The People We Hate at the Wedding Page 9

  “Okay,” Karen says, once Alice is seated. “Now, where were we?”

  She’s acting ridiculously, though, she thinks, glancing around her. It’s not like any of these women are hiking into the Himalayas to discover their own inherent Zen anytime soon, either. They’re professional, stylish, put-together. Save the dark circles beneath the eyes of the blonde sitting next to her, or the puffy cheeks of the new redhead across the circle, they look, for the most part, like her: educated and reasonable; healthy, save a few secret weekend vices; the unlucky targets of random tragedies.

  The women collectively stare into their cardboard cups. Someone’s phone, lost in the depths of a purse pocket, buzzes against a set of keys. Struggling with the silence, Karen ventures an answer to her own question.

  “Right,” she says. “The opening mantra.”

  Karen stands and takes the limp hands of the women on either side of her, and, after a bit of gentle prodding, the rest of the group follows suit, standing and forming a loose ring of ambivalence and sweaty palms.

  Karen says, “Good. Now, let’s begin.” She breathes in and closes her eyes. “This is whole and complete. That is whole and complete. This and that are whole and complete.”

  With each clause, another voice joins her …

  “From wholeness comes wholeness.”

  … until the room reverberates with a sort of morbid, spoken symphony. Alice mouths the last sentence of the mantra—When a portion of wholeness is removed, that which remains continues to be whole—but she can’t bring herself to say the actual words.

  “Peace,” Karen sighs. “Peace, peace, peace.”

  Alice glances around her: heads are bowed, and eyes are still closed. There’s one exception: the new redhead stares back at her. She raises an eyebrow and risks a smile. Alice grins back before Karen instructs the women to sit back down.

  She retrieves a clipboard from beneath her chair and slips on a set of wireless frames, perching them on the end of her nose.

  “Before we get started, I’d like to take a moment to make just a few announcements.”

  The folding chairs creak as a few of the women shift their weight. Footsteps thunder from upstairs, where the center’s staff prepares for a birthday party. Alice tears at a cuticle.

  “I’ll start with the most … well, the saddest,” Karen says. “I got a call from Valerie Gonzales this morning. Her husband, Richard, finally passed last night. Stomach cancer, I think most of you will remember. She seems to be doing about as well as one might expect, but she did say that she wants us all to know that…” Her eyes fall to the clipboard. “That … she really cherishes the support that we’ve been able to provide her through this … this difficult time, and that she hopes to be back in a few weeks or so.” She adds: “The funeral’s scheduled for this Friday, at St. James Episcopal on Wilshire.”

  There are murmurs of condolence. Alice nods solemnly. She wonders if any of the other women are secretly thinking the same thing that she is, or if she’s alone in counting Karen’s grim announcements as the most therapeutic part of the weekly meeting. It’s not that she wishes ill on any of the women sitting around her—that’s not it at all, is it? No. Of course it isn’t. She likes Valerie Gonzales. Really likes her, actually. And yet, here Alice is, finding acute, Germanic comfort in the fact that Valerie’s husband has just died. While her luck has been shit, for someone else it’s been shittier.

  She keeps nodding, and wonders if it’s possible to feel spectacularly better and worse about herself at the same time.

  “Okay, then.” Karen flips to the next page on her clipboard. “Alice,” she says.

  A radio voice trickles down from upstairs. L.A.’s number-one station for hits from the eighties, nineties, and today.

  “Yes?”

  “It’s your turn to share.”

  “Didn’t I just share last week?”

  “You last shared in February.”

  “And wasn’t that last week?”

  Alice strains to hear the first three chords of the Cure’s “Boys Don’t Cry.”

  Karen says gently, “Today’s May seventeenth.”

  “Oh. I see.”

  “Alice.” Karen leans forward. She crosses her knees and rests her elbows on her thighs. “If you want to conquer your grief, you’ve got to let it speak.”

  The song rattles on. Robert Smith wails.

  “I just feel like whenever my grief speaks it bores people,” Alice says.

  Karen frowns. “I don’t think that’s true. We’re here for you,” she says. “We’re here for each other.”

  The woman seated to the right of Alice—a bottle blonde called Beth—squeezes her knee. From the rest of the circle, she’s offered nine variations of the same weak smile. The redhead arches an eyebrow.

  Alice stands and flattens out the wrinkles from her jeans and blouse. She clears her throat. “All right. Okay.”

  Karen folds her hands across her lap, and Alice tries picturing her as Kay Adams, or Annie Hall, or Nina Banks from Father of the Bride. She imagines her wearing a white turtleneck, drinking a glass of merlot in the middle of some fabulous kitchen. Big bay windows. Countertops of reclaimed wood and white swirling marble. Basil growing on the windowsill. Bowls full of fruit that’s actually meant to be eaten.

  “I had a miscarriage,” Alice says. “I was at the end of my second trimester, and I had a miscarriage.”

  She begins to sit down again, but Karen asks, “When?”

  Alice wants to not hate this woman; she wants to trust her, to be guided by her, but right now all she can think of is throwing Karen clear off a high overpass onto the 405. She’s just doing her job, Alice tries telling herself. Even though she knows the answers to her own goddamned questions, she’s just doing her job. It’s all part of the process: explore your grief until you’re the one telling the story, instead of the story telling you. She had read the brochures, had spoken to former members; she had signed up for this.

  “It’ll be six years this September.” Alice sighs.

  Beth squeezes Alice’s knee again, and when she slides her hand away, Alice wonders if she could ask her to keep it there a little bit longer.

  She’d been living in Mexico City, she explains to the group. For a little over a year. Ever since she graduated from UCLA with a double major in Cinema & Media Studies and Spanish. (She leaves out details that she deems unimportant: That she’d gone to UCLA because she hadn’t gotten in to Stanford or Pomona. That she spent the first year and a half sulking about it, making friends selectively with other undergrads who had been relegated to their safety school, trying unsuccessfully to transfer to those two other institutions that didn’t want anything to do with her. That it wasn’t until she took a survey course in Latin American film, during the spring of her sophomore year, when things began to turn around. After watching Cuarón’s Sólo con tu pareja in a darkened lecture hall, Los Angeles seemed to open up to her; the streets and palm-lined boulevards now unfurled themselves in ways that seemed beautiful and chaotic, as opposed to crowded and unorganized.)

  “I was lucky,” she says. “At school I joined the Latin American Film Society and met a rich kid from Mexico City. A Chilango. His uncle knew a woman who ran a small production company. Banditas, it was called. Their distribution arm was looking for an assistant. Someone who could eventually help them leverage the American market.”

  The women nod; they understand. This is Los Angeles.

  She had taken to D.F. immediately. She got an apartment in La Condesa, a big alcove studio right off Calle de Durango, a five-minute walk from the Parque México. She liked the messy energy of the place, how it straddled a thin line between progress and disaster, how it couldn’t decide what to do with, or how to treat, the European echoes that Cortés had left behind. She spent her weekends in the Bosque de Chapultepec, reading magazines in the shadow of the old castle, lying to the odd American tourists who approached her for directions, telling them in a halting English tha
t she didn’t speak their language. In the afternoons, if the weather was nice and if the smog wasn’t stinging her eyes too badly, she’d buy a torta from a street vendor (she only got sick twice, and she never once was kidnapped, despite Paul’s incessant predictions) and sit at the base of the Monumento a la Independencia, where she’d watch quinceañera parties pose for pictures along the flanks of long pink limousines. Fourteen-year-old boys wearing ill-fitting tuxes who reached into the girls’ loud gowns, through folds of tulle and lace and silk, so they could grab a handful of flesh.

  “And the job?” Karen asks.

  “It was … it was wonderful,” Alice says, as she always does, though she’s starting to believe herself less and less. It was interesting, and sounded exotic to people when she spoke of it, and she liked that. She liked that Eloise called the job “worldly” and “sophisticated.” She liked that she could join her mother and her half sister in the experience of living and working abroad; that she wouldn’t be lumped in with her father’s pool, whose sense of geography began in Wicker Park and ended in Sarasota, Florida. But the job itself? The day-to-day of it? It was … fine. The problem, she figures, is that she’d naïvely assumed that an intellectual interest (passion was the word she used most often when describing her attachment to Mexican cinema) would translate into some sort of fulfilling career. If anything, her stint with Banditas made her hate the movies she’d loved just months before. She learned too much about them, and about the artistic sacrifices that were made to get the pictures produced. “It’s like I’m learning how the sausage gets made,” she remembers having told her brother during one of their weekly phone calls. “And it’s disgusting.”

  “Of course it’s disgusting,” Paul had replied. “It’s Hollywood.”

  “Actually, it’s Mexico City.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  She realizes now that her mistake had been trying to do something she loved for a living.

  Karen twirls a jade necklace around her finger. “The boy? I mean, the man,” she says, apologetically. “Where does he come into the picture?”

  “Right,” Alice says. “I’m rambling. I’m sorry.”

  Karen says, “You need to stop apologizing.”

  “Sorry.”

  The redhead smiles.

  “A Chilango,” Alice says. “Grew up in D.F., but went to school at Boston College. Not in the industry or anything. A consultant, actually. He worked in McKinsey’s Mexico City office.”

  “His name?”

  “I’d prefer not to say.”

  It was Alejandro. Ten months after Alice arrived from L.A. they met at a bar in La Roma—a small, angular place that served one type of torta and eighty different kinds of mescal. She’d gone there with two coworkers, and first saw him standing next to a cigarette machine. When she went to the bar to get another beer (she hated mescal; she thought it tasted like you were gargling a chimney), a bartender with skulls tattooed on his wrists started hassling her over a tip, and Alejandro swooped in to save her.

  “Thanks,” she said. He had dark hair and those sharp green eyes that reminded her of certain Italian actors who were always cast as members of the aristocracy. A young Marcello Mastroianni, maybe.

  “You’re American?” He gave the bartender the twenty pesos to get lost.

  “Sí,” she responded in Spanish. She was afraid he’d think she was helpless. Just another gringa tourist.

  Behind her, someone lit a cigarette. She heard the first flick of a match, smelled the first waft of tobacco.

  “Here on vacation?”

  “No.” She ran a hand through her hair. “Vivo aqui. En Condesa.”

  “We can speak in English, you know.”

  She grinned and took a sip of his mescal, resisting the urge to pull a face. He grinned back.

  “Okay,” she said. “Si quieres.”

  “Sí, lo quiero. I need to practice.”

  He didn’t, though. His English was perfect. He’d attended an American school in Lomas de Chapultepec before shipping off to Boston College, and after graduating he’d spent two years with McKinsey in New York before asking to be transferred to the company’s Mexico City office.

  “My mother was ill,” he said.

  “Is she okay now?”

  “Healthy as can be.” Behind them, someone dropped a torta to the floor and cursed. “To be honest, she wasn’t really that sick. I was just tired of winters in the Northeast.”

  After an hour, Alice’s coworkers found her and whispered that they were headed home, but encouraged her to stay.

  “Oh, don’t worry,” she whispered back en español, “I am.”

  She was enjoying herself, and she could tell that Alejandro was, too. He kept finding ways to lean into her; he’d blame the people standing on the opposite side of him, but when Alice glanced over his shoulder, she’d see that there wasn’t a single person within three feet of them. He convinced her to try three different kinds of mescal. The last one she actually liked, or at the very least tolerated, though she doubted it was the drink itself; by that point, she figured, she was drunk enough that her brain was filtering out the booze’s smokiness, its ash. They talked about the things she missed from the States (“not going to bed nervous that I accidentally used tap water to brush my teeth”), and the things that surprised her about D.F. (“People have shockingly nice shoes. In L.A. all I ever wore were flip-flops”). They discussed the city’s unsettling ethnic and phenotypic divisions; how once you crossed into the wealthy enclave of Polanco, people suddenly became taller, fairer, thinner, and more European looking than their European ancestors could ever have hoped to be. They shared how that particular neighborhood made them uncomfortable, hyperaware of their own privilege. After two more drinks, they sheepishly admitted that because it had the best restaurants, maybe Polanco wasn’t so bad.

  “You just have to know what you’re getting yourself into, I guess,” Alice said, sucking on the end of a cocktail straw. She was drunk enough that she wanted to throw a few pesos into the cigarette machine and buy a pack, but not so drunk that she was unworried about what Alejandro thought of smoking.

  He said, “Right. I actually live there.”

  “I have a lot of friends who do, too.” She set the straw down. “I live closer.”

  “Oh?”

  “About a ten-minute walk.”

  She let him poke around her apartment while she emptied half a bottle of red wine into two water glasses. There wasn’t much to look at, she realized for the first time: a full bed tucked away behind a set of French doors; a living area with a love seat and a matching set of Ikea side tables; a framed poster for Sólo con tu pareja that she’d found while digging through a stack of old movie memorabilia at a flea market in Coyoacán; a pile of scripts covered in Post-its.

  “Who’s this?”

  He was holding a picture of her, Paul, and Eloise that she kept on one of the side tables. Her father had taken it the last time they had all been together, at Alice’s graduation from UCLA. Half the time she forgot it was even there.

  Alice circled around the couch to hand Alejandro his glass and look at the photo. She was still decked out in her cap and gown, and she clutched a bouquet of flowers to her chest. Paul’s eyes were closed, and Eloise’s hair looked perfect.

  “That’s my brother,” she said, pointing at Paul with her free hand.

  “You two look alike.”

  “You think?”

  Alejandro squinted. “Sure, same color hair and all that.” He had started to slur his s’s. “And who’s that?”

  “My half sister.”

  “I see.”

  She watched as his eyes traced Eloise; as he took in the way the sun shone through her light hair, the plunging neckline of her blue dress, her tan athletic shoulders. She was used to it—all the men who’d ever stopped long enough on the way to her bed to notice the picture did the same thing. You look so happy, they’d say. And then: Who’s the guy? Are you twins? And finall
y: Who the hell is this?

  She drank as much merlot as she could manage in a single gulp, and set the glass down on the table.

  “Come on,” she said, and unfastened his belt.

  Upstairs in the community center there are more footsteps, but these new ones are lighter, softer. Kids, Alice figures. Here for the party. She thinks she hears a balloon pop.

  “We were together for about a year before I got pregnant. We weren’t as careful as we should have been,” she says, and leaves it at that.

  “How did he react to the news?”

  She’s gripped by the urge to say that he’d been awful. That he’d given her some terrible, misogynistic ultimatum: get rid of it, or get out. Something that might paint her as more of a victim, more of a martyr. Something that would squeeze out whatever empathy was left trickling through these women’s veins.

  “He was wonderful. I was terrified, but he was wonderful. Honestly, my first instinct was to buy a ticket back to L.A. and call this doctor I used to see when I was in college and schedule a…” A balloon pops. This time she’s sure of it. “But anyway, he told me that he’d support me, regardless of what I decided. It was like he was following a script or something. How to Be a Great Boyfriend When You Knock Up Your Girlfriend, as written by Joan Didion.” This gets a few laughs—it always does. Alice shrugs. “So I decided to keep her. The baby, I mean. It was a girl. Or, I learned it was a girl. I figured if he could be this amazing when things were so shitty, then he’d be an even more amazing dad.”