Infinity (6 page)

As we got out of the car at the church, I saw Ashley’s fiancé, Lewis Warsher, heading our way from the other end of the lot
where he’d parked his little blue Chevette. He was fixing his tie as he walked, because Lewis was a neat dresser. He always
wore shiny shoes and skinny ties in pastel colours. When Ashley saw him, I swear she shrank about two inches; there is something
about Lewis that turns my sister, who is tough as nails, into a swooning, breathless belle.

‘Hey, honey.’ And of course they were immediately connected, his arms slipping round her small waist, pulling her close for
one of those long, emotional hugs where it looked like he was the only thing that
was keeping her from collapsing to the ground. Ashley and Lewis spent a lot of time hugging each other, supporting each other
physically and whispering. They gave me a complex, always with their heads together murmuring in corners of rooms, their voices
too low to catch anything but a few vowels.

‘Hey,’ Ashley whispered. They were still hugging. I stood there fiddling with my dress; I had no choice but to wait. Ashley
hadn’t always been this way; she’d had boyfriends for as long as I could remember, but none of them had affected her like
Lewis. For years we kept track of major family events by whom Ashley had been dating at the time. During the Mitchell period,
I got my braces and Grandma came to live with us. The Robert era included my mother going back to night school and Ashley
getting in the car wreck that broke her leg and made her get the stitches that left a heart-shaped scar on her right shoulder.
And it was during the year-long Frank
ordeal that the divorce came down, complete with law proceedings, family therapy and the advent of Lorna, the Weather Pet.
It was a boyfriend timeline: I could not remember dates, but I could place each important event in my life with a face of
a boy whose heart Ashley had broken.

But this was all before Lewis, whom Ashley met at the Yoghurt Paradise at the mall where they both worked. Ashley was a Vive
cosmetics salesgirl, which meant she stood behind a big counter in Dillard’s department store, wearing a white lab coat and
putting overpriced make-up on rich ladies’ faces. She thought she was something in that lab coat, wearing it practically everywhere
like it meant she was a damn doctor or something. She was just coming out of the messy break-up of the Frank era and was consoling
herself with a yoghurt sundae when Lewis Warsher sensed her pain and sat himself down at her table because she looked like
she needed a friend. These are their words, which I know because I’ve
heard this story entirely too many times since they announced their engagement six months ago.

My mother said Ashley missed our father, and needed a protective figure; Lewis just came along at the right time. And Lewis
did
protect her, from old boyfriends and petrol-station attendants and bugs that dared to cross her path. Still, sometimes I
wondered what she really saw in him. There was nothing spectacular about Lewis, and it was a little unsettling to see my sister,
whom I’d always admired for being plucky and tough and not taking a bit of lip from anyone, shrinking into his arms whenever
the world rose up to meet her face to face.

‘Hey, Haven.’ Lewis leaned over and pecked me on the cheek, still holding Ashley close. ‘You look beautiful.’

‘Thanks,’ I said. Lewis had the arm clamp on Ashley, steering her towards the church, with me following. Even though we were
wearing the same god-awful pink fluffy dresses, we looked totally
different. Ashley was a short, curvy pink rose, and I was a tall, pink straw, like something you’d plonk down in a big fizzy
drink. This was the kind of thing I was always thinking about since my body had betrayed me and made me a giant.

When I was in first grade, I had a teacher named Mrs Thomas. She was young, sported a flip hairdo that made her look just
like Snow White, smelled like Lily of the Valley and kept a picture of a man in a uniform on her desk, staring stiffly out
from the frame. And even though I was shy and slow at maths she didn’t care. She loved me. She’d come up beside me in the
lunch line or during story hour and smooth her hand over my head, saying, ‘Why, Miss Haven, you’re just no bigger than a minute.’
I was compact at six, able to fit neatly into small places that now were inaccessible: under the crook of an arm, in the palm
of a hand. At five eleven and counting, I no longer had the sense that someone like Mrs Thomas could neatly enclose me if
danger should strike. I
was all bony elbows and acute angles, like a jigsaw puzzle piece that can only go in the middle, waiting for the others to
fit around it to make it whole.

The church was filling up with people, which wasn’t surprising: my father is the kind of person who knows everybody somehow.
Mac McPhail, sportscaster, beer drinker, teller of tall tales and big lies, the latter being told mostly to my mother in the
last few months of the marriage. I can remember sitting in front of the TV watching my father on the local news every night,
seeing the sly sideways looks he and Lorna Queen exchanged during the leads into commercial breaks, and still not having any
idea that he would leave my mother for this woman best known for her short skirts and pouty-lipped way of saying ‘upper-level
disturbance’. She didn’t know the half of it. There had been no disturbance before like the one that hit our house the day
my father came home from the station, sat my mother down at the kitchen table right under the vent that leads to the
floor beneath the counter in my bathroom and dropped the bomb that he’d fallen hard for the Weather Pet. I sat on the side
of the bath, toothbrush in hand, and wished the house had been designed differently so I wouldn’t have been privy to this
most painful of moments. My mother was silent for a long time, my father’s voice the only one wafting up through the floor,
explaining how he couldn’t help it, didn’t want to lie any more, had to come clean, all of this with his booming sportscaster
voice, so agile at curving round scores and highlights, stumbling over the simple truth that his marriage was over. My mother
started crying, finally, and then told him to leave in a quiet, steady voice that made the room seem suddenly colder. Two
weeks later he had moved into the Weather Pet’s condo. He met me and Ashley for lunch each Saturday and took us to the beach
every other weekend, spending too much money and trying to explain everything by putting his arm round my shoulder, squeezing,
and sighing aloud.

But that had been a year and a half ago, and now here it was wedding day, the
first
wedding I was dreading this summer. We walked into the lobby of the church and were immediately gathered up in the large
arms of my aunt Ree, who was representing the bulk of my father’s side of the family, most of whom were still upset about
the divorce and sided with my mother, family loyalty notwithstanding. But Aunt Ree was ample enough to represent everyone
in her flowing pink muumuu, a corsage the size of a small bush pinned to her chest.

‘Haven, you come over here and give your aunt Ree some sugar.’ She squashed me against her, and I could feel the flowers poking
into my skin. She’d clamped Ashley in her other arm, somehow getting her away from Lewis, and hugged us both as tightly together
as if she were trying to consolidate us into one person. ‘And, Ashley, this should all seem pretty familiar to you. When’s
your big day again?’

‘August nineteenth,’ Lewis said quickly. I wondered
if that was the answer he gave to any question now. It was what I usually said.

Aunt Ree pushed me back, holding me by both arms as Ashley made a quick dash back to Lewis. ‘Now you are just growing like
a weed, I swear to God. Look at you. How tall are you?’

I smiled, fighting the urge to slouch. ‘Too tall.’

‘No such thing.’ She tightened her grip on my arm. ‘You can never be too tall or too thin. That’s what they say, isn’t it?’

‘It’s too rich or too thin.’ Ashley said. Leave it to my short, curvy sister to correct even a misworded compliment.

‘Whatever,’ Aunt Ree said. ‘You’re beautiful, anyway. But we’re running late and the bride is a mess. We’ve got to go find
you your bouquets.’

Ashley kissed Lewis and clung to him for a few more seconds before following me and Aunt Ree through the masses of perfumed
wedding guests to a side door that led into a big room with bookcases
covering all four walls. Lorna Queen was sitting at a table in the corner, a make-up mirror facing her, with some woman hovering
around picking at her hair with a long comb.

‘We’re here!’ Aunt Ree said in a singsong voice, presenting us in all of our pink as if she’d created us herself. ‘And just
in time.’

Lorna Queen
was
a beautiful woman. As she turned in her seat to face us, I realized that again, just as I always did when I watched her doing
her forecasts in her short skirts with colour-coordinated lipsticks. She was pert and perfect and had the tiniest little ears
I’d ever seen on anyone. She kept them covered most of the time, but once at the beach I’d seen her with her hair pulled back,
with those ears like seashells moulded against her skin. I’d always wondered if she heard like the rest of us or if the world
sounded different through such small receptors.

‘Hi, girls.’ She smiled at us and dabbed her eyes with a neatly folded Kleenex. ‘Y’all look beautiful.’

‘Are you okay?’ Ashley asked her.

‘I’m fine. I’m just’ – she sniffled daintily – ‘so happy. I’ve waited for this day for so long, and I’m just so happy.’

The woman doing her make-up rolled her eyes. ‘Lorna, honey, waterproof mascara can only do so much. You’ve got to stop crying.’

‘I know.’ She sniffled again, reaching out to take my hand and Ashley’s. ‘I want you girls to know how much I love your father.
I’m going to make him just as happy as I can, and I’m so glad we’re all going to be a family.’

‘We’re very happy for you,’ Ashley said, speaking for both of us, which she often did when Lorna was concerned.

Lorna was tearing up again when a man in a suit came in through another door and whispered, ‘Ten minutes,’ then flashed the
thumbs-up sign as if we were about to go out and play the Big Game.

‘Ten minutes,’ Lorna said, her hand fluttering out
of mine and to her face, dabbing her eyes. The make-up woman spun her back round in the chair and moved in with the powder
puff. ‘My God, it’s actually happening.’

Ashley reached into her bag and pulled out a lipstick. ‘Do like this,’ she said to me, pursing her lips. I did, and she put
some on me, smoothing it across with a finger. ‘It’s not really your colour, but it’ll do.’

I stood there while she added some more eye shadow and blush to my face, all the while looking at me through half-shut eyes,
practising her craft, her face very close to mine. This was the Ashley I remembered from my childhood, when the five-year
gap didn’t seem that large and we set up our Barbie worlds in the driveway every day after school, my Ken fraternizing with
her Skipper. This was the Ashley who painted my nails at the kitchen table during long summers, the back door swinging in
the breeze and the radio on. This was the Ashley who
came into my room late one night after breaking up with Robert Losard and sat on the edge of my bed crying until I wrapped
my arms awkwardly round her and smoothed her hair, trying to understand the words she was saying. This was the Ashley who
had climbed out on the roof with me all those nights in the first few months of the divorce and told me how much she missed
my father. This was the Ashley I loved, away from Lewis’s clinging hands and the wedding plans and the five-year-wide impasse
that neither of us could cross.

‘There.’ She capped the lipstick and dumped all the make-up back in her bag. ‘Now just don’t cry too much and you’ll be fine.’

‘I won’t cry,’ I said, and suddenly aware of Lorna looking at us behind her in the mirror I added, ‘I never cry at weddings.’

‘Oh, I do,’ Lorna said. ‘There’s something about a wedding, something so perfect and so sad, all at the same time. I bawl
at weddings.’

‘You better not be bawling out there.’ The make-up lady dabbed with the powder puff. ‘If this stuff doesn’t hold up, you’ll
look a mess.’

The door opened and a woman in a dress the same shade as ours but without the long flowing skirt came in, carrying a big box
of flowers. ‘Helen!’ Lorna said, tearing up again. ‘You look lovely.’

Helen was obviously Lorna’s sister, seeing as how she also had those tiny little seashell ears. I figured it had to be more
than coincidence. They hugged and Helen turned towards us, clasping her hands together. ‘This must be Ashley and Haven. Lorna
said you were tall.’ She leaned forward and kissed my cheek, then Ashley’s. ‘And I hear congratulations are in order for you.
When’s the big day?’

‘August nineteenth,’ Ashley said. It was the million-dollar question.

‘My, that’s soon! Are you getting nervous?’

‘No, not really,’ Ashley said. ‘I’m just ready to get it all over with.’

‘Amen to that,’ Lorna said, standing up and removing the paper bib from round her neck. She took a deep breath, holding her
palm against her stomach. ‘I swear I have never been so nervous, even when I did that marathon at the station during the hurricane.
Do I look all right?’

‘You look lovely,’ Helen said. We all nodded in agreement. An older woman appeared, gesturing frantically. Her lips were moving
as if long, unpronounceable words were coming out, but I couldn’t hear a thing she was saying. As she came closer, I made
out something that sounded like, ‘It’s time, it’s time,’ but she was warbling so it could have been anything.

‘Okay,’ the Weather Pet said with one last sniff. Ashley checked my face again, licking her lips and telling me to do the
same and with Lorna Queen behind us, her sister Helen carrying her train, we proceeded to the lobby of the church.

We’d practised all this the night before, when I’d
been wearing shorts and sandals and the aisle seemed like a hop, skip and jump to the spot where the minister had been standing
in blue jeans and a T-shirt that said Clean and Free Baptist Retreat. Now the church was packed and the aisle seemed about
a hundred miles long with the minister standing at the end of it like a tiny plastic figure you might slap on to a cake. We
got pushed into figuration, with me of course behind Ashley since I was taller and then Helen and then Lorna, who was telling
us all how much she loved us. Finally the mad whisperer walked right to the front of the line, waved her arm wildly like she
was flagging a plane in to land right there in the middle of the church, and we were on our way.