The People We Hate at the Wedding

by Grant Ginder

  Ever since calling Claridge’s to pay for and upgrade Alice’s room, she’d been racked by nerves. Ollie had told her that she was worrying over nothing—who wouldn’t be thrilled to discover that she was staying in one of the nicest suites in London, for free?—but Eloise knew not to rest so easily. She remembered her senior spring at Yale, when Alice had e-mailed her a photo of the dress she was planning on wearing to her high school junior prom. Eloise found it charming and admirable (respectable and grown-up were the words she’d used with her sister) that Alice had saved her earnings from the Blockbuster where she worked to buy herself a dress, but the gown itself was less than flattering. It wasn’t a matter of Alice’s taste so much as the quality of the dress itself; it looked … well … cheap. And so, the next weekend, when she and a few girlfriends took the train from New Haven to New York, she excused herself for a few hours to buy her sister a new dress—a gorgeous black A-line. She sent it via next-day Fed-Ex to St. Charles, along with flowers, a silver necklace, and a note, written on her personal stationery, that read You Deserve This!

  Ten days later, she received a package from her sister. Inside (without a note) were the necklace and the dress, its twin spaghetti straps snipped in half.

  But that was a long time ago, she tells herself now, licking a drop of espresso from her lips. Alice has grown up. She has grown up. It was just like Ollie had said last Wednesday: this wedding, in addition to all of the other things it’s destined to be, will usher in some changes. It will be an opportunity to enter a new phase in her relationship with Alice—and, if he was willing, Paul.

  Still awash with relief, still grinning and satisfied, she unfolds her laptop and clicks open her company e-mail. Yesterday, she had set a strict no-work rule for herself; she’s taken these three weeks off to focus on her wedding, because God only knows how much more needs to be done, and how little time she has to do it. And yet, here she is, responding to questions and requests, and it’s hardly nine o’clock. It’s pointless to try to stay away, though, she tells herself; being indispensable means too much to her. That’s always been her problem. She gets so wrapped up in being needed that she forgets to stop and actually consider what she needs for herself. Clicking send on a message, she recalls the fit that her brother had when she took the job.

  “A nonprofit that helps children in developing nations by fixing their deviated septums?” he’d said over Christmas dinner. This was three years ago, when he was still speaking to her with semiregular frequency.

  “That’s right,” she’d said, proudly. “It’s called Mission: Breathe. I’ll be helping to run their communications department.”

  “So you’re doing public relations, is what you’re saying. Public relations for deviated septums.”

  She remembers pushing the mashed potatoes to the side of her plate to make room for more salad.

  “It’s a terrible condition,” she said. “In fact—”

  “Do you know how many children under the age of five die of diarrhea every year?” Paul interrupted her.

  “I—no. I don’t.”

  “Seven hundred sixty thousand. How many children die from having deviated septums?”

  “That’s not the problem. They don’t die from the deviated septums themselves, so much as—”

  “Exactly.”

  He’d never explicitly apologized, but she forgave him, nonetheless. Paul was naïve and idealistic, which were two qualities that she adored in him, but which also often prevented him from understanding life’s more nuanced complications. For instance, did Paul know that deviated septums are often the cause of childhood sleep apnea—a condition that, not unlike diarrhea, can also lead to death? Or, did Paul know that septoplasty isn’t as easy a surgery as most people assume it is, and that, in the hands of an unskilled doctor practicing in a developing country, the procedure may put a child’s life at risk? These are just a few of the myriad facts that Eloise has learned since helping to mold the public’s perception of Mission: Breathe—facts that she’s certain would change Paul’s mind about the organization’s worth, if he ever deigned to hear them.

  She finishes her espresso and pulls her hair back into a bun. Three new e-mails have just arrived, all of them written in the same panic-stricken tone, a franticness that Eloise has come to expect from her colleagues whenever she’s out of the office. (“What would they ever do without you?” Ollie often says to her. Eloise’s reply is always the same—oh, give it a rest—but really, she had no idea. She expects the whole organization might burn to the ground.) She clicks the first message—this one from her assistant, a sweet but daft girl named Bee, from Essex—and begins to read. In two days, the Daily Mail will publish an online story about London’s “top five most shallow charities,” and Mission: Breathe has made the list. Evidently, some asshole reporter managed to get wind of the organization’s financials and is now planning a story about how more cash is being spent to host lavish galas than to help poor children with deviated septums. Eloise shakes her head and frowns: accusations like this one make her fucking sick. After all, here she is trying to help people, and all this reporter could do was write about numbers.

  She starts to respond to her assistant, but then, taking a deep breath, she stops herself and closes the window, opting instead to cue up her Out of Office.

  On the other side of her laptop, next to a vase filled with the hydrangeas that Anka brought when she came to clean yesterday, sits the seating chart for the reception that she and Ollie have been working on. Next to it are the RSVPs that they’ve received, a collection of cards forming a neat, mother-of-pearl stack. Looking at the open places on the chart, she begins to sift through the names, cross-checking them with a spreadsheet of guests that she created nearly six months ago. She remembers when she first started hearing back from the people she and Ollie had invited. Using his letter opener, she sliced apart the envelopes one by one, tallying all the yeses. Once in a while she’d come across a no, and she’d do her best not to frown and to suppress her disappointment. Poppy and Hugo had a cousin’s wedding in Sydney, and while Eloise knew how Poppy felt about a member of her clan hitching up with an antipodean, her aunt would no doubt skewer her if she missed the nuptials. And given that this was the aunt with the house in Lacoste that’s empty for practically fifty-one weeks out of the year, and where Poppy and Hugo and Eloise and Ollie have spent the past four Bastille Days—well. Eloise understood, didn’t she? Yes, she thought to herself, setting Poppy’s card in a separate pile. She did. Life comes up; life happens. While they came few and far between, there were more regrets: Charlotte and Guy would be skiing in Las Leñas, and it’s a trip that Charlotte had “stupidly” booked ages ago; Kristen, a classmate of Eloise’s from Yale, had a memoir being released that week (after reading Around the World in Eighty Days in the wake of a messy breakup, she spent a year traveling the world, trying to find eligible men in foreign cities with untapped dating pools, like Accra and Vilnius. She’s still single) and her publisher and agent were both insisting that she stay in New York (they were 90 percent certain she was a shoo-in for the Today show); an uncle of Ollie’s named Cedric whom Eloise wasn’t aware existed would have adored to come, and was flattered that the couple thought to invite him, but surely Ollie remembered how Cedric felt about traveling, and what atrocity transpired the last time he boarded a train? Nobody wants to see that again, Cedric assured them. Nobody.

  As she tackled the pile, she found a steady rhythm for herself, a four-count beat: open, read, smile, log; open, read, smile, log. Soon, the routine became hypnotic, and then, finally, gleefully therapeutic: she considered how all those little envelopes (even the regrets, the tearful excuses) bore evidence of just how much she was loved and appreciated. She gazed at them, scattered across the breakfast table like two hundred warm hugs. Beyond them, her flat glowed with soft morning light, and London pulsed with the same refined excitement that first seduced her six years ago, when she moved here to get a master’s in art history at UCL,
and that continues to seduce her now, as she puts the final touches on the seating chart.

  How could she not consider herself lucky, privileged? After all, hadn’t that been the reason she decided to take the Mission: Breathe job in the first place? She’d been offered other jobs after grad school, positions that were more in line with the careers of her friends (a development role at the Tate Modern; VP of publicity at one of the big Haymarket firms), but still she’d chosen this, she’d chosen charity. She considered it her responsibility, a sort of noblesse oblige duty of hers to give back. And besides, the parties really were fabulous.

  Thinking again of the Daily Mail reporter attempting to defame her efforts with claims of shallowness, she feels a sharp sting. Her blood starts boiling, and she hovers the computer’s mouse over her e-mail, which she’d minimized at the bottom of the screen.

  At the last instant, though, she yanks her hand away. To distract herself, she looks at the names of the two remaining guests who, nine days out from the wedding, she’s yet to seat: Donna Wyckoff and Henrique Lafarge. Squinting, she rubs her temples; the riddle of what to do with her parents has been puzzling her ever since she received Henrique’s RSVP (late) two weeks ago, his name scrawled out in fluid, Continental script. Since then, she’s moved them around the seating chart in a dizzying game of hide-and-seek, trying to keep them apart while also contriving scenarios in which they might interact. It’s been infuriating work, though—twice she’s had to reseat an entire table of guests, and last week she was on the verge of revoking her father’s invitation, just to make her own life a little easier.

  Fearing that she’s reached the end of her patience, she opts for the most obvious solution: she slams her computer shut and figures she’ll deal with it later.

  “Fuck it,” she says, and downs the last dregs of her espresso.

  * * *

  At noon she takes the Tube to Canary Warf to meet Ollie for lunch at a bistro on Montgomery Square, a few blocks away from his office at Barclays London headquarters. She waits nearly thirty minutes before bringing up the issue of seating arrangements.

  “What if I just sit them next to each other?” she says.

  “As in side by side?”

  “As in side by side.”

  “Huh.” Ollie picks the onions out of his burger and discards them on his bread plate. He rolls up the sleeves of his shirt and loosens his tie.

  “I mean, they’re my parents. Is it that weird that they’re going to be sitting next to each other?” Eloise looks around for their waiter, who told her five minutes ago that her salad was on the way. “Go ahead and eat,” she says, though she knows he won’t.

  “Of course it’s not weird.” He reaches across the table for her hand. “It’s just—I thought you said they didn’t get along all that well.”

  “You’re right,” she says. “It’s a horrible idea.”

  When she went on her first date with Ollie five years ago, Eloise was hardly speaking to her father herself. Henrique had taken up a third wife, a French soap star two years younger than Eloise, and she couldn’t bear to face the child her father had become. But last year she received word that he’d left the soap star (or perhaps she left him—her father was rather vague on the issue, saying that il etait près de se caser). At first, she had a difficult time believing him: Henrique, ready to settle down? It was like asking Paul to get off his high horse. Yet, over the past twelve months, her faith in her father’s proclaimed need for stability and maturity has grown. He canceled his annual boys’ trip to Biarritz, which was a start, and from what Eloise could gather, more of his weekend nights were now spent reading at home, rather than buying bottles of champagne for women a third his age at some Parisian nightclub.

  “Have you told your mum?” Ollie asks.

  “To be honest…” Eloise pauses and stirs her iced tea with her straw. “I mean … To be honest, she’s not totally aware that he’s going to be there.”

  “Well, uh, don’t you think that’s the first order of business?”

  “I’m going to tell her,” Eloise says. “I just haven’t found the right opportunity to.”

  The waiter refills her iced tea and apologizes again for her salad’s delay. She smiles, but given how he’s looking at her (terrified, like he’s staring down the barrel of a gun), she worries that whatever she’s doing is coming across as more of a sneer. Ollie, meanwhile, cracks a joke, a one-liner about the restaurant growing its own watercress that, in the hands of someone less charming, would come across as cliché at best and snooty at worst. The waiter laughs, though; any traces of Eloise-inspired terror fade, and he seems instantly at ease. Watching Ollie joke, she wonders what it’s like to be so likable. She’s always been liked, sure, but that’s different; it’s not the same thing. Being likable is an inherent state of being, while being liked takes work: a constant effort to suppress the parts of her that her siblings have called tone deaf or out of touch; a daily war she wages to keep her privilege in check. Sometimes, though, she just can’t help it. Sometimes, her effort starts to show.

  “I’m sure you’ll figure it out,” Ollie says, and looks down at his burger.

  “I’ll tell her that he’s coming when I pick her up from the airport tomorrow,” she says. “Honest to God, Ollie, eat. It’s going to get cold.”

  He plucks a single French fry from his plate, pops it in his mouth, and smiles.

  “Just—make sure you’re managing your expectations,” he says, once he’s swallowed.

  “What do you mean?”

  He reaches for the ketchup and shakes a glob of it out onto his plate.

  “You know, just, maybe don’t expect too much to come from your mum and dad seeing each other again,” he says, adding, “Because sitting them next to each other … that just sends a pretty specific message, is all.”

  “Oh, come on. Give me a little credit. I’m not trying to stage some kind of Parent Trap bullshit.” She laughs and looks around the room again. “Honestly, at this point I might as well go home and make my own damn salad.”

  Is she, though? Trying to contrive some latent romance to bloom between Donna and Henrique? No, she tells herself. She’s smarter than that; she’s not that naïve. It’s not that her mother doesn’t love Henrique anymore—Eloise knows for a fact that she does; she’s always mining Eloise for information about her father whenever they speak on the phone—but in the years since they divorced, too much animosity has been allowed to fester; too many walls have been built. And clearing away that rancorous mess is too Herculean a task for Eloise to consider. Still, though, would a minor reconciliation be too much to ask for? Not love, per se, but rather the subtle grace of an apology? Of forgiveness?

  “Let’s change the subject,” she says.

  Ollie wipes his mouth—he’s finally given in and started on the burger—and nods.

  “Have you spoken to your sister?” he asks.

  “She texted me from the hotel. She said she liked the suite, thank God.”

  He sets down his burger. Mustard oozes out from beneath the bun. “No,” he says. “I mean about the job.”

  Eloise smooths down her hair. “Not yet,” she says. “I will when I see her.”

  The truth is, though, she still has no strategy for broaching the subject with Alice. On paper, the whole ordeal seemed easy enough: unprovoked, Ollie (because this is the type of man Ollie is) had arrived home two weeks ago and announced that he’d had a fantastic idea. An old classmate of his from Sherborne had just taken the reins of a film production company in London whose bread-and-butter were high-budget documentaries. (“Nature stuff, mostly,” he’d said. “But also some big social justice pieces. The sort of stuff Morgan Freeman or Susan Sarandon would narrate.”) This particular classmate, he went on to explain, had called on Ollie a few years back for a bit (“or, really, a quite substantial amount”) of financial advising, and thus owed him a favor.

  “What if that favor was hiring Alice to work in distribution?” He leapt
up from the couch in the living room. “Brilliant, isn’t it?”

  Eloise stayed seated, and looked up at him. His blond hair was a bit tousled—it was the end of the day—which gave him a boyish look that was wonderfully at odds with his ropy rower’s build. She thought the same thing she had when she first met him: this is someone who’s been blessed to look perpetually twenty-three.

  “I don’t understand,” she said.

  “Come on. Think about it. How many times have you told me how much you suspect Alice hates her job?”

  Eloise reached forward and straightened a stack of magazines on the coffee table.

  “Yes,” she said. “But—”

  Ollie cut her off. “But what?! Think of it: You could save her from all that awful California sunshine! No melanoma for Alice!” Eloise tried not to laugh. “Finally, she’d get to have her big sister around to show her the ropes!”

  Eloise smiled, even though she knew how naïve Ollie’s suggestion was. When she’d called Claridge’s with her credit card number, she’d been fearful—petrified, even—of Alice’s reaction. And now—what? She was going to offer her a new job? Alice didn’t take well to handouts, particularly when they came from her. Still, the idea of being helpful, of being needed—and not just by anyone, but by her own sister—was seductive in a way that Eloise couldn’t ignore.

  She asked, “And you’re sure this classmate of yours—”

  “Xavier Wolfson.”

  “Okay. Xavier Wolfson. You’re sure he’d hire her?”

  Ollie nodded. “Absolutely. Like I said—he owes me.”

  “Okay,” Eloise conceded. “I’ll mention it to her.”

  * * *

  Eloise sets her mother’s suitcase down next to the love seat in the guest room and flips on the light.

  “Here we are,” she says, stepping aside to let Donna enter.

  “How lovely.”

  Eloise smiles. This morning she asked Anka to fit the bed with a fresh set of white cotton sheets, and to leave some hydrangeas in the vase on one of the two bedside tables. On the other one, she’d left her own, personal touch: an old picture she’d found of her and her mother outside the Palais de Tokyo, which she’d had matted and framed in a gorgeous ten-by-four-inch frame that she found last month at an antique store near Finsbury Park. She watches as Donna walks over to the window, past the picture, and opens the curtains, letting ashy light into the room. Her gaze falls down to the street, where it stays for a minute, tracking some unknown event, and Eloise finds herself wanting to know, desperately, what it is that has snatched her mother’s attention so relentlessly. When she can’t stand it any longer, she clears her throat, and Donna turns to her and smiles.