Read The Two-Family House: A Novel Online
Authors: Lynda Cohen Loigman
NATALIE
(May 1961)
“I’m never getting married,” Natalie announced. She was standing on a small wooden box while Mrs. Tuber, the tiny seamstress in an ancient housecoat, pinned up the hem of her bridesmaid dress. The pale blue fabric was stiff and itchy. The skirt was too full, the neck was too low and the waist was uncomfortably tight. She couldn’t wait to take it off.
“Mmm hmm.” With a mouthful of pins poking out in all directions, Mrs. Tuber was unable to respond. Her gray head was bent over the hemline of Natalie’s skirt, and Natalie was afraid the woman might never make her way back to an upright position. “Are you sure you’re good all hunched over like that?” she asked.
Mrs. Tuber shuffled forward and bent down further. “Mmm.”
This was Natalie’s first time at Mrs. Tuber’s. The shop consisted of one small room, with a rack of clothes on one side and an old wooden table on the other. Two sewing machines were set up on the table, and spools of thread in every color were strewn across the top. Natalie wanted to leave. She didn’t like how people passing by on the street could see her through the shop’s picture window. She kept her back to the glass while she stood on the box, but she could see the reflections of the people walking past in the mirror that ran the length of the shop’s rear wall. One little boy pressed his face up against the glass and stuck his tongue out at her. She glared back.
Finally the seamstress rose from her spot on the floor. She stood back a little from the mirror and clucked approvingly at the fit. With the pins out of her mouth and tucked into the bottom of the dress, Mrs. Tuber was free to speak at last. “Soon it will be your turn to be the bride!” she told Natalie.
“I already told you. I don’t want to get married.”
“You’re only thirteen,” Helen interjected. She was sitting on an old wooden chair in the corner of the shop. “You’re too young to say things like that.”
Mrs. Tuber agreed. “When my daughter was your age, she wanted to be a dancer. She swore she’d never get married. Then the right fella came along, they fell in love and then she got married—just like that.” She snapped her fingers.
“Real love isn’t that simple,” Natalie protested. “It doesn’t just happen all of a sudden.” She was tired of talking nonsense with some woman she had only just met. The room was getting hot and she was starting to sweat in the dress.
Mrs. Tuber shrugged. “What’s so complicated? You meet a fella. You either love him or you don’t.”
“You can’t just say that. What about Antony and Cleopatra?” Natalie wanted to know. “Or Guinevere and Lancelot?” She threw up her hands in frustration. “What about Bonnie and Clyde?”
Mrs. Tuber stared at Natalie like she had two heads. She turned to Helen. “I thought you said she was only thirteen. Already she’s an expert on heartache?”
Mrs. Tuber hadn’t known their family for very long. She didn’t know what kind of heartache they’d been through. Natalie watched her mother stand up, fish a tissue out of her purse and blow her nose. Natalie calmed herself down and tried to salvage the conversation. “Fine. I might get married someday.” Her voice was artificially bright. “When I’m older.”
Mrs. Tuber nodded. “Now you’re making sense.” She took a ticket from a stack on the table and stuck it on a hanger. “Tell me again, who’s getting married?” She waved Natalie into the small changing area that was marked off with a curtain in one corner of the room. “My cousin Mimi,” Natalie called out. “I’m one of the bridesmaids.”
“That’s right,” Mrs. Tuber said. “The cousin. Pretty girl. Looks like you. She came here last week with her sister. I told her I would fix her wedding dress, but she said it didn’t need fixing. Some fancy store did it for her.”
Natalie came out from behind the curtain and handed the dress to Mrs. Tuber. Then she walked over to her mother and took her by the arm. “Mimi likes everything fancy, right, Mom?”
Helen agreed. “Lucky for her, she’s marrying a rich man. His family insists on paying for everything.”
“Good!” Mrs. Tuber said. “She should live and be well.”
“She should live and be well,” Helen repeated.
* * *
Three weeks later Natalie was in the itchy dress again. The bride and groom had just finished their first dance, and Natalie was hiding, sitting on a chair she had dragged to a corner of the cavernous room, behind a pillar and a pair of potted palms. She couldn’t bear the thought of speaking to one more stranger or having to smile for one more photograph.
“I can see you, you know.” Natalie recognized the voice. She peered out from behind a clump of fronds.
“Johnny? Is that you?” she whispered.
“Yup.”
“You weren’t at the ceremony. I’ve been looking for you everywhere! Where were you?”
“My mom took forever to get ready, so we got here late.” He tugged gently at the black bow tie that topped off his tuxedo. “What are you doing?”
“Hiding.”
“From who?”
“Everyone. Being a bridesmaid is awful. Edward’s mother is worse than Aunt Rose. She’s so bossy. She wouldn’t even let me sit down before the ceremony. She said my dress would wrinkle.”
“Who the heck is Edward?”
“The groom! Didn’t you read the invitation?”
“Nope. Never even saw it.”
Natalie snorted. “Of course you didn’t. I guess it’s no use asking whether you read the engagement announcement in the newspaper.”
“Who reads the newspaper?”
“For Pete’s sake, Johnny, your father owns a
newsstand
!”
“Never mix business with pleasure. Besides, who cares which rich guy Mimi married? I just want some food. Come on out of there. Please.”
Natalie sighed. “All right. But if Edward’s mother comes near me, I’m going back.” Natalie stuck one arm out through the greenery. “Can you help me? It’s tricky in these shoes.” Johnny grabbed her hand and pulled gently, but after she emerged he still didn’t let go of her hand. He held it and stared at her.
“What? Is my dress ripped or something?” Natalie took her hand away and looked over her shoulder to see whether the back of her skirt was torn. Her cheeks were flushed.
“You look really … nice.” Johnny’s voice sounded strange. He was probably making fun of her. They always teased each other.
“Ugh. This dress is awful. It’s so tight and the skirt is too puffy, and—”
“No. It’s nice.”
“It is?” She squinted her eyes, trying to read his expression, but he only looked down at his shoes. “Thanks.” The silence became uncomfortable.
Johnny recovered first. “Let’s head over that way.” He pointed across the dance floor. “There’s a waiter with those tiny lamb chops.”
Natalie stood up on her toes to look and grabbed his hand as soon as she saw the tray. “Let’s go,” she told him, already running. “I’m starving!”
JUDITH
“I’m never getting married,” Judith said. Her cousin Harry raised his eyebrow at her. “How come? You don’t like any of those Harvard boys?” They were moving slowly around the dance floor, neither of them particularly graceful. Harry’s wife, Barbara, was dancing with Uncle Abe.
“It’s not that,” Judith tried to explain. “I just don’t want all of
this.
” She gestured to the ballroom and the couples dancing around them. “I don’t want a big wedding with everyone looking at me and lots of people I don’t even know. Mimi likes being the center of attention. But I would never want something this elaborate.”
“I don’t think you have to worry about that,” Harry told her. “Not unless Mr. Moneybags has a brother.”
Judith shook her head. “Just Lillian, his sister. Over there.” She pointed across the room to a young woman wearing the same bridesmaid dress. It was obvious that the color had been selected to flatter Lillian rather than Judith. Mimi was by the girl’s side, and the two of them were laughing and sipping champagne.
“No offense or anything, but Mimi fits in much better with Edward’s family than with yours,” Harry observed.
“Hmmph,” Judith snorted. “Did you know Edward’s parents bought them an apartment in their building as a wedding present? Mimi never stops talking about how wonderful they all are. Or about all her shopping trips with Lillian and Mrs. Feinstein to pick out her gown. She didn’t bother inviting me or Dinah.”
“Did she ask your mom?”
“No, but my mother wouldn’t have gone even if they had invited her.”
The music stopped and the bandleader approached the microphone. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he announced, “it’s time for the bride and her father to have their dance.”
Judith watched Mimi down the rest of her champagne and hand the empty glass over to Lillian. Mimi and Mort took two uneventful turns around the ballroom before Edward cut in. When her father exited the dance floor, Mimi’s face flooded with unapologetic relief. “I’ll see you in a little bit,” Judith said to Harry, and she followed her father to the bar.
“I didn’t know you could dance,” she told Mort, as she took the seat next to his. He ordered two glasses of champagne, handed one to Judith and raised his glass. “To your sister,” he said.
“To Mimi,” Judith agreed, and the two of them touched glasses.
Judith was curious. “So what do you think of Edward?”
“He’s the kind of man your sister always wanted to marry.”
“You mean rich? I guess.” She sighed. “I feel like this is the wedding of a stranger, not my sister.”
“Well, your mother and I agreed that it was best to stay out of her way while she planned this. Mimi made it clear that she didn’t want our input.”
“Were you upset?”
“It wasn’t unexpected.”
“Still, we’re her family.”
Mort took a sip from his glass. “I think you already know this, Judith, but I’ve been trying to…,” he searched for the right words, “to look at things … differently.”
“I know, but—”
He held up his hand to silence her protest. He looked tired. “Some things we just have to accept,” he told her. Judith followed her father’s gaze across the room to where her mother was sitting alone, looking as grim as possible. He turned back to Judith and finished his thought out loud. “So we can save our strength for other problems.”
ROSE
Tradition mandated that Mimi be escorted down the aisle with her father on one side of her and her mother on the other, but Rose had no intention of participating. An hour before the ceremony, while the photographer was taking pictures on the hotel terrace, Rose complained of dizziness. It wasn’t a lie—she
had
been dizzy for a moment. But when the moment passed, she stayed quietly seated and kept her eyes closed. She tried to imagine she was somewhere else.
She must have been doing a pretty good job of it, because when the photographer was done, the women and girls all left for the powder room without her. Dinah ran back to retrieve her before the ceremony. “Still not feeling well?” she asked. Rose kept her eyes shut and nodded. She didn’t have to say
why
she wasn’t feeling well. She didn’t have to say anything at all.
Dinah had been given strict instructions. Whether they were from Mimi or Mimi’s new mother-in-law, Mrs. Feinstein, it didn’t matter. If Rose wasn’t feeling up to walking down the aisle, she was to be given a cup of water and brought to the room where the ceremony was to take place. She was to be shown to a seat in the first row on the right, next to the groom’s grandmother. Dinah settled her there, gave her an obligatory kiss on the cheek and left to find the other bridesmaids. The wedding was about to begin.
The music started, something classical and elegant, wafting toward Rose from the string quartet in the corner of the room. Half a dozen good-looking young men, bow ties carefully knotted, strolled down the aisle one by one. Rose supposed they were Edward’s friends or cousins—she didn’t care. She didn’t recognize any of them. Next came Edward himself, flanked on one side by his father and on the other by the cunningly coifed Mrs. Feinstein. Mrs. Feinstein’s slim gown was the same pale blue as the dresses the bridesmaids wore. The same blue, Rose noticed, as the flowers cascading down the sides of the wedding canopy. No one had told Rose what color dress to wear. Her dress was gray.
After a few moments the music changed, and the bridesmaids entered carrying impeccable blue bouquets. The maid of honor took her place at the front of the room, and the crowd stood in unison, all hoping for a glimpse of the bride. Rose felt Edward’s grandmother take her hand and squeeze. She tried to pull away—she didn’t even know the woman—but the grandmother’s grip was too strong. “Oh my,” she murmured to Rose when she first saw Mimi coming through the door. The old woman’s eyes were watery and bright. “Now I can die happy,” she whispered. Rose managed to free her hand.
A minute later and there was Mimi, floating past in the ivory gown that Rose had seen for the first time just that morning. Mort marched beside her, solid and slow, as unremarkable as Mimi was stunning. The guests let out a collective sigh. Only Rose was unmoved.
The sensation was a familiar one and took Rose back to a day she had spent with her father at the very first Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. It was called the Macy’s Christmas Parade back then, and she couldn’t have been more than ten years old. She had been excited for the outing, thrilled to see the animals, the floats, the costumed employees. There was a large family standing next to her, the girls in bright red wool coats and the boys in matching sweater vests. At the end of the parade, Santa glided past in his red velvet suit, waving to the crowd from his perch on a giant golden sleigh. The children next to Rose squealed with delight. “It’s Santa! He’s here!”
Rose had looked around at the other faces in the crowd. All of the children were convinced that the man in the sleigh was the real Santa Claus. Suddenly, she was disappointed. What had seemed so magical just moments before was only paint and glitter after all. The parade was not meant for her. She felt the same watching Mimi walk down the aisle.