Authors: Susan Palwick
“Oh,” I said, thinking a lot of things even I knew better than to say, like if she’s showing already it’s not going to be a secret for long, like if your mother’s so happy about the lovely grandchildren you and Bill are going to give her, why can’t she love this grandchild too? But I saw right away that Mandy’s parents would never let Cindy be in the wedding, and I knew Mandy would do whatever they wanted, because she always did. She never could talk back to them. That’s why she was the favorite daughter.
Mandy was my best friend, but sometimes I got just plain disgusted with her. She never stuck up for herself at all, and somehow she got everything she wanted. Here she was marrying Bill and planning this big wedding while Hank Heywood, who made me dizzier than anybody I’d ever met, hadn’t even kissed me yet. And if I ever did get married my dad couldn’t afford to pay for a fancy wedding, and my mother had died when I was a baby, so there wouldn’t even be anybody to fuss over the dress and stand there crying during the ceremony. It wasn’t fair.
I wanted to say something really mean to Mandy, right then, but I knew I was just feeling sorry for myself when I should have been feeling sorry for Cindy. So I took a swig of root beer float to calm myself down and tried to say something useful instead. “What does Bill say about this?”
“Bill’s staying out of it.”
Bill stayed out of a lot of things, mainly debt and drugs and trouble, which was why Mandy’s parents liked him so much. A fine upstanding young man, they said. I could have told them a few things about what he got into, and what stood up when he did it. I’d had a scare myself, about a year before Mandy and Bill started going together, but nobody knew about that except Bill, and I wasn’t about to tell a soul, and neither was he. I’ll say this much for Bill: he knew how to keep a secret. He knew how to keep promises too, mostly. Turned out I was just late, but we had a few nervous weeks there, and the whole time he said, “Now don’t you worry about anything, Cece. I’ll get the money for a good doctor if that’s what has to happen, I promise.” He’d have done it, too. Funny, I never doubted that, even though I knew full well I didn’t love him and he didn’t love me. I don’t doubt it now. He was a better man when he was seventeen and scared than when he was thirty-five and broke his big promise, the one he’d made to Mandy at the altar, in front of the priest and all those people and God, if you believe in God.
But I’m getting way ahead of myself. So I said to Mandy, “Well now, look, if I’m not your maid of honor, who will be?” Because I still didn’t like the idea, not one bit. A bridesmaid, fine, but maid of honor? Standing at the altar next to Mandy and Bill, knowing that Cindy should have been the one up there and that I wasn’t any better than her, just luckier? Knowing that Bill knew all this too, and that Mandy didn’t know any of it and now I’d never be able to tell her? Even back then I watched enough soap operas to know that once you get into a tangle like that, you don’t get out. You’re in it for life. Your kids are in it, probably, and their kids too. It doesn’t end.
“I guess I’d have to ask my cousin Sandra,” Mandy said, looking at me like I’d just drowned the last puppy in the world. She still hadn’t touched her shake, and I gave up. First of all, Sandra was the snootiest bitch in the county; I didn’t know anybody who liked her, not even Mandy, and Mandy liked everybody. Secondly, there was the cousin thing. If you don’t ask your sister to be your maid of honor and ask your best friend instead, maybe you can get away with it. “We’re so close.” “We’re just like sisters.” Something like that. But not to ask your own sister, and then to ask
another
relative, some cousin you don’t even like? That’s ten times more of an insult all around, and there’s no way of hiding it.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll do it.” I guess I didn’t sound very honored, but I’ve never been good at lying about things like that. Mandy smiled at me and let out a big sigh of relief, and finally reached for her shake.
So I was the maid of honor, and Sandra and our friends Christy and Diane were the bridesmaids. We carried pink sweetheart roses and white carnations, and wore pink satin dresses with big bunches of tulle at the shoulders. I still have that dress hanging in my closet, not that I’ll ever be able to fit into it again, not that I’ve been able to for years now. I always thought I’d give it to my daughter, when I had one. That’s never going to happen now, I guess, even if I ever do get married. You hear stories on the news about women having babies after forty, but that always smacks of Instant Miracle Cure to me. And going through the Change is enough work, without having to chase a toddler around while you’re doing it. I guess I could give the dress to one of Mandy’s girls, but what would I say? “This is the dress I wore when your mother married the man who ran off with his secretary fifteen years later”? The girls are real bitter about Bill. The oldest was only thirteen when it happened, and when you’re that age everything’s easy: black and white, right and wrong. And the other three believed whatever their big sister told them.
So no one will ever get to wear that dress again, which is too bad, really. It’s still the fanciest dress I’ve ever owned, and I was excited about wearing it in the wedding, even if it should have been Cindy’s dress. I squared my conscience about that by promising myself that if I had to be maid of honor I was going to do it my way: I was going to be real nice to Cindy, so that maybe Mandy would be brave enough to be nice to her too, and then when Mr. and Mrs. Mincing saw the two of us being nice their hearts would soften and they’d take Cindy back into the family. I was going to fix everything, oh yes I was. I had it all planned out.
That’s the kind of plan you can only come up with when you’re nineteen and don’t know how anything works yet. I’d never been in a wedding before: I didn’t know how scared I’d be, in front of all those people. I didn’t know that Cindy would sneak into the church late and sit in the very back pew, rows and rows behind the rest of the family, cowering there trying to hide. Cindy’d always been so bold about everything that I thought she’d be bold about the wedding too—especially since by then everybody in town knew she was expecting, it wasn’t like it was a secret at all—but maybe the church made her lose her nerve. Who could blame her? The priest had been saying something boring but pretty nice, and then all of a sudden he gets going on how we’re there to bless the joining of two souls, to make a marriage that will last until death, longer than youth and longer than beauty, longer than the sinful desires of the body. He wasn’t looking at Mandy and Bill anymore by the time he said that; he was glaring over their heads, practically yelling at the back of the church. And then all three of us knew what must have happened, even though we hadn’t seen Cindy come in. You could feel everybody else in the church fighting not to turn around and stare at that back pew. Some of them did, mostly kids, before their parents yanked them back around again. I couldn’t see that from where I was, but Hank told me about it after the ceremony. That was only about a week before he got shipped out to Vietnam: he was one of the last ones to get sent over. He never did kiss me before he left—he was so shy, Hank—but he wrote me letters until he disappeared. He just vanished into the jungle; nobody ever found out what happened to him. I wore one of those silver
POW/MIA
bracelets for a while, you know, back when everybody was wearing them. After a while it stopped being the thing to do; people would give you funny looks when they saw it, ask what it was. Some people thought it was a MedicAlert bracelet, thought I was diabetic or something. And it was ugly, to tell you the truth, so finally I took it off. But I’ve never stopped wondering what happened to Hank. A lot of my nightmares are about jungles, even now.
So. Anyway. I’m standing up there at Mandy’s wedding, I can’t see anything but the altar and the priest—he was young then, handsome, like that guy in
The Exorcist—
and he’s thundering along about the transience of youth and beauty and the body like we’re not at a wedding at all, more like we’re at a funeral, and Mandy’s making little choking noises and Bill’s clutching her hand and all three of us are glaring at that guy. Shut up, shut up,
shut up
. Well, he didn’t. Never so much as looked at us. I should have said something. Maybe I would, now, but I was too scared then, especially since it wasn’t my church and who was I to challenge somebody else’s priest? I tried to catch his eye, I did, I’ll say that much for myself, but he wouldn’t look at me, so I was left staring at the statue on the wall behind him, the one of Jesus nailed to the cross. If you want to feel lousy about having a body, all you have to do is look at that thing. Ouch. Every nail. Every drop of blood, I swear, and that poor man in so much pain he must have been out of his mind with it, just praying to die soon so it would be over. You can tell all that, from that statue. I guess that makes it good art. I tried to talk to Mandy about it once, but Mrs. Mincing was there and she gave me a lecture about how Jesus wasn’t suffering on the cross, he was at peace, he was happy to be doing the Lord’s will, and if I’d been a godly person I would have known that. Well, religious or not, you’d never know it from looking at that statue. Even now, whenever I think about what might have happened to Hank in the jungle, I wonder if he wound up looking like that. It’s what my father looked like, when he was dying of cancer.
So I’m standing there looking at that statue, figuring that’s what Cindy feels like too—like she’s nailed to a piece of wood with everybody staring at her and nobody doing a thing to help—and I’m thinking, well, I’ll talk to her at the reception, I
will
, even if the whole town cuts me dead for it. I’ll go up to her and say something friendly. Better yet, I’ll go up and give her a big hug. Except that I never got my chance, because Cindy didn’t go to the reception. Of course she didn’t: I should have known she wouldn’t. She walked out of that church and she disappeared. For years. Like Hank.
Well, it ate at Mandy like you wouldn’t believe. She thought it was her fault, because if she’d included Cindy in the wedding maybe everything would have happened differently. “You were right,” she kept saying. “You were right all along. I should have asked her.” Which made me feel like dirt, of course. I kept telling her I hadn’t been right, I’d just been self-righteous, and that’s not the same thing. Her parents paid for that wedding and it was their show all along, not hers and Bill’s, and they sure didn’t want any spotlights on Cindy. Mandy couldn’t have done anything.
“Blame the priest,” I kept telling her. “Blame your parents, if you have to blame somebody.” Mr. and Mrs. Mincing didn’t even look for Cindy: just said good riddance, as if you can wash a daughter off your hands as easily as a speck of dust. Mandy and Bill looked, got the police to put out a missing-person report, checked with bus stations and lying-in homes and hospitals, everyplace they could think of. They printed up fliers with Cindy’s picture, and every year on Cindy’s birthday they put ads in papers all over the country: “Happy Birthday Cindy, We Love and Miss You, Please Call Your Sister Mandy Collect.” They did all that stuff for six or seven years, I don’t even remember how long it went on, and they couldn’t find a clue. It wasn’t cheap, either, taking out all those ads. Bill was a prince about it, he really was, and it can’t have been easy on him. I used to wonder if maybe he was the father of Cindy’s baby, especially after what had happened to me, but I decided that no, he couldn’t be, because Cindy had to have gotten pregnant while Bill and Mandy were a steady couple—practically engaged already—and I just couldn’t believe that Bill would do such a thing. I still can’t, even with what he did later. And there were plenty of other guys who could have been the father. So I think he was so good about the search because he was a decent man, not because he felt guilty.
But finally, after years of not finding anything, Bill told Mandy that their marriage was haunted and that she had to choose between looking for Cindy and living with him. She and I had a long talk at Sam’s Sodas over that one, believe me. She didn’t touch her vanilla shake at all that time, and we talked and talked and finally I told her I thought Bill was right. “You’ve done everything you can,” I told her. “You’d have found her by now if she wanted to be found. Wherever she is, she wants you to be happy, Mandy.” I don’t know if I believed that even while I was saying it, but Mandy did, and she said it made her feel better, and she prayed for Cindy every night and settled down to loving Bill and her kids the rest of the time.
You can’t forget a lost sister, though. Mandy and I still talked about Cindy, how she’d probably gone to some big city—Chicago, Houston - and gotten a good office job, because Cindy could type like nobody’s business. We decided Cindy was happy. We knew it. We had her life all planned out for her. Except that we didn’t know anything, of course, and we knew
that
, even though we never admitted it. We told each other that she’d probably had her baby and then gotten married to some nice young lawyer or doctor who wanted kids, in a church with a
nice
priest this time. Mandy always insisted on that, that this new priest would be kind, he’d forgive Cindy her past the way her husband forgave her, her past, the way priests are supposed to forgive, because that’s what Christ did. That’s what Mandy said; I didn’t know, not being religious. The only priest I’d ever met was the one who married Mandy and Bill, and I’d heard so many different things about Christ from so many different people that I didn’t know what to think. Seems to me you can make anything you want to out of Christ; he’s like a politician that way.
After Mandy and Bill stopped looking for Cindy they seemed happy for a long time. Bill was going great guns with his CPA business—even in a little town like Innocence, everybody needs their taxes done—and Mandy kept busy taking care of the kids, which would have been a full-time job for anybody. They looked like the perfect family, and I was jealous again. Thinking back on it, I guess I should have known better. There was plenty of tension there, like the way Bill always talked about how his girls were going to go to college, not just get married right out of high school and have babies like all the other women in town. The girls were smart enough to know that every time he talked that way he was putting down their mother, and they didn’t like it. Mandy didn’t mind that so much—she wished she’d been able to go to college too—but whenever Bill talked about teenagers having babies she remembered Cindy, and the old wound opened all over again. So really, that family was in an awful mess even before Bill fell for his secretary.