems like something a little girl would wear, or a flirty coed, not an English woman of Bernice’s age and stature.
“You done flying yet?” George asks, and out of the corner of his eye, Will can see Bernice turning toward him with an expectant smile. “Gracious,” that’s the word he would use to describe her. But it’s a studied graciousness. He shifts his weight and scratches one arm with the other hand. She makes him nervous, standing there waiting patiently for his answer. It’s as if she expects something from him.
“Well,” Will says, looking around the room. “I don’t know about that. I don’t know if I’ll ever be done flying.”
Walking by him, Leanne hears him say it.
No, he won’t,
she tells herself. She and Kit work their way through the foyer. Leanne greets people, introduces Kit, thanks everyone for coming. People address her as she passes.
“Are you excited?”
“Oh, yes.” When she’s faking friendliness, her voice develops a false ring that sounds incredibly obvious to her. She hates hearing it. She clears her throat, trying to make her voice sound normal. She’s shaking the hand of one of her mother’s friends, and the woman’s hand feels damp and slightly too warm, like something rotten. Leanne resists the overwhelming urge to drop it, to pull away from the woman and go wash her own hands.
“Hey, Pester!” Eddie says. He turns around as she reaches the edge of the foyer, drawing her into the living room. Grateful, she walks toward her cousin. Surely things will be better there. Kit stays at her side.
“God,” she says quietly to Eddie. “It’s quite the turnout, isn’t it?”
Eddie smirks toward the foyer. “Just wait till my mom gets her hands on you.”
Leanne shivers a little. The living room door is open, and after a
day of muggy heat, there seems to be a cool breeze coming in. She tightens her grip on the glass of soda someone handed her.
“Kind of makes you wish you’d eloped, don’t it?” Eddie says. He drains the glass in his hand, watching Leanne over the top of it. When Leanne and Margaret were young, he seemed like the height of cool. He taught them to smoke, to identify car models, to listen to the Clash, to use the latest curse words. He introduced Margaret to Doug, and once or twice he took Leanne to Kalamazoo to play minigolf. Now he seems like a far less glamorous character, divorced, working in a factory, living in a Ryville apartment as he slides toward middle age. He sees his boys on weekends, probably taking them to monster-truck rallies or the local double-A baseball game with all the other divorced dads.
“You look a little sick,” he says to Leanne. “You need a drink.”
When they were little, Rem and Aunt Janice used to hang around on Sunday afternoons, drinking Jim Beam and eating chips. Sometimes Carol, Leanne, and Margaret would visit when Will was away on a trip. There was something incredibly comforting about Rem and Janice’s house. Margaret was always trying to get everyone to go do something—a movie or a walk to the nearby lake—and even their mother would sometimes shake her head on the way home. “What a waste of a Sunday,” she would say, but to Leanne it seemed ideal. Everyone was content there, willing to take the afternoon as it came. She wished they could go there all the time.
“You’re right,” she tells her cousin. “A drink is exactly what I need.”
“I’ll get us some champagne,” Kit says, surprising her with his presence. He puts a hand on Leanne’s arm and squeezes lightly. It’s a squeeze meant to speak volumes, but whether to reassure Leanne or to warn her isn’t clear. Leanne turns her head partly toward him as he moves off, so it’s in her peripheral vision that he leaves.
Eddie is watching her, his eyes sparkling. “Forget the champagne,” he says. “What you need is some of this.” He takes a bottle from his jacket pocket and holds it up. The familiar gold-rimmed label spurs a sense of longing Leanne hasn’t felt in years. She sees
Hoyt’s apartment, the shelves full of cassette tapes, the bare floor where they used to sit in silence for hours.
“That,” she says, “is what’s so great about men. Interior pockets.”
“Here,” he says, holding out a hand. “Give me your Coke. No one will know the difference.”
Carol looks over in time to see Leanne handing something to Eddie. She looks away, surveying the room without really seeing it, then looks back. Eddie and his date and Leanne are chatting. Everything looks quite normal.
“Excuse me,” she says to her friend Sylvia. “I just want to check on the food.”
A vague fear nags her as she heads for the dining room, like a large, hovering bumblebee. If she ignores it, it will fly away on its own. Lashing out at it or trying to shoo it off will only make it sting.
She stands in the door of the dining room and assesses the situation. As always, the deviled eggs are disappearing fast. The bowl of crab dip is half empty. The nuts are ebbing, and the cheese ball has a good hunk hacked out of it. Cracker levels are low. The crudité platter is far less disturbed, the stacked vegetables still looking pristine and orderly, only the smallest inroads visible in the dressing. And the cucumber rounds with trout salad appear to be untouched.
“More crackers,” she says to herself. Cloaked in purpose, she threads her way around the people chatting between the kitchen and dining room. Once she has the cracker box, it’s even easier. People smile and nod, and she moves by them, clearly on a hostessing mission.
It’s going well,
she tells herself as she refills the platters with crackers, arranging them in a neat half circle around the cheese ball, and lining them up in perfect overlapping rows next to the crab dip. Everyone seems to have arrived—the doorbell is no longer ringing. General movement has distributed people throughout the living room and dining room, filling both spaces with the ebb and flow of
conversation. They have even spilled out onto the deck. Thank goodness she made Will move that hideous post-hole digger.
She glances nervously out the window. There has been a darkening in the light, and it’s too early for the sun to be setting. She still refuses to allow that it might rain tomorrow. But she’s worried about more rain tonight, which could make the lawn at the country club soggy, complicating Leanne’s high-heeled walk down the grass aisle. The weatherman said rain, but he’s always wrong. Probably it’s clouding over a bit, the way it often does on Michigan evenings.
If only Leanne had agreed to have her wedding indoors, as Margaret did. Margaret never would have planned an outdoor wedding. Weather brings an element of uncertainty into planning, and Margaret hates uncertainty. But Leanne—it isn’t that Leanne likes uncertainty, but she always seems to surround herself with it. It’s her natural element, the way some people tend toward depression and others seem constitutionally cheery. Leanne’s disposition is watery, blurred, unfixed.
Marrying Kit will change that. There will be another pole in her life, holding her steady even as she drifts along her own unplanned path. And if she has kids—Carol hardly allows herself the hope that Leanne will give her more grandchildren, since Margaret seems less likely than ever to do so—then that will ground her even further, tie her to the world in a way she seems reluctant to allow on her own. It’s not that Carol wants her daughters tied down. But it would do Leanne good to have some stability in her life, something to give her a sense of progress.
“Things are really going well, Carol. You must be so pleased.” It’s Bernice, moving toward Carol and standing a little too close for comfort. She smiles benevolently at the table. “You really have gone to a lot of trouble,” she says. “I’m sure the children are grateful.”
Carol can’t think of a reply. Bernice puts her off, makes her nervous and tongue-tied, not through any standoffishness or offense but because of her excessive good grace. Bernice is just too perfect.
“Well,” Carol answers, taking the smallest step back to regularize
the distance between them, “hostessing is something I’ll be doing a lot of after this, with the bed-and-breakfast going!”
“There she is!” someone sings out in the next room, and for a split second Carol thinks they’re referring to her. But then she hears Leanne’s high-pitched “Hello, Aunt Janice!” Carol recognizes the artificial edge in Leanne’s tone. She never could disguise her discomfort in social situations.
“I’d better just check on the living room and see that things are going well out there,” she says, embarrassed by the intensity of her desire to escape Kit’s mother. After all, the woman is soon to be a member of the family, even if an honorary one.
I’ll make it up to her later,
Carol tells herself as she moves decisively away. She hovers in the archway that separates the dining room from the foyer. It feels as if there’s a small cloud hovering around her head. It’s holding her back, this tiny darkness, urging her to turn around and say something kind in parting.
Don’t be silly,
she tells herself. She has no reason to feel guilty. It’s not as if she’s shirking some pressing duty—she’s just going about her business. Her daughter is getting married tomorrow, and she has a party to run. Pressing herself into motion, she sweeps out through the arch and into the foyer, where her guests are gathered in groups of three or four, waiting for her.
EDDIE’S BOTTLE HAS SAVED LEANNE’S LIFE. SUD-
denly, it all seems bearable. Not only bearable but almost fun, in a vaguely sickening way. The party is like swimming in the ocean when the surf is high. Waves of it surround her, lift her up until her feet aren’t touching the ground, then set her down again, to get her bearings and regain her balance. Every now and then one crashes over her head, so that she tumbles without knowing where she is for a while, but then her feet find the ground and she’s back, preparing for the next one.