A Wedding on the Banks

by Cathie Pelletier

  Marvin was explicit about what tasks Randy would not be expected to perform as part of his official duties.

  “Stay to hell away from the mourners,” he warned his grandson. “Don’t touch a thing in the embalming room. And don’t even think of going into the chapel.”

  Marvin was in a grandfather-employer quandary. Maybe the boy would be capable, later on, of learning the line of caskets. He could be a salesman of sorts in the showroom. Junior could teach him. It might keep them both out of trouble.

  “Balls,” said Randy. “So like, what am I supposed to do then?” He ran his musical fingers through his closely cropped hair. He felt bald. He longed for his ponytail, but a barber had heartlessly disposed of it on Saturday. It had been one of Marvin’s strictest demands. Almost a year of growth, gone down the drain at some stranger’s barbershop. “Like, what is my job?”

  “I’ll tell you what your job is,” Marvin said, and pulled out a file before him. “It says here your take-home pay will be sixty-eight dollars and ninety cents every week.”

  “So whadda I do?” asked Randy, wishing he could see through the wooden door to the reception room where the secretary was lounging.

  “Let’s see,” said Marvin, as he pondered the business details in his head. “Sixty-eight ninety a week. Looks to me like you sit in the coffee room, stuff your face with doughnuts, and keep your mouth shut.”

  “It’s a deal, man,” said Randy, suddenly enlightened by the world of big-time employment.

  ***

  Ever since the wedding invitation had arrived from her niece Amy Joy, Pearl had been in the doldrums. Maybe it was because she hadn’t seen Amy Joy in ten years, and this wedding reminded her of the cruel passage of time, as everything did these days. Time had become Pearl’s mortal enemy. Time was gobbling up everyone and everything she ever loved. Time would be coming for her soon.

  Pearl McKinnon Ivy turned the thick pages of the old McKinnon scrapbook as she sat on the edge of her bed, still in housecoat and slippers at ten thirty in the morning.

  “What would Marge have thought of that?” Pearl wondered, as she stared down at a picture of her older sister. Marge was brown-haired, with a wash of freckles across the straight bridge of her nose. Hollyhocks swam in the frame around her. The picture was taken, then, just outside the old McKinnon homestead, famed for its display of the flower.

  “What would Marge say about me sitting here on my bed, still in my nightclothes, in the middle of the day?” Pearl wondered again. “Marge was always up with the birds.” The hollyhocks began to swim around Marge’s head as Pearl’s eyes filled with warm tears. The memory of the old homestead, with its charming summer kitchen, drenched in all those colored flowers of China, had unlocked another kind of memory inside her. Suddenly her bedroom in Portland, Maine, was overpowered with the smell of hollyhocks. Their fragrance burst out of the closet, killing the formaldehyde aroma of Marvin’s suits. It fairly flew from the drapes, seeped out of the rugs, was so strong it stirred up a small breeze and moved the loose strands of hair still clinging, uncombed, around Pearl’s face. Or was that just a regular breeze, billowing up from the streets of Portland? Who could tell anymore? Hollyhocks. Marge. The Reverend Ralph. The old homestead.

  “Why are you bothering me now?” Pearl asked Marge’s faded picture. “Why now, after all these years?’ she asked the fragile hollyhocks, and now the fragrance of them was so thick that Pearl closed the scrapbook and lay back on her bed. The flowery perfume moved in on her, the way a heat wave presses down, blanketed, solid as a wall. She could even hear bumblebees, which unnerved her at first. The last time she heard bees was when she had her nervous breakdown. That was the balmy spring of 1928, when Marvin came into their small apartment and announced that he was dropping out of law school to become an integral part of the family funeral business. Pearl heard bees buzzing in her head, loud enough to be a swarm of little airplanes. Undertaking, instead of law. How does one adjust to that? But it had been forty-two years now. She had recovered. The bees had eventually flown away. Today was different. These were different bumblebees. These were the bumblebees of 1923, the year her father left. There had been hollyhocks that day, hadn’t there? And Marge had put one hand on Pearl’s shoulder, one on Sicily’s, and they had watched the Reverend bounce away in a horse and buggy. To catch the train in Houlton. To go to China. To die of kala-azar. When he had disappeared, Marge said—oh, what had she said? It was something straight out of the Bible, word for word, but Pearl couldn’t remember. What she did remember was that she had gone immediately and stuffed her nose into a hollyhock, a lavender one.

  “My heavens, yes,” she thought, as she lay on the bed. “It was lavender, wasn’t it?” And lavender had always been her favorite color. Did it begin there? Or did she choose that flower because she had always loved the color? Things of the mind were so complicated. The fat smell of hollyhocks was fingering its way around her on the bed. She undid the top buttons of her nightdress and loosened the garment away from her throat. Her hand brushed the skin of her neck and she pulled it back quickly, outraged at the work nature had done there, the loosening, the harrowing, the furrows. The way one readies earth in order to plant a garden. Useless work. What seeds could come up after sixty years? What plants could prosper?

  “Weeds,” Pearl whispered. She heard the mailman flop her mail into the box and the cast-iron thud as the cover fell. Then she heard the neighbor’s dog barking as mail was delivered in the next yard. The phone rang many times, but she did not even consider answering.

  “Some people are more patient than others,” Pearl thought, “depending on how long they allowed the phone to ring before giving up.” Perhaps this was a secret of life, of why some succeed where others don’t. It all has to do with how long a person will sit with a phone to his or her ear and listen to it ring.

  A housefly landed on her nose, and she squinted her eyes to stare at it. But she hadn’t been able to read anything up close for so many years now, what did she expect to see right on the very end of her nose? Her eyes were growing toward cataracts. That’s what the eye doctor told her. It happens to all of us, he had said. She wrinkled her nose and the fly, with its head of magnificent eyes, launched off for new territory.

  Pearl heard her next-door neighbor, Mrs. Tinley, hosing down her car.

  “Washing off the mud,” Pearl thought, and even this seemed significant in life, another clue perhaps as to how some folks manage where others don’t. She had lived in Mattagash long enough, eighteen years of her life, to know that this could be an effective maneuver. The McKinnons, Pearl had come to realize, were famous for such. She and Sicily were the only McKinnons left in Mattagash. The name, at least there, had died out. But she thought of the old aunts and uncles. The second cousins. If one had a drinking problem it was shoved into a closet. None of the McKinnons drank in public. They preached “Love thy neighbor” a good part of the day, then spent the rest gossiping about that neighbor.

  “Real good Christians,” thought Pearl. She wondered if Amy Joy was in the family way. Why else would anyone shiver and shake to get married on May first? Well, if she was, so be it. She was always boy crazy. Yet Pearl knew that if someone else’s daughter found herself “up the stump,” to use Marvin’s expression, and still unmarried, she would be nothing short of scandalous. But if a McKinnon ended up in the same predicament, or a Craft, or a Fennelson—and many of them did—it was another matter.

  “The Lord will take care of her,” Pearl remembered her great-aunt Caroline saying of her pregnant daughter Lydia. Pearl was very young then. And she believed her great-aunt. She felt there was a difference between a Gifford getting pregnant out of wedlock and a McKinnon doing so. Now she was too many miles down the road from Mattagash, too many years, to believe any of that nonsense. The Lord will take care of her. Great-Aunt Caroline was dead. So was Lydia. And that child was God only knows where. Lydia had never come back
to Mattagash after she’d had that baby. Baby. Pearl still thought of it as a small woolly bundle kicking its feet, yet in real years it would be almost as old as she was now. The Lord will take care of her. Just a matter of washing off the mud.

  “The Lord didn’t knock her up,” Pearl thought. She listened as the lunchtime traffic in front of her house increased. Folks putting food into their bodies just to keep going. Time was moving on, with or without her. She felt around on the bed for the scrapbook and walked her fingers over the cover. Marge’s old book, passed on to Pearl because she was next in line. And, of course, that meant she was next in line for a lot of things. Marge was dead, and she, Pearl McKinnon Ivy, was next in line. Thanks a lot. Thanks a hell of a lot.

  When she heard Mr. Tinley turn into his driveway, his car door slam, his dog bark, his house door shut behind him, Pearl smiled.

  “It’s so routine,” she thought, “I don’t even have to look to know what’s going on. Or what’s gonna happen next. Marvin will be home in a half hour. Him and Mr. Tinley are as regular as clocks.”

  There was a scurrying, micelike, in the attic. She stared up at the ceiling. It must be the wind rustling about. It would actually be nice to have mice living up there. How Marge had fought the mice, back at the old homestead. Yet it was as if they were part of the family. Nowadays, especially in Portland, you got to be pretty damn hard up before you get a few self-respecting mice to settle down in your house. Yes, it would be nice to believe there were mice living in her attic, in her nice house on Hillsboro Street, a little secret from the neighbors. She imagined Mrs. Tinley standing on a chair screaming at just the thought of those mice next door. It would be nice to have something living up there besides dusty trunks of old clothes and letters. Some of Marge’s personals. Some of the Reverend Ralph’s. Some of her mother’s delicate china. Letters and papers, mostly. Articles it seemed only the spiders were interested in these days. Junior’s kids certainly didn’t care. They must believe she had always been from Portland, Maine, their grandmother Pearl. They had never bothered to ask her one single bit of family history. She even brought it up one day when Cynthia Jane, the oldest, was a senior in high school.

  “Did you know that you’re descended from the first settlers of Mattagash, Maine?” Pearl had proudly told her first grandchild. She had waited years for that day.

  “Where?” Cynthia Jane had asked, and turned up that little nose that looked so much like Thelma’s.

  “Did you know that your great-grandfather Ralph was a missionary who went all the way over to China and died there?” Pearl had gone on, determined to leave behind her this oral history. To give it to her grandchildren as something to be protected for years to come. The way you might give a high school graduation gift. The way you might give them luggage, or money, or bicycles.

  “Who?” Cynthia Jane had asked.

  Pearl closed her eyes. She did not want to look up at the wide-open ceiling anymore. It reminded her too much of the clear night sky over Mattagash, of the late-night sessions with Marge when the three sisters had sat with legs dangling off the back porch and spied on the sky for falling stars.

  “There’s one!” She could hear her own voice at twelve years old. Yes, she could still hear it. Now, how many people who don’t have such things preserved on a tape recorder can say that?

  “There’s one, Margie!” And Sicily would be asleep beside them on the porch. Old Chad, the dog. My God, how had she ever let Old Chad slip out of her memory? The day he died, she and Sicily had simply known they would never be happy again. And here she was, in Portland, Maine, with a family who barely knew she existed and yet she’d forgotten a friend as loyal as Old Chad.

  “Old Chad,” Pearl whispered, and tried to swallow the lump in her throat. “There’s another one! Wake up, Sicily! Wake up and look!” It had been so much better than she had ever remembered it. Why didn’t she know that when she was way back there right in the heart of the action?

  “We were washing off so much mud all the time, the way we were taught,” Pearl thought, “that we never realized how good we really had it.”

  So it had come to this, then? Sixty years of living and learning and raising a family had brought her to stretching out on her bed, in her nightclothes, and letting a whole day inch by. She hadn’t even had an urge to go to the bathroom. If she had made her morning coffee, perhaps it would have been different. But she hadn’t. The only energy she’d put into the day had been to sit up, swing her legs over the edge of the bed, and pick up the old scrapbook where she’d left it the evening before. The rest was history. Yet she’d worked out a lot of things, more things than if she’d gotten up and puttered about her kitchen in another useless day of routine. She would call Sicily as soon as possible. Yes, she would be coming to the wedding, even if she was the only one in the Ivy family to do so. She would even set her mind to picking out a perfect gift for Amy Joy. But no, she would not be staying at Sicily’s.

  “Please have someone clean up Marge’s old house,” she would tell Sicily. “Please have someone sweep all the cobwebs off the old homestead. And tell the mice I’m coming home.”

  ***

  When Marvin walked in the front door half an hour later, sharp as a clock, Pearl was in a lavender dress, with her hair swept up and sprayed in a nice coiffure. The electric teakettle was singing, and the radio was tuned in to a local talk show. The newspaper had been brought in off the front porch and all the houseplants had been given a drink of water. Who would know that there had never even been any breakfast dishes, or lunch dishes, to wash and put away? For forty years now, Marvin had preferred to eat one or two doughnuts in the Ivy Funeral Home coffee room for his breakfast. How would he have known any different if, over the years, Pearl had been starving herself during the day? If she had been lying crazily on her bed for hours? He never noticed if she waxed a floor, or bleached a sheet, or dusted a lamp. Would forty years of dust have piled up to his nose and eventually choked him? A houseguest in his own living room?

  Marvin smiled as he plunked his calfskin briefcase down and took off his tweed jacket. He made a quick assessment of the kitchen. How nice it would be to have nothing more to worry about all day long than washing a few dishes and cooking a bit of food. Maybe dust a vase every couple days. Bring in the paper. Open the mail. Search for a purse. He almost envied a woman’s life. He sniffed the air. Usually he could identify the fare of the evening by keen smell alone. He knew pot roast immediately. Steaks and pork chops were more elusive. So was meat loaf. But there was no mistaking the spicy air of stuffed cabbages or a boiled dinner. Marvin sniffed harder. Ham. Yes, it was definitely ham. Boiled ham dinner. Good. It had been at least a month since he had tasted the sweet broth, the carrots, the small whole potatoes, the tender ham. Boiled ham dinner, that old New England fare that had put muscle on their ancestors. Helped them cope in a harsh new land. Good for her. Good for Pearly.

  “And how was your day?” Marvin asked, as Pearl put a bowl of canned pea soup and a hastily built ham sandwich in front of her starving husband.

  ***

  “Come on down!” Thelma Ivy screamed along with the Price Is Right audience on television. The trick was for the three contestants to pinpoint the price of a new 1969 Maytag washer. Thelma searched her memory bank of female knowledge. Her very first washer had been a Maytag. She purchased it in 1948, the year she and Junior were married. What had they paid for it? Yet that was over twenty years ago. What had been the rate of inflation over that period? And how much would that amount to in dollars and cents right now? Right at this minute? Good heavens, they only gave contestants seconds to figure this all out. Even game shows demanded so much of a person’s intellectual and emotional responses, especially three or four a day.

  “I’ll be a basket case if I watch Let’s Make a Deal,” Thelma decided, and she reached out a shaky hand and shut the monster off. She trembled at the sudden disappearance of Bob Bar
ker. It was as if she had murdered him. Had murdered the whole audience. Had ripped the very guts out of the shiny new Maytag. But it had been the most positive movement, she was quite sure, her hand had taken upon itself in ages. Thelma had been cheating on Junior for three months now, and he didn’t even suspect it. Maybe he thought he was the only one to have affairs, but he was wrong. Thelma had loved Bob Barker ever since she found out about Junior and Monique Tessier. Ever since she’d heard Milly, the secretary-accountant, laughing about it in the restroom at the Ivy Funeral Home, during the employee Christmas party. She was telling one of the ambulance drivers’ wives about it. They had come into the restroom to arrange their hair, fix their lipsticks, and smoke a quick cigarette since Marvin didn’t allow it in the funeral home.

  “I’m surprised he allows dying,” Milly had said to Buddy Simlac’s wife, about the no-smoking situation. Then she had gone on to spill the marital beans.

  “Oh yes, it’s been going on for months,” Milly had giggled. “I think Monique is bored. What other reason could there be?”

  Thelma had pulled her skinny feet and ankles up off the floor to avoid detection. By the time the women had doused their cigarettes beneath the water faucet and disappeared back into the dullness of the party, Thelma had heard all. And hard as she tried, she could not pee a drop.

  “I’m all shriveled up,” she thought, but she meant her heart.

  After that, Thelma fell so deeply in love with Bob Barker that every time she looked at her husband, she saw Bob’s narrow face on Junior’s fat body. At night she had lain beside Junior in their bed, and she had known it was not really her husband lying there, lost in his snores. It was Bob. Bobby. And several times in the past few weeks, she had lain beneath Junior, and while he grunted himself to satisfaction and whispered things like “Oh, Thel. Yes,” she had heard Bob whispering instead, gently, encouragingly, “Come on down, Thel. Come on down, baby.” And she had moved rhythmically beneath Junior and shouted, “Yes! Yes!” as she heard the crowd behind her catch its breath and wait to see if she was lucky enough, this time, to win. “Yes! Yes!” She wanted that refrigerator so much that she could taste all the food that might go in it! And Bob wanted her to win. She could see it in his eyes. He wanted all his women to win. It was she and Bob against the sponsors. “Oh, yes. Come on. Come on down.”