Mating Rituals of the North American WASP

by Lauren Lipton

  Brock was already moving toward the next group of guests. Most were people Peggy didn’t know: friends and business associates of the Clovises. She spotted Brock’s brother, Brent, a shorter, blond version of Brock who’d be best man—the only other member of the wedding party besides Bex. A few of Brock’s former football teammates from high school were swapping stories with Brock’s father, Ron, while the friends’ wives stood separately, eating shrimp from an icy heap of seafood on the dining table. Peggy realized this was the difference between WASP parties and everybody else’s parties: Here, people ate the food.

  She scanned the room some more. There were no cameraman buddies; except for Brock, they were all over the country, setting up for tomorrow morning’s bowl games.

  “See how he’s changed? He turned down work on New Year’s just to be with me,” Peggy pointed out to Bex and Josh, as if the two had been criticizing Brock—when neither had made a single disparaging comment since Peggy had finally told them of her engagement. They’d been supportive and complimentary and all the things Peggy had hoped they’d be.

  “I noticed.” Bex settled into a bony reproduction armchair, not even taking the opportunity to comment that earlier, Brock’s stepmother, Sharon, had pretentiously described it as “Louis Quatorze.”

  “Me too.” Josh took another gulp of champagne.

  It was bizarre.

  “I’ll be right back.” Peggy dodged through the crowd toward Ron and Sharon’s media room, where guests’ mink coats lay in perfumed strata along the backs of the couches and chairs and rhinestone handbags littered the seats. Peggy found her own plain bag and stood, her phone to her ear. On the wall-mounted flat-screen television, people cavorted live in Times Square, the sound on mute.

  “Happy almost New Year,” she greeted Luke when he answered.

  “The same to you.” His matching polite, distant formality bothered her, which was stupid. It wasn’t as if she’d called to whisper sweet nothings in his ear.

  “Where are you?”

  “You called the house,” he said. “You didn’t think I’d be out in a cardboard hat, singing ‘Auld Lang Syne’?”

  “I guess not.” She laughed, feeling foolish. “How’s your great-aunt?”

  “She went to bed hours ago.”

  And where’s the redheaded strumpet? Peggy thought. She took an anxious breath and let herself be mesmerized by the televised revelry. She and Bex and Jen and Andrea and a few other college friends had actually gone to Times Square the first New Year’s Eve after Peggy had moved to Manhattan. It had been tightly packed with people, and every so often, just for fun, Peggy had lifted both feet off the ground and let the crowd carry her along.

  “Is there anything you wanted to say?” Luke asked.

  “Yes. I think we should call it off early. Our, uh, arrangement.” She couldn’t bring herself to say “marriage.” “I can’t keep hiding this from my fiancé—”

  “What about the money?”

  The complete absence of hurt in Luke’s voice left Peggy more confused than she had been before she’d picked up her phone; she’d thought the conversation would ease her mind. “I don’t care about the money.” She pictured Luke in the chair he liked in the den, the one by the telephone table. “I’ll find some other way to save the shop. This isn’t worth it.”

  “You’re right. I’ll find some other way to take care of Abigail. We can tell her as soon as Mayhew draws up the papers.”

  “Great.” Her throat ached. “I have to go.”

  Back at the party, the football wives were still attacking Mount Seafood and Brock was still chatting it up with his friends, though Josh had joined them.

  Bex, in her chair, looked up as Peggy approached her. “What’s wrong? You look upset.”

  “Not at all. I’m happy.” Or would be, once the numbness wore off. And once she had broken the news to Bex. “Luke and I are calling it off early. I hope you can understand, Bex. I just can’t pretend to be his wife anymore. Not now that I’m engaged. Luke will have his lawyer draw up the papers right away, and we’ll break the news to his great-aunt together.” Miss Abigail. What would become of her? Peggy refused to acknowledge the growing choking sensation in her throat. Miss Abigail wasn’t her responsibility. She was Luke’s relative, Luke’s concern.

  On the opposite side of the room, one of Brock’s friends was reenacting a dramatic football pass. “He goes long…long…and…”

  Peggy turned away from the distraction. “The money will be a problem, I know. But we’ll figure it out, Bex. There has to be another way to keep the store. We did pretty well this holiday.” They had; sales had been up over last year, according to Peggy’s accounting. “Maybe we can do a little advertising. And look for a new space. On a side street, where the rent is lower. I can’t be married to Luke and engaged to Brock. It’s just wrong. I hope you understand.”

  “Five minutes to midnight!” a guest yelled.

  “I understand.” Bex rested her hands in her lap.

  “You’re not upset?”

  “Why would I be upset? You’ve got to do what’s right for you.” Bex smiled, a little wistfully, perhaps. “It’s too bad, though. If I were you, it would kill me to lose that house.”

  “I would have lost it anyway,” Peggy reminded her.

  “And here’s the other future Mrs. Clovis!” Brock’s bronzed, blonded, surgically enhanced stepmother swept up and clutched Peggy’s upper arm enthusiastically. “I’m so excited! You have to set the date, Peggy. Don’t keep us in suspense!”

  “Four minutes!” came the call.

  The room felt packed to the walls, the guests tipsy enough that each seemed to occupy twice as much space as before.

  Peggy squeezed between the flailing arms and swaying bodies and touched Brock on the shoulder. His friends hooted and catcalled as she led him toward the glassed-in patio Sharon called the lanai.

  They were alone.

  “I’m ready to set a date. Is there a day you can take off in June, when you’re back from your documentary?” By then, her annulment would be final. Her sadness at the thought of Luke got lost in the bursts of laughter and premature honking of party noisemakers coming from the party room. “What do you think?”

  “Ten! Nine!” the guests shouted. “Eight…!”

  “Let’s go for it.” Brock grabbed her and squashed her to his machine-toned pectorals, his movie-star lips locking on hers as the party guests on the other side of the glass embraced each other. The New Year had begun.

  NINETEEN

  Midwinter, January

  A few days after New Year’s, Luke met with Lowell Mayhew, who warned that once Abigail understood he and Peggy were dissolving their marriage, she would reinstate her previous will. Luke again asked who the beneficiary would be, as he had almost four months ago, but Mayhew still wouldn’t tell him.

  “Do you think we could talk Abby into letting me sell the house without Peggy?”

  Luke read the answer to his question in Mayhew’s downcast eyes. “I wish you’d reconsider,” the lawyer said. “I wasn’t keen on this arrangement in the beginning, but Peggy is a lovely girl, and you seem fond of her. Surely you can tolerate each other until September. Why break up now with so much at stake?”

  “It was her idea,” Luke said mopily.

  He thought long and hard and went to play tennis at Ver Planck’s club. “I’m ready to talk to Grant Atherton,” Luke said with no preamble as they strolled onto the indoor court.

  Ver Planck didn’t ask what had changed Luke’s mind, as Luke had known he wouldn’t. He took the lid off a can of tennis balls, which emitted a vacuum-sealed whoosh. “I’ll set you two up with a meeting.”

  Luke had half hoped Ver Planck would tell him it was too late, that Atherton had found another plot of land. He imagined what his great-aunt would say about their farmland being turned into a parking lot and a Budget Club. But there was no use fretting about it. He needed the money. The land was part of the family portfol
io and Luke’s to do with as he wished. The house was not his to sell. A quick windfall from Budget Club would go a long way toward solving his financial problems. He could get the roof fixed before it fell in on their heads and hire an attendant for Abigail, a nurse to help him care for her.

  The annulment papers named Luke Silas Sedgwick IV as the plaintiff and Patricia Adams Sedgwick as the defendant. Luke brought them home from Mayhew’s office in a legal-size folder and left them on Peggy’s bed for her to sign. In the ballroom, he stared alternately at the computer screen saver and out the window. He longed for snow, to lose himself in the physicality of shoveling the driveway. But there had been none so far this winter; the landscape was brown and dead. He got up from the computer and went downstairs.

  His great-aunt was in the mudroom, picking up rain boots and snow boots one at a time and holding them upside down. She didn’t turn around, and he watched her work awhile, then asked, “Any luck?”

  She picked up a garden clog and shook it.

  Luke removed the umbrellas from their tarnished brass stand. A spider scuttled out; otherwise the canister was empty. He searched the pockets of the ancient coats and slickers hanging along the wall and found a Swiss Army knife he thought he’d lost ages ago, but no box with a star on it. “Do you really think you hid it out here?”

  “No,” Abby admitted. “I still think it’s in the library.” They went inside.

  He started at the top of the room, rolling the library ladder and taking several books at a time from the uppermost shelves and shining a flashlight behind him. His great-aunt did the same on the bottom shelves, and for a while they worked together companionably.

  “My hands ache,” she complained after about forty minutes, and put down the books she was holding. “I guess I’m getting old.”

  Luke hid his concern. It was the first time he could remember his great-aunt admitting to pain. For the rest of the afternoon, he searched the library—deciding, after a time, that he might as well dust the books while he was at it—and spent the whole of the next day, too, working mindlessly, removing, looking behind, dusting, and reshelving. By midday Thursday, he had dusted the entire roomful of books and had found nothing hidden behind them but more dust. He moved on to the closed-off and long neglected east addition, vacuuming and polishing. He searched every nook and cranny, under every cushion, in every drawer. At last, empty-handed, dirt caked, and aching, he climbed the stairs to the third-floor bathroom. When he emerged from the blackened bathwater, it no longer mattered to him whether Abigail’s treasure existed or not. She believed it did, and he would keep looking for it. It was the only wish of hers he still held the power to grant.

  The computer screen flickered in the dark room. Peggy watched intently, trying not to blink. Was this normal—a shifting, grainy pattern; snow against blackness?

  “I’m not seeing anything,” Josh said beside her, but just then a denser pool of darkness appeared.

  “That’s your uterus.” Bex’s obstetrician waved her free hand in front of the circular void on the ultrasound screen. “And…wait…”

  From her position on the table, a pink medical drape covering her from the waist down, Bex craned her neck. Josh reached for his wife’s foot and squeezed it.

  “There’s Embryo A!” The doctor waved her hand again. “And…good…we have a heartbeat…nice and strong. See that flicker, Josh?”

  “Maybe,” said Josh.

  “I do! Nice and strong!” Bex repeated.

  Peggy could make out a blurry, lambent mass, nothing more, but she was happy to take the doctor’s word for it.

  “Wait…” The doctor’s face turned serious, and Peggy’s chest ached as she braced for bad news.

  “Here’s Embryo B. It looks like you’re having twins!”

  On the subway home, Peggy and Josh sat on either side of Bex. No one spoke for many stops; Peggy guessed her friends were in shock. It was one thing to consider the possibility of more than one baby. It was another to prepare for the reality.

  The train came into Columbus Circle, and passengers crowded on. A woman and a boy squeezed onto the bench next to Peggy. The boy leaned his head against his mother’s shoulder. “Mommy. Mommy. Do you know who the goddess of home and family is?” His smile was a mismatch of adult and baby teeth. “Hestia.”

  His mother snuggled him closer. “Is she mortal or immortal?”

  “We need to buy an apartment.” Josh spoke up first. “We can’t raise twins living down the hall from each other. We have to work as a team twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and neither of our places is big enough for four.…” He stopped talking; Bex was crying. “Come on, Bexie, it won’t be that bad. I promise to be neater and—”

  “Can you name the names of all nine Muses?” the boy asked his mother.

  “Can you?” she returned.

  “No, but I know what they do, at least most of them. There’s one of music, and one of drama, and there’s one of history. They’re the goddesses of hobbies.”

  Peggy patted Bex’s hand. “You’ll be able to afford it. There has to be one apartment in New York under a bazillion dollars.” If she’d been able to stick it out with Luke, she realized, she could have lent Bex and Josh a down payment.

  “Except for history. History isn’t exactly a hobby,” the boy continued.

  “That’s not it…” Bex produced a ragged tissue from her coat pocket. “Poor little Embryo C! What happened to little Yehuda?”

  A lump rose in Peggy’s throat. “You can’t think that way. You have two babies! It’s a miracle!”

  “I know!” Bex sobbed, and then laughed, and Peggy and Josh laughed, too, wiping their faces and clearing their throats, and then the train was at their stop, Seventy-ninth Street.

  “You should hold the handrail,” Josh told his wife as they walked toward the subway station steps. “You’re carrying precious cargo.”

  “I’m not ninety years old, sweetie.” Bex took the hand-rail, but it was too late for Peggy; her friend’s response had reminded her of Miss Abigail, and the thought of Miss Abigail had led her to Luke, and the thought of Luke was making her want to cry some more, a luxury she would not allow herself, because the idea of wanting to cry over a human being as unimportant to her as Luke Sedgwick was driving her mad. Especially when she loved Brock.

  At her appointment with Jon-Keith the next day, she studied herself in the salon mirror as the colorist picked at her eternally lifeless hair.

  “We need to get you on a schedule right away,” he pronounced. “You’ll want your last set of highlights no more than two days before the wedding, so there are absolutely no roots. Do you know what happens if you have even an eighth of an inch of roots? Your part shows up in all your photographs as a black line down the center of your head. It’s a nightmare. Are you doing color photos or black and white? It’s worse with black and white.”

  “I don’t know.”

  Jon-Keith looked at her in disbelief. “Okay, anyway, what I do with my brides is count back from the final appointment and book all your previous appointments at six-week intervals. When’s the wedding date?”

  “I’m not sure.” Peggy scrutinized her forehead. Maybe it was time to get those wrinkles fixed. Brides weren’t supposed to have worry lines. “We only just decided on June.”

  Jon-Keith narrowed one eye, which made him appear more piratelike than usual. “You have got to choose a date. Already, the good venues are probably booked up. Do you know how long it takes to get a dress made? Months. You should have chosen your gown, like, yesterday, and you can’t do that until you decide where you’re having the wedding, because the setting dictates the tone of the whole day, and Lord help you if you end up at a beach ceremony in a black-tie dress. You’re getting me all stressed out, and I’m not the bride!” He slid a piece of aluminum foil under a few strands of hair and painted on the highlights with a brush. Peggy felt like a turkey being basted.

  The next day after work, Peggy stopped at a ne
wsstand to pick up all the bridal magazines she could find, came home, and settled herself at the coffee table. “What do you think of this dress?” She tore out a page and held it up.

  Bex was on the couch, engrossed in What to Expect When You’re Expecting. “It says here I should eat six hundred extra calories a day, three hundred per baby. I eat six hundred extra calories a day just at breakfast!”

  “Oh, no!” Peggy let her magazine page slip to the floor. “In June, you’ll be a month away from your due date!”

  “Actually I may be giving birth. The doctor revised my date; she says most multiples are born early.”

  Peggy felt the familiar anxious tingle in her lungs. How could she marry without Bex? “We could push the wedding back.” She felt better just saying it aloud. In the excitement of New Year’s Eve, she’d forgotten another detail: how to explain to her parents that in a matter of a few months she not only would no longer be Mrs. Sedgwick, she would become Mrs. Clovis. How her parents would react was the big question. They’d always liked Brock but seemed to have grown attached to Luke and Miss Abigail over their Christmas visit. And they’d be stunned at the quick annulment.

  “We could have the wedding in the fall instead,” she suggested to Bex.

  “During football season? That’ll never work.”

  The perfect model-bride on the magazine nearest Peggy beamed up as if to ask, What’s wrong with you? Peggy flipped over the magazine. “We could wait until next January, then.”

  Bex turned pages in her book. “Don’t be silly. Get married in June. You’ve been waiting your whole life for this wedding. Why put it off?”

  As the news of Peggy’s engagement spread, there were excited calls and frenzied e-mails from the Las Vegas bachelorettes. Andrea, now married, chirped, “It was the guy in the casino, wasn’t it? You told Brock and worked him into a jealous frenzy, didn’t you? Nice job!”