After they’d gone out to the kitchen, Bernie said, “Well, I have some good news. If you were worried about having to tell everybody about being pregnant, that’s pretty much unnecessary at this point. Your mother called while I was at Loren’s and told her, and there’s no telling where she heard it.”
He came and sat on the couch next to me, so I scooted over and let him put his arm around me.
“What did you and Aunt Ginny talk about?” he said.
“You.”
“Is that good or bad?”
“Mostly good,” I said to tease him. I tried to get myself ready for what I knew he was going to say next. He gave me a goofy smile and started to kiss me, and then he changed his mind, I guess.
“You know what I’m going to ask you, don’t you?”
“You’re so romantic.”
“The romantic approach worked so well earlier, when you screamed and tried to run away from me,” Bernie said, kind of frustrated.
It made me laugh, and Bernie looked relieved. I let him hug me and kiss me until his aunt came back.
Her People Don’t Get Married
“Does this mean you’ve received a satisfactory answer, Bernie?” my aunt asked from the doorway.
“Actually, I haven’t gotten any answer out of her.” I let Meda up and she made a flustered effort to smooth her hair and straighten her blouse.
“Meda, dear, I’m sure there are several wise maternal things that ought to be said to you at this moment. I don’t know what they might be, but I can’t possibly think you ought to let him make love to you on my divan without telling him something,” Aunt Ginny said. Meda blushed from pink to red and put her hand over her mouth.
She answered me so quietly I had to make her repeat herself. She took her hand away from her mouth and said, “Yes. Okay.” It sufficed for me and Aunt Ginny was ecstatic. She hugged and kissed Meda again with all the enthusiasm of her earlier outburst.
“Of course, I knew you would,” Aunt Ginny said triumphantly. “My dears, it’s only natural to be a little nervous. Now, I think Annadore ought to know.”
Because neither Meda nor I had a clue how it ought to be done, Aunt Ginny explained to Annadore that her mother and I were getting married.
“Now, Bernie will be your daddy,” she told Annadore, who stared at her with amazement, as though Aunt Ginny had just performed a magic trick. Then Annadore looked at me quizzically, so I put her up on my lap and hugged her. I had no idea if she even knew what a daddy was, but it was a nice feeling.
“I want to adopt her, you know, if that’s possible,” I told Meda on the drive home. I wanted to, and I wanted to make Meda happy.
“Okay,” she said.
“I wasn’t sure if there would be a problem because of Travis.”
“Travis isn’t even on her birth certificate.” She seemed sad, but then she looked at Annadore and smiled.
When we pulled up at Miss Amos’ house, Meda stopped me from getting out, and in a rush of anxiety said, “What do you know about being married?”
“As much as anybody does.”
“You’ve never been married, have you?”
“No,” I said, “but I don’t think you have to know anything special. Lots of people get married without knowing anything about it.”
“Well, my people don’t get married.”
“Your people?”
“You saw us! Like, two people in my family have ever been married. Not my mother. Not my grandmother. Not her mother. My aunt did and it didn’t even last a year. And my uncle, that didn’t work out either. We don’t get married. We’ve always been Amoses.”
“You don’t have to stop being an Amos because we get married. I’m not old-fashioned. You should keep your name if you want,” I said.
“I don’t mean the name.” She didn’t say what she meant, because she saw her mother standing in the doorway of the house, looking out at us. “Don’t come in. Wait here.”
She looked so unhappy I didn’t argue. Annadore and I waited for her, and whatever blow up there was must have been brief, because in five minutes she came out with a familiar cardboard box.
At my house, Meda was utterly silent on the topic. She talked about other things, but she refused to talk about getting married or even the baby. If I mentioned those things, she stared into space and said nothing until I brought up something else. She wasn’t doing it to be cruel; those subjects were simply too much for her at the moment. After a while I gave up trying to talk. I didn’t want to piss her off. We were both relieved when Annadore’s bedtime rolled around. It allowed us to go to bed and engage in the one mode of intercourse that no longer seemed all that dangerous.
Before we went to sleep, Meda went downstairs to iron her uniform. It seemed silly to me, so I said, “You’re not really going to wear that tomorrow, are you?”
“Yes, I’m really going to wear this tomorrow,” she said with a glare.
“You know you don’t need to.”
“Yeah, well, what else am I going to do with myself?”
I wasn’t sure how to answer that, or her annoyance, so I kissed her again, and went next door to sleep.
Another Aunt’s Love
Meda
I couldn’t think of any way to avoid Aunt M. the next morning, except hiding out in some corner of the house, and I couldn’t do that for the rest of my life. Instead I decided to bluff my way through it, so I got dressed, made breakfast for Bernie and Annadore, and then started polishing silver. I needed to do something, just to stay busy. Besides, if Bernie got his way, it was going to be my silver soon enough.
“You’re five minutes late,” I said to tease Aunt M. when she came in, hoping to throw her off balance.
“At least I’m not two months late.”
“If you were, I’d congratulate you and Uncle Donald.”
“Is that what you want? For me to congratulate you? Congratulations, then, you stupid little shit.”
I’d expected her to be mad, but that kind of language was a bad sign. I got the dust mop and the window cleaner and went out to do the front hall before she could say anything else. I took my time, but Aunt M. started in again as soon as I went back to the kitchen.
“Muriel says he asked you to marry him.” When I didn’t answer fast enough, she said, “Well, is that true?”
“He did.”
“And?”
“Why do you care what I said?”
“You always pretend I’m a witch who never cared anything about you. I’ve spent your whole life trying to look out for you, because your mother certainly couldn’t,” she said.
“I said yes, okay?”
She sighed. I was trying not to get aggravated with her, but she stood there, shaking her head.
“I can’t win with you, can I? What would you do if I’d said no? You’d just sigh and shake your head. What would make you happy?” I said.
“Maybe if you could think about anything you do, instead of acting like a chicken with your head cut off.”
“We were being careful. It was an accident.”
“So your whole life, and Annadore’s life, and this baby’s life, they all get decided by an accident,” Aunt M. said.
I shrugged. There was no use arguing. That made her even more upset, and she started yelling at me.
“Sleeping with your boss isn’t an accident, Cathy. It’s stupid. It’s worse than stupid. It’s sleazy and it’s thoughtless. It makes this whole family look bad and it doesn’t make the Raleigh family look great either. And it makes you look like exactly what you are.”
She was gearing up to go like I hadn’t seen since I was a teenager, when Bernie opened the kitchen door.
“Mrs. Trentam. Please don’t talk that way to Meda,” he said really calmly. “I can hear you down the hallway.” Aunt M. didn’t say anything and she looked so shocked I started laughing. Bernie smiled then and came over to give me a kiss. “How are you?”
“I’m fine,” I said. “How are you???
?
“Excellent. I wanted to ask you when you want to do the ceremony. I thought Saturday, in two weeks?”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Raleigh,” Aunt M. said.
“It’s okay. Would you like to go home, Mrs. Trentam?”
“Are you firing me?”
Bernie gave me a terrified look that was very funny.
“Not at all,” he said. “I thought maybe you needed a day off. I know things are a little tense.”
“Yes, sir.” Nothing like herself.
“Two weeks seems really soon,” I said.
“I thought you preferred sooner to later. Three weeks?”
“Yes, sir,” I said, but Aunt M. didn’t even notice. After Bernie went back to the office, she snapped out of it, but just barely. “You should go home, Aunt M. You look upset.”
“I am upset,” she said.
I thought she was going to yell at me again. Instead, she went home.
When I took lunch into the office, Bernie jumped up and took the tray away from me. He put it on the side table and said, “I don’t want you carrying that anymore.”
“I’m fine.”
“Is three weeks enough time?” He looked down at his calendar and I got the biggest kick out of seeing that Celeste didn’t know what he was talking about.
“Three weeks is fine. It’s just my family, you know, and I don’t want to do anything big.”
“It’s literally just my mother and Aunt Ginny on my side of things, and I doubt my mother will come.” He put his pen on the Saturday on his calendar and wrote “wedding.” Then I guess he remembered that Celeste was there. “Meda and I are getting married.”
“Congratulations,” she said in a squeaky voice.
“What am I not thinking of that we need to do? Flowers? Cake? A dress?” Bernie clearly had no idea what most people go through to get married.
“I had a nice dress but it got torn up.”
“That wasn’t a wedding dress. Anyway, I don’t want to be involved in shopping for this dress,” he said.
“You’re not supposed to be,” Celeste said. I bet she knew about all the things Bernie was forgetting.
Zombie
After Meda left, I suppose I stood there with a sappy smile on my face. The phone rang and I reflexively picked it up.
“Bernie Raleigh,” I said, and got an earful of Lionel Petrie’s enthusiasm.
“Great! I caught you in. You must be a very busy man. I hope you won’t mind if I drop in on you. I’m headed out to L.A., and I was hoping that before I left, you and I could sit down and chat. Just the two of us,” he said in a rush.
As I was about to come out with a reason we couldn’t meet, he said, “Oh, here’s the turn. I’m coming up the drive now. I’ll be there in just a second.”
He hung up, and I sat paralyzed, waiting for him to come get me. Lionel Petrie was like a zombie. His overtures toward me weren’t quick or graceful, but fiendishly inexorable. If you’ve ever watched one of those movies, and wondered how the shambling undead manage to catch the athletic co-eds, know that it’s the inexorability. Just when I thought Lionel had given up, there he was. Mrs. Trentam let him into the house, and from down the hallway, I heard him enthusing about the “timeless” styling of the house.
Celeste looked up at me expectantly. I said, “It’s Lionel Petrie.”
“The director?” she said, her eyes lighting up. She did his entrance justice. When Mrs. Trentam showed him into the office, Celeste gushed her fawning admiration all over him. She so desperately wanted to do something for him that she made a sad face when she saw he’d brought his own expensive bottled water. Not with an eye to rewarding Celeste, but intending to thwart Lionel, I didn’t send her out of the room. She sat as close as she could to him, her notebook on her lap, waiting for him to speak.
“Bernham—” he said.
“Bernie.”
“Bernie, then, good. I just wanted us to talk about this, because I got the feeling you weren't really on board. You don’t seem to want to do this.”
“Actually, I’m not going to do it.”
He blinked hard, took a drink of his water. “I’m really sorry to hear that. I guess I just hoped that there was still a chance. I thought Reg Tveite had talked to you about it.”
“He did, but I never agreed to be in a commercial, as any part of my role with Raleigh Industries. My grandfather and father were never in any commercials, and neither was my uncle. I think I’ll stick to that.”
“Well, let me just—let me just assure you there’s nothing to be worried about. I absolutely respect the dignity of the Raleigh family. This isn’t gimmick advertising. No gimmicks, no slick clap-trap. No Fred Astaire dancing with a vacuum cleaner,” he said.
At least Fred Astaire had the dignity of being dead. I shook my head, but the zombie kept coming.
“You know, it’s not going to be what you might think of as acting. It’ll just be you talking to me, with a camera there. You don’t need to worry about that. Just a conversation really, and we can piece it all together in the editing booth later.” He smiled, took two quick swallows of water. Celeste was magnetized. I watched the zombie think, trying to figure out why I didn’t want to do the commercial. I decided to throw him a bone.
“I don’t want to do the commercial, and when you’re as rich as I am, you don’t have to do what you don’t want to do.” I wished that was true.
“Why is it, exactly, that you’re so set against this?”
“Right now, I’m practically a nobody. When I go out in public, no one knows who I am. You start appearing on television, and people recognize you. I don’t want that. No offense, Lionel, but I’m done here. I have other things to take care of.” As a not so subtle hint, I stood up. When that didn’t work, I said, “Celeste, if you’d walk Mr. Petrie out.”
Disturbed from her reverie, Celeste looked at me for a few moments, then seemed to remember her job. She promptly began chattering about how exciting it was to meet the Lionel Petrie. The zombie looked defeated, but I suspected it was another ploy. The undead playing dead. Standing up, he offered his hand to me. My own hands were slick with sweat, so I kept them in my pockets. It was half an hour before I was calm enough to think about anything productive, and I felt like my little glow of happiness had been doused with a bucket of water.
Later that night, as I was trying to lure Meda to bed, her silence broke open like a dam.
“So, is it just the baby then? Is that why you think you’re ready to get married?”
“It’s a lot of things,” I said, before I realized I didn’t have anything to add to that. “How I feel about you. And about Annadore. I’m very happy with you. I like feeling like we’re a family.”
“Why are you so sure we should get married?”
“Look, I’ve never been in a situation like this, so I’m trying to figure it out as I go.”
“You never even had a girlfriend say, ‘I’m late’? Where even for a little while you thought you’d have to make a decision like this?”
I thought long and hard, but couldn’t think of even a moment of worry. “The night of the Hall of Fame was the first time I ever had sex without a condom,” I said. “Sex makes it too easy to get attached to someone when they don’t feel the same way. I was always afraid of things getting complicated.”
Meda stared at me in disbelief. She didn’t understand. Whatever her fears were, they were not sexual.
“If you were so worried about it before that you never did it without a condom, how come you’re so calm about this? I thought you were just really shy. That’s why I practically threw myself at you, because I thought you weren’t ever going to do anything,” Meda said.
That was not the way I remembered it. I remembered being brought to my knees. “I didn’t do anything because I was afraid of you.”
“Afraid of me?”
“I knew you weren’t someone I could just fool around with, that I was going to fall in love with you. I was hoping sex
wasn’t the scenic route to Hell.”
“You’re such a liar.” She laughed loudly. I couldn’t guess what she was trying to cover up with her amusement.
Massachusetts Wedding
When I was about twenty-five my mother suggested I get married. Five years later, when I called to tell her my news, there was an amazed silence on the other end of the phone. After a few stunned seconds she said, “You mean here in Massachusetts? Did that law pass already?” That struck me as the voice of dementia, because I couldn’t fathom what she was talking about. Then she said, “Well, who is it? Where did you meet?”
“Her name is Meda Amos. She’s the dark-haired girl who helped out before the funeral.” I felt unaccountably nervous about what she would say.
There was another painful silence until, hostile with confusion, my mother blurted, “But you told me that you were, that you weren’t that kind of person, to get married.”
Five years before, that had been my answer to her suggestion. I didn’t think marriage belonged on a to-do list like learning Spanish or climbing Mt. Everest. I wasn’t that kind of person. I reviewed our conversation, trying to assemble some sense out of it. Slowly it dawned on me that my mother had inferred I was “not that kind of person” by dint of my sexual orientation. I tried not to be disturbed by the fact that my mother had believed I was gay for so long. The idea must not have seemed particularly surprising to her, for it not to spark even one further word of conversation in the intervening years. I wasn’t insulted, but I was sunk at the reminder of the distance between us.
We came to an unspoken agreement to pretend it hadn't happened.
“It’s so sudden. I didn’t even know you were dating anyone,” she said.
“We’re just going to have a small wedding, nothing elaborate.” I decided at the last minute not to mention the catalyst for our nuptials.
“Well, when? Where?” I’d begun to tell her, before I realized it was all part of her usual pattern.
“Bernie, that’s awfully short notice,” she demurred, either trying to get me to reschedule my wedding or to excuse herself for not coming. When we finally disconnected, I didn’t believe she would come. To be fair, she would have been disappointed if she had.