Step-Ball-Change: A Novel

by Jeanne Ray

  “You married me because the soup was good?”

  “I asked you to marry me because after the fight I missed you. I figured if I missed you that much then you must be the person I was supposed to marry.”

  “But that’s not the same as being completely sure.”

  “Well, that depends. Is being sure you don’t want to be apart from someone the same thing as being sure you want to be with them?”

  “It’s probably close enough.”

  Tom slid one arm under my waist and pulled me to him and pulled himself over to me. I put my head on his chest and listened to his heart. It had been the single most consistent sound in my life. “Do you want to tell me what’s stirred all this up?”

  “You were right. It was Kay. She wants to know how a person is supposed to be sure about who they marry.”

  “First you find someone who knows how to dance.” Tom rubbed my hip, the little knot that was always there. He found it and untied it. “Then you wait to see if they bring you soup.”

  I kissed him and then broke away to pull my nightgown over my head. I dropped it on the floor and then I kissed him again. “And if they bring you soup?”

  “Marry that person immediately.”

  chapter eight

  THREE DAYS LATER LILA BENNETT CALLED AND INVITED me to lunch. I immediately regretted not having made the preemptive strike. We should have invited the Bennetts out to dinner, then the four of us could have met together. Tom and I could have touched our shoes under the table in the reassuring way we did in certain social situations. We could have dissected the evening in the car on the way home and made something funny out of it no matter how badly things might have gone. But it was all too late for that. She had asked and there was nothing to do but to go. I was on my own.

  “Shouldn’t we invite Tom and Scout?” I had asked hopefully on the phone. It was Sport. Sport. Scout was the little girl in To Kill a Mockingbird.

  “Just the mothers this time,” she had said to me, graciously ignoring my gaff. “There’s so much work to be done.”

  “Well, you can’t wear any of this,” Taffy said, sliding my clothing piece by piece down the bar in the closet while I sat on the bed.

  “Oh, come on, there has to be something in there.”

  She held up my favorite black blazer, tilted her head to one side. “I don’t think so.”

  I was a fairly secure person, but I knew that fashion wasn’t my strong point. I tended to favor clothes that could be worn over other clothes. “What about the dark purple dress?”

  Taffy laughed and closed the closet door. “Forget this. Come with me.” She waved me down the hall and I followed her to her room, sat down on her bed, Kay’s bed. How many times had I sat on this bed while Kay dug through her closet trying to decide what to wear on a date? “Why do I have three brothers?” she would wail. “I need somebody I can borrow clothes from.” She never thought of my clothes as a possibility, either.

  But I had never worn my sister’s clothes. Growing up in the same house, it never would have occurred to either one of us to borrow something from the other one. Our sense of style was defined by our direct opposition to each other. Now there was a rain of featherlight cashmere sweaters falling all around me. Stamp jumped up on the bed and made himself comfortable in a red cardigan. Stamp was only allowed off the leash when he was in Taffy’s bedroom with the door closed.

  “Woodrow said Stamp wasn’t supposed to be on the furniture,” I said.

  “Not true,” Taffy said. “He is allowed to get on my bed. I already told Woodrow, I sleep with Stamp. There’s no point in even having a small dog if you can’t sleep with it.”

  “Did he sleep with you and Neddy?”

  Taffy just looked at me. Stamp looked at me. Of course they all slept together.

  She looked at a beautiful navy dress with a scoop neck and then put it back. Then she pulled out a gray pantsuit made out of some kind of soft knit. She held that one up for a while and I started feeling hopeful, but then she shook her head. She went back into the closet. “Here we go. This is nice. This would be good on you.” Taffy pulled out a green suit that was neither drab nor bright but the rich color of a holly leaf. She held it in front of her and looked in the mirror. “This is your color,” she said to her reflection.

  “Do you think?”

  “Trust me.”

  “I’m taller than you are.”

  She tossed the suit on my lap. “You are two inches taller than I am, maybe less. That doesn’t mean that you can’t wear my clothes.”

  I touched the fabric. It was a wool gabardine as light as silk. It was gorgeous. Why in the world did she think to bring clothes like this with her in the first place? Maybe we should start taking her out more. Taffy shuffled through her closet for a blouse. “Shouldn’t I be myself? If Kay and Trey get married, we’re going to be seeing these people. Sooner or later she’s going to know what I really look like.”

  “First impressions.” Taffy held up a blouse that at first I thought was off-white but on closer inspection I could see was ever so slightly peach. “This gives you power. You’re going to need power. Take your clothes off.”

  Taffy had been notoriously modest when we were young. Not only did she refuse to change clothes unless the door of her room was bolted shut, she would scream if anyone else tried to change clothes in front of her. As I pulled my sweater over my head, it occurred to me that I hadn’t seen her naked since she was seven years old. “We never did this,” I said, picking up her blouse. It slipped over my arms like a breeze. I caught the name of an impossibly famous and expensive Italian designer before I buttoned up.

  “Did what?”

  “Tried on each other’s clothes.”

  “I’m not trying on your clothes.”

  “You wore my tap shoes.”

  She thought about this and nodded. “True enough. Still, it would have been hard to imagine doing something like this when we were young.”

  I stepped into the skirt and zipped it up. “It’s shorter than what I usually wear.”

  “That’s because most of your skirts hit your ankles. How can a person who spends half her day wearing a leotard be modest? You worked hard for those legs. You should show them off.” She draped a scarf around my neck and then helped me on with the jacket. I looked like the chairman of the board, the extremely stylish, slightly sexy chairman of the board. “Shoes,” she said.

  “I have shoes.”

  “I refuse to let you wear that suit with flats.” She went back to the closet.

  “I’ve always found high heels to be uncomfortable.”

  Taffy stared at me. “Do you think that is specific to you?”

  “We don’t have the same size feet,” I reminded her.

  “Shut up,” she said kindly, and handed me a pair of heels.

  I looked in the mirror. From the neck up I was still myself, but from the neck down I had never looked better. “I love it. I will live in fear of spilling something on it, but won’t I be seriously overdressed for lunch?” I slipped on the shoes and felt my hip shift forward.

  “You won’t even be in the ballpark of overdressed.” Taffy took a step back, gave me a look of hard assessment, and then smiled. She took the heavy gold hoops off her ears and handed them to me. They were warm. “When she asks you where you got the suit, and she will, do not say your sister’s closet. Say, Atlanta.”

  “ATLANTA,” I TOLD Lila Bennett. “I was visiting my sister.”

  “They have the best shopping in Atlanta.” Lila Bennett ordered us each a glass of white wine and handed the menus back to the waiter.

  “Yes,” I said dimly. I was thanking God for Taffy because if I had been wearing my purple dress at this moment, I would have had to excuse myself, go to the rest room, and try to climb out of a window. I had been to the restaurant before, though I’ll admit not knowing they served lunch. The hostess said, “Welcome, Mrs. Bennett.” The waiter said, “It’s always good to see you, Mrs. Benn
ett.” Even the busboy nodded to her as he spooned the star-shaped pats of butter onto our plates. I would not have said that Lila Bennett was beautiful or homely or heavy or thin. All I could say was that she looked like money, extremely subtle, extremely old money. Everything about her was tastefully elegant, expensively compiled—her jewelry, her hair, her manicure. Wearing the nicest outfit that I had probably ever had on, I was just breaking even.

  “I should tell you right away, of course, that we simply adore Kay.”

  Again I was scooped. “We think the world of Trey.”

  “And we couldn’t be more pleased about the wedding.”

  I was absolutely going to say that. Dammit. Salads arrived. Suddenly I felt unsure of my fork. This was insanity. I was a perfectly well-mannered person. I wondered how Kay managed whole dinners, entire long evenings at the Bennetts’. I wondered how Trey had managed it for a lifetime. “We’re very happy,” I parroted back. Why hadn’t I insisted the four of us get together, husbands and wives? Why didn’t I think to demand that Kay and Trey be included as well? I had spent my life dancing in front of strangers, and now I couldn’t eat a salad or navigate the simplest patterns of conversation?

  “I think they should wait a year.” Mrs. Bennett gently pierced a bit of endive but did not bring it to her lips. “I know they’re in such a rush, no one can wait for anything these days, but what they forget is that it takes so much planning. It would be simply impossible to manage it in six months, even if we all work together. I have a woman, Mrs. Carlson, who is a wedding planner. She did my daughter’s wedding. Mary Hunt’s wedding was only six hundred people, maybe a few more, and we spent a year on that.”

  “Only six hundred?”

  “A few more.”

  I picked up my glass. When the wine arrived, my original thought had been that it would be better not to drink, but now I could see that wouldn’t be possible. “And how many people are you thinking about for this wedding?”

  “Trey’s?” she asked, making sure we hadn’t moved on to a discussion about some other wedding.

  I nodded, sipped.

  Mrs. Bennett (and I will make a point to explain to Tom why Kay can’t imagine calling her Lila) tilted her head. “I think a thousand would be the cap. I’d like to see nine hundred, but these things never turn out exactly the way you think they’re going to. But that’s just me guessing at your list. I don’t know your numbers at all.”

  “Fifty?” I offered.

  She nodded. “So then it would be nine hundred or a thousand.”

  I DROVE AROUND the corner to a gas station and called Tom from a pay phone. I did not chat up Alison, his secretary. I told her to put me through. “Can you meet me in the parking lot?” I said.

  “What’s wrong?”

  An old man with seven teeth and an oily rag in his pocket smiled at me. It must have been my suit. “I need to talk to you.”

  “Can’t you come into the office?”

  “I don’t want to run into Kay. Just come outside. I’ll be there in five minutes.”

  WHEN TOM GOT into the car, I was trying very hard not to perspire. I had one arm propped up on the window and the other one draped over the back of the passenger seat. He kissed me with some enthusiasm.

  “You look fantastic,” he said. “Where did you get that outfit?”

  “It’s Taffy’s,” I said flatly. “It all goes back to the closet this afternoon.”

  Then he remembered where I had been. “This is about lunch,” he said.

  “That’s right.”

  “This is not good news about lunch, either.”

  “Right again.”

  Tom stared out the window and exhaled. He didn’t pressure me. Whatever I was going to say, he was in no hurry to hear it.

  “Lila Bennett is thinking a thousand people, maybe nine hundred. She pointed out that traditionally the bride’s family pays for the wedding, but given that their guest list was so much larger—she was very tactful about all of this—given the enormity of their guest list, she thought it would be fair to split the whole thing down the middle. With them paying for the rehearsal dinner, of course. They would insist on paying for the rehearsal dinner.”

  Tom continued to stare. I wasn’t entirely sure he had heard me. We both sat in silence while cars shot past us on the street. I wondered if we could run away. I wondered if Tom knew someone who could get us into the witness protection program. Wasn’t there a branch of the witness protection program that was for parents who couldn’t pay for their daughter’s wedding?

  Finally Tom’s head dropped forward onto his chest as if his neck had just spontaneously snapped. It was very startling. “I’m not going to be able to retire,” he said.

  “You’re not going to be able to retire? Do you think that’s the answer to this? You’re going to have to join a corporate law firm and make full partner in the next six months if you want to pay for this thing.”

  “What are we going to do?”

  I looked at the heavy gold bracelet Taffy had lent me. Pawning that would be a start. Maybe I could pawn the suit, too. “Realistically, we have two options: We assume a level of debt that would crush us until our death if we were able to borrow that much money in the first place, or we tell Kay and the Bennetts the truth: We simply can’t do this.”

  “Maybe we could offer to pay a smaller percentage.”

  “It’s possible. But what if the wedding costs a million dollars? Do we offer to pay ten percent?” The image I had of us standing on the coast of the Mediterranean vanished, or, I should say, the sea was still there, but Tom and I had been excised from the picture. We had put all four of our children through college. We hadn’t paid for anyone to go to law school, but all four times we had helped. It had not been easy. It had taken a lot of planning and creative financing. We weren’t living on the edge, but the edge was in plain sight. We had saved up for the Florida room, but we still didn’t have a Florida room. Having the bottom of our house rebuilt had shaken us up some, and now to think that after a lifetime of work we could be finished off by one large party, wiped out over cake and a dress, we were stunned. “It’s my fault,” I said. “I should have just told her no. I should have said it straight out the second she brought the whole thing up.”

  Tom blinked. “I might be able to get us a spot in the witness protection program.”

  I will say it: I have never felt closer to another human being in my life. I told my husband how much I loved him.

  He reached over and held my hand and we sat there, two married people in the life raft of their car.

  “HOW WAS THE suit?” Taffy asked. She and Woodrow were sitting in the kitchen eating their own late lunch, with Stamp tied to a table leg between them. He growled at me and wagged his tail at the same time, which seemed like progress.

  I sat down and took off the earrings and the bracelet and put them out on the table so as to return them before my baser instincts got the better of me. “The suit was a big success.”

  “It’s a great suit,” Woodrow said.

  “It’s mine,” Taffy said. “Did she ask you where you got it?”

  I nodded.

  “I knew it. I knew she would ask.”

  “What’s wrong?” Woodrow asked. “You don’t look so good.”

  “What are you talking about?” Taffy said. “She looks gorgeous.”

  “No,” Woodrow said. “Look at her.”

  And that was all it took. I put my elbows on the table, my face in my hands, and I cried.

  “My God,” Taffy said. “What happened at lunch?”

  I told them everything and they both listened carefully.

  “You can’t do what you can’t do,” Woodrow said. “There’s no sense torturing yourself over it. Pick up the phone right now and call her.”

  Taffy shook her head. “Wait awhile. It’s a big decision. You need to think it over. You’re not going to pay half, but you need to look at what you can pay.”

  “These people have
more money than some countries,” Woodrow said. “Why should she have to pay anything?”

  “If it were one of your girls, you wouldn’t want the other family taking care of everything,” Taffy said to Woodrow. “Just because somebody has more than you doesn’t mean that you have no responsibility. Think about Kay. How is she going to feel if you don’t even make an effort?”

  “Will she feel so different if we offer to pay five percent?” I said. What did Taffy know, anyway? Her daughter wasn’t married, and when she got married, she and Neddy would have all the money in the world to spend. Holden had plenty of her own money, as far as that was concerned, and she tended to date movie stars, who weren’t the kind of people who expected the bride’s parents to pay for the wedding anyway.

  “Maybe I was wrong,” Woodrow said, his voice sounding disillusioned. “Maybe this business of marrying rich people isn’t as great as I thought it was.”

  I thought about Jack the D.A. in his rumpled suit and scuffed shoes. He was probably the kind of guy who would talk a girl into going to Vegas. He’d want to be married by an Elvis impersonator with hired witnesses you had to tip later. And God bless him for it.

  I had a class to teach at three o’clock, though my head was so full of numbers I didn’t know how I’d ever make sense out of music.

  “Ah-ah,” Taffy said when I went to get behind the wheel. “Give me the keys, I’ll drive.”

  “It would be different if I were completely convinced that Kay wanted to marry him in the first place.”

  “How would it be different? You’d have more money?”

  “No, I’m just saying, it’s one thing to destroy your entire financial future if you know they’re going to stay together and be happy, but to destroy it and then have the marriage fall apart … I think that would kill me.”

  “Oh, who the hell knows? When I married Neddy I thought I was the luckiest girl in the world. I’m getting divorced now, but if someone had suggested it to me then I would have socked them in the jaw. I was absolutely sure that there was nobody else for me, and I guess, if I was going to be perfectly honest, for a while it was true.”