Aftermath of Dreaming(83)
24
My sister’s living room has successfully completed its transmogrification into an issue of Modern Bride. Suzanne is holding forth in italicized verse while flinging yards of net around the room—the yards of net I have labored over to create a bridal-fantasy dream come true for her.
“Impossible for me to get married without a goddamn veil. This isn’t what I wanted or drew. I want froufrou without looking complicated or too…too…I’m getting married in two days and I’m not even going to have a veil.” My sister sputters to a stop, her harangue and arms winding down.
“Suzanne, I’m sorry, okay? I’ll fix it and it’ll look great, I promise.”
The veil she is holding is exactly what she drew, or as close to it as I could get. Not to mention that she already saw the damn thing, just a little less finished. I fight the urge to snatch it out of her hands, throw it on the ground, and stomp on it, screaming, “How do you like it now?” This fantasy allows my breathing to luxuriate in a long, slow exhale, as my body has tired itself out from my imagined tantrum.
Suzanne is staring at me. I have a wild worry that she can read my thoughts, but realize she is just waiting for me to continue reassuring her. “Your new and improved veil will be at the church on Saturday whenever you want.”
“Three o’clock.”
“Okay, I’ll be there, veil in tow.”
“Okay.”
“Okay. So.”
The child bride’s dress is hanging over the back of an upholstered chair, the whites of each fabric blending together into a blinding cloud. “This one’s nice,” I say, lifting the lace-covered frock.
“Coffee?” Suzanne is already leaving the room.
With cyanide for you preferably, but okay.
As I replace the child bride’s gown on the chair, I notice my maid-of-honor dress hanging on the wall, like some horrible floral flag. “Well, you cheer me up immensely,” I say out loud. I am glad that Suzanne insisted on keeping it here until today. Its proclamation of maidenhood in my apartment all these weeks would have done me in; the veil was depressing enough to have around.
Suzanne and the silver coffee service glide in like the figurehead on a ship.
“So is anyone coming?” I move our mother’s prayer book off the coffee table and sit down next to it on the couch, taking small comfort in Momma’s presence by proxy.
“Of course anyone is coming.” My sister is pouring the coffee we drank growing up; she has bags of it airmailed to her each month. The aroma of all our relatives’ kitchens every morning and most afternoons is now wafting toward me in Suzanne’s living room so far away on the West Coast. She and I were weaned on this coffee in the form of coffee-milk, which was milk heated on the stove just to the point where the whiteness of it gets really bright, then poured at the same time as the coffee into a cup already waiting with three full spoons of sugar in it. Pouring it was the trick. The milk came out of the open pot faster than the coffee did through the spout, so more milk went in, leaving a beverage that was a beautiful soft ivoried dark. Suzanne and I would sit with our coffee-milk at our relatives’ breakfast tables, listening to family news, and watching facial expressions that said everything about who was getting along with whom, while the adults drank their coffee black. It was heresy for the adults to put in sugar, much less milk. But one uncle, who had scandalized the family by moving North, sometimes returned and would tease our grandmother, his momma, by putting a broken spoon handle in his cup, stirring it a few times, then lifting it out, saying, “See, Momma, I told you, the coffee down here just eats spoons right up.” Even though it had been many years since I had to drink mine as coffee-milk, I still like the taste of sugar in it.
“Three hundred anyones are coming to the wedding. About a hundred of Matt’s relatives from San Francisco, practically his entire firm—”
“No, I meant from home is anyone coming.”
“Oh. No. They’re not.” Suzanne hands me my cup. She has put the sugar cubes in first, the way we were taught growing up so that the heat of the coffee liquefies them, thereby making a spoon unnecessary although it was still used for decorum.
“Aunt Cecile already gave us that engagement party down there, and we decided to go visit in the fall when everyone is back in town, so, no. No one’s coming out here for it.”
“Oh.”
“What?” Suzanne sounds the way she did as a child after she explained the rules of a game she made up that she worried I might not play.
The china cup I am holding has the same delicately balanced weight of hundreds of cups I have held sitting with countless family members in many living rooms as we participate in being flesh and blood. “Is this y’all’s pattern?”
My sister nods.
“It’s nice.” I can imagine her selecting the autumnal floral china, the juxtaposition of blossoms in a season near death—it is very Suzanne to have avoided the exuberance of a spring palette. Beauty with restraint. I have always liked that about her.
“No, it’s just…” I put my coffee cup down carefully, hoping the action will force me to also be delicate with the fragility I am feeling. “I mean, we have how many first and second and removed and twice-removed cousins, but honest to God, sometimes I feel completely untethered, like a wayward party balloon.”