Calamity and Other Stories (14 page)

“She’d been after him for years, apparently. Even when we were in college. Remember when she came to visit that time?”

“Right after that was when Mack dumped Callie.”

“I thought Callie was the one who broke up with Mack.”

“That was the second time, after college.”

“Because of
her.
”

“It’s true. Callie told me.”

“Then why would she make her Maid of Honor?”

“A consolation prize. You know how Callie is.”

Indeed, that was just like her. She was the team captain who in gym class picked the unlikely athletes, the student who made a point of befriending the new kid or the underdog. Her latest plan had been for the Maid of Honor to hit it off with the Best Man. But in a shocking—if largely unnoticed—turn of events, the Best Man appeared to be smitten with a distant relative on the bride’s side: a woman in her early forties who, though not in the bridal party per se, had been given a corsage and asked to read a passage from
The Little Prince.
Yet no one but the groom’s mother had noticed the Best Man’s affections, even though it had been perfectly obvious at brunch that morning, the way that he had angled for a seat next to the lovely light-eyed woman. Eileen, who still recalled him as a sweet teenage boy, had watched him ask the woman fawning questions, and had smiled to herself as he repeatedly offered to fetch her food from the buffet. No one else even seemed to be watching. It was as if, because they themselves could not see the appeal of a woman in her forties to a man in his thirties, the entire courtship must not be taking place. But Eileen herself had been loved, greatly loved, by a much younger man, and so she was able to see. After all, there was no good reason such a thing shouldn’t happen, especially at a wedding, where there is little space of any other kind for a random middle-aged woman to inhabit.

Eileen watched as the Best Man, through with his announcement, fetched a drink for the light-eyed woman, while the woman pretended not to know exactly what was occurring between them. That’s what you did in situations like this, where everyone was a bit compromised. You played your role and made sure the day was grand. You forgot about your own pleasures, and your own disasters. You smiled politely and held your breath—as big a gasp of air as possible, enough to last you, you hoped—and then you waited until it was over, when you could go back to being your full self.

But the cluster of bridesmaids was buzzing:

“He hasn’t been at any job for more than a year.”

“He keeps saying he’s going to get an M.B.A., but he never gets the application in on time.”

“I thought it was that he finished the application but missed the exam deadline.”

“He applied on time but wasn’t accepted. He doesn’t have the grades. We all know he was a total partyer in college.”

“So was Callie.”

“But Callie excels at everything.”

“It’s just that he’s unfocused. And then he was with that Internet startup, just when all the dot-coms started to go belly-up.”

“I heard he got fired.”

“Callie likes that kind of thing. Now she gets to be his savior.”

Annie watched the Maid of Honor down more wine. It was possible Eileen was wrong about her after all. Maybe she wasn’t such a good match for Mack. For one thing, she was an academic of some kind, and scholars were no fun as spouses; Annie knew because she herself was one (comparative philosophy) and understood what it meant to be mired in the petty imbroglios of university life. Plus, a woman endeared to serious, arcane study was sure to wear out her welcome with someone of Mack’s aptitude for laziness.

And maybe Mack wasn’t a good match for
her.
After all, if she could be this shaken by some sort of emergency landing, then how in the world could she ever put up with a man as carefree as Mack?

Annie had known Mack since his infancy, when he was a smiling, drooling baby with no clue of what life had to offer. Now here he was, twirling his bride with the bashful clumsiness of a man who rarely danced. Annie wondered what would happen with them. The furthest she could possibly see ahead for the two of them was the underbelly of a baby carriage stuffed with a mother’s own toys: cell phone, water bottle, gym clothes, snacks. Even of this she wasn’t quite sure. When you considered the realities of marriage, it really didn’t matter how good or bad a match two people were.

Her own wedding day, nearly forty years ago, had been generally unpleasant. All morning long, huge storm clouds had loomed overhead, and even though they never broke, Annie had spent the entire reception worrying that they would, so that by the time the guests left she felt as if the whole world had been washed out in floods. Meanwhile, her husband had been cheerful as ever and seemed not to even notice how narrowly they had escaped disaster.

Surely it was better for Mack to marry someone like Callie, who would never worry about storm clouds, and who didn’t quite know what it meant to not always enjoy life. Perhaps he shouldn’t be with a person like the Maid of Honor, who, it was obvious, knew what it felt like to try hard and still not necessarily get what she wanted. Just look at her, too skinny, and in that bruise-colored dress, circles under her dark eyes. It probably was best for him to be with Callie.

For the time being, at least.

At Salt Island, already they were making a ruckus. The bride’s side wondered what kind of people those were. Was it a fight, or was it just teasing? There were hoots and hollers, and the bride’s father asked his wife, “What’s going on over there?” But Helen, sparkling proudly in gold shantung, said, “Tom, honey, I think that’s singing.”

Then she gave a concerned glance toward Annisquam, where the Maid of Honor was pushing herself up out of her seat, taking noticeable pains to regain her balance. It seemed forever ago, thought Helen, that she had been a daily presence in their home, a little curly-haired girl, almost a second daughter. What a shame her parents couldn’t be here. They had moved out to a condominium in Phoenix years ago, and Helen hadn’t seen them in ages. The brother, too, now lived out west—and had apparently opted to take a last-minute Caribbean vacation rather than attend Callie’s wedding. Well, better that her family wouldn’t witness their daughter like this; she had always been such a good, good girl. Now she made her weaving way between other guests— excuse me, if you’ll excuse me—navigating with effort, that tinny jangling sound warning of her arrival.

“The Girl with the Shaken Nerves,” the Best Man joked as she walked past him, toward the dance floor. Then he dared to ask his new amour, “Shall we join her?”

Smiling, the light-eyed woman rose from her seat, and together they moved to where everyone was swaying and twirling and telling each other how they wished they had signed up for swing classes, or they had started to, or they had done so once, long ago. The two of them began to improvise, wondering lightly if any of the other guests were watching. While their union was an unorthodox delight it was also—though no one would have admitted it—just the sort of thing guests expect at weddings. After all, something had to happen. It was in the air. Everyone was waiting.

“They look good together, don’t they,” Eileen said to Annie, still seated at Magnolia.

“Definitely.” But Annie was referring to the bride and groom, who were still dancing sloppily, energetically, against each other. A posse of bridesmaids appeared, and Callie ushered them around her, forgetting, it seemed, all about her new husband.

With his wife gone, Mack began to dance with the Maid of Honor, the bells on her dress whipping back and forth. Eileen watched her son, and watched the Maid of Honor, and watched her daughter-in-law, and watched the Best Man take his love interest by the hands. The two of them did a little inverse turn, hands over their heads, smiling when they managed not to get tangled, and the people watching them smiled, too.

Eileen could not take her eyes off these people she loved— even she had to admit, Callie, with her tall blondness and splendid curves. Only a few hours earlier that bright-eyed girl had been enthroned at a salon, a panoply of pins and spray in her hair. Now here she was, a married woman.

A gust of wind came through the tent, stirring up the linens and cooling the leftover mashed potatoes. Eileen watched as all around her women pulled their throws more tightly around their shoulders. She didn’t believe in omens, and she had never taken weather personally. This was the ocean, after all, a harsher, more dangerous world, where seamen had braved all sorts of conditions in the name of blubber and shellfish and a nice fillet.

He wrapped her warm in his seaman’s coat
Against the stinging blast;
He cut a rope from a broken spar,
And bound her to the mast.

Eileen inhaled deeply and tasted the fetid odor of the ocean. She was filled with a suddenly overwhelming question: what would happen?

“I remember the day when Callie was two and a half, maybe three years old,” the bride’s grandmother said in her crumbling voice. Now that her son-in-law had joined her daughter on the dance floor, there were just Eileen and Annie to hear her story.

“My daughter called me, out of breath. Her voice was shaking. I was so worried, my heart started pounding. Helen said, Something’s happened with Callie, and my heart stopped. And you know what it was that had happened? It was that she was gorgeous.”

As if to confirm this, all three of them looked out to the dance floor, where the bride was circled by bridesmaids, her cheeks full and flushed from dancing. Now that more people had finished their meals, the floor was filling up, physical motion warming the brisk evening.

Mack had managed to locate Callie among the pack of bridesmaids. Annie, tugging absently at her fruit earrings, saw him kiss her grandly and spin her around for a bit. He then leaned her back in a sloppy dip from which she gracefully recovered.

“Let’s go,” the Best Man called into the microphone, out of breath from his own exertions. “All of you, get out here and join us!”

“Come on, kiddo,” Eileen said, nudging Annie, “let’s you and me dance.”

The music was suddenly turned up louder—a cue for everyone to join in. Annie found a spot on the dance floor and immediately began flapping her hands and wagging her broad hips. Eileen followed along and was swept up by her son, who seemed suddenly taller, lankier, as he took her by her bony hand.

“Just don’t dip me,” she told him. “Dip Annie instead.”

The three of them danced in a little triangle, just like the old days, when Annie would visit them, balancing Mack on her knees as he bobbed along to music on the radio. Eileen looked around at the throng. What release, as if there were no such thing as troubles in life. As if life really could be—if we all just did this a bit more often—one big party. And yet surely they had all, everyone under the tent, contended with something. All around her, an array of shipwrecks.

Now Callie had arrived, and the four of them danced in a square for a bit, until she and Mack set off and left Eileen and Annie shimmying across from each other. In the center of the dance floor, Mack tossed Callie this way and that, and the DJ turned the spotlight onto her, and you could see her white underwear through her dress.

By the time the hour came for making toasts, the Maid of Honor was too drunk to say her speech. Not that anyone had expected otherwise. And yet there was a mild sense of disappointment in the air; they would have liked some kind of spectacle.

“It’s a shame,” Eileen said to Annie. “She can be pretty damn funny.”

Of course, Annie thought. How could it have taken me so long to notice? With her wiry limbs and inappropriate dress and all that implicit disapproval around her, the Maid of Honor must have reminded Eileen of the way she herself had been. A younger, darker—if less intrepid—Eileen.

They listened and laughed as the Best Man spoke, his toast full of little, loving jabs of just the sort that Eileen felt could do her son good.

The bridesmaids who didn’t have boyfriends craned their necks to see better, wondering if the Best Man was truly single. The women who were mothers thought of what a good son he must be. Eileen wondered what would happen with him and his new love.

“And so,” the Best Man concluded, “let’s raise our glasses to two truly wonderful people who deserve not only each other but every other wonderful thing this life has to offer!”

There were cries of “Cheers!” and some spilt champagne, and over at Folly Cove an usher whistled. People laughed as the Best Man kissed the groom energetically on the lips, and when, as he embraced the bride, one of her bobby pins stabbed him in the cheek.

Amidst the hubbub, the Maid of Honor had managed to step up to the microphone. Like a ballerina en pointe, she stood in a commanding, if wobbly, way. Then she raised her glass and, with the purposeful clarity of a drunk, spoke:

“People,” she said, looking straight out at the crowd.

“People—”

She formed her sentence carefully and very, very slowly, each word emerging just when it seemed she had forgotten what it was she meant to say.