by Rumaan Alam
She looks at Lauren, seated before the mirror, postcards tucked into the frame at its perimeter. Sarah is far from the vanity, a mercy that she doesn’t have to study her own face, reflected back at her over Ines’s shoulder. She is pretty, Lauren, always has been. A mystery, how the alignment of your features determines so much. It’s an accident. Her brothers are not handsome; they’re unremarkable. Lauren has always been otherwise. When you are pretty, people notice it the first time they see you, so Sarah had seen it, been drawn to it, known immediately that she wanted to claim it, claim her friendship, and she had. She remembers it quite clearly. That the friendship endured turns out to be one of those things: unplanned for, but welcome. She needs her. She understands Lauren. She relishes knowing her, and if there have been times, times when they were younger, mostly, when she envied her—though, no, there haven’t been. It wasn’t envy so much as magic Sarah wished; she wanted to be Lauren, once, though she doesn’t any longer. Her prettiness hasn’t faded, has in fact grown, and Sarah takes a strange pride in this. She’s chosen wisely.
“Look at me, please,” Ines whispers, her voice intent yet somehow far away.
“Sorry,” Sarah says, shifting eyes forward.
“How are you doing over there?” Lauren asks.
“Holding up,” Sarah says. She hasn’t snapped at anyone or thrown a tantrum about anything, but still, everyone’s using a gentle, encouraging tone with her. She’s trying not to let it irritate her. They’re acting like she needs to be placated, which is making her want to act like a monster.
“Almost done,” Ines says.
“You look amazing!” Lauren’s stood, slipped away from Danielle, and is standing behind Ines.
Sarah opens her eyes. The two of them, Ines and Lauren, beaming down at her, like a child they’re proud of. “Do I?” She wants to know, she realizes as soon as she’s said it.
“You do,” Lauren says. Her smile takes over her face. She smiles with her mouth, but also her eyes, her voice, her being.
Danielle comes over to inspect Sarah. “Gorgeous,” she says.
“You guys are miracle workers,” Sarah says.
“Shhh,” Lauren says. “You always look great. You look like yourself. Your best self. Isn’t that what the magazines say you’re supposed to be?”
Sarah goes into the bathroom, brushes her teeth in one of the matching sinks—the left, she’s always preferred the left-hand one. Ines has brought a toothbrush, bright orange, still in its plastic package, and a miniature tube of toothpaste. Sarah hadn’t expected these women to be so thorough, but she’s grateful. She feels bad that she’s going to have to brush her teeth, muss her face, but whatever—Ines works for her, after all.
She finishes, tries and fails to dry her mouth without smudging the lips, stains the towel, even, but she doesn’t care. She cups nose and mouth with her palm, exhales, tries to breathe in her breath, gauge the smell, but of course, she can’t; this never works, though everyone tries it. There’s smoke in her hair, across her shoulders, a whisper of it, a suggestion, she’s sure of it. Does it matter? Downstairs, it’ll be warm—all those tuxedoed bodies, dancing, waiters weaving through the crowd with trays bearing a crisp white wine, which she thought would make it seem more like summer, a dark, heavy red, and waters, still and sparkling, the latter with pretty twists of lemon and lime. The room will smell like sweat and bodies, like flowers, like food—little shots of a creamy tomato soup in tiny glasses, mushrooms stuffed and topped with a sprinkling of bright green chive, a sweet little concoction of beet, salty goat cheese, and a single, candied pecan. No one will notice the touch of smoke lingering about Sarah’s body, certainly not her parents, who seemed never to notice the smoke or beer on her breath those years she and Lauren—and it was always with Lauren that she got up to such things—came back to this house stinking of both.
Of course, there’s Dan. He notices everything. No matter; he’s too logical to care. Even when it’s something that annoys him, he never gets impatient. To those things—not refilling the ice trays, say—he proposes a logical response—buying a new refrigerator, say, one with an icemaker built in. That’s Dan. On television and in movies, people who are getting married talk about wanting to spend the rest of their lives with someone. That doesn’t seem like something a normal person would say in reality. Sarah doesn’t think people are designed to think about the rest of their lives. If we had to grapple with that, we’d never get anything done.
She’s not marrying Dan because he’s the man she wants to spend the rest of her life with, though she will, and that’s great, that’s fine, but in a way, it’s the added bonus. The reason she’s marrying him is because he, exasperated about her not refilling the ice cube trays, suggested that they buy a new fridge. This somehow seems to explain everything. Does she love him? Of course, what a stupid question. What do you do with that love but get married, and maintain it?
Sometimes Sarah thinks: What if this is something only the two of them have discovered, that only the two of them know about, and what if everyone else really is unhappily married? She’s glad they’re getting married. She can’t imagine her life without Dan, because this life they’ve started on is so good, and she believes it will only get better. She and Dan have never discussed this, not in these terms, this question of their love, their reasons for getting married, their expectations for that hopefully long arc of the rest of their lives. She assumes that it’s a condition of their being so well suited to each other that it’s redundant to even discuss it. She knows they share the same expectations, believe the same things. She knows because it’s always been this way.
Chapter 16
Lauren knows this house so well. She may know it better than she knows her own family home, because at home, she was never paying attention, whereas here—there was always a lesson to be learned here. She can scoff at Lulu now, but Lauren was once in her thrall. She’s long since grown out of that. As any child, with any mother, she now regards Lulu as something less complex than what she once seemed: just another person, making another set of mistakes.
Lulu’s crammed the house so full of things that you’re forever noticing details previously unremarked upon. In the powder room on the second floor, Lauren recalls the wallpaper—chinoiserie in blue and white, panoramas of pagodas and flying creatures, but she doesn’t remember the ornamental shelf over the toilet, with its chubby soapstone Buddha, all flopping tits and squinting eyes, a tiny, round box, malachite, swirling, an impossible green. She opens the box. A lone earring, a pearl, missing its back; a half-spent book of matches from a restaurant in midtown; two Italian lire.
She lifts the seat of the toilet, pushes down her pants, sits, confronts a little wrought-iron table, the kind you’d leave in your garden, painted orange, piled high with copies of the New York Review of Books. It would never have occurred to her parents that some guests might like to read while they shit. What happened in her parents’ bathrooms was a matter wholly unrelated to the rest of life; thus, soaps in the shapes of seashells, clustered together in a little porcelain dish, tiny towels with silken flowers on them that were useless for drying your hands, an apple cinnamon–scented candle flickering decorously throughout the evening.
Lauren selects the issue from the top of the pile. It’s from 1997. That year, they were fifteen. She can remember herself at fifteen, there’s a particular feeling around fifteen, the way synesthesists perceive in numbers a color, or a scent. Her friendship with Sarah has always been about nostalgia. At fifteen, it was about them at eleven; in college, it was about the tough-talking girls of fifteen they’d once been; in that shitty apartment in the East Village, it had been about the eager little undergraduate selves they’d sloughed off, the ones who flirted with socialism, or performance art. Now, what is it they see when they see each other? Old selves, old periodicals, a currency no longer in circulation. This house, it’s a museum.
She pees, flushes the toilet. Her body feels lean, empty, hard, and the thought
of the fried and salted things that will certainly appear the second the I Dos have been uttered renews her. She wasn’t lying about Sarah’s makeup; it’s good, so having seen that, Lauren’s less scared about having Ines minister to her face. Willa is in Sarah’s room, steaming the dresses. Sarah will wait while guests arrive, kiss hellos, sip their spritzers, take their seats, gossip and anticipate. The more Lauren thinks about it, the less sense it makes, all this pageantry and pretend. Why the implication that Sarah exists on some celestial plane, but will be made flesh at the appointed hour and descend, literally, to the garden, to be wed? She remembers something she’d genuinely forgotten all about—the spring dance, their junior year of high school. Theirs was a progressive and serious institution, uninterested in the rites of limousines and corsages, rented tuxedos and photographs before some backdrop meant to communicate an evening in Paris. Still, the party was planned and they were not so cool they didn’t want to get dressed up and go to a ballroom at a hotel and dance. They didn’t go with dates, much to Lulu’s dismay: Lulu, clutching the camera at the foot of the stairs, as she must have seen some mother on some sitcom do, the pantomime of parenthood. They wore dresses found at a thrift store in Connecticut, a simple column for Sarah, pale pink but not princessy, a black flappery thing for her, though they did go to Bloomingdale’s and buy new shoes. They felt so beautiful, even if they felt embarrassed, or uninterested in feeling beautiful, as they flew down the stairs, hammed for Lulu’s camera, tottered out into the night, awkward as foals but relishing the echo of their heels, the spring air on bared flesh, the appreciative grins of strangers on the street. They were beautiful, in that moment, and there’s a picture, proof of it, tucked into the corner of a larger collage of pictures outside Sarah’s door. She’s got to remind Sarah of that, that night. Taking the subway uptown to the hotel, because it seemed hilarious to take the subway so dressed up, then arriving, evaluating how pretty the girls looked, admiring how cute the boys looked, dancing, first with a knowing smile, later, with real abandon, in some cases fueled by the flasks, surreptitiously sipped, that some boys had snuck in interior jacket pockets, pretending to be James Bond. Cheeks flushed red, ties undone, and she thinks, but isn’t sure, that Sarah made out with Patrick Alden, the same boy she’d once overheard dismiss Sarah, or maybe he was just summarizing her. After, piling into taxis, calling for car services, some of the boys unbuttoning shirts, other boys slipping on jackets and fixing pocket squares. They reconvened at a diner in the East Village, where the boys ate scrambled eggs and hash browns and the girls smoked cigarettes and laughed. Lauren remembers it all, compressed into a few seconds of thinking. She thinks about that girl, quiet, dark eyed, in the old-fashioned dress that didn’t flatter—her breasts too big; she should have opted for postwar abundance rather than Roaring Twenties privation. You’re supposed to remember your previous self and imagine the advice you’d give to you then. If she could go back in time, back to that night, what would she say to that girl? She’d tell her to put the cigarettes out and order some food. At this moment, she’d kill for those hash browns, crispy, oily, salty. The Odessa Diner itself is long gone; it’s now a nail salon.
Lauren walks down the steps, toe then heel, toe then heel, the report of shoe on wood exactly like hammer on nail, or an impatient judge’s gavel, announcing look at me, look at me with every step. She keeps a hand on the railing, because the steps are slippery.
The house is transformed. A few chairs and tables and knickknacks have been banished, for the time being, to the front rooms of the basement, where, long ago, the nanny had lived, a part of the house forbidden when she was in residence and forgotten over the years since. There are flowers, everywhere, arrangements in innocuous glass vases, white peonies the size of fists, roses a pale, limey green. There are tea lights in glass votive holders in clusters: on the mantel, the coffee table, on each step, on that little ledge of step peeking out past the railing, which seems unsafe. Later, it’ll be someone’s task to move through the house as quickly as possible, lighting them. A couple of rugs have been taken up, and the dining table repurposed as a bar, where a pretty redhead is lining up glasses and taking stock of the bottles. There’s something else: a thrum, an energy, distant voices, nearby whispers, footfalls, anticipation. The guests will arrive soon. Sarah has sent her downstairs to see what’s what.
“Just come see for yourself,” she’d told her.
Sarah shook her head. “I can’t.”
“You’re going to just sit up here and wait like . . . like what, like a prize in a piñata?”
Lauren gives up out of her own curiosity and a desire to get away from Sarah, who is not speaking, because there’s nothing left to speak about. She’s promised to report back on what she finds. So far, so good. Willa and Lulu have done an impressive job, reorganizing the elements of the house to show it to its best advantage, to make the most of the house’s charm, but also its expanse, the fact that it continues to unfold all around you, that beyond the living room there’s another sitting room you wouldn’t have anticipated, that off the dining room there’s a powder room, that there are so many places in the house to sit and catch up, or congregate and laugh. It’s a good house for a party and the obvious choice for the wedding, even though she knows it wasn’t Sarah’s first choice. She knows just why, too—that air of inevitability. Sarah hates doing what is expected of her, even though that’s just what she ends up doing most of the time.
Lauren does the circuit: through the living room, into the library, back into the hallway, peeks in the dining room, takes the stairs down. Here, too, an impressive job, the kitchen table and chairs banished, the room open and light, and beyond, the garden, tented, in case of rain, though there’s none threatening, after all. There’s not enough room for many seats, just a few for the older guests, but standing, everyone should be able to see the ceremony, lit by paper lanterns overhead. It’s pretty. Dan is here, in his tuxedo, with his parents.
“Lauren!” Dan waves her over. She walks through the kitchen and he walks through the yard and they meet just at the threshold. He touches her arm affectionately. “You look beautiful.”
“Wait until you see your almost-wife,” she says.
“You remember my parents.” Dan gestures toward his distinguished-looking parents, his silver-haired mother, Ruth, in a sensible but still chic dress, not baggy but certainly forgiving, his father, Andrew, his tuxedoed twin, the very image of Dan’s own future: thick neck, puffy hands, intensely focused eyes.
“Hi, again,” Lauren says. “Did you have fun last night?”
“It was wonderful,” Ruth says. “I ate so much. Sarah told us the whole evening was your idea, and I have to say, you really put together an incredible party.”
“That’s so sweet, thank you,” Lauren says. She’s being sincere but a false note always creeps into her voice when she’s talking to other people’s parents.
“A great time,” his father agrees. “How’s everyone holding up here?”
“I think we’re basically ready,” she says. “I’m down here on reconnaissance.”
Huck ambles over to them, draping an arm over the shoulders of father and son. “The inner circle,” he says. “What are we talking about?”
“I’m just saying I snuck down here to check things out,” Lauren says. “We’re all ready and waiting up there, but I wanted to be where the action is.”
“I’d say it’s upstairs, no? The lady of the hour.” Huck grins.
“Sure,” she says. Huck has to have his say.
“Just tell Sarah to come downstairs,” Dan says, impatient.
Ruth looks scandalized. “Daniel! It’s terrible luck.”
“Mom.” Dan rolls his eyes. We’re all teenagers again, when our parents are involved.
“I tried, believe me,” Lauren says. “Propriety, though.”
“It’s not 1951,” Dan says.
“Have a little respect for tradition, Dan,” Andrew says. “You’ve only an hour or so to
go.”
“That’s assuming that everyone will arrive on time, which I think we all know to be unlikely.” Huck laughs. “My poor daughter. Should I go up to visit, help pass the time?”
“Pass along some fatherly words of wisdom?” Ruth might, possibly, be teasing Huck, but it’s so gentle no one notices.
“I have some of that,” Huck says.
“I’m sure she’d love some company,” Lauren says. “She’s just sitting up there waiting for her life to begin.”
“Now, now,” Huck says, as though it’s the beginning of a thought, then trails off, says nothing more.
“Has Sarah eaten?” Sarah’s mother-in-law-to-be: concerned.
“She’s eaten,” Lauren says. “I made her two boiled eggs. Protein.”
“You’re a good friend.” Doctor Ruth Burton squeezes Lauren’s forearm gently. “I remember when we got married, I was starving, no one told me I had to eat anything, and then I could barely focus through the whole damn thing, and to this day when I look at our wedding pictures I look so angry, because I’m hungry.”
“Well, this will all be over soon enough,” Dan says.
“What kind of a thing is that to say?” Dan’s mother shakes her head disapprovingly. “Maybe you need something to eat, Daniel.”
“I’m just saying I wish Sarah was down here at the party instead of shut up upstairs like a woman in purdah,” he says.
“I’ll go,” Huck says. “I’ll sneak up a glass of champagne and we’ll while away the hour.”
