Flyover States, page 17
“No,” I say, making a snap decision not to tell my sister about my little vomit break. “But I think he talked the rest of New York to death.”
Theresa, my co-maid of honor, rolls her eyes. I’m probably the only person on earth who thinks Theresa is less-than-attractive. To me, she looks pinched and weathered, in that used-to-be-a-pretty-blond kind of way that can happen anytime after puberty to those with fine features and cold hearts. She’s always been jealous that Lisa has an actual sister, and she’s polite but gives me the eye to let me know that I don’t quite match her exacting standards. Truly, I have no idea why my sister likes her. I think they tortured fat kids at Girl Scout camp together once upon a time. Which Lisa has outgrown, which Theresa has not.
“He was on his cell?” Lisa asks. “I’m going to kill him if he doesn’t lay off that thing. You know he has two now? As if call waiting weren’t enough. It’s like he needs four-way call waiting. Yet, when I need him to confirm seating for the reception, he’s mysteriously out of range.”
Theresa leans back onto her elbows, legs posed in front of her like there’s some hidden camera recording her every move.
“So what’s new in Idaho?” she asks.
“Indiana,” I say. “Totally, totally different.”
“Whatever.” Theresa musters up a bony, indifferent shrug.
“Teaching’s almost over,” I say. “Just waiting for the next semester to get started. Trying to write every day.”
“You published yet?” Theresa asks.
The second most dreaded grad-student-type question, but thankfully one that I can answer in the affirmative.
“Yes,” I say. “In fact, I am.”
My sister squeals and jumps up and down.
“It’s so cool, Theresa. I have the two magazines that took Doris’s poems. And there are going to be a million more, I just know it. She’s going to be faaaamous.”
Theresa looks at me blankly, but hard. Now is not the time to point out that there’s no such thing as a famous living poet—unless you’re counting Jewel.
“Your skin,” she says finally. “God, you have really, really good skin. How old are you anyhow?”
“Almost thirty-one,” I say.
Theresa gestures for me to come closer. Flattered, I oblige.
“Seriously,” she says. “Lisa, have you really ever looked at Doris’s skin? She has, maybe, a few deep lines starting across the forehead, but otherwise, baby’s bottom. What do you use?”
I rattle off a list of drugstore products: Cetaphil, Neutrogena, whatever sample they’re handing out at the mall, and Theresa listens skeptically.
“I don’t know,” I say jokingly. “But I don’t have the figure that either of you has. Maybe the old face/ass choice is true. I chose face because it’s easier and tastes better.”
“Guess so,” Theresa says, looking at my ass, which could be the size of Idaho and Indiana combined given the way I feel now. “Interesting.”
“Stop it,” Lisa warns us. “You’re both beautiful. Everyone’s going to be beeeautiful for my wedding. I’m getting maaaaaarried.”
“Lisa?” I ask. “Have you been hitting the sauce?”
She laughs her very-bad-girl laugh, a staccato burst of glee.
“I’m so stressssssed,” she hisses. “And Marvin is Groomzilla. He and his family, they’re like hemorrhaging money over this wedding.”
“Forty thousand dollars,” Theresa chimes in, “and counting.”
I can hear the words that’s disgusting curling up in my gut, gathering steam in my windpipe, ready to burst out in one unchecked, self-righteous burst. No wonder my parents are biting their tongues. They got married at some little Catholic church, with ten guests and a reception at the local diner. Lisa and I were taught by our parents to want and to live with less, materially speaking. All through grade school we wore hand-me-downs from my cousins (with many a half size and season between our lives and theirs), ate truckloads of spaghetti, and macaroni and cheese, and a not-so-healthy amount of low-grade beef, none of which I ever really minded. However, Lisa was constantly unlearning her childhood, adopting the American mantra of “more is better,” because more is more.
It reminds me of a conversation I had with Claus last week, when he asked, So, how much you make anyhow, Ms. W.? I told him twelve thousand dollars a year, including my tuition waver, a decidedly less-than-bling-bling salary. Did Claus respect me for choosing less money and a job that might actually make the world a better place? Nope. Instead, he looked at me befuddled, as if he’d thought until that exact moment that I might actually have some smarts. Not me, he said. I’m a make me some money when I get out of this place. Looking at my sister and Theresa, they don’t seem so miserable, and they certainly don’t look poor and frustrated. Not like me, wondering how much money I’m going to make when I get out of grad school, or if I’m even going to make it out at all.
“You seem so happy,” I whisper to Lisa. “Really, truly happy.”
And whether it’s the alcohol or the truth, Lisa beams back, “I am. I really, truly am.”
Once upon a time, long, long ago in my early teaching days I taught a composition class where the students had to analyze movies. In order to keep their attention and (hopefully) get them to learn, we watched Pretty Woman, the Julia Roberts/Richard Gere vehicle in which Roberts plays the stylin’ Cinderella-hooker who helps Gere learn to open his heart as well as his wallet. Pointing out the improbability of such a scenario to my students (No, really, how many of you know hookers who married millionaires? Anyone? Anyone?), one of the students, an open-faced girl from the mid-Indiana farmland said to me: “Don’t you believe in love?” My response at the time was: “Yes, I do. But not like that.”
In a way, that’s a little how I feel about my sister and Marvin. Two years ago, Lisa was burnt-out on dating. Eroded shell-of-a-human-being. Totally burnt-out. One night she called me to tell me about her latest date from hell. Her last pre-Marvin date.
“He started in by telling me that he doesn’t like wearing condoms,” she’d said.
I think I said something along the lines of, “you’ve got to be kidding,” but with a bit more judgment and expletives.
“Then,” Lisa’d said, “he gestured around the bar, and was like, ‘And I’ll bet I’m not the only one. I’ll bet if you polled every person here, they’d all say, at least the men, that they didn’t like wearing them.’ But, Doris, it didn’t end there. I told him he ought to watch out for social diseases, and there’s not enough liquor in the bar, in the world, to numb my head, and then he says, ‘It just kills the mood. You get things going, then you can’t get them back,’ wink wink. But it’s even worse, he then says, ‘But I’m working on it. Now, when I’m looking at porn on the Internet, I practice putting on a condom. I think it’s working. Kind of.’”
Marvin came next, and after the first few dates I would ask Lisa what she thought, if there were any sparks, if she felt that something in the pit of her stomach.
“No sparks,” she’d say. “I don’t need sparks, Doris. And that feeling in the pit of my stomach is just the bile rising for when I realize what a perfect ass the spark-man really is. I like being with Marvin. He’s a gentleman, and he’s very handsome. He has a good job, and he’s crazy about me. At this point in time, that’s worth a whole forest fire’s worth of sparks.”
Marvin was the guy she settled into, and she seems happy. But the sweet little latent-farm-girl romantic voice inside of me just doesn’t want to call that love. Of course, my sister is now getting married and I am merely, as Theresa is quick to point out, getting older. I miss the days when it was just fat they talked about. At least fat, technically, could be helped. But aging? Good luck.
I wait until the house is quiet before sneaking down to the kitchen for a glass of milk and the blandest food I can find, something to calm my stomach for good. I hadn’t been consciously avoiding my parents, but I just wasn’t up for meeting the whole extended Marvin gene pool, not with a shower and rehearsal and actual wedding all crammed into the next three days. I almost cried, I was so happy to see my father in the kitchen, backlit only by the refrigerator bulb, foraging like some deranged raccoon.
“Tacky,” I say. “Poor relations.”
“Dori!” he says, closing the refrigerator door. “I heard you were sick!”
“Shh. Inside voice.”
My father has two pieces of salami in his mouth, which he keeps there while pulling me into his flannel robe and hugging me tight. My dad’s a big man, six-four slouching, and it’s work for him to whisper. It always takes me a minute to get used to the gray in his hair, denser every visit, and the ever-shrinking fringe of it like a low-slung halo round his scalp. But after thirty seconds, he looks like my dad again, big smile, big nose, big eyes. All face and personality.
“Get a load of this place. Your mother went to bed. I think she was worried that if she stayed up too long, she’d break something and we’d be out our retirement.”
“But, Dad,” I say, “did you ever really think Lisa would marry anything else? She’s not exactly a punch-and-cookies kind of girl.”
My dad shakes his head.
“Marvin’s a nice fellow,” he says. “We went together to get haircuts. I don’t think he trusted my barber. Eighty dollars he spent. On me. To trim this.”
He points at his six square inches of hair.
“It looks good.”
“It looks just as good for twelve,” he says. “Counting tip.”
We sit down at the wood-block table in the center of the kitchen. My dad pours me a glass of milk and makes us both a pair of salami sandwiches with Dijon mustard imported from France.
“This is so good,” I say, talking with my mouth full. “Good thing Marvin’s not marrying me. I’d get totally fat with a spread like this.”
My dad reaches across the table and wipes mustard from my cheek.
“What about that?” my dad asks. “You seeing anyone special? Your mother thinks that you need to start eating lunch at the law library, or the hospital, somewhere you can meet a nice man. I’ll bet that Marvin has some eligible friends.”
“Dad,” I say, “do you really think that Marvin’s friends are going to be lining up to meet me? ‘She’s published two poems and dresses like Goodwill is Prada.’ If they wanted that, they’d visit the East Village, which they don’t, I guarantee it. I’d rather die alone in a cardboard box. They’d put me in a cage and starve me like some veal calf.”
“They stuff the veal calves, Dori.” My dad laughs. He brings out my melodramatic streak, more so than usual. “Wonder what you’ll end up with,” he says. “Not in a box, you’re too scrappy.”
“Probably with some guy who knits,” I say, not really knowing where it comes from. “And I may yet die in a box. A cardboard one. Because it’s all I can afford.”
“If the man who knits loves you, remember that at least it’s a trade. Honest work. And all this,” he says, gesturing at the house, the imported mustard, the Chagall in the distance. “You know what Aristotle said, or Socrates, ‘Call no man happy until he’s dead.’” Morbid, my father, but accidentally so.
I try to imagine Zach here, and realize that he and my father would get along like a house on fire. They’d get twelve-dollar haircuts together and open the wedding reception up for the homeless and unemployed, and probably make fun of whatever I was wearing.
“Get some sleep,” my dad advises. “Marvin has a schedule.”
“Marvin has a schedule” turns out to be the understatement of the weekend. If Marvin ran my life, I would probably have three books published by now, a tenure-track position, a socially acceptable and presentable husband and a bambina on the way. And he does it without breaking a sweat. I’ve got to hand it to Lisa, if that energy translates into all areas of their relationship, she may have done quite well for herself. Regardless, he makes J.J. seem straight from Bedrock as managerial skills go. Theresa, queen mother of snippiness behind his back, is positively geishalike in his presence. That Marvin, my dad elbows me at the rehearsal dinner, something else.
I’m so happy to be eating lobster, I can barely respond.
“You go,” my dad says, tousling my head like I’m ten years old. “That’s it, you show ’em you’re an eater.”
Tonight is possibly the only time outside of funerals that I’ve seen my father in a suit. My mother is wearing a pretty peach-colored pantsuit that picks up the gold in her hair, and she’s even quieter than usual. My dad’s always been the talker of the two.
“Shut up, Dad,” I say. “Aren’t you supposed to be making a toast or something?”
Marvin has seated me between my father and some stockbroker named David Arthur. My students think that I’m so “New York/East Coast” because I’m one of the few Yankee specimens they’ve observed up close in the bug jar of Langsdale, but David is what I think of when I think East Coast. Square jaw, sun-blond hair, clothes just evah-so rumpled, perfect table manners, perfect grammar, like a grown-up Ken doll with distant Mayflower relations whom he’d have the decency never to mention. And I could tell you what his next girlfriend will look like without even asking. Like Theresa.
“I like that you’re eating,” he says, looking at my plate, which I’ve all but licked bone dry. “It’s cool.”
I could give him a hard time, but what would be the point?
“It’s incredible,” I say. “And you wouldn’t believe it, but I’ve been doing it my whole life.”
“My last girlfriend,” he confirms, and points a finger down his throat, making a discreet gagging noise.
“Oh, no,” I say. “Totally, totally defeats the purpose.”
Rather than apologize for my voluptuous derriere, I decide to lean into it. I’m Anna Magnani, Monica Vitti and Sophia Loren rolled into one Midwestern tomato. Mr. Arthur, with his lifetime of yakking stick insects, will not know what to do with himself. I regale him with tales of the Midwest, my life there, my friends, the Ronnie and the robin story (always a winner), and you’d think I was Christopher Columbus himself, bringing news of a new and distant world.
“I’ve been to Chicago,” David says. “Guess it’s not the same.”
“No, David,” I say. “It most certainly is not.”
At the end of the evening, David lets me borrow his cell phone to give Ronnie a call. When she picks up, she sounds exhausted. It’s almost ten o’clock, and I was thinking she’d just be going to work, but it sounds as if she’s been jolted from a cycle of REM sleep.
“Is it fun?” she asks politely.
“It is,” I say. “Even Marvin is less on my nerves. I just wanted to see if you could get me from the airport. I didn’t get to drive myself. It’s a long story.”
“No problem” she says. “Or I’ll send Paolo.”
“And the rest of L.A.?”
“I’ll tell you on the ride.”
The next afternoon, Lisa and Marvin get married. They exchange vows in a small church made of marbled rock, and sunlight streams through the stained-glass windows like something out of a fairy tale. David and I walk down the aisle together, and I feel like the star of an old movie in my long, champagne-hued dress. At that exact moment, it almost doesn’t matter how Lisa and Marvin are going to feel about each other tomorrow, or in three years, or ten. Who could stand in a church like this, dressed like them—Lisa in my mother’s antique lace gown, Marvin in tux and tails—and not feel like it’s going to last forever?
Lisa’s eyes are tearing, and Marvin shifts her hands in his. He clears his throat. Even David looks misty. And though it’s the last thing I should be thinking about, my mind wanders to Luis, to La Varian. I’ll bet the last thing CityBlondBarbie ever thought, standing next to Faux Che on some beach or in some chapel, was that somewhere down the line there was a Winn-Dixie in Indiana, a state she’d probably only seen on a map, with her future husband’s lover’s name on it. Or La Varian’s mystery wife reduced to a footnote.
“I do,” Lisa whispers. Her face is angelic, backlit and radiant.
My parents watch from the first pew, and my father holds my mother’s arm close to his body. Thirty-five years, and not once do I remember my father making excuses, coming home late or “just looking” in some other woman’s direction. Not once, not one day, did he and my mother seem anything but a team, anything but two people in love. Not once.
Marvin slips the ring on Lisa’s finger and they kiss. I don’t just love my sister, I admire her. Technically, I’m eleven months her senior, but right now I feel as though she has a lifetime on me. There’s no prenup between her and Marvin, it would never occur to my sister to look at a marriage and see a divorce. Marvin, either. In a field, my sister would be part of that field. She’d find wildflowers, watch the sunset, wander as far as she could without getting lost. She’d look around her and say, Yes, all this and me, too.
Walking back down the aisle, David links his arm in mine and offers me a tissue.
“It’s okay,” he says. “They’re going to make it.”
And I hope they do. I really, really hope they do.
Ronnie
“Look,” Mona says, holding up a People magazine that someone left behind. “It says here that Marcus Montgomery and that Dakota Triplehorn bought each other matching Rolls-Royces and platinum his-and-her watches and a private jet so they can get around to wherever they want to. Did it for their fourth anniversary, been dating for four months.”
I don’t even know who these people are, because for the first time in years and years I’m out of the pop-culture loop. It’s not even ignorance on purpose, like people who always say, Well I wouldn’t know. I don’t have a TV, all superior and elitist over the blind masses. I happen to love TV—in all its entertaining, horrifying beauty. Hell, for Roots alone TV has been worth all the other crap mixed in—even the “reality” bullshit they’ve been peddling these days. I actually miss TV, now that I’ve not been able to afford cable all summer. I wouldn’t have the time to watch, though, even if I could afford it, and for some reason, I’m angry about idiot Marcus Montgomery and Dakota, and all their Hollywood bullshit, even if I don’t know who they are.
