The bride wore black, because the groom was dead. The bridesmaids all wore black, too. The bride had wanted one of those modern weddings in which she wore white and the bridesmaids wore black. She hated pink and teal and also hated the idea of forcing all the bridesmaids into the same dress, especially since they ranged in size from two to twelve and in shape from cinnamon stick to eggplant. So they had bought black dresses to suit their sizes and shapes, and the bride insisted they wear them to the funeral.
It was not to be a formal wedding, after all, so the dresses were not too dressy, were not gowns or anything approaching gowns. And the bride didn't want her bridesmaids to have wasted money on a dress they would never wear. They tried to remind her that a woman can never have too many black dresses, but she seemed to have forgotten, and it was hardly a time to argue the finer points of fashion. Secretly they suspected that she wanted to pass judgment on the dresses and their appropriateness for the occasion, even though the occasion had changed. The bride always had to be the boss, even in a situation like this, didn't she?
The photographer the bride and groom had hired to shoot the wedding came to take pictures of the funeral instead. He found this odd, but the bride said he'd promised her memories that would last a lifetime, and who was he to say she shouldn't have them? Besides, shooting a funeral would be a break from the overwhelming froth and joy that threatened to drown him every time he dove back into it. At the funeral he could explore the way light played off darkness, instead of spending all day trying not to blow out every shot because of the blinding whiteness of the dress, the cake, the tablecloths, the toothy smiles.
The florist and caterer were more than willing to change their plans a little and help out for a reduced fee; how could they not be? The toasts had all been written and could easily be performed without drink in hand. The tasteless jokes stayed in, including the one about how the groom used to torment his brother by dangling spit in his face then sucking it back upward. It was a day for happy memories.
All in all, the event could not have gone more smoothly. The bride even suspected she would get to keep the gifts, though she no longer had any need for the guest towels or the chip-and-dip set, as she did not intend to host any more events as long as she lived. Afterward she went home, took off her black dress, and hung it next to her white one in the closet.
Showing posts with label fiction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fiction. Show all posts
Saturday, January 2, 2010
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
Hadley Had a Boyfriend
When Hadley was five, her father got a new job and moved the family from Los Angeles to Connecticut. Hadley cried for hours after saying goodbye to her boyfriend, Jeremy. They had met in nursery school, where Hadley's favorite game was messing up Jeremy's floppy sand-colored hair until he reciprocated by yanking on her long braid. They had looked forward to stepping over the threshold of kindergarten together, not knowing what to expect but knowing they would face it together, holding hands—always with Hadley's other hand clutching her stuffed pony, Jeremy's other hand lost in his Dodgers glove.
Instead Hadley faced kindergarten alone, in the unfamiliar orange of a New England fall, in a town where the other kids all knew one another from nursery school or music class or swimming lessons. But she was bubbly and liked to share her chewing gum, and her isolation lasted only a few weeks. Soon she found herself in an unexpected flirtation with Brandon, who had accidentally slammed her foot in a car door at a particularly rushed carpool pickup one morning. Her foot was fine, but the flame of his apologetic gaze seared her heart.
Brandon held her hand until halfway through first grade, and he brought her laughter and joy and sometimes jellybeans, but he never succeeded in making her forget about her first love, and finally broke things off when she refused to stop referring to Jeremy as "my other boyfriend."
Hadley's dating life was uneventful for a while as she focused on grades and jazz dance and rebuffing mildly violent attacks from her older brother. Jeremy's parents and her parents had been friendly in California, and she would see Jeremy every couple of years when his family would visit New York and come up to Connecticut for Sunday brunch at Hadley's house. She would show him her swing set and her jazz dance moves, and they would play catch, even though she wasn't very athletic, which didn't matter at first because of the excitement of once again being in each other's company. She continued to refer to him as her boyfriend to her friends and family, though never in Jeremy's presence—there was no need.
But as she edged closer to puberty, Hadley found herself dreading rather than eagerly anticipating these occasional visits, for relationships based on occasional visits rarely work even for adults, much less for the young, with their ever-evolving personhood. Jeremy's obsession with his Little League stats proved tiresome (though she took heart in their agreement about the plain common sense of the designated hitter rule). Likewise, he found her love of horses too predictable for a girl, and struggled to pay attention when she showed off the wooden figurines she had painted and the photographs of her riding lessons. Her attempts at eliciting kisses brought nothing but a wrinkling of his nose in disgust.
Still, Hadley saw this awkwardness as only a phase in their relationship; they had always been fated to marry, after all, and all couples must endure hardships that will ultimately make their bond stronger. The slow fading of their parents' friendship and the cessation of Jeremy's visits brought relief—she loved him more easily from afar, at least for now. She would focus her energy on thinking of the perfect names for their children (she planned to surprise him by naming their first son Tommy, for Tommy Lasorda, a gesture he would never see coming!).
In middle school Hadley had no boyfriends, unless she counted Nick, who sat next to her in eighth-grade math and had a way of solving problems involving the speed of trains that made her feel a little faint. But that relationship progressed no further than sharing a table at lunchtime, and as much weight as lunchtime table-sharing carried in the eighth grade, Hadley still saw Nick as only a temporary distraction from her one true love.
The teen years, however, found Hadley's memories of Brandon fading, replaced by the immediacy of boys who touched her long strawberry blonde hair, or beamed with pride when she cheered them on at basketball games, or developed a sudden interest in acting when she won the lead in the senior class production of Spoon River Anthology. One boy did all three and earned the privilege of being the first to touch more than Hadley's hair, much more, a privilege she once had assumed would be Jeremy's, though she had imagined it only abstractly. At the moment it happened she suddenly thought of this old assumption and smiled at her youthful naivete, even as she felt a twinge of sadness at this new boy's not being Jeremy, and even as she began to plan her life with this new boy, from college through marriage and children and into old age, during which they would exchange grumpy-yet-loving banter in their own version of On Golden Pond.
She did go to college and have marriage and children, not with that boy or any of the next three but with an older boy, a man in fact, who could not have looked or behaved more differently than Jeremy looked or behaved—or at least the way she imagined Jeremy did, during the rare moments when she still wondered where he was or what he looked like as a thirty-two-year-old or whether he had a family of his own.
In middle age, Hadley's divorce brought the usual regrets and self-doubts and wishes that she could click her heels and start over. Sometimes those wishes involved Jeremy, and "what if," but they couldn't progress much beyond that, as she knew nothing about him past the age of twelve. It was easier to imagine "what if" with the boyfriends who had come later, closer to adulthood, though it was also easier to see the folly of imagining such things; there were, after all, good reasons they had left her, or she had left them. It was nicer to think of Jeremy, as their romance remained unblemished by yucky adult goings-on. But it was also sadder, as the only reason she could think of that they had left each other was geographical. And geography was just another word for bad luck.
Also, she had her children, a boy and a girl—a man and a woman, now, with a few boys and girls of their own, who had little boyfriends and little girlfriends just as Hadley had Jeremy. So she couldn't wish that she had married Jeremy and named their son Tommy, not in any real way. Only in those occasional shameful moments when she looked at her son's face and imagined what he would look like with the nose of the father he might have had, the nose that used to wrinkle when she tried to kiss it, the nose that she liked to think hadn't changed a bit since Jeremy was her boyfriend.
Instead Hadley faced kindergarten alone, in the unfamiliar orange of a New England fall, in a town where the other kids all knew one another from nursery school or music class or swimming lessons. But she was bubbly and liked to share her chewing gum, and her isolation lasted only a few weeks. Soon she found herself in an unexpected flirtation with Brandon, who had accidentally slammed her foot in a car door at a particularly rushed carpool pickup one morning. Her foot was fine, but the flame of his apologetic gaze seared her heart.
Brandon held her hand until halfway through first grade, and he brought her laughter and joy and sometimes jellybeans, but he never succeeded in making her forget about her first love, and finally broke things off when she refused to stop referring to Jeremy as "my other boyfriend."
Hadley's dating life was uneventful for a while as she focused on grades and jazz dance and rebuffing mildly violent attacks from her older brother. Jeremy's parents and her parents had been friendly in California, and she would see Jeremy every couple of years when his family would visit New York and come up to Connecticut for Sunday brunch at Hadley's house. She would show him her swing set and her jazz dance moves, and they would play catch, even though she wasn't very athletic, which didn't matter at first because of the excitement of once again being in each other's company. She continued to refer to him as her boyfriend to her friends and family, though never in Jeremy's presence—there was no need.
But as she edged closer to puberty, Hadley found herself dreading rather than eagerly anticipating these occasional visits, for relationships based on occasional visits rarely work even for adults, much less for the young, with their ever-evolving personhood. Jeremy's obsession with his Little League stats proved tiresome (though she took heart in their agreement about the plain common sense of the designated hitter rule). Likewise, he found her love of horses too predictable for a girl, and struggled to pay attention when she showed off the wooden figurines she had painted and the photographs of her riding lessons. Her attempts at eliciting kisses brought nothing but a wrinkling of his nose in disgust.
Still, Hadley saw this awkwardness as only a phase in their relationship; they had always been fated to marry, after all, and all couples must endure hardships that will ultimately make their bond stronger. The slow fading of their parents' friendship and the cessation of Jeremy's visits brought relief—she loved him more easily from afar, at least for now. She would focus her energy on thinking of the perfect names for their children (she planned to surprise him by naming their first son Tommy, for Tommy Lasorda, a gesture he would never see coming!).
In middle school Hadley had no boyfriends, unless she counted Nick, who sat next to her in eighth-grade math and had a way of solving problems involving the speed of trains that made her feel a little faint. But that relationship progressed no further than sharing a table at lunchtime, and as much weight as lunchtime table-sharing carried in the eighth grade, Hadley still saw Nick as only a temporary distraction from her one true love.
The teen years, however, found Hadley's memories of Brandon fading, replaced by the immediacy of boys who touched her long strawberry blonde hair, or beamed with pride when she cheered them on at basketball games, or developed a sudden interest in acting when she won the lead in the senior class production of Spoon River Anthology. One boy did all three and earned the privilege of being the first to touch more than Hadley's hair, much more, a privilege she once had assumed would be Jeremy's, though she had imagined it only abstractly. At the moment it happened she suddenly thought of this old assumption and smiled at her youthful naivete, even as she felt a twinge of sadness at this new boy's not being Jeremy, and even as she began to plan her life with this new boy, from college through marriage and children and into old age, during which they would exchange grumpy-yet-loving banter in their own version of On Golden Pond.
She did go to college and have marriage and children, not with that boy or any of the next three but with an older boy, a man in fact, who could not have looked or behaved more differently than Jeremy looked or behaved—or at least the way she imagined Jeremy did, during the rare moments when she still wondered where he was or what he looked like as a thirty-two-year-old or whether he had a family of his own.
In middle age, Hadley's divorce brought the usual regrets and self-doubts and wishes that she could click her heels and start over. Sometimes those wishes involved Jeremy, and "what if," but they couldn't progress much beyond that, as she knew nothing about him past the age of twelve. It was easier to imagine "what if" with the boyfriends who had come later, closer to adulthood, though it was also easier to see the folly of imagining such things; there were, after all, good reasons they had left her, or she had left them. It was nicer to think of Jeremy, as their romance remained unblemished by yucky adult goings-on. But it was also sadder, as the only reason she could think of that they had left each other was geographical. And geography was just another word for bad luck.
Also, she had her children, a boy and a girl—a man and a woman, now, with a few boys and girls of their own, who had little boyfriends and little girlfriends just as Hadley had Jeremy. So she couldn't wish that she had married Jeremy and named their son Tommy, not in any real way. Only in those occasional shameful moments when she looked at her son's face and imagined what he would look like with the nose of the father he might have had, the nose that used to wrinkle when she tried to kiss it, the nose that she liked to think hadn't changed a bit since Jeremy was her boyfriend.
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