The People We Hate at the Wedding Read online

  She had been so proud of herself. Scheming up the idea to get an out-of-state cell phone number. But Paul still hasn’t answered, nor has he been curious enough to call her back. And then there was the thing the salesman at the AT&T store had said. He’d asked her why she wanted a new phone, and she’d just come out with it: explained Paul, and his silence, and how she needed to con her own child into picking up when she called.

  “Why don’t you just e-mail him or something?” the salesman had asked.

  “I’ve tried. He just ignores me.”

  He rubbed the back of his neck, then fingered a zit at the corner of his mouth. “Man,” he said. “If I tried ignoring my mom for even two days, she’d go nuts and strangle me.”

  Donna nodded. “Yes, that’s an option I’ve also considered.”

  With a few chords the medley shifts, and “Imagine” blooms into “Bridge over Troubled Water.”

  “You’ve picked out some gorgeous pieces,” Kim says. She hangs the dresses on a hook next to the mirror.

  “Have I?”

  “Absolutely. That purple scoop-neck is one of my favorites.”

  Donna knows that Kim’s paid to be sincere—she’s not fooling anyone—but still, she’ll take it. She can’t remember the last time she was prepared to spend this much money on a dress. Paris, maybe. Or possibly during the first few years she and Eloise were back in Chicago. But that was over three decades ago now—what if her tastes haven’t kept apace with trends? She’s tried to choose dresses that might impress Eloise, dresses she thinks of as chic and sophisticated. A champagne A-line. A navy tunic. But those garments were designed for younger women, weren’t they? Women whose bodies haven’t started to sag and settle and surrender to gravity. Earlier, at the Nordstrom on the opposite end of the mall, she’d tried on a violet shift and had just about wept when she turned to inspect herself in the mirror: she looked like a sausage, dipped in cheap nail polish and stuffed into a casing fit to burst. She saw herself escorting Eloise down the aisle (because God knows Henrique won’t be there to do it), not walking, but waddling alongside her daughter as her statuesque in-laws tried their best not to gawk at her ass.

  So, yes, Donna thinks. Kim can lie through her bleached teeth as much as she’d like. She’s just happy to have someone who’s complicit in this Decision of the Dress.

  “Are we looking for something for a special occasion?” Kim winks. “Or are we just treating ourselves?”

  Donna fixes the strap of her purse so it rides higher on her shoulder. “Actually, my eldest daughter’s getting married. In England.”

  “How exciting!” Kim claps. “In London?”

  “In Dorset. In the southwest. But I’ll be staying with her in London for a week or two before.”

  “I’ve always wanted to go to England.” The last dress—a cream-colored wrap—won’t fit on the hook, so Kim drapes it across the bench. “The closest I’ve ever been is Toronto.”

  “Hm.” Donna nods. “I’ve actually got a picture of her.” She rummages around for her pocketbook. “Would you like to see it?”

  “Of course.”

  Donna hands Kim the wallet-size photo that she keeps in her purse. The edges of it are brown and worn.

  “Gorgeous,” Kim says. “Though, she’s … young?”

  She takes the photo back. “Oh, she’s just a little girl there.” She looks down at it. Eloise stands on the Champ de Mars; the Eiffel Tower poised in the background looks to be the size of a cheap souvenir. Three and a half years old. She’s sporting her beloved tiny pink backpack and a pair of Lacoste sneakers (Donna’s still got those things, she thinks, stashed away in the attic somewhere), and her hair’s so light, so blond, that you can hardly tell it’s there at all. It’s April: the sky is a tepid blue that threatens to revert back to gray; clouds hang like lazy brushstrokes.

  Donna runs her finger along the picture’s edge, feeling the stock of the photo paper. Henrique, her husband, had been supposed to meet them that day, but hadn’t.

  “Paris as a little girl, and now living in London.” Kim rolls the clothing pins in the palm of her hand. “Quite a life.”

  “We lived there. In Paris. That’s where I met and married her father.” Donna knows she sounds boastful, but she can’t stop. “Eloise—sorry, my daughter—she was born there.”

  “Born in Paris!”

  “We had a lovely home. Well, actually, many lovely homes.” She grins. “But the one in Paris was the loveliest. Right in the heart of the Sixteenth. An old nineteenth-century revival with a chambre de bonne that we used as Eloise’s playroom.”

  Kim’s still smiling: she has no clue what any of this means, but it’s important to Donna that she knows it. It’s terrible, this need to gush over her past—a past that was hardly ever hers in the first place. It flies in the face of the Midwestern humility to which she’s always subscribed. Still, though, she can’t stop herself once she’s started. It’s as if she’s suddenly infected by this awful snobbery, a need to list and catalog the privileges she once enjoyed before her unceremonious return to Illinois, and the PTA meetings that followed. Before Alice fled to a far-off city and a disaster that won’t leave her; before Paul left for a man and a life and years of cruel silence. Before the word widow became a part of her daily vocabulary.

  “Two blocks from the Palais de Tokyo, and an exquisite view of the Arc from the master bedroom, if you can believe it. A formal dining room with all the original windows and the perfect amount of chinoiserie. Really, a complete dream.”

  Kim looks over her shoulder.

  Donna hears herself; she stops.

  “In any event, that was a long time ago.” She slips the picture back into her pocketbook. “But that’s her. That’s my Eloise.”

  “Well, you and her father must be thrilled.”

  “I … well.” Donna swallows and feels her throat bulge. “Her father’s no longer with us.”

  “Oh, God. I am so sorry.” Kim brings a hand to her mouth and Donna notices her fingernails: acrylic, French-tipped. “Did he … did he pass on?”

  “You mean did he die? Yes. He did.”

  This is a lie, and one she’s grown accustomed to telling: Henrique is still very much alive. But the temptation to fantasize, to imagine the thousands of bloody and gruesome ways that her ex-husband could have met his end—well, that’s simply too seductive to ignore. She wonders how Kim is conceiving of it: if she’s settled on something pedestrian like a heart attack, or if she’s let her mind wander into darker territories. Donna won’t give her an explanation—she never does. She prefers instead that the strangers she lies to imagine and reimagine Henrique’s death on their lunch breaks, their drives home. She comforts herself knowing that, at least for the next few hours, Kim will be killing Henrique in her mind. A thousand tiny deaths.

  It’s easier, just claiming he died. It saves her from the torture of having to explain what Biarritz, and seafood paella, and the Simons’ Spanish au pair (Maria-Elena was the bitch’s name) have to do with her failed marriage. (The answer, Kim, is everything.) The lie, like most lies, is a defense. It saves her from the horror of admitting she’s a cliché.

  * * *

  Kim knocks on the dressing room door.

  “How’s everything going in there?”

  Donna’s just slipped on the purple tunic and she stares at herself in the mirror. She turns left, right, examines her uneven profiles.

  “Going well!” she shouts.

  The thin fabric scrapes at the extra skin just below her armpits.

  “Can I get any other sizes for you?”

  What is Kim implying?

  “No, not just yet, dear.” Donna does her best to mask her annoyance. “Still working through the ones I have.”

  Kim says something in return, but Donna can’t hear it. She’s too busy wiggling her way out of the purple disaster, letting the brittle cloth gather on the floor around her ankles. She faces the mirror and grabs a handful of pale flesh on either si
de of her waist. She squeezes. Fat globs together in her fists, and blue veins threaten to burst. Errant hairs sprout from freckles. She prods at one of her breasts, lifting it up, letting it fall and slap against her upper ribs.

  She could blame her second husband. She could say that things turned south when she married Bill, two years after she and Eloise packed up their lives in Paris and moved back to Chicago. (Henrique had given Donna no indication that Maria-Elena was going anywhere, and she wasn’t about to accept the … er … modern arrangement that he had proposed to her. France had opened her eyes, but she was still from Indiana, a Hoosier at heart.) Before too long Alice was born, and then, two years later, Paul. Soon, Donna forgot what it was like to eat a meal sitting down. She tried to hold on to vestiges of her old life—despite Bill’s grumbling, she declared Tuesdays to be coq au vin night; she spoke to Alice and Paul in a mash-up of English and French. At night, she read French novels, and watched French movies, and listened to the news on Radio France. But constantly reminding herself of the person she used to be was exhausting. Besides, the reality of her new life was too flagrant to ignore. Instead of being chauffeured around in black cars driven by quiet, angular men in wool hats, she drove the car that Bill bought her, a used Ford station wagon—the only thing he could afford on his accountant’s salary. If Henrique, with his prominent law career and his opinionated aristocratic friends, had offered her a chance to transcend her suburban American upbringing, then Bill had yanked her back to her roots. He had reminded her that she was, and always would be, middle class. There were no more galas, no more Augusts in Provence, no more last-minute dinners at Le Meurice. Now there was Sunday football, and big-box retailers, and celebratory dinners at the Cheesecake Factory in Oak Brook.

  “He’s a good man. Salt of the earth,” her own mother had told her when she called with the news of Bill’s proposal. “Don’t turn your nose up at him.”

  “I didn’t say that I was going to.”

  “Because from where I’m sitting, these sorts of offers aren’t going to come along every day. Not when you’re pushing thirty-two and you’ve already got a kid hanging off you.” She didn’t hesitate to add: “Most men are scared of kids.”

  “Thanks, Mom.”

  “Well, what’s the other option, honey? Go back to Paris, find another job teaching English, and marry some other rich frog who’s got a thing for Spanish floozies?”

  “I think you’ve made your point.”

  “Just say yes, Donna. For Christ’s sake, say yes.”

  She did.

  Donna cocks her head to the left. She pokes her other breast.

  She could blame Bill.

  She shakes her head: No. She couldn’t. After all, she’d loved him. Maybe not with the same naïve passion with which she’d fallen for Henrique, but she had loved him, in her way. He hadn’t been perfect. He’d made his mistakes, and unforgiveable ones, at that. But turning Donna into … God, into this thing that she’s staring at in the mirror hadn’t been one of them. And anyway, hadn’t she learned to treasure the life he gave her? While the initial shock of returning to the world she’d fled was disappointing, disorienting, the truth was that there was a homey comfort in falling back into old routines. While the tedium of life in St. Charles certainly dragged on her, she also felt strangely cleansed by rediscovering the pureness of the suburbs and the simplicity of life with Bill.

  Besides, Bill’s dead. And not fake dead, but actual dead, which makes the whole business of blaming him for turning her into a Midwestern housewife feel a little tacky.

  * * *

  She sneaks out of the store before Kim comes to check on her again. She considers leaving the dresses (all of them tried on; all of them discarded) on the floor in their little humiliated heaps—it would make for a faster getaway—but her guilt gets the better of her, and she hangs each of them up, flattening out wrinkles, picking away bits of lint. She’s hurrying past the food court when her phone begins to buzz. Her heart skips a beat, and she quickly rehearses what she’s planned on saying when Paul calls: excitement, without being saccharine; joy, without being scripted. But when she finds the phone, its screen is dark. No missed calls. No long-lost sons. And yet: more buzzing. She reaches farther into her purse, past half a packet of Kleenex and a box of Altoids, and finds her other phone, her real, guilt-free phone. A text blinks on the screen. Her neighbor Janice, from across the street. House Hunters International and wine 2nite?

  Donna squints as she hunt-and-pecks y-e-s and presses send.

  In the mall’s garage, she finds her car and digs through the center console for her parking ticket and the joint she rolled earlier this morning. She lights it and reclines in her seat. Three rows to her left, a car door slams and footsteps echo. Donna inhales and lets the pot swirl in her lungs. She’s new to smoking—it’s a habit that she’s made a very conscious effort to cultivate over the past three years, ever since Bill died and, in her grief, she reached the conclusion that she needed to start having a little more fun. She coughs. She’s still getting the hang of it, the shock of hot air and smoke searing her throat. She likes the repetitive action, though—joint-to-mouth, joint-to-mouth, joint-to-mouth—and how the weed makes her feel, slowing things down until each blink seems as long as an afternoon nap.

  She fishes beneath the passenger seat for her copy of Carole King’s Tapestry and slides the disc into the car’s stereo. She flips forward three songs, to “It’s Too Late,” slides deeper into her seat, and laughs.

  * * *

  “Jesus, what took you so long?”

  Janice has come out to the driveway to meet Donna wearing an old Michigan State shirt. She’s barefoot and holding two sweating glasses, filled nearly to their brims with vodka martinis. Two weeks ago she cut her hair short, in the same boyish fashion that more and more women Donna’s age seem to be favoring, and now, in the humidity, it flares out clownishly over her ears.

  “I took the scenic route.” Donna closes the door and locks the car.

  “There are no scenic routes in Illinois. In the meantime, you’ve left me no choice but to drink alone.”

  “I’m a terrible friend.”

  “Mmm.” Janice sips from her glass, and a few drops of booze splatter on her khaki capris. She waves across the street, to Sylvia Watson, who’s watering her azaleas. “Anyway, then, let’s see it.”

  “See what?”

  “The dress, you drip.”

  Janice hands Donna her martini.

  “Oh.” She drinks, and winces. “I couldn’t find one.”

  “You spent all day at Oakbrook Center, and you couldn’t find a single dress.”

  “Oh, I found some, sure, but they all looked so godawful on me. Like I was a piece of overripe fruit.” She takes another sip; this one goes down easier. “I should probably just try Ann Taylor or something.”

  “Never admit that kind of defeat.”

  “That’s easier for you to say. You’ve still got the hips of a nineteen-year-old.”

  “Oh, boo-hoo. What’s wrong with your eyes, anyway?”

  “Whaddya mean?”

  “They’re all red. Were you crying? Christ, were the dresses that bad?”

  Donna smoked over an hour ago, but suddenly she feels a dull burst of lingering paranoia.

  “Pollen,” she says. “So much pollen in the air today. Happens to me every spring. All those goddamned flowers.”

  Janice takes half her drink down in a single gulp. “Speaking of which, what do you say we take this inside? I can see Sylvia just itching to come say hello, and I swear to God if I have to hear another word about that sick dog of hers, I’ll keel over and die.”

  “I thought Poppy died two weeks ago?”

  “As if we could be that lucky. Her last round of doggy chemo bought her another month or two.” She finishes her martini. “The world’s not a fair place.”

  “You’re awful.”

  “That’s probably true. Now, come on.”

  In the livi
ng room, Janice flops down on a beige sofa. Her feet dangle inches from a small square side table, on top of which sits a blue lamp, along with a framed picture of Janice, her husband, Gary, and their daughter, Amy. Donna picks up the photo to inspect it closer. They’re on a beach somewhere along Lake Michigan, and they’re wearing jeans and matching black polo shirts. All three of them have been professionally posed within an inch of their lives, heads tilted just so, faces stretched and pained, the unnatural smiles drooping. Donna wonders how much the photographer had charged. Whatever it was, Janice overpaid.

  “What a lovely picture,” she says.

  “Oh, that?” Janice doesn’t bother looking up. She wiggles her big toes. “We took it last summer, when Amy was home from Boulder. Last week I finally got around to getting the damned thing framed.”

  “Hm.” Donna sets the picture down. She walks around a squat coffee table loaded with the sort of hardcover, glossy-paged books that everyone’s expected to have, but no one’s expected to read: a visual history of modern American art, Nate Berkus’s The Things That Matter, Barbra Streisand’s My Passion for Design. She’s about to sink down into an overstuffed leather chair when Janice says:

  “Oh, hey, before you get around to making yourself comfortable, would you mind?” She taps her ring against her glass.

  “I’ve hardly made a dent in mine yet.”

  “Well, whose fault is that?”

  “Oh, give it here.”

  Donna slips out of her shoes and pads into the kitchen, where she finds the martini shaker in the sink. She rinses it out, and then fills it with ice from the automatic dispenser on the freezer door. The whole room smells like orange juice and bologna, and Donna wonders what Janice could have possibly made for lunch.

  “Whatever happened with the Reynoldses’ tree? You never told me.” She unscrews the cap from the vodka bottle and lets the viscous booze slop into the shaker.

  “You mean my tree.”

  “Where the hell is your vermouth?”

  “Oh, I ran out on the last round. If you’re feeling ambitious, squeeze a little lemon in mine. If you’re not, plain ol’ vodka’s fine.”