A Wedding on the Banks (9 page)

There was a scurrying, micelike, in the attic. She stared up at the ceiling. It must be the wind rustling about. It would actually be nice to have mice living up there. How Marge had fought the mice, back at the old homestead. Yet it was as if they were part of the family. Nowadays, especially in Portland, you got to be pretty damn hard up before you get a few self-respecting mice to settle down in your house. Yes, it would be nice to believe there were mice living in her attic, in her nice house on Hillsboro Street, a little secret from the neighbors. She imagined Mrs. Tinley standing on a chair screaming at just the thought
of
those
mice
next
door.
It would be nice to have something living up there besides dusty trunks of old clothes and letters. Some of Marge's personals. Some of the Reverend Ralph's. Some of her mother's delicate china. Letters and papers, mostly. Articles it seemed only the spiders were interested in these days. Junior's kids certainly didn't care. They must believe she had always been from Portland, Maine, their grandmother Pearl. They had never bothered to ask her one single bit of family history. She even brought it up one day when Cynthia Jane, the oldest, was a senior in high school.

“Did you know that you're descended from the first settlers of Mattagash, Maine?” Pearl had proudly told her first grandchild. She had waited years for that day.

“Where?” Cynthia Jane had asked, and turned up that little nose that looked so much like Thelma's.

“Did you know that your great-grandfather Ralph was a missionary who went all the way over to China and died there?” Pearl had gone on, determined to leave behind her this oral history. To give it to her grandchildren as something to be protected for years to come. The way you might give a high school graduation gift. The way you might give them luggage, or money, or bicycles.

“Who?” Cynthia Jane had asked.

Pearl closed her eyes. She did not want to look up at the wide-open ceiling anymore. It reminded her too much of the clear night sky over Mattagash, of the late-night sessions with Marge when the three sisters had sat with legs dangling off the back porch and spied on the sky for falling stars.

“There's one!” She could hear her own voice at twelve years old. Yes, she could still hear it. Now, how many people who don't have such things preserved on a tape recorder can say that?

“There's one, Margie!” And Sicily would be asleep beside them on the porch. Old Chad, the dog. My God, how had she ever let Old Chad slip out of her memory? The day he died, she and Sicily had simply
known
they would never be happy again. And here she was, in Portland, Maine, with a family who barely knew she existed and yet she'd forgotten a friend as loyal as Old Chad.

“Old Chad,” Pearl whispered, and tried to swallow the lump in her throat. “There's another one! Wake up, Sicily! Wake up and look!” It had been so much better than she had ever remembered it. Why didn't she know that when she was way back there right in the heart of the action?

“We were washing off so much mud all the time, the way we were taught,” Pearl thought, “that we never realized how good we really had it.”

So it had come to this, then? Sixty years of living and learning and raising a family had brought her to stretching out on her bed, in her nightclothes, and letting a whole day inch by. She hadn't even had an urge to go to the bathroom. If she had made her morning coffee, perhaps it would have been different. But she hadn't. The only energy she'd put into the day had been to sit up, swing her legs over the edge of the bed, and pick up the old scrapbook where she'd left it the evening before. The rest was history. Yet she'd worked out a lot of things, more things than if she'd gotten up and puttered about her kitchen in another useless day of routine. She would call Sicily as soon as possible. Yes, she would be coming to the wedding, even if she was the only one in the Ivy family to do so. She would even set her mind to picking out a perfect gift for Amy Joy. But no, she would not be staying at Sicily's.

“Please have someone clean up Marge's old house,” she would tell Sicily. “Please have someone sweep all the cobwebs off the old homestead. And tell the mice I'm coming home.”

***

When Marvin walked in the front door half an hour later, sharp as a clock, Pearl was in a lavender dress, with her hair swept up and sprayed in a nice coiffure. The electric teakettle was singing, and the radio was tuned in to a local talk show. The newspaper had been brought in off the front porch and all the houseplants had been given a drink of water. Who would know that there had never even been any breakfast dishes, or lunch dishes, to wash and put away? For forty years now, Marvin had preferred to eat one or two doughnuts in the Ivy Funeral Home coffee room for his breakfast. How would he have known any different if, over the years, Pearl had been starving herself during the day? If she had been lying crazily on her bed for hours? He never noticed if she waxed a floor, or bleached a sheet, or dusted a lamp. Would forty years of dust have piled up to his nose and eventually choked him? A
houseguest
in his own living room?

Marvin smiled as he plunked his calfskin briefcase down and took off his tweed jacket. He made a quick assessment of the kitchen. How nice it would be to have nothing more to worry about all day long than washing a few dishes and cooking a bit of food. Maybe dust a vase every couple days. Bring in the paper. Open the mail. Search for a purse. He almost envied a woman's life. He sniffed the air. Usually he could identify the fare of the evening by keen smell alone. He knew pot roast immediately. Steaks and pork chops were more elusive. So was meat loaf. But there was no mistaking the spicy air of stuffed cabbages or a boiled dinner. Marvin sniffed harder. Ham. Yes, it was definitely ham. Boiled ham dinner. Good. It had been at least a month since he had tasted the sweet broth, the carrots, the small whole potatoes, the tender ham. Boiled ham dinner, that old New England fare that had put muscle on their ancestors. Helped them cope in a harsh new land. Good for her. Good for Pearly.

“And how was
your
day?” Marvin asked, as Pearl put a bowl of canned pea soup and a hastily built ham sandwich in front of her starving husband.

***

“Come on down!” Thelma Ivy screamed along with the
Price
Is
Right
audience on television. The trick was for the three contestants to pinpoint the price of a new 1969 Maytag washer. Thelma searched her memory bank of female knowledge. Her very first washer had been a Maytag. She purchased it in 1948, the year she and Junior were married. What had they paid for it? Yet that was over twenty years ago. What had been the rate of inflation over that period? And how much would that amount to in dollars and cents right now? Right at this minute? Good heavens, they only gave contestants
seconds
to figure this all out. Even game shows demanded so much of a person's intellectual and emotional responses, especially three or four a day.

“I'll be a basket case if I watch
Let's Make a Deal,”
Thelma decided, and she reached out a shaky hand and shut the monster off. She trembled at the sudden disappearance of Bob Barker. It was as if she had murdered him. Had murdered the whole audience. Had ripped the very guts out of the shiny new Maytag. But it had been the most positive movement, she was quite sure, her hand had taken upon itself in ages. Thelma had been cheating on Junior for three months now, and he didn't even suspect it. Maybe he thought he was the only one to have affairs, but he was wrong. Thelma had loved Bob Barker ever since she found out about Junior and Monique Tessier. Ever since she'd heard Milly, the secretary-accountant, laughing about it in the restroom at the Ivy Funeral Home, during the employee Christmas party. She was telling one of the ambulance drivers' wives about it. They had come into the restroom to arrange their hair, fix their lipsticks, and smoke a quick cigarette since Marvin didn't allow it in the funeral home.

“I'm surprised he allows
dying,”
Milly had said to Buddy Simlac's wife, about the no-smoking situation. Then she had gone on to spill the marital beans.

“Oh yes, it's been going on for months,” Milly had giggled. “I think Monique is bored. What other reason could there be?”

Thelma had pulled her skinny feet and ankles up off the floor to avoid detection. By the time the women had doused their cigarettes beneath the water faucet and disappeared back into the dullness of the party, Thelma had heard all. And hard as she tried, she could not pee a drop.

“I'm all shriveled up,” she thought, but she meant her heart.

After that, Thelma fell so deeply in love with Bob Barker that every time she looked at her husband, she saw Bob's narrow face on Junior's fat body. At night she had lain beside Junior in their bed, and she had
known
it was not really her husband lying there, lost in his snores. It was Bob. Bobby. And several times in the past few weeks, she had lain
beneath
Junior, and while he grunted himself to satisfaction and whispered things like “Oh, Thel. Yes,” she had heard Bob whispering instead, gently, encouragingly, “Come on down, Thel. Come on down, baby.” And she had moved rhythmically beneath Junior and shouted, “Yes! Yes!” as she heard the crowd behind her catch its breath and wait to see if she was lucky enough, this time, to win. “Yes! Yes!” She wanted that refrigerator so much that she could taste all the food that might go in it! And Bob wanted her to win. She could see it in his eyes. He wanted all his women to win. It was she and Bob
against
the sponsors. “Oh, yes. Come on. Come on down.”

Yet, rather than be jealous, Junior had become, she noticed, more energetic about lovemaking. He was less tired at night and more demanding of her. They were barely in their bed lately before he started. The night-light bulb was still hot to the touch when she felt his heavy hand stirring the blankets, searching for her in the darkness.

“How about it, Thel?” he would ask, as he patted her barely perceptible buttocks. “Do I get to hear my little cheerleader tonight, or don't I?”

So
that
was it. He thought the new Thelma was nothing more than a revival of the old high school cheerleading days, when they'd first met, rather than the work of a mature woman with an experienced lover in tow. A lover who also happened to be the king of the game shows. What else, then, could she do? Would it take a ménage à trois with Monty Hall to get her husband to sit up, despite his cumbersome belly size, and take notice?

It was Christmas Day that Thelma had taken her first
extra
Valium, a week after hearing Milly's conversation in the restroom. And on Christmas Day she didn't bother to give Junior his biggest, best present. It was a belly toner called Belly Beautiful, complete with an exercise program to help him shed his burgeoning gut. Thelma had wrapped it three weeks earlier, but she left it right where it was, behind the summer dresses in her walk-in closet. Instead she let him poke sadly among the balled-up wrappings and flattened bows that covered the floor of the family room. And when his sad eyes met hers they almost cried out to her, “Didn't I hint a thousand times that I wanted a Belly Beautiful?” Even when he rounded up his ties and socks and Fruit of the Looms into a somber heap and sat looking at it vacantly, she said nothing. Two days later she took Belly Beautiful back to Sears.

“It wasn't something my husband needed,” she had told the holiday returns clerk. On the drive home, she had barely noticed the fat flakes of snow as they pelted against the warm windshield and were eaten up by the wipers.

“Let Monique Tessier fight for breath beneath him, the way I did for years,” Thelma thought as she drove. “I won't help him get rid of his belly just so he'll have an easier time crawling into bed with
her.”
She had driven around for an hour, past other people's happy holiday homes, up and down the streets of Portland, like a delivery woman of some sort, until she remembered she had a house of her own, with a family, with a Christmas tree in a den full of scrunched-up paper. Until she remembered she had a fat-bellied husband. Thelma had parked her little yellow Corvair in the driveway, and then gone straight upstairs and found the ring Junior had given to her as her big gift. It was an opal. Her birthstone. She didn't want it. It would be like a birth certificate around her finger, reminding her. “I'm sorry I was ever born,” Thelma had said, as she stood staring out into the streets, into the heavily falling snow that could cover up mistakes so easily if you let it. She took another Valium, another sort of snowfall, a warmer kind of covering.

Now Thelma looked out her spring window at the balmy April day, at the same scene that had been freezing and snow-filled, and so like a New England Christmas card, just a short time ago. The day she had flushed her birthstone ring down the upstairs toilet. Where the mounds of snow had been, there now were flowers. There were no longer white things everywhere but green things. Green as money. Greener than envy.

Thelma went to Junior's tiny bar and washed another Valium down with a splash of club soda. She had never dreamed the day would come when she would abuse her prescription. She felt about the prescription the same way she had felt about her first credit card. A mark of maturity. Dr. Phillips would never believe that his little Thelma would take more pills than he told her to. It was like disobeying her father to disobey Dr. Phillips. He had been the doctor who was there when she was born.
Born. Birth. Birthstone. Christmas. Junior. Junior and Monique. Ocean Edge Motel.
Oh, wasn't the mind a terrible thing sometimes? Sometimes it seemed that even if you started out with nice thoughts, it could lead you right back to painful ones.

Thelma was still sitting in the den when Junior arrived home on time for a change. Randy, his son, and now Junior realized, his
chaperon,
was with him. Junior looked at Randy's hair, cut so short you could see the white scalp. He looked at the tweed suit, which had once belonged to Jimmy Driscoll before Marvin fired him for insubordination. The tweed hurt his eyes. The sight as a whole reminded Junior of his own first days in the family business, sans tweed.