The Death of Small Creatures

by Trisha Cull

  Sweetheart, I’m charting my own course.

  I bought into the game.

  I bought the bridal magazines, surfed the internet, created a wedding website. I watched reality TV (A Wedding Story; Rich Bride, Poor Bride; Wedding Disasters; Bridezillas; I Do, Let’s Eat!), scoffed at and ridiculed the spoiled brides, scorned the grooms for putting up with such shit, condemned the networks.

  My mother bought me a Martha Stewart weddings DVD, and I watched it one hungover Sunday afternoon, determined by the end of it that I had all the faculties required to layer fondant over a three-tiered maple-vanilla wedding cake, and all the tools to create a thousand paper origami doves.

  I dog-eared the pages of my favourite wedding gowns and hairstyles, a wide array of beautiful brides: Princess Bride, Damsel-in-distress Bride, Come-hither Bride, Regal Bride, Bitch Bride, Heroine Sheik Bride, Anorexic Bride, Cradle-robbed Bride, Porno Bride and your run-of-the-mill Fairytale Bride.

  Which was I?

  Chemically-imbalanced Bride? Wino Bride?

  We meet the wedding planner, Sussett, to go over the plans again. I am drunk and sun-stroked, can feel the dampness of my bathing suit bottoms bleeding through my long khaki skirt to the lobby sofa, and my halter bikini top bleeding through my cheap cotton tank top, outlining a distorted version of my ass and tits respectively. I know when I leave, my ass-print will remain.

  Sussett drives us around on one of the golf carts to scope out photo locations: the veranda, the fountain, the gazebo and of course, there’s always the beach.

  “I only ever drive this one time before,” she laughs, and the cart lurches.

  “You’re a good driver,” I say.

  “Oh no,” she says.

  “Is it true that Sting is staying here?” I ask.

  She looks over her shoulder, smiles and whispers, “Yes, it’s true… Can you believe it?”

  “Oh my god,” I say, and Leigh rolls his eyes. “I love him!”

  She escorts us to a lush courtyard in one of the bungalow complexes. There’s a circular cement enclosure filled with water in the middle of this courtyard, and a wooden pail melded to the rim of the enclosure to give the effect of a well. Flowers climb up the pillars. Palm fronds dip down from above, forming a canopy of shade.

  “This is beautiful?” she says.

  “Oh, yes, amazing,” Leigh and I agree.

  I lean over the rim of the well and look in, expecting something deep and cool, but the enclosure is shallow and filled with still water. A rusty pipe runs across the bottom. The concierge for this courtyard joins us, gestures into the well now too: “You like our turtle?” he says, and now I see the turtle emerge from under the pipe. She paddles up quickly, pokes her smooth head through the surface and blinks right at me.

  Every morning at breakfast, they play The Godfather music. The muted horn inspires love and murder in the most nostalgic, sexy way.

  “For you, beautiful señorita,” Dunyeski says, “I make best omelette every day.”

  Every day I wait in line for Dunyeski to make me an omelette and tell me I’m beautiful, until I learn that the other breakfast cook, Yunyeski, makes even better crepes.

  In the dining room, little black birds swoop from the rafters and sing from chandeliers. Their tiny yellow eyes survey the room for scraps, fallen crumbs. Just now, a bird flaps above a crust of bread at the next table over.

  “Weather’s supposed to be nice tomorrow,” Leigh says. “Should be a perfect day to get married.” He sits over there across from me with his glasses perched down lower on his nose than is necessary, a feigned aristocratic gesture, something to make him look sophisticated, a false pretence. I hate him for it.

  “You’re such a snob, you know. All your life you’ve been trying to make up for lost time, from when your father left you when you were a kid. All your life you’ve been trying to please him.”

  The bird’s wings shudder with anticipation as it places one foot on the roll and tears away at the crust with its pointy beak. I think about physics, the nature of leverage, the transferability of the laws of the universe, how we are all bound by the same static energy, the same electrical impulses, the same gravity: an ant hoisting a crumb onto its back; a bird’s foot bracing a crust; two people making love; a finger on a trigger.

  “You’re disgusting,” Leigh says, then gets up and leaves me sitting there, alone, stupefied by my appalling behaviour.

  I look to the little black bird flapping its wings against the window, trying to get free, a piece of crust in its beak. Stupid bird, I think, wanting the animal to transcend, to comprehend at last the impenetrability of glass, to understand the force required to make it through to the world outside. In its flapping wings I see the fine line between love and terror.

  Along the seafront in Havana is a picture of Uncle Sam growling at a stoic Cuban. The caption reads: Señores Imperialistas ¡No les tenemos absolutamente ningún miedo!

  Yet, in Cuban marriages, it’s customary for family and friends to pin money to the bride’s gown during the marriage dance. This is meant to inspire goodwill and prosperity, but the gesture strikes me as antithetical to a socialist economy—a tad opportunistic, a hair hypocritical. It occurs to me that communism will inevitably fail to uphold its ideology of equality in the same way capitalism will inevitably fail to uphold its ideology of equal opportunity for all. Historically speaking, human greed has always usurped the best intentions of both worlds.

  The coolness of crushed mint and ice envelops me, or maybe it’s the Effexor reacting with the booze.

  I don’t understand how this works, how a pill can make you happy, make you better. I worry that this is not making me better, that when they say “better” they mean normal, and that to become normal in a crazy world is to move in entirely the wrong direction.

  I worry that it’s the rest of the world that’s crazy, not me.

  I imagine me in my gown covered with convertible Cuban pesos, dancing alone in the gazebo, holding my arms out and embracing an imaginary man.

  The first time I mixed antidepressants with alcohol, my neurons went into overload, fired back and forth at each other, collided in my synapses like projectile missiles from opposing sides of a psycho-pharmaceutical Cold War—the Effexor the opportunistic capitalist promoting contrived versions of happiness, and the booze the reserved communist whose utopian ideology inevitably wanes into a systematic breakdown of social structure.

  I shot up in bed at five o’clock that morning. “Leigh?” I said.

  And he shot up too, faster than I would have thought. Perhaps he sensed something in my voice. “What’s going on?” he said.

  My heart was racing. “I’m having a bad reaction to the medication.”

  “Tell me what’s happening.”

  “My heart,” I said. “I don’t want to die. Oh my god, I don’t want to die.”

  “How many did you take?”

  “One!”

  “Let me take you to the hospital.”

  “No,” I said. “Just hold me tight… and don’t let go. Don’t—ever—let—go.”

  I was pronged, an animal skewered between two pitchforks. It took me all day to come down. I was exhausted but wired, pacing around keeled over in order to increase my surface area relative to the earth that was slipping out from under me. I was pitched against the universe: a tuning fork straining to retain the last music of its high-pitched ting; a Y-shaped tree branch dowsing toward some remote reservoir of water I could not divine, but which I was thirsting for desperately.

  I am only now learning the truth. I am the music and the water that evades me.

  I am on my knees, ironing my wedding dress the night before my wedding. “Stay up there!” I holler.

  Leigh sips wine on the balcony, rehearsing his vows. “Okay,” he replies, followed by a playful, “Are you suuuure?”

&
nbsp; It’s as if I have engaged him in a game of hide and seek, as if he has only to count to one hundred before coming to find me. This playful exchange—the boyish giddiness in his voice—kills me. I am overcome with guilt and love, imagine the worst-case scenario. What if I don’t show up? What if I leave him standing at the altar? What if when the time comes I cannot find those implacable words, I do?

  I unzip the pink garment bag and remove the gown with tender reserve, knowing that years from now I will regard this act as a moment of sublime acquiescence, that it was I who carried my dress across this Cuban bungalow and hung it on the back of the television cabinet; it was I who opened the window and paused briefly to ascertain the temperature of the wind hoping for good weather on a wedding day I only vaguely understood was my own; and it is I now who kneels on this cool marble floor before this willowy white hem. I will remember this with humility and grace, I hope, knowing in the future as I do right now that I am the harbinger of my fate and no one, not even a man, can save me.

  The iron wheezes as I angle its smooth face perpendicular to the fabric. I have it on the lowest setting, use the iron as a makeshift steamer, leaving an inch between the metal and the fabric, hoping the bursts of steam will suffuse the material and work out the wrinkles. But to no avail. The fringes won’t give; each tiny crease maintains its delicate line and depth.

  I turn up the heat, beginning on the silk setting, climbing to cashmere and ending on polyester. The creases refuse to smooth. I run upstairs and grab the chrome spray bottle Leigh uses to wet his hair, fly back down the stairs again as if my life depends on it, desperate to complete this act of ironing a dress I may never end up wearing, a point which seems irrelevant at this juncture. There are wrinkles in my wedding dress, and I have to get them out. I have to make things right.

  I spray the hem, wet it down. The iron coughs hot clouds of steam as the heat and moisture react. I fear that I will melt the chiffon in my urgency, I will fuck this up the way I seem to fuck up everything, that the length of the dress will shrivel up like a plastic bag. So I use my flesh as a buffer, place my hand behind the fabric so I can gauge the temperature as the steam blows through.

  I wince with each burst.

  My hand turns red.

  My dress becomes smooth.

  Yurixa arrives one hour late to give me a manicure, and to do my hair and makeup. She is flushed. Beads of sweat dot her forehead along the hairline where her hair is pulled back tight, parted at the side and tied into a ponytail at the nape of her neck. She is dressed in spa attire, a pristine white uniform—stiff cotton pants and blouse—but the white flowers she cradles in her arms (as one would cradle a baby) have rubbed against the blouse leaving streaks on the cotton where the blood of the stems has seeped through.

  “Hola,” I say. I don’t want this poor Cuban girl who does not speak a word of English to sense my displeasure at her late arrival. My capitalistic roots haunt me; to complain given the economic circumstances that divide us feels extraordinarily obtuse. I do not want to be Bitch Bride like the women in the magazines. I want to be laid back Caribbean Cerveza Bride.

  So I crack open a Mayabe, still thinking, Mayabe I will go through with this and Mayabe I won’t. I try to relax and get a buzz going as Yurixa transcends the language barrier by lifting my hand from the table and tenderly placing my fingertips in solution. “My first manicure,” I say.

  “Si, manicura,” she says.

  Silence hangs in the air, punctuating the breadth and uncertainty of our disparate experiences. Our sex is our only common ground. As she removes my fingertips from the solution and begins that delicate process of cuticle removal, one hand then the other—dredging the blunt edge of the rounded pick from each nail bed to each first half-moon—I think of how seldom I have been touched by a woman, how lovely this experience of being cared for in such an insignificant but exquisite manner. In this moment I understand why men keep women for themselves: this unspoken tenderness between women could at once save and govern the world.

  Yurixa lays out her assortment of makeup and application swabs on the coffee table then positions a living room chair so it faces the light of the window. “Naturel?” she says, recalling perhaps the glossy picture of Demure Bride in the magazine I showed her at the salon the previous afternoon.

  “Si, gracias,” I say. “Naturel,” and notice that she has not brought with her the picture of Demure Bride as I would have thought.

  She scrapes a comb across my scalp and twists my hair into a tight ponytail like hers. This is nothing at all like the picture of Forest Nymph Bride from the magazine, whose bangs hung in loose tendrils around her face, laying softly upon her shoulders, cascading in a way that suggests beauty without trying. As she twirls the ponytail around into a bun and pins it tighter to the back of my head, the skin at my temples tightens and I feel like a kind of Sumo Bride. She holds my sumo bun in place and sprays my head for fifteen seconds. Lastly, she pinches the white buds from the stems and pokes them through my crispy hair helmet, positioning them in what I hope is a sensible configuration at the back of my head, and at intervals between each flower-bud placement, she further cements the petals in place.

  She applies gobs of naturel foundation all over my face, uses her fingers to blend. The powder follows. She powders my face, even my tanned shoulders and neck, and it occurs to me that Yurixa is blotting out my sun-kissed tan, perhaps in conjunction with local opinion that the pinkish hue so many white people adorn after a few short days at the resort has surely happened upon them by accident.

  Then comes the pink blush, glittery gold eye shadow, pink lipstick, liquid eyeliner and mascara. The pointy tip of the applicator sweeps up and away from the outer corners of my lids, each one a final artistic flourish. And lastly, she feathers in my otherwise non-existent eyebrows with a questionable reddish brown.

  In ten minutes a golf cart will arrive to transport Leigh to the gazebo and shortly thereafter I will be expected to follow looking fresh and vivacious—and I have found myself in Cuban drag.

  My scalp is screaming. I feel plastered in goo.

  I am most struck by the harshness of my eyebrows which have been painted orange and over-arched, giving me the appearance of a surprised clown.

  “Okay?” Yurixa says.

  “Gracias… si, but maybe less here,” I say, tracing the arches. “Not so much here.”

  Yurixa nods, glides an applicator in a more naturel pigment and applies another layer of light brown powder to my brows. I fall back in the chair, gaze down upon my hands and admire the smooth white fingertips, the glossy sheen of each nail. There’s no point in putting up a fight, I think. The damage is done.

  A grave unimpressed fellow named Jorge, who will also be one of our witnesses, waits for me in a golf cart that Sussett has decorated with white tulle and colourful balloons. Several of the housekeeping ladies huddle together in the shade across the courtyard, wait for me to appear in my dress. They smile and nod as I step out of my air-conditioned bungalow into the blazing midday heat. Sussett is dressed in her royal blue Occidental Hotel uniform (a knee-length skirt, matching blazer and white blouse), but she has placed a flower behind her ear for the occasion.

  “You like the balloons?” she says, as I suck in my gut and slide into the cart.

  “Si…gracias,” I say.

  Jorge nods hello but appears hot and strained in his suit and tie.

  Sussett slides in the cart too, and the driver lurches us forward. The maids smile and wave goodbye.

  Ciao, I think. Adios. Goodbye. Goodbye.

  It’s only a three-minute drive to the gazebo, but it’s so hot out that one by one the balloons pop. Pop! Pop! Pop! It’s like the shootout at the OK Corral, or gunfire from Guantanamo, a kind of ambush on my wedding day, or bullets zipping across the coral reef all the way from Florida.

  Pop! Pop! Yehawwww!

  Only one balloon sur
vives.

  Rose petals flutter on the dirt path to the gazebo.

  Jorge offers his arm, and I latch onto it, hook myself into it. I find this such a comfort, this strange man’s arm, that there is someone here to hang onto on these last steps to matrimony.

  A catamaran with orange and pink sails drifts past in the distance.

  “You look beautiful,” Leigh says.

  “You too,” I say.

  He smiles, seems composed, his arms relaxed, hands clasped together in front, but I know he’s nervous. The lawyer lady is here too; she has come in from Havana to orchestrate the vows, to declare in Spanish all the legal obligations of Cuban marriages. And Sussett is here, smiling with that flower in her hair.

  The lawyer lady proceeds and Sussett translates, struggles with the legal terminology and convoluted sentence clauses, stumbles once, refers to Leigh as someone named Tom, we’re not sure why. Everyone laughs, and I say, “I’d like to know who this Tom fellow is.”

  The vows come and go without meaning.

  I don’t care about any of this—these vows, these legalities, this lawyer lady from Havana. I don’t believe in marriage anyway. It’s the ceremony that has drawn me in, the public declaration of love.

  I could not resist the silver sandals with jewelled overlay.

  I hear ice cubes clinking in margarita glasses from the beach far away, a blender mixing ice and lime into mojitos, the buzz of electric golf carts cruising up the path, the French Canadian girls in high heels and sparkly bikinis grooving to salsa on the pool deck.