Marry or Burn (35 page)

Gerda didn't have an especially forceful grip when she shook your hand. She didn't look like someone who would hunt or climb rocks or even work out. Her hair was a solid glossy white and reached her shoulders, and her wide face had pink young skin just crisscrossed with lines at the eyes, which were blue and childishly clear. I felt them touch me, though. You could see she had been through something.

“Here she is,” our father said, his face stretched tight with excitement under his new crew cut. He had a smile like somebody coming deafened out of a rock concert. No one knew who should be introduced first, so with his hand on Gerda's waist he started with us.

All she said was our names, turning to him with a look of confirmation as if the bearer of the name were all she could have hoped. She took Shelley's hand a second time and repeated hers. I felt her hand tremble when she came back to me a second time. “The little one,” she said. Her eyes were the blue of her baby grandson's, with some of the same drag on you.

So this was Gerda. “Can't I just hug you?” Diana said, cocking her head. Then we all hugged Gerda and each other, and the sons shook our father's hand and the daughters-in-law hugged him and the first part was over.

In the middle of it all, Karen and Uncle Cal pulled in. Karen ran down from the car calling, “Oh, look at us, late to a wedding.” She and Gerda hugged, held each other at arm's length, hugged again. “Oh, this is a happy day. Tomorrow I mean. Oh, you've cut off your hair. But it looks great.”

“I thought it was time,” Gerda said with a laugh. “You should have seen it,” she said to Diana. “I hadn't cut it in three years. I had it in one of those braids.” Of course she would pick Diana, whose straight hair swung so neatly at the neck. So Gerda did talk, she laughed. Like all women, she explained a haircut.

Our father had said she was small but she was not small. She filled out the pink shirt and she was taller than I was. Her legs, wide at the thigh in stretch jeans, were almost as long as Diana's. The legs looked as if they belonged to someone who would go shopping and buy herself an expensive bathing suit. Dad could not stop smiling. “So here she is, Jenny,” he said again, when I took him into the kitchen to see the cake. Was it all right for the groom to see it? Mrs. Burney thought so.

“She's wonderful,” I told him. “How long was her hair before?” What kind of a question was that?

“I don't know,” he said, bewildered. He really didn't know.

“Hi baby,” she whispered when he came back. Very soft on the
b
's, as if a tall man with a receding hairline really were a baby. She took his hand. It was then that I saw she was beautiful. It had escaped me until that moment.

I wondered if everybody else had known it right away. Who was seeing her for the first time? Only the three of us, Shelley and Diana and I. Two were her sons, of course, used to her—
though Glen had stood apart, seeming to sulk, and made her come away from the rest of us to take him in her arms.

It wasn't the kind of beauty that effectively discourages the ones who behold it, not the pure or absolute, perfect-jawline kind. Whatever it was, it had spurred Mr. Burney to place himself between her and the group reconfiguring itself around her, in order to make sure she took her seat on the best-sanded bench so she would not get splinters. But she got up again and with no permission from Becca gathered the baby out of the car seat into her arms.

Becca sighed. “This is when you want a cigarette. When you can relax and somebody else has him. Not just anybody,” she added, to Glen.

“I don't blame you,” said Gerda. The baby's gaze, so electric and yet magically sedated with un-knowledge, roved over us. He closed his eyes as she held him to her face and inhaled against him. Maybe I had wondered how long her hair had been because in fact, I now saw, she looked like a woman who could ride by naked and a cruel tax would be lifted.

“Can we maybe just try to forget cigarettes?” Glen said in a high, despairing voice.

“
She
used to smoke too,” Becca said, speaking to Diana. “Gerda. We would sneak off together.”

“Oh yeah?” said Diana.

“I guess I've done everything bad,” said Gerda. I looked at my father. He looked back from under his eyelids, like a man lying in the pool on his back.

“Like what?” said Diana.

Gerda shook her head and leaned forward with her eyes closed to sip from the glass of wine our father was holding for her.

“IMAGINE IF THERE were a mousetrap big enough for a person,” Karen said. She had found a mousetrap under the bed in their cabin. “Just imagine how you would feel if an iron bar snapped down on you!” So there must have been a mouse in it.

“Karen, you will never change,” said Uncle Cal, looking around for somebody in our family who would know that he took pride in this fact. Karen was talking to the four-year-old, Robbie. We had eaten everything including a watermelon and two of Mrs. Burney's coconut custard pies, and we were lurching between the tables stuffing paper plates into trash bags. Except for the two mothers, we were all a little drunk, some more than others. Bobby, for one, had stretched himself out on the pine needles.

“But there would never be a mousetrap that big,” said Cindy. She took the smaller boy by the hand.

“Uh-
huh
,” said Robbie, walking backwards away from his mother as he sucked custard off his fingers.

“Uh-
huh
,” the little one repeated, breaking loose.

“Come on, fellas,” said Cindy. “Let's get back on the swing.”

“I want to see what kind of a mousetrap,” said Robbie.

“I do, I want to see it,” said his little brother. “What
is
it?”

“No, you are not going to see a mousetrap.”

“I want Grandma.”

“She's not going to take you to see the mousetrap.”

“Where is she?”

“She's coming back out in a minute.”

“I'm going up to Grandma's room. She said I could.”

“I'll take them,” Diana said, getting up, but Gerda was already coming down the path.

We had finished toasting some time before; we had finished hearing the long story of how our father and Gerda had met at
Karen's table and Cal had known that night not just what Karen and Lois had figured out in the afternoon, that they must meet, but that they would marry. Yes. Cal could have sworn to that before dessert. “It's true he predicts things,” Karen said. “He predicted Bobby Kennedy's assassination. But seriously, no, it's almost always good,” she said, raising her glass unsteadily to Cal. The sons had made little speeches, Bobby's filled with jokes and Glen's with quotations.

Diana wanted Gerda and Dad to tell what went through their minds at the first sight of each other. “I thought . . . I can't really say what my first thought was,” our father said, and blushed, and we all laughed at that. The jokes about the shotgun wedding had petered out gradually as we looked at them.

Gerda said, “I thought, he's
good
. Oh, and of course I thought so many other things. Over the evening. Everything just had to sink in.”

He agreed with that.

Mosquitoes had begun to whine. Becca held out her darkly tanned arm and said they never bit her. Glen, with his short-sleeved shirt and pale skin—the skin of his father?—was their chosen prey, and after much slapping had gone to put on another shirt as Mrs. Burney was bringing out dessert. She wore an apron stenciled with MARRIED FOR HER PIES. She had lingered as we cut and ate them, trying to get Mr. Burney to go in with her. He had remained outside the whole time, hauling an archway made of varnished branches from the shed and securing it at the base with rocks and pegs.

“I'm so sorry about the mousetrap,” Mrs. Burney said. “Usually there's no need, because there's an owl. Well, we'll be going in. You have your celebration.”

“Why don't you sit with us and have some of this lovely wine?” Karen said.

“No, no, we'll leave you with the family.”

“Well, just for a minute,” said Mr. Burney.

“Tomorrow is a big day,” said his wife.

“I'm going to see the mousetrap,” said Robbie.

“Three blind mice,” said the little one.

Karen looked up. “Did you ever notice they ran
after
the farmer's wife, not away from her? After she cut off their tails with the carving knife?”

“We won't get into that,” Cindy said.

“Wait, listen to this, anyway,” Diana said. “I want to read something. Shelley found this great book in the cabin.”

“They're in all the cabins,” Mr. Burney said. “Lifetime supply.”

“Just listen to this while I can see to read,” Diana said. “‘If you have been long away from the sound of the Western Yellow Pine'—that's the ponderosa, Shelley says—‘you may, when at last you hear it again, close your eyes and simply listen, with what deep satisfaction you cannot explain, to the whispered plainsong of this elemental congregation.'”

“Ah,” said Gerda and Dad together.

“I don't see how you can call that a whisper,” said Glen. Drink had rendered him morose. But I was glad to think of the trees as a congregation, instead of pillars weighing tons, swaying overhead.

“
Plainsong
,” Bobby corrected his brother from the ground, keeping his eyes shut.

“What do you think?” Diana asked Gerda, closing the book with a flourish.

Gerda said, “I don't know. I don't know how I thought I could live anywhere else but in the Northwest. I don't know about anything. I don't know how anything that happened, happened.”

“We do love these trees,” said Mrs. Burney dreamily into the silence that gathered as we considered all that had happened.

“We should be like trees,” Karen sang out in a boozy voice. “Know who said that? Thoreau said that. Separate individuals. Individualism! He should see us. Look at this war. Look at our trash. Look what we do to the Earth.”

After some thought, Gerda said soberly, “The Earth is our mother,” as if she had never heard of the Sixties, and all their precepts that were now comedy, and perhaps she had not, married and a mother at eighteen. “All I know,” she said, turning to Dad, “is that I met you.”

“To matrimony!” Mr. Burney stumbled in Gerda's direction, glancing off the tree trunk as Mrs. Burney leaned forward to catch the bottle from his hand.

“Diana tells me we have two veterinarians,” she began, already pouring for Gerda. Gerda knew how to drink. She kept it up with no perceptible effect. Maybe she was like Eddie's brother's bride, who just knew how to be happy. “And one works with cats?” Mrs. Burney pressed on as her husband settled into a squat. “We love cats. But oh, dear, we can't keep one here. We did have a little cat Mitzi. Coyotes . . . And then we've had bears.”

“I almost thought Eddie would show up,” I said, as the word
bears
hung in the air. “Because he likes Dad so much and he would have loved to meet you, Gerda.”

“How would he get here, you have his car,” Karen said. “She broke up with Eddie,” she added to Gerda.

“I'm sorry to hear that,” Gerda said, and the eyes touched me again with their almost musical sorrow and benevolence. I could see how my father might have been hypnotized into thinking there was a heaven after all. “But nothing's written in stone,” she added.

“No indeed,” said Dad. I noticed Gerda didn't encourage him when he spoke, the way the rest of us did. She had sat down and leaned on him. Some of the toasts had been long, and made him
blush and even bend over in a kind of pain at the things being said of him. Every once in a while she had laid her hand on the small of his back, the way he had done with her during the introductions. He smiled. I saw that he had withdrawn even deeper into his happiness than he had into his unhappiness, now broken in on and honorably banished.

Was that smile the proof that nothing up to now had really been meant as we had taken it, Shelley and I? Could we have said to wasteful memory, or in my case lack of memory, “The deal is off,” could we have taken a giant floating stride across the chasm of what was only, after all, the disappearance of one person?

“I guess that settles it about the t-e-n-t,” Cindy said to Bobby, who had fallen asleep on the ground with his mouth open. “Animals.” Bobby sat up and looked around.

“What about animals?” said Robbie. “Where?”

“Oh, we're quite safe here.” Mrs. Burney stood up and went over to where Mr. Burney was sitting with his back propped against a tree. “Let's go back, your show is on,” she said.