Julia 03 - Miss Julia Throws a Wedding (12 page)

“She liked this one, too,” the saleslady said, reaching for the other purple gown.

“I’ll take it,” I said before she could whip out another bare-necked one. It was much more to my taste, a purple, I mean lavender, lace with a high neck and long sleeves, and I figured I’d better get it while the getting was good. No telling what else Binkie might’ve had her eye on.

“Oh, you have to try it on, Miss Julia,” Hazel Marie said, as I averted my eyes from her state of undress.

Not wanting to put on a public display of nudity, I retired to a private space that was no more than a closet and stepped out of my dress. Putting on the lavender lace, which I was happy to note had tiny buttons all the way to the neck, I looked in the mirror. It fit, Lord, did it fit. I was not accustomed to anything binding me around the waist, but that thing started binding from the bustline to the hipline. Then it flared out enough to allow a few medium-sized steps.

I went out into the main room, hesitantly, because I wasn’t accustomed to all the swirling around my ankles the skirt was doing. Hazel Marie was standing on the platform, modeling her dress, and I must say she was a picture in it. Even though I wanted to throw a stole or a sweater around her shoulders before Mr. Pickens and half the town saw her in it. Emma Sue Ledbetter was going to have more to criticize than a little blue eye shadow.

“Oh, you’re beautiful, Miss Julia!” Hazel Marie cried. “Don’t you just love it?”

“It’ll do, I guess.”

The saleslady snuck up behind me and seized the back of the bodice. “We need to take this in; it’s too loose,” she said, turning me toward the mirror as she pulled the fabric tight enough to strain the seams. “See how much better that looks?”

Before I could disagree for the sake of taking a breath, Hazel Marie chimed in. “She needs a better bra, one that’ll give her some uplift.”

“I have all the uplift I want, thank you all the same,” I said, but they weren’t listening to me. Hands unbuttoned the bodice, reached around and noted my underwear size, and someone was dispatched to that intimate apparel shop that ought to be ashamed of the catalog it sends to unsuspecting homes.

The next thing I knew, I was back in the closet, refusing help from either of them, with the promise of at least trying on a wired-up, padded contraption the likes of which had never been on my person.

By the time I’d snapped, rebuttoned and ventured out again for their inspection, I was feeling some better about Binkie’s choice. When the fitter pinned the back of my gown, I finally dared to stand beside Hazel Marie and look in the long mirror. As Hazel Marie exclaimed over the fit and how the color of the dress complimented my hair and complexion, I marveled at the difference certain foundation garments can make in a woman’s general appearance. They can make a new woman of you, if you didn’t need to sit, walk, turn around or take a deep breath.

“Well, Hazel Marie,” I said, as we drove back toward Abbotsville. “It looks like I’m breaking with the tradition for mothers of the groom, even substitute ones, as I guess I am for Coleman.”

“I didn’t know there was a tradition.”

“Oh, yes, it’s an old saying but most mothers of the groom try to follow it, as well they should. Anyway, the tradition is that the mother of the groom should wear beige and keep her mouth shut. That’s exactly what I intended to do, but with that lavender dress Binkie wants me to wear, I guess I’m just throwing that part of the tradition right out the window.”

Hazel Marie turned her face away from me, her shoulders shaking and a strangling sound coming from her throat. I reached over, keeping one hand on the wheel, to pat her on the back so she could get her breath. She was often affected that way when I instructed her in the traditional graces of refined living.

Chapter 11

“Did you reach everybody on your invitation list, Hazel Marie?” We were driving through town on our way home, and the burden of all we still had to do was weighing heavy on my mind.

“Yessum, I got through to the last one this morning before we left. And everybody I called is coming. What about your list?”

“I still have two I haven’t reached. I declare, you’d think people’d stay home just one hour a day to receive their calls. I must’ve called the Bentons and that girl who works in Binkie’s office a dozen times yesterday. So, I still have them to invite, plus everything else we have to do.” I pulled into the driveway. “Here we are.”

“Lillian,” I said, as Hazel Marie and I came into the kitchen. “As soon as we change our clothes, we’re going to start on that silver. Will we be in your way if we use the table in here?”

“No’m. I’ll put some newspapers on it an’ get out the polish for you. But ’fore you go upstairs, that phone been ringin’ off the hook. The florist lady say do you want baby’s breath in all the ’rangements, an’ do you want some ferns hanging on the porch. The rent man say when he bring them little chairs, do you want him to set ’em up or do we want to do it. Miz Conover, she call an’ say do you need to borry her good china,
an’ that Miss Etta Mae, she call an’ say nobody doin’ anything ’bout the lights where she live, an’ Mr. Sam, he call an’ say he waitin’ to he’p any way he can. Oh, an’ Miz Mildred Allen, she say she had to be away from her phone an’ she wonderin’ if she miss gettin’ her invite to the weddin’.”

“Oh, for goodness’ sake, that woman, she doesn’t even know Binkie and Coleman. Lillian, help me please. Call the florist, the number’s on the pad by the phone, and tell her baby’s breath is fine and so are the ferns, but that I’m counting on her to make these decisions. And tell the rental man that I certainly do want him to set up the chairs, and that I expect them to be in place no later than ten A.M. Saturday morning.” I stopped to think a minute. “No, tell him Friday afternoon, and he can bring the piano at the same time and it better be in tune. Oh, and I need to see about having the furniture moved out of the living room. I’ll do that as soon as you’re off the phone. Call Sam back and ask him to pick up LuAnne’s china. I don’t think we’ll need it, but better safe than sorry. And Etta Mae Wiggins’ll just have to hold her horses till I have time to get to her. That woman’s going to give me a case of heartburn with all her complaints. And Mildred Allen can keep on waiting.

“Come on, Hazel Marie, let’s get out of these shopping clothes and get to work.”

“I’m coming,” she said, then turning to Lillian, she asked: “Did J.D. call?”

“No’m, but he might’ve tried and not got through.”

“I hope he will,” Hazel Marie said. “I can’t wait to tell him about my bridesmaid’s dress.”

“Binkie’s keeping him busy,” I reminded her. “And I’ll tell you something else, Hazel Marie, you can’t expect a man to be interested in a dress.” Or non-dress, I added to myself. But on recalling how little she’d be wearing, maybe he would.

As it turned out, we didn’t get far with the silver that afternoon. By the time we all got off the phones, Hazel Marie left to pick up Little Lloyd at school. We’d heard a news broadcast on Lillian’s kitchen radio that Dixon Hightower was still eluding capture, so Hazel Marie didn’t want the boy to walk home by himself.

When they returned, Lillian put a glass of milk and a peanut butter sandwich in front of Little Lloyd. “You eat all that,” she told him. “I know you hungry.”

“Yessum, but I’ve got to hurry and get over to the church for Mrs. Ledbetter’s meeting.”

“Law, you ain’t goin’ over to the church by yo’self. Miss Julia, he can’t go by hisself. That ole Dixon could reach out an’ grab at him.”

Hazel Marie gasped at the thought, but I said, “Dixon’s nowhere around here, Lillian. The boy’s perfectly safe to walk half a block. But,” I went on, seeing the stricken look on Hazel Marie’s face, “I’ll walk over with him and wait for him till the meeting’s over. I need to talk to Emma Sue anyway, and see what she’s done about that missing clock.”

“Oh, thank you, Miss Julia,” Hazel Marie said. “I’m hoping to hear from J.D., so I want to stay by the phone. I’ll keep on with this silver while you’re gone.”

“What clock?” Lillian asked.

“Oh, the one with the brass balls of the pastor’s,” I said, waving it off. “Emma Sue thinks Norma Cantrell took it, but that’s the way false rumors start. Now, don’t any of you say a word about it, because I don’t believe in passing on gossip.”

As Little Lloyd and I walked across the street toward the church, I said, “Now, Little Lloyd, it’s good to be active in a young people’s group and be involved in wholesome activities.
But if it’s too much for you, you don’t have to stay in it. You already go to church and Sunday school, and you have your schoolwork to consider, so don’t feel like you have to add anything else if you don’t want to.”

He said something in reply, but I didn’t catch it. The noise as we passed the construction site was so loud I couldn’t hear myself think. The sidewalk was covered in mud from hoses snaking around wheelbarrows and pallets and one kind of power tool after another. Why, we even had to leave the sidewalk and walk in the street to get past them all. I’ll tell you, Pastor Ledbetter was going to have a monument to family values to beat all other monuments. The thing was huge, stretching up some three stories and spreading out to cover most of what had been the parking lot. From what I’d heard, although I tried not to listen when the subject came up, they were putting in a gymnasium, a running track and an exercise room with all kinds of muscle-building machines that would create ripples on your stomach, and who would want such as that, I’d like to know. And a sauna, of all things. Plus office space, meeting rooms with up-to-date sound and video systems and a snack room with a microwave. Now, don’t tell me that Presbyterians needed such luxuries, especially since what we really needed was more space for the day-care center the church ran during the week for working mothers. Of course, we’d been the last church in town to open a day-care center, since Pastor Ledbetter didn’t believe in working mothers. The diaconate and the session finally overruled him, though, since most of their wives and daughters were now running the town’s professional offices, hospital, retail stores and city and county bureaucratic departments, in spite of what the pastor didn’t believe in.

When Little Lloyd and I finally got into the relative quiet of the church, closing out the din of construction, he joined
several other little boys and girls who were on their way upstairs to Emma Sue’s meeting.

“Tell Mrs. Ledbetter that I’ll be waiting down here in the Fellowship Hall for you,” I told him, hoping that would make her hurry things along. I’d brought along my lists to rearrange while I waited, and I didn’t want to wait long.

A lot of good that turned out to do, because an hour and a half later, after I’d made a completely new list and read every pamphlet in the rack and was reduced to reading a hymnal somebody had left on a table, the children finally came straggling downstairs. They all looked somewhat dazed, although a few ran out of the building as if their lives depended on it. Little Lloyd was one of the last ones, coming down the stairs carrying a long box full of papers of some kind, a bewildered expression on his face.

He walked over to me, holding the box across both arms. “I’ve been elected chairman of home missions,” he said, looking up at me. “I didn’t want it, but Miz Ledbetter said it’d be good for me. She said I was the perfect one for the job since you had all the time in the world to help me, and it’d be good for you, too.”

“Well, I never,” I huffed, taken aback at having been appointed to a committee at a meeting I hadn’t even attended. But that’s the Presbyterian way of doing things. If you’re not on your toes every minute of the day, they’ll slap you on a committee so fast it’ll make your head swim. “What’re we supposed to do on this committee?”

“Knock on doors and hand these out,” he said, setting the box on the floor and handing me a pile of pamphlets entitled “The Power of Prayer,” and stamped with the phone number and address of the First Presbyterian Church of Abbotsville. I glanced inside one of them and saw that it was little more than a list of what to pray against. Our nation would be saved,
it said, if we united in prayer against liberal forces that wanted to extend the welfare state, secular humanists who wouldn’t allow little children to pray at football games and tree-hugging groups that were trying to undermine free enterprise.

Before I could gather myself, so outraged at the thought of sending children to pass out such propaganda that I could hardly get my breath, Little Lloyd said, “And we’re supposed to put these on as many cars as we can.” He handed me a stack of slick red and blue bumper stickers.