The Marriage Pact (1) (20 page)

Depends
on what you mean by good.
 “I
guess so, ma’am.”

“Good.
You keep things to yourself, then.”

“Yes,
ma’am.”  Marci could not understand many things about Mildred, and many of
her questions would remain unasked and unanswered. But Marci knew something
about secret pain. She could keep her mouth shut.

The
ride back to Peaceful Estates was less tense than before, though still entirely
silent. Both women seemed lost in thought, and Marci noticed that Mildred
grabbed her purse rather less often than on the way to the cemetery. Despite
her dislike of her cranky great-aunt, Marci began to entertain the idea of
spending time with her periodically, reading to her or helping her run errands.

Marci
had no living grandparents, not since her sophomore year in college when her
dad’s mom had passed away. Mildred’s own children lived out of state; her only
consistent company was Marci’s mom and Odessa. Of course, she could be
horrible, but Marci felt perhaps she had seen a human side of her today, and
maybe that could bring them together on some level. In the movies, hard-shelled
old women always ended being secretly vulnerable and sweet.

She
held the elevator door for Mildred, wondering whether she had any fascinating
hobbies or a memoir that Marci could help her write. It was actually perfect
that Marci wasn’t working right now so she could visit regularly. Perhaps she
could invest in a tape recorder to take down Mildred’s stories. Of course, it
would have to wait until after the wedding...

“Are
you gaining weight?” Mildred asked as soon as the doors closed.

“What?
Um, no, I don’t think so, Aunt Mildred.”

“Your
calves look heavy. And your face is fat. You’d better be careful or you’ll
never get married. Your sister is thin; that’s why she had no problems finding
a man.”

“Uh,
okay, Aunt Mildred. Thanks for the suggestion.”

“Stay
away from bread, that’s my advice. And all those sodas and hamburgers you kids
eat. You know what they say, ‘A moment on the lips, a lifetime on the hips.’”

“Yep,”
Marci said.
And never mind about the tape recorder, then
. She deposited
Mildred back in her plush suite and headed home.

Tuesday
before the wedding, Jake called to take Marci and Suzanne out to dinner at a
place they’d wanted to try, which advertised its nouveau Southern cuisine.
Nearly blind from wrapping tiny handfuls of birdseed in tulle and tying the
bags with bits of ribbon, Marci could not get out of the house fast enough.

Barely
glancing at the menu after they settled into a booth, she accepted the waiter’s
first suggestion for a cocktail, a pecan pie martini. It tasted like burnt
caramel, but Marci didn’t care. They ordered a couple of the more interesting
appetizers, including green tomato and goat cheese fritters and something
called butterbean kabobs, which turned out to be the aforementioned beans and
other tiny vegetables speared on little toothpicks and served with some sort of
sweet glaze for dipping. Marci wondered what her rural Southern grandmother,
who had eaten butterbeans at almost every meal with a glob of mayonnaise on
top, would’ve thought of this rather prissy presentation.

“So
how are the preparations for the Wedding of the Century?” Suzanne asked,
helping herself to a fritter.

“Oh,
my God,” Marci exhaled dramatically. “Who is this crazy person and what did she
do with my sweet little baby sister? She’s the devil!” She told them about
Nicole’s most recent meltdown when the florist couldn’t get some particular
flowers in on time because of heavy rains in South America. There had actually
been crying and pulling of hair (Nicole’s own, thank goodness). Marci had never
seen anything like it.

“See?
This is why I don’t do weddings,” Suzanne said. “Too much emotion. If the
floral arrangements aren’t exactly perfect for the grand opening of a car
dealership, no one throws a tantrum or threatens to fire me. Hell, chances are,
no one even notices.”

“It
sounds like Nicole is under a lot of stress,” Jake said diplomatically. Marci
loved how he was always seeing the good in people, even at the worst times. But
right now she really just wanted to be pissed off.

“Yeah,
well, she’s certainly handing a lot of that stress my way,” she said, dipping a
fritter into some sort of creamy pepper sauce and popping it in her mouth
whole.

“Well,
let this be a lesson to you,” Suzanne said in her best motherly tone. “When you
get married, you’ll have a simple wedding and be a totally low-maintenance
bride, right?”

“
If
I get married,” Marci said without thinking. She’d become so accustomed to
joking about marriage in this self-pitying way in the last couple of years, she
had momentarily forgotten Jake and their decade-old promise.
Damn
.

As
usual, Suzanne didn’t let the ball sit on the field for long. “Hey, aren’t you
two supposed to be getting married around now? I seem to remember there was
some sort of promise made in a bar back in college...” she said innocently.
Marci kicked her shins under the table, hard. Of course, she had told Suzanne
everything, and now she was playing dumb and stirring up trouble. Marci could
kill her.

Jake
grinned. “We
are
supposed to be getting married this year, actually. I’m
up for it, but I think Marci is still too attached to whoever she left in
Texas.” This last bit held just a hint of an edge to it.

“Well
then, Jacob, perhaps you’d better get on the ball and show her why you’re
better than anyone else. Thirty doesn’t last forever, you know.”

“Yeah,
I guess I’ll have to work on that. Let me know if you have any ideas about how
to win her over.” They were grinning at each other the way they always did when
having a laugh at Marci’s expense.

“Very
funny, you two. Can we move on, please? The real wedding is stressful enough.”

They
did move on, to a conversation about Suzanne’s latest job, a huge convention at
the World Congress Center that had her running around like a headless chicken.
By far the biggest event she had planned since going out on her own, she’d had to
hire an assistant. For the control freak Suzanne, delegating to someone else—a
bright, motivated college grad named Chad—was about as easy as pulling out her
own toenails. Still, she was beginning to admit, albeit grudgingly, that she
had never been more organized.

While
Suzanne went into a few of the more minute details about the event, which Marci
had heard in long form as they had come up in the past couple of weeks, Marci’s
mind drifted to Doug. She had only heard from him a couple of times since she
blocked his number from her phone, calling from the office number, which she
did not block. He had not left messages, though, and Marci supposed he had
figured out she wasn’t listening or maybe given up on being able to say
anything that would sway her. In a way, she was glad, but it was strange not to
hear from him.

In
spite of her anger, she was curious how he was doing, how he was feeling, what
was going on in the office and in his life. She wondered how her departure had
been received by Frank Dodgen, for example. She knew her hasty explanation to
Stella that she needed to be home due to a “family situation”—she hadn’t said
whose family—was thin at best. Of course, she would not call Doug, but there
was a tiny seed of regret for deleting all the messages he’d left and the
information they might contain.

Jake
was talking about his latest project, following a few top-ranked Georgia high
school football players as they went through the college recruiting process. “I
have five kids on board for the fall, which I know sounds like a lot,” he was
saying. “I’ll be on the road quite a bit, taping games and doing family
interviews and stuff, but hopefully it means at least a couple of them will
have great stories for the film.”

Suzanne,
who hated sports, made a show of feigning interest. “So it’s a movie about how
these football players decide where to college?”

“Well,
yeah,” Jake said, slowed by the question. “But it’s so much more than that. A
lot of these kids come from lower-class families in rural areas, and suddenly
they’re being offered all kinds of scholarships and opportunities and being put
on pedestals as hometown heroes. Eventually, I’d love to follow all these kids
through college and beyond. There’s always a chance one of them could make it
to the NFL, and then it gets really interesting.”

“Watch
out with those potatoes there, Mr. Spielberg,” Marci teased him. He had been
waving his fork of mashed potatoes animatedly as he talked, coming dangerously
close to flinging them onto her shirt.

 “Oh,
yeah. Sorry, Marce.” He put down his fork and went on, not noticing the smiles
exchanged by his female companions. “Anyway, there’s this one kid, Jamal
Anderson—he’s a really talented wide receiver from Bainbridge. I think he could
be talking to schools all over the country. He has nine brothers and sisters
and will be the first person in his family to ever go to college. He works a
part-time job and has a 4.0 average on top of being a State All Star. He runs
track in the spring, too. The kid is amazing, and actually a really nice guy,
too.”

“It
sounds fantastic,” Marci said, and meant it. Jake was great at shooting
commercials and community service announcements, and everything he did was
polished and beautiful. But Marci knew his real love was the human side of things,
especially with sports.

She
was so proud of him, and yet there was a stab of envy, too. She envied Jake’s
passion for his work, his connection to the kids. More than anything, Marci
wanted that same passion about something she
did
, rather than just someone
she loved.

On
the drive back to her parents’, Marci mused how much of her energies in the
last couple of years had been divided between figuring out how to get by on a
temp worker’s pay, and investing in a relationship that was doomed from the start.
She thought of all the hours she’d spent hiding out with Doug, or waiting for
Doug to arrive, or being sad that Doug was not around, or wondering what Doug
was doing. In the moment, she’d never felt as if she was wasting her time on
him, because when he
was
around, the passion was delicious.

Until
a couple of weeks ago, every moment she’d had with him had been equal parts
devastation and ecstasy, and she could focus on nothing else. It was like a
drug, as though the torrid beginning of the relationship had never faded into
comfortable normalcy. Even several months in, she had always put on makeup and
shaved her legs when he was coming over. She never made him watch bad
television with her or wasted their precious time together by complaining about
her family or her job. She didn’t fart in front of him or shit in the bathroom
while he was at her apartment.

At
the time, she’d thought of this as a positive thing; their love always felt new
and exciting. They didn’t have to deal with the things Beth complained about
with Ray: perfunctory sex during halftime of the football game, month-long
periods without any sex at all, spending all their time managing the kids and
schedules and finances, bitching at each other about laundry and dirty toilets.
Doug and Marci never had to deal with any of that. When she was with him, she
felt as if he was the only thing in the world he cared about. And when she
wasn’t, she was looking forward to the next time she would be. Until now.

She
walked quietly into her parents’ dark kitchen, thinking perhaps that everyone
might be either asleep or watching a movie. She needn’t have bothered, however,
because as she turned into view of the living room she saw that everyone was
awake, and that Ravi had been added to the group. Her father was the first to
notice her; he smiled wanly from his place on the couch. In the middle of the
room, Ravi was kneeling on the floor with Nicole, who was obviously sobbing. He
whispered to her and stroked her hair, while their mother paced in and out of
Marci’s view in front of them.

For
a moment, she debated turning around and going upstairs through the dining
room, and avoiding the latest drama altogether. What was it this time? The
special vanilla extract being flown in from Madagascar for the cake icing had
been waylaid at the border by the U.S. Customs Department? She sighed and moved
into the room, clearing her throat to announce her presence.

“Hi,
sweetie,” said her mother, her tone resigned and sad.

“What’s
wrong?” The question elicited a loud sob from Nicole and Ravi held her tighter.

“Ravi’s
mother is not attending the wedding. He spoke with her this afternoon.”

Marci
spoke slowly, sensing a minefield ahead. “Um, okay. I—I thought we already knew
that? Hasn’t she been saying for months that she wasn’t coming?”

This
time Ravi answered, over Nicole’s head. “Well, yes, but I think I was always
hoping that she would change her mind by now. My mother can be very stubborn
but I didn’t think she would actually miss the wedding. I’ve been telling
Nicole not to lose hope, but at this point it seems really unlikely she will
attend.”

“Oh,”
Marci said. “I’m sorry.”

He
nodded gravely. Marci was a bit surprised to see Nicole this upset. She’d been
very nonchalant about Mrs. Argawal’s refusal to attend until now, so Marci had
never explored it with her. Now, it appeared that it was bothering her more
than she’d let on. Poor Nicole; she thrived on approval, more so than Marci,
and failing to earn it from this very important person was obviously crushing
her. She wanted to say or do something to comfort her sister, but could think
of nothing.

Ravi,
however, had it covered. He held Nicky by the shoulders, pushing her back from
him just a little. He produced a couple of tissues from somewhere, wiped her
eyes and (
really gross
) snotty nose with incredible tenderness, and then
kissed her eyelids. Watching such a sweet, intimate gesture, Marci felt odd
that she and her parents were witness to it. “My love,” he said in a soft, deep
voice Marci had never heard him use. “This is my mother’s mistake. I am sorry
for you, and for us, because it is so hurtful. But I am more sorry for
her
that her stubbornness will cause her to miss out on my wedding to the most
beautiful woman I have ever met.”

Nicole
smiled through the fresh tears. He wiped them with the back of his hand and
held her chin up as he continued, “We can do anything together, right?”

Knowing
her stubborn and petulant baby sister, Marci expected to hear an argument or a
“Yes, but...” Nicole, however, nodded obediently, her eyes fixed on Ravi’s.
Marci had never seen her sister so soft and compliant, especially not after
mercilessly running down every wedding professional in Atlanta over the last
several days.

“We
have the rest of my family supporting us, and our friends, and your wonderful
family.” He gestured to acknowledge the three of them. “And, most importantly,
we have each other. We will always have each other, and if my mother cannot see
that, it is her loss. Not ours.” Marci saw her dad glance over at her mom and
give a tiny nod as Ravi spoke. He liked his new son-in-law. Nicole was in good
hands.

Nicole
was a different person with Ravi in town, and over the next few days, Marci
found herself wishing he’d flown down sooner. When they returned to the caterer
for a second tasting—the first had not lived up to the bride’s
expectations—Marci went to provide a third opinion. Chris, the heavyset
catering manager, looked like a nervous cat as he covered a tiny table with
food samples. He was tired and pale, and there were sweat rings beneath both
arms on his black smock. He gestured a little too desperately at the first
dish, inviting them to try the re-worked vegetarian samosas, with more curry
and less cilantro.