Wedding in Great Neck (9781101607701) (3 page)

Yes,
she wanted to scream.
I’m still here, but I wish you weren’t!

But Gretchen was not a screamer. Never had been and never would be. She had always been the good sport, the trooper, the one who compromised, yielded, and accommodated. She watched her sister shoot through her life with the force and direction of an arrow heading straight for the bull’s-eye. Her brother Teddy had that same quality. But she, Gretchen, did not. Instead she lived her life like a handful of confetti, tossed up into the air and scattered down—gracefully, she liked to think—a little here, a little there.

“I didn’t know you were coming,” she said, sidestepping the question about driving to the station to get him.

“I wasn’t…” he said. “And then I was.” There was a pause. “So here I am.”

“Well, well!” she said, the brittle falseness in her tone bordering on parody. “Isn’t that just dandy?” She drew a deep breath for strength. “Does Angelica know?”

“Yes. I called her to tell her.”

Funny, she never bothered to ask how I might feel about that
, Gretchen fumed.

“Gretchen? Did I lose you?”

Did you ever
, she thought. But did not say. “I’m still here,” she said finally. “Though I’m really not sure why you came, Ennis. I don’t think it was a good idea.” She began pulling on the lace edge of a pillowcase; if she kept this up, she would tear it.

“The girls asked me to.” He sounded defensive. “They kept calling to see if I would change my mind, and I didn’t want to disappoint them.”

“But you had no trouble disappointing
me
,” she said, unable to hide her bitterness.

“That’s another reason I came,” he said quickly. “I wanted to see you. To talk to you.”

“About what?” The lace was sturdier than she would have expected: despite her yanking, it remained intact.

“Let’s do this in person,” he said. “Will you come out and get me?”
Oot.

Gretchen did not answer right away. In the past she would have gone. She would have grumbled, she would have stewed, but she would have gone. Right now, though, she felt uncharacteristically uncooperative. Why should she have to play chauffeur for her estranged husband? Would Angelica do such a thing? Angelica, who had not even bothered
to let her in on this small but significant change in the guest list? Gretchen was quite sure the answer was no.

“I really don’t want to, Ennis,” she said at last. “I wasn’t expecting to see you today, and I want to…prepare myself before I do.” She gave the lace trim a final tug and was obscurely pleased when it tore free of the pillowcase.

There was a brief, wounded silence before he spoke again. “Fine,” he said. “I’ll call a taxi. See you later.” He clicked off.

Gretchen was left staring at her phone. Whatever burst of spirit that had enabled her to say no evaporated as soon as the connection was severed. She felt depleted and sad. Dreamy, sensitive Ennis, with his fine, wispy hair and his adorable accent. He was the love of her youth, the love of her life. Or so she had thought. They met, they courted—he’d been so ardent back then, calling late at night “just to hear her breathe,” penning verse that he slid under the door of her dorm room at school or slipped into the poetry books he was always buying for her—and they wed in great haste. Her parents had worried that they were too young, but Gretchen waved away all their concerns. He was the one, she told them. The One. Hah.

Gretchen surveyed the room to which she had been assigned. It had a cloying, virginal feel. A lace-infested bower of tiny floral prints, suffocating swags, and fancy flounces, it effectively catapulted her back to middle school, one of the more dismal periods in her life. Angelica had been given much more soignée lodgings, with a raw silk duvet the color
of champagne, and a very fine, at least to Gretchen’s admittedly imperfect eye, Persian rug. She had not seen the other rooms occupied by her brothers or her grandmother Lenore, though she had been downstairs to the media room with its sixty-inch flat-screen TV, piped-in sound, Wii, and latest-model PlayStation. Justine and Portia were camped out there because Betsy thought it would be “more fun” than one of the upstairs bedrooms. Portia had been delighted by all the flashy, high-tech toys, but Justine scowled ferociously.

“What’s wrong?” Gretchen had asked. “Don’t you like it?”

“What’s to like?” Justine had said. “It’s decadent beyond belief.”

Gretchen had not known how to reply. Her immediate thought was that she wanted to box Justine’s ears for her rudeness—
box
her ears
, what an archaic term. Gretchen was not even sure she knew what it meant; besides, she had never hit her children and was not about to start now.

But on a deeper level Gretchen was worried. Justine’s displeasure—with the room, with her life at school and at home in Brooklyn—had become a kind of emotional kudzu, propagating madly and strangling everything in its path. Justine was not happy with
anything,
and Gretchen’s maternal barometer told her this was not just a typical adolescent need to push her mother away and in the process carve out her own identity. No, it was something more. Something, if Gretchen was willing to be stingingly honest with herself, darker and more troubling. Justine was hurting; Gretchen
could feel it, smell it, practically taste it, but the barrier her daughter had erected made it impossible for Gretchen to either locate the source of the pain or do anything to help.

Looking around herself now, Gretchen felt sickened by the terminal sweetness. The urge to escape propelled her downstairs, where the kitchen was a hub of activity. Of course the crew from Elite Catering had its own state-of-the-art station set up outside, near the main tent, but Betsy’s maids were preparing food to set out in the breakfast room to feed the family and, apparently, anyone else who happened to wander in.

Water ran, pots clanged, and the phone trilled. One of the maids was at the sink rinsing berries in a colander; another was pouring various juices—apple, orange, grapefruit—into colorful glazed pitchers brought back from Betsy’s recent trip to Tuscany.

Gretchen heard her mother’s voice: “Carmelita, could you please—” although the rest of what she said was drowned out by the noise of the food processor, which in full throttle sounded like a small jet taking off.

Gretchen paused. No one had seen her yet, and, apart from her desire for a cup of strong black coffee, there was no reason to go in. She would just be in the way. Breakfast was supposed to be laid out in the appropriately named breakfast room, but she saw no signs of it yet. Besides, Ennis would be here soon, and she still wasn’t ready to deal with him.

She hurried back up the stairs and poked her toothbrush around in her mouth. Having her own immaculate
bathroom for the duration of the visit was almost compensation for being here; back in Brooklyn, without Ennis’s calm, orderly presence, the house had become a perpetual mess. Without any discussion or prompting on her part, he had loaded and emptied the dishwasher, dusted furniture, vacuumed with a vengeance. Now that he was gone, it seemed like there were always towels on the floor, hairs in the sink, and wads of dirty tissues and cotton puffs overflowing from the bathroom trash pail. Portia, when reminded, would make an attempt at corralling the chaos; Justine would use Gretchen’s perfectly reasonable request as another black mark against her.

But it was time to stop wallowing. There was nothing she could do this weekend to address or alter whatever was going on with Justine. It would be challenge enough to get through the wedding relatively intact. She would deal with Justine when the nuptial circus had concluded and she was back home with her girls again.

Looking out the small, lace-bedecked window, Gretchen saw the four-car garage, which suddenly presented her with an escape route. Her mother had given her a set of keys to one of the cars that was housed there—not the Mercedes convertible, the Lexus or the Jaguar, but the older, admirably maintained Volvo that the maids used for running errands. She’d go find a diner where she could order coffee, a couple of fried eggs, and a side of hash browns without having to listen to anyone discuss calories, saturated fats, or the wedding of the century. If she hurried, she could be
out of the house well before Ennis and his Scottishly inflected but nonetheless perfidious heart arrived, before she heard one more word about what Angelica wanted or Justine did not. Gretchen grabbed the keys. In her mind she was already gone.

D
ozing lightly in a room at her daughter Betsy’s Great Neck house, Lenore dreamed of breasts: big breasts and small breasts, breasts as high and firm as hills, breasts that drooped and sagged like a couple of old change purses. Breasts as pale as milk, dark as cocoa beans, and every shade in between. There was nothing erotic in her reverie; her interest was purely professional. But breasts were more than a profession for Lenore. Breasts were a calling.

Years ago, before Betsy was even born, Lenore and a friend had made the trek down to Essex Street to a lingerie shop owned by her husband’s best friend’s father, Sy Rosenzweig. Sy could take one look at a customer and say, “Maidenform, thirty-two-C,” in a tone that brooked no discussion. If the customer attempted to argue, he would simply turn to the wall of cardboard boxes stacked up to the ceiling, yank out the size and brand he deemed appropriate, and thrust it toward her. “You can put it on over there,” he would grunt, indicating a curtain—so faded a blue as to appear gray—that cordoned off the single dressing room. The woman
would slip behind the curtain, try on the bra, and—lo and behold!—Sy would have been right.

Lenore had grudgingly admired his expertise, but disdained his manner. Why make a woman feel that buying a bra was somehow a shameful and dirty business, like a backroom abortion? Why couldn’t the search for the right bra be a joyful, self-affirming experience? That’s where Lenore had seen her opening, and she’d stepped into it with all the tremulous excitement of an aspiring actress taking to the floorboards for the first time. It hadn’t happened right away; no, Lenore had had to plan and wait. But when her own sainted grandmother had died and left her a little nest egg, Lenore knew just how to hatch it: she rented a small storefront on Montague Street in Brooklyn Heights, and opened Lenore’s Lingerie.

Remembering everything that had offended her about Sy’s shop, Lenore set out to do things differently. The shop was painted a delicate, wistful shade of pink, like the inside of a seashell. There were pictures of lingerie ads, clipped from
Vogue
and
Harper’s Bazaar
and framed in the gold-tone frames that Lenore bought on sale at Woolworth’s. She had carpeting installed, and the curtains to the two small fitting rooms were made from a pink-and-green flowered fabric that she had cut and sewn at her kitchen table.

As she stitched the hems on her compact little Singer, a girlhood gift from her parents that she had brought with her into her marriage, she thought of what would take place inside these dressing rooms. She, Lenore, would do all the fittings
herself. Straps. Hooks. Padding. Push-ups. All the small yet essential details that would coalesce into the perfect fit, the perfect experience. The women who came to see her would be made to feel beautiful, special, cherished. They would leave feeling confident in a way they had never felt before. And then they would return, bringing their mothers, daughters, sisters, aunts, friends, and bridge club members. Her thoughts hummed merrily in concert with the buzzing machine. There. She’d finished both panels. Now all they needed was a quick pressing with a
schpritz
of starch.

That had all been more than fifty years ago. Lenore had opened her shop, and then another in Midwood and a third in Bay Ridge. They’d been successful, every single one of them, and she’d reluctantly had to accept that she could not do every single fitting herself. But she trained her fitters personally and would perform surprise spot checks, sweeping in unannounced to see how Myra, Susie, Ruby, and Precious were getting on. Even now, she still made her weekly rounds to the different shops, though Betsy had been hinting that she ought to give up driving. Give up driving! Lenore seethed just thinking about it. She loved to drive almost as much as she loved to breathe, and she still kept a drawer filled with silk scarves—only silk, never cotton or, God forbid, polyester—that she tied over her head when she was behind the wheel. Not only did she like to drive, but she liked to drive fast, and the scarves provided the necessary protection for her carefully wrought coif.

The sun was brightening behind the shades, and Lenore woke herself with a little snore. How rude! She was glad that no one, not even Monty, had had to hear that. One more indignity of aging, these crude, piglike snores; she had never snored when she was young. Or if she had, she had slept so soundly that she had never heard herself.

Mildly disgusted, she got out of bed and went to the window. A light tug caused the shade to snap up with a satisfying ping and allowed her to survey the scene below. Two gardeners were working around the edges of the lawn; another trimmed the hedges across from the kitchen door. Someone she didn’t recognize—maybe from the catering crew?—hurried across the lawn, avoiding the path. Lenore hoped Betsy did not see him; she was very particular about people using the paths, not the lawn.