by Anne Tyler
“This is all NoNo’s fault,” Biddy said. “She’s made me lose my confidence. First she says I can cater the wedding and then she says I can’t, and then she says, oh, if it means so much she’ll let me do it after all; and ever since then, I swear, everything I’ve made has come out wrong in some way. Look at this! It’s an embarrassment!”
Meanwhile, she was just standing there. It was Rebecca who located the strawberries. “Here,” she told Peter. “Fill in that place in the middle and put some more around the edges.”
Peter first wiped his palms on the seat of his jeans, and then he took the bowl from her and started gingerly, meticulously placing the berries just so.
“Not much of an appetite out there,” Dixon said, walking in with two plates that looked untouched. “Do you think that’s a good sign, or bad? I’m pretty sure he hasn’t proposed yet, because all they’re talking about is some movie they’ve both seen.”
“It’s my cooking,” Biddy said gloomily. “I knew I’d overseasoned that beef heart.”
Rebecca said, “We should have asked if he planned to give her a ring. Then we could have put it in the dessert or something and he’d be forced to propose.”
“A ring! Isn’t she too old for a ring?” Dixon asked.
“With my luck, she’d just eat it,” Biddy said.
Rebecca said, “Now, Biddy, you’re being silly. This is a lovely meal, the beef heart is lovely, and Peter is doing such a nice job with the berries!”
Her voice cracked on a high note, but nobody was paying any attention anyhow. Except, perhaps, for Peter, who took on a full-cheeked look of pride when she complimented his work. He stepped back from the counter and cocked his head, appraising the dessert with narrowed eyes. Then he stepped forward again and added one more berry precisely in the center.
“You should have seen your father propose,” Biddy told Dixon. “He really and truly got down on his knees.”
“I didn’t know that!” Rebecca said—more to encourage the change of subject than anything else. “And what did he say, exactly?”
“He said, ‘Well, I suppose you can guess what I want to ask you.’ And I said, ‘Well, and I suppose you can guess what I would answer, too.’”
Rebecca laughed, but Dixon stayed very sober and alert, his eyes fixed on his mother’s face. (He could never hear enough about his father.)
“It didn’t occur to me till this instant that he didn’t actually ask,” Biddy said. “And I didn’t actually answer, either.” She shook her head. “Bring a serving spoon with you when you carry in the dessert,” she told Dixon. “Let them dish it out themselves. The more privacy the better.”
Then she started bustling around, scraping plates and wiping counters.
Rebecca would have liked to know how Troy had proposed, if propose was the proper word. Did he say, “Biddy, Dixon Senior may be dead but Dixon Junior is on the way, and I’ve always wanted a child to raise”? Or had it been more romantic? (“I do prefer men in general, Biddy, but I prefer you in particular and now I’d like to take care of you.”) Well, at least the arrangement seemed a success, contrary to all predictions. Rebecca was everlastingly grateful to Troy for sticking by Biddy so loyally and providing Dixon with some warmth in his life. Who could say for sure that it didn’t work just as well as a regular marriage?
Barry came into the kitchen, jingling his keys in his pocket, and told Peter it was time to leave. “Any errands I can run in the morning, call me,” he told Rebecca.
“Well, thank you, Barry. Have a good night.”
She looked past him and saw NoNo just behind him, her purse clutched to her chest. “Sweetie?” Rebecca said.
NoNo didn’t answer, but she came to stand beside Barry. Her head barely reached his shoulder—her dark, shiny cap of hair resembling an upside-down flower. She was such a little elf. Ridiculously, Rebecca’s eyes filled with tears. “Oh, sweetie,” she said. “You’re getting married! You’re all grown up! Oh, I know—” and she gave a laugh. “I know you’ve been grown up for ages, but, oh, here you are! About to be a wife!”
She reached out her arms, and NoNo stepped into them. They stood there hugging for a moment with NoNo’s purse pressed bulkily between them. Rebecca heard a sniff as delicate as a cat’s sneeze. She patted NoNo’s sharp shoulder blades and drank in her familiar smell—the rainy, limp smell of fresh violets.
From the passageway, Dixon said, “Hot dog!” He burst into the kitchen, and Rebecca and NoNo drew apart. “Well, he did it,” he said.
“Did what?” Rebecca asked.
“He proposed, Gram. Wake up!”
Then he described in detail how it had happened: the man taking hold of the serving spoon but setting it back down, swallowing so loudly that Dixon could hear it from where he stood. “I could tell that something was up,” he said, “so I got out of there. Walked out but then stopped just around the corner; so I heard him say, ‘Vivian, I know you must wonder why I asked you here all by yourself, and you probably think I’m a fool,’ he said. ‘Lord, I must look like such a fool, but I didn’t know how else to . . . Vivian,’ the guy said, ‘look. I really, really need you to marry me.’”
Biddy made a clucking sound, and Barry said, “Well, gee, he could have come up with something a little more romantic.”
“What did she say?” Rebecca asked. “Did you hear?”
“She said, ‘Steven, I’d be honored to marry you.’”
NoNo clapped her hands, and even Peter started grinning. Rebecca said, “Well, thank heaven. I’m so relieved.”
Although she also felt a little sad that her moment with NoNo had been cut short. Oh, nothing in this family ever flowed from start to finish without interruption. Their lives were a kind of crazy quilt of unrelated incidents—always some other family to consider, some strangers getting married or retired or promoted. (Even her own wedding had taken place at an earlier hour than she’d wanted because of an anniversary party scheduled for that night.)
When she was a girl, she had imagined her future as a single, harmonious picture. But what she had ended up with was more like the view in one of those multi-lensed optical toys that Lateesha was so fond of: dozens of tiny chips of pictures, each interfering with the others.
She saw Barry and Peter and NoNo out the back door, kissing Barry and Peter politely on the cheek and giving NoNo another hug. Biddy hugged NoNo too. Apparently she’d recovered from her hurt feelings. “Nighty-night, hon,” she said. “Get your beauty sleep, you hear?”
Then she and Rebecca set up the coffee tray.
“But don’t take it in quite yet,” Rebecca told Dixon. “Let them have a little time together on their own.”
It was some consolation, at least, to arrange that for somebody else.
* * *
She closed her bedroom door because Poppy and Tina were still up watching TV, and she sat down on the bed and drew the stick of paper from underneath the phone.
301, his area code was. She lifted the receiver and dialed it. Then she paused. Then she hung up.
It was nearly ten o’clock. Maybe he was asleep already. In the old days he’d been a night owl, but that could very well have changed.
Maybe his wife would answer. “Will, darling!” she would carol. “Some woman wanting to speak to you, darling!”
Or, “Dr. Allenby’s working late tonight,” in a forbidding tone. “Who’s calling, please?”
Rebecca lifted the receiver again, but this time she punched in his office number—the first three digits of it, at least, after which she paused so long that a voice came on the line saying her call could not go through as dialed. Even the recording—that impersonal, singsong “We’re sorry”—caused her heart to race, and she slammed the receiver back down. “You’re an idiot,” she said out loud. She rose abruptly and left the bedroom. “Ninny,” she told the mirror in the bathroom. “Silly moron,” she said as she yanked her toothbrush from its holder.
“What say, Beck?” Poppy called.
> “Nothing, Poppy. Never mind.”
* * *
The big surprise was, the wedding went wonderfully.
NoNo was a vision in her white chiffon dress, with her giant yellow-and-gold bouquet, and Barry made a very handsome bridegroom, and Peter, wearing his first grownup suit, seemed touchingly dignified. The backyard was more or less presentable, if you ignored the sort of wide-wale effect produced by the strips of sod that had not had time to meld together yet; and the dead azaleas (which would have to wait to be replaced by professional nurserymen) had been cunningly costumed in billows of white netting—a solution proposed by NoNo herself, although even she had not foreseen that the netting would attract a flock of tiny yellow butterflies so decorative that they might have been sewn on by an inventive designer.
It was too hot, anyway, for the guests to venture outside for long. Until the ceremony began they stayed in the house, which Alice Farmer had cleaned and polished to a fare-thee-well. Nobody would have known that a curtain rod had torn itself loose from the wall in a cloud of plaster dust only that morning. Barry’s family—his brother and sister-in-law, plus a couple of cousins—kept admiring this and that, asking if the dining-room fireplace actually functioned (it didn’t) and if the people in the portraits were actual ancestors (they weren’t). Most of the Davitches arrived not too scandalously late and stayed on their best behavior throughout, never once bickering or stalking off in a huff; and the grandchildren were models of deportment. It was true that Rebecca’s mother and aunt—in town just for the day, since neither one of them liked sleeping in strange beds—kept to the edges of the gathering, Rebecca’s mother wearing her characteristic who-are-these-people expression. But at least they came; at least they each accepted a glass of wine, and conversed agreeably when spoken to, and Aunt Ida was heard to observe that she hadn’t seen such a beautiful bride in donkey’s ears. (“Years,” Rebecca’s mother said. “What?” Aunt Ida asked. “Donkey’s years, Ida.” But Aunt Ida was already turning away to flash her sweetest and most winning smile at Peter.) Also, Tina’s hot-pink gown was put to shame by Alice Farmer’s sequined turquoise cocktail dress with matching feather tiara. Rebecca found this immensely gratifying.
As for the waitress who officiated, she was nothing like what Rebecca had feared. Demeter, her name was, and she was at least partly Greek, with one of those strong, noble Greek faces. She wore a simple black dress and carried herself as if she were supporting an entablature. Granted, Rebecca still wished they’d rehearsed. The “Wedding March,” for instance—played on the piano by Emmy and relayed to the backyard via Min Foo’s baby monitor—continued all the way through to the end while the couple stood sweating in the hot sun waiting for her to finish; and then Demeter asked, “Who gives this woman . . . ?” which no one had thought to prepare for. Rebecca was just opening her mouth to say that she did, in order to move things along, when Tina finally said, “Oh! Me.” But she was repositioning her corsage at the time, so that it seemed she was merely sort of tossing off the bride.
Well, these things happen. What mattered was that Barry and NoNo really appeared to enjoy their own wedding. As soon as the ceremony was finished, they moved back indoors and Zeb took over the stereo and people started dancing. Rebecca watched from the sidelines, smiling. She was wearing a red silk dress with a many-tiered skirt, and she felt like a gypsy queen. Everything that Biddy’s waiters offered her, she accepted—little canapés and stuffed pastry shells and several glasses of champagne. All of it tasted delicious. And the cake, when they wheeled it out, was a work of art: six layers, each decorated with a different kind of sugar flower to reflect NoNo’s profession. Unfortunately it listed to the right somewhat, but Barry and NoNo cleverly solved that problem by listing to the right themselves, arm in arm, when they posed behind it for the photographer.
The best thing about being stepmother of the bride was that Rebecca didn’t have to think up one of her rhymes. Troy offered the first toast—a nice little rumination about what couples learn from each other as they travel together through life. “From Biddy I have learned caretaking,” he said. “Feeding, nurturing, nourishing,” and he raised his glass to Biddy across the room, which made Rebecca a little teary because she had never before considered what Biddy had brought to Troy; it had always been the other way around. Then Barry’s brother delivered a humorous speech about Barry’s improved taste in women, and then Poppy struggled up from the couch to propose his toast, although he got confused and started reciting his poem instead. He was partway through it before Rebecca realized what was going on. (“If you weep away the days, or you try not to weep, or can’t,” he was intoning, “And pace the floor all night and sleep at dawn . . .”)
“Poppy,” she called. “Wait.” He paused, lips still parted, and turned so blindly in her direction that it stabbed her heart. She threaded her way through the crowd and came up and hugged his nearest arm to her breast. “A toast to NoNo and Barry,” she whispered into his tufted ear. “Long life and happiness.”
“Eh?” he mumbled. “Oh.” He turned to the others. “Long life and happiness,” he echoed. Then he seemed to collect himself, and in a stronger voice he added, “May your marriage be as happy as Joyce’s and mine was!”
Everybody clapped, and Rebecca squeezed his arm tighter and kissed his cheek.
“I got a little mixed up,” he told her as she helped him sit down. “But it was just for a second, there. I don’t think anyone noticed.”
“Not a soul,” she assured him. “Can I bring you a piece of cake?”
“I believe it was hearing the vows that took me back,” he said. “Seems like only yesterday I was saying those vows.”
“I know, Poppy.”
“People imagine that missing a loved one works kind of like missing cigarettes,” he said. “The first day is really hard but the next day is less hard and so forth, easier and easier the longer you go on. But instead it’s like missing water. Every day, you notice the person’s absence more.”
“I know.”
“But I surely never meant to spoil NoNo’s wedding.”
“You didn’t spoil it! You were fine,” Rebecca said. She caught a waiter’s attention and beckoned him over. “Look,” she told Poppy, lifting a plate of cake from the tray. “Fondant icing! Your favorite.”
“Ah, yes,” he said, brightening.
The photographer—just a college boy, a friend of Dixon’s—snapped Poppy’s photo as he raised the first forkful to his mouth. “I think I got that,” he told Rebecca.
Then Zeb came up and invited her to dance. The stereo was playing “Band of Gold.” “Where did that come from?” she asked as she stepped into his arms.
“It’s one of those 1950s collections,” he said. “Looked like good slow-dance music.” He steered her into Min Foo by accident and murmured, “Sorry.” Min Foo was so pregnant by now that Hakim had to hold her practically at arm’s length, leaning across her belly to set his cheek against hers. It made Rebecca laugh. Zeb drew back to smile at her. “You’re having fun, aren’t you,” he said.
“Yes,” she said, “I am.”
In fact she might have been tipsy, because everything made her laugh, after that. She laughed when Tina waltzed by clinging firmly to Peter, who wore the shocked, frozen look of a hijacking victim. She laughed when Alice Farmer, whose church forbade dancing, started swaying her head to the beat so enthusiastically that her feathers must be setting up a breeze. She laughed when “Band of Gold” switched abruptly to “Sixteen Tons” and everyone came to a stop and looked helplessly at everyone else. Then Dixon’s friend herded them outside for a huge group photograph. “Could the people not related by blood get over on the left end?” he asked. “Just in case, you know. Because I’m not absolutely sure I can fit you all into the picture.”
“How ingenious: a pre-cropped photo,” Zeb murmured, and Rebecca laughed till her cheeks ached.
Yes, she had to admit that the wedding went much better than she had expected.
* * *
Alone in her room, with everyone else in the house fast asleep and the champagne giving her courage, she sat on the edge of the bed and dialed Will Allenby’s home number.
The phone at the other end rang twice and then gave a click. “Dr. Allenby,” a man said. A man; not a boy. He had the worn, slightly furry voice of somebody middle-aged. She recognized the Church Valley accent, though, that turned Allenby into Allen-bih.
“Will?” she said.
“Laura?”
“Who?”
There was a sharp silence, during which she longed to hang up. But finally she said, “This is Rebecca Holmes Davitch, Will. Do you remember me?”
“Rebecca?”
She waited.
“Rebecca,” he said dully.
“I hope you weren’t asleep!”
“No . . .”
“Just tell me if you were! I know it’s late!”
It seemed she could not get rid of this insanely manic tone. She grimaced to herself. “In fact,” she said, “maybe I should call another time. Yes, why don’t I do that? Okay! Bye!”
She hung up and doubled over, burying her face in her lap. It felt to her as if something in her chest had started bleeding.
Five
The house had a post-wedding atmosphere: crumbs ground into the carpet, paper napkins splotching the grass, soiled white satin ribbons drooping listlessly from the mantel. Peter returned to his room after breakfast and shut the door and remained there. Tina left for the airport with a skeleton crew of luggage bearers, her hair a sickly pink in the morning light. Alice Farmer washed stemware so silently and morosely that she might have been hung over, except that she didn’t drink.
The telephone kept ringing in a jarring way, and each time Rebecca answered, the cold, smooth weight of the receiver brought back last night’s call to Will. She felt battered and damaged and mortified. It was all that she could do not to hang up in mid-conversation.
