“You don’t have time to worry about this,” Verena said after a while, sucking the last of her drink through her straw, noisily. “You have an engagement party to plan, not to mention a wedding. I’ve allowed you to laze around for months now, but I have every intention of making sure your bridal gown is stellar. So prepare yourself.”
“How do you even start to find a dress?” I asked. It was a largely rhetorical question, which did not prevent Verena from answering.
“We go to a store and you try on everything in your size while I take illegal pictures with my cell phone on the sly,” she said, very matter-of-factly. “I’ve been practicing.”
“I can’t deal with a wedding dress.” I rubbed at my temples. “I can’t deal with a wedding. Dealing with this engagement party practically makes me want to break out in hives.”
“Those are not the words of a blushing bride-to-be,” Verena pointed out as we stood to go. “Is this Raine’s influence?”
“I’m not influenced by every stray breeze, Verena,” I snapped at her, finally losing my cool. And my volume control. “For God’s sake!”
She held up her hands in surrender. Her cheeks flushed to a dull red, like she was forcing herself to remain in control. So who knew what she wanted to say.
“I’m sorry” was what she said at last. She cocked her head to the side, and considered me for a second. “But we always go on and on about how controlling Norah is. When the truth is, I think Raine is equally controlling. She just has a different approach.”
That was the part that I kept returning to as I walked toward home.
I had never thought of Raine in that way. It was hard to do so now, but there was something in me that thought Verena was right. I kept going over my time in San Francisco, looking for clues. Raine had, after all, decided where and when we would talk. She’d run that conversation, and when it got uncomfortable she’d ended it. She’d also minimized our contact. Made me take a yoga class, insisted we meet where she wanted to meet. The only difference between Raine and Norah was that I’d wanted to do what Raine wanted me to do, for the most part. Was it controlling then? Or something else?
Not that it mattered. What mattered was that I was so incredibly naïve and controllable, according to Verena, that everyone took advantage of me. Raine, Matt, Norah. I couldn’t help thinking that if I wasn’t so malleable, none of these things would be happening.
I didn’t think of myself as naïve. But who did? Maybe naïve was like crazy in that way—those who were never thought they were. Unfortunately, that left me with few options for ceasing to be naïve. It was like the wedding stuff—I didn’t know where to start. As far as I knew, I couldn’t pop into Target to pick up some healthy cynicism and a clue. Of course, I didn’t know where to start shopping for my wedding, either, so as far as I knew wasn’t all that far.
My phone buzzed in my pocket then, a happy diversion. I looked at the display to read BLOCKED ID. This usually meant Verena was calling from her work phone.
“I thought you had to get to work,” I said without saying hello, assuming she was calling to apologize for being harsh, as she had been known to do on occasion. Or to discuss the latest photos posted on Go Fug Yourself, which she did far more often.
“Hi, Courtney,” Raine sang at me. “Oops, did you think I was someone else?”
“Oh,” I said, thrown. Did that sound naïve? I tried to sound stern and tough. “No. I mean, yes, obviously.” So much for that. “How are you?”
“You know what?” She laughed a little bit. “I’m good. But I think I owe you an apology.”
“You do?” I wished that hadn’t come out like a question. It felt like I was proving Verena’s point.
“Well,” Raine said, “I don’t think I showed you how delighted I was to see you again. I’m sorry about that. I guess I was more thrown by your sudden reentry into my life than I wanted to admit.”
That had not been what I was expecting. In my memory, Raine had never apologized. She was Raine. She didn’t have to. It occurred to me to wonder why that was so, when I’d always felt compelled to apologize for everything, but I brushed it aside.
“I did just show up on your doorstep,” I reminded her.
“But it’s all fine,” she said quickly, her voice kindling with that delight that made me want to listen to her talk forever. “I can make it up to you.”
“You can?” I shook my head as if to clear it. What was wrong with me? This was my sister. I was behaving like a kid with a crush—a feeling I remembered vividly and had no need to revisit. “I mean, of course, that you don’t have to do anything—”
“I’ve been meditating on this since you left,” Raine interrupted me, gently. And insistently. “And my life coach thinks that I was subconsciously striking out at you because I have so many unresolved issues about home and Norah and Mom and whatever else.”
“Huh,” I said, hoping that hit the appropriate note of interest or concern, whichever was required. How would I know? Meditating and life coaches weren’t topics that seemed to crop up much in my Philadelphia life.
“So she thinks that the best thing in the world I could do is come to your engagement party. And finally confront all my demons!” Raine’s voice rang through the phone.
I thought about that for a moment.
“Except maybe my engagement party isn’t the best place in the world for you to confront your demons?” Again, I felt that might have sounded more impressive had it emerged from my mouth as a statement.
“Oh, of course not,” Raine said, as if that was the silliest thing she’d ever heard. “That’s why I’m taking the whole month off!”
“The whole month?” I wanted to be excited, but all I could think was that I’d have to explain this to Norah. And that if I thought Norah was already pissed, this was going to send her through the roof. I didn’t want that.
“All of July,” Raine confirmed happily. “Isn’t that terrific?”
On the other hand, this was what I’d wanted, wasn’t it? Both my sisters in attendance at my engagement party as a sort of rehearsal so everyone could get their bad behavior out of the way before the wedding.
Norah would deal, I assured myself. She might even find that this was a good thing. A step she wouldn’t take on her own, but the right step to take even so. Because I had to believe that gathering the family together was better than letting it lie splintered. It had to be.
“Yes,” I declared, trying it on for size. “It’s terrific. I’m really glad you’re coming, Raine.”
I thought there should have been a soundtrack playing down Locust Street, to underscore the importance of the moment. But there was only the dirt and congestion of the city in the sweltering heat.
“Me, too!” Raine squealed. And then her voice cooled a little bit. “Oh yes,” she said, “and one more thing. I’m bringing Matt.”
Chapter Fifteen
I couldn’t say that I was surprised by Raine’s little bomb. I hadn’t sat around thinking about whether or not she would come with Matt, if she chose to come at all, but that was probably because I hadn’t had time to do so since returning home.
I was forced to admit to myself that on some level, I’d wanted her to bring him. That I’d suspected she would, and had hoped she would—because of those secret, golden threads and because I wasn’t ready to let go of them. Of him.
Which made me feel that wedge between me and Lucas widen.
None of which made me happy with myself.
And in case the fact that I wasn’t a good person needed underlining, there was my mother’s obsession with my wedding to contend with. You know, the wedding that I hadn’t planned at all, and here I was almost six months’ engaged. It wasn’t lost on me that as the bride, I should have been exhibiting an interest in my nuptials at least equal to the interest being shown by my mother.
After Mom left me no less than seven voicemails in a three-day period, all with ideas for me (translation: action items), I decided t
hat instead of passively lolling around in the air-conditioning in our living room, listening to Lucas work his ass off in his home office, I could be proactive for a change. It had dawned on me in the time since we’d returned from San Francisco that proactive was something I didn’t do very often, unless it had something to do with my cello. And that perhaps this had something to do with the apparently widespread notion that I was a naïve pushover.
The very least I could do, I figured, was show someone that I wasn’t that controlled, manipulated child. Why not my mother? Her last voicemail message had dipped a bit too far toward the sarcastic for my liking. Please call me back if you’re interested, she’d said in that dry tone. She hadn’t said, if you’re interested in your own wedding, because she didn’t have to. She was now all about the implication.
Deciding it was time for action, I headed to 30th Street Station the next morning. I got myself a huge coffee at Dunkin’ Donuts, fries from McDonald’s and only then—properly fortified—was I able to face the newsstand and its wedding magazine section. I didn’t comparison shop, I just pulled out one of each. Four magazines in total, weighing in somewhere above twenty-seven pounds. Each.
Sitting on the train on the thirty-minute ride out to my hometown, I flipped through the glossy pages and read up on what a failure of a bride-to-be I was. I should have registered for gifts already. I should have notified my wedding party (possibly via a mock proposal, flower delivery, or tasteful dinner party), begun dress shopping (after identifying which silhouette I felt best flattered my figure and then deciding what the dress of my dreams said about what kind of bride I was), and begun the comparison hunt for a wedding reception site (country club, art gallery, or secluded beach—what your dream venue says about your love). It was clear that I was expected to have thoughts about our wedding ceremony. Religious or secular? Inside or outside? Write our own vows or repeat old ones? Then there were all the things I was supposed to have done/be doing for our engagement, starting with a punishing fitness and beauty regime, neither of which involved the consumption of Dunkin’ Donuts or McDonald’s. Each magazine featured anemic-looking models striking bizarrely stiff poses, with atrocious hair, so they looked more like grotesquely large insects than glowing brides. This was supposed to inspire me to purchase one of the highly unattractive dresses, many of them festooned with feathers, sequins, or in one case, what looked like an actual mermaid tail, complete with scales. Each magazine also presented me with a handy pull-out checklist, thoughtfully broken down by months, as to what I ought to be doing at any given moment. None of which I’d so much as thought about, much less done.
Thinking about it now filled me with panic.
Were these other women aliens? These women who wrote in and described planning processes that read as more complicated and involved than the invasion of Normandy? Did their engagement rings somehow send off some kind of homing beacon that awakened the party-planning Über Bride within? Because if so, my ring clearly wasn’t working.
I tried to shake it off, but couldn’t. I didn’t understand what my problem was. I’d entertained fantasies about getting engaged my whole life. They hadn’t been concrete fantasies, but I’d had them. I’d wondered who my husband would be. Every time I’d been to a wedding, I’d wondered what mine would be like. So why wasn’t I jumping in, feet first, now that it was finally my turn?
I couldn’t answer that question.
I climbed off the train and set off on the five-minute walk to Mom’s office, tucked away in the upstairs of one of the pretty buildings on the main street of town. I loved everything about the quiet Main Line town I’d grown up in. I loved the manicured lawns and old Colonial houses, the sound of lawn sprinklers and cicadas in the afternoon air, the solid feel of hundreds of years of history in the ground and Revolutionary War memorials scattered here and there about the town.
And next to that, the more fragile and tempestuous feeling of the Cassel family history, which I also felt settle around me as I walked.
Across town, where the roads started to slope upward into gentle hills that bore no resemblance at all to the hills of San Francisco, was the house where we’d all grown up. It was brick and stucco, cool in the summer and freezing in the winter, and a permanent shrine to my father.
As I walked, I thought about the photographs of my father that covered the surface of every table in the small room we called my mother’s sitting room, steps off the living room. On the wall, a huge abstract painting dominated the room that was filled with his laughing brown eyes. It was one of my father’s three finished paintings. The other two hung in Raine’s old room.
The facts of my father’s life were these: he and my mother eloped when they were both very young and fresh out of Temple University. They bought a house in a town near the one where my mother grew up, had a couple of kids, and lived what seemed to be a perfectly unexceptional life, until my father announced that he needed to “find himself” and, like so many before him, headed west, as Raine would do—no doubt in homage—many years later. Coincidentally, he discovered this need right about the time my mother announced that she was pregnant with me.
Dad had headed to Los Angeles with plans to wander up to San Francisco. He’d never gone north, and he’d never come home. Eight months after he’d gone, when, according to one of my mouthier aunts, Mom had been just about ready to consider a divorce to go along with her impending labor contractions, my mother received word that he’d died of a heart attack in his friend’s small apartment near the Sunset Strip. I was born several weeks after his funeral.
Those were the facts. Around these facts, my family had created any number of epic stories. My mother had never gotten over his death, and had raised us to remain ever-reverent of him. Raine worshipped him, and had decided to follow in his footsteps. Norah, on the other hand, was far more critical of his decisions. But we all loved his pictures. We would often debate which ones we liked best: Raine liked one of the Polaroids he’d sent home from L.A., a grinning man with big sunglasses to match his muttonchop sideburns and the Hollywood sign in the background. Norah loved the one of him holding her as a baby, gazing down into her face as he held her in his lap.
My favorite was a candid someone had taken while my father was still in college. He was looking through a record bin in some old record shop, and he was unaware that the camera was on him. I thought I recognized his intense focus. I loved his slight frown, and the determined set to his jaw. He looked so at ease in himself, in his T-shirt and jeans, and also so purposeful. When I’d been starting out on the cello, I would think of that picture of him and imagine myself making the same face as I concentrated.
Because the truth was, my father was just a myth to me. I had no memories of him that weren’t stories told by someone else or pictures interpreted by someone else. Unlike my sisters, I didn’t have even the smallest, foggiest memory of his voice or his face to cling to through the years. It had always made me feel guilty somehow. And more alone.
I wasn’t sure what had brought on all those thoughts of my father. It was funny, what losing a parent before you were born could do. Having never known what it was like to have a father, I couldn’t say I missed it, necessarily, and sometimes I felt that way—that it was no big deal. Other times, I worried it was a visible wound.
As these were not thoughts that were likely to impress Mom with my new interest in wedding planning, I ruthlessly shoved them aside as I pulled open the glass door to her office building and climbed the stairs to the second-floor suite. I had done the same so many times that even the smell of the carpet felt like memory lane. Sometimes, after a late practice when I was still in high school, I would meet Mom here and we’d have dinner, just the two of us. I’d spent many an afternoon on these steps, waiting for her to lock up.
Today, however, I was planning to surprise her. I knew she usually had her lunch at her desk, while the two partners wined and dined clients or made absurd requests she was a master at denying. I pushed open the oute
r office door, expecting to see her in her usual place at the reception area facing the entryway. But the outer office was empty. I heaved my heavy armload of glossy wedding magazines onto the surface of Mom’s desk. I was about to sit down in the waiting area when I heard the sound of her voice from down the hall. Her real voice, some part of my brain noted, not the smooth one she usually put on in professional settings.
Thinking I could really surprise her at this point, I crept down the hall. I knew the file room was straight ahead, having spent some school vacations helping Mom out. I knew which office belonged to Stan, the passive-aggressive one who still wanted Mom to pick up his dry cleaning because his trophy wife was too busy Botoxing, and which belonged to Leonard, who Mom generally found exasperating every third day. She was in Leonard’s office. I poked my head around the open door, started to speak, and then stopped dead.
Mom and Leonard were sitting on the leather sofa together, the remains of their lunch on the coffee table before them. Which was unremarkable. What was remarkable was that Mom’s feet were up in Leonard’s lap, and he was massaging them, since he clearly knew—as I did—that her arches ached when she wore the shoes she loved.
Their casual, and thus evidently long-term intimacy hung around them like a sepia tint.
I may have been naïve, but even I could see the freaking obvious. Which was that Leonard and my Mom were . . . what? Dating? My mind skittered away from that word.
I could feel that my mouth had dropped open.
“Hello, Courtney,” Mom said. She made no attempt to leap away from Leonard or move her feet from his grasp, though I could swear his fingers tightened. “This is a surprise.”
And suddenly, an old memory came rushing back to me. I must have been all of ten years old, and Mom had started having late dinners out with one of the lawyers at her firm. In retrospect, it must have been Leonard, though I had no particular memories of him.