Whose Wedding Is It Anyway? (6 page)

Thump head on desk. Harder, this time. Repeat.

I couldn’t bear to read further.

When I lifted my head, an addendum had been added to my in-box.

Wow Weddings
Memorandum

From: Astrid O’Connor
To: To the Modern Bride and the Classic Bride
Re: Sibling Photo Shoot

Please note that as Devlin is going on vacation the last week of January, your sibling-photo shoots have been moved up to Monday. If your siblings cannot attend, please hire the appropriate stand-ins, reimbursable at
WowWeddings
’s standard, not industry standard.—AO

Translation: If you hire someone really good-looking, you’ll have to pay the difference between the averagely good-looking models we use and the gorgeous models other magazines shell out big bucks for.

Mini Flirt Night Round Table Discussion 1, 000, 000: Which Fake Father and Brother Look Most Like Eloise?

During our lunch hour on Friday, Jane and Amanda and I headed to Perfect People, the model agency
Wow
used. We sat in the reception area, poring over huge leather binders filled with eight-by-ten glossies of men, men and more men. There were gorgeous men. Average men. Ugly men. Tall, short, medium. With hair. Without. With potbellies. Without. (There was even a book labeled Ugly Men Without Hair and Potbellies. According to the Perfect People associate who handed us the books, ugly men without hair and potbellies were in demand for “reality-based” commercials and “before” shots for print ads.)

I asked for the Men With Urban Appeal book. Jane, Amanda and I were each handed a stack of four. There were six books of men over thirty-five with urban appeal, and six under thirty-five. We also received the celebrity look-alike book.
Wow Weddings
had been sued
three times by celebrities who claimed the magazine had hired models of their likeness to sell products they wouldn’t endorse.
Wow Weddings
won each time and continued the practice.

Jane was flipping through the look-alike book. “Oohla-la—check out Ewan McGregorly!” She slid out the photo and held it up. A label along the border indicated that his name was indeed Ewan McGregorly. The back of the photo listed his vital stats and real name: Harold Flubman. Jane laughed. “Ewan looks like he could be your brother, Eloise.” She kissed the photo. “Oooh, he’s so hot!”

“Ewan or the model?” Amanda asked.

Jane blew another kiss at Ewan. “Both.”

“Well, he isn’t supposed to be hot,” I pointed out. “He’s supposed to be my brother.”

“Your brother
is
hot,” Jane said.

“Jerks aren’t hot,” I countered. “They’re just jerks.”

Jane closed the book and sat down on the sofa next to me. “What happened between you and your brother, anyway?”

I bit my lip, stared at the ceiling, kicked my toe against the beige carpet.

“Does it have something to do with your grandmother and her stroke last year?” Amanda asked.

I bit my lip and fidgeted.

“Eloise, I don’t know what happened between you and Emmett,” Jane said. “You never told me. I just know that when your grandmother was recovering from the stroke in the hospital, he never came to see her. I also know that you haven’t spoken to him since. And that’s way too long.”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” I said.

“Honey, you’re at a modeling agency to hire a stand-in
brother for a photo shoot of your wedding plans,” Jane said. “But you
have
a brother.”

“Where is he, then?” I asked. “I also have a father, but I haven’t seen him in twenty-seven years. What the hell is the difference?”

“The difference is that until a year ago, you were nuts about your brother,” Jane said. “I know he drove you a little crazy, but I also know how much he means to you. I know you’ve been very protective of him your entire life. And I know that you love him to pieces.”

“Call him, Eloise,” Amanda said.

I fidgeted, still staring up at the ceiling.

“Will you call him?” Jane asked.

Blank page. Blinking cursor.

“Eloise?”

“Maybe I should just back out of the whole thing,” I said.

Jane raised an eyebrow. “Out of a free hundred-thousand-dollar wedding?”

“Out of everything,” I said. “The engagement, the wedding, everything.”

“Don’t make this about Noah when it’s not,” Jane told me.

“Meaning?” I asked.

“Meaning, this is about you and your feelings about your father and your brother. It’s not about Noah. Don’t hurt what’s there and working.”

“Maybe Noah and I
aren’t
working. Maybe I want a husband who’s around more than twice a week.”

“And maybe you want a husband who you love very much,” Amanda said. “A husband who loves you very much.”

Jane nodded. “And a husband who does quite inadvertently push buttons that force you to deal with stuff.”

I shook my head. “I don’t want to deal with stuff. I just want to—”

“Bury your head in the sand?” Amanda finished for me.

Was that what I was doing? If you didn’t deal with something that you couldn’t deal with, were you a big fat ostrich?

Jane squeezed my hand. “Eloise, I’m just saying that the fates of the universe have conspired against you—or for you, actually. You’ve got to produce a father and brother for your wedding feature.
One
of them is in your life—okay, he hasn’t been this past year. But you can remedy that.”

“Does your grandmother have his phone number?” Amanda asked.

I nodded.

“Call him, El,” Jane said.

I shook my head.

“Call him,” she said again.

Call.

Don’t call.

Call.

Don’t call.

Ah. The fates of the universe had conspired again and landed on Don’t Call.

Two minutes later, I had a fake brother named Ewan McGregorly signed, sealed and available for delivery on Monday.

W
hereas I had three relatives, one AWOL since I was 5 and one I hadn’t spoken to in a year, Noah Benjamin had a cast of thousands. I tried to imagine Thanksgiving dinner with his family.

Pass the turkey, please.

Sorry, it weighs four hundred pounds. Self-serve!

At least a hundred people were stuffed into Noah’s parents’ New Jersey house for our engagement party. There were siblings, first, second and third cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents and close friends of the family who were called Aunt This or Uncle That. There were children, at least ten, of various ages, building things out of Play-Doh or reading comic books or sulking about “this stupid boring party.” There were even two dogs, a German shepherd named Buddy and a terrier named Scruffy, playing teeth-tug-of-war with a ratty bone.

And there was Noah, looking incredibly handsome in
his gray shirt and charcoal pants, debating the last presidential election with his uncles.

Last but not least, there I was, facing the bookshelves (heavy on the leather-bound editions of classics, à la Philippa’s fake library) at the far end of the living room, sipping a glass of wine and staring at my watch, which
tick-tick-ticked
very slowly. It was only seven-thirty. Snippets of twenty different conversations went on around me. Mostly
about
me.

“I hear both her parents are dead, poor thing.”

“Nah, Eloise just doesn’t talk to her family.”

“She’s very pretty, but a little skinny, don’t you think?”

“Is Uncle Jeffrey coming?”

“Some big advertising promotion for the magazine she works for.”

“Maybe her father’s in prison. Some kind of white-collar crime, most likely.”

“Beth says the bridesmaids have to wear Halloween costumes.”

“Can someone
please
turn down the stereo?”

“I thought we were meeting Eloise’s family.”

“No family?”

“I hear she has a sister.”

“No, a brother.”

“Eloise has no family—no one. So sad.”

“Hmm, this chopped liver is delicious!”

“She has a sickly grandmother. I hear the poor little old lady is in a nursing home.”

You hear wrong. You all hear wrong.
My grandmother wasn’t sickly and didn’t live in a nursing home. Five feet ten inches tall and weighing one hundred and seventy-six pounds, seventy-nine-year-old Bette Geller, of the cashmere sweater sets, heavyweight dungarees, rouge and lip
stick, was as robust and full-of-life as you got, despite the partial paralysis that made it difficult for her to get around or travel, which was why she wasn’t here tonight. She played poker and adored Rodney Dangerfield and hooted with laughter at his movies.

It was true that my grandmother had been sick. A little over a year ago, she’d had a stroke. One minute she’d been fine, sitting across from me in the diner where I met her for lunch every Saturday afternoon, and the next minute, she wasn’t fine.

She’d been sipping the chocolate egg cream that she always got for dessert and telling me a joke, one of her favorites of Rodney’s that embarrassed her and delighted her at the same time, when she suddenly
stopped,
just sort of froze, and things had gotten worse from there.

There was a rush of waiters, people sitting around us, the diner manager, and then the ambulance sirens. Then there were doctors and nurses and Jane and Amanda and Natasha, baby Summer cooing in her stroller. There was Noah, whom I’d been dating somewhere between casually and seriously for almost a year. There was my old boss at Posh Publishing, a couple of girlfriends from high school and one from college. Even Michael, my ex-boyfriend from a decade before, showed up in the hospital with a bouquet of red tulips and a box of Whitman’s Samplers, which my grandmother had kept on her shiny mahogany coffee table every day of the year. There were my grandmother’s friends, who’d come every day and sat for hours, playing cards by her bedside, talking to her, telling her who was having a sale on rib roast, whose husband was in the doghouse, whose granddaughter just had a baby.

There was no Emmett, but no one asked why.

It was understood that Emmett was
traveling.

My brother was one of those “march-to-their-own-drummer” types who graduated (barely) from Yale, then got a job driving a truck to Alaska, where he fished for a while until he decided to climb a mountain in Africa, funding for which was provided by the occasional wealthy older woman he was sleeping with.

I was the only one who asked where Emmett was.

“Where the hell is Emmett?” I’d scream and rage at the top of my lungs in the tiny studio apartment I lived in at the time.

“Jesus Christ, I don’t know!” shouted back the guy who lived in the apartment above me. The walls, floors and ceiling in that dumpy walk-up were so thin, you could hear way too much of what went on in your neighbors’ lives. I mourned for the days, the years, when Jane lived above me. Before she moved into a swanky Upper West Side apartment with Ethan, Jane and I could conduct entire conversations via our kitchen cabinets.

Where the hell is Emmett?
I started raging silently.

Despite the many warm, caring people, from friends to doctors to co-workers to strangers I met in the hospital elevator and in the hallways where I prayed that my grandmother wouldn’t die, there was no family.

My family was Grams, myself and Emmett, and Emmett was nowhere to be found.

He often took off for weeks at a time and couldn’t be reached.

“What if something happens!” I had yelled at him for years. “You have to be reachable!”

“What’s going to happen?” he’d say. “Stop being so melodramatic.”

“Get a cell phone!” I’d scream.

“Stop telling me what to do!” he’d scream back. “And I’m not getting a cell phone. You can get cancer from cell phones.”

“What if something happens?” I yelled again.

His response was some indecipherable mutter (his usual response).

And then something happened. And I couldn’t reach Emmett.

Despite all the people, there’d been no family.

No family meant me. And I was strong, I’d been born strong apparently, and made stronger just a few years later, but I wasn’t
that
strong. I wasn’t immune to the aforementioned raging. The crying jags, the fear.

Emmett turned up three weeks and four days after my grandmother’s stroke, with an overnight bag slung over his shoulder, his stupid grin and shaggy blondish-brown hair that always needed a cut but always looked rock-star good anyway. I opened my apartment door to find him with a girlfriend in tow, a pretty blonde with braided pigtails despite her age, which had to be at least twenty-five. Her name was Charlotte. Emmett wanted to know if he and Charlotte could crash on my couch for a few days until Charlotte’s freshly painted living-room walls dried.

“It’s a really cool plum color,” Charlotte said.

I ignored her and told my brother to go to hell.

“You have a lot of rage,” Charlotte said before I clued them both into
why.

“I didn’t know, okay?” he screamed back, red-faced. “How was I supposed to know that Grams had a stroke if I didn’t know?”

Gee, Emmett, and you went to Yale?

“You were supposed to know because you should have
been here!” I said. “You should have been here or should be reachable. But you’re a selfish, self-absorbed brat!” I stood there yelling. “Grams is all we have of family…where the hell have you been since you were eighteen…taking off on whims without a second thought…leaving all the responsibility to me…where have you been the past three weeks when Grams, our only family in the world, has been in a hospital, slowly recovering from a stroke that you didn’t even know she had…you wouldn’t know it if I dropped dead in the street…Selfish brat!…Self-absorbed!…Immature!…”

I went on and on and on.

Lips tight, Emmett listened until I stopped yelling. Then he said, “I don’t need this crap,” and he and Charlotte stomped off, her pigtails flopping against her puffy white jacket as they headed down the stairwell.

That was the last time I saw him.

He sent my grandmother postcards. During the past year, he’d been all over the United States. Beverly Hills. Las Vegas. Chicago. Nashville and Memphis. Atlanta.

“Don’t be so hard on your brother,” Grams would say when I’d toss the postcard aside with a
harrumph.
“It’s all very complicated.”

It wasn’t complicated. Nothing was complicated. Things either were or weren’t.

And Emmett was a weren’t.

“Emmett and I have the same background,” I ranted to Grams. “What’s complicated about him should be complicated about me. And here I am!”

“Yes,” she’d say, “but you’re different people.”

Right. I was a normal human being who took care of the one true relative aside from Emmett I had on this earth. And Emmett was a self-absorbed jerk brat!

“Things aren’t black and white, dear,” Grams would say.

I would nod, but I secretly didn’t agree.

You were or you weren’t.

“Eloise, dear, as a traditionalist…”

Startled out of the memories, I turned around to find Noah’s mother, Dottie Benjamin, eyeing me with a frown. I took my hand off the leather-bound
Great Expectations
I didn’t even know I was clutching.

“Dear,” Mrs. Benjamin said, “I’m sure Beth was exaggerating—she’s been in the foulest mood lately—but she was muttering like crazy about having to wear a Halloween costume to her own brother’s wedding. Dear, does that make any sense to you? I couldn’t make heads or tails of it.”

A woman standing behind Mrs. Benjamin wiggled her way through the small group of people between us. “Louise, did I just hear that you and Noah are marrying on Halloween—in costume? How festive!”

Eloise,
I corrected mentally. Why waste the breath? Besides, the woman was already deep in conversation about whether Cousin Marcy was carrying high or low and whether that meant she was pregnant with a boy or a girl.

I turned back to my future mother-in-law. “Mrs. Benjamin, the dress is a little different, but—”

Mrs. Benjamin leaned close. “Dear, a wedding is no time for
different.
But don’t you worry—I saw the most beautiful bridesmaid dress today, and I took it upon myself to put a deposit on five of them. Don’t even try to thank me—that’s what a mother-in-law is for! The dress is a lovely deep purple taffeta with cute little polka-dot bows on the neckline and a festive bow at the back waistline. Beth, as you know, looks great in jewel tones.”

“Um, Mrs. Benjamin, the magazine feature—”

She waved her hand. “Oh, don’t you worry about a thing! Once your boss sees these dresses, I’m sure she’ll want to feature them in the magazine.”

“Mrs. Benjamin—” I waited for her to say,
Dear, call me Dottie, we’re family,
but she never did. “I hope you can get back your deposit. The bridesmaids’ dresses are a done deal. Yes, they’re a little different, but—”

“Different?” repeated Beth, appearing out of nowhere behind very pregnant cousin Marcy. “It’s
hideous.
I’m not wearing it. I’m a size fourteen if you haven’t noticed, and there’s no way that skintight thing will look good on me.”

Be kind, she’s going through a divorce,
I mentally chanted.

“The color’s great on you, though,” I said.

Mrs. Benjamin and Beth Benjamin eyed me as though I were speaking Swahili, as they often did at family functions.

Two of the kids began feeding the little dog Play-Doh, and Mrs. Benjamin ran off to save it. Beth slunk away, and I was back to my books and inability to shut out conversations about me.

“I hear they’re getting married on Halloween.”

“Their wedding is a costume party.”

“What? What kind of nonsense is that?”

“It’s bad luck is what it is!”

“Ooh, I’m going to go as Jay Leno. I bought a rubber mask of his face last year.”

“I just met Eloise’s mother. Lovely woman.”

I raised my eyebrow at that one. What I would do to meet my mother at this party, chat with her for a little while. Hear her voice. The voice of reason, at that.

“We can sneak out if you’re dying,” Noah whispered in my ear. “There are so many people here, no one will notice.”

Effectively reminding me of why I had said yes all over again.

Sunday morning, Noah and I got into a huge fight.

“You’re mad at me because I drank the last of the Diet Coke?” he asked.

I stood in the doorway to the bedroom, waving the empty soda bottle at him. “Whoever drinks the last of the soda has to either buy more or write
Buy More Soda
on the fridge!”

“Fine. I’m sorry. I will.”

“Oh, like you can buy soda from Chicago,” I snapped.

“What?”

“Stay home,” I said. “Blow off the trip. Who cares if Oprah is rumored to be marrying Steadman in a secret ceremony on air?”

“Eloise, I can’t
not
go,” he said. “It’s my job.”

Sometimes I wanted his job to be being my fiancé.

“Are you mad that I drank the last of the soda or that I’m going away?”

“That you’re going away,” I admitted, and slunk down on a chair like a sulking child.

He sat down next to me. “Sweetie, being an investigative journalist means hitting the road. I’m very likely going to be traveling a lot forever.”

But—

“Eloise, I know it’s hard on us as a couple, but I love you and you love me and—”

“‘We’re a happ-y fam-i-ly’?”

“What?”

Noah didn’t do much baby-sitting for two-year-olds and have the preschool crowd’s theme songs down pat.

“I’ll be all right,” I said. “I’ve just got a lot on my mind.”

“If you need me, Eloise,” he said, “you just call me.” He took my hands and looked into my eyes. “You come first. You need me and I’m in the middle of interviewing Oprah’s friend’s friend’s cousin’s next-door neighbor’s sister, I’ll take your call. You can count on that.”