Lookaway, Lookaway (21 page)

It was also an education sitting next to her mother throughout Millie’s ceremony. After her role as Girl at the Book was finished, Annie joined her mom and Jerilyn in the church pew. The music was lavish—a string quartet. There had also been Millicent’s Mary Washington roommate who majored in music, vocalizing something or other, flat and mediocre. Annie tried to catch eight-year-old Jerilyn’s eye to laugh about it, but Annie saw her little sister was enthralled by the spectacle like it was a deeply moving theater play. Then, to a processional Annie thought she recognized off a Kenny G. album, entered the bridemaids and ushers.

“Oh lookee there,” her mother whispered, as one peach-magenta chiffonized bridesmaid holding a flower basket strode by. “She has the stems facing the wrong way.”

Annie turned around to see that all the girls carrying baskets had the stem end of the flowers facing the guests on their side of the aisle, rather than the flower heads.

Good God, Mrs. Johnston whispered, the best man and the groom had the
same
boutonniere … and look, they have the same ties as the lowly ushers—was there a Men’s Wearhouse special on ties, eight for the price of six? Here came the mother of the bride, fifty if she was a day, in a gown with ample display of bosom in front and back in back. (“Mutton dressed as lamb,” Jerene purred.) A five-year-old urchin smugged his way down the aisle littering the way with rose petals, with his twin brother behind as train bearer. The train of the bride was risibly long and kept escaping the hands of the fumbling five-year-old, who looked overstuffed in an excess of sateen and lace trim, a courtier mini-uniform that Gainsborough would have rejected as too much. He had kid gloves which could find no purchase on the satin train, so he kept dropping it and running after it, which everyone, even Annie, found adorable.

“That’s cute, you have to admit—”

“It’s appalling,” corrected her mother. Jerene pointed out that his shoes were black while he was in white. The program listed five maids of honor, when only one should have had that designation. No mention of the auxiliary Girl at the Book, Annie noticed.

“At least two of them, including her sister,” Jerene said quietly, “are married so they are hardly
maids
of honor.”

“What are they supposed to be called?”

Matrons of honor. The photographer they had hired AND the videographer were blatant nuisances, all but inserting themselves between bride and groom for the shot. “Scarcely comprehensible,” breathed Mrs. Johnston, though she was nearly swaying with pleasure. At last, after a tendentious homily that was twenty minutes of moralizing about the state of modern marriage, the preacher pronounced them man and wife and the happy couple kissed fully on the mouth—“How nice,” Annie’s mother noted, “to get a preview of the intimacies of the bridal suite.” Then the wedded couple accompanied each other up the aisle, followed by the maid of honor still clutching the bride’s bouquet. “No no, darling, pass it to a matron of honor for safekeeping,” urged Mrs. Johnston, under her breath. “Oh look, she’s going to actually take the arm of the best man for the exit. Maybe they can do-si-do up the aisle, like a square dance in a barn.”

“How many of these stupid little rules do you know, Mother? Is this your game at weddings? Counting the infractions?”

Mrs. Johnston smiled, barely. “I’ve counted at least twenty breaches of tradition, and today’s lapses in good taste are … oh my land, without number, without number.”

Jerilyn broke in to say she thought it was the most beautiful wedding she had ever seen.

“I can make sure yours, Jeriflower, is better by a long shot,” Mrs. Johnston said, gathering her gloves—her mother was still wearing gloves then! in 1993!—ready now to turn her attention to the enormities of the subsequent reception.

“What about
my
wedding?” asked Annie.

“I fully expect you to be married upon a mule in a national park, presided over by a hippie shaman in a cloud of incense smoke.” That made Jerilyn laugh. Jerilyn would be the perfect lifeless doll when she grew up, Annie thought, for her mother to play wedding dress-up with.

“Well, Jerilyn,” Annie said, “I will NOT be the Girl at the Book at your wedding, so don’t even ask.”

“Who says you’ll get to be in my wedding?”

At the reception (where Annie lost count of the continually mounting atrocities adumbrated by her mother), she got to see her old Mecklenburg Country Day associates, and clearly her reign as alpha female had passed. Rather than shriek with delight in seeing her or pull her into a corner to recall mishaps and follies of the debut they all had shared, they seemed to look at her—was it her imagination?—with a kind of pity, a reserve. Was it the fat thing? The goth-black hair which she, nonetheless, had styled neatly for the wedding? Was it her ludicrous bridesmaid dress that only emphasized the upper arms and paunchy stomach? Before coming to Millicent’s wedding, she had dreaded seeing these throwbacks to her private-school past, but when she saw them and they held her at some polite, smiling remove, she felt oddly crushed. They all had dates, trial husbands-to-be, all handsome and promising, particularly where starting salaries were concerned.
Poor Annie,
she could hear them thinking,
all strange and hanging out with UNC-G weirdos and fat, fatter than last time, fatter than anyone we know on earth
 …

It was Annie’s nature not to be coerced or obligated to do one fool thing she didn’t want to do, including dieting. She wasn’t a binge-eater, she wasn’t one of those women who when things turned stressful ate a carton of ice cream; she ate healthfully but plentifully, and every bit of it found its way to boobs, upper arms, thighs, hips. She did tell her UNC-G roommate Gillian about the humiliation of the bridesmaid dress and the still-top-secret debutante ordeal, about her being the biggest deb in North Carolina history, and her vile old racist aunts.

“Well,” said Gillian, “speaking of race. Why not go out with a black guy? I hear a lot of black men like, you know, plus-sized women.”

That was a really good question. And Annie wasn’t sure what the answer was. She had fantasized about driving a black boy like a parade float through some stuffy family occasion, maybe some sacrosanct old-biddy thing where her high-society grandmother was holding court like Queen Victoria.
Aunt Mamie Mae, I’d like to you meet Jeyrohn.
Annie was the least prejudiced white person she knew! She was a round-the-clock racism police with others, as a matter of fact. It wasn’t that she didn’t find black guys attractive—Jesus, you were blind if you didn’t think some of those hip-hop guys or athletes or movie stars weren’t hotter than fire. But that wasn’t her fantasy, her romantic template.

Gillian kept being helpful, more devoted to Annie’s couplings than to her own nonexistent dating life. “My cousin Janey is pretty, you know, plus-sized, and she goes out with this Puerto Rican boy who is
totally
fine.”

Yeah, didn’t that sound like Annie? She could join the Hispanic Student Association or something, and go trawling. Better yet—how about the Mexican boys who were, apparently, the whole of the university grounds crew these days? Get someone who barely spoke English and drag him to campus parties and, yes, take him home to Jerene.
Mom, this is Pedro and I love him.
Why was she stuck on handsome, somewhat jocky, potential frat boys who’d probably turn out to be future Republicans? It teased at the edge of her consciousness, the reason, just out of reach. The taint of Mecklenburg Country Day School perhaps, early imprinting. It was the challenge, perhaps. To harangue them away from their bourgeois comforts and attitudes, to detach them from their expected blond airhead escorts, to give them their political and spiritual makeover. She didn’t want boyfriends, so much as she wanted converts.

As if to test the Latin theory, Vinicius Costa arrived at UNC-G Annie’s junior year. There were surely better-looking Brazilian boys (photos make him look like an oily white boy with a Jheri curl) but he made up for crooked teeth and lingering acne by such animation, such loud and expressively accented English that he had a cult female following in no time. He tried to get parts in the theater, where Annie got her first look at him, but the accent was too distracting (and no plays featuring accents were on the boards), so he often was used as eye candy, the hunky centurion standing beside Brutus in
Julius Caesar,
the guy-waiting-with-a-suitcase in
Bus Stop,
all parts with no lines. He was one of those young men who never as much as glanced at a piece of gym equipment or contemplated exercise but somehow retained, on a diet of espresso, cigarettes and what was available in the Brown Building vending machines, a body ready for the cover of
Men’s Fitness.

And he liked the big girls. First, he was smitten with Rolonda, a large black singer imported from NC A & T across town to play Effie in
Dreamgirls,
and then after a few other misfires (and plenty of underpublicized direct hits), he turned his liquid brown eyes on Annie. “How did you get so good in the dramatic arts, Annie Johnston?” All of Vinicius’s conversation starters seemed like lines from some teach-yourself-English series of cassette tapes that were fifty years of out sync with how people talked. But what did it matter
? The zramateek artz … Uhnnie Jhohnz-tone
 … The Brazilian ability to insert a
z
or soft
j
sound into most words was aphrodisiacal.

So she married him. Yep, married—as in justice of the peace, as in I now pronounce you. Marriage was a sham, a rube’s game, a dead end for women, some patriarchal antiquated holdover, right? But that meant, on the other hand, it was also so unimportant and trifling, that it hardly mattered if you married for a political purpose, i.e., to get Vinicius into the country. You could say it was cosmic payback for the forced-march debut she had just suffered. Let the catty Stepford Wives from Mecklenburg Country Day get a load of this! Vinicius wanted to stay in America (where even the Catholic girls would put out, unlike back home), where everyone made fortunes, where (given his vast theatrical experience) he would be a big star on telenovelas filmed in Miami, where he wouldn’t have to go back and work as a manager in his father’s small factory in Salvador that made those horizontal electric signs affixed to the front of buses that announce destinations and
OUT OF SERVICE.

Everything about this scandalous plan appealed: it would horrify both sets of parents, and it made her the emissary of radical shock and surprise, a business she had been out of for too long. And she was rescuing someone from the third world! Very soon, Annie learned that most third-world people in American universities paying out-of-country American tuition with plenty of disposable income tended to be ruling-class wealthy and not up from the favelas. Details, details—her international rescue mission was undeterred. Ha, how she relished the phone call to her mother.

“You’ve done what now?” Jerene said, not sure if this was mere rhetoric from her daughter.

“Yes, we made it official at Greensboro City Hall.”

“Can he support you?”

“Actually, I suspect he can.”

“Good, because from here on out, your tuition will be your husband’s affair, and your rent, expenses. I wish you both every happiness. Your father will be very pleased that—what was his name again?”

“Vinicius.”
Vuh-neet-see-ooze
 … those delicious
z
sounds again.

“Vinicius. We’ll expect you for Sunday dinner. We have to meet our new son-in-law.”

Oh Jerene Johnston knew, knew somehow even during the phone call, that this was a folly, a marriage that wouldn’t count as a marriage, a mishap headed for annulment. Annie, throughout her later life, never had a sense of humor about this, never really would forgive her mother for her blithe performance, her smug foreknowledge of what would happen. A month into wedded bliss (during which Annie did not break the news to Vinicius that he would soon be picking up their mutual tab), Senhora Costa arrived in Greensboro. Mrs. Costa proved to be Brazil’s answer to Mrs. Johnston. A round, tanned face with her features (eyebrows, cheek rouge, lipstick) drawn on, her hennaed hair pulled back so severely that it may have constituted a kind of face-lift, a lime-green linen suit and a silk floral blouse which on anyone else might have seemed warm and summery but on Mrs. Costa was suggestive of Amazonian assault.

Mrs. Costa greeted Annie, not impolitely, but then never looked at her again. She sat with her son, who began their discussion defiant, petulant, agitated, raising his voice, while she sat with the bottled water Annie offered her, calm, serious. Soon Vinicius was weakening. Annie couldn’t understand the Portuguese but she sensed in the senhora’s measured listing of … what? Incentives, bribes for him to come home? Reasons this marriage could not endure?… that he had seen the logic of it. Saw how his family money was cut off from him, saw how Annie would not be especially welcome back in Salvador (where the town’s most eligible young women still hoped he might yet alight on them), saw how his mother could fix it all, if only he would just accompany her to the courthouse.

Mrs. Costa had only appeared, Annie pieced together in retrospect, once a lawyer had been contracted and the paperwork and court appointments were put in place. The Costas didn’t mess around—they had a top Raleigh divorce and annulment specialist sweep in and declare that “there was a want of understanding” on the part of Vinicius, who was too foreign and naïve to understand what Annie had roped him into. Well, it was either that or paying a doctor to say Vinicius was impotent, and that sure wasn’t the case. Had the Costas contacted her parents? Had Duke Johnston set up the Raleigh attorney, an old buddy from law school days, to argue the one (barely) defensible line before a judge who was also one of the North Carolina cabal of courthouse good old boys who all played golf and drank scotch together, who all knew each other from Duke and Carolina, who made stuff like this go away for good families? How vast was the conspiracy to undo what she had done? It was striking that she was never yelled at or told what trouble she had caused. Her mother and father proceeded as if this were a nuisance, as if there were some file in a drawer waiting for when she did something precisely like this, some set of phone numbers, instructions, directives. In her most paranoid fantasy, she imagined her mother and Vinicius’s mother meeting for a brief victory champagne, some balcony in Rio de Janeiro enshrouded by palms, her mother (through an interpreter) congratulating her partner on a job well done, some archsecret conclave worthy of divas on a prime-time soap as the champagne glasses clinked.