Days

by Mary Robison

  “Mi-mi-mi,” Mickey sang, and Denise elbowed him.

  “Shhh,” she said. “There they are.”

  “So grown up,” Mickey said. “I ought to be hanged for leaving the movie camera at work Friday.”

  Altar boys with raised crucifixes headed the march, and behind them came a priest in a cassock and surplice, swinging a smoking bulb of incense. Riva came next, flanked by two boy attendants, who held the hem of her short cape. Beneath the cape Riva wore a blue bridesmaid’s frock. She carried a tiny wreath of roses and fern on a satin pillow. Her face was lifted in the white light. Her throat moved as she sang the Ave Maria.

  A family of redheads who were grouped ahead of Denise and Mickey turned around and grinned. Mickey wagged his head left and right. “Great!” he said.

  Denise slipped a miniature bottle of spray perfume from her pocketbook. “One of us smells like dry-cleaning fluid,” she said. She wet her wrists with the perfume. “Unless I’m reacting to the incense.”

  “It’s me, I’m afraid,” Mickey said. “This suit’s been in storage nine months.” He brought his coat sleeve to his face and sniffed. “Maybe not. I don’t know. Who cares? Let’s enjoy the damn ceremony.”

  The procession had moved into the church and most of the people went in, too. Mickey and Denise threaded quickly through the crowd to the church doors. Mickey took the handle of Denise’s pocketbook and guided her skillfully, but when they got inside the church, all the pew seats had been taken. They stood in back, in the center aisle, directly in front of the tabernacle. Riva was way up in front, kneeling between her attendants at the altar railing. The children’s choir began a hymn about the month of May and the mother of Christ.

  When the hymn was over, a young boy all in white got up on a stool near the front of the church and sang alone. Riva and her attendants got off their knees and moved to the left of the altar, where a stepladder, draped in linen and hung with bouquets, had been positioned next to a statue of the Virgin Mary. The arms of the statue extended over a bay of burning candles in supplication.

  Riva climbed the stepladder, still carrying the wreath on the satin pillow. She faced the church crowd and held the wreath high. Mickey and Denise grabbed hands. Riva’s eyes were raised. She turned and began to place the wreath over the Virgin’s head.

  “Am I right?” a man standing next to Mickey said. “Her dress looks like it’s caught fire.”

  “Dress is on fire!” someone said loudly. There was quiet, and then there was noise in the church. People half-stood in their pews. A young priest hurried to Riva. She was batting at her gown with the satin pillow. The fern wreath wheeled in the air. Her attendants pulled her down the steps of the ladder.

  Mickey shouted, “Stop!” and ran for the altar. He pushed people out of the way. “I’m her dad,” he said.

  The priest had Riva by both shoulders, pressed against him. He folded her in the apron of his cassock, and a white flame broke under his arm.

  “They both caught,” a woman in front of Mickey said.

  The priest smothered Riva’s flaring skirt. He looked left and right and said, “Everybody stay back.” Riva collapsed on the priest’s arm and slid toward the floor.

  Mickey vaulted over a velvet cord in front of the altar. He and the priest picked up Riva and between them carried her quickly across the altar and through a doorway that led into the sacristy.

  AN USHER WITH A LILY dangling from the lapel of his suit jacket came into the room with a folded canvas cot. “Put her here,” he said. “Just a minute. Just one minute.” He unfolded the cot, yanking at the stiff wooden legs. “There she goes,” he said.

  When they got Riva lying down, an older priest, in vestments, began sending people away from the room. Denise was allowed in. She helped Mickey cover Riva’s charred dress with a blanket.

  “That leg is burned,” the first priest said. “Don’t cover it up.”

  “I’m sorry,” Denise said.

  The two priests sat facing each other in metal chairs, as if they were playing a card game.

  “We called for an ambulance, Father,” the usher said to both of them.

  “It doesn’t look too terrible,” Mickey said as he folded the burned skirt back and examined his daughter’s leg. He glanced around at the priests. “I think we’re going to be okay here,” he said.

  Riva was sobbing softly.

  Denise stood at the base of the cot and clutched each of Riva’s white slippers.

  “Listen, sweetheart,” Mickey said, “your parents are right here. It’s just a little burn, you know. What they call first degree, maybe.”

  Riva said nothing.

  “When this thing is over,” Mickey said, “and you’re taken care of—listen to me, now—we’ll go up to Lake Erie, okay? You hear me? How about that? Some good friends of mine, Tad Austin and his wife—you never met them, Riva—have an A-frame on the water there. We can lie around and bake in the sun all day. There’s an amusement park, and you’ll be eighteen then. You’ll be able to drink, if you want to.”

  The priests were looking at Mickey. He blotted perspiration from his forehead with his coat sleeve.

  Denise said, “I’m surprised they are not here yet.” Her glasses had fallen off and she was crying with her mouth open, still holding Riva’s feet.

  “Give them a little longer,” one of the priests said.

  “You know,” Mickey said to Riva, “something else I just thought of. Tad’s wife will be at Erie some of the time. Remember how I told you about her? She’s the one who went on television and won a convertible.”

  “Will you shut up?” Riva said.

  Bud Parrot

  HE WATCHED THE NEW BRIDE from across a banquet table where punch cups were cluttered, napkins, an ice swan, the high remains of a many-tiered cake.

  It was a cool late-September noon. The bride’s name was Gail, and she had pulled on a babyish short-sleeved sweater over her strapless, backless wedding dress. Bud Parrot was looking at her arms.

  A hundred people were at the reception on the broad lawn behind the bride’s father’s house, in Ohio, in East Columbus, in Bexley. There were working fountains on the lawn, to the right and left of a rose garden. There was a waxed platform for dancing, and two loudspeakers wired to a sound system in the house. They were booming a big-band jitterbug song. A man in a frilled-front shirt and white jacket was spinning clownishly, alone on the platform. The bridal car, a milky Mercedes, was parked on the grass.

  The bride’s older sister, a brunette in yellow, was dish-toweling a puddle from the bar table. She dropped a lime disk into a cocktail, hesitated, then fished the fruit out and threw it on the ground. She handed the drink to Bud Parrot.

  “Another one,” Bud said. “Thanks.”

  “I’m a good barmaid,” the brunette said.

  “You’re the bride’s sister, aren’t you? Aren’t you Evaline?”

  “Yeah,” Evaline said. “Which side are you on? The bride’s or the groom’s?”

  “Both. I know both of them,” Bud said. “I’m older friends with Dean than Gail. By about thirty minutes.”

  Evaline stood over bottles of various kinds of liquor. She stirred up a warm martini and handed it to Bud Parrot.

  “One for both hands,” he said. “Thanks.”

  Evaline began to make a Gibson. “What’s your name?” she said. “Maybe I’ve heard of you.”

  Bud said, “Bud.”

  “Oh,” Evaline said, looking a bit flustered. “Oh, yeah.”

  Gail Redding Blaines, the bride, hitched up her skirt and crossed the dance platform on her way over to Bud. She made a V with her fingers and patted her lips. Bud tapped some cigarettes onto the bar table.

  “I only need one,” Gail said, sounding out of breath and excited. “Hi,” she said to her sister. “You’ve met Buddy-boy, eh?” She put a cigarette to her lips.

  A weathered man of at least sixty came forward to light the bride’s cigarette. The man struck a stick match on
the zippered fly of his dress trousers. He stood in front of Gail with his feet planted wide apart for balance.

  “Daddy-boy,” Gail said, inhaling.

  The man waved out the match and tossed it into a punch cup. He looked without pleasure over the crowd on his lawn. “That fathead Ed Byers,” he said. “That bufflehead.”

  Gail smiled at Bud. She said to her father, “Were you arguing again, Daddy?”

  “You don’t argue with Ed Byers,” the man said. “You try to fit two words in sidewise.”

  Bud said, “The worst used car I ever bought in my life came from an Ed Byers lot.”

  Mr. Redding looked at Bud. He said to Gail, “Who is this?”

  Gail introduced Bud Parrot.

  “You a friend of the groom’s?”

  “He’s a mutual friend,” Gail said. “Dean and Bud and I met on the same night, didn’t we? At a party that we all decided to leave because it was so boring—right, Bud?”

  Bud had some of his drink and said, “Right.” He looked at Evaline, who was slopping Scotch whisky into a glass. She winked at him.

  Evaline said, “Bud and Dean roomed together in college, or something.”

  “College and after,” the bride said. “You’ve met Bud before, Dad.”

  “I don’t remember,” Mr. Redding said.

  Evaline winked at Bud again and then at her sister and then once more at Bud.

  “I remember,” said a woman with a yellow net hat and dark glasses. She was sitting in a too-short chair about ten yards from them, facing the lawn. She had a plate with a wedge of cake on her lap and one of Evaline’s tall, sweating highballs in her right hand. “I remember Bud,” she said. “Don’t I, Bud?”

  “Mother remembers,” Evaline said, smiling and winking at Bud again and then winking at the back of her father’s head and finally at the cup of Scotch in her hand.

  Bud emptied his glass and excused himself. He asked Gail’s mother to dance.

  On the platform, Mrs. Redding’s step was serious. She kept her neck stiff as she dipped, humming in her throat.

  Bud delivered her back to her short chair. Mr. Redding was standing by the chair, legs spread.

  “You working?” he said to Bud.

  “I live over East,” Bud began, “and I’m on leave of absence.”

  But Mr. Redding had wheeled around and was saying, “Hey, Evvy! We don’t need chairs,” to Evaline, who was dragging a picnic bench over to them.

  The bride, Gail, rejoined them. She kissed her father and her mother and then she looked at the sky. “Is that the sun or the moon?” she said. “I can’t tell.”

  “Sun,” Bud said.

  Gail puffed on her cigarette and tipped her head back. She and Bud watched the smoke rope upward and disperse. Bud said to her, in a low voice, “Do I have to tell you you’re, uh, radiant? You look absolutely—”

  “I’ve heard all that,” Gail said. “But, boy, do you look good.”

  “I do?” Bud said.

  “Did you know the brown tuxedos were my idea? And you are perfect for brown, Bud. I mean it.”

  “Your mother’s asleep,” Bud said. They looked at Mrs. Redding, whose cheek was pushed fatly against her shoulder.

  Mr. Redding was propped, arms folded, with his back pressed on a thick maple tree. “She’s having a good time,” he said. “Have some of that million-dollar cake, Evvy. We’re going to have to chuck it out if someone doesn’t eat.”

  Evaline was drinking furiously from the cup of Scotch. The air was breezy and there were green and gold leaves in the yard, but Evaline had droplets of perspiration on the end of her nose. “There are eighty thousand people here to eat the cake,” she said. “I don’t want any. No cake for me.”

  “That’s smart,” Mr. Redding said. “You watch your figure.”

  “I am,” she said, and winked at him.

  “C’mon, Mommy,” Mr. Redding said to his sleeping wife. “Let’s head for coffee.”

  When he had helped his wife get up and the two of them had moved off, Evaline said, “I can’t stand them. Especially I can’t stand him.”

  Bud rolled his eyes in the direction of Gail, who was not far away, doing a mock-serious tango with Evaline’s youngest child, ten-year-old Tucker.

  “I don’t care,” Evaline said. “Gail can’t stand them, either—hey, can you, Gail?”

  “Nope,” Gail said, marching Tucker straight toward a privet hedge.

  Dean Blaines, the groom, came up the walk from the rose garden. Trailing him was a photographer strapped with cameras. The photographer took some pictures, and Dean held out the flared skirt of his tailored tuxedo jacket and performed turns. Dean was dark and attractive, with an involuntary-sounding laugh that showed his white teeth and kept him busy most of the time.

  Bud studied Dean’s chewed fingernails and the many cuts on his hands from his work at the lumberyards and paneling centers he owned in town.

  “Well, Bud,” Dean said, “it’s a wedding.” He said to the photographer, “Get some snaps of Bud.” He said to Evaline, “Somebody better cut you back on the drinks, Evvy. Your eye-twitching could be taken for an invitation.”

  “Hey, Mrs. Blaines,” Dean said to his new bride, “have you danced with Bud?”

  “He won’t want to,” Gail said.

  “I don’t want to,” Bud said. “I mean, I don’t dance.”

  “See?” Gail said. “Besides, I’ve got a fellow.” She mussed Tucker’s hair.

  Bud went over to where some people were milling in a corner of the lawn. A man of about fifty, very pale, was lying flat on his back. Mr. Redding was there, with a thick cheroot stuck in his mouth.

  “Everybody quiet down,” he was saying. He weaved slightly and took off his dress jacket and dropped it on the ground. He ran his thumbs up and down the insides of his white suspenders. “He had too much punch,” Mr. Redding said to Bud. “Let’s clear off before he starts to be sick.”

  Bud pulled his jacket off, too, and folded it over his arm and walked with Mr. Redding up seventy-five yards of lawn to a rectangle of Cyclone fence that encircled clay tennis courts and an emerald-painted swimming pool.

  “Dip?” Mr. Redding said. He put all his weight against the chain-link fence and wound his fingers in the wire diamonds. “We’re draining it tomorrow.”

  “No,” Bud said.

  “What can we do for you?” Mr. Redding said. “What can we do so you’ll enjoy the wedding? Short of an annulment.”

  Bud looked surprised. “I’m enjoying it,” he said. “A lot.” The older man turned around. He smelled of alcohol and faintly of the cedar closet where his clothes came from.

  “Bud?”

  “Um-hmm?”

  “What I think is the most beautiful wild flower, the fringed gentian. You can barely see it peeking around the diving tower. See it?”

  “Mmm,” Bud said. He was crouched against the fence in the shadow of the tower, fingering the fine silt of an anthill.

  “Come on now,” Mr. Redding said. “Get back to earth.”

  “I’m on earth,” Bud said, with his nose full.

  “I had to see a girlfriend of mine get married. I had to be the damned best man. It tore me up. But a year later I met Gail’s mother and a year after that the first couple were divorced and I didn’t even give a curse.”

  Bud was laughing weakly.

  “You’ve never married,” Mr. Redding said. “You’re not very much to look at.”

  “No,” Bud said.

  “You’re bright, though. And because of that, bored.”

  “That’s it on the nose,” Bud said.

  AROUND THREE, BUD GOT HIS Opel out of the sun and drove it into some shade being thrown by the branches of a walnut tree. He sat in the car, watching the grounds next to the Reddings’—a school for girls. Some teen-agers were having a softball game there, throwing up dust as they swung and missed and took off for first base anyway.

  Bud got the key to his glove compartment from where it
was secured to the sun visor with a rubber band. He looked for paper and finally ripped a blank page from the back of his car-service manual.

  “This is the last letter you’ll get from me, Dean,” Bud wrote before his fountain pen clogged. He removed the ink cartridge and shook it. A bubble of blue rolled along his wrist and some blue plips appeared on the bib of his dress shirt. Exasperated, he lit a cigarette and smeared ink on his mouth. He licked his palm and was pressing it along his lips when Evaline came around the walnut tree.

  She stopped, a few feet from Bud’s window.

  “Damn it,” he said, licking at the ink.

  Evaline jumped. “Jesus,” she said. “I didn’t see you there. You almost gave me a heart attack.” She stooped and looked in at Bud. “Help me find my shoe, will you? It’s out here somewhere.”

  “In a minute,” Bud said.

  “Forget it,” Evaline said. She went around and got into the car. “Let me just sit here a second. I’m feeling—you know.”

  “I know,” Bud said. “Me, too.”

  “What happened to you?” she asked.

  “Ink,” Bud said. “Everybody leaving?”

  “Mostly,” Evaline said. “Except for some people dumping out the ashtrays and putting away folding chairs. I forgot your first name.”

  “Bud.”

  “I need air, Bud. How about driving us around?”

  “WILL YOU SLOW DOWN? I’M trying to light this cigarette. This is the second time I’ve burned myself,” Evaline said.

  “It’s not me,” Bud said. “It’s this road.”

  They bucketed over a pothole and landed in the dirt yard of a cinder-block house where there was rusting lawn furniture and a sign that read NO CHRISTMAS TREES.

  “A good neighborhood,” Evaline said. “A good road.”

  “Hold your britches,” Bud said. “I’m going for the Outerbelt. I was thinking we could go to the amusement park out by the zoo.”

  “Well, that’s crazy,” Evaline said. “I’ve got to be back to stow my kids in bed.”

  “It’s a good place to go,” Bud said. “It’s on the river, all lit up with colored lightbulbs. There’s a merry-go-round, Ferris wheel, a good roller coaster. It’s wood.”