The Wedding Machine

by Beth Webb Hart

  “Let’s eat on trays in the living room,” Kitty B. says, sliding the newspaper across the couch and taking a seat.

  As the gals load their plates with freshly fried chicken, LeMar turns up Salome. He shuffles into the living room as they take their first bites. “Now she’s dancing with his head, girls.”

  “Turn that off, LeMar,” Kitty B. says. “We’re trying to eat.”

  LeMar nods and moves over to the stereo. He places his head on the speaker and says, “Next thing you know, Herod will have her killed too.”

  Richadene strides out of the kitchen and across the room and yanks the stereo plug out of the wall.

  “Supper time,” she says to LeMar.

  “Poor John the Baptist,” LeMar says to Ray as Richadene brings him a tray of fried chicken legs, a slice of watermelon, and a big helping of creamed corn. “He had his role to play in history, and then he was chopped right out of the picture at the whim of a seductress. It just doesn’t seem fair.”

  Ray clears her throat and looks awkwardly around at the other gals. LeMar says a blessing and then excuses himself to eat on the porch, and they get to work sorting out the final wedding preparations. The Tea and See and the bridesmaid luncheon, the rehearsal dinner, and the wedding itself. It will take place at All Saints Episcopal Church, followed by a reception right across the street at Pink Point Gardens, a beautiful park on the water where colossal live oaks stretch their long moss-covered limbs out over the seawall. Little Hilda and Giuseppe will leave by boat—a fifty-foot yacht that Kitty B.’s brother, Jackson, has agreed to let them borrow for the occasion. It will be tied to the dock at the yacht club right next to the park, and the guests will line up on the seawall and throw birdseed on them as they race to the dock and sail away, standing on the upper deck of the grand vessel. Jackson will deliver them to the Sanctuary Resort on Kiawah Island, where they will spend one night before flying to Italy for their two-week honeymoon and tour of Giuseppe’s homeland.

  As the gals gnaw on the chicken bones, they strategize.

  It’s not the nitty-gritty details that concern them. Ray keeps the wedding box within arms’ reach at all times, and she can handle any logistical emergency that could possibly come up among brides and bridesmaids. The wedding box consists of smelling salts, stain remover, buttons, needles and thread, safety pins, starch, a mini iron, breath mints, scissors, tape, bobby pins, tampons, Band-Aids, superglue, cover up, hairspray, baby wipes, Kleenex, and more. No button will pop, no heel will break that Ray can’t handle; no stain or wrinkle will appear that can’t be eradicated.

  But there are other concerns with this particular wedding. There’s the weather, of course, and the mosquitoes, not to mention the population explosion of various reptiles that have been a particular nuisance this summer, but more hazardous than that are the people and the tensions rising between them, so Ray refers to her notes and reels off the damage-control plan:

  “If Hilda blows up at Angus’s fiancée or whatever she is—Trudi Crenshaw—then Kitty B., you pull her outside and take her on a walk.” Kitty B. nods and Ray continues.

  “If Dennis Dannals shows up to take the pictures after having tipped the bottle as he is apt to do, Sis, you pump him with coffee and take the rolls of film out of his box so they don’t get lost. And ask Capers to take over the camera. He took a photography course at the College of Charleston a few months back.”

  “Got it,” Sis says.

  “And if the good Reverend doesn’t ask Sis to dance, let’s force him to have a little champagne so that he will shrug off his inhibitions and spin her around in her spiffy blue dress with the big silk ecru sash and high-heeled sandals that Hilda picked out for her last May at the Copper Penny in Charleston.”

  “I can’t believe how much I spent on that dress.” Sis shakes her head. “I feel a little ridiculous about the whole thing.”

  “Oh, what else are you going to spend your money on?” Ray asks, hoping that Capers will finally notice the little knockout of an organist in his midst.

  “I could have bought a whole new wardrobe with what that ensemble cost!” Sis says.

  “Sis.” Ray leans in toward her friend and nods once. “I’m going to put it to you plainly. None of us are getting any younger, and there comes a time when one must put all of one’s eggs in a certain basket. You understand?”

  “I guess,” Sis says, her head shaking back and forth. “There aren’t too many empty baskets coming through Jasper these days.”

  They all chuckle.

  After they put aside their trays, they get out the tulle and the birdseed and the funnels and the satin ribbon and start making the sweet little sacks to hand to the guests before the bride and groom’s departure.

  “Well, anyway girls, we need to work out a damage-control scenario with one more issue,” Kitty B. says.

  “What could we have possibly left out?” Ray studies her notes one last time.

  Kitty B. lifts up the newspaper she’s been sitting on and points to the color image of Eleanor swirling across the Bahamas. “Oh, just a little tropical beast.”

  Ray swats her hand. She’s tired of having to think about storms. “They’ve been predicting it’ll hit Georgetown on a Thursday. Nothing to worry about.”

  “It almost always bumps north, and it’s always at least two days delayed,” Sis says.

  “I know, I know, but every now and then it bumps south,” Kitty B. says, “and you know how it slows down when it comes ashore, so there is a slight possibility we could be looking at a Friday sideswipe.” “I hope not.” Sis pinches her chin.

  Ray stands up and says in a firm tone, “I can’t put much stock in worrying about storms. There are always storms looming in the tropics that could have our name on them, but in truth, it’s been over a decade since our fair state has really felt the blow of one.”

  As the dogs begin to bark outside, Vangie Dreggs pokes her made-up face through the window between LeMar’s speakers. “Just pray it away. I saw y’all’s cars over here, and I just wanted to pop in and say hi.”

  Ray rolls her eyes. “So you just happened to be at the tip of Cottage Island?” she asks.

  “Well, you know I’m looking at a piece of property out here.”

  “Really?” Ray says. “What in the world for?”

  “For an investment . . . and a getaway. It’s either this or Edisto Beach, and I just can’t decide. Little Bit and I are testing the sunset at both places.”

  Vangie turns around toward the Ashepoo River and takes a mock picture with her fingers as her skirt billows up around her knees.

  Why don’t you just buy the whole durn county? Ray’s tired of outsiders poking around Jasper in search of a little coastal living. Heck, Florida is already the north, and so are Hilton Head and Kiawah Island for that matter. Maybe the Texans should take over the rest of the southeastern coastline—buy it up and build their oversized houses and fancy chain stores around it. Is there no way to stop them?

  A hot flash starts in Ray’s chest and moves down her arms and up to the top of her head. She picks up the newspaper and starts fanning herself.

  “Do come in,” Kitty B. says to Vangie.

  “Can’t.” Vangie winks. “Going to Charleston to hear Beth Moore speak at the Gaillard. Then out to dinner with some friends to the Peninsula Grill. Oh, I just love their coconut cake. It’s eight layers, Kitty B.! I’ll bring you a slice to the tea tomorrow.”

  “All right,” Kitty B. says. “I’d love to try it.”

  “No, seriously, Ray,” Vangie says as she lifts her palms up to the sky. “Just pray that storm away. The Lord won’t let it ruin that sweet child’s wedding day!”

  Ray shakes her head, and Sis lets out a nervous giggle.

  “Hope it’s okay for me to bring my sister-in-law to the tea tomorrow?” Vangie says as she turns toward the porch. Ray bristles. “She’s looking to buy a place in Charleston, and she wants to sample a little of the outlying small-town life.”

&n
bsp; Flavor. Sample. It’s as if Jasper County is one big spiral ham that Vangie will slice off layer by layer until all that’s left is the knobby bone.

  “Why don’t you give her a taste?” Ray says, but Vangie doesn’t pick up the sarcasm.

  Then the Lone Star Realtor of the Lowcountry bids the gals good evening, her heels clacking down the steps as she scurries out to her white Lexus SUV that looks like a slick horse pill that would be painful to swallow. They watch from the window as she pulls out, the silver Jesus fish on her bumper catching the afternoon light.

  “Pray, pray, pray, pray, pray!” Ray says to the gals. “She thinks she’s the Lone Star Coordinator of Divine Communications too. The gall! Do you know she’s talked Capers into having some kind of ‘prayer revival day’ at All Saints? Now does that sound very Episcopalian to y’all? The Reverend Capers has lost his mind if he entertains all of this pray, pray, pray kookiness!”

  “Pray for world peace!” Sis says.

  “Or for a million more bucks!” Kitty B. adds.

  “Or for God to snuff out my fibroid tumors!” Ray stands up and adjusts her skirt. “If she tells me to pray one more time, I just might slap her!”

  “Or for Sis and the Reverend to fall hopelessly in love!” Kitty B. says, unable to stop the banter. “Or for LeMar’s chronic fatigue to vanish!”

  Kitty B. looks at a picture of Baby Roberta in her pink day gown the week before she lost her, and they all know what she really wants to pray for. She picks up the picture and plops down on the couch, and they come over and rub her back.

  “Mama?” Katie Rae says from out of nowhere. She stands in the doorway with a nice-looking young man who has her parrot, Froot Loop, on his shoulder.

  This must be one of the fellows she met from that online dating service. Kitty B. says she’s been seeing the man who opened the new Serpentarium near the ACE Basin, a veterinarian, and his father is some kind of evangelical preacher. Ray looks down at her espadrilles. She hopes they haven’t offended him with their banter.

  “Oh, it’s okay, sweetheart.” Kitty B. pats her eyes with the backs of her palms and invites them into the filthy living room, where newspaper pages and birdseed are strewed amidst their trays of dirty plates and chicken bones and balled-up napkins. “These are my mom’s gals,” Katie Rae says to the young man.

  He smiles and reaches out his hand in Ray’s direction. “I’ve heard a lot about you all. It’s a pleasure to meet you. I’m Marshall Bennington.”

  Sis stands up and pushes down the wrinkles in her pants and waits behind Ray to shake his hand. He looks each of them in the eye—and Ray has to admit, he’s right polite and handsome, albeit slightly affected. Maybe she should get Priscilla onto one of those dating Web sites.

  “What’s that noise?” he says.

  “Oh, that’s LeMar snoring.” Kitty B. shakes her head, and Ray looks out on the porch, where the sick man snoozes in his rocking chair as the sun makes its descent behind the trees across the water.

  “So nice to meet you, Marshall,” Ray says as she nudges Kitty B. “I better get going.”

  The gals quickly load Kitty B.’s silver chest, her china teacups and saucers and creams and sugars into Ray’s backseat to add to the stash for the Tea and See. Next they load up Miss C. and the lemon squares and the petits fours, which Ray positions carefully in the way back. Sis drapes some towels around Miss C. so she won’t knock into the sweets and flatten them.

  “Don’t forget the wedding presents,” Kitty B. says as LeMar wakes up for a moment, smacks his lips, and drifts back into sleep on the rocking chair.

  Ray doesn’t see how she can fit any more into the Tea and See display, but Kitty B. went to Charleston last week on account of LeMar’s doctor’s appointment and so she stopped by Tirlants to pick up some wedding gifts. They’re some of the most beautiful Little Hilda has received: four silver goblets, two teacups, six salad plates, a rice spoon, a place setting of silver, and a crystal ice bucket from Tiffany’s.

  “Well, y’all,” Ray says as Kitty B. and Sis carefully stack the gifts in the passenger seat. “I’ll just have to find a way to squeeze them into the display.”

  The summer day finally gives way to night as Ray pulls out of Kitty B.’s dirt driveway and heads home. As she bumps along the old road, she thinks of Eleanor chasing its tail over the Bahamas and Vangie Dreggs’s foolish belief that her prayer could pop the storm like a pinprick in a balloon. Then she thinks back to Hurricane Hazel, the one that pummeled Charleston when Ray was ten and living in Mrs. Pringle’s carriage house.

  ~ OCTOBER 14, 1959 ~

  “You’re crazy, Mama,” Nigel had called to Mrs. Pringle from the bottom of the stairs as Ray and Laura sat huddled on the love seat in Mrs. Pringle’s guest room. “You mean to tell me you’d rather be holed up with that whore and her two bastard daughters instead of with me on higher ground?”

  It knocked the breath out of Ray when he said those words. She can remember literally gasping. Bastard? She didn’t think she’d ever heard the word before, but, as if by instinct, she knew precisely what it meant. For the first time in her young life she was face-to-face with the harsh reality of what she was. The sharp and succinct title that defined her.

  Her mama, with her persuasive way of softening the edges of life, had never made it sound like that. Ray’s daddy was a soldier whom Carla loved, if briefly, before his deployment. A brave man who fought for their country and surely died in the line of duty, didn’t he?

  Bastard. Ray rubbed the pads of her fingers over that sharp word, and it pricked her as if it were the end of one of her mama’s sewing needles.

  Her mama ran out of Mrs. Pringle’s bedroom to the top of the stairs and stood beside her employer. “Leave her alone!” she screamed down to Nigel. “She’s eighty years old, and she’s still got the right to make her own decision. She doesn’t want to evacuate!”

  Ray could hear Nigel scoff and punch at the crystals that dangled from the chandelier in the foyer as Laura curled up on the love seat and burrowed her head into Ray’s chest.

  “What did he mean?” Laura whispered.

  “Mmm?” Ray asked, still trying to catch her breath.

  “Mr. Pringle called us a name. Bastards. What does that mean?”

  When that needle of a word pushed out of her little sister’s mouth, Ray picked it up between her fingers, turned it from side to side, then pushed it into the pincushion of her heart, where it has been lodged ever since.

  “Something bad, Laura,” Ray said as the bile rose in the back of her throat. “Something awful.”

  Now as she drives down the gravelly island road with the sound of the goblets and the silver clinking together in the box, Ray knows she has no business running the Wedding Guild or posing as the first lady of Jasper. But, maybe that was part of her plan all along. To have her life so intertwined with the pack, have them so dependent on her that they couldn’t throw her out if they wanted to. Even if they knew the truth.

  Ray had married into Jasper society, after all, and borne two beautiful children who she thinks she raised well. Granted she spoiled them, but she and Willy provided them with everything, and they seemed to be making their way in the world.

  Ray prides herself in how she rose to leadership under Roberta’s tutelage with the ballet recitals and the Christmas pageants at church, then the debutante balls. Her role in coordinating the weddings of the next generation will seal her legacy and her place in Jasper society for good, despite the ugly truth of her origins.

  Looking into the darkening woods with its tropical vines and scrub pines, Ray remembers her mama moving her daughters out of the carriage house and up to Mrs. Pringle’s bedroom the night of the storm. They slept around the old woman’s tall four-poster bed on the hardwood floor as the shutters slapped against the yellow clapboards and the water trickled from the edges of the panes and formed a puddle by their feet.

  Now just as Ray turns on her headlights, a large brown figure leaps onto the
road, then halts, its twelve white spears pointing up. He stands stone still. Like a wall. His nostrils flare, and his large black eyes glisten like moonlight on the smooth surface of Round-O Creek. She brakes, but it’s too late.

  She barely registers the impact as the air bag bursts from its storage bin like gunfire itself and punches her in the face before enveloping her with its warm, ballooning latex as the smoke and dust spew out of its pores.

  The steering wheel is hot and her face begins to burn. As she opens the window, she smells lemon squares and cake and looks in the rearview mirror to see icing dripping from the ceiling. Bits of cake have landed in her hair, and chunks of lemon squares are sliding down the windshield and the creases of the deflated air bag. With a cursory glance, Ray sees that Miss C. has landed in the backseat and has lost an arm, and she’s sure that Kitty B.’s teacups and Little Hilda’s crystal ice bucket and Christmas china are cracked beneath the tissue in their gift boxes.

  On the hood of her Volvo is a twelve-point buck, and before she passes out she can hear Cousin Willy calling to her as he runs toward the car, but she’s not sure if she’s dreaming it.

  “Ray? Are you okay?”

  FOUR

  Kitty B.

  Kitty B. teeters at the top of the stairwell wondering what her middle daughter would be like or who she would marry if she had lived to be twenty-five like Little Hilda and Priscilla. They were all the same age, you know? Born within a four-month span of one another. The three watermelon seeds.

  In Kitty B.’s daydreams Baby Roberta is a younger version of herself. How she looked and felt as a teenager, stealing melons with the pack or chasing after her older brothers down Third Street when they stole her hat or her report card or the notes carefully folded in her back pocket that she and Ray would slip back and forth during Mr. Unger’s biology class.

  It’s strange that she misses the young woman her baby might have become. She wonders if when she is elderly and the gals’ daughters become middle-aged, if she’ll yearn for the midlife version of her child, if she’ll imagine what particular way Baby Roberta would have taken her arm and led her out of the nursing home and into the noonday sun for a lunch at Opal Dowdy’s or an appointment with Angus.