The Wedding (22 page)

“Liz, Dad and I—” Shelby began.

Liz waved her arms in impatience. “No, no, wait. Your news can’t possibly top
my
news.” A sly smile crept across her face. “You will never be able to guess the contents of my right pocket.” She patted the right side of her shorts knowingly and raised her eyebrows.

Shelby couldn’t help but smile at the look of pure mischief on her sister’s face. “You’re right, I can’t. What is it?”

Liz shook her head slowly and ran her tongue over the bottom of her front teeth. “Uh, uh, uh. Not until you tell me you forgive me for our fight this morning. I was unfair to you, and it’s been bothering me all day.” The impish look on her face told a different story.

Shelby put her hands on her hips and rolled her eyes. “You know I can’t stay mad at you, Liz. Besides, I only have the energy to quarrel with one family member at a time, and right now it’s Dad. Do you know he—”

Again Liz cut her sister off. “Never mind, never mind. Tell me later.” But the look in Shelby’s eyes told her that the cause of her sister’s mood was more than a summer squall. “Oh, all right. What happened?”

“Dad told me I was marrying Meade because I’m afraid of colored men.”

Liz threw her head back and laughed merrily. “Heck, I could have told you that a long time ago.”

“Liz, stop it. It’s not funny. You’re just as bad as he is.”

Liz put her hands on her sister’s narrow shoulders and
bent forward to stare her in the eye. “Now listen here. That old fool’s probably just jealous because you’re doing what he secretly wished he could. Mom’s as close to white as it gets, but she’s still not the real thing.”

Shelby brushed Liz’s hands away and turned her face to the wall. “You’re awful. You don’t mean that.”

Liz frowned slightly. “No, I don’t, but I can’t say that it would surprise me. In a way it would make for a powerful symmetry.” She grunted. “You were too wrapped up in your own world to see how jealous Mom was when I married Linc.”

“Jealous? That’s a funny word for it. She hated the idea.”

“Part of her did, but the rest couldn’t stand the fact that I was following my heart and marrying a dark man, something she herself never had the guts to do, and never will. She sees herself in me, the side of herself she was never honest enough to face. But I can’t blame her—she had Gram and her mother watching her like hawks, making sure she understood that skin color was a direct barometer of virtue.”

Liz and Shelby stared at each other, two sisters squared off inside a cramped, locked room. Liz leaned back on one leg, cocking the other foot up on its heel and swaying it raffishly. “But enough of all that.
That
is not what I came here to tell you.” Impatient with her sister’s indifference, she reached into the right-hand pocket of her shorts and pulled out a square envelope, which she dangled in front of Shelby’s face like a piece of cheese. “Emmaline got this from GiGi.” Liz and Shelby both knew that there was only one GiGi on the island—Lute’s housekeeper. Emmaline was the only
maid in the Oval who would have anything to do with her: snobbery among the help was just as virulent as snobbery among the owners, if not worse, and only the Coleses’ cook, absolutely secure in her position as employee of the Oval’s most respected family, would dare befriend the employee of such a rank outsider, and an obvious social climber at that. GiGi had confided in Emmaline regarding Lute’s attraction to Shelby, and both approved, or at least they disapproved less of that idea than the idea of a mixed marriage.

Shelby snatched the envelope out of her sister’s hand and tore it open, devouring the contents. She noticed with a small smile that on one line Lute had tried to spell “imperative” but had given up, crossed it out, and written “important” instead. She looked up with a grimace and handed the note to her sister. “Oh, Liz, this is ridiculous.”

Lute had been stalking Shelby all summer, throwing himself down next to her and her friends on the beach, sidling next to her in the grocery store. She was never more than polite to him, and when her friends teased her she was quick to dismiss them with a scoff, but she had to admit she found his attention flattering, even if the idea of having anything to do with him was absurd.

Liz crossed her arms over her chest. “Oh, I don’t know,” she drawled, “I can think of worse things than getting love letters from a damn sexy man.”

Shelby said nothing; at times like this she found her sister’s brand of humor particularly intolerable. Lute McNeil, sexy? She didn’t know whether she found him sexy or not, but she did know he made her uncomfortable, with his frank stare and the words that he had no right to speak to her but
did. Her friends had long whispered to her about Lute’s sleek good looks, and the way he sashayed about the island as if he owned it. Shelby saw what they meant, but if the truth be told she could never quite
feel
what they meant, about Lute or anyone else.

Sex was the source of Shelby’s worst fears, her deepest misgivings. What was wrong with her, that she never felt swept away by desire the way the women always were in the sand-filled issues of
True Romance
that got passed back and forth on the beach? She had found men sweet before, and nice, and fun to be around, but where was the pounding of blood at her temples, the blind lust that was supposed to consume her? In moments of panic, she wondered whether she wasn’t highly sexed enough, whether she was doomed to fall far short of Meade’s expectations. She knew the stereotypes that whites held about race and sexuality—would Meade expect more from her than she knew how to give? She knew her fiancé so well on every other subject, but here she drew a blank: it was a subject they did not discuss. In part she had loved him for that, loved the tender understanding with which he had acquiesced to her wish not to consummate their relationship out of wedlock. But sometimes she couldn’t help but wonder if he would be disappointed, and in disappointment turn away from her. A man like Lute could teach her, wanted to teach her; but Meade, sophisticated world traveler that he was, had been exposed to so many exciting women. How could she hope to hold him with her lack of expertise?

Liz gave Shelby a playful shove. “Come on, baby sister, what’s wrong? This man’s been after you all summer. Don’t
tell me you’re finally starting to crack, the day before your wedding?”

“Liz, I’m so confused right now I don’t know what I think. When I met Meade, it was his music I fell in love with at first. I’d never seen a man make sounds like that come from a piano, never seen a man
care
so much about sounds coming from an instrument. He played that thing like he was giving birth, and his fingers pounded into those keys so hard I couldn’t tell one from the other. I felt like I was in church. But maybe that’s just it. Maybe I’m marrying him because he’s safe, because so much of his passion is poured into his music, and who knows”—Shelby paused and turned her confusion-stricken face up to regard her sister—“maybe because he’s white.” Shelby pushed past her sister and strode to the center of the room. Her back was turned to Liz, and from behind her sister could see the tension rippling through Shelby’s shoulders. “Could it really be true?” Shelby whispered softly, almost inaudibly. “Am I really afraid of sex with the highly touted colored male—because of Mother’s compulsion, because of Dad’s infidelity?” As if a wall had been removed inside her, Shelby talked faster and faster, pouring all of her fears out at her sister’s feet. Her eyes blinked furiously. She was not accustomed to exposing so much of herself to her sister, and though she felt purged, she also felt vulnerable.

For her part, Liz was secretly delighted to play the role of counselor in an area on which she thought herself an expert, having lived through the dark night of doubt that preceded her own marriage. She stroked her sister’s hair soothingly. “Shelby, it all comes down to how well you really
think you know Meade. No one else can answer that question for you. Because if you don’t know someone all that well, you react to their surface qualities, the superficial stereotypes they throw off like sparks. Lute equals black, Meade equals white. But once you fight through the sparks and get to the person, you find just that, a person, a big jumble of likes, dislikes, fears, and desires. Trying to figure what a man is going to think or do based on the color of his skin will tell you as much about you as it will about him. Look at Gram. Until I married Linc and had the baby, I never thought of her as white, you see. She was just Gram. I still don’t, except when her rejection of my child throws the fact in my face. You don’t think of people you know as white unless they remind you, any more than you think of yourself as colored unless a white person reminds you.”

“I do know Meade, as much as I need to. I mean, you always have doubts, but you can’t marry a man on a trial basis. And outside of marriage, there are some things that we just can’t know about each other.”

“Well, how’s it been with you and Meade so far? How close have you come?” Shelby’s silence spoke volumes. “Not that close, huh?” Liz shook her head. “Huh.” She went silent herself, scratching her cheek thoughtfully with one hand.

“Don’t give me your huhs,” Shelby said curtly. “Not all traditions are so wrong, and I happen to believe that if you don’t save some intimacy for marriage then what’s the point, really?”

Liz put her hands on her hips and emitted a snort. “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with your decision. It
just wasn’t right for me. Sex is important, and if Linc and I hadn’t experimented a bit before marriage”—she laughed wickedly—“how would I have known that I wanted to marry him?”

“What are you saying—if you hadn’t liked it you would have broken up with him?”

“I’m saying that what worked for me doesn’t have much to do with what works for you. If we’ve learned anything from being sisters for twenty-two years, we’ve learned that.”

Shelby sighed. She was tired of doubting, tired of being confused. She wished Meade were there right then to tell her that everything was going to be okay, to calm her with a glance, a touch, but he wasn’t. He was only a few miles down the road, staying at an inn with his best man, a friend and fellow musician, but he might have been in Nepal for all the good he did her now. She stared at the scrawled note still resting in her sister’s hand. Considered one by one, her encounters with Lute that summer seemed irrelevant. They had seemed like the shooing away of a dog pleading for scraps, the dismissal of a panhandler begging for spare change. Yet now that she regarded them as a whole, these run-ins congealed in her mind into a disquieting mass. She had laughed at his callow mockery of her impending wedding to a white man, but now it was as if the black bile he had poured into her ears had quietly trickled down to a secret place within her and festered there. Shelby knew few interracial couples, but those she did know seemed as happy as anyone. She had always assumed that, if two people were strong enough to fight through all the obstacles thrown in front of even the possibility of marriage, surely they could
face its day-to-day realities. Lute’s words to her, built up from here and from there over the course of the summer, had introduced doubts, doubts she did not want to accept but could not quite shake. Lute was cunning: he had discussed his divorces at length, always blaming them on the impossibility of interracial marriage. He had described in agonizing detail the torment that he and his wives were forced to endure day after day and week after week during the course of their marriage, until the combined weight of so much societal disapproval crushed their love into fine powder. “Liz, what if I don’t have the strength to fight a war against bigotry every day of my life, for myself and for my children?”

“What if you don’t?” Liz answered impatiently. “Do you really expect an answer to that question? If you’re that worried about it, why don’t you just pass?”

Shelby recoiled as if struck. “You have to be kidding.”

“Why? You could, you know, you easiest of all of us. Don’t tell me you’ve never thought about it. Meade has a hard enough road in front of him without taking on the cross of your color.”

“Don’t be a fool. And live my life in shame and embarrassment, always scared of being exposed? I think not.”

“Come on, Shelby, don’t be so naive.”

“No, you come on, Liz. I would never do that to my children. What, so I lie to them, praying that they never learn the truth? Or tell them the truth, and force them to live a lie too, force them to listen in silence as their schoolmates tell nigger jokes? Not while I have a breath in my body. And how much would we see each other if I decided to pass?”

Liz admitted that the answer to that question was difficult. Shelby could visit her freely, but if Liz visited Shelby without her husband and child, it would be tantamount to denying them. She eyed her sister with both amusement and concern. She liked Meade a great deal, liked his wit and his daring and the fact that he was a little dangerous, that he drew Shelby out and took her places she would never otherwise have gone. A few years ago, Liz would have chuckled at the thought of her sister sitting at the bar in a smoke-filled downtown jazz club waiting for her boyfriend to finish his set, and there was something magical about the way that fantasy had been transformed so swiftly into almost mundane everyday reality. That Meade and Shelby could meet and fall in love at all encapsulated for Liz everything she loved about Manhattan. But if Shelby were succumbing to doubts of this magnitude now, then she owed it to herself to face them, for Liz knew Lute’s type far better than Shelby, and Liz knew that whatever spell he had her in would burst like a soap bubble upon close inspection, but unless Shelby faced Lute, confronted him, saw him for what he was, then it would be too late. She would be married, and a nagging cloud of doubt would never entirely leave her. Liz looked out the west-facing windows. “Time’s running out, little sister. Your man is waiting for you.”

“You really want me to have a rendezvous with Lute McNeil the night before my wedding?”

“Why not? Go! Get him out of your system. Get over it. This is the last chance for you to explore your feelings, the last chance for you to be sure.”