A Wedding on the Banks (10 page)

“I have seen and heard all of you today that I care to,” Junior said to Randy, and the boy went promptly up the stairs to his room, where he had cleverly hidden a fat joint for a rainy day. “Thank you, though,” Junior said as Randy slammed his door, “for sharing yourself with me.”

In the den Junior stopped at the bar to pour a quick drink. He also wanted a few seconds to size up Thelma, determine her mood, before he interfered with it. He found the opened wedding invitation from his cousin Amy Joy where Thelma had left it, leaning against a bottle of club soda. He hoped the notion of a wedding, of sacred vows, of words like “honor” and “obey” hadn't thrown her into a emotional dump. He never knew what might set her off. One time it was a radio advertisement for Chicken Delite. The description of juicy thighs had reminded Thelma that Monique Tessier had some.

Junior eyed his wife. She seemed fine. She was sitting on the sofa, her legs crossed, holding a record album and thinking, brows knitted.

“Trying to remember some old song,” thought Junior. He prided himself on being as good as any damn disc jockey when it came to the whos and whens of music trivia. He would help Thelma out. Things were better between them, weren't they? A few months ago she'd come alive in bed. Even after she caught him with Monique, it hadn't put a damper on things. Just last night he'd tried again, and sure enough. It was so good he thought she might accidentally wake the kids. Stir up the neighbors. He even imagined a fire truck pulling up and turning a spray of water loose through the bedroom window. Maybe that's what women needed sometimes. A little push now and then. A little jealousy to stir up the old home fires.

Junior stared at Thelma's thoughtful brow curiously. He would help her out, the way she'd been helping him through the nights lately.

“She keeps that up,” Junior thought, “and I might start coming home on time, with or without Randy.” Besides, he didn't want to be like his father. A million times in his childhood he had heard Marvin ask Pearl, “And how was
your
day?” and then never bother to listen to her answer.

“What are you trying to think of?” asked Junior. He noticed Thelma had
The
Hits
of
Bobby
Vinton
in her hands. What could be puzzling her? The year “Roses Are Red” was a hit? 1962. “Blue Velvet”? 1963. Come on, it was Thelma here he was dealing with. How tough could it be? Vinton's nationality? Polack.

“What's the problem, hon?” Junior prodded. “Are you trying to think of a year?”

At the sound of the question, Thelma burst into loud sobs. She shook her head.

“It was
1948
, you asshole!” Thelma screamed. She made a motion with her hand, quickly, the way one throws a Frisbee, and Junior ducked as Bobby Vinton sailed through the air and struck the wall behind the bar. “Just tell me what we paid for that damn Maytag!”

“Ed Lawler run around on that woman every chance he got. He pillowed and plundered and bedded, I tell you, all he could. But Sicily's a saint. She stuck with him every inch of the way.”

—Winnie Craft, at the 1962 Avon party

Sicily McKinnon Lawler took her wedding dress, still in its original box, down from a shelf in her bedroom closet. She wiped away a cobweb that had attached itself to one corner. There had been no spring cleaning done that year, thanks to the wedding revelation by Amy Joy. Sicily no longer cared if cobwebs festooned the entire house. The spiders could have it, for all she cared, and the few acres of land too.

The dress was still softly beautiful. The lace design had always reminded Sicily of frost creeping across icy windowpanes during Mattagash's wintry months. What is it about spring that old memories seem to thaw out too, along with the flies, the fields, the river, the buildings? Sicily remembered Ed Lawler, so nervous on his wedding day that he had vomited, leaning out of John McRyder's new Pontiac. Sicily had always suspected nerves had little to do with it. John McRyder, Ed's old college classmate and best man, was famous for the bottles of alcohol that poked out from the springs of the Pontiac's seats. A rainy August day in 1931, the skies so dark and foreboding that someone not so much in love as Sicily might have taken it as a bad sign. A kind of matrimonial omen. Funny that John McRyder came to mind. She had looked at Ed's old college class book just a few days ago and had found them both, John and Ed, arms around each other's shoulders, cocky in their football uniforms, faces so young they were almost unrecognizable. “John ‘The Flying Scott' McRyder, Captain,” is what the caption said, “Gets a Pat on the Back from Ed ‘The Lawless' Lawler. Championship Game, 1929.” It was in the late forties that John McRyder had gone up in a little yellow airplane at the Houlton state fair for a five-dollar joyride and the plane had come plummeting down to earth in a potato field. For years afterward, during the harvest, kids found pieces of yellow like chunks of sun turned up by the digger and tossed among the rows and rows of russet potatoes. Sicily had always liked John, despite his philandering ways, which she worried would rub off on Ed. But John had even managed to get himself married to a nice girl, and he had settled down before he died. And didn't Mrs. John McRyder cry at the funeral! Ed and Sicily had driven all the way to Houlton to attend.

“Can you imagine?” Emily McRyder had cried out to Ed in her grief. “Can you imagine going up in an airplane
just
to
look
down
?” The McRyders had enough little kids by then to fill that old Pontiac. It pained Sicily to see Emily McRyder so.

“They might just as well have buried that woman along with him,” Sicily had told the women who gathered around her back in Mattagash, anxious for news of the wake. A little yellow airplane never took enough interest in Mattagash to crash there. They were always flying
over,
toting hunters and fisherman from the city into the virgin lakes that had once been safe from such men. But now Mattagash's geography was being plundered, thanks to yellow Piper Cubs and red Stinsons, which never landed for a chat but chose instead to stay above it all, tipping their wings mockingly.

John McRyder. He had been so dashing in his day. Sicily realized years after his death, when it was perfectly safe to admit such things, that she had had a passionate crush on John McRyder. She held the wedding dress beneath her chin and studied herself in the mirror. She had never been thin—none of the McKinnon women had ever been accused of that. But it was all tied in to the reason their ancestors had been strong enough and sturdy enough to withstand the raw country that faced them, to be the first in that country. Yes, the McKinnon women, like the men, were all big-boned and solid, a compliment for young girls of that place and time. But Sicily had become a little more big-boned and solid over the years than she cared to be. And besides, it was all over now, this pioneering notion, this striking out to hinterlands unknown. Why did she need the childbearing, water-carrying frame of a woman you see nowadays only in
National
Geographic
pictures of Russia? It all seemed a bit unfair in 1969. Oh, maybe a great-grandchild of hers would end up on the moon one day. It was possible. They were getting ready to send a man there, Neil Armstrong.

“Imagine that, Ed,” Sicily thought. “A man on the moon. You always said we were close.” And then Sicily smiled to remember how Ed used to tease old Mr. Fennelson about going to the moon.

“There's gonna be trouble,” the old man would sputter. “You mark my words. God don't want mankind on the moon. God wants to keep as far away from mankind as he kin.” Now they were both dead, moonwalking or not. And soon man
would
go off to the moon, seeking rivers maybe and warm places sheltered from the snows and winds, just as Sicily's ancestors had done.

“Look out, God,” Sicily thought. “Here we come.” And then she was suddenly unhappy that she had been caught between pioneering ages, the way some young men complain of being lost between wars.

Sicily folded the dress carefully and tucked it back inside the shell of its box. The dress, her very own wedding dress, did not fit her anymore, it was true, but with a few adjustments, it would suit Amy Joy just fine. Tears filled Sicily's eyes. All the times she had dreamed of seeing little Amy Joy gussied up in her mother's wedding lace! What had she expected all those years? Perhaps that Amy Joy would meet a nice young boy at Loring Air Force Base, a boy from Delaware or New Jersey or one of those civilized states. Or perhaps Amy Joy would go off to college somewhere, since a high school degree didn't create the brouhaha it used to. In Mattagash the hot new item was a year or two of college. So perhaps Amy Joy
would
go off to college and at that college, all hidden mysteriously in those intelligent green vines, Amy Joy would sip a Pepsi in the cafeteria next to some young boy whose family was influential in some way or another, like the Rockefellers or the Kennedys, and they would fall in love and marry. And the whole influential family would come to Mattagash to meet Sicily, and their entourage would stay at the Albert Pinkham Motel, and Sicily would fix a pot of Tetley's so that they could all come by her house for a cup of tea, and they would sit on the back porch and listen to the Mattagash River and be thankful that their son had the foresight to chase down one of the descendants of Mattagash's founding family.

“Darn that Jean Claude Cloutier!” Sicily said. “Or however you pronounce that god-awful French name.” She could actually
poison
him, if she thought she would get away with it. She could give him a plug of arsenic hidden in the creamy center of a homemade whoopie pie. But a Frog probably wouldn't eat a whoopie pie.

She took the fragile dress back out of its box and held it to her body again, for one final look before it went off to belong to someone else, to become a part of someone else's future. She turned before the mirror, for a side view. If someone had told her years ago, when she first started dreaming her wedding dreams for Amy Joy, that this dress would flounce its way down the aisle to weld Amy Joy to a French Catholic for eternity, she would have burned it, veil and all. Or better yet, she would have marched right down to the banks of the Mattagash River and heaved it far out into the rips. Let it float all the way down to the ocean at St. John, New Brunswick. Let it go back down that old river in the
opposite
direction
to the one that the first McKinnons had taken. That's just what it was like for Amy Joy to be marrying in the territory of Catholics. It was the opposite direction from any McKinnon before her. If you so much as glanced at the McKinnon family tree you would be able to pronounce in a second any name that your eye spied. Just how did they say “Cloutier” in Frogtown? “Clue-tier”? Or, worse yet, “Clue-tee-yay”? A person would sound like a cheerleader. Her poor little grandchildren. Yes, sir. The way Sicily felt about weddings and trousseaus and bridal showers now, she might just as well toss the dress into the Mattagash River and let the young girls down around St. John, New Brunswick, pull it out of the water and wear it. They were Canadians, true, a shortcoming. Yet they could still speak the King's English down there. But she kept forgetting. Jean Claude wasn't a Canadian. He was American, like the rest of them on this side of the border, on this side of the Mattagash River. And his family had most likely been American for a hundred and fifty years. Maybe more. Yet, and Amy Joy had told her this, Jean Claude's parents could barely speak a sensible word of English.
Americans,
unable to speak English. Imagine that.

“You can't depend on a river to separate folks in a proper manner,” Sicily thought. She had once said to Ed that she wished the French-speaking people in Watertown and St. Leonard would go back where they came from. And Ed had reminded her that a century and a half ago, her very own ancestors had come from New Brunswick, Canada. The Loyalists. And that there were names in her family tree from Ireland who had been
Catholic
back in the old country, before the famine, before the passage, and they came here as orphans to be adopted by Protestants.

“Well, God meant for that to happen,” Sicily had answered him. “Maybe God caused the famine to disperse the Catholics so that they could find good Protestant homes in America.” Ed had only laughed, his “I know more than you” laugh. But it was true. And besides, why bring it all up now? Why bring it all back?

Amy Joy knocked on the bedroom door and Sicily quickly put the dress away and slid the box under the bed. She kicked her slippers off and lay back. As a final touch, she flicked some bangs down into her eyes and then pulled the spare woolen blanket, meant for cold winter nights and not balmy spring days, up around her neck.

“Come in, dear,” she said. The eyes that looked from beneath the heavy blanket were dull with remorse. Pain had erased all memory of a former, happy life.

“Oh, I didn't know you were taking a nap,” said Amy Joy, and started to close the door.

“No!” said Sicily, showing much too much vigor. “What do you want?”

“Well,” said Amy Joy, “I guess it's time I got the wedding dress taken in. Rose Henderson said she'd do the seamstress work as a present, and the wedding is only a week away. Have you decided to give it to me yet or not? It doesn't matter, you know. I can get something at J. C. Penney's at the last minute.”

Sicily heard the awful words as they entered the external part of her ear. Once there, in the foyer, they were escorted on into the middle ear. Here the ruckus started. The awful words beat fiercely upon the tiny bones in the middle ear and caused something fluid to move around in the internal ear. It was in there, in the internal ear, that the awful words caused you-know-what to hit the fan.
The wedding is only a week away.
Amy Joy, her own daughter, her only daughter, was going to cause deafness in her.

“What?” asked Sicily. “What?”

“I said do I, or do I not, wear your wedding dress? If it's going to bend you out of shape, I'll pick up something in Watertown. It doesn't matter to me what I wear.” Amy Joy sucked some Pepsi up through a straw.

Bend you out of shape. What did
that
mean? What was happening to Mattagash's youth? Once, they were content to skate all night around a fire on the bogan, or slide on pieces of linoleum down Russell Hill, or swim all day long in the patch of good swimming water by the bridge and then drink pops while the sun dried them again. And the next thing you know, they want cars to drive to Watertown
for
no
reason
at
all.
Not for shopping, or to go to the doctor's office, or even to trade in a few books of Green Stamps at the redemption center. For no reason at all. Amy Joy had given that answer herself a thousand times. Now they wanted television sets instead of old-fashioned storytelling. They turned their noses up at handmade clothing, hand-knit mittens, home-given haircuts. The outside world had reached its hand into Mattagash, dirty fingernails and all, and had grabbed up the fancy of the youngsters. There was something missing now. A sense of heritage maybe. What young girl would not beg to wear her mother's precious wedding dress?
I'll pick something up in J. C. Penney's at the last minute. If it's going to bend you out
of
shape.
Whatever that meant, it was happening. Sicily
was
being bent out of shape. Her ears were bending out of shape. Her heart was twisting out of shape.

“Speak up please, dear,” said Sicily, and held a hand to her right ear. “I can't hear a thing,” she said. “Not even the river.”

Not hearing the river, that downpour of water that rushed past all the houses in Mattagash clinging to its bank, was unimaginable. If you'd lived there all your life, it's true that you wouldn't notice it. Like the soft ticking of a clock, it went away with time. Only the tourists remained wide-eyed about the river, as they did with most foolish things. But if you listened for it, by God, the river was there. It was your family scrapbook strung out, page after page. It was the watery line of your heritage that pointed straight toward the ocean, then across the ocean, to the old country. It gurgled and rippled and snarled. In Mattagash, say you don't hear the wind, and no one will pay you much mind. Say you don't hear the heaving pulp truck, or the whining skidder, or the grating chain saw that has replaced the old-timer's broadax. Say you don't hear the throaty loon in the bogan. Say you don't hear your own heart washing its beat against your rib cage. But, for Christ's sake,
say
you
hear
the
river.