The Wedding Machine (11 page)
“Oh my,” Vangie says, with her hand over her thick painted lips. She turns back to her sister-in-law, who nods in acknowledgment, as though she is up to speed on all of the Jasper drama.
Kitty B. eyes Sis as the whole party seems to stop and stare. Then Ray steps in. “Oh, don't give it a second thought, Trudi. I'm honored that you're admiring that piece. It belonged to a dear old aunt of mine from Charleston.”
But Ray is too late. Trudi's eyes fill with tears before she scuttles out the front door, her hefty daughter Dodi chasing after her.
“Mama!” Little Hilda runs over. “That was awful!” The little bride slings the pomander off her arm and runs after Trudi. The ball of hydrangeas lands on the Oriental rug in Ray's living room, where it rolls beneath the coffee table, leaving a small trail of flowers.
Hilda looks up and around at everyone. A few throats clear before she says through clenched teeth, “Thank you so much, Ray and Kitty B. and Sis. This has been lovely.” Then she walks through the kitchen and slams the back door.
The gals look around at one another, wondering why in the world she's mad at them, and the guests clear out faster than you can say, “Boo!”
When they are all alone, Ray shakes her head and throws up her arms.
“Lord, I give up!” she says, patting her black eye and flinching at the pain. “We have worked ourselves to the bone for this wedding, and Big Hilda thinks she deserves every bit of it and more. As if we are on her daddy's payroll!”
She scoops up a handful of dirty silver forks and throws them into the sink before adding, “This is not the Jasper Mill monarchy! The mill is long gone. And so is Angus and so is Little Hilda. And we'll be gone, too, if she keeps this up.”
“Let Sis and me clean up, Ray.” Kitty B. says. “You need to rest.” “My eye hurts like the dickens.” She pulls out some Advil from the cabinet above her and swallows three at a time. “But I'm too angry to rest.”
Then Ray fills the sink with suds and scrubs the silver with a sponge. Kitty B. works with Sis to collect the dirty plates and cups and saucers and place them carefully at the sink. Then she picks up a hand towel and dries the forks and spoons before handing them to Sis, who places each one in its rightful silver box. Ray has a laminated sheet on each of the gals' silver boxes on which she has typed out the number of spoons, forks, knives, and serving pieces that belong in each box.
They all chose the same patternâChantilly by Gorhamâat Roberta's suggestion so they could pool their silver resources for occasions such as this. Of course, they about died a few years ago when the book
A Southern Belle Primer: Or, Why Princess Margaret
Will Never Be a Kappa Kappa Gamma
came out because it noted that ladies with the Chantilly pattern were “loose” in high school.
“I was a little loose,” Sis had said when Ray pointed out the chapter one weekend as they sipped gin and tonics on Ray's screened porch at Edisto Beach.
“Yes, you were,” Hilda said, ashing her cigarette in a pink conch Ray bought at the gift shop. “But at least you were monogamous.”
Now the kitchen window is open, and Kitty B. hears Priscilla and Little Hilda, who have gathered on the porch with a few of their friends and a pitcher of mint juleps. They've slipped off their high-heeled sandals and relax with their legs over the arms of the wicker furniture where they murmur about the blowup and Little Hilda's frustration with her mother.
After everything is cleaned and put away, the gals retire to the other end of the piazza on the long porch swing that Cousin Willy installed last spring.
“Well, here's to that disaster,” Sis says, handing Kitty B. and Ray mint juleps, which they sip heartily as they rock back and forth, consoling one another in the swampy air about the fact that the blowup wasn't their fault. It was just Hilda being Hilda.
Ray dips three napkins in an ice bucket and gives one to each of them to put across their foreheads.
“Hot flashes,” she calls to the young girls, who are looking inquisitively at the older women. She puts the sopping linen around the back of her neck and adds, “Just wait.”
Just wait is right
, Kitty B. thinks. Menopause pales in comparison to the daily struggles of married life. She remembers the night before her wedding some thirty-five years ago. The curlers with the Ace bandage, the pep talk, the silk nightie. The gals had buoyed her with a sense of wonder and expectation about her life with LeMar, and she let them. How were they to know what was to come?
The girls giggle, their rosy cheeks filling with air as the gals wipe themselves down with the cool water. Then they settle back into their cushions as Little Hilda recounts the story of Giuseppe proposing to her on the steps of the Capitol last Fourth of July.
Kitty B. moans softly in the bittersweet gathering of her missing daughter's contemporaries. Her child ought to be right there with them. It's what she thought at their christening twenty-five years ago and at each of their birthday parties and their high school graduation and debutante balls, and it's what pains her each time she passes over their child-sized handprints sealed indelibly in the concrete on the corner of Third and Main Street. That someone who should be here is missing.
Suddenly, the sky turns gray from what could be an early band of Eleanor, and the wind kicks up, sending the dead oak leaves and the browning petals of the summer flowers spinning in circles.
Kitty B. lies back and so do Sis and Ray. They close their eyes and swing back and forth, enjoying the fresh wind on their face as the sweetest scent wafts over the piazza.
“Y'all, I swear I smell gardenias,” Kitty B. says.
“Me too,” Sis says, “I was trying to place it.”
Ray keeps her eyes sealed shut as if she is asleep, as if she is soaking herself in this warm air and the sorely missed chatter of young girls on her piazza. She looks worn and fragile with her swelling eye and the black gash across her cheek. It makes Kitty B. uneasy to see her best friend wounded and suddenly looking every one of her fifty-five years.
“That's the confederate jasmine,” Ray mumbles.
“No,” Sis says, sniffing the air. “It smells just like those gardenias we carried in Kitty B.'s wedding.”
Now Kitty B. pictures the small, fragrant bouquet her mama placed in her bedroom the morning of her wedding day. Roberta set the gardenias on the bedside table, then pulled opened the drapes to let the morning light in, and the gals squinted their eyes and moaned and burrowed beneath the sheets and pillows like earthworms, their arms and legs groping for cover.
“It's a glorious day,” Roberta had said. “Y'all wake up.”
If Kitty B. had known what lay ahead, she would not have risen and dressed and walked down the aisle that day.
Big Hilda sees her daughter's reflection in her vanity mirror. The bride-to-be stands in the bathroom doorway the night before her wedding in the strapless raw silk cocktail dress they bought together at Saks in Charleston a few months ago.
“Hi, Mama,” Little Hilda says.
Big Hilda thought the day Angus packed his bags and left for good was the most dreadful day of her life. But now she realizes that this wedding weekend will be the worst, watching her lovely daughter marry a foreigner while her husband sports his cheap and chubby girlfriend on his arm. She's heard that Trudi claims they are getting married, but she doesn't believe that for a minute. She hasn't seen a ring on her finger, and she can't imagine Angus marrying her or anyone for that matter.
“We have to be at the church for the rehearsal in twenty minutes,” Little Hilda says, tilting her head gently to the side, the gold clasp on her pearl necklace catching the light. “You about ready?”
Angus has always said their daughter is a miniature version of Big Hilda. She's petite with a round doll-like face and wrists and ankles that you could easily fit your hands around. Sylvia Crenshaw, the town hair stylist, has fixed her golden hair for the wedding rehearsal and the dinner that will follow. It's up in a clean French twist with the faintest wisps curling around her forehead and her pearl drop earrings. Her little legs are balancing on a pair of super high silver heels like the models wear in the store windows in Charleston, and she's simply stunning.
Hilda couldn't be more proud of her or more shocked that she is no longer a child. She can feel the unfamiliar pinprick of tears below the surface, but they won't come.
“Almost, sweetheart,” she says, turning slowly around on her vanity stool to face her daughter. Hilda looks toward her room to make sure that the door is closed. It's a funny thing, but no one has been in her bedroom since Angus left. She doesn't even let Richadene go in there to clean, and she keeps it locked when she's not home. She's spent some dark nights between those four walls, and for some reason it is important for her to seal it off from the rest of the world like a tomb.
“Mom, you're still in your bathrobe,” Little Hilda says. “Giuseppe's going to be here in ten minutes. What can I do to help you?”
“Oh, you two can go on without me. I'll be right behind you.” She swivels back around and unrolls the hot curlers in her hair.
Now Hilda feels her daughter's hands on her shoulders. She wants to turn back and pull Little Hilda into her lap and tell her how very much she loves her and how she wishes her all of the happiness in the world, but she doesn't. Instead she straightens up and starts rubbing her Clinique moisturizer on her face.
“Mama, I know this isn't easy,” Little Hilda says, softly squeezing her mama's shoulders. “But I know you can get through this weekend. I really
need
you to make it through, okay?” Little Hilda takes a deep breath, and Hilda watches the pearls rise and fall across her collarbone. A crooked vein in the center of her daughter's glowing forehead has surfaced, and she knows it must be hard for her to tell her own mama to pull herself together and “deal”âas she would put itâat least for the next three days.
Hilda nods and looks down at her containers of makeup. She meant to allow time for a bath so she could soak the foundation into her pores, but she was distracted with painting her toenails. She has to do this herself now! Then she'd seen a little crease in her silk suit that needed ironing.
“Don't worry,” Hilda says, as she watches herself in the mirror's reflection, reaching up to take hold of Little Hilda's hands. The liver spots across her knuckles surprise her, and she realizes that her hands are aging and looking more and more like her mother's each day, with dark brown splotches and prominent veins that snake across the surface like a topographic map. Well, at least she's not her mother on her own wedding weekend, that is to say, catatonic. Hilda's mother and father were still together, but he had her holed up on the mental ward at the Medical University of South Carolina, and it wouldn't be long before he signed off on her lobotomy. Sometimes Hilda suspects that her mother actually faked her craziness just to get away from him.
Like her mama, Hilda always has a lit cigarette nearby, its smoke ascending now from the crystal ashtray on the vanity. It rises, then curls before dissipating into the thick air like the minutes that ticked by as she counted down the long-awaited exit out of the sad, dark home of her childhood.
She can't help but wonder if Little Hilda prays the same way she once didâ
God, get me out of this nut house and get me on with my
life.
That's exactly how Hilda felt when she married Angus. Their union was her freedom. Her ticket out of hell.
~ SEPTEMBER 6, 1969 ~
Hilda tried to sprint down the aisle to the kind and handsome medical student beaming at the other end. Her high school sweetheart. But every time she lurched forward toward the altar, her father pulled her back.
“Take your time,” he murmured; then he tilted his head toward one of the mill executives who was seated on the bride's side of the church and nodded. A whole group of the executives had flown down from New York for the wedding, and they had presented Hilda with the most extravagant gifts: a hand-cut crystal ice bucket from Austria, five place settings of her finest china, and four square sterling silver candelabras from Tiffany's that weighed more than the dumbbells Angus used to lift in the weight room of the high school gymnasium.
Angus was grinning from ear to ear that day as Hilda's father placed her hand in his, and when he felt the soft touch of her white gloved fingers, tears literally rolled down his full, flushed cheeks. She knew he was full of hope about their life together, so sure it would be as idyllic as his own parents' marriage.
Hilda's father cleared his throat as if to say, “Pull yourself together, boy,” and she even squeezed her intended's hand and lifted her chin high behind her veil like a bothered nanny to let him know he'd need to collect himself to get through the vows.
