The People We Hate at the Wedding

by Grant Ginder

  “But isn’t that always a risk?”

  “Sure, but why compound it by actively recruiting that someone else, and then asking them to get naked?”

  A car honked outside.

  “Are you worried that I’m going to leave you?” Mark asked.

  “No,” Paul answered. “I’m honestly not.”

  He is though, of course. Not unreasonably so. At least he doesn’t think unreasonably so. Wasn’t anyone who was or had ever been in love terrified, at least to some tiny degree, of love deciding to take its business elsewhere? And wasn’t that partly the thrill of it all? Knowing that you were sharing something vulnerable that required your protection? So, okay, yes—he’s worried that Mark will leave him. But somehow admitting that would feel like losing.

  There are also the more complicated concerns: the pins and needles of Mark’s own unhappiness. These are the actual reasons (as opposed to half-assed academic ones) behind why he finds Alcott Cotwald’s theories so compelling. There are the ways in which Paul isn’t satisfying him, and the ways in which he never actually could. There are the worries that Paul mulls over during long showers, the questions that he doesn’t ask because the last thing he wants are answers.

  “We’d have rules,” Mark reiterated. “There would be boundaries. Things that we were both comfortable with.”

  “Like what?”

  Mark dashed salt onto the frittata.

  “I don’t know, we’d have to talk about it, I suppose.”

  “Well, can you give me an example?”

  He rested both of his elbows on the counter. “Like, you’d always be safe. Condoms would be a must. And … what else. Oh, here’s one—if there’s a chance that someone might become something else, then it’s probably not a good idea.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Sure you do.”

  Paul thought. “You mean if there’s a chance that, like, a guest star might become a series regular who, a year in, snags his own prime-time spin-off.”

  Mark cracked open a bottle of beer.

  “I’ve never thought about it in such sitcom-ish language before, but sure.”

  “And the chance that, despite our best efforts, that will always remain a possibility doesn’t scare you.”

  Mark blinked. “No.”

  And maybe he was right, Paul thought. Maybe it was as simple as Mark was making it out to be: fuck around, get their rocks off, congratulate each other with high-fives, and then kiss and say their I-love-yous before they shut off the lamps each night. It sounded so easy when Mark painted it as a hypothetical. But therein lay the problem, Paul realized: he couldn’t exist in hypotheticals. He never could. Not as a kid, and certainly not now. Mark did it masterfully; he constructed a future within a vacuum, something smooth and motionless, like a slab of ancient obsidian. Paul’s future, meanwhile, bore a tangle of implications. A litany of how abouts and yeah, but what ifs. And each time he addressed one of those imagined scenarios—each time he took a sword to its head—three more terrible possibilities would appear in its place.

  “Hey, I love you, okay?”

  Mark said that to him this morning, before he set off on the ten-block walk west toward Penn’s campus.

  Paul was standing in the kitchen, eating a slice of reheated frittata, and Mark hugged him from behind.

  “I love you, and I’m not going anywhere.”

  “Love you, too,” Paul said. “This thing’s delicious.” He’d been staring out the window, watching a squirrel navigate a space between two rain gutters.

  “I’m glad you like it.”

  Mark kissed his cheek. He smelled like patchouli and mint.

  “You feeling okay about last night?”

  Paul nodded.

  “Good.” Mark mussed his hair. “I’m going to be late, but have a great day. And don’t think about all this too much, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “You promise?”

  Now Paul’s mouth was full, but he managed a yup.

  It was a lie, obviously. Paul knew it was a lie, and Mark must have, as well; there’s no way that Paul wasn’t—isn’t—going to spend some part of every moment of today considering and reconsidering the conversation he and Mark had last night. He’s obsessive; he obsesses. It’s what he does; it’s how he survives. It’s a trait that he’s always had a keen sense of, but that he’s just now getting around to self-diagnosing.

  The unshackling of denial for a set of new chains is liberating.

  * * *

  Goulding launches his clipboard toward a lamppost. It’s an impressive throw—perfectly aimed, and with startling velocity—a particle-board Frisbee, which collides with the post and shatters into five jagged pieces.

  “PAUL!”

  The Nissan’s stopped at an angle, and the driver’s-side door swings on its hinges. Erwing’s on all fours, dry heaving onto the pavement. Next to him lies a female mannequin—this one full-grown and voluptuous, with hips and tits that remind Paul of the dolls he and his sisters used to play with. Her blond hair is a rat’s nest of knots, but otherwise her plastic form is intact.

  “For fuck’s sake, Paul!” Goulding yells. On the opposite side of Route 7, two mothers in athletic shoes stop pushing their strollers for long enough to gawk. “What kind of pansy-ass throw was that?! I’ve seen eight-year-old girls who can throw a softball twice as hard!”

  Marcia kneels down beside Erwing, asking a series of post-round questions.

  Paul clenches his teeth until his jaw flexes. Enamel grinds against enamel. He marches forward, takes hold of the mannequin’s stiff wrist, and drags her back to the pile of bruised, naked bodies between him and Goulding.

  “You’ve got one more shot at this,” the doctor says. He’s collected the scraps of his clipboard, and he uses one of them to point at Paul. “You hear me? One. More. Shot. You screw it up this time, and it’s answering phones and taking lunch orders for the next year.”

  The Nissan’s door slams shut. Paul reaches for a shoebox-sized baby with blue, lidless eyes. He rolls his shoulder in its socket, loosening the screaming muscle.

  He grips the baby’s neck and thinks back to the doctor’s question from last month: whether Paul wants to help, or whether he wants to be helped. It was a glib, condescending thing to ask—but then, glib and condescending don’t necessarily render a question untrue or inaccurate. Sure, Paul isn’t slipping on a pair of gloves each time he has to shake someone’s hand, but is he really that far off? His obsessions don’t manifest themselves physically, but they certainly lay other species of snares and traps in hidden corners of his mind. They lasso him and hogtie him and yank him away from logic and rational thinking. They spin him into vortexes where one thought grapples with another, which grapples with another, which grapples with another, until it’s three o’clock in the morning and all he can think about is all the problems he’s still left unexamined.

  What’s your anxiety level? he asks himself. Off the fucking charts.

  “Remember, Paul,” Goulding’s voice growls two feet behind him. “You fuck this up one more time…”

  The Nissan’s halfway around the parking lot. Goulding breathes audibly, his nostrils flaring. Paul plants his heels and begins to sweat.

  “Throw when I tell you to this time,” the doctor says. “Let’s try to minimize the chances of this being yet another failure.”

  He thinks of Wendy standing in the trash can, her ankles sinking into wet webs of spaghetti and linguini. He thinks of her fleshy arms trembling as he cajoled her into hugging the thing she detests the most. Or, better yet, he thinks of Rick Erwing. He thinks of how his fingers must ache from gripping the steering wheel so hard; he thinks of the synthetic pine smell leaching out from the felt tree that dangles from the rearview mirror. He thinks of limbs bouncing off the windshield, of heads lodged between tires.

  The doctor says, “All right, fairy, let’s see what you’ve got.”

  He thinks of his own awful thoughts, launc
hed like naked plastic bodies assaulting his consciousness.

  “NOW!”

  Paul spins and throws the baby as hard as he can, squarely and exquisitely at Goulding’s face.

  Donna

  June 10: Present

  The joint’s end burns uneven and ragged, like loose cloth hanging from a Molotov cocktail. Donna squints at the embers, willing them into focus as she slowly rotates it in a lazy circle. For the past hour and a half she’s been mindlessly reading an old copy of Architectural Digest, and now ash and charred weed scatter across the foyers and bedrooms printed on the magazine’s pages. She blinks once, twice, savoring the cosmic and heartbreaking way the earth pauses each time she closes her eyes. An ember lands between her first two fingers, and she watches it burn a speck of skin for a few seconds before the pain registers. How many house fires start with a scene like this, she wonders. A divorcée-cum-widow, wearing a ratty pair of jeans and one of her daughter’s old sweatshirts, sitting cross-legged on the living room floor, toking on pot. Toking. Do people say that anymore? She hopes they do—it’s too ridiculous a word to retire.

  “I’m toking on a blunt,” she says aloud, and laughs. Toking. How delicious.

  She cranes her neck around to look at the empty couch behind her. Since she took her first hit off the joint she’s had the very real sense that someone’s been sitting there, listening to her and her thoughts. So much so that when she says something clever—something like “I’m toking a blunt”—she instantly turns to see if her faceless guest is enjoying her wit as much as she is. But then—no. She’s alone. Just her, and her magazines, and her glass of Shiraz, and her joint. Her joint on which she’s toking.

  She laughs again, and takes another hit. The smoke curls around her insides and she feels that marvelous burn in her lungs and, finally, she exhales a shape-shifting cloud. But something strange happens as her lungs empty: deep within the kangaroo-ish pocket of Alice’s old sweatshirt, she feels a faint vibration. At first Donna’s sure she’s hallucinating; her faceless friend from the couch, the one who’s wily enough to disappear every time she turns around, is pulling a fast one on her. But then, she feels it again: a vibration just above her hipbone. With the hand that’s not holding the joint, she digs into the pocket until her fingers graze something solid: her new cell phone. She holds it tightly, and a lazy eternity passes, but then, then—yes, she’s sure of it—it buzzes again.

  “Fuck.”

  She yanks it out into the open air and sees Paul’s number blinking on its screen.

  November 22, 2012

  Swinging the oven door open, Donna leans over to peer inside. Heat sears her cheeks; she blinks away the dryness. Using a small brush, she starts basting the turkey, painting strips of melted butter onto its puckered skin. Fat oozes and spits in the pan, and she makes a face. She hates turkey. Stuffing it, cooking it, eating it. Washing down its dusty aftertaste with gulps of sauvignon blanc. If she had her way, she’d serve a filet mignon for Thanksgiving. Pair it with some asparagus in a hollandaise sauce, instead of the mishmash of croutons and apples and giblets that passes as stuffing in America. But then—her son had been insistent. It was the first holiday they were celebrating since Bill’s death, and so help them God, they were going to have turkey. “He loved it,” Paul had said the week earlier, when he called from New York to give Donna his flight information. “The dark meat especially.”

  Donna tries to remember if this is true, and she can’t. It seems to her like one of those memories that she’s become all too familiar with during the past several months—an inflated recollection exaggerated after the fact to give a life more character than it may have actually had. Still, she hadn’t wanted to upset Paul, particularly now, when he seems especially prone to getting upset. So, on the way home from the airport, they’d gone to the store. Had picked out a bird. And then, while Paul squirreled himself away in his old room upstairs, she’d buried herself in every cookbook she owned, trying to find the most painless way to prepare the damned thing.

  “Alice?”

  Her daughter’s lying down in the living room; Donna’s head is still in the oven. It’s questionable whether Alice heard her. Donna takes in a breath of oil and brine, and calls out again:

  “ALICE!?”

  “You can stop yelling. I’m right here.”

  She stands in the kitchen doorway, holding a glass of red wine with two hands. It’s the same glass that appeared a week ago, when Alice first arrived from Los Angeles, and which has remained attached to her (almost anatomically, Donna thinks, the glass melding into skin) as it refills itself with a sort of quiet and autonomous frequency. She wears slippers and black mesh shorts and an old high school track shirt, and draped over the whole mess is the long gray knit cardigan that Donna had bought her for her seventeenth birthday. The same sweater that Alice had proclaimed to loathe before shoving it to the back of her closet.

  Alice takes a sip of wine and swaddles herself in the cardigan, pulling it across her shoulders like it’s woolen chain mail.

  Donna wipes her hands against her apron. “I didn’t know if you could hear me.”

  “Well, I could.”

  Donna smiles. She reminds herself again that this is nice. That even though Eloise is spending the holidays in London with Ollie’s family, having at least two of her children home is nice. A blessing, particularly now that she spends so many days in this rambling, falling-apart house, alone. Yes, all right, Paul has warned her that he’ll have to spend much of his time in his room, working on his thesis. And maybe Alice isn’t really Alice—the drugs the doctors prescribed her after she returned from Mexico City have whittled away her personality in ways that Donna is still trying to understand, sharpening some corners while dulling others. Still, though: nice. The warming sound of footsteps as someone other than she moves around upstairs. Coming into the kitchen in the morning to discover, happily, that Paul or Alice has made coffee. For these peculiar comforts, she’s happy to entertain the strange ghosts of her children’s other lives.

  Donna hears Paul open and close a door.

  She says, “I can’t tell if this thing’s done. Does it look done to you?”

  Alice steps forward, though she’s still halfway across the kitchen from the oven. “Yeah. Sure.”

  “Alice.”

  “Mom. I’ve never made a turkey, all right?” She slept until eleven, but she still sounds exhausted. “What’s the meat thermometer say?”

  “It says it’s done, but I don’t know.” Donna glances back at the bird. “Don’t you think it looks a little … pale still?”

  Alice shrugs. She leans against the counter and takes another sip of wine.

  Donna closes the oven door. She figures another fifteen minutes can’t hurt. The last thing she needs is one of them ending up in the hospital with worms.

  She says, “Alice?”

  “Yes?”

  “Should you really be … I mean, is it a good idea to be drinking on the…”

  “The crazy-person pills I’m taking?”

  Donna reaches back to untie the apron.

  “You’re always so hard on yourself.”

  Alice leans across the counter for an open bottle of pinot noir, and Donna watches as she drains what’s left of it into her glass.

  “They only say that because alcohol is a depressant, and the fuck-ups who typically take pills like Klonopin are depressed.” She throws the empty bottle into the recycling bin below the sink. “Thankfully, while I may be your typical fuck-up, I am not, categorically, depressed.”

  “All I’m saying is that maybe it would be a good idea to slow down. It’s hardly noon.”

  “Mom. Donna.”

  Donna winces. “Yes, dear?”

  “I’m an adult.”

  “I know that, sweetheart.”

  “I can make adult decisions.”

  “Of course you can.”

  “So please stop—”

  The angry thuds of Paul galloping down the st
airs interrupt her. He slides into the kitchen wearing only his socks and a pair of pajama bottoms. He needs to eat more, Donna thinks, glancing at his ribs. He needs a haircut, and he needs to eat more.

  “Mom?” he says.

  “What can I get you, sweetheart?”

  “What’d you do with Dad’s chair?”

  “Which chair?”

  “Don’t play dumb.”

  Donna drapes her apron over the back of a chair. She notices a small puddle of water on the countertop next to the sink, and to avoid having to look at her son, she begins wiping it up.

  “I’m sorry, honey, I don’t know what chair you’re talking about.”

  “Then come here,” Paul says, and pushes open the door that leads out of the kitchen. Reluctantly, she follows him into the living room and finds him standing in the empty spot where Bill’s old leather armchair had sat for thirty years, its existence now reduced to a darkened square of carpet.

  “Here,” Paul says, pointing at the ground. “Dad’s chair used to be here. I … I came down here because I wanted to sit in it while I read, but now it’s gone. So I’m asking you: What did you do with it?”

  She looks at him squarely and says, “I got rid of it.”

  “I was going to take that chair to New York with me, Mom.”

  “I’ll get you another chair.”

  “That’s not the point!” He grabs the back of his head and looks around the room. Donna stares at the ceiling. “Wait,” he says. “Wait. Where are all the pictures of Dad?” He rushes over to the bookcase, where Donna’s rearranged pictures of Paul, and Alice, and Eloise. “There were like ten pictures that had Dad in them in this room. What happened to them?”

  What was she supposed to say to him? Without hearing some approximation of the truth—the very thing she’d so consciously kept from him—how would he ever understand her choice to rid the house of Bill and the conflicting memories she had of him? How could he empathize with that peculiar feeling she experienced six months ago, when the rawness of her grief gave way to logic and rationality?