The organ started up, louder this time. What it played was not the traditional march, but then it couldn’t be what Margaret thought it was either—the wedding music from Lieutenant Kije. She looked around her; no one else seemed to find anything funny. She looked toward the aisle and saw a frilly blonde in pink—Elizabeth’s sister, it must be, but softer and prettier—keeping pace with some more dignified music in her head and carrying a nosegay. Behind her came Elizabeth, on the arm of a young man whom Margaret assumed to be the brother-in-law. Elizabeth’s white suit was crisp and trim, but without her dungarees she seemed to lose all her style. She walked as if her shoes were too big for her. A short veil stuck out around her face like a peasant’s kerchief. Her escort scowled at the carpet, but Elizabeth’s face was serene and the music had brought out one of her private half-smiles. They passed Margaret and continued forward, beyond a multitude of flowered hats and whisking fans.
When everyone was in place, Margaret sat back and wiped her damp palms on her skirt. “Things are going to be all right, I believe,” the fat lady whispered. Margaret watched Elizabeth’s father open his black book and carefully lay aside a ribbon marker. “Dearly beloved …” he said. He was one of those ministers who develop a whole new tone of voice in front of a congregation. His words rolled over each other, hollow and doomed. Margaret forgot to listen and watched Elizabeth’s straight white back.
But Elizabeth wasn’t listening either. The moment her father started reading she turned toward Dommie, as if the ceremony were some commercial she already knew by heart. She spoke, not whispering but in a low, clear voice. Margaret was too far away to hear what she said. Dommie turned toward Elizabeth and parted his lips; Elizabeth waited, but when he said nothing she went on speaking. Her father’s voice crashed above their heads, unnoticed.
Now no one was listening. Everyone watched Elizabeth. Whispers traveled down the pews. “You would think just this once—” the fat lady said. Even Elizabeth’s father seemed to have stopped hearing what he was saying. He spoke with his eyes on Elizabeth, his finger traveling lower on the page, line by line, without his following it. He was going faster and faster, as if he were running some sort of race. “Do you, Dominick Benjamin …” Dommie’s face turned reluctantly from Elizabeth. “I do,” he said, after a pause. He had the strained, preoccupied look of someone interrupted in the middle of more important things. “Do you, Elizabeth Priscilla …”
Elizabeth’s pause was even longer. A fly spiraled toward the ceiling; someone coughed. Elizabeth drew herself up until she was straight and thin, with her elbows pressed to her sides and her feet close together.
“I don’t,” she said.
No one breathed. Elizabeth’s father snapped his book shut.
“I’m sorry, I just don’t,” she said.
Then she turned around, and the organ gave a start and wheezed into Lieutenant Kije again. Elizabeth came down the aisle slowly and steadily with her nosegay held exactly right and her head perfectly level. Oh, why didn’t she just turn and run out that little door at the front? How could she bear to travel all that long way by herself? Margaret thought of leaping up and shouting something, anything, just to pull people’s eyes from Elizabeth. But she didn’t. She stayed silent. After one glance at Dommie, frozen before the pulpit, she stared down the aisle as hard as anyone.
It took several minutes for people to realize what had happened. They just sat there—even the fat lady. Then the organ dwindled out in the middle of a note, and whispers and rustles started up. Mrs. Abbott rose and marched firmly toward her husband. She looped one arm through his and the other through Dommie’s, and led them back out the little door.
“Did you ever?” all the women were asking, rising and clustering together. “Did you ever hear of such a thing?” the fat lady said. “I always did want to see somebody do that,” a man told Margaret. She smiled and sidled out of the pew. In the doorway, Elizabeth’s sister stood circled by more flowered hats. She looked dazed. “I don’t understand, I just don’t understand,” she kept saying. A woman with feather earrings said, “Now tell me this, Polly. Had they had a little quarrel or something?”
“Dommie wouldn’t quarrel,” an old lady said.
“Did they—”
“She told us she’d changed her mind,” Polly said. “Told us just as we left the house. Father said no. He said, ‘Liz, now all the guests are here,’ he said, ‘and you owe them a wedding,’ and she said, ‘Well, all right, if a wedding’s what you want.’ But we never thought, I mean, we thought she meant—and Father said she was sure to feel differently, once she was standing at the altar.”
“Well, of course. Of course she would,” someone said. “All brides get cold feet.”
“That’s what he told her,” Polly said. “ ‘And they forget about it an hour later,’ he told her, but Liz said, ‘How do you know? Maybe they’re just saying that, and they regret it all their lives. It’s a conspiracy,’ she said—oh, but still I never thought—Mother asked if there were anyone else. I mean, anyone, you know, but she said no, and you could tell she meant it, she looked so surprised—”
“Excuse me,” Margaret said. She slid sideways through the crowd until she reached the front steps. Then she shaded her eyes and looked all around her. The sun had bleached everything—the grass, the walk, the highway—but in all that whiteness there was no sign of Elizabeth’s wedding suit. She had vanished. All she had left behind were two high-heeled shoes placed neatly side by side on the bottom step.
Margaret walked to her car very slowly. She wanted to give Elizabeth a chance to catch her, in case she needed a ride. But no one called her name. By the time she reached the highway she was feeling a letdown. Now I suppose I’ll never hear from her again, she thought, I’ll never know how this turned out. Then she opened her car door, and there was Elizabeth on the front seat.
She was slouched so far down that she couldn’t be seen from outside, but she didn’t have a fugitive look. She seemed flattened, exhausted, as if her sitting so low were merely poor posture. “Hi there,” she said.
“Elizabeth!”
“You think you could get me out of here?”
Margaret slid in and slammed the door and started the car, all in one motion. When she pulled onto the highway she left streaks of rubber. Anyone watching would have known it was a get-away car. “Elizabeth,” she said, “are you all right?”
“More or less,” said Elizabeth.
But from the stoniness of her face, Margaret guessed that she wanted to be left in peace.
They flew down the highway, across mirages of water that streaked its surface. Margaret wanted to make sure where they were going, but she was afraid to break the silence. Then they entered Ellington, and Elizabeth sat up straighter and looked out the window. “There’s where I went voting,” she said.
“Boating?” Margaret asked. There was no water anywhere, but she couldn’t believe that Elizabeth would mention voting at a time like this.
“Voting. Voting,” said Elizabeth. “Polly’s husband said I ought to.” She sighed and trailed a hand out the window. “There were all these people lined up. Shopkeepers and housewives and people, just waiting and waiting. So responsible. I bet you anything they wait like that every voting day, and put in their single votes that hardly matter and go back to their jobs and do the same chores over and over. Just on and on. Just plodding along. Just getting through till they die. You have to admire that. Don’t you? Before then I never thought of it.”
“I admire you,” Margaret said.
“What for?” said Elizabeth, absently. “But when I was waiting to vote I thought, Wouldn’t you think I could do that much? Make some decisions? Get my life in order? Let my parents breathe easy for once? Well, I tried, and you see what happened. Just before the finish line I think no, what if I’m making a mistake? Sometimes I worry that everyone but me knows something I don’t know: they set out their lives without wondering, as if they had a few extras stashed away som
ewhere. Well, I’ve tried to believe it, but I can’t. Things are so permanent. There’s damage you can’t repair.”
“But it took a lot of courage, doing what you did today,” Margaret said.
“Flashes of courage are easy,” said Elizabeth, with her mind on something else. Then suddenly she spun around and said, “What’s the matter with you? What are you admiring so much? If I was so brave, how’d I get into that wedding in the first place? Oh, think about Dommie, he’s always so sweet and patient. And my family doing all that arranging, and people coming all that way for the wedding. But Dommie. He’s never said a mean thing in his life, or done anything but hope to be loved. What am I going to tell him now?”
From far back in Margaret’s mind, where she hadn’t even known it existed, came the picture of Dommie’s face as he watched Elizabeth leaving him. His eyes were blank and stricken; his mouth was closed, unprotesting. He hadn’t yet realized what was happening to him. He unfolded before her eyes as complete and as finely detailed as if the glance she had given him had taken whole minutes, as if she had known him for years and had memorized that picture of him line by line and dreamed of it every night. She blinked and widened her eyes, tightening her hands on the wheel as she drove.
“Well, shoot, Margaret,” said Elizabeth. “It’s weddings you cry at, not the escapes from them.”
“So,” said Melissa, settling herself in the car. “How’d the wedding go?” “It didn’t.”
“It didn’t? What happened?”
“She got to the altar and said, ‘I don’t,’ ” said Margaret. She laughed, surprising herself. “Well, it really wasn’t funny, of course.”
“Sounds funny to me,” Melissa said. She frowned, briefly interested. Then she said, “Well, anyway, this patchwork skirt woman. She’s a nut. I’m sorry I ever came down. Do you know what she said to me? I said, ‘Look, you’re getting twenty dollars for these things. I’ll give you twenty-five apiece,’ I said, ‘if you’ll supply me with a dozen now and all you can make from now on.’ ‘Twenty-five?’ she said. ‘Well, I don’t know, there’s something fishy about that.’ You’d think I was trying to sell her something. ‘Look,’ I told her …”
Margaret gazed through a traffic light. She was thinking of Jimmy Joe, who might be sauntering down the sidewalk just a block from here. His collar would be turned up, he would be whistling beneath his breath. When he saw her, he would stop and wait. She reached out and touched his wrist, which was frail and bony. “Jimmy Joe,” she said, “I’m sorry I left you the way I did.” He smiled down at her and nodded, and then he walked on. If he ever came back it would be dimly, for only a second, in the company of others whose parts in her life were finished.
“ ‘How do I know I’ll feel like making all those skirts?’ she asked me. Feel like it! What next? ‘Oh, I believe I’ll just go my own little way,’ she said. Teeny old scrawny woman living all alone, you’d think she’d be jumping at the chance. In her front yard she’d set a bathtub on end and turned it into an icon.”
Margaret laughed.
“Why do you keep laughing?” Melissa said. “I think you’ve spent too much time with Elizabeth.”
“Elizabeth? No. She wasn’t laughing at all.”
“Oh, that doesn’t matter,” Melissa said. “She’s all in the mind anyway. Margaret, what am I going to do? I was counting on patchwork skirts. What can I do instead?”
Margaret didn’t answer. She was out on the highway now, concentrating on driving, trying to get home before nightfall.
10
1965
Mary’s letter said, “Good news, Morris and I are going off for a week in July. Just the two of us, no children. Finally we’ll be able to finish a conversation, I told him.…”
Mrs. Emerson read it several times, trying to figure out what was expected of her. Was this a hint? Was Mary hoping her mother would babysit? No, probably not. The last time she visited Mary she had overstayed her welcome. Only four and a half days, and she had overstayed. She had replaced a scummy plastic juice pitcher with a nice glass one—nothing special, just something she picked up in downtown Dayton—and Mary had thrown a fit. “What is my juice pitcher doing in the garbage?” she had said. “What is this new thing doing here? Who asked you? What right did you have?” Mrs. Emerson had packed and left, and held off writing for three weeks. Then just a bread-and-butter note, brief, formal, apologizing for waiting so long but life had been so cram-packed lately, she said. And now what?
She wandered through the house carrying the letter, pressing her fingers to her lips while she thought things over. If she didn’t offer to babysit she would be missing a chance to see her grandchildren. If she did offer, she might be turned down. The insult pricked her already; imagine how much worst if it actually happened! But if she didn’t offer …
She climbed the stairs to her bedroom. Lately her legs had grown stiff. She moved like an old lady, which she had promised herself she would never do, and although her shoes were still frail and spiky she had lately been eying the thick, black walking shoes in store windows. If she wore sheer stockings with them, after all, if she bought the kind of shoe with a fringed flap so that people thought she had merely changed into a tweedy type.… Her hand rested heavily on the banister, and when she reached the top she had to pause to catch her breath before she went into her bedroom.
Dear Mary, she wrote on cream notepaper. How nice to hear about the vacation. It will do you a world of good. You don’t mention a babysitter, and maybe you’ve already found one, but I did want to let you know that just in case you haven’t—
She stopped to read over what she had written. Although she had chosen her words carefully, her handwriting was deliberately a little more slapdash than usual. Let it look casual, spur-of-the-moment. But when she took up her pen again, she paused and read the letter a second time. She was thinking of her grandchildren. Four of them, three girls and a boy, and she would like to know where people got the idea that girls were quieter. Oh, they ran her ragged. Climbing too high, jumping too far, running too fast. Talking in their high-pitched voices with excited gulps for air. Always hiding her things and giving shrieks of laughter when she missed them. Was she even sure she wanted to do this?
Grandchildren were not all they were cracked up to be. She held onto that thought a minute, enjoying it, before she flicked it away again. Grandchildren were wonderful. What else did she have to live for? Her committee work was fading out; her friends were turning into droning old ladies or even, some of them, dying. Mornings, when she came downstairs in a fresh crisp dress and looked all around her at the high ceilings dripping cobwebs, she sometimes wondered why she had bothered to get up. The house seemed thinner-walled, like an old and brittle shell, and she was a little dried-up scrap of seaweed rattling around in its vastness. But then she would remember her children, who descended and spread out from her like a fan, and their children spreading out further; and she felt grand and deep and bountiful, a creamy feeling that she held to tightly all through her empty mornings. She felt it now. She rose and made her way to the hall again, for no other purpose than to fill all the other rooms with her richness while it lasted.
Down the stairs, which was harder on her legs than coming up but not so bad for her chest. Through the lower hall, touching pieces of furniture meaninglessly as she passed them. And into the kitchen, where she put a piece of bread in the toaster because it was possible that she had skipped lunch. While she waited for the toast she gathered dirty dishes and set them into the sink. Alvareen had not been by for a week. It looked as if she had finally quit, and all over a little spat that had no importance whatsoever. She had claimed she ought to be paid for her sick-days. “Seeing as you always save up what work I missed, every rag and tag,” she said, “and I got to do it then when I get back, you ought to at least pay me for it.” “That’s rubbish, that’s ridiculous,” said Mrs. Emerson. “I don’t have to stand for any smart talk, Alvareen, I can always find some clean hard-working gir
l to bring in from the country.” “Suit yourself,” said Alvareen. What Mrs. Emerson couldn’t bring herself to tell her was that it wasn’t just work she paid Alvareen for, it was her presence in the house, something to drive the echoes away. But try letting her know that: she would puff up immediately, maybe ask for a raise. Mrs. Emerson would not even give her the satisfaction of a telephone call. If she quit, she quit. There were no more clean hard-working girls in the country (where had they got to, anyway?) but good riddance, even so. She’d make do without.
The toaster clicked. Mrs. Emerson took the last clean plate from a cabinet and went over to the table, but then she saw that the toast had not come up. It was caught down inside by one bent corner. Mrs. Emerson poked it with a finger, and nothing happened. She circled the table thoughtfully. “Never put a fork in a toaster,” people were always saying. It might have been the only advice she had ever been given; it came in a chorus, from somewhere above her head. Lately she had been noticing how many opportunities there were for painful deaths. Anything was possible: gas heaters exploding, teenaged drivers running her down, flying roof slates beheading her in a windstorm, and cancer—oh, cancer most of all. Several nights she had awakened with the certain, heart-stopping knowledge that when she died it would be in some horrible way. She had pushed it off, but the knowledge sank in and became accepted. In the daytime she often found herself surveying her actions from some distant point in the future. This was me, before It happened, she would say, going about my business blissfully unaware, never dreaming how it would end. The thought gave a new tone to everything she did. Measuring out tea leaves or folding back her bedspread was tinged with a lurking horror, like the sunlit village scenes in vampire movies. And where there was actually some danger—getting this toast out, for instance—she became nearly helpless. She spent minutes just staring at the toaster, plotting courses of action. A wooden spoon, maybe—something non-conductive. But how did she know it was non-conductive? She had only the scientists’ word for it. Finally a channel seemed to break through in her brain, and she clicked her tongue at herself and bent to unplug the toaster. Even then, she didn’t put her fingers in. She turned the toaster upside down and shook it, scattering crumbs all across the kitchen table.