Dictatorship of the Dress (9780698168305)

by Topper, Jessica

  He gave a short bark of a laugh and ran a hand through his hair. “Sorry about my reaction back there. It was more about the bumpy flight than . . .”

  “Than having to pretend to be engaged to a complete stranger?” I finished.

  “Yeah,” he said slowly. “Something like that.” His grin started grim but ended sheepish, and with his eyebrows raised apologetically, it was hard to hold it against him. “So. Food? My treat.”

  I touched my belly. It wasn’t exactly full, and neither was my wallet. I hoped my mom would take five minutes out of her prewedding bliss to remember to run payroll on time. “I don’t know. That yogurt really filled me up.”

  “Oh, bull. You totally had asparagus envy.” He had me there. “Sushi in the food court?”

  I could roll with that.

  Noah

  ROLL WITH THE PUNCHES

  “So. You’re a runway bride.”

  Laney, my dress-obsessed seatmate, smeared wasabi across her asparagus roll like it was war paint. “I’m not running away,” she said simply and left it at that.

  “Not runaway.” Julia Roberts had nothing on this one. Laney had a thousand-watt smile but so far she had only flickered it in my direction twice. “No, I mean you’re flying solo, on the runway. Why are you traveling alone? G.I. bride?”

  I could see my own mother in my mind, smiling down at me from the wedding portrait that graced all the fireplace mantels of my childhood. A fresh-faced signorina about to marry a handsome man in uniform. I wondered if my dad had promised to carry her over each and every threshold—nineteen, to be exact—after meeting her during his first station at Camp Darby, in Italy. Or if she had realized she would be a single mother for months at a time while he was deployed to various other places. Unable to plan ahead, not even to schedule my sixth birthday party, never knowing when he might be on active duty. I guess that was just part of the whole “for better or for worse” vow.

  “You assume too much,” Laney snapped, bringing me back to the here and now.

  Christ, would it kill her to make conversation? It was like she was studying me, trying to decide if I was worthy of her valuable time. I bet she had a wedding checklist a mile long, possibly even longer than Sloane’s.

  “Well, you’ve got a dress dictating your every move. You won’t let it out of your sight. And you were doodling pictures of it, and sketching rings, back there.” She probably had a page full of signatures of her future married name, too. Sloane had had no problem cranking out endless variations on her future acquired name: Sloane Ridgewood, Sloane B. Ridgewood, Mrs. Sloane Ridgewood, Dr. and Mrs. Noah Ridgewood. I was the one holding the PhD in computer science and I barely felt comfortable using the title “doctor.” Yet she was ready to monogram it on stationery in order to pen thank-you letters to the two hundred guests from our engagement party.

  “Yeah, right,” Laney scoffed. “Although you should’ve seen me ready to shiv security for making me take my ring off earlier.”

  I frowned as I accidently lost control of my chopsticks, my California roll dropping into the little plastic cup of soy sauce. “See? Sounds like classic Bridezilla behavior to me.”

  She almost choked on her wasabi-laced sushi piece. “Bridezilla? I am the least likely person to turn Bridezilla you will ever meet. In fact, I am like the Mothra of the Bridezilla world.”

  “Mothra.” I tsked. “Pedestrian. Destoroyah—no, Bridestoroyah—could totally take on Bridezilla.”

  “You have the chopstick skill level of a preschooler, and you dare to go around citing Japanese monster movie characters to me?” Laney seethed. “I have my reasons for choosing Mothra.”

  “Yeah?” I stabbed my chopsticks straight through the middle of my errant sushi piece. “Let’s hear them.”

  “Don’t, it’s bad luck!” she exclaimed.

  “What, to talk to a bride about her wedding dress before the big day?” And I thought Sloane was taking the wedding superstitions too far.

  “No, to stab your chopstick through the middle of your food.” She reached across the table and readjusted my sticks for me with one hand. I noticed she kept her other hand on the garment bag riding shotgun in the chair next to her. Its midnight blue sheen and fancy silver embroidery looked out of place in the middle of the airport food court.

  “So, what’s with guys wanting to have bachelor parties in Vegas? Are they really buying into the whole ‘what happens here, stays here’ thing?” she demanded.

  “Dunno,” I mumbled. “I’m just showing up where I’m told to.” Which was the truth. Tim had made all the arrangements. Although I had been the one to organize the insanity the only way I knew how. The other guys ripped on me for a couple of days about creating the Excel file, but I bet they’d be happy to have it when they were drunk at four o’clock in the afternoon and couldn’t remember where their dinner reservations were.

  “Vegas just seems so plastic,” Laney went on. “Everything’s a mirage. I mean, you’re in the freakin’ desert. Everyone having the time of their lives, please.” She dismissed the notion with a swat of her hand. “It seems so forced. If the groom really needs one last hurrah, take him to Amsterdam where there are real hookers and good dope, at least.”

  Is that where your groom is right now? I felt like asking. I wondered if she really felt that way. Either she was the coolest Bridezilla on the planet or she was trying to pick a fight. “Maybe the groom just wants to chill with his friends and have some time to not have to think about his wedding. A break from the china patterns and seating arrangements?” I could list five or twenty other things, but just the thought was enough to make me break out in a sweat.

  “You mean a break from things that make him feel less like a man? So he can go beat his chest and act all macho? And leave the girl stuck with all the crap jobs? Where is it written that all the brides have to buy into the Martha Stewart song and dance?”

  Says the diva with the death grip on the fancy dress bag. “Where’s it written that Vegas has to be this Gomorrah for grooms like you’re implying?” I just wanted a drink by the pool, and maybe a couple of good hands in poker. And some sorely needed laughs with my friends . . . a distraction from worrying about everyone else’s happiness but mine.

  “What about yours?” she demanded.

  Wait, did I say that out loud? “My what?”

  “Your friend. The groom. What’s his story?” Laney persisted. “Is he going to stand around good-naturedly while all his single guy friends hook up? Or is there, like, pressure to make sure he gets some? What if he’s a dweeb? Or if his future wife is calling him every ten minutes?”

  “I don’t know. Jesus.” Ever hear of don’t ask, don’t tell? I really didn’t want to get into it with her. Then again, I had been the one to start up with the questions. “Can’t it just be about having a good time?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Can it?”

  We finished our sushi in silence. Not exactly comfortable silence, but I was used to not speaking while eating. Sloane and I often texted through dinner on our respective phones: finalizing work projects (me) and confirming manicure appointments (her). Phonetiquette, the phonic translation app I had created, was still in beta testing, but I threw the name of Laney’s fancy dressmaker in there for the hell of it. “Bichonné means ‘pampered.’ Well, that explains first class.”

  “First class only happened because . . .” Laney’s cheeks flared about as pink as the pickled ginger on her plate. “I got a bump up.”

  “Ah, so that’s why . . .” My fingers flew over the minuscule keypad of my phone, making notes for SeatSight, my airline seating app. “There needs to be a code in the app that accounts for already ticketed passengers in the system receiving airline upgrades.” I looked up at her triumphantly. “Thank you.”

  “No problem. If you need another test subject, you can just pay me in sushi.” There it w
as, that thousand-watt smile. Hot damn. Whoever she was marrying, wherever he was, must feel like a million bucks when she flashed that grin his way. “Good call,” she added.

  “Attention, all passengers in the boarding area. This is the final boarding call for Flight 3320 with nonstop service to Las Vegas, departing out of gate 28.”

  “That’s me.” What do you say to a beautiful girl you will never see again and who’s about to hurl herself willingly into a marital abyss? “Safe travels, Laney.”

  She gave a wave. “Later, Vegas.”

  Standby

  “Passenger Helena Hudson to gate 14, please. Passenger Helena Hudson, gate 14.”

  I had no idea how long they had been calling my name. Helena Hudson had gone MIA somewhere around her second birthday and only made brief appearances at family funerals, bar mitzvahs, and any other occasion where the majority of the population was over the age of sixty and related to me.

  The guy working gate 14 was none of these things, but a ticketed passenger is a ticketed passenger, and since 9/11, your name had better match every piece of photo ID you had.

  “Helena, we have you on the three o’clock flight to Los Angeles with a connecting flight to Lihue. But with the weather they’re predicting . . .” He leaned closer to me, as if to avoid causing mass panic in the gate area. “I wouldn’t be surprised if we see most flights grounded within the hour.”

  Over his shoulder, the one o’clock sky beyond the airport window was darkening to shades of winter evening, and Auntie Em–type winds were blowing. The snow was flying sideways, and not many planes seemed to be moving at all. “We know you obviously have an important place to be,” he drawled, flashing me a smile so large I could practically see his wisdom teeth. “So we’re trying to get you on standby for a direct flight to Honolulu that leaves an hour earlier, if you are okay with that?”

  “That would be great. I’ll just take a puddle jumper from there to Kauai.” The sooner I could get out of this weather, the better.

  “Stay close to the gate area. And don’t worry, we’ve never had a bride miss her wedding day yet, Helena.”

  • • •

  “Helena Hudson!” an unmistakable familiar voice boomed from the inner circle crowded around the name tags on the check-in table at Central Bluff High School’s five-year reunion. “Some heads are gonna roll when Laney Jane sees that!”

  I edged around the perimeter of the gathered masses and sidled my way next to Allen. I hadn’t seen or spoken to my ex-boyfriend since graduation, and the term sight for sore eyes was an understatement. How many times had I cried my eyes sore and swollen to sleep? And how many times had I woken from a dream only to find him gone from my life, seemingly for good? I reached for my name tag and pinned it on.

  “Laney Jane’s the forgiving sort,” I said quietly, hoping he was, too.

  Forgive and forget, and let’s move on. Let’s move in. Together. Laney and Allen, forever. I had dated my way through college, thoroughly miserable and mismatched.

  “Oh, my God, look at you, girl!” The lanky drummer’s arms I had missed so much enveloped me. “Miss College Diploma. Where’s the Mohawk? No more rocking the pink?”

  I had gone through a My Little Pony phase of hair, dyeing it every hue of the Manic Panic rainbow and keeping the sides shaved into a punkish little mane for years. While it had made me a standout in our tiny Long Island village, it was standard fare at SVA in Manhattan. So I became a rare bird for going natural. Besides, it made for good camouflage in corporate America.

  “I’m rocking a nine-to-five desk job on the island,” I said breezily, but there was no way to make it sound remotely cool.

  “Courtesy of your mom, I bet.” The sneer that hooked his lip was a reminder that five years’ time hadn’t put enough water under the bridge for us to sail smoothly past the pain.

  “I think you’ve got enough color for both of us now.” I gently touched his tattooed wrist, letting my eyes follow the designs up his arm. Beneath the thin white cotton of his rolled-up shirtsleeve, I could see muted ink all the way up to his muscular shoulder. Cartoony moonscapes and cratered planets, rockets and sunbursts mixed with mermaids, skulls and flaming poker playing cards. I wanted to know them all.

  “Yeah, well, L.A., baby. Gotta walk the walk! Everyone’s inked.” He pulled a Sharpie marker from his back pocket and carefully corrected my name tag, his thumb hovering tantalizingly close to my left breast. I seized the moment to study him, loving the look he had cultivated in California. Both sides of his head were shaved close, but what was left on top was unspiked and longer than I had ever seen him wear it. Leather and silver graced his throat. He sloppily crossed out and scrawled upside down over his own name tag so it read: HELLO, my name is SATAN.

  He swung his floppy curtain of flaxen hair over to one side as he dipped his ocean blue eyes down to inspect me. “I’m surprised you don’t have any tats, with all that doodling you used to do.”

  I laughed, I basked, I glowed under his attention. “Not anywhere you can see, anyway.”

  “Laney Jane Hudson, are you flirting with me?”

  • • •

  I sighed, inking a speech balloon around the word “MAYBE . . .” in my latest drawing. The lanky rogue and petite, bright-eyed waif held each other at arm’s length, but the tilt of their heads and the gaze of their manga-style wide eyes showed they were utterly immersed, consumed by one another.

  The stages of my life with Allen were like the multiple-panel sequence of a comic book. A series of starts and stops. Fresh renewals and “To be continued . . .” with every page. A girl can dream, right? Over the years I had tried to capture what I referred to as The Short but Brilliant and Doomed Courtship of Allen and Laney Jane. I had filled many a night, and many a sketchbook, with my attempts.

  And now I filled the minutes and the hours, past the departure time for the Honolulu flight (canceled), past the boarding time for my three o’clock LAX flight (delayed, soon to be canceled). I kept working while every TV in the terminal was tuned to the weather, every caption running along the bottom of the screens the same:

  . . . high winds have grounded planes in the nation’s midsection . . .

  . . . as much as an inch of snow an hour expected . . .

  . . . 250 flights canceled . . .

  • • •

  My father took me to my first comic book convention when I was seven years old. I think it was the Big Apple Comic Con, certainly not the most famous of its kind. But it was a pretty big deal for the time. I remembered the crooked lines of people, and row after row of long boxes tightly packed with every comic you could ever think of. The air of the old church basement where it was held had the distinctive scent of old paper pulp, tinged with the excitement of hundreds of collectors. I hung onto my dad’s pant leg and stared up at the racks stretching toward the ceiling, lined with the colorful highlights of each collection sheathed in thick plastic. My dad handed me an old Harvey kids’ comic; to keep me occupied, I supposed. It was a Little Dot, and I was quickly caught up in her world. I wanted to live in Dotland.

  By age eleven, I had read through my father’s collection and was developing one of my own, devouring each issue from cover to back page filler. I accompanied him to various conventions and shyly loitered around Artists’ Alley. The seemingly ordinary men sitting at their tables would transform into heroes before my very eyes as I’d glimpse their name tags and match them to the series spread out before them.

  Before my parents split up, the highlight of each summer was the weekend excursions out of town, just my dad and me. With a map and a sack of peanut butter sandwiches, we’d pile in his old Cutlass and make our way to Philly, South Jersey, and Delaware in search of comic book Mecca. Some places turned out to be no more than glorified garage sales; others like the Holy Grail. One day, we drove through the Pine Barrens, which was always spooky and made me t
hink of the Jersey Devil urban legends, to an unlikely little shop near the ocean called Gus’s Last Gathering. Tina and Gus, the owners, welcomed us like family, and it became a regular stop on our itinerary.

  “Laney, I’ve got an errand to run. Tina’s going to watch you for an hour, okay?” my dad said one day.

  “Can’t I come with you?”

  He shook his head sadly. “Adults only, kid. But I got a hot tip, it’s a sure thing. One hour, tops,” he assured me, kissing my forehead. Kissing that Blarney Stone. I stayed with Tina and picked through the open back issue bins, trying to imagine where my father had gone that wouldn’t allow me, too. There were some comic stores with small back rooms. Adults Only, the signs hanging from the closed curtains would read. Or 18 and Over. I knew there were inappropriate comics, and I knew some men read only those kinds of comics. But my dad never went behind those curtains, as far as I knew.

  He came back just as he had promised, within the hour, happy and chatty. He bought me my Magic 8 Ball and five Archie comics for being “the best daughter in the world”; and for himself he bought the old Justice League comic that Gus kept in glass behind the counter. Tina called that a “fine thank-you” and laughed when he let her keep the change from the hundred-dollar bill as a tip.

  The next time we went down to Gus’s Last Gathering, my dad told me he had to meet a friend in Acey. “It’ll be quick, I promise.” He left me with Tina again. Quick didn’t feel like an hour; it felt like several. A man came into the store and stood close to me at the new issues rack. He smelled like corn chips and sweat, and I could feel him staring as I kept my eyes on the pages in front of me. After that, Tina made me come behind the counter where she worked the register. She let me play with the action figurines, but only the ones that were already out of their boxes.

  Gus had a huge map of New Jersey hanging on the back wall, and I tried to find Acey on it, but couldn’t. I traced along the ocean and over to Long Island, where my house was. It felt like a long way away, even though we were on the same oceanside.