At Weddings and Wakes

by Alice McDermott

  “Hiya, Bobby,” the woman in white behind the glass counter said. She placed the white bakery box she had just tied with string on top of the glass case. “Is this your girlfriend?”

  Margaret saw her brother blush and felt better about him than she had all morning when he said sullenly, “My sister.” He stepped forward and without another word the woman pulled out a white bakery bag and shook it open. She turned to the bin behind her and extracted one plump golden roll. She looked over her shoulder as she slipped it into the bag. “Your sister want one, too?” she said.

  Margaret had moved to the little window seat where the tall wedding cake sat and she shook her head quickly when her brother turned to her. She looked at the ground. “No, thank you,” she heard her brother say—and as if to express her own lack of conviction, her stomach loudly grumbled.

  She turned her head and saw the traffic through the glass, the lumbering bus for a moment cutting out the light. The debate had always been whether or not the wedding cake had once been real, had in fact been made for a bride who had changed her mind or died as suddenly as Aunt May had died, who’d run off with someone else or found when the time came that she could not pay, or whether it was indeed, as their father said, cardboard covered with paste. It looked real enough, Margaret thought, and she’d been told at Aunt May’s wedding that there was a way to preserve forever both wedding gowns and wedding cakes. Part of the icing at the base had crumbled and she could catch no glimpse of gray cardboard beneath it, only something stiff and beige. Definitely real, she decided, although she still could not say if the bride it had been made for should be pitied or blamed.

  Aunt May’s cake had been dark and heavy and filled with fruit, as much a disappointment as the candied almonds. But there had been a strawberry parfait as well, in an ice-cold silver dish. At the restaurant a week later Maryanne had asked the waiter for a strawberry parfait, sending a shouted laugh all up and down the long table of darkly dressed relatives. “Parfait?” their mother had called out. “Now, wherever did she learn that?”

  With his white bag in his hand her brother said, “Let’s go,” and as soon as they stepped outside they saw they had the light and so they ran to cross the avenue. They were now at the corner where the cemetery began and her brother said he was going to stop right here and eat his roll, in case she changed her mind. He walked to the black fence and shimmied his backside onto its narrow concrete base. “I know as soon as I start eating you’re going to want a bite,” he said.

  “No, I won’t.” She crossed the sidewalk and the grass and sat down beside him. “I’m not hungry,” she said.

  Shrugging, he pulled the roll from the bag—she could smell the sweet dough—and took a bite. He watched the traffic as he chewed, his jaw moving behind his pale blue skin. Beyond them, just the other side of the black stakes of the fence, was a corner of grass and then the first row of wide tombstones—the row of the unlucky dead who took the brunt of street noise and garbage, of living backs and rumps and peering faces. At the end of the row, piled against the opposite fence, was a haystack-size collection of leaves and twigs and discarded flowers embedded in Styrofoam. A pretty lavender ribbon waved from the top.

  Her stomach growled again, seemed to turn itself completely over, creaking and moaning. Her brother pushed the white bakery bag into her lap. “Here,” he said and looked away.

  She knew by its weight that it was another roll. “I said I didn’t want one,” she told him.

  “You have to eat,” he said.

  “I’m fasting.”

  He turned to her. His dark blue eyes were earnest. “God doesn’t want you to make yourself sick.”

  “I won’t get sick,” she said arrogantly, so that he would understand that she was as acquainted with what God wanted as he. “I received Communion.”

  Her brother looked at the half-eaten roll in his hand and for a moment she thought he would toss it into the street. A nice touch, she thought. The idea that Communion would sustain her.

  But he merely shrugged and took another bite.

  “Eat the roll but not the cookie, then,” he finally told her. “The bakery lady put a cookie in there for you. If you want to offer something up, don’t eat the cookie.” He paused and said without boasting, “I always give mine to Maryanne.”

  She recalled that she had seen him do it. He was the one who carried the house key now that their mother went to Brooklyn every day, and because for the past month he had been returning to the vestry after school to pick up his cassock, she and her sister had been forced to wait for him to let them in. Standing before them at the front door, he would bend quietly to fish the key out of his book bag and then pass to Maryanne without fanfare the single butter cookie wrapped in a piece of bakery paper. Once or twice Margaret had even said, “Hey, what about me?” and, as she recalled, he had then, once or twice, offered it to her, telling the stricken Maryanne that it was only fair, after all, since he had given her one yesterday and would give her another tomorrow. “I don’t even want it,” Margaret recalled telling him once. She recalled once having knocked it right out of his hand.

  She pushed the extra roll back into his lap. “No, thank you,” she said and then stood, and walked to the end of the fence, turning once to see if he would pursue her with it. He stared after her, the pale gray stones with their unlucky names all behind him.

  She went around the corner, touching the black flaking paint of the fence. At the stack of grass and leaves and flowers she paused. A dozen long and seemingly perfect stems of gladiola were scattered across the top and down the side of the pile. She reached her hand between the bars and touched the nearest one, carefully pulling it through. She shook some fine dirt from one of its pale yellow flowers. She reached again, for a bright pink one this time. When her brother came around the corner to say, “Let’s go,” she had six of them cradled in her arm and was pushing her cheek against the bars in order to reach the others. “Look at these,” she said. She brushed at the crumbs of paint and rust on her face. “Aren’t these nice?” He said they were, and then knelt down to help her gather the others.

  “They’re mine,” she told him. “I saw them first.”

  “I know,” he said with some indignation. “I’m just helping you.”

  They collected twenty stems and when her brother asked what she would do with them she shrugged. “Take them home,” she said, and then—a brilliant notion—“Give them to Miss Joan.”

  “That’d be nice,” her brother said. He lifted the bakery bag. “Sure you don’t want this?” There was a glorious plan taking shape; a glorious future filling her mind’s eye, and in it Miss Joan was transformed, gliding across a golden dance floor in a new husband’s arms. Margaret had never pitied her teacher before—waving her backside in the schoolyard and smoothing an invisible lipstick over her puckered mouth—but now with the flowers in her arms she allowed herself to do so. She allowed herself to imagine the woman’s lonely single life, her solitary dinners and the TV beside her bed, the despair she must have felt each time she glanced into the mirror she set up on her desk and sprayed and teased her hair. All unloved, poor Miss Joan, and mostly unnoticed, until, the story would go, one loyal student with a good and valiant heart stepped forward to be her friend.

  “Oh, all right,” she told her brother and walked back to the schoolyard with the flower in her arm and the sweet bread in her mouth.

  Standing first in line, she presented the flowers to Miss Joan the way a child would present them to a queen—taking one step forward and one step back, making the young woman bend elegantly (perhaps the first elegant movement she had ever made) to accept them.

  A moment ago Miss Joan had stepped out of the school with her brown coat flapping open and her face a brown study in getting the day over with, but now she paused and said a red-lipped “Oh,” showing her huge teeth. She put her face close enough to the trumpets of pink and orange and yellow to catch some of their shade on her skin. Lined up behind her, th
e rest of the class watched in awe as Miss Joan led them inside with the flowers in her arms: a sudden May processional in the midst of Lent. Once inside, she placed the flowers on her desk and returned from the coat closet not with the brush and hair spray and small round mirror that she usually set up on her desk, but with a glass vase they had never seen before. She filled it at the sink in the back of the room and then placed it on her desk.

  “Margaret,” she said, pleasantly, “would you like to help me?”

  The child scrambled happily from her seat. Miss Joan handed her the scissors from the top drawer of her desk and instructed her to snip off the end of each stem. This she did, diligently, and then handed each stem to Miss Joan, who placed it carefully in the tall vase.

  “These are lovely,” Miss Joan said, moving the flowers in their vase. “Just lovely.” Her fingernails were long, as bright and as red as her lipstick. The backs of her hands were plump. “Wherever did you get these?”

  Filled with the grace of her own bestowed blessing, Margaret said, “From the cemetery,” well before it occurred to her to lie.

  Miss Joan stopped short, hands held high. She looked at the girl, briefly bared her ugly teeth. “You’re kidding,” she said.

  There was a ripple of laughter from the class behind them.

  “No,” the child said, still at a loss to come up with anything else. She pointed vaguely toward the window. “Out there.”

  Miss Joan stepped back, suddenly moving her short red fingers in the air as if she had touched a cobweb. “For God’s sake,” she whispered under her breath and then, without another glance at the child, told her to sit down. Then she lifted the last two stems and without snipping their ends quickly stabbed them into the vase. She lifted the vase filled with tall flowers and carried them at arm’s length to the coat closet. She placed them on the floor inside and quickly closed the door. She brushed her hands together and when she returned to the desk she eyed the crumbs of black dirt that the flowers had left there as if they were crawling toward her. Then she brushed these into her palm, and brushed her palms together over the wastepaper basket. She returned to the back of the classroom to wash her hands at the sink and then dried them elaborately. She came to the front again, pulled at the ribbed waist of her sweater and pulled with delicate red-tipped fingers the two seams of her wide tweed skirt. She cleared her throat. Telling the class to do the same, she put her ugly face into a book.

  A good three minutes passed before she heard the caught breath and she waited at least one more before she raised her head. It was the Dailey girl, of course, quietly sobbing, a ripple of nods and elbow nudges spreading out to the children all around her. Miss Joan settled these down with a stare but still the child, fists to her temples and head bent to her book (and it was a textbook from the District that she was marking with her tears), sucked and sobbed.

  Good Lord, Miss Joan thought, would she really have to explain to the child that flowers plucked from a fresh grave were repulsive? Was it really necessary to spell that out to her?

  “Margaret,” she said and had to say it again, more sharply, before the child, without raising her head, slowly stood, shoulders heaving as she fought to collect her breath. Tears dripped to her shoes.

  “Do you want to go to the bathroom, Margaret?” Miss Joan said with infinite, eye-rolling patience. There was another tremor of laughter from a far corner of the room. The girl seemed to nod.

  “Go, then,” she said and then watched silently as the girl, hands in fists and shoulders hunched, walked quickly up the aisle and across the front of the room, the fluorescent light shining on her dark hair, the plaid skirt barely moving against her hips. And it may have been the dark shining hair and the slim hips, it may have only been her own reluctance to acknowledge the disappointment she had felt when she realized that the flowers had not been bought for her, planned for her, that made Miss Joan tell the class with the girl just outside the door, “From the cemetery, no less.”

  Breathing painfully now, the class’s sudden laughter rolling at her heels, the girl headed for the bathroom and pushed at the door. She knew in an instant that the place was empty. It was gray and green and smelled of disinfectant and old paint and the floor seemed to vibrate dimly with the droning recitation of the fourth-grade class downstairs. She went to one of the small sinks and scooped some cold water onto her face and then grabbed a harsh brown paper towel.

  There was no mirror in here, it had been decided that mirrors would only make the girls dally—and even the paper-towel dispenser had been slapped with a dozen coats of pale green paint. But there was a window that sometimes reflected, and she went to it now to see her face.

  She saw instead her mother in her white car coat and gray skirt, a small white hat covering her ears, walking on the sidewalk opposite the school’s fence, going to the bus that would take her to the subway, going to Momma’s, as she did every day now to make up for May.

  HE SAID he was from Kildare, she wrote, and I said Cork by way of Mallow. And when I told him about Dad he laughed and said wasn’t that just like a woman, the whole country going to rack and ruin and all she sees is the drunk in the parlor. I said the drunk in the parlor was reason enough for me. Then he told me his own reasons for leaving and he was full of them. Before I knew it he was shouting and banging his fist on the rail. His face turned so red I thought he’d throw himself into the sea. He hated them all, every politician in the country, and half the population too, it seemed. And with reason, I never heard anybody with so many reasons. It must have been all he thought about. I didn’t like him much, but while I stood there, still holding the handkerchief he’d lent me, as big as a tablecloth, the sickness began to pass and for the first time I wasn’t thinking about that awful sea. I was thinking how maybe once we got there he’d marry me. Love being so much harder to find reason for than enmity.

  She wrote: I’ve stopped praying for them. For the babies my mother lost when we lived in the country, Monica and James and little Tommy (I won’t write their names again). Because I can’t hold them both in my mind, my own sweet baby’s face and theirs. I am sorry for them, sorry for their tiny souls and for my mother’s grief, but I can’t hold them at the same time, my mother’s sad life and the joy I’ve got in my own. If it’s a sin, I’m sorry for it. My sweet girl’s little face is all I want to think of.

  Jack’s angry, she wrote. He’d wanted Mavis after his mother, God rest her soul, but I said it was a donkey’s name. What a tongue I have. I put down Mary, for my sister. I’d already told her in a letter that I would. When he gets home tonight I’ll tell him we can call her May. Sweet as can be.

  And on another page: Dad’s nieces were here again today. They mean well I suppose, but aren’t they a pair of moles? Tweedledum and Tweedledee. I told them I’d taken the girls out yesterday to feel the snow. In your condition? they said. It wasn’t a bit slippery, I said. But the neighbors! So there it was. They weren’t worried about me falling but the neighbors seeing what a size I am, not nine months after May. They’ve got sweeter dispositions than their uncle and they don’t drink as much, as far as I can tell, but still the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. I wonder how long it’s been since either one of them has seen a bar of soap.

  Another: Agnes will be the brilliant one. Already she knows how she wants things to be done and she’s got more control over the other two than I have. I’m waiting for the day Jack tries to tell her what to think.

  And this: Dad died three weeks ago Thursday and Mary was left to do all the arranging. How was it that I left her alone with him, sailing off as I did without a care in the world? I shame myself sometimes to think of all I can close my eyes to. And this morning Mrs. Power, the widow downstairs, learned her son had died, the one who was hurt in the war. Her only child. God forgive me, but my first thought when I heard was that she might have a room for Mary, now that Dad’s gone and she’s free to come. I’ll light a candle for the boy, but wouldn’t that be something, Mary here? Th
e two of us together again.

  And: Jack was sitting up last night, having a cigarette by the window. Are you all right, I said, and he said yes, but he didn’t turn around. He’d opened the window and there was a lovely breeze but I was still angry and so I didn’t say anything else. Today I feel I’ve lost something. I don’t know what. Just one night, I suppose.

  Mary’s here, she wrote. I’d forgotten how strong she is and how pretty. She shared my bed with me, poor Jack sent to the couch, and we talked until sunrise, the baby all the while twisting and turning. I put her hand on my belly to feel it and she said she remembered doing this with our mother. I told her she could stay here as long as she liked but she wants to spend tomorrow night at Mrs. Power’s. She couldn’t move her bowels, she said, with a man as handsome as Jack so near. I thought I’d have an accident myself we laughed so hard at that. There’s a woman from church who knows a family on the Heights who may need a girl come the first of the year, so if it all works out I’ll have Mary for myself till then. The girls were shy with her and I don’t think she knew what to say to them, she’s so used to the company of old men, Dad and his cronies, but it won’t take long. She has only the money she sent ahead but we’ll help out, Jack won’t mind much. We’ll manage. I am perfectly content. Or I will be when this bouncing baby is born. If it’s another girl, I’d like Veronica. If it’s a boy he’ll be John, of course. For a certain boy I met coming over. Which reminds me to write down what happened with Mary and the chocolates, on the boat. Another time, though. This babe wants me in my bed.