Читать книгу Hanging by a Thread - Karen Templeton - Страница 12

A week later, my living room is wall-to-wall big hair and Queensspeak. It seems that not only does Heather want me to do her dress, she wants me to come up with something that will work for twelve—at last count—bridesmaids, ranging in size from a 4 Petite to a Woman’s 24.

I tried to talk her out of it, I really did. Not that (now that I’m used to the idea) I’d mind making Heather’s dress—with her curvy figure and those deep blue eyes and all that dark hair, she’s going to be a knockout in white. But a dozen bridesmaids? I think not. Besides, I pointed out, by the time she buys the fabric and pays me for my time—her sister and I weren’t that close, for pity’s sake—she’d do just as well, if not better, buying from Kleinfeld’s.

“Right. Like I’m gonna find dresses that’ll work for everybody at Kleinfeld’s,” she said over the phone when I called back. “And everybody still talks about that dress you made for Tina, and that was five years ago. God, that was one fucking gorgeous wedding gown.”

Hard to resist a compliment of that magnitude. Of course, she would bring up Tina, who remains amazingly elusive for somebody I used to talk to no less than three times a day.

Anyway, not wanting to appear rude—and needing time for the head-swelling to subside from her praise—I told Heather we’d talk about it. The plan was, since I’ve yet to meet a newly engaged woman who doesn’t go “just looking” for bridal gowns within a week of getting the ring, that she’d find the gown of her dreams before she and I got together, and my involvement would become a nonissue.

Next thing I know, she shows up at my house armed with twenty bridal magazines, her sister Joanne (who’s been married for four years and has three kids), her mother Sheila (who looks like an older, drier version of her daughters), her best friend Tiffany (there’s one in every bunch) and the worst case of wedding lust I have ever seen. And I’ve seen some pretty bad cases over the years, believe me.

So. Here we all are, in my teensy living room. It’s like Fran Drescher night in Vegas. The clashing cheap perfumes alone are enough to knock me over, let alone the noise of—let me count—sixteen women all yakking at once. Unfortunately, Heather’s dress hasn’t yet “found” her, as she puts it. So she’s enlisted the help of the entire wedding party. Which, by the time she included her sister, her sisters-in-law-to-be, three cousins she couldn’t get out of including and five of her closest friends, swelled to the monstrous proportions you see here. Except for Tina, who’s supposed to be here but isn’t.

The crowd is beginning to make hungry noises; grateful for the excuse to escape for a few minutes, I hustle out to the kitchen where Leo and Starr are hiding out, playing checkers.

“Quick. I need mass quantities of food, here.”

“I just bought chips and cookies,” Leo says, not bothering to look up from the board. “In the cupboard.”

I grab bowls and plates, rip open bags and dump out treats, stealing a Chips Ahoy for myself. Also not looking up, Starr says, “What’re they gonna drink?”

Good question. I open the fridge to half a bottle of probably flat root beer, a carton of Tropicana, a jug of ice water and a gallon of two-percent milk.

“I could go to the store, pick up a few things,” Leo says.

“Two twelve-packs of Diet Coke,” I say without missing a beat. “From the refrigerator case so they’re already cold.”

From the coatrack by the back door, my grandfather grabs his parka, hands Starr her puffy coat. “You know,” he says as he opens the door, letting in a blast of frigid air, “that could be you one day, planning your wedding in our living room.”

I find this a highly unlikely possibility, but this is not the time for a reality check. So all I say is, “Believe me, if I ever even think of having twelve bridesmaids, you have permission to shoot me.”

I cart bowls of goodies back out, barely having time to set them on the coffee table and jump out of the way before the pack attacks. I do notice, however, that Heather’s begun to slip into the Fried Bride stage. Her lipstick’s gone, her hair is sagging and she’s got that desperate, panicked look in her eyes. “This one’s not bad,” she says for at least the hundredth time. And for the hundredth time, she is pelted by a barrage of objections.

“Oh, no, that’s way too plain, honey—”

“It’ll squash your tits—”

“You can’t be serious. Long sleeves in June?”

“All those bows? What? You wanna look like you’re six?”

“Don’t take this the wrong way, baby, but that’s made for somebody with a much smaller ass.”

A word of advice—choosing a wedding dress by committee is a seriously bad idea.

She looks up at me, tears glittering in her eyes.

“Why don’t you give it a rest for a moment?” I say.

“Yeah,” Joanne says, brushing cookie crumbs off her front. “Maybe we should talk about the bridesmaids’ dresses?”

Panic streaks across Heather’s face. “We can’t do that! Tina’s not here!”

Oh, yeah, like this poor woman needs one more opinion. “Heather?” I sit down beside her, put my arm around her shoulder and hand her a cookie. “You can do this, honey.” She takes the cookie and nibbles on it, but her brow is a mass of wrinkles. “Now, do you—you,” I repeat, “have any ideas?”

“Well…not really. Except I know I want something the girls can wear again.”

Naturally, that brings a chorus of “Yeah, that’s right,” along with the sporadic fire of bridesmaid-dresses-from-hell stories. However, unless she’s planning on putting the girls in halter tops and suede miniskirts, ain’t gonna happen. Like “Just relax, this won’t hurt a bit,” the concept of recyclable bridesmaids’ dresses is a myth.

“That’s a great idea,” I say, because, really, who wants to know it’s gonna hurt, right? “What colors do you have in mind?”

“Colors?”

Oh, boy.

A sane, solvent person would gently extricate herself right now. Since I am neither—and since Sheila Abruzzo has already given me a hefty check up front—I smile and start tossing out suggestions. By the time Leo gets back with the Diet Cokes—at which point we get a rerun of the swarming locust action—we’ve narrowed the choices down to yellow, magenta, lavender, dark green, mint-green, pearl-gray, or some shade of blue.

“You know what?” I heft a Modern Bride off the teetering stack at her feet and lay it on her lap. “Maybe once you find your dress, the color scheme will come to you….”

My attention is snagged by Leo’s psst-ing me from the kitchen. I excuse myself, threading my way through the sea of lush Mediterranean womanhood.

“What?” I say when I get there.

“It’s Tina.”

“That’s weird, I didn’t even hear the phone ring—”

“Not on the phone. Here. In the kitchen.”

She’s sitting at the table, the green tinge to her skin clashing horribly with her mustard-colored sweater, letting Starr try on her necklace. Tina’s always been really sweet to my daughter, but her affection has always seemed…cautious, somehow. As if she’s afraid to let loose.

“C’mon, Twinkle,” Leo says, “Time to get jammies on.”

“Aw…”

“Now.”

With a huge sigh, Starr hands Tina back her necklace and troops off after her great-grandfather.

“God, she’s getting so big,” Tina says. “Who’s she look like?”

“Judith,” I say, referring to my father’s mother. “Isn’t it obvious?”

“Yeah, you’re right, I don’t know why I didn’t notice it before.”

The conversation comes to a dead halt; I try kicking it back to life by saying, “Uh…Tina? Aren’t you supposed to be in there?”

“Would you be, if you had a choice?”

Point taken. I sit down beside her. “So how come you didn’t return my calls?”

“Sorry. I just wasn’t feeling real sociable, that’s all.”

I take her hand and say gently, “Luke’s so happy about the baby.”

Her lips stretch into a thin smile. “I know. But please, El, not a word to anybody else. In case, you know, something happens.”

“Nothing’s going to happen, honey.”

She nods, not looking at me. Then, on a sigh, she glances toward the door. “So is it a total zoo in there?”

“Total. And you’ve been missed.”

I’m not sure she’s heard me, her attention focused on the sporadic explosions of laughter from my living room. Suddenly, her gaze meets mine.

“I’d forgotten, how crazy and fun it all was. How happy I was. How I thought…” Tina shakes her head, removes her hand from mine. “Pete and Heather are so good together, you know?”

“So are you and Luke,” I say through a thick throat. “And you damn well know that—”

The kitchen chair nearly topples over, she gets up so fast. “I’m sorry, I thought maybe, once I got here, I’d feel better, I’d be able to do this. But…I don’t know, maybe it’s hormones or something.” She’s slipped her coat back on, the same faux leopard job she had on the other night. “I’ll call you, I promise,” she says, then vanishes out the back door.

The woman is going to drive me nuts.

But then, I think as I rejoin the madness in my living room, I apparently don’t have far to go. Elissa, Heather’s size 24 cousin, corners me with a plea to steer Heather away from choosing a sleeveless attendant’s dress; I say I’ll do what I can, only to find myself nose-to-chest with the only redhead in the bunch besides me, some friend of Heather’s I only know by sight, making an impassioned case against magenta.

And suddenly, don’t ask me why, I’m up for the challenge. Of course, four months from now may be a totally different story, but at the moment, I actually think this might be kind of fun. If nothing else, I’ll be too busy to worry about things I can’t control.

Dressing these chicks for the biggest day in Heather Abruzzo’s life—now that, I can control.

Across the room, Heather lets out a shriek, clamping her hand to her chest like she’s just been shot. “Ohmigod! Ohmigod! I found it!”

After I elbow my way back over, kohl-smudged eyes lift to mine, shimmering with a mixture of hope and dread. Hands shaking, she holds out the picture, as if offering up her first-born. Sixteen sets of eyes fasten on my face as I take the open magazine from her. Sixteen sets of bosoms collectively hitch with bated breath.

The girl has chosen well, I must say. We’re talking enough tulle to outfit an entire “Swan Lake” corps de ballet, but the beading is minimal, there’s no lace, and—with a few adaptations to camouflage the, shall we say, weaker aspects of Heather’s figure—the pattern’s a piece of cake.

“I can do this,” I say at last, and a roar of joy goes up from the crowd.

Power’s a heady thing, you know?

I may have to resort to a tranquilizer dart to get my daughter to sleep tonight. Since I put her to bed an hour ago, she’s been back up three times. Like one of those trick birthday candles you can’t blow out. By this time I’m in bed myself, although I never have been able to go to sleep as long as she’s awake. Unfortunately, the little monkey knows this.

Floorboards creak behind me. “Mama?”

I keep my eyes shut, breathing so deeply I nearly hyperventilate.

“Ma-ma!” Starr climbs up onto the bed and flings herself over my shoulder, her hair tickling my face. “I know you’re awake!” I grunt when she scrambles over me, bony little elbows and knees landing where they will as she turns on the bedside lamp. Great. Now I’m bruised and blinded.

“Honest to God, Starr!” I shield my eyes, blinking in the glare. “Did you get into the Diet Cokes?”

She vigorously shakes her head. “I just can’t sleep. Guess I’m overwrought.”

Her word of the week, ever since she heard somebody say it on some TV show. Last week’s was evocative. I kid you not. Can you imagine what she’d be like if I’d started shoving flashcards in her face when she was six weeks old?

“C’n I look at this?”

I yelp as a fifty-pound something whaps me in the arm. “What?” I peer at the weapon, which turns out to be an abandoned Martha Stewart Weddings. Starr knows she doesn’t have carte blanche to look at everything that comes into the house, not since the day she walked in with one of my Nora Roberts books and asked, “Mama, what’s he cupped her mean?”

That freethinking, I’m not.

“Yes, that’s fine,” I say, entertaining a sanguine hope that she’ll haul her find back to her room. Instead, I nearly bite my tongue when she yanks my extra pillow out from underneath my head and wads it up against the headboard.

“Uh, Starr? You’re doing this in here because…?”

“’Cause there’s no monster in here.” Damn. I have really got to get rid of that thing. She pushes her glasses farther up onto the bridge of her tiny nose. “Oh, this is a pretty dress.”

This from the kid who screamed bloody murder when I tried to get her to wear a dress to somebody’s wedding last year. I squint at the picture, giving in to the inevitable. Never again will I take for granted the luxury of going to sleep when I’m tired. “Yes, it is,” I say on a yawn.

She skootches closer to me, smelling like watermelon shampoo. “It looks like fun, getting married.”

“It can be, I suppose.”

“Will I get married when I grow up?”

“Maybe. That’s not something anybody can predict.”

After a minute or so critiquing a spread on wedding cakes that cost more than my first year of college, she says, “Why’s Tina so sad?”

Not what I was expecting. But then, that pretty much describes my life these days. “She’s got a lot on her mind right now.”

“Like what?”

“Grown-up stuff, Twink. Nothing that would make sense to you.”

“Mama. I’m not a baby, geez.”

I stifle a chuckle. This kid was never a baby. A memory surfaces from several weeks before her fourth birthday, of Starr with her head in her hands, moaning, “Why am I still three?”

“I know you’re not, sweetie pie. But you’re not a grown-up, either. And I am—” maybe if I say it with enough conviction, I’ll believe it “—so I get to make the decisions about what you need, or don’t need, to know.”

“That is so lame.”

“And you so have to deal with it.”

She slams shut the magazine, her sharp little eyes meeting my bleary ones.

“You weren’t married to my daddy, were you?”

I have long since given up trying to figure out my daughter’s thought progressions. Fortunately, I’m too pooped to flinch. “No, baby. I wasn’t.”

“How come?”

You know, I always swore I’d never put her off, never dismiss her questions. But for some reason, I’d always pictured her being older and me being awake. And that I’d have answers that actually made sense. To at least one of us. Why is life so freaking messy?

I pull her into my arms. “Would you be really mad at me if I told you I can’t answer your question right now, but I promise I will one day?”

“Why can’t you tell me now?”

Why couldn’t I have had a kid content to ask me why the sky’s blue? Or, since we live in New York, snot-colored?

“Because, baby, I just can’t.”

“Like you can’t about Tina?”

“Kinda, yeah.”

“Well, that just blows,” she says, and I’m sorry, I can’t help it. I burst out laughing.

Starr’s bottom lip starts to tremble. “It’s not funny.”

I hug her harder, trying to tamp down the chuckles. Underneath that so-cool-I-rule exterior is a very sensitive little girl. “I know it’s not, honey. And I’m not laughing at you. But honestly—where did you hear that?”

“Jason. He says it all the time. He says some other stuff, too, but he told me I can’t say those words, ’cause you’d burn his butt.”

I crack up all over again.

Of course, the next time I see Jason, he is so dead.

“Ohmigod! Ellie Levine!”

Ten days have passed. I’m standing in a crush of bodies at a new deli close to work—I’d given my old one the heave-ho the day I saw a cockroach the size of the Hindenburg taking a stroll through the potato salad—when I hear the voice. I crane my neck, but even in four-inch heels all I see are chests and arms.

“Ellie! It’s me! Mari!”

My mouth drops open. Ohmigod, is right. Mariposa Estevez, my best friend from college. We fall into each other’s arms—much to the annoyance of the hundred or so people in our immediate vicinity—as I wonder how I managed to lose touch with somebody I thought would always be close.

Of course, then I remember. Daniel. Who happened at a time in my life when I hadn’t yet figured out there’s a difference between installing a man as the center of my universe and letting everybody else spin right out of my orbit.

“Girl,” Mari says with a huge smile. “You are looking good!”

She is nothing if not kind.

The tall, thin product of a French mother and a black Cuban father, the woman in front of me, the woman fully aware that every straight man in the place is gawking at her, the woman radiating some out-of-this-world perfume she probably didn’t rub on her wrists from a magazine strip, is unbelievably gorgeous. Skin a perfect golden milky color, huge dark gold eyes, God-given below-the-shoulder ringlets, full lips shimmering in some right-this-minute burgundy that would make me look like my great-aunt Esther three weeks after her funeral. She is wearing a coat that, swear to God, looks like it’s made out of rags, thigh high black leather boots with five inch spike heels that scream dominatrix (but classy), a striped miniskirt and a tiny, olive-green cashmere sweater that on anyone else would look like moldy cheese.

“So are you!” I say, thinking, Why is it so hard to hate nice people?

“Numbah fawty-three!” booms from behind the counter.

I check my number. Seventy-five.

“I can’t believe we lost track of each other!” she says, beaming. “How are you doing? What are you doing?”

“Seventh Avenue,” I hedge. “You?”

Mari rattles off a major designer name. As in, not just first tier, but on the right hand of God. “But I’m thinking of moving on. It’s all about keeping your options open, you know? Listen, I’m running like three years behind here—” she grins “—but we have got to get together for drinks…shit, hold on…”

She pivots to the man behind her and says at the top of her voice, “You got some kinda affliction that makes you grab women’s butts or what? And don’t even think about giving me some sorry-assed story about how crowded it is in here. You don’t see me with my hand on your balls, do you?” Then, muttering “Jerk,” she turns back to me, fishing for something in her pocketbook. Gucci. This year’s. The girl is doing well. “Are you uptown or down?”

“Oh, um, actually…neither. But here’s my cell…” I pretend to rummage through my purse. “Damn. I must’ve left my card case at work.”

“Not a problem.” She pulls out a second card, scribbles my cell number on it. “I’ve gotta couple evenings free next week. Will that work for you?”

“Uh, sure.”

“I’ll call you, I swear!” she says, slithering through the crowd, undoubtedly leaving a plethora of hard-ons in her wake.

“Sixty-fowah?” I hear. “Sixty-five? Yo, sixty-five?”

My bag rings. My arms squeezed so close to my ribs I’m about to suffocate in my cleavage, I somehow get my phone from my purse, while number sixty-six—presumably—and one of the guys behind the counter are having a major set-to about exactly how fresh the tuna salad is. Guy sounds like nothing’s gonna do it for him short of the fish swimming up the Hudson that morning, then taking a taxi over from the 42nd Street pier.

“Hey,” comes the faint, pitiful voice through the phone after I say hello. “It’s me.”

I now understand what they mean by “her heart leaped into her throat.”

“Tina?” I press the phone harder to my ear, stuffing my index finger in the other one. “I can’t hear you very well—where are you?”

“Home,” I barely hear as “Seventy-five!” booms right in front of me. Jesus. How’d it get to be my number so fast? I wave my hand; a round-faced, white-shirted man beckons to me with a gruff, “Okay, sweetheart, what’ll it be?”

“Hang on,” I say into the phone, then: “Liverwurst on whole wheat, mayo on the side, lettuce, pickle.” Back into the phone: “We’ve got a crappy connection, I can’t hear you—”

“We just ran outta whole wheat, you wan’ white, rye or pumpernickel?”

It’s not even noon, for God’s sake, how can they be out of whole wheat already? “Rye. No seeds—”

“Oh, God, Ellie—I’m so sorry…”

“About…what?”

“I couldn’t go through with it.” By now, she’s sobbing. “I just got too scared.”

My stomach drops. “What are you talking about?”

“What do you think?” I can hear her now, boy. Hell, half the people on either side of me can hear her now. “I got rid of the baby! I went by myself, and just…did it.”

“Here ya go, sweetheart,” the deli man says, handing me a white bag emblazoned with hieroglyphics over the glass case. “Pay at the register. Number eighty-t’ree!”

Ten people surge in front of me, shoving me into the minuscule air pocket left in their wake. I tell Tina to hang on a sec as I peer inside the bag, noting a suspiciously dark image through the butcher paper and nothing that even remotely resembles a container of mayo. Which means either there isn’t any or it’s slathered on the bread thicker than Anna Nicole’s makeup.

Just a mite too preoccupied to assert my usual snarky self, however, I elbow my way through the hordes and over to the register, grabbing a Dasani, a bag of chips and a Hershey’s bar to round out my meal. Juggling the bag, my purse, my now-extracted wallet and the phone, which is too damn small to wedge between my shoulder and my ear, I finally say, “You went alone?”

“Yeah, it was okay, I took a taxi home after.”

The dark-haired hottie on the register gives me a total that could feed a family of six in his country of origin for a week; I swipe my Visa and say, quietly, “You okay?”

The silence on the other end slices right through to my soul. “You’re not mad?”

Frankly, I don’t what I am. And God knows, I don’t know what to say. I do know, however, that she didn’t call just to give me the news.

I sign the slip and say, “I’ll be there in forty-five minutes.”

I told Gretta, our new bookkeeper—Angelique did indeed throw in the towel, the end of last week—I had a family emergency and to tell Nikky to call me on my cell if she needed to get in touch with me. So far, she hasn’t. Which actually might break the tension as Tina and I sit here on her king-size bed in her aqua-and-peach pseudo-Southwest style bedroom, watching Ricki Lake and sharing my mayonnaise-drenched liverwurst on pumpernickel. I gave her my whole chocolate bar, though. I think she needs it more than I do.

More than anything, I want to ask her what she’s planning to tell Luke. Who stopped by last night to show me the itty-bitty pair of athletic shoes he found. The day before that, a toy elephant nearly as large as a real one. Well, a baby one, anyway.

The people at the clinic told Tina since she had it done so early, she should be basically okay by this evening, just to take it easy for a day or so.

But there’s “okay” and then there’s “okay.” I’ve finally sorted out my feelings at least enough to know that I’m feeling sick about the whole thing, but I can’t tell what’s going on inside Tina’s head. Which, as I said, is totally unlike her, since at any given moment her emotions hover a good foot outside her body. Rather than really talking, she’s instead providing running commentary about the bozos on today’s show. Something about fat girls who slimmed down and then slept with men who hadn’t given them the time of day when they were heavy. Without bothering to reveal their true identities, of course.