Wedding Bell Blues

by Julia Watts

  Lily wondered if Dr. Jack might agree to let her go along on a few farm calls, so she could sit back at a safe distance and sketch the animals. She would ask her on Friday, she decided, when she called about Mordecai.

  CHAPTER 11

  “The hearing is set for August fifteenth,” Buzz Dobson told Lily and Ben as they sat in his dingy law office, the decor of which consisted of half a dozen dusty football trophies and one bedraggled plastic plant. “Let’s just pray that the air-conditioning in the courthouse is working.”

  Lily sighed and looked down at Mimi, who was getting positively filthy playing on the law office’s unmopped floor. “I’m afraid the temperature in the courtroom is the least of our worries.”

  Buzz shot Ben a conspiratorial grin. “She’s the nervous type, ain’t she?”

  “Well,” Ben said, attempting a macho attitude, “you know how women get about babies.”

  Lily sat quietly with her hands in her lap, but her fists were clenched so tightly she doubted anyone would be able to pry them apart.

  Buzz pasted a condescending smile across his face. “Now, Mrs. McGilly, I don’t think you have a thing to worry about. We just need to establish that you and Benny Jack love each other and that you love Mimi and take good care of her. And if Benny Jack here is Mimi’s real father like he says he is, you’ve got no worries.”

  “Right,” Lily said, clenching her fists even tighter. “No worries.”

  “Now if you wanna do something that’ll turn the odds even more in your favor, I have a couple of suggestions for you, Mrs. McGilly.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Well...” Buzz shuffled some papers uncomfortably. “When you’re up there on the stand, you could try to look like a nice girl.”

  “A nice girl?” Lily looked down at her cutoff Levi’s and Doc Martens, which were separated by pasty white legs whose unshaven state was due to apathy rather than feminist politics. “Well, I was planning on wearing a dress, if that’s what you mean.”

  Buzz smiled self-consciously and reshuffled his papers. “Um, well, yes, that’s part of it. But I was also thinking you could take that ... that thing out of your nose and maybe do something with your hair.”

  “My hair?” Lily was proud of her hair. Very few white girls had such soulful braids.

  “Yeah, I mean ... somethin’ respectable.” He was still staring at his desk. “Look, Mrs. McGilly, I’m not a fashion expert, and the last thing I wanna do is tell a lady how she should fix herself up. I’m just saying that in these parts, a judge might look more sympathetically on a lady with a more ... conservative appearance.”

  Lily flinched at the sound of the word conservative but muttered, “I’ll see what I can do.” As long as she was the same person on the inside, it didn’t matter what clothes she wore or how she styled her hair. Or so she tried to convince herself. If the only way she could keep her daughter was by deceiving people with misleading appearances, then deceive them she would.

  At first Lily had been reluctant when Ben had wanted to invite Ken over for dinner. The facade of propriety they had created was so delicate that the slightest provocation could cause it to shatter.

  “Don’t be so paranoid, O wife of mine,” Ben had said. “Married couples have bachelor friends over for dinner all the time —just to make sure the poor single guys get a decent meal every once in a while. No one will think a thing of it. And besides,” he added, “Ken knows the truth. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to let your guard down for an evening — to spend a few hours not pretending to be my little woman?”

  Lily had to admit that it would.

  Despite the fact that she was not slated to play the role of little woman for the evening, Lily still got saddled with the cooking. She didn’t mind it, actually.

  Ben’s culinary abilities were limited to picking up the phone and ordering Chinese takeout, and there was no Chinese takeout to be had in Versailles.

  So now, they—Lily, Ben, Ken, and Mimi—were sitting around the oak dining room table, eating Lily’s vegetarian chili with cheese, sour cream, and flour tortillas. Mimi, in her high chair, was wearing a flour tortilla on her head.

  Ken, who was quite attractive in a just-stepped-out-of-a-Ralph-Lauren-ad kind of way, took an appreciative bite of chili. “Quite a little cook you got here, Ben,” he teased, winking at Lily. “You know what they say: The best way to a man’s heart is his stomach.”

  Lily swigged the Corona and lime that Ken had brought to complement their meal. “Actually, I think the most direct route to a man’s heart lies farther south.”

  Ben and Ken burst out laughing.

  Finally, Ben said, “You sounded like Dez there for a second.”

  Lily smiled. “I did, didn’t I?”

  Ken turned to Ben. “Dez was your ex, right?”

  “Yep.” Ben pushed his empty bowl away. “We were lovers for eighteen months, then friends for a decade. Dez could be maddening, but he was funny as hell. Lily, do you remember when he went to that faculty Halloween party dressed as Mae West?”

  “How could I forget it?. I helped lace up his corset beforehand, which was no mean feat, let me tell you.”

  Ben laughed. “Three mai tais, and Dez was sprawled on top of the piano singing Frankie and Johnny,’ to the utter mystification of the better part of Atlanta State’s liberal arts faculty”

  Ken laughed. “I take it that when he did this, he already had tenure?”

  Lily smiled. “You take it correctly. Dez was always flamboyant, but never foolish.” She looked over at Mimi, who had poked two eye-size holes in her flour tortilla and was wearing it as a mask. “And it was Dez’s kind sperm donation that helped create little tortilla face over there.”

  Ken smiled at the little girl. “Hmm...this is quite a byzantine ruse you’ve constructed here. I bet the whole thing’s exhausting.”

  “It is.” Lily didn’t realize how exhausted she was until Ken made that observation. It was only now, while she was relaxing in the company of a person with whom she and Ben could be honest, that she fully realized how strained and tiring their other social interactions were. It was only in the presence of other gay people that she and Ben could relax and be a family — the kind of family they really were.

  “Yeah,” Ben said, “in Atlanta I used to bitch all the time about the little dramas going on in the gay community ... all the backbiting and gossip. Now that I’m away from all the gossip, though, it’s like I’m dying for some. I find myself calling all the shallow queens I used to bitch about just so I can find out who’s lusting after whom.”

  Ken laughed. “I do the same thing with my friends back in Nashville. I also find myself voraciously reading those glossy fag rags I used to make fun of when I lived in the city.”

  Lily drained her Corona. “Where do you get those magazines around here?”

  Ken grinned sheepishly. “The mailman delivers them ... in a plain brown wrapper, no less. I save all the back issues. If you like, I could bring over the ones I’ve read.”

  “You know, I’m scaring myself, but I think I’d really like that,” Ben said, rising to clear the table.

  “Me, too.” Lily was helping Mimi out of her high chair. “I’m starved to death for news about my people ... even if it’s just idle chatter about who’s shtupping who.” A prickle of fear hit her. “Of course, we’d have to be careful not to leave those magazines lying around. God, I hate this! It makes me feel so self-loathing, even though I’m not.”

  They settled in the living room. Lily had to coax Mordecai off the couch with a Milk-Bone. Since his injury, he had made the couch his own personal sickbed. He would make room for Lily or Mimi to sit with him, but he growled ill-temperedly at Ben or anyone else who tried to join him there.

  “You know,” Ken said, sitting on the couch next to Ben and draping his arm around Ben’s shoulders, “when Ben told me what you were doing, I really objected to it at first. It seemed to me that you were just catering to other people’s prejudices.”
He watched Mimi stacking her wooden alphabet blocks. “But then I started thinking: If you fought the custody battle as an open lesbian, you’d lose your daughter. Mimi would lose her mother and be raised as some kind of psycho-Christian. Everybody would lose in that situation. And while I’m uncomfortable with this level of deception ... well, some things are just too precious to lose, even if it is to make a political point.”

  Lily nodded in agreement. “Yeah, sometimes I think I’d be a better person if I’d made myself a martyr for the cause of gay rights, but the thing is, I wouldn’t just be sacrificing myself. I’d be sacrificing Mimi, too, and sentencing her to the same miserable, oppressive upbringing her mother had.”

  Without warning, the front door swung open, and a female voice drawled, “Knock-knock! Hello?”

  Ben and Ken scooted apart just as Lily’s vapid sisters-in-law, Sheila and Tracee, walked into the living room. Each was wearing a pricey-looking pastel warm-up suit and had her platinum curls pulled back in a perky ponytail.

  “Hi,” Lily said, finding it difficult to feign friendliness. One of the numerous downsides to this faux marriage was that the McGillys dropped by unexpectedly any time they felt like it.

  “Ken,” Ben said, doing an even worse job of masking his irritation than Lily was, “meet Sheila and Tracee, my sisters-in-law. Girls, I don’t know if you remember Ken Woods. He went to high school with us.”

  Sheila nodded at Ken. “Your daddy used to work with State Farm Insurance, didn’t he?”

  “Sure did.” Ken was doing an admirable job of being cordial.

  “So ... Sheila, Tracee, I was just about to make some coffee. Would you like some?” As grating as these drop-in visits were, Lily was determined not to alienate any of the McGillys through her lack of hospitality. After all, her success in the courtroom depended largely on the McGillys’ continued good will.

  “No thanks,” Sheila chirped. “Me and Tracee just decided to have a night away from the boys —

  let them stay home with the kids for a change.”

  “There’s this new aerobics class they’re starting over at the middle school,” Tracee added. “We thought we’d stop by to see if you wanted to come with us.”

  The idea of aerobics— let alone the idea of aerobics performed alongside Sheila and Tracee —

  filled Lily with the kind of anxiety she hadn’t experienced since junior-high PE class. It wasn’t that she was adverse to exercise. Back in Atlanta, she and Charlotte had taken long walks every evening, talking about the day’s happenings and pushing Mimi in her stroller.

  But walking was a natural exercise—it was something human beings were inclined to do anyway.

  There was nothing in Lily’s genetic makeup, however, that gave her the inclination to contort her body in rhythm to outdated top-forty music. “Gosh, guys, I’d really love to, but as you can see, we have company.”

  “Oh, you go ahead.” Ben smiled with devious benevolence. “Ken and I can hold down the fort here.”

  She looked at her ersatz husband with pure spite. She knew what that twinkle in his eyes was all about. He and Ken would be making out on the couch like a couple of teenagers, while she was forced to skip around a middle-school gym like a moron. “Well, I don’t know, hon. Mimi still needs to be put to bed.”

  “Don’t you worry about a thing.” Ken smiled. “Daddy Ben and Uncle Ken will take care of her.”

  “Come on, Lil-leee,” Sheila playfully whined, “it’ll be fun.”

  Now she was in the position of looking like a total bitch if she declined. “Just a second... let me go get changed.”

  In her room, she threw on a baggy long-sleeve T-shirt and some cutoff sweatpants, all the while imagining elaborate ways to murder Ben and Ken. A mere five minutes ago, she had been having such a pleasant evening.

  “I tell you what, Lily,” Tracee said, after they had piled into her Lexus. “Five years ago, if Sheila and me was gonna have a girls’ night out, we woulda been heading to the bars instead of to aerobics class.”

  Sheila giggled. “We’re getting old, I guess.”

  “Yep,” Tracee agreed, “we ain’t nothin’ but old married ladies. How ’bout you, Lily? You feel like an old married lady yet?”

  “I don’t know. I hadn’t really given it much thought.”

  “Oh, you wait till Benny Jack knocks you up a couple times, then you’ll feel like an old married lady—trust me.” Tracee laughed.

  Lily hoped her tight-lipped smile didn’t reveal how uncomfortable she really was. She had spent very little time around straight women over the course of her adult life; it was little wonder she was so clueless about how to act like one.

  The aerobics class was, if possible, even worse than Lily had imagined. The middle-school gym was populated by a herd of slim, tanned bleached-blond women who looked like so many Sheilas and Tracees. Lily wondered if somewhere in Faulkner County a factory churned out these seemingly identical women just as the Confederate Sock Mill churned out identical socks. The one distinctive-looking woman in the class was middle-aged and heavy, her broad hips stuffed into a pair of gray sweatpants.

  Lily was just admiring the big woman’s chutzpah far attending an aerobics class full of Sheilas and Tracees when the real Sheila elbowed her, nodded toward the big woman, and whispered,

  “Somebody’s got a long way to go.”

  The aerobics instructor was distinctive from all the Sheilas and Tracees only in that her hair was brunet. Her taut and toned body was apparent in her electric-blue leotard and hot-pink tights, and a zealous smile of the type worn by born-again Christians was plastered across her carefully made-up face.

  “O-kay, lay-deez!” she chirped, clapping her well-manicured hands. “We’re gonna start in tonight with a weigh-in. And then, after you’ve been coming to this class for six weeks, we’ll weigh in again, and you’ll really see some improvement.”

  She led the way to the locker room, where the “ladies” were invited to come in one at a time to stand on the scales. Several of the Sheilas and Tracees giggled when the heavy woman took her turn, and one voice stage-whispered the word, “Tilt!” If there was a way in which this class was dissimilar to junior-high PE, Lily failed to see it.

  As she stepped into the locker room for her turn on the scales, she even breathed in the odors of junior-high PE — the stale, sour smell of pubescent sweat. “O-kay, hon,” the aerobics instructor, whom Lily had begun to think of as Spandex Dominatrix, said, “now, how tall are you?”

  “About five-three.”

  Spandex Dominatrix wrote the information down on her clipboard. “Step on the scales, please.”

  Just as she would have when she was thirteen, Lily dumbly obeyed.

  “Uh-huh,” Spandex chided as she looked at the scale. “You’re a full eight pounds over your ideal body weight. But don’t worry. Stay in this class, and you’ll be shedding that flab in no time!”

  Lily walked out of the locker room, disgusted not because she was supposedly a few pounds over her ideal body weight, but because she had let Spandex Dominatrix actually make her feel bad about herself for a few seconds. Sheila and Tracee, she noticed, had stripped down to butt-floss leotards for their weigh-ins, and she saw the fat woman looking at their firm buttocks with a mixture of envy and loathing.

  What was this psychosis American women had about weight? Even Lily, a supposedly enlightened feminist, fell prey to it sometimes. When she had suffered an insecure moment, when she had expressed to Charlotte the need to flatten her tummy or firm up her butt, Charlotte had always pulled her close and whispered, “Now, who wants to ride in a car that doesn’t have any upholstery?”

  The women lined up in rows for their exercises. “O-kay, lay-deez,” Spandex Dominatrix chirped, like Richard Simmons with just a touch more estrogen, “we’re gonna start out with a warmup. But first, does anybody have any questions before we start burning off those calories?”

  Lily felt her hand go up in the air.

  �
��Uh-huh?” Spandex acknowledged her.

  “Uh ... yeah.” Lily searched for the right words. “I was just wondering, why does this class have to be about how skinny we can get? Can’t we just exercise to improve our health and feel good instead of trying to live up to some impossible commercial ideal of beauty?”

  Although Spandex was still wearing her smile, she was looking at Lily as though she had been speaking to her in Latvian. Finally, Sheila nodded toward Lily and said to the aerobics instructor, “She ain’t from around here.”

  “Oh,” Spandex Dominatrix said, seeming to find Sheila’s comment a satisfactory explanation. “Okay, let’s get started then.”

  The soundtrack for their stretching was, as Lily had suspected, moldy top forty. They moved from the warmup into a more strenuous step routine. Lily looked around to all the Sheilas and Tracees, who were clapping and yelling “Whoo-hoo!” and enjoying themselves enormously. Great, Lily thought ...