Sister of the Bride (10 page)

“Oh,” said Barbara, interested that her sister was revealing sentimental feelings, “does she want a do-it-yourself wedding dress, too?”

“If she does, she will have to be talked out of it,” said Mrs. MacLane. “She isn't the only one in the family who has finals. Come on, let's get out the wedding veil again and see what kind of dress might go with it that we can afford.”

Barbara was only too happy to agree. Naturally they would want to see what the veil looked like on a bride, and naturally she would be the one to try it on. As they walked down the hall past Gordy's room, Gordy burst into song. “Love, oh love, oh careless love.” Barbara glared.

“That's a pretty song,” said Mrs. MacLane, pausing at Gordy's door. “I like it much better than that gloomy one you've been singing about twenty-nine links of chain around your leg. Why don't you sing it more often?”

“Okay, Mom, I will.” Gordy grinned at Barbara, who wanted to hit him over the head with his guitar. “Sorrow, sorrow, to my heart,” he sang with gusto. “Sorrow, sorrow, to my heart.”

Once again Barbara wondered why, of all the thirteen-year-old boys in the world, she had to have this particular one for a brother. And even though he stopped singing, the words of his song continued to ring through her head.

In the bedroom Barbara and her mother took
down the suit box from the closet shelf, set it on her bed, and removed the lid. Gently they lifted out the veil and spread it out on Rosemary's bed, which was not cluttered with stuffed animals.

“It is lovely,” admitted Mrs. MacLane. “I don't blame Rosemary for wanting to wear it.”

“It's awfully long.” Barbara was waiting for her mother to ask her to try it on, the veil she would wear for her own wedding someday.

“There is no possible way that it could be worn with a short dress. It needs a dress with a train. And Rosemary simply can't wear a long satin dress in June in California. It would be much too warm.”

“Isn't a dress with a train awfully expensive?” asked Barbara doubtfully.

“I'm afraid so.” Mrs. MacLane's brow wrinkled thoughtfully as she looked at the veil and considered its possibilities. “
Peau de soie
might be nice, but a dress with a train of any really nice fabric is going to cost more than we can afford.”

“And that will mean long bridesmaid dresses, too,” Barbara was saying, when suddenly Buster ran into the room and, in one flying leap, landed in the middle of the fragile veil. His claws clutched the gossamer threads, and he rolled over on his
back, ready to play the change-the-sheet game that Barbara played with him once a week.

Mrs. MacLane gasped. Barbara screamed and grabbed at the cat. Buster rolled over in the lace.

“Stop him!” cried Mrs. MacLane. “He's ruining it!”

Gordy stopped singing in the middle of a phrase and came to see what the commotion was all about. He stood staring, unable to say anything. Buster laid back his ears and with his strong hind legs kicked at Barbara through the lace. The old veil shredded.

“Do something,” beseeched Barbara, struggling to hold Buster motionless within the lace. The claws of his hind feet scratched her hands.

“That beautiful old lace…” Mrs. MacLane was in despair.

Gordy approached Buster cautiously. “Nice kitty,” he said, petting his cat through the lace. Buster hesitated, stared at Gordy an instant, dismissed him, and went on kicking with his hind legs.

“Nice kitty!” Barbara was bitter as she handed the whole lacy, kicking bundle to her brother. How anyone could call this demon, this fur-covered fiend, nice…

Gordy ignored his sister as he continued to pet Buster. “Relax, boy,” he said soothingly.

“What will we tell Gramma?” Mrs. MacLane wondered aloud. “She'll be heartbroken, simply heartbroken.”

Gordy stroked Buster through the lace. Now he had his cat's attention, because the animal stopped kicking and, with his ears laid back and his tail lashing, he looked watchfully at Gordy. “Nice kitty,” crooned Gordy. “Nice old boy.” Gently he began to unhook the cruel claws from the threads.

“Maybe if I opened the refrigerator door he'd want to run into the kitchen,” suggested Barbara.

“Oh no, that would be worse,” said Mrs. MacLane. “He'd jump down and tear the lace even more.”

“Nice kitty.” Gordy ignored his mother and sister.

“Nice puss.” Buster's hind feet were disentangled from the lace. Carefully Gordy unhooked it from a front paw. Buster was not entirely convinced he wanted this delightful game to end. He laid back his ears and extended the claws of his front paws in ten cruel arcs.

Barbara moaned. Her sister's wedding, to say nothing of her own, ruined by an evil cat. And she had not even had a chance to try on the veil.

“Come on, Buster,” coaxed Gordy. Buster slowly sheathed his claws, but kept a wary eye on Gordy. “How would you like some cat tuna, huh, Buster?” Through the lace he rubbed Buster's nose, and Buster became less wary. He enjoyed having his black-satin nose rubbed. He raised his head as if to say, Do it some more. Gordy unhooked the last claw and carefully lifted the cat free of the veil.

“You get that horrible cat out of here,” stormed Barbara. “Why Mother and Dad let you keep that awful beast is beyond me. He claws everything to shreds. My stuffed animals, the furniture, everything. Someday he'll claw the whole house down over our heads in splinters, and then I hope you will be satisfied!”

“Relax, Barbed Wire,” drawled Gordy. “Who let him play with the sheets in the first place?” And with Buster draped over his arm Gordy left the room.

Barbara felt suddenly deflated. Gordy was right. She had let Buster play on the bed when she was changing the sheets. She had even encouraged him. Naturally he had thought the wedding veil was some new kind of sheet and that she would be willing to play with him. It was all her own fault.

“What's done is done,” said Mrs. MacLane sadly.
“Let's see how much damage there is. Perhaps it can be mended.”

Carefully Barbara helped her mother spread the veil on the bed once more, and together they stood looking at the damage. In the center of the veil were three jagged holes, two large and one small, and these were surrounded by little breaks and tears. They both could see that it was hopeless. The veil could never be mended.

“It's ruined,” was Barbara's blunt pronouncement. She added bitterly, “And now that she doesn't have a veil to wear I suppose Rosemary will go back to her original idea of a practical wedding in a Harris tweed suit.”

Mrs. MacLane managed a rueful little laugh. “She didn't say she planned to be married in a tweed suit, Barbara. That is an exaggeration.”

“And what about my wedding?” demanded Barbara. “That old tomcat has spoiled my wedding, too.”

“We'll worry about your wedding when we come to it.” Mrs. MacLane fingered the edge of the veil. “It's a long way off.”

“I'm only two years younger than Rosemary,” Barbara reminded her mother.

“Don't you start getting any ideas,” said Mrs.
MacLane mildly, her eyes on the veil.

Barbara did not say anything. How surprised her mother would be if she knew that only a little while ago Bill Cunningham had kissed her, sort of.

“You know,” said Mrs. MacLane suddenly, “I do believe all our problems are solved!”

“By a tattered veil?” Barbara was skeptical.

“Yes,” answered her mother. “The veil is only damaged in the center. This end could be made into a very lovely short veil, finger-tip length, by cutting it here and gathering the cut edge onto a band or a spray of orange blossoms or something of the sort.”

Barbara could visualize this. The lace was so fine and so light it would make a very beautiful short veil.

“And the other end,” continued Mrs. MacLane, “and the part on either side of the holes could be made into a little jacket to wear over a simple wedding dress. See, the back and front could be cut here and the sleeves there, so that the scallops on the edge of the veil would make the edge of the jacket.”

“Mother, that's a marvelous idea!” cried Barbara. “Lots of wedding dresses have little jackets. I read about them in the paper all the time. And that way
Rosemary can wear a short dress and so can the rest of us!”

“And now that that is settled, let's put the veil away before anything else happens to it.” Mrs. MacLane spoke briskly. “It's time to start dinner.”

“What about Gramma?” asked Barbara, as they folded the tattered veil and returned it to the suit box. “What do you think she will say?”

“Your grandmother, even though she is old and her feelings are easily hurt, is a woman of character who has survived many disappointments in her lifetime,” said Mrs. MacLane, “and although she will be upset when she hears what happened, I am sure she will be happy that enough of her veil was saved for Rosemary to wear.”

After Buster's shredding of the wedding veil, hostility between brother and sister grew more intense. Barbara shoved Buster outside whenever she found the cat in the house. “You're just an old nuisance!” she would say, and slam the door. Then Gordy would begin to sing
Careless Love
in an irritating way that Barbara felt amounted to blackmail.

At the same time plans for the wedding went ahead, and because most of the planning was done by telephone, Barbara became quite openly an eavesdropper. Almost every evening Rosemary called with an order or a suggestion, and almost always the call ended abruptly when her twenty
cents had run out. Then Mrs. MacLane would call her back so that the toll would go on the family's telephone bill. Aunt Josie came over several evenings to talk over the wedding. She was full of ideas. It was very smart this year for bridesmaids to carry garlands of ivy instead of flowers. And had Rosemary thought of having the wedding veil gathered onto a coronet?

And look like a ballerina about to dance
Swan Lake
, Barbara thought privately. As for carrying a garland of ivy—she only hoped the matter would not be brought up again. It was always best to let Aunt Josie babble on and to hope that most of her ideas would fade away. Next Aunt Josie suggested blue polished cotton with bouquets of hydrangeas. Barbara, who wanted to carry flowers, not shrubbery, did not mind at all when this suggestion was forgotten.

Then one morning before school, while Barbara was pressing the full skirt she was wearing, without bothering to take it off, her mother announced, “The Amys want to give Rosemary a shower, and we thought next Saturday would be a good time. Rosemary is coming home, anyway, and there won't be many Saturdays before the wedding.”

Barbara, who had lifted the front of her skirt over the end of the ironing board and was trying to press it with the iron pointed toward herself, started to protest, Oh, Mother, not the Amys! but caught the words in time. Any shower was sure to be fun, and this was the moment to keep her opinion of the Amys as a group to herself. “Will I be invited?” she asked.

“Yes. You and Aunt Josie and Gramma, because you are family,” said Mrs. MacLane. “Here, let me press the back of your skirt before you burn yourself.”

The first party, and she would get to go, thought Barbara ecstatically, as she lifted the back of her skirt over the ironing board and her mother began to run the iron over it. Fun, excitement, presents—lots of presents, because there were at least twenty-five Amys—good things to eat, although half of the Amys would protest that really they shouldn't, they simply had to lose a few pounds. Barbara could hardly wait for Saturday to come. “Which Amy is giving the shower?” she asked, pulling her pressed skirt from the ironing board and feeling it warm against the backs of her legs.

“Nancy Bodger,” said Mrs. MacLane. “Dessert and coffee. And it's to be a miscellaneous shower.
We thought you could make up some sort of excuse about wanting to see Tootie about some homework and ask Rosemary to walk over to the Bodgers' with you.”

“Mother!” groaned Barbara. “Of all the awful ideas! I try to
avoid
Tootie.”

“Well, I can't tell Nancy that,” Mrs. MacLane pointed out. “And, anyway, Tootie probably won't even be home. I can't imagine a boy his age wanting to hang around the house when his mother's friends are there.”

This was true. “But Rosemary will know something is up, because she knows how I feel about Tootie,” Barbara reminded her mother.

“We'll just have to hope for the best,” answered her mother. “I'll leave that part of it up to you. It is practically impossible to surprise a bride with a shower, so there's no point in worrying about it.”

The plans for the shower rolled along during the week. All the Amys wanted to know what Rosemary might like for a shower gift, and the MacLanes' phone rang several times a day. It seemed to Barbara that her mother found unnecessary amusement in every conversation. “As near as I can figure out,” she would say, “Rosemary likes anything that is modern, earth colored, and
clunky. You know, artsy-craftsy.” Or she might say, “Pink bath towels! Don't you know pink is too old-fashioned for this generation. Pumpkin color is the thing. Or brown or olive green.” Or, “Sometimes I think they don't want dishes at all. I think they plan to eat off phonograph records.”

“Oh, Mother!” Barbara would then protest. “How silly can you get?” But when she answered the telephone herself and an Amy inquired of her what colors Rosemary was collecting for her kitchen and bathroom, she could only say lamely, “Well…she likes earth-colored dishes and pumpkin-colored towels.”

“Earth-colored dishes!” the Amy invariably exclaimed.

“Yes,” Barbara would say defensively, “she and Greg know a potter over in Berkeley who is going to make them a set of plates.”

“Oh…” was the Amy's usual answer. “Well…perhaps I should get her something for her kitchen.”

Since Barbara was to be a guest at the shower she, too, was faced with the problem of a gift. She shopped after school one day, even though it meant missing a ride home on Bill's Vespa. As she wandered through the shops, everything seemed
too flowery, too fragile, or too pastel for Rosemary's taste, but finally in a store specializing in imported furniture and gifts she found a pair of squat terra-cotta candlesticks from Mexico. They seemed to fill all the requirements, and were earth colored, amusing, and just right for a bride and groom whom she could see dining by candlelight. Gradually the picture in her mind faded and reemerged—Barbara and Bill were dining by candlelight. They were students at the university; they had an apartment near the campus….

Early Saturday afternoon Rosemary arrived in her usual confusion of books and laundry, but this time there was a difference. Rosemary was wearing an engagement ring.

“Rosemary!” cried Barbara, seizing her sister's hand as soon as its sparkle caught her eye. “Where did you get that ring?”

Rosemary laughed. “From Greg, of course, silly. Who else would be giving me a ring?”

“But—” Barbara held her tongue. It would not do to remind her sister that a short time ago she had dismissed an engagement ring as middle-class. Just be glad she changed her mind, Barbara told herself. “It's beautiful,” she said. And it was. It was a large stone, full of fire and light, in a plain gold
setting. She wished she could keep from wondering how Greg could afford such a ring.

“It was Greg's grandmother's.” Rosemary might have read Barbara's thoughts. “His mother got it out of the safe-deposit box and brought it over to him. He gave it to me last night after the library closed. Isn't it beautiful?” She held out her hand and whirled around, as if her ring trailed light behind it like a Fourth of July sparkler.

Barbara could hold her tongue no longer. “I thought engagement rings were middle-class.”

“Not if they are heirlooms,” was Rosemary's airy explanation.

“Boy. Some hunk of ice,” said Gordy, who had come into the room in time to overhear the conversation. “Doing anything special tonight, Rosie?”

Barbara shot him a look that said, You be quiet! Honestly, Gordy actually worked at being exasperating.

“Just studying. Greg is working tonight.” Rosemary was so preoccupied with her own affairs that she missed this bit of family byplay.

She had a hem that needed repairing, poetry that had to be read for English, and work that must, simply must, be done on that paper on “Plato: Teacher and Theorist.” She had to turn it in by
next Wednesday. The professor was an old bear about late papers. She hoped someone had found time to address wedding invitations.
Please
no little figures on top of the cake. She and Greg had agreed on that. No cardboard wedding bells, either. Just a little nosegay of real flowers to match her wedding bouquet. That much she was sure of. And could Barbara be an angel and find time to type the first part of her paper on Plato? She had a few pages written. They were full of footnotes, which were a nuisance to type, but everybody knew professors adored footnotes, especially if there were a few in French or German. Unfortunately hers were all in English.

“You don't sound very thirsty for knowledge,” Barbara observed.

“Of course I'm thirsty for knowledge,” retorted Rosemary. “It's just that…well, you know. Plato, when I'm planning a wedding.”

It's a good thing the footnotes are in English, thought Barbara, who would much prefer addressing wedding invitations or even doing her own homework to typing a paper on Plato. But type she did, rolling the platen of the typewriter up each time she typed a number to indicate a footnote at the bottom of the page and then forgetting to leave
space for the footnote at the bottom of the paper and having to do the page all over again. It was a tiresome chore, doubly tiresome because she was anticipating the shower. She was glad when evening came.

After dinner Rosemary put on an old housecoat and some woolly bedroom slippers she had left behind when she went away to college and settled down at her desk to attack Plato. She was working so hard she did not notice that her mother changed her dress and left the house. As Barbara was changing her own dress, she said as casually as she could manage, “Come on, Rosemary, put on a dress and walk over to the Bodgers' house with me. I have to borrow a book from Tootie.”

“Can't,” answered Rosemary.

This was not encouraging. Barbara pushed the zipper on the back of her dress up as far as she could and then reached down over her shoulder and pulled it up the rest of the way, while she considered what to say next that would not spoil the surprise for Rosemary. “Please, Rosemary. I simply have to get the book, and you know how Dad is about my going out alone at night.”

“Can't Mom drive you? I'll be up half the night as it is.”

Barbara looked at her sister's head bent over the circle of light from the study lamp. There was no question about it. She was a problem bride. First she was determined to be practical about her wedding. Now she had to study. “Mom's gone out on an errand.” As a last resort Barbara could come right out and tell her sister she had to go, because she was about to be the guest of honor at a shower, but only as a last resort. She tried again, and endeavored to keep the urgency out of her voice. “You've been grubbing on Plato all afternoon. You need some fresh air.”

“Can't, I said.”

Barbara was getting desperate. The minutes were slipping away, and she was committed to deliver Rosemary to the Bodgers' front door by eight o'clock. “If you're going to study late you'll want a snack. We could stop for a malt or something.” Her voice was more pleading than she had intended.

Rosemary finally looked up from her desk. “Did you know,” she asked, “that one peanut will provide enough energy for a student to study all evening?”

That was Rosemary. A scientific answer to everything now that she had gone away to college. “No, I didn't,” said Barbara crossly. “And what is more,
I don't believe it. I get hungry when I study.”

“Psychic boredom,” pronounced Rosemary. “You don't want to study, so you decide you are hungry. All you need is one peanut.”

Barbara was so exasperated with her sister she felt close to tears. “Oh, you and your psychology. Or, rather, your roommate's psychology. All I'm asking is that you come on one little errand with me.” Then she added virtuously, “After all, I have been typing for you.”

Rosemary looked quizzically at her sister. “How come you are borrowing a book from Tootie Bodger?” she wanted to know.

“I need it,” answered Barbara. “You'll have to come with me.”

“Out of thirty-five students in whatever class it is, and you have to borrow a book from Tootie?” Rosemary raised an eyebrow and smiled. “There's something funny going on around here.”

“Well…”

“And Mom has gone out?” persisted Rosemary.

“Yes.”

Rosemary laughed and dropped her pencil on her desk. “I get it.”

“Get what?” Barbara managed wide-eyed innocence.

Doubt flickered across Rosemary's face. “At least I think I do. Are the Amys meeting tonight?”

“What makes you think they are?” countered Barbara, longing to glance at her watch. It must be time to go by now, and she had not even succeeded in getting Rosemary dressed. In a minute she would have to come right out and tell her.

“Because Mrs. Bodger is a pillar of the Amys, and Mom always does her errands in the daytime, and you would never borrow a book from Tootie of your own free will. If you did, you'd get it after school instead of insisting that I go out in the evening.” Rosemary left her desk and walked toward the closet. “It all adds up. I am about to be surprised by the Amys with a shower. Am I right?”

Barbara, who was applying lipstick, was not able to answer.

“Don't worry,” said Rosemary cheerfully, as she pulled off her housecoat. “I'll be surprised.”

At least I didn't tell, thought Barbara, relieved to see Rosemary dressing.

“Are we late?” asked Rosemary, as she combed and fluffed her hair.

“Not if we hurry,” said Barbara, giving up pretense. “Now remember,” she said, when the two girls had left the house and had started the short
walk to the Bodgers', “I'm supposed to ask if Tootie is there, and you sort of stay behind me as if you had just come along for company.”

“I know,” said Rosemary. “I wouldn't want to spoil the Amys' fun by not being surprised.” The girls turned the corner onto the Bodgers' street. “I suppose Mrs. Bodger's Secret Pal will do something cute, like leaving her a present in some unexpected place.” At the first of the year each member of the club drew the name of another Amy who was to be her Secret Pal. All through the year the Amys surprised one another with anonymous cards and gifts, and at the annual Christmas party the Pals revealed their identities. Barbara and Rosemary had long poked fun at Secret Pals.