Joanne slides out of the booth and they hug. Although Elizabeth is nearly four inches taller, Joanne seems to lean into her a little, as if she were the one who had to bend for the embrace. They haven’t seen each other since her wedding a month ago, although before that they met here for drinks nearly every Friday night. Joanne has a party to go to when she gets home tonight and Elizabeth has Tupper Daniels coming over, but they made this date two weeks ago and neither of them wanted to break it. They’d promised each other that Joanne’s marriage wouldn’t change their very old friendship, and this meeting is their token attempt to keep that promise.
“How are you?” Elizabeth says, sliding into the booth, slipping off her jacket. “You look great.”
Joanne laughs, puts her thin fingers to her face. Her thick, shining wedding band. “Do I still have my tan?”
“You do,” she says, looking closely. “How was Aruba?”
“Hot.” She rolls her eyes. She has a narrow face and big, bulging brown eyes. Nervous hands. When they were in grammar school at St. Elizabeth’s, people used to say that Elizabeth was the Irish version of Joanne and Joanne the Italian version of her. But since then Elizabeth has grown taller and wider and her nose has gotten sharp. Joanne has simply grown breasts, large ones; everything else about her has seemingly stayed just about the same.
The waitress comes to take Elizabeth’s order and Joanne asks for another vodka and tonic, although the one before her is nearly filled. Elizabeth notices that the black bowl between them contains only popcorn kernels and is nearly empty.
“How long have you been here?” she asks.
Joanne shrugs. “Not long. So what’s new with you? Did Toby ever call you?” She picks up one of the kernels and bites it between her front teeth.
“No,” she says. “I didn’t really expect him to.” Toby was her partner at the wedding. They’d kept up a polite banter throughout the whole thing and eventually got ridiculously drunk together, but she was sure he’d only asked for her number because all the other unmarried ushers were asking all the other unmarried bridesmaids for theirs. “I think he just took my number because he was kind of caught up in the spirit of things.”
“What do you mean?” Joanne asks, looking at her carefully, almost cautiously.
“Oh, you know, the wedding and the drinking and the dancing. And you and Tommy looked so cute together, I think everyone wanted to get married, or at least be in love.” She laughs. “And when your father got up and sang ‘Stay as Sweet as You Are,’ to your mother—”
“He was drunk,” Joanne says.
She laughs again. “God, who wasn’t?” It had been a wonderful, extravagant wedding. Eight bridesmaids, six limousines, three hundred guests, a nuptial mass, and seven rolling bars. Joanne’s father, a short, burly man, almost suave in his brown tuxedo and ruffled yellow shirt, had cried openly during the ceremony and then danced with every woman at the reception, frequently grabbing the microphone away from the band leader to shout insults at his friends. Insults that always ended with, “Ahh, I love ya!”
There had been a cocktail hour with a twelve-foot table of hors d’oeuvre and a fountain of champagne. A six-course Italian dinner, a Viennese dessert table. Tommy’s family sang German and Irish songs, Joanne’s sang Italian, all of them did the hora and sang Hava Nagila.
“You should see the hem of my dress,” she tells Joanne now. “Ripped to shreds.”
Joanne looks concerned. They’d spent a year finding those blue Qiana dresses and another six months deciding what to wear in their hair and what flowers to carry. “Is it ruined?”
“No,” Elizabeth says. “I can fix it. Don’t you remember? I showed you at the wedding.”
She shakes her head. “They say the bride never remembers anything.” “Are you on drugs?” Elizabeth had asked her at one point during the reception, she was smiling so, her eyes were so bright. Joanne had just smiled back at her, lights snapping around them.
“How did the pictures come out?”
Joanne pushes her glass to the end of the table and pulls the new one to her. The small red napkin beneath it is soggy and she lifts the glass a few times, blotting it. “I don’t know,” she says, watching the glass. “I haven’t looked at them.”
“What?” Elizabeth laughs a little. “After all the posing we did? How could you not look at them?” She suspects Joanne is joking.
She takes a sip of her drink. “I don’t like thinking about the wedding,” she says solemnly. “I don’t even like to talk about it.”
Elizabeth puts her hand on Joanne’s wrist. A reflex. Like when they used to play lightning tag when they were young: If I’m touching home and you touch me, you’re safe, I’m safe. If I’m touching you and you’re out, I’m out too. They always tried to be near each other when they played.
“What’s wrong?” she asks, touching Joanne’s wrist, trying to absorb what she feels. “Is something wrong between you and Tommy?” She wonders briefly if she’s prying.
Joanne laughs a little, shaking her head. “No,” she says. “It has nothing to do with Tommy. It’s just me. My mother says it happens to everyone. Tommy’s great. I love him.”
“Then what is it?”
She sucks her bottom lip. Twelve years old again. The two of them sitting on the curb outside Elizabeth’s house, knees and thighs touching. Joanne sucking her lip, eyes filled with tears, Elizabeth watching her, thinking death, divorce, she’s moving, whatever we fear most for our friends at twelve. “My father threw a cup at me,” Joanne had finally said.
She says now, in the same tone, “I just can’t stand that it’s over.”
“What’s over?” And already she’s searching for some antidote, some sad part of her own life to hold up beside Joanne’s. If you’re out, I’m out. “At least your father’s home to throw a cup at you,” she had said that day on the curb. “My father’s never even here.” Just what her mother would say to their neighbors when she sat with them in the kitchen, drinking beer or coffee. “At least your husband’s always home.” Not that either Elizabeth or her mother would have changed places with any of them—replaced their sometime father/husband with any of their friends’ permanent tyrants. But neither would they have said the others were right, that they had a right to complain, that their husbands/fathers were bastards, oafs. No, only the subtle lie: At least he’s home, at least you have that.
“The wedding,” Joanne says. She breathes once, a laugh, a sob, and puts the back of her hand to her mouth. “I know it’s stupid, but, God, I just can’t stand it.” She swallows, shakes her head. “It was the biggest day of my life and it went so fast. And now it’s over. Forever.” She looks directly at Elizabeth. “I waited all my life for that day.”
“And it was beautiful.” At least you have that. “Perfect.”
“Yeah,” she says, stirring her drink. “So now I’m back and my parents are yelling at each other again and Mr. Havers is bitchy again and work is the same and I don’t even have flowers on my desk any more.”
“But you’re married now,” Elizabeth says. “You’re living with Tommy.”
“I know,” she says wearily. She’s heard it before. “I know. And I ride the train home to Westbury instead of Valley Stream. And I live in an apartment with Tommy instead of at home with my parents. But what do I have to look forward to? Everything’s over.”
“Oh, Joanne.” She tries to think for her: She has her job, but she’s an executive secretary already, has been for the past four years. Good salary, nonpromotable. She has children to look forward to, but not for a while, not with Tommy just out of law school, still struggling to pay off his loans. She may buy a house someday, but when, how far away?
“What does anybody have to look forward to?” she says, feebly. “And you’re married. You’re lucky.”
She stares at her drink. After a while, the waitress comes and they order two more. Joanne glances at her watch but says nothing.
“You want something to eat?” E
lizabeth asks. She nods.
At the hors d’oeuvre table, Bert hums as he puts the tiny meatballs into a small white dish. “How you been, darling?” he asks.
“As good as I can be,” she tells him, glad to smile, to joke a little. Feeling guilty that she’s glad. He laughs, his teeth whiter than his tall chef’s cap. “Well, you can’t beat that,” he says. “You just got to do your best.”
A man in a dark suit steps in front of her, holding out a small plate. “Yes, sir,” Bert says. “Have some of this nice ham here.”
“You know what it’s like?” Joanne says when she returns to the booth.
Elizabeth offers her a toothpick and she takes it, holds it. “It’s like when I got busted in high school, remember?”
She laughs, spearing a meatball. “I remember you telling me about it.” Joanne had gone from St. Elizabeth’s to the public school just down the street, “the incubator of atheism,” as one of the nuns called it, while Elizabeth went on to Blessed Virgin High. They parted ways for a few years then, while Elizabeth learned why she was sick of the Catholic Church and Joanne discovered why she couldn’t live without it, and were reacquainted in their senior year when they both started going to the same bars; as if, despite the efforts of the nuns and the atheists, they had both ended up looking for the same thing.
Not, Elizabeth recalls, that Joanne ever had any trouble finding it. Boyfriends. Dates. Sex. Romance. Her appeal to men has always been legendary and puzzling. “She’s such a homely, wiry little thing,” Elizabeth’s mother used to say, and her girlfriends at college, who were dazed by the number of men Joanne met each time she came to visit, decided she was, “Not pretty, but attractive, sexy.” Elizabeth has always attributed it to every man’s fantasy of a twelve-year-old with breasts.
She was with one of her many boyfriends, parked by a reservoir somewhere, when a policeman, just checking, found three joints in her pocketbook, in the plastic case where she stored her tampons. The charges were eventually dropped, but her father told her then and there that she would never be allowed to go away to college, or to leave home until the day she was married.
“Well, after that,” Joanne says now, “I made myself sick wishing I could go back to that night. Do it over. I just kept thinking if I could only relive it, go backward and do it over right.”
“Yeah,” Elizabeth says, chewing the tasteless meatball, glad to have an answer for her, a point to make. “But that’s because you wanted to do it differently, so you wouldn’t have gotten caught. You wouldn’t want to do your wedding any differently.”
“Yes I would,” she says quickly. “I’d pay more attention. I’d make it seem to last longer. Maybe I’d even put it off for another year. Maybe even two years.”
Elizabeth smiles at her. “But it would still have to be over, eventually.”
“No,” she says, childish, stubborn. Then, softer. “I waited all my life. I mean, how many times did we play bride? And have weddings for our Barbie dolls? Remember I had the five-dollar gown with the veil and the bouquet and the little blue garter? And I’d always pretend her husband got hit by a car or drowned or something so she could get married again?” She laughs a little; not a real laugh, but one that tells Elizabeth that she knows all this is beginning to sound a little silly. “Jesus, Liz, I’ve been planning my wedding since I was three years old!”
Elizabeth laughs, touches her arm again. “Oh, Joanne,” she says. “Everybody probably goes through some kind of depression after they get married. They probably even have a name for it, like post-partum blues.”
“That’s what my mother told me. She said she had it too. But I still just can’t accept that my wedding is over. I feel like somebody died. Maybe even me.”
Elizabeth laughs again, patting her hand. “Oh, really,” she says kindly. “Come on, it’s not that bad. At least you’ve had your wedding. Look at me, I’ll probably never have one. Having your wedding over is better than never having one at all.”
At least. It could be worse. Don’t complain.
Joanne smiles a little, somewhat sheepishly. “I know,” she says. “I’ll get over it.”
Elizabeth knows Joanne is only trying to appease her, Joanne doesn’t believe it herself, and suddenly she regrets being so rational. But, she wonders, what else can she do for her? Moan with her for the impossible? Cry with her over the irretrievable? Joanne is lucky to be married to someone like Tommy. They’d all said so at the wedding, they’d all envied her. She has no reason to be so unhappy now.
She looks into the dark bar behind Joanne, the tables filled with young women and businessmen of all ages. The blue glow of the jukebox. She looks again at Joanne, and sees the beginning of those changes they’d promised each other would never occur.
Joanne finishes her drink and checks her watch. “I’d better go,” she says.
Out in the bright station, they embrace again.
“You have to come over,” Joanne says.
“I know, let’s arrange something. I’ll give you a call.”
They kiss again and Joanne heads toward her train. The announcer is calling it already and she jogs a little, somewhat awkward in her high heels. From the back, she could be ten, nine. A little girl playing dress-up in her mother’s shoes. There’s a crowd at her gate, moving slowly through it. She joins them, pauses. A tall man beside her turns, looks at her, and then bends to say something into her ear. Two more men come up behind her so Elizabeth can’t see if she replies.
She goes up the stairs, out of the station. It’s darker now, and the crowds have thinned. The bums and shopping-bag ladies are stationed in their doorways. Women gather at the windows of various shoe stores. The streets are littered with pamphlets and newspapers.
The air is growing colder but it’s refreshing after the bar in the station. She can feel the drinks at the back of her throat and she decides to walk most of the way home. It will be good exercise and she’ll still have plenty of time to prepare for Tupper Daniels. She wonders if she’ll sleep with him, decides not to. Wonders what Joanne would have done, before. Fallen in love and then slept with him? Slept with him and then fallen in love? For Joanne, the two had always gone together. She’d been in love so many times before Tommy.
She crosses Fifth Avenue, pauses in front of Altman’s windows. Sleek manikins in sheer silk dresses. One wears a narrow yellow gown, slit to her thigh, mandarin collar. On her right side there are three rows of silver sequins from shoulder to hem. One hand is placed seductively just over her bare thigh.
“Must be cold in that window,” the man beside her says to the woman on his arm. “Look at their nipples.”
The woman laughs, pulls him away. He is fair, she is dark. They are both tall and sleek. They take long strides together.
Elizabeth smiles a little, turns back to the window. All the manikins are cold, or aroused, standing there under those blue and red lights, in silk dresses that shine with hundreds of tiny mirrors. She wonders how Tupper Daniels would react if she were to answer the door tonight in a dress like that, her nipples erect.
She turns, continues walking. Remembers Joanne in the bridal shop where she finally found her gown. Up on a platform before a semicircle of mirrors. Her mother and the saleswoman and the eight of them in the bridal party grouped around her, watching her, or one of the five images of her. The same scene repeated six times around the busy shop, six different brides, all shapes and sizes, all young, up on little platforms, before five images of themselves. Thirty images in white silk or satin or lace or Qiana or polyester, some turning to check their hems, some running their fingers across their chests, along their waists, some standing oh so still, arms out, smiling back at themselves. Mrs. Paletti had cried when Joanne had said, “Yes, this is the one.” And all of them had smiled, sat up a little, made a wish.
No one being rational then, saying perhaps this is a little silly, perhaps all this fuss and fanfare will outshine the event, leave you disappointed, bitter that it’s over. None of
them, not even Joanne’s mother, who had been through the disappointment herself, reminding her that this is a fantasy, that when it’s over there will still be your parents fighting and the papers on your desk, and a lifetime of wondering what you should look forward to. Not saying it, not even thinking it, but thinking instead of their own moment up there on the platform, in the white gown, their own moment, in the past or in the future, that they’d been told all their lives to prepare for.
Told so often and so well that even now she can dismiss Joanne’s unhappiness, admit that yes, even now, she wants her own moment up there in the white dress. Even now she believes it will somehow change her life forever.
End it, Joanne had said. But she’ll get over it; everyone goes through it. She has no reason to be unhappy. She has Tommy, love.
She turns down Fiftieth Street, heads crosstown, believing that Joanne should be happy, will be happy. And yet, as she decides that maybe she will sleep with Tupper Daniels and feels, like the fresh air, like Friday night, like her freedom to turn at Park or York, Sixty-first of Seventy-ninth, that the decision need not be final, she knows she would not trade places with her.
Chapter 5
Eight ten and the downstairs buzzer rings.
He answers “Tupper” when she asks who it is, and when she opens the door he stands there with a bottle of wine and a cone of flowers. Rosebuds and baby’s-breath, the kind they sell on the street, near subway entrances. The kind that always make her think of businessmen stopping on their way home to buy the wife some flowers after eight hours of lusting after their secretaries.
“Madame Editor,” he says, presenting her with the bouquet, the facetiousness again in his eyes, again making her feel caught. His eyes look very blue.
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