A Wedding on the Banks

by Cathie Pelletier

  The driver’s window of the dirty Buick, splattered with April’s muddy leftovers, wound cautiously down. Albert felt his pulse thumping about like a wild drum. Albert Pinkham was fifty-seven years old, and one day last week it had occurred to him that he might never again know the pleasure of undoing his belt buckle and letting his trousers drop because some woman was waiting, wanting him to. Albert glanced nervously at Bruce, who had his nose pressed like a pig’s against the pane in a frenzied inspection of the guest, his tail wagging furiously.

  “Go for it, boss,” the tail seemed to say.

  A delicate head popped out of the window and the movement startled Albert. He had meant to rattle off his pitch about how the Albert Pinkham Motel welcomes you greatly, and all, but then he saw the face, the shapely nose, the aristocratic chin, and those brunette wisps of hair tumbling about like little feathers.

  Albert Pinkham stared. Could it really be who he thought it was? Could it be her, tired of minks and Hollywood and Richard Burton? He was the seagull now, spotting for the first time the glistening, violet-backed raven.

  “How can you people up here drive on these roads?” Monique Tessier asked the proprietor. “I nearly bounced my tits off.”

  MÉNAGE À TROIS AT THE MAISON LAWLER: SIGHTS, SOUNDS, AND SMELLS OF MATRIMONY

  Catholics, Catholics, ring the bell,

  Protestants, Protestants, go to hell.

  —lines to a childhood singsong

  Amy Joy sat in front of her vanity mirror, on her dainty vanity chair, the set Sicily had gotten with Green Stamps as an eighth-grade graduation present for her daughter. Amy Joy sat in her bedroom, in front of her cans of Clairol spray-on silver hair color, deodorants, perfumes, and a half bottle of Pepsi. She sat with her chin on her hands and stared at her face in the mirror. She was fresh from a hot bath, which had opened her pores and soothed her muscles but troubled her mind with prewedding jitters. Now her face was waiting to be covered again with a layer of creamy makeup. Her eyes were waiting for the two blue swaths of shadow to render them alluring. The brows were in need of a penciled arching, the cheekbones in need of rouge. The black eyeliner waited, on the table before her, to add mystery to her bottom lids. And then the silver spray, as liquid as poetry, which would turn strands of hair around her face into tinsel icicles, shimmering and fluid. Putois. Jean’s little skunk. Amy Joy stared at her childhood face, unspoiled, pristine as an old school photo. She looked like Sicily a bit, it was true, with her McKinnon eyes that wanted to see inside people. But her thick, frizzy hair, a drab brown, had none of the red highlights that had raged in her mother’s hair. Now Sicily’s hair was rusty, scattered with a wash of gray.

  “Spraying gray into your hair!” Sicily had criticized the streaks about her daughter’s face. “Mother Nature is gonna spray that onto your head permanently. Just wait a few years. You’ll get it for free.”

  “It’s not gray,” Amy Joy had quit protesting months ago. “It’s silver.” What was wrong, then, with trying to brighten up something as drab as medium-brown hair? Why not spray a patch of silver into a bleak world? What was wrong with bringing a little tinsel to Mattagash, Maine?

  “You’re making yourself grow old too fast, Amy Joy,” Sicily had warned, as if a pulse on aging was a talent her daughter had. You’re growing old too fast. This always reminded Amy Joy of those children with that aging disease. She had seen them on television, the little old men in baseball caps, toothless, rickety. Tiny Grandma Moses look-alikes in dresses sewn for ten-year-olds. Little girls with hair thin as spiderwebs, breastless and dying.

  “You’re just making yourself age,” Sicily had said. That showed how much she knew.

  Amy Joy sprayed one side of her hair. The color clung like wet beads to the strands until it grasped on and hardened. She was reminded of the wet drops of snow that splatter against a windowpane. She had seen twenty-three Mattagash winters. She knew snow. It was pliant at first, and soft, and on a warm window she had seen it glisten in drops, had seen those drops catch the outdoor light. And then, in the morning, when Jack Frost had ravaged his way across the pane, the drops were frozen solid, embedded, married to the glass. Fossilized snow. When Amy Joy and Jean Claude signed their marriage certificate they would be crystallizing themselves. The letters of their names would be like ancient fish that have died in rock and are now sealed forever.

  Amy Joy watched as the spray attached itself like silver flakes to each strand. But before she could finish the paint job on her hair, she was overwhelmed with sadness. There was something tragic in how her face, without the makeup, reminded her of crawling out of the Mattagash River, fresh from swimming, in need of a good toweling, in search of whatever food Sicily had cooking on the stove. What a simple time it had all been.

  “I feel like dying,” Amy Joy said, and she laid her head upon the circle of her arms and cried.

  When she heard Jean Claude’s Super Sport shift downward for the turn into the Lawler yard, Amy Joy went into the bathroom and splattered her eyes with cold water. They were still puffy but makeup would disguise the problem. She applied her second silver streak. Putois. Jeans and a sweater were suitable for the quiet occasion. She wished, however, that she’d had one of those stiff drinks Jean Claude promised to down before he left his job in Watertown. It could only help. It was three days to the wedding. The Ivys were descending upon Mattagash at any minute, no matter how Amy Joy wished she could have avoided inviting them. The truth was, she never thought for a second they’d accept. And then there was the problem of the future in-laws. Jean Claude’s mother was praying to saints that the Vatican had yet to canonize.

  “She even make some up, her,” Jean Claude had explained. And now Amy Joy’s betrothed was downstairs, about to partake in what was to be a get-acquainted-with-the-mother-in-law party. Sicily had promised this would happen. In fact, she had initiated the event. And then she had placed her wedding dress into Amy Joy’s arms. It was, strangely enough, this sudden change in Sicily that had precipitated the sadness in her daughter. Amy Joy almost hated to see Sicily relent. After all, it was Amy Joy as a child Sicily was finally relinquishing. And it was that same child Amy Joy was desperately holding on to.

  Amy Joy touched her lips with gloss. Now there was the Amy Joy who was ready to take on the bilingual world. The eyes were blue almonds above the black liner. The sides of her face glittered in silver. The lips shone. The cheekbones blossomed red. It was time to go down and make an appearance. All soon-to-be brides got the jitters.

  Sicily welcomed Jean Claude into the living room and watched as he sat uncomfortably on the sofa. The future mother-in-law sat in the chair across from him. She had smelled a quick odor of whiskey as he passed her. It may have been merely beer or wine. No matter. To Sicily it was all whiskey.

  “A nice cup of tea?” she asked him.

  “No tank you.”

  “Coffee?”

  “No tanks,” Jean Claude said. He bit carefully at one, then another of his fingernails. They smiled black smiles up at him.

  “A Coke?”

  “No.”

  “One of Amy Joy’s Pepsis?”

  “No.”

  “Orange juice?” Chalice de Tabernacle. Would he have to tell her in French? Jean Claude shook his head. Merde. Merde. Shit. Why had he agreed to this?

  They sat in silence and listened to the clock in the kitchen reminding them that in just three days they would be legally bound. They sat like indifferent travelers on a train until Amy Joy bounded down the stairs and allowed the pent-up sighs to escape from both of them.

  “Water then?” asked Sicily. “From the spring?” Christ de Calvaire! This anathema was taking a potshot at Christ’s unfortunate visit to Calvary.

  Ever since he was a little boy, Jean Claude knew that he would grow up one day to acquire a mother-in-law, and when he did, he must call her la belle-mère. The pretty mother. How then, eve
n with years of practice, could he accomplish this successfully? La femme avec une grande bouche, Jean Claude whispered to himself. This would be a more appropriate title. The woman with a big mouth.

  “She hask too much question, her,” he had complained to Amy Joy, when he was told of the tête-à-tête that would take place.

  “So?” Amy Joy had been indifferent, used to a lifetime of Sicily’s interrogations. “Hanswer them.”

  Jean Claude stood up when he saw Amy Joy. She saw right away that he was quite drunk. She might have smiled at him had they been at the Acadia Tavern in Watertown. Jean Claude could be clownish in the most sensitive way when he was nipping, his smile crooked, his curls tumbling about on his forehead. But this was not the place for crooked smiles and loose curls. This was a crew cut occasion.

  “Hello, sweetie,” Amy Joy said, and saw her mother cringe as she leaned over to quickly kiss her future groom.

  “Al-lo, Putois,” said Jean.

  “How was the drive, darling?” Amy Joy intended to throw out as many endearments as she could. It was obvious, by the look on Sicily’s face, that she wanted the evening plans to flop.

  “Holy Tabarnacle,” said Jean. “Hall I can see, me, for tree or four mile, is dem pothole and fross heave. Chalice!”

  Sicily canted her head at the unusual sound of the words, like a curious dog, but semantics didn’t arouse her tonight. Tonight she wanted Amy Joy to see this Frog for what he was. She wanted Amy Joy to realize what the social aspects of her life would be like from then on, if this marriage occurred.

  “And how is your mother?” Sicily asked. She had even tried, unbeknownst to her daughter, to phone the Cloutier home and rouse up Mrs. Cloutier as an ally. She had heard Amy Joy telling Lola Craft that Jean’s mother was against this wedding, too. Why Sicily couldn’t imagine. It was obvious to her that marrying Amy Joy Lawler amounted to several rungs up the social ladder for anyone from Frogtown. But Catholics were strange folks, Sicily knew. They lit candles for the dead and then played bingo by the light of them. She’d heard it all when it came to the Catholics. But Sicily couldn’t find the right Cloutier in the phone book. There were so many listed that she might as well be looking for a Smith or an Adams in New York City. And the two she did ring up answered their phones in French. They merely hung up when Sicily asked, meekly, “Parley vouse some English?” Of course they could all speak some English. They were just too proud to, was all. And there they were, in the good ole United States of America, living off the fat of the land all these years, and still speaking French!

  “My mudder?” asked Jean Claude, and Sicily nodded. “She ho-kay, her.”

  “Well, that’s good news,” said Sicily. “Whatever you said.”

  “Mama, please,” said Amy Joy.

  “Where’s da bat room?” Jean asked. He had had a few too many red beers, a favorite at the Acadia Tavern, a combination of beer and tomato juice. Alcohol for the soul, tomato juice for the hangover. Now the beer was pressing upon his bladder.

  “Go up the stairs and turn left,” Amy Joy directed, motioning with her hands.

  “Just look at her,” thought Sicily. “She’s only been with that Frog for a few months and she’s already talking with her hands.” All of Mattagash knew that Frenchmen wouldn’t be able to utter a word in either language if someone held their arms.

  “As for you.” Amy Joy turned to confront Sicily once she heard Jean Claude close the bathroom door. “What kind of stunt are you trying to pull? I thought this was going to be your chance to get to know him. All you’ve done is make crude remarks and roll those McKinnon eyeballs.”

  “Oh, you’re wrong,” said Sicily. “I am getting to know him.”

  “You’re making fun of him.”

  “He looks just like Chester Gifford,” said Sicily, and stood to smooth the fabric of the couch where Jean Claude had been sitting, as though the action could make him disappear, could send him back to Canada, or to France, where he truly belonged. “And you know it, Amy Joy.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” said Amy Joy. “You’re grabbing for straws.”

  “Well, this straw has dark, curly hair, a mustache, and brown eyes. Except for the accent, you got another Chester Gifford.”

  Upstairs in Sicily’s bathroom, Jean Claude Cloutier lifted a pint of Yukon Jack whiskey from his hip pocket and, as he had done all the way from Watertown, let it pour slowly down his throat. This was his second pint of the evening and it took hold of his stomach immediately, an assurance he needed. His gut had begun to tighten under the scrutiny of his future belle-mère. Anxiety was rampant in his entrails. He broke wind rather loudly and then smiled at the soft explosion. Une petite brise pour la belle-mère. A nice little breeze for the pretty mother. Something in which she could hang her English bloomers. As soon as the marriage was over, he would, Jean Claude Cloutier, put his boot down. Already his childhood friends were warning him that this girl, this shimmering Putois, was a handful.

  “She make a good woods boss, her,” Philippe LaGrange had just finished telling him at the Acadia Tavern. “She pick up a stick of pulp, her, and hall da boys run for dere lifes.” Jean Claude bristled to learn that his best friends, his fellow altar boys, his fellow drinkers, lovers, fighters, could even think that he’d let a mere woman dominate him like that. Vierge! Something had to be done before the merde hit the fan. But what? He was in love with Amy Joy. At least it felt like love, and Jean Claude reminded himself daily that all his big brothers had two or three children when they were his age. He was in a bit of a biological rush to catch up, so if Amy Joy was a little bossy, who was the worse for it? But he must make her understand that she shouldn’t be so pushy in public. At home, push away, especially in bed. But in front of those old altar boys, well, that was another matter.

  Jean Claude killed the pint of Yukon Jack, and then urinated quickly into Sicily’s commode, trying desperately not to wet the fuzzy pink cover. He shook himself thoroughly, spraying the pink fluff with occasional drops of pee. What a stupid place to decorate, to put something fancy. The English, and to Jean Claude the English were anyone who spoke the language, were like that. They were always embarrassed of bodily functions, always trying to disguise the less than pleasant facts around them. At Jean Claude’s house, there had been so many boys in the typically large Catholic family that the commode seat stayed wet all the time. The girls, forgetting to look before they sat, complained about the freezing drops of pee they were forever setting their warm bottoms down upon. Jean Claude’s father, Théophile, had argued the point for all his sons when the females had sheepishly asked the males to lift the seat before spraying.

  “Men have work to do. We have no time for this fool’s stuff,” he had lectured his wife and daughters, in French. “Be thankful that now you piss in the house, not out, in a snowbank.”

  Jean Claude shook a few final drops on the fuzzy pink cover, a final tribute to his father, before he tucked himself away. He was reminded of how, as boys, he and Philippe LaGrange and the others would write their names in the snow as they peed. Boys who had to dot i’s or cross t’s usually lost. Jean Claude’s problem had always been the sheer length of his name, and the separation. No matter how he practiced his technique, his calligraphy always ran together in the snow as a sunken, yellow JeanClaude. On some days, he lost terribly, creating only JeanC or JeanClau before his steaming pen ran out. Later, when he grew to manhood, and he and Philippe LaGrange stood out behind the Acadia Tavern, competing under the cold, blazing stars of the Big Dipper, bellies full of fifteen red beers, he had astonished even the old altar boys of his youth as they gathered around him, disbelievers. JeanClaudeCloutierBox274WatertownMaine. Sometimes he even went so far as to add, as a final coup de théâtre, a flourishing USA. When he stepped back to admire his handiwork, it always sent a shiver through him. He knew who he was at times like that. He was JeanClaudeCloutier. He felt as if he were hanging from
the frosty handle of the Big Dipper, looking down on WatertownUSA, looking down on the tiny speck of the Acadia Tavern, where the altar boys of his past had gathered around some yellow writing in the snow.

  “Mon dieu,” he would mutter to himself on those boozy, starry nights. And he wished he were a man who could take a pen to a sheet of paper and say clever things on it, so that it would last, instead of disappearing like this watery writing in the snow.

  The stairs moved beneath him on his descent. He stopped and shut one eye to survey the situation. There they were, eight, maybe nine steps, lying in perfect unison in front of him, and not one of them was moving. He lifted his right foot carefully and every step wriggled before him. He tried the left foot. The steps danced. Chalice de Vierge! He tried squinting. Then he opened both eyes wide. The steps were now bouncing. He was reminded of the cold mornings of the potato harvest, when he was hung over and sleepy on the harvester, trying to concentrate on potatoes leaping before his eyes. Now here were stair steps coming at him like giant brown russets. He shut both eyes, and things quieted in his stomach. With a hand steadied against the wall, he lowered himself to a sitting position. On the top step he contemplated his fate. Putois would live up to her name for sure. There would be a big stink over this. But Christ de Calvaire! These were the last few days of his bachelorhood. Did anyone anywhere on earth, including in the Papal City, expect him to stay sober just days before the guillotine would fall? La belle-mère. She would. Jean Claude slid his rear off the top step and bounced safely to the next. He was a man. Le diable avec la belle-mère. She could take her fancy pink cover and go straight to hell. She could put it on the devil’s toilet, for all Jean Claude cared. There would be only Protestants in hell anyway, so she wouldn’t have to worry about any Catholics setting their toasty asses down. Smiling at this, he bounced down to the next step, his eyes still shut tightly to avoid the nausea of spinning stairs. He could drink an oil drum full of whiskey and still manage his affairs. It was a good mark to his ancestors, the Québecois and the Acadians, that he could drink whiskey like a workhorse. He farted and the grating music of it caused a rumbling beneath him. He wanted to dance. He longed for his father’s fiddle and bow. He would play “Jolie Blonde” all night long on la belle-mère’s pretty pink cover, and he would dance her around until she died, straight out, of a heart attack. More intestinal wind escaped, and more loudly than before. He’d had too many hot dogs at Henri Nadeau’s Quick Lunch and Gas.