The Wedding Machine (3 page)
But the truth is that the only person from her family tree that she has ever known was her mama, Carla Jones, and the woman somehow managed to keep everything a mystery. She hands Dr. Arhundati the forms when she returns; then she places her feet in the stirrups for her examination.
Now Ray races over the drawbridge between Charleston and Jasper. Dr. Arhundati sent her to the health food store in Charleston for some strange-sounding herbs, and she's way behind schedule. She's only got a few hours to make the final preparation for the Tea and See and get to Kitty B.'s for the last wedding meeting before Little Hilda's big day.
A reporter stands on the side of the bridge in a dry, bright orange raincoat. He's pointing at the salt marsh reeds, stone still in the August heat. Ray rolls her eyes. Eleanor is the third tropical storm this summer that they've said would hit the South Carolina Lowcountry, but Ray feels sure it will make the same northerly bump the others have and wind up somewhere along the North Carolina coast.
“Lord, protect Little Hilda's wedding day,” she prays, then quickly pulls over at Pink's roadside vegetable stand and buys one of the last watermelons of the season to take to Kitty B.'s. Oh, and she just has to get an extra one for Willy. It's a special thing between them allâwatermelonsâand her husband particularly likes them. Ray loves to roll them over on their pale underbellies, where she thumps them softly with the pad of her thumb, then rubs her hand across the dark green seams.
Once Little Hilda's wedding is over, Ray will go right back to Angus's practice. He happens to be a wonderful physician and believes like they all do that her mama and Laura and Ray just appeared out of nowhere one late summer afternoon before their sophomore year of high schoolâone hot-to-trot Mary Poppins and her two shy daughters who descended out of the clouds with their three sets of big green eyes and their bright smiles.
~ AUGUST 16, 1963 ~
The second Friday after Ray moved to Jasper, the church youth group put a For Sale sign in her yard, which was the joke at the time. Ray didn't know whether to cry or laugh when she woke up that morning and walked out onto the dew-covered grass and pulled the muddy stake out of the ground. She leaned the sign against the side of the house, where it fell over and stayed for years, rusting behind the hydrangea bushes.
Then that night Kitty B. knocked on her kitchen door and said, “Wanna come out?” Ray was trying on a brand-new pair of linen pedal pushers that they had bought in Charleston just before the move. Her mama tore off the tag, pushed her out the door, and said, “Just go on, honey.”
Ray looked up at the truckbed full of smiling faces. A boy she'd never seen before reached out his hand to pull Ray up and over the edge of the flatbed of Angus's truck. She took her place nervously between him and Kitty B. on the curve of the warm wheel well while Fitz held Sis on his lap opposite them. Hilda was in the passenger seat by Angus,
“Where are we going?” Ray said.
“To steal a watermelon.” Kitty B. giggled.
Willy patted Ray's back. “It's the tradition. When someone new comes to town.” He put his short, round hand out flat as if he wanted her to give him five. “I'm Willy, pretty girl.”
Ray smiled and lightly slapped his hand. No one in Charleston had so much as noticed her existence. Her blossoming into a young woman. Except maybe Nigel Pringle, who was thankful to be rid of her.
But the Jasper teenagers had sought her out immediately. Probably her mama's doing, if she thought about it. Carla Jones was going to work for Willy's daddy, the state senator and small-town attorney, and she had bragged to everyone about how nice and bright her daughters were.
It was dark on the outskirts of town that night Ray first hung out with the pack. So black she could not even make out the figures of the strangers sitting next to her. The tunnel of live oaks dripping with Spanish moss outlined the pitch blackness until a porch light, usually a single uncovered bulb, lit up a patch of the land for a moment.
She might have been afraid except the thick summer air smelled so sweet and earthy that she couldn't breathe it in fast enough. It was like a warm and balmy laughing gas, and she let go into the intoxicating fragrance of salt air and withering corn husks and tomatoes so ripe she imagined them dropping off the vines around her.
When they reached complete darkness about ten miles out of town, Angus turned off the headlights and quietly pulled off the road and onto the edge of a field. There was the faintest light above the door of a shack where the woods met the field, and she could barely see the waxy tops of the watermelons lined up in tight rows in the open soil.
“Let's go,” Fitz commanded in a loud whisper. He and Willy jumped right over the bed of the truck and lifted their arms up toward the girls.
Ray took both of their hands and let them lift her gently down. Fitz grabbed Sis by the hips and hoisted her down before spinning her around. He patted her on the backside, just once, before taking her hand and running out into the blackness. Ray had never seen such affection among folks her own age. She had been a scholarship student at an all-girls Catholic school in Charleston, and when she wasn't in school she was cooped up in the carriage house with Mama polishing silver and ironing linens for Mrs. Pringle.
As the pack laughed and ran into the blackness before Ray, she felt like she was at the edge of the world, and she stood stone still until someone took her hand. “It's all right.” Willy led her gently out into the darkness as the soft, damp soil yielded beneath their feet.
“Grab the biggest one you can,” Fitz instructed, and Ray could barely make out his outline as he bent down and rubbed the smooth, round melon tops. “It's a contest.”
Of course, Ray had no idea about the water hoses lined up alongside the heaped rows, and as she felt from melon to melon, her foot became tangled in one, and she nearly tripped before Willy caught her in his short, husky arms.
Then a dog barked somewhere in the distance, and Angus whispered, “Grab one and get back to the truck!”
Ray knelt down and pulled the first one she could feel. It was heavy and wrapped in vines that were thin but tough, and Willy set his own down to tug hers loose.
“Big 'un.” He chuckled as he ripped it from its cord. Then he balanced both of theirs on his hips as she scurried ahead of him back to the truck.
When the dog came closer, Fitz warned, “Look out!” and Willy dropped the fruit, then hoisted Ray up into Fitz's arms before hurling their melons into the flatbed. Just as Willy was about to climb over, the dog nipped his ankle and caught hold of the hem of his blue jeans. Fitz kicked the dog loose with the heel of his sneakers and pulled Willy in by his belt loops as Angus spun them away.
Fitz let out a whoop before planting a long, wet kiss on Sis. Kitty B. laughed as Willy scooted closer to Ray so that their hips touched. Then he rubbed his ankle and said, “That was a close one, y'all.”
Kitty B. cradled her watermelon tight in her lap, and said, “Now y'all don't forget to give me the leftover rinds so I can pickle them.”
They chuckled at her request; then they hooted and hollered in the blackness all the way to the church gym, where the high school was hosting its weekly summer dance.
When the pack wheeled into the church parking lot, Angus opened the back door of the pickup and lined up the melons. Ray's was the biggest. It was long and wide with deep green seams down its back. Angus inspected their yellow undersides and thumped the ripe edges. “The new girl's is the pick of the litter!”
Everyone cheered over Ray's melon, and Kitty B. hugged her, and little did Ray know it at the time, but she had officially become a lifelong member of the Jasper pack.
One knock on Willy's nubby knee, and Ray's watermelon split open down the center. Everyone grabbed a piece from the heart, sucked on it, and spat out the seeds and sucked some more as the juice ran down their forearms, even Hilda, who had been fretting about the soil on her white tennis shoes moments before.
Then they all ran into the darkened gym, the crevices between their fingers sticky and sweet, and they shagged until midnight when Coach Sanders shut off the music and flicked the lights on and off and on so that their muddy footprints and pink streaked arms were like photos snapped for an album or evidence of a small-town crime.
As Ray pulls back onto Highway 17, she gets stuck behind a tractor going ten miles an hour. Then she hears her cell phone buzzing in her pocketbook.
“Mama,” Priscilla says from the other end of the line. “Where have you been?”
“At the doctor in Charleston,” Ray says. “Then to the health food store where I had to buy some funny kind of herbs they want me to takeâginkgo biloba and don quai.”
“Ooh,” Priscilla says. “Herbs can work wonders. I took these rishi mushrooms last year when I had this awful chest cold, and they cleared me right up.”
“Hormones can do wonders too.” Ray comes upon an elderly man driving a tractor down the single lane highway. “When does your flight get in?”
“10:05, from LaGuardia.”
“And you're coming alone?” Ray crosses her fingers.
“Yes, Mama,” Priscilla says. “J.K. has a shoot, so he can't make it.”
“Well, all right.” Ray tries to hold back her enthusiasm. “I'll make sure your daddy is at the airport before ten.”
Yes
. Ray snaps her telephone shut. Priscilla's last two boyfriends have been so awful that Ray and Willy have named them Poop 1 and Poop 2. The current one, J.K. (Poop 2) is by far the worst. Priscilla was the valedictorian of William Bull High, but she took a wrong turn in college and wound up majoring in film and television production, of all the inane things. She met Poop 2 on the set of this reality TV show,
Knucklehead
, where the idiot pins raw T-bones to his clothes and roasts himself over a grill and calls it entertainment. Oh, Ray's got to get her away from him.
“
No Poop 2 for the wedding weekend!” she calls to the heavy salt air.
This good news is almost enough to cancel out the fact that my
private parts are withering on the vine.
Ray claps her hands, presses the gas, and moves out into the two-lane highway to pass the tractor. A convertible sports car comes flying down the road opposite her, and she swerves back behind the tractor and barely misses the giant tires, their wide, mud-encrusted grooves spinning slowly forward.
Ray has set out a place setting of each of Little Hilda's crystal and china. She can hear her husband and nephew loading up their deer hunting gear at the top of the stairs, and she's not going to let them cross through the dining room and the gift display without her supervision.
Tomorrow Big Hilda, Little Hilda, and the other gals and their daughters will gather around her dining room for tea and a look at all of the beautiful wedding gifts: the three china patterns; the Chantilly silver; the crystal water, wine, and champagne glasses and the assortment of silver trays, vases, bowls, ice buckets, and fanciful knickknacks. It's the tradition for the mother of the bride to host the tea, but Big Hilda just wasn't up to having it in her home and Ray has all but taken over the wedding.
Yes, Little Hilda Prescott is getting married this very Saturday. Of course, Ray worries about her unconventional choice of mates, a first-generation Italian from New Jersey, a Democrat, no less. And Little Hilda has even decided to hyphenate her last name. Now how in the world should they monogram her silver and linens?
Ray and the pack are starting to resign themselves to the fact that their children will neither marry who they hope for nor behave in the way they think is most appropriate. The pack can hardly relate to their offspring, if you want to know the truth, and they were shocked that every last one of them hightailed it out of Jasper after college with no plans to return.