Toss the Bride Read online

  Maurice leaves the safety of the sidewalk and rushes to her aid. But the driver of a furniture truck has already climbed down from his cab to Darby’s side. She sobs and the driver offers her what, from my viewpoint, looks to be a very clean hankie. When Maurice draws closer, the driver snarls, “Don’t you think you’ve done enough?” I think he even calls Maurice a pretty boy, but I can’t be sure. I’m not leaving the sidewalk. I don’t get paid to wade into traffic.

  “I’m not—I’m not, surely you don’t think—” Maurice is, for once, speechless. “I’m a married man!”

  “That’s even more disgusting. You could have gotten her killed, moron,” a woman standing beside her minivan says. “You don’t need him, sweetie.” Darby wails like an animal.

  Maurice backs away from Darby as the crowd grows. We stand there for about five minutes watching people get out of their cars to offer Darby advice, food, and sympathy. Sirens make their way down Peachtree. I motion for Maurice to get going. He doesn’t need this kind of publicity, and Darby is obviously fine. Well, she’s not fine and her dress is ruined from wallowing in road grease and dirt, but she’s alive.

  “This day could not have gone worse,” Maurice says when he joins me on the sidewalk. Someone heaves a soda can our way.

  I point to the first news van careening up the sidewalk. Maurice decides to slip on his shades, and we make a retreat to the edge of the lawn. Several cathedral staffers who have come outside to see what the fuss is about give us the eye. This won’t help Maurice the next time he has a wedding here.

  Eventually, the police coax Darby off to the side of Peachtree, and when she won’t talk to Maurice, we leave. By this time, a few reporters have tried to shove microphones in our faces, but their real target is Darby, fallen-from-grace news reporter. Maurice seems like a footnote and as soon as he can, he splits. I clean up the bride’s room, carefully packing Darby’s cosmetics case. I wonder what kind of self-help guide she’ll read after today’s episode.

  It really doesn’t matter; we’ve tossed her—two times—and it’s time to move on to the next bride. I turn off the lights to the bride’s dressing room and close the door.

  3

  The Museum Bride

  So far I have seen a giant sloth’s matted belly and the delicately crossed paws of a fox. If the fox had a say in the matter, my guess is he would rather be running through a damp forest glade instead of crouching stuffed and perpetually foppish-looking in an air-conditioned museum exhibit. I have also had two lattes from the museum coffee shop. The shop is helpfully tucked next to the museum store.

  Maurice is running this way and that, measuring the museum’s Great Hall. We have a wedding and a reception here next week, and there’s something wrong with the width of the hall. Maurice is threatening to pull the whole shindig from the museum because their measurements are off by ten feet, but I know he won’t do it. He’s simply having an especially high-strung day.

  May is a particularly trying time for professional wedding planners—and their staff. The heat hasn’t sunk in yet for the summer, and the days are balmy and perfectly well behaved. And, of course, every gal in Atlanta gets it into her head that she must be married during the month of May. I’ve grown to hate May and all its chirpy, springlike trappings. Part of me knows this is a twisted way to enjoy the loveliest season of the year, but I promise it’s the job.

  I leave Maurice and wander through the museum. If he notices I am gone, he will take a guess that I am inspecting the fire exits and valet parking options for next week’s event. I love to organize, make lists, and cross off items. I carry folders, three under my arm right now, in three different colors. I’m wearing another gift from Avery—a rose brooch that contains a tiny digital camera—and before the day is out, I swear that Maurice will show it off to someone. “Look,” he’ll coo, “it takes real pictures!”

  With the Great Hall to my back, I climb the white stairs, heading for the entrance level. A spooky dinosaur looms over the entire hall. I noticed earlier that the dinosaur’s head is glaringly small for the rest of its body. This makes me think of the dinosaur’s brainpower. I wonder if it was sort of a slow creature, prone to making mistakes and stumbling toward extinction.

  I enter the exhibit area that details the various areas of Georgia. I’ve lived here all my life, but I couldn’t tell you where these places are. The Piedmont. Springer Mountain. The Cumberland Valley. I didn’t much pay attention in school. Mostly, I had boyfriends and we had a good time—now, not in the way a person would think. It was more like a fun season when I didn’t have to do anything but brush my hair and pick out a cute pair of sandals. Now that I’m twenty-six, I see that there was probably more I could have done with my life.

  More and more, I find myself thinking about settling down. It makes sense. After all, I’m surrounded with all the trappings of love: pricey sit-down dinners for five hundred, bead-encrusted dresses from Paris, and strolling minstrels who take requests. At least, that’s what these brides think is love.

  With Avery and me, love is often wrapped in keeping up with his odd but strangely endearing family. The Lelands tend to get excited about some interesting stuff. Last week, Avery’s dad brought home an outdoor ceramic beef-cooking stove called the Vite. The cooking directions were written in Czech or Polish, so Mr. Leland just guessed. The fillets ended up curling, blackening, and eventually catching fire. As the two laughing men threw water on the smoking meat, they yelled, “Vite! Vite!” I stood a safe distance away, pouring lemonade into tall glasses.

  “See there, son,” Mr. Leland said with tears in his eyes, “it pays to learn a foreign language.”

  Other times in the Leland house, Mrs. Leland plans the evening. She likes to pick out a movie for all of us to watch, although I learned pretty quickly that she talks all the way through the flick. She enjoys asking questions such as, “Who is that? Is he the killer? Is he going to kill someone?” until Avery says, “Watch the movie, Mother! We don’t know yet!” I like hanging around the Lelands. They are very different from my family, but not an awful different.

  To be perfectly honest, though, I don’t know if his mother is all that happy. She has sad eyes sometimes. If I really think about it, it seems like having scads of money actually gives you more headaches, not fewer. For me, I knew I had to go to work when I was done with high school. My grades really weren’t much to write home about, so college was a dim, vague dream. Avery, on the other hand, had a lot more choices. Half of the time, I believe he’s still trying to decide what road to take. At least, I think so.

  I pass another dinosaur, this one with an eager college-age worker standing under it. The worker is holding a large bone. He looks nervous, poor guy, like he knows he should approach the small knots of parents and kids wandering through the room and offer them some sort of dinosaur demonstration. Maybe wave the pitted bone around, giving the kinder a mouthful of facts. But the poor kid looks scared, totally whipped and nervous. I think about going over to him and asking a lame question about the dinosaur whose crotch he’s standing under. You know, give him a boost.

  Instead, I realize I am tired. I have spent all day keeping up with Maurice and his demands. He’s all right, but sometimes, blast it, I grow tired of helping other women get married. I’d like to toss the whole lot of them out of the window, to tell the truth. I sigh, remembering I would have to go back to waiting tables or gift wrapping at Luck’s.

  Thinking too much about Avery makes me clench my jaw, so I duck out of the dinosaur room and head into the Okefenokee Swamp. The exhibit is set up, like all of them, to imitate a place. It’s a hard thing to do, and I think the museum pulls it off as best as it can. The birds aren’t moving, though, and the water is stiff Plexiglas, and all of a sudden, I am deep down sad. The swamp’s birds were real once and now they are stuck on sticks that jut up out of cattails. Really, it’s no life that I can appreciate.

  I pause on the swamp boardwalk that snakes through the exhibit. A red-shouldered
hawk hangs above me, frozen on a wire with a snake in its talons. Herons and other birds I think I should know are crammed into the space to my right. A bullfrog pulses a deep-throated warning. I read a little about the swamp. I learn that the swamp’s cypress trees will eventually take over because that’s what cypress trees do. They’ll make a thick, knitted space where earth can form and then the swamp will be out of business. Just like that, it will be gone.

  While I’m standing there, the bullfrog music gets louder. And the lights start to fade. At first the lights dim slightly, then freefall from color to a darkness that tells me night is on. I almost feel the rush of a night wind in the wet swamp. A mosquito hums near my ear. In the other room, the dinosaur is forgotten by bored children. Then, without a skip, the lights turn up and it’s morning in the swamp. More birds join the looped audiotape. It’s bright and pink, the way a sunrise always is when you’re looking right into it.

  A group of tourists enters the room. They have noisy children. I read the rest of the swamp information. It seems the only way the poor Okefenokee can get out of its predicament is to have a good ol’ fire. Apparently, when the fire destroys the cypress trees, the spaces of earth between the trees collapse, and all of the water is free to be swampy again. The lights start to dim again, and I realize I’m in for my second night in the swamp. A kid steps on my foot. I decide to leave.

  It’s not that Avery wouldn’t marry me. Or that I haven’t, well, you know, hinted. Looked at rings. Threatened in my own way. But Avery, he’s working on some other level. Like the battle of the swamp bottom back there. There’s stuff working down in the depths that no one knows about. And you might think it’s sad and sorry to get hung up on marrying someone, but when you’re not twenty-one anymore and you’re working for a man named Maurice who paid more for his imported dog than you made last year, sad and sorry starts to work itself over pretty good.

  I think about that swamp as I drive to Maurice’s favorite jewelry store. The bride we’re tossing later in the summer is named Isabel, and she wants to give all her bridesmaids platinum I pendants. Subtle nudges that perhaps they might want to receive pendants with their own first initials have gone unheeded. So, here I am, in Barrclere, inspecting and then ordering fifteen I’s in Gothic script. They will be ready in ten days. Isabel will be thrilled, I tell Maurice into my wristwatch.

  “Are you using it?” he screams to me. He thinks the volume is low because the watch is so small.

  “Yes,” I reply. The saleslady at Barrclere points to me. The other salesgirls stop to look. I feel like Judy Jetson.

  “So Euro. See you tomorrow.”

  I nod and sign off. The time flashes at me: 5:25 P.M. It’s almost time to meet Avery. We’re playing tennis before dinner. He likes to work up an appetite. Before I go to meet his convertible, I order a pendant for myself. I’m in luck; the A’s are in stock. I wear my purchase outside into the spring air.

  * * *

  Tennis is no simple affair at the Lelands’. For one thing, Avery’s father might join us. That’s always tricky because Mrs. Leland told us Mr. Leland feels he is losing his youth, and winning at tennis is one way for him to “pull back the hands of the time-clock,” as she puts it. Mrs. Leland never joins us, even though she played tennis at Vandy and a few trophies up in Nashville have her name on them. Then there’s Avery, a really decent player, and me.

  Avery and I start with a few ground strokes. I enjoy warming up. It’s something about the rhythm of the new, yellow ball bouncing toward me and then away. Occasionally, the rhythm stops and starts when I toss one into the net. Avery rarely makes mistakes. Unless his mind is on something big, he can hit winners by me all day long.

  This is a source of tension between us. “Avery,” I’ll say when he hits a particularly evil shot to my backhand when he knows full well I am recovering from diving for his previous return. “Avery, give me a break. That’s not fair.”

  “Fair? What’s fair?” he’ll reply without breathing hard.

  This is where I pout and refuse to play anymore. In my mind, an opponent who picked up a racket for the first time two years ago is not to be tortured with a constant volley of winners. Especially when said opponent is the girlfriend.

  But Avery, of the summer tennis camps in some European country and custom-made leather tennis shoes, does not subscribe to my way of thinking. I am reminded of this when a wicked slice drops in front of me and thuds out of my reach. The warm-up is over.

  We play hard for thirty minutes and then relax for a bit at the net. Avery leans over the webbing and gives me a quick kiss. “You seem distracted today. What’s going on?”

  “Oh, well, you know, it’s the job. I just live for those bridal gals,” I say.

  Avery laughs, showing his pink tongue and white teeth. I smile back, feeling the spring sun on my face.

  “I’m thinking about telling the next bride who asks for those tiny autumnal flowers they saw last month in Atlanta Wedding to jump off Stone Mountain,” I say.

  “Why?”

  “Because that magazine is printed months in advance, so those flowers were available, like, eight months ago. I cannot get them for a May wedding,” I reply, starting to get worked up.

  “Okay, easy. I was just asking.” Avery flips his racket over in his hands, examining the strings. He’s ready to play again. But I’m not. I go on.

  “You’d think that one of these perfectly intelligent and rich women would take the time to notice that flowers called ‘autumnal joy’ would not be sitting around their chichi florist in early May. It’s just not going to happen!”

  Backing away from the net, Avery stops turning his racket over. He glances toward the veranda, where his father is reading The New Yorker. He can’t hear us because he’s a good quarter of a mile away from the courts. I can make him out, just barely. He’s a tiny speck wearing a V-necked sweater.

  “So, that’s what I get worked up about. Every day. And Maurice has ‘absolute confidence’ in me because I can alphabetize folders while wearing a telephone watch. Believe me, when I get married, I will not be wearing this watch and I will not order flowers that don’t exist naturally!”

  A trickle of sweat runs down my chest and lodges in the band of my sports bra. Without looking at Avery, I know that I’ve gone too far. Avery hates conflict, and I don’t really like it too much, either. My parents don’t fight, and neither do his. Mom teaches thirty second-graders, so when she gets home, the last thing she wants is a noisy house. Dad delivers mail and is alone all day, riding the rural routes around Cutter. He is usually fairly quiet; I’ve heard him raise his voice maybe a dozen times in my life.

  “Ah,” Avery starts to say.

  “No, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t take out my day on you.”

  “Well, that’s okay. I guess.” Avery’s face is stretched tight with some sort of decision. I figure he wants to get back to the safety of the veranda, or, at the very least, away from me.

  We walk toward the house, Mr. Leland, and some sort of awaiting cold plate. I’ll find out later that it is smoked salmon, a dish I’d never had until I started dating Avery. I wonder, if we ever break up, will I like the taste of salmon ever again or will it just be a fish I knew once, a long time ago?

  * * *

  Maurice calls me in early on Saturday. Katie Anna, our bride, the one with the natural history museum reception, has cold feet. Maurice tells me loudly over the phone that she isn’t sure she wants to be Mrs. So-and-So for the rest of her life. The parents of the bride are pressuring her to go through with it. The creamy engraved invitations alone set them back eight thousand dollars. The wedding is in seven hours.

  I arrive at the museum, where the tables and candle globe centerpieces are being set up. Museumgoers wander along the perimeter of the Great Hall, looping around to tour an exhibit about ancient Syria. Mentally, I try to place the country on a map, but I draw a blank. I was never that great with geography.

  “There she is,” Maurice whispers
dramatically as I skirt the caterer’s helper laden with white wooden chairs. “You’ve got to get on this, and I mean fast.”

  Maurice is worked up. He reminds me constantly about referrals and reputation and publicity. If this bride bails—and from the look in her dazed and sobbed-out face, I think she’s close—Maurice will be damaged. I’m usually sent in to save the day. I’m supposed to talk about babies and white wedding dresses. If that doesn’t work, I’m to go for the you’ll-be-lonely-until-you-die jugular. The sad thing is, I kind of believe in it all. The white dress, the honeymoon in Belize, the procession of infants in short pants. Standing in the Great Hall with that tiny-headed dinosaur towering over the entire show, I’m not sure how anyone can escape where they’re going.

  Katie Anna agrees to go for a walk with me. She is a pretty blonde with a thin nose and the peppy gait of a gym fanatic. Even though it’s her wedding day, she looks sad and confused. I know immediately where to take her. We go to the Okefenokee Swamp. On the boardwalk, I point to the frozen thrushes and plastic water. Her blond hair, recently done up in a cascade of curls and twirly French knots, has become a bit unhinged. I touch one sprung curl and tuck it back into the rest. As the pink lights of morning come up on the swamp, Katie Anna lets me put one arm around her shoulder as she cries.

  She tells me that her fiancé is really, well, she says apologetically, there’s no other word for it, an ass. He works all day and then expects her to put on a black dress and entertain clients. He likes wrestling and drinks beer with every meal. She envisions a parade of expense-account dinners and low-brow weekend sports that never ends, yet she can’t think of life going forward unless she marries him in six hours.

  Katie Anna and I stand in the swamp for about a week of up and down lights, cooing birdcalls, and mating deep-voiced frogs. She cries a little bit, and I explain the wonders of the swamp I had never seen before last week, even though it’s in my home state. I tell her about the trees knitting together and the sorry chance the swamp has to make it out alive. She stops crying and lifts her head just slightly, all the while working her two-carat ring off her left hand. When I get to the part about fire helping the swamp get back to what it’s supposed to be, Katie Anna has the beginnings of a smile that no cypress tree, small-headed dinosaur, or ass-faced fiancé can take away.