The People We Hate at the Wedding

by Grant Ginder

  “I don’t know.” Then: “Ollie went to school down there or something.”

  “The British and their goddamned traditions. We went to school next to a cornfield in Illinois. You don’t see us planning our weddings there.”

  Alice scrapes something from underneath her fingernail. “You don’t see us planning our weddings, period.”

  Paul fills his cheeks with air, then exhales. “How long is the drive?”

  “Google Maps puts it at about two and a half hours. But that’s without traffic.”

  “Two and a half hours? Aren’t we already pretty far south, and isn’t England smaller than New Jersey?”

  “Take it up with Google.”

  Paul watches as Donna emerges from the rental office, a road atlas of England tucked under her left arm. She’s wearing khaki pants, a light blue camisole, and a pair of sensible shoes—the kind that are sold at places like Talbots and Eileen Fisher under the dubious pretense of being fashionable, while also serving vague and unnamed orthopedic functions. Aging is a sudden process, Paul thinks, as his mother navigates a minefield of cement parking barriers. And despite her best efforts, Donna suddenly got old.

  He turns to Alice. “Can I at least have a Klonopin?”

  “You know I stopped taking that shit years ago,” she says. “Ever since that weekend in Carlsbad.”

  “Sure you did.”

  She rips her glasses off her face. “And what the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

  “Here’s Mom.”

  Donna stops a few feet from them. She looks at Paul, and then Alice, and then forcibly smiles, as if she’s paying due respect to her executioners.

  “It’s going to be a gorgeous drive,” she says. “And before she left yesterday, Eloise gave me the names of a few places we can stop for a drink, or lunch. They’re all supposed to be positively charming.”

  “Positively charming,” Alice parrots.

  “What?”

  “You’ve been spending too much time around Eloise.”

  “I—”

  Alice stops her. “We should go. There’s already going to be a ton of traffic.” She opens the passenger-side door, pushes down the shotgun seat, and motions grandly to the sliver of space in the back of the car. “Your chariot awaits, Paul.”

  Contorting his way past seat belts, a roller suitcase, and Alice’s purse, Paul folds into the rear of the Peugeot. He loathes himself for giving in so easily to his sister’s demands. More than that, though, he loathes how quickly and seamlessly he slips into his old childhood role. He loathes how quickly and seamlessly they all slip into their old roles: Donna trying to be nice, despite the fact that nice became an impossibility years ago; Alice veiling her disdain as she makes peace by bossing people around; Paul allowing himself to be tossed around like a rag doll because it justifies his contempt. He pulls his knees up to his chest—there’s nowhere else to put them—and wonders what Mark would say.

  “Here, Alice,” he hears his mother say outside the car. “Take the keys.”

  “What do you mean take the keys? Why would I need the keys?”

  From the backseat Paul watches as Donna walks around to the left side of the car, where Alice is standing.

  “I’m not going to drive this thing,” Donna says. “The steering wheel’s on the wrong side.”

  “What makes you think I’d be any better at it?” Alice removes her sunglasses again. Her cheeks are red, which makes the faint freckles that dust her nose burn like sunspots. She’s got her blond hair pulled back in a ponytail, and she brushes a few loose strands out of her face.

  “You’re from L.A.,” Donna says.

  “What’s that have to do with anything?”

  “You drive on the 405.”

  She squeezes past Alice and claims the passenger seat. Reaching back, she pats Paul’s knee.

  “I’ll navigate,” she says, pointing to the road atlas in her lap.

  “Oh, no.” Alice slams the passenger door shut and shakes her head as she circles back around to the driver’s side. “No, no, no,” she says, opening her own door. “God knows when that atlas was made. I’ve got the map pulled up on my phone. Paul can navigate as we go.”

  “I’m fine doing nothing. Really.” He shifts, trying to find a comfortable position for his legs, which now, in the backseat of the Peugeot, seem longer than they ever have before.

  Alice tosses her phone at him, and it lands squarely in his lap.

  “You literally just have to follow the blue dot,” she says. “No one’s asking you to blaze a trail, for Christ’s sake.”

  * * *

  The hole in his life that Mark left creates a hollow pit in Paul’s stomach, but strangely it’s all the small actions the breakup will eventually necessitate that cause a million pangs to prick his ribs. There are so many knots to untie as they work to separate their lives, and loosening each one will require a phone call, an e-mail, a text. Who will keep the apartment? Mark, likely, though maybe that isn’t such a bad thing. Paul’s tired of Philadelphia—of people overlooking the mediocrity of its restaurants; of its obsession with a whitewashed and mythical history. Yes, he could use a change, particularly now that he’s been (1) sacked from his job and (2) ceremoniously dumped by his boyfriend. What better time to hack away at the ties that bind? But where should he go? There are, of course, hundreds of places. Thousands, really. Picking up and leaving for any one, though, would require—will require—the same awful and impossible steps. The buying of cardboard boxes. The emptying of closets and cupboards. The division of goods and wares. The artifacts, so to speak, that must be salvaged from a fire. Stained pillowcases and half-burned candles; two coat racks and a love seat that’s not quite long enough to accommodate two grown bodies. A mail receptacle they never hung, a crafty little thing that had been given to them as a housewarming present: a box with two smaller containers, one for Paul’s letters and one for Mark’s.

  “A his-and-his sort of thing,” their friend Audrey had said, when she’d presented them with it.

  Now what would he call it? In the event that he got to keep the receptacle—and he hoped he would; like everything else, he wanted it—how would he explain those twin boxes to people? What’s more, what would it look like with only one of the boxes stuffed with letters? Lonely, Paul thinks, lonely and unbalanced.

  They’re stopped in bumper-to-bumper traffic on the M3, a few miles north of Woking, and it dawns on Paul that he can’t feel his toes; his legs are hiked halfway up his nostrils, which has cut off circulation to everything below his kneecaps. He tries wiggling his toes, and when that doesn’t work he decides to let it go. Wincing through a wave of pins and needles, he fantasizes over what Mark might say if he called him up to tell him that he’d suddenly become a double amputee; that, thanks to a torturous few hours that he’d selflessly spent in the back of a Peugeot, surgeons had to saw off everything below his knees. He thinks of the look that would be on Mark’s face—a mix of horror and pity and sympathy—and for a moment he gets giddy. But then he tells himself that he’s better than that—or, if he isn’t, then he wants to be—and forces himself to look out the window, where a long scar of vehicles, minivans and caravans and coupes, gashes south toward the English Channel.

  He counts how many heads he can see in the cars that surround him, and then he wonders about the thoughts festering and multiplying inside of them. He wants to know if he’s the only person on, say, this mile of the M3, who’s been dumped in the past seventy-two hours, or if there’s some other kindred, miserable asshole stuck in the backseat of a car. But even if there is, and even if they could sit on the curb and air their wounds, what good would it do?

  Heartache, he’s come to realize, the devastation of being chewed up and spit out, is an individual and isolating experience. Why else would there be a million different idioms in just as many languages that tried, always unsuccessfully, to describe it? If there were some common, shared experience, language would have already accounted for th
at. It would have streamlined the feeling into something concise and translatable, like water, or food, or air.

  * * *

  “You’re going to take a left in about four kilometers,” Paul says.

  Twenty minutes ago, after some initial bickering, Paul, his sister, and his mother agreed to stop for lunch at one of the places Eloise had suggested, some Ye Olde Inn ten kilometers off the main road in the New Forest.

  “You mean I’m going to exit the M3 and then take a left.” Alice glances at him in the rearview mirror.

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “No, not yeah, sure, Paul. I have no idea where I’m going. I need specific directions.”

  In the passenger seat, Donna begins flipping through the road atlas.

  “Hold on.” Paul zooms in on the map. “It’s like none of these roads even have names.”

  In the past twenty minutes, the traffic has opened up; they aren’t freely moving, but there is enough space now between the cars for Paul to see a series of lazy bucolic hills to their right and a thick green forest to their left. On Alice’s phone, the blue dot jitters, correcting and recorrecting its position on the map.

  “I think the road that you want is called Old Forest Lane,” he says. “But just … just give me a second.”

  “That road isn’t on my map,” Donna says.

  Paul squints. He just wants the goddamned dot to stop moving for a second. “Your map was published alongside the Magna Carta,” he says. “The roads have probably changed.”

  “It’s the 2005 edition.” Donna holds up the atlas so Paul can see its cover. “Certainly things haven’t changed that much?”

  “Get that thing out of my face.”

  Now she’s handing it back to him.

  “Maybe just look at it, sweetie? Just to double-check what your phone is saying?”

  Traffic stops again, and Alice nearly rear-ends a minivan. Donna drops the atlas, and it falls between Paul’s knees. Behind them, someone honks.

  “Oh, geez.”

  “I don’t need to double-check it. It’s a satellite. Satellites don’t need to be double-checked.”

  Alice thuds the steering wheel with the heel of her hand. “Can someone just please tell me where I’m fucking going.”

  “The next exit,” Paul says. He’s not sure if that’s right, but he can’t stand the prospect of prolonging this discussion regarding the merits of GPS with his mother any longer. Besides, each of the one-lane roads leading into the New Forest seems as good and worthless as the next, and he imagines that they all lead to the same, predictable destinations: a cow blocking traffic, a village of thatched roofs, a gastropub that’s been serving the same watered-down ale since before the American Revolution.

  “Take the next exit—yes, this one—and then bear left.”

  They crawl down a lane walled in by thick shrub hedges. Above them, branches of elms wrap together to form leafy tunnels perforated by pinpricks of sunlight. Hugging the steering wheel, Alice balances her sunglasses on top of her head and leans forward. The road’s hardly straight—every hundred yards or so it inexplicably and carelessly banks around a sharp corner of nothing, and it’s only blind faith that promises Paul that they won’t smash into something head-on once they clear the curve. After ten kilometers they emerge into a small hamlet, an afterthought of a village with a few houses, a gas station, a chemist’s, and a smattering of other single-story buildings. Alice parks the car in a gravel lot behind a pub, and once Paul’s extricated himself from the back of the Peugeot, he tells his sister and mother that he’ll meet them inside in a few minutes.

  “Are you sure?” Donna asks; Alice has already gone inside.

  “Yes.” Paul does his best not to sound irritable.

  He waits for her to leave and reaches into his pocket for a pack of cigarettes. Fishing one out, he lights it and leans against the car. Mark used to hate it when he smoked. Not because of the smell, or for how it was crippling Paul’s health, but because he thought it looked trashy.

  “There are smokers you know, and smokers you don’t know,” he would say. The smokers you know—or, as Paul thinks now, the smokers Mark thought he knew—were people like Audrey Hepburn and Clark Gable, people who managed to turn puffing a cigarette into high, erotic art. The smokers he didn’t know were Paul and everyone else.

  “Honey?”

  Hearing his mother’s voice, Paul moves to drop the cigarette, but Donna stops him.

  “Oh, don’t worry about it,” she says. “In fact, you mind if I have one?”

  “Yes,” Paul says.

  “Yes, I can have one, or yes, you mind?”

  “Yes, I mind. You’re trying to turn this into a moment.”

  “I’m not sure I know what that means.” Donna scuffs at the gravel with her toes. “Alice forgot her wallet. And I wanted to check on you.”

  “I’m fine,” Paul says, exhaling a thick cloud of smoke. “I’ll be there in a second.”

  Donna pulls him to her and kisses his forehead. “Oh, Pauly.”

  “What did I say about calling me that?”

  “I know how hard it is,” she says.

  Across the street, a small pickup truck pulls into the gas station. Pigeons coo atop sloped roofs.

  “You don’t, though,” Paul says. “Your husband died. He didn’t just up and leave you in the middle of a foreign country. It’s not the same thing.”

  “I wasn’t talking about your father.”

  “Who, then? Henrique?” He ashes his cigarette and stomps sparks into the earth. “He was a prick. Good riddance.”

  Donna sighs, dramatically, and Paul’s blood boils.

  “All I’m trying to say—”

  “I know what you’re trying to say,” Paul says, “and please—I’m begging you—just keep it to yourself, okay? Do me a favor and just keep it to yourself.”

  Dropping the cigarette to the ground, he adds: “The only person I want to talk to is Dad, and he’s fucking dead.”

  * * *

  He first catches sight of the coast around three o’clock when, on account of some roadwork, they’re forced to take a detour on the A338 and dip through Bournemouth. He’s staring straight forward to ward off carsickness—the fish and chips and beer he had for lunch are somersaulting in his stomach—so when they crest one of the gentle hills that carve through the English southwest, he’s able to see it immediately, the sea. It lacks vastness, is the first thing he thinks. It doesn’t have the sort of oceanic interminability that he’s used to. Rather, this—all this blue and gray and dull green water—somehow feels reasonable, digestible. Maybe it’s because he knows that France is right there, just out of eyeshot, or maybe it’s because right now, crammed in the back of the Peugeot, suffering through Alice’s Fiona Apple album for the umpteenth time, he knows that vastness is something that he lacks the mental capacity to confront.

  “How gorgeous,” his mother says, and neither Paul nor Alice says anything in response.

  His mother’s right, though, Paul thinks. It is gorgeous—it really is. Lush open fields sloping toward gunmetal beaches. Sheep dotting hillsides like wisps of cotton. The sun glinting off the surface of the water. It’s not the blazing glory of a California sunset—that fiery magnificence whose beauty lies in its ability to convince you each night that the world is ending. No, he thinks, there’s something subtler going on here, something less intrusive. A polite and very British reminder that gorgeous things are out there and happen every day.

  “Thomas Hardy country,” Alice says.

  Paul blinks. “Never read him.”

  “That’s a lie. We had to read Far from the Madding Crowd in the tenth grade.”

  “I know. I didn’t read it. Bought the Cliffs Notes.”

  “Tess of the d’Urbervilles?”

  “Skipped that one, too.”

  Alice looks at him in the rearview mirror. “What a disappointment.”

  Paul ignores her. At lunch she twice interrupted him by taking out her p
hone, and once she stormed away from the table, sans excuse, to make a call. He’s irritated—today is his day to be in a foul mood.

  He looks out the window, back to the sea.

  Mark was an asshole, right? Particularly at the end? Yes, Paul tells himself. He was. Objectively, Mark was an asshole. Why, then, can’t Paul seem to believe that? Why, in the past seventy-two hours, has he been dead set on revising the history of their relationship, on wiping clean the terrible and sadistic ways Mark treated him? It’s not due to a lack of effort; he’s lost track of how many times he’s replayed that scene from the Millennium Bridge, of how many times he’s recited Mark’s words, zeroing in on his cold, compassionless voice. But every time he does that—every time he’s on the verge of convincing himself that, maybe, this breakup is a good thing—he’ll stumble upon some other memory. He’ll recall those heady days when they first moved to Philadelphia and Mark’s insecurities overshadowed his own. When Paul would hold Mark’s head in his lap and stroke his hair as Mark rattled on about what it was like to be young and inexperienced in one of the country’s best economics departments. Paul would respond with what he knew Mark needed to hear—that he was brilliant, that it was only a matter of time until his colleagues realized that—and Mark would pull his face down to him and kiss him and tell him how crazy, how absolutely fucking crazy, he’d go without him. Invariably, the next day Paul would come home to find lamb roasting in the oven; he’d trudge in after another terrible day with Goulding to an apartment filled with the woodsy scents of rosemary and sage. “Hell,” Mark would say, wiping his hands on his apron. “It’s the least I could do.” And there was, of course, more: in the middle of the night, for example, when he thought Paul was asleep, Mark had a tendency of kissing the back of his neck, of gently mussing his hair. During the last six months, these moments grew few and far between—Paul was more likely to find Mark snoring with his back turned toward him than gently kissing him—but still, for some vexing reason, he can’t help but give them a disproportionate amount of attention. They grow and fester, these pleasant memories, forming indelible cancers that belie Paul’s despair. What he wouldn’t give, he thinks, to be wholly convinced of Mark’s dickishness. To be rid of this nagging doubt rooted in happier times.