Wedding in Great Neck (9781101607701) (5 page)

“Only a little!” Lenore repeated. “No one has any respect these days, none at all.”

“I was just going out to get some coffee,” Gretchen said. The lack of respect in the younger generation was not a topic she wished to tackle before her daily caffeine infusion. “Come with me?”

“You want me to go out now?”

Gretchen nodded, ears attuned to the bustle below.

“But why? There’s coffee right here. And good coffee too. That man your mother married, he’s no skinflint. You eat well in his house. Did you know that tonight they’re serving three entrees? Three! And one of them is filet mignon.”

“Exactly. The place is a madhouse. We’ll just be in the way.”

“Betsy said there would be food in the breakfast room,” said Lenore.

“There was nothing there when I last checked,” Gretchen said.
And even if there was, she still wanted to get the hell out of here for a little while.

“Maybe it’s there now,” said Lenore.

“Let’s go out,” Gretchen coaxed. “It’ll be fun.”

It was the word
fun
that persuaded her; Gretchen could see that. “All right,” Lenore said. “But first I have to get dressed.”

“You are dressed.” Gretchen knew from experience that getting dressed for Lenore was something that might take an hour. Or more.

“In this? I couldn’t possibly go out in this.” She fluttered her hands, indicating the vividly colored garment.

“Put a raincoat on over it.”

“I couldn’t do that.”

“Yes, you could. We’re just going to a diner. Some people go in their pajamas. Or what might as well be,” she amended.

“You ought to know by now that I am not
some people.”

Which, of course, was true. “Well, all right,” Gretchen said. “But please—
hurry.”

Lenore went back to her room and promptly reappeared in a pair of brown linen pants and a flowing leopard-print blouse whose buttons glinted with rhinestones; a square silk scarf in a brilliant flame color was tied under her chin. “So my hair doesn’t get mussed from the wind in the car,” she explained.

Gretchen doubted the windows had ever been opened in the Volvo; her mother was a believer in heat during the winter and air-conditioning at all other times of the year. But she saw no reason to say this to Lenore. Instead she made sure her grandmother was safely buckled into her seat, and then they were off.

The diner was more crowded than Gretchen would have liked. Oh well. She had escaped, and the waiter, clearly experienced in handling a crowd, had them in a booth within minutes. Plastic-coated menus and thick white mugs filled with steaming coffee appeared almost immediately after. Lenore took a sip, leaving the vivid, striated imprint of her lipstick on the ceramic surface. She scanned the menu and then snapped it decisively shut.

“Do you know what you want?” Gretchen asked.

“I
always
know what I want,” Lenore countered. “But what about you, darling? What do you want?”

“I thought I’d have fried eggs and hash browns. With toast and a side of sausage.” Gretchen set the menu aside and tried to make eye contact with the waiter.

“That’s not what I meant.”

Gretchen continued looking for the waiter. She had an abiding tenderness for her grandmother, and recalled the many afternoons spent companionably on Lenore’s ice-blue satin comforter, eating handfuls of Poppycock with a scoop of Breyers vanilla ice cream on the side, and watching the soaps or working a crossword puzzle together. But all that was a long time ago, and now, when Lenore slid into her meddlesome mode, it made Gretchen itch to be somewhere, anywhere else. The waiter was embroiled with a party of eight, two of whom were squirming toddlers. Gretchen sighed and turned back to her grandmother.

“No? Then what did you mean?”

“What you want. From life.” Lenore removed the scarf from her head and reached up to pat her lacquered hair, as if she wanted to make sure it was all still there.

“To be happy?” Gretchen ventured. She sipped the coffee, which was not at all bad.

“Well, of course you want that, darling! We all want to be happy. Happy as songbirds, trilling our happy little hearts out. But that’s so vague, don’t you see? Wanting to be happy.” Lenore knotted her ruined fingers tightly and placed them on the table in front of her. “No, you have to decide what it will take to
make
you happy. And then you have to go out and get it.”

“It’s not that easy, Grandma,” Gretchen replied. She had believed that Ennis would make her happy. And now look.

“Who ever said it was?”

Just then the waiter appeared to take their order, so Gretchen had a reprieve. But as soon as he left, Lenore began again.

“Tell me this: are you happy now?”

“Happy about what?” Gretchen knew perfectly well what Lenore meant; she was simply stalling.

“Happy with yourself, your life. What you’re doing, where you’re going.”

“Sometimes, yes.”

“And the other times?”

“No one is happy all the time. You know that.”

“I know what I know,” Lenore said cryptically.

Was Lenore losing it, or could she really tap into what Gretchen was feeling? Because most of the time Gretchen wasn’t very happy at all. She was unhappy about her separation from Ennis—not even the soul-rousing, clean break of divorce—and the reek of disappointment and bitterness that trailed along in its wake. She was unhappy about her job, at which was she pedaling in place, and unhappy about her disorderly, decaying house—leaks in both bathrooms, an invasion of ants in the kitchen, and, just last week, the sudden collapse of the deck out back—which seemed a perfect metaphor for her life. And she was perhaps most unhappy about her daughters, who had somehow been turned from two impish, adorable girls into a pair of opaque, critical, and, in the case of Justine, increasingly difficult strangers.

Thinking of Justine was like touching her finger to a hot iron; Gretchen needed to quickly snatch her thoughts away or she would be seared. And while she knew her mother—who was already paying the tuition for the private school the girls attended and had made clear her intention to pay for college as well—would have gladly helped with repairs on the house and even with a maid, Gretchen was aware that allowing her mother’s rich husband to subsidize her life would be just one more thing about which she would not be happy. She looked around desperately for the waiter.

“I don’t mean to pry,” Lenore continued.
Really? You could have
fooled me
, Gretchen thought. “But I’m an old woman and I don’t have much time left, so I might as well be blunt. I worry about you.”

“I’m sorry I worry you,” Gretchen said. It was true. She didn’t want to be the cause of anyone’s worry; she just wanted to slip under the radar of her family’s notice and live her life without hewing to their standards, their expectations, their whole way of seeing the world. Was that so terrible? So she was unhappy. Her unhappiness was hers alone; she was entitled to it. But looking at Lenore’s fretful old face, Gretchen softened. “You don’t have to worry, Grandma. I’m all right.” She tried the words on to see whether she could make them fit. “I was promoted at work; did you know?”

This last comment was a bit of a stretch; Gretchen’s professional life was as crammed and disorganized as her suitcase. In school she had studied subjects as wide-ranging as medieval Norse poetry (the fateful class in which she had met Ennis), silent film, Russian literature, and environmental science; she’d had a host of jobs since graduation, but not one of them could have been considered a career.

Ennis had been the artistic one, the one with the calling. Gretchen had been willing—no, eager—to hover around the periphery of his creative flame. If there had been something she wanted for herself, she would have described it this way: she wanted to be of use. This was, she knew, a quaint, old-fashioned concept, especially when compared to the goals of her classmates, who were busy angling for fast-track corporate jobs and admission into the trifecta of professional schools—law, medicine, business—or of Ennis, who sought to add his humble drops to the vast and coursing river of Literature.

Her first job after college was teaching English to a group of well-educated Russian women—pharmacists and chemists, accountants and psychologists—who desperately wanted to be able to work at something other than menial labor in their adopted country. When the grant money that funded the program dried up, it left the Russian women adrift in a confusing sea of unfamiliar conjugations and verb tenses, and Gretchen unemployed. She moved on to a day care center in an impoverished Bronx enclave, but after months of watching the parents—many single women—trying to juggle too many children and too little money, she was nudged in a different direction. Ennis had applied to an MFA program in Syracuse and she followed him there, landing a job in what was euphemistically called a family planning clinic.

It had given Gretchen a quiet, radiant sense of competence to be able to show a nervous teenager how to use a condom (unfurling it over a slender green wand of zucchini while the girl nodded her head in fierce concentration) or to counsel an overburdened mother of five about her options concerning her sixth—accidental—pregnancy. But then the clinic was bombed by a group of fanatic right-to-lifers; the building was severely damaged, and the doctor who performed the abortions had three fingers blown off in the explosion. Most horrific was the fate of a technician Gretchen had especially liked—sixty-three and only months from retirement, the woman had been left legally blind after her corneas were scorched in the blast.

Gretchen could not—would not—go back to such a place. So she was massively relieved when Ennis completed his MFA and was offered the Brooklyn College position. She had taken time off when her girls were babies and toddlers—twins were a major handful, and, besides, she had wanted to be there
with
them,
for
them—and since then none of her jobs had the altruistic aspirations as those of her youth. Thanks to Ennis’s many connections, she’d dabbled in the arts: she had been the office manager for an experimental theater company, worked on the set of an indie film and as an assistant at a now-defunct literary magazine.

Her present job had sounded interesting, even exciting, when she first signed on. She had been hired by one Virginia Valentine, a former principal dancer with the New York City Ballet. Ginny, who was now married to a brilliant—and quite wealthy—neurosurgeon, was writing her memoirs, spurred on by the fat six-figure advance she’d received from a very important New York publishing house; it was Gretchen’s task to assist her in this undertaking. Ginny was vastly entertaining, and over many wine-fueled dinners, she regaled Gretchen with tales from her storied past. The two of them sat in her dining room, table swathed in raucous red linen, as the maid brought in course after course of rich, delicious food; no wonder Gretchen had been packing on the pounds. It was especially annoying since Ginny, slender as a stick of chewing gum, seemed to be able to down the duck and the veal, the cheeses and the desserts with no apparent effect at all.

Gretchen would both record her subject and take notes as well; later she attempted to turn all this material into a coherent narrative. But Ginny would not leave one single thing to Gretchen’s discretion and instead would excise, alter, or curtail Gretchen’s every vaguely felicitous turn of phrase, every original thought or word. The project, which had been in the works for more than two years, had yielded exactly eighteen pages thus far, pages so arid, clichéd, and devoid of interest that Gretchen was certain the big important publisher would soon find out, and when he did, he would cancel the contract. Immediately.

Since Gretchen was the only employee and worked out of not an office but the maid’s room of Ginny’s expansive Riverside Drive apartment, telling her grandmother that she had been promoted was something of a lie, albeit a white one. Still, as long as she was lying, she might as well use the lie again—get her money’s worth, so to speak.

Lenore brightened. “Your mother didn’t tell me!”

“She’s been preoccupied,” Gretchen said. “With the wedding.” As if that needed clarification.

“That’s another thing,” Lenore said, quickly seizing on this new topic.

“Angelica is getting married; Teddy has someone, and so does Caleb. But you—you’re alone.”

“I have Justine and Portia,” Gretchen said, stung. “I wouldn’t exactly call that alone.”

“But you’re not living with your husband. And you don’t have a boyfriend.” She paused. “Do you?”

“No, but there’s still time,” Gretchen quipped. She reached for a packet of sugar; what if she tore it open and poured the white crystals right down her throat? Or maybe she could tackle the waiter the next time he sped by?

“Not as much as you think,” Lenore said; her usual bravado seemed to crumble slightly around its edges. “You’d be surprised how fast it goes.”

“I know,” Gretchen said, thinking of Justine and Portia’s astonishingly rapid transformations from babies to girls and now to perplexingly aloof and self-contained young women. Sometimes she pined for their infant days, difficult though they had been. “I really do know.”

“Then
do
something,” Lenore implored. “Do something, and don’t let it all pass you by.”

“Let what pass me by?” Gretchen said, moved despite herself by her grandmother’s urgency.

“Everything, darling! Everything!”

Gretchen looked into Lenore’s slightly cloudy blue eyes; were those tears, or were her eyes simply watering? Before Gretchen could decide, the harried waiter appeared with breakfast.

“Finally!” Lenore said, releasing her knife and fork from the napkin’s cocoon. She looked up at the waiter and batted her lashes in a gesture she must have perfected seventy years earlier. “We thought you’d never get here!”

“Sorry for the delay,” he said, setting the plates on the table.

Gretchen tore into her eggs and eagerly mopped the plate with bits of toast. She was so hungry. Even though she would consume a lavish meal tonight, she felt incapable of depriving herself now despite the extra pounds she was toting. She’d even had to buy a new dress, black of course, for the wedding; nothing she owned fit anymore.