Wedding in Great Neck (9781101607701) (8 page)

“I know you do,” Caleb said and leaned over to give Lincoln a kiss on his clammy, ashen cheek. “Only you love her more.” He started the car up again. “Why don’t you go and lie down for a while?” he added kindly.

“Will I see you before the wedding?” Lincoln said, confused but moved by the sequence of events these past few minutes: the accusation followed by the unexpected gentleness.

“Of course. I’ll check in with you later,” Caleb said.

Lincoln nodded. Clutching his meager baggage, he got out of the car. The broken tooth throbbed, almost musical in its iteration of pain. Watching Caleb as he pulled away, Lincoln remained where he stood long after the car had disappeared down the road.

A
wedding in Great Neck
, fumed Justine.
A Great Neck wedding.
Nuptials in the Neck. The bride wore green
. Justine imagined many thousand-dollar bills pasted to the had-to-have-cost-a-fortune wedding gown that no one, not the bride’s mother, not her stepfather—who had paid for the damn thing—not her husband-to-be had been allowed to see. How predictable, how lame, how wasteful. And to think it was her aunt Angelica—formerly so hip, so cool, so smart—who had not only consented to but was actively embracing this whole over-the-top, show-offy business. Justine was awash in righteous revulsion. She’d agreed to be in the wedding party only because Portia had pitched a small fit when she had expressed her disgust at the idea.

Yesterday when they had arrived, Don, Grandma Betsy’s husband, had insisted on going into town for a walk along the main drag. In one shopwindow Justine saw watches so big they must have weighed half a pound, their bulbous faces crammed with so many dials, needles, and numbers that telling the time would be impossible. In another window was a monstrous choker with a cluster of jewels the size of a golf ball in the center; a third featured a leather-trimmed canvas tote that cost 945 dollars; the price tag looped around the handle faced outward, toward the street.

She turned away, disgusted. Had she a rock, she would have pitched it through the glass. Her own clothes were gleaned from stores like the Salvation Army or Goodwill. She told Don she wasn’t feeling well—not a lie, actually—and so was able to beg off the trip to Häagen-Dazs in favor of driving right back to the house.

Justine looked over at Portia, who was still asleep in the room that they had shared last night. With its massive television screen and series of serpentine leather couches (several of which opened into beds), it seemed like the perfect place to stage an orgy: just dim the lights and break out the Ecstasy. But Justine highly doubted that the room had ever been put to that particular purpose. Her grandmother, Betsy, and her husband were way too old. And it was clear her grandmother was more besotted with her dopey dog than with any being possessing a mere two legs.

Justine wandered into the bathroom and back out again. Portia slumbered on. Ordinarily Justine would have woken her twin, and together they would have found a way to make this day bearable. But right now Justine was actually glad of the time alone. She had a few things she had to work out before the wedding of the century unfolded tonight, and for once she was not letting Portia in on her plans.

This was a departure from form, and a radical one. Portia had always been her partner in everything. When they were little, they had their own language, which they called
twinspeak
. It had driven everyone within earshot crazy—much to their mutual delight. More recently they had had to deal with their parents’ stupid and messy separation, and try not to take sides, which was pretty impossible. They pooled their intellectual resources to do their schoolwork (Portia was better in math and science, while Justine was the literature/history/politics maven) and they resolutely defended each other against mean girls, bumbling administrators, boring teachers, jerk-off guys—in short, the world as they knew it.

But lately Justine had felt subtle tremors, the sort of occurrences that might signal an earthquake or a tsunami, beneath the tectonic plates of her bond with Portia—this was exactly the sort of metaphor Portia would have employed. Justine could not really put a name to it; every time she tried to analyze it—What exactly were signposts of the change? What between them was actually different?—she failed.

Maybe the problem was not Portia at all, but Justine herself. She was the one who had changed. That was the nasty little secret she’d been trying to push away or ignore. Lately she had been prone to these—What to call them? Moods? Trances?—that descended on her out of nowhere. She was powerless to predict when they would arrive or with what intensity, but when they came, they ruled. The
dread reds
made her seethe with a low-level but deadly kind of anger: at her parents, at her circle of friends and their petty concerns, at her teachers, who encouraged their asinine ruminations. If, in the throes of this thing, she could have banished them all permanently with a blink to some unseen parallel universe, she would have done it.

Then there were the
moody blues
, when the smallest thing—a news account of someone shot and killed in a holdup, the sight of a dead pigeon in the street—could make her eyes flood and her chest heave with hiccupy sobs so that she could not catch her breath; she’d have to curl up alone in the dark (light was intolerable when she felt like this) until the sensation passed. The
mean greens
were similar though not identical to the dread reds; when she was in the grip of them, she was compelled to commit small, spiteful deeds, ones that she hoped would go unnoticed. She’d yank a button off a coat that someone at school had left hanging over a chair; she’d steal something dumb, something she didn’t even want—dental floss, a gross wad of beef jerky—from a store as her pulse roared in her ears at the possibility of being caught. Afterwards she’d feel sick with shame, which in no way prevented her from doing it again when the urge seized her.

She looked over at Portia, still sleeping, oblivious to her sister’s turmoil, and she felt simultaneously furious and bereft. Better to get out of here now, before she was tempted to wake Portia and tell her everything after all.

Justine emerged from the media room and went quietly up the stairs. She could hear the activity coming from the kitchen. They had all been instructed to take their breakfast in the breakfast room, where food would be laid out for them, but Justine wanted to do a little scouting around first.

A television—tuned in to a weather channel—was announcing the possibility of a thundershower this afternoon. Could she detect the sound of someone—her grandmother, possibly—moaning, or was she imagining this? There was a tent, of course; two tents, in fact—one for the ceremony, the other for the dinner. Justine had heard all about them, with their laminate flooring, chandeliers, and cathedral-style “windows,” several times. But she got the feeling that, even with the tents, Angelica would consider it a personal affront from God if the sky opened and it poured on her wedding day.

Neatly skirting the activity, Justine continued up the stairs to the second floor. The hallway was wide and long, and the floor covered in a deep, plush carpet that did feel nice on her bare toes. The carpet, chosen by her grandmother, Betsy, no doubt, made her feel guilty. Grandma B. was not a bad person; she was amazingly generous to Justine, Portia, and plenty of other people besides. Justine was fully aware that what she planned to do today was going to hurt Grandma Betsy. But knowing this did not change anything; she was going to do it anyway. Collateral damage, isn’t that what they called it?

The way Justine saw it, she was rescuing Angelica from marriage to a man who was an oppressor, a colonizer, and even a murderer. Angelica was too blinded—by love, by lust—to see him for what he was, but Justine was not. So it was up to her to unmask him and show Angelica—along with everyone else—just what kind of a person he really was. No one would thank her for it—not immediately, anyway. But years from now Angelica—and everyone else—would see that Justine had been a hero, the only one in the family with the vision to see the truth and the courage to do something about it.

Once in the hallway Justine was faced with a number of doors, all of them closed. Now, this was a problem. She knew her mother was sleeping up here, along with Angelica, her grandmother, her uncles and their various partners, and Great-grandma Lenore, with her constant talk of boobs and whose bra did or did not fit correctly. But Justine didn’t know who was in which room, and it was essential that she find out; could she hang around and wait to see who emerged?

Ohad, Aunt Angelica’s fiancé, wasn’t even staying in the house; he and his large, noisy Israeli family—the dark-skinned, black-haired mother, siblings, aunts, uncles, and cousins—were all checked in at a nearby hotel. So it wasn’t even clear to Justine what she was doing; she wanted to find Ohad, and she wanted him to be alone. It wasn’t likely that either of those aims were about to be accomplished by prowling around up here.

Still she crept along like the inept spy that she was, staring at the doors. There were voices coming from behind one of them; she pressed her ear to the wooden panel to listen. The words were not clear, but she thought she could hear her uncle Teddy. Major douche bag. Also pompous, status obsessed, and self-important. Last night at the rehearsal dinner, he must have asked her three times where she planned to go to college.

“I’ve just finished my sophomore year; I have a little while to decide,” she had answered.

“Not all that much,” he shot back. “You’d be amazed at how the time flies.”

“Would I?” she said. She raised her left eyebrow, the one with the piercing in it. She could tell that this piercing, even more than the stud in her nostril, offended him deeply, and from this she derived a rich and enveloping sense of satisfaction. “I’m not so sure.”

“Well, you should be,” he said. “Getting into college is the whole point of high school. And not just any college—the
right
college.”

“Really?” she asked with feigned innocence. “I thought the point of high school was to get an education.” In fact Justine was quietly obsessed with the topic of college in general, and the
right college
in particular. She was maniacal in her quest for good grades and spent most of her allowance on scoring Adderall—the cheery yellow 30-milligram capsules were the most coveted of the lot—which enabled her to study with a magnificent and single-minded ferocity. When she was deep in the A-zone, her mind became a highly powered leaf blower whose roaring blasts sent all extraneous thoughts scattering; she could hunker down and work for hours without a break. But she had no desire to share any of this with her uncle Teddy, who had clearly decided that she was not worth another nanosecond more of his precious energy and moved off in search of someone else to badger.

Justine pressed her ear closer to the door. Yeah, that was Teddy in there, all right. Teddy had gone to Dartmouth as an undergraduate, and he managed to twist and stretch virtually every conversation to include this fact. What if she told him that these days Dartmouth was considered the bottom of the Ivy barrel, filled with dumb-ass frat boys who probably had sex with cows in their downtime? Justine had set her own sights on Yale.

She continued along the hall. At the far end was her grandmother’s room; she knew that, but even if she hadn’t, the sound of the dog—it had started barking
again
—would have clued her in. So she had eliminated two of the possibilities. Then it occurred to her that she could simply knock on the doors or, if no one answered, go in. She could say that she was looking for her mother. Why had she not thought of this sooner? She rapped on the next door she came to.

“Come in,” quavered a voice she recognized as belonging to her great-grandmother, Lenore. Justine opened the door a crack and peeked inside. “I said to come in,” Lenore said. She was standing next to a complicated-looking steaming device planted in the center of the room; she wore something flowing and gauzy that involved leopard print and lots of it. Shiny buttons winked their way down the front. With both hands, Lenore directed the nozzle at an olive-green dress. “Ow!” she added. “That’s hot.”

“Are you okay?” Justine asked. Maybe Grandma Lenore shouldn’t be handling the steamer by herself.

“I’m fine,” Lenore said, sucking on her finger. “Don’t you worry about me.”

“I was looking for my mom,” Justine said, though Lenore had not asked.

“Other direction,” Lenore said. “Down the hall.”

“Thanks,” Justine said, feeling awkward. “Thanks a lot.”

Lenore looked up at her as if only just realizing who she was. “What bra are you wearing?” she asked. “To the wedding?”

“I don’t know. Just a bra.” Grandma L. truly was obsessed by the topic of other people’s underwear.

“The dress is shantung, right? And very fitted?”

“I guess,” said Justine. She didn’t know what shantung was, though she actually liked the dress Angelica had chosen, which was dove-gray and had a silvery sheen in the light. But she disapproved of it on principle. Meant to be worn once and then never again, it offended both Justine’s sensibilities and her morals.