She rolled her eyes. Then she rolled them again, just in case I missed it. “I appreciate that, love, but we don’t have time to be all dramatic about it right now,” she said.
“Just tell me what you need me to do,” I said.
“Well, we’re going to have the ceremony in here,” my mom said, pointing toward the center of the ballroom. “And then just an abbreviated version of the cocktail hour with drinks and the unperishables. Is unperishables even a word?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Can you find out? I keep using it, but your father’s looking at me like he thinks I made it up.”
“Did you?’
She looked at me seriously. “It’s possible,” she said.
I’d never known much about making things beautiful. There were girls who were built that way, probably the same girls who knew from birth how they wanted their own weddings to be, everything already in place—every dried flower and champagne flute, every pressed napkin. I, on the other hand, was another kind of girl. You could show us how to dry a flower, and we would be able to do it. You could get us to shine-swipe a champagne flute. Hell, we could even set a fantastic china-filled table, given the proper guidance. But the whole time, we’d be giggling on the inside, deep-down believing that all of it was just an extended version of playing with Mommy’s makeup, waiting for someone to come in and get us in trouble.
So when I explain that the ballroom was beautiful when we were done, I say it with a sense of surprise that I had anything to do it with it. I imagined my wedding, if it ever came around, would involve nothing more than a beach and a little barbecue, some very rich chocolate cake. But for those twenty minutes that we had to make the Essex House’s mostly windowless ballroom blackout-friendly, I was Martha Stewart living. Granted, one with an injured foot less than daintily wrapped in a cloth napkin beneath my fancy shoe, but a Martha Stewart nonetheless.
When we were done, there were tall mahogany candles everywhere, huge clusters of them forming a semicircle in the entranceway. We’d brought in antique lanterns from the basement, placed them in front of the flower bouquets: everything dark and lit and backlit and floral. Browns and deep blues present in the candlelight, the windows open just enough for the heat-wind to start kicking in, a drop of breeze making its way from the river.
The only trouble we had was with the stained glass window directly behind the altar—the fiery, unmitigated sun threatening to burn right down on Josh and Meryl, making them sweat. My mother came up with the idea of covering the window with the black garbage bags, still holding the ice for the affair. Bag balanced on bag balanced on bag. It looked somewhere between a modernist sculpture and an unfinished wall. But it almost didn’t look like a mistake.
More of the guests had been dissuaded by the hotel’s promise of hundred-degree temperatures than had been inspired by my father’s plea that they stick it out, but there were about thirty people there, filling up the first several rows.
We had filled up the first row ourselves: me sitting next to my dad, my mom on his other side. Then Berringer and Michael and Bess and the Moynihan-Richardses. All of us were sitting there, semicircled around the small vine-inspired altar. The judge was standing, in wait, at the center of the altar.
Josh and Meryl had decided a long time ago to take religion out of the ceremony—no glass breaking and circle walking, and also no family priest performing. The part that I didn’t know was that they had also decided that they didn’t want anyone standing up there with them. Together, they’d walk down the aisle and be under the awning. Together, they’d stand there. Now we were all just waiting for it. In balmy 90-degree weather.
My dad slid back around in the seat next to me. And when I say slid, I mean that literally. We were all sticking to our seats, our feet to the floor.
“Are you going to get up and look for them?” I said.
“No,” he said, shaking his head. He wasn’t really looking at me, which scared me. It was another thing Josh seemed to inherit from our dad: They only looked away when they didn’t want you to see something.
“Don’t you think someone should go and look for them, maybe?” I was whispering, careful so my mom wouldn’t hear me.
He looked worried, his eyebrows meeting on top of his nose. “They’ll come down when they’re ready,” he said.
“Then why are you making that face?”
“I have a bad feeling they’re not going to be,” he said.
But before I could ask him why he thought that was, the music started—the one lone cellist who had decided to stick this out started to play her rendition of Canon in D. Everyone stood up, myself included, trying to get a clear view of the betrothed in the half-dark: Meryl in her princess dress, Josh beside her, his hand on her elbow. If this were all we’d have to remember this day by, wouldn’t it end up looking like this was the only way it was ever supposed to be? So maybe I was wrong to be questioning it still. What did I know about the way things came together? Maybe they had to come this close to falling apart first.
Only—before I could think about the rest of it, before I could think about everything I did know—they were there, right before me, right before all of us, walking down the last stretch of aisle, holding hands. It didn’t seem like real handholding though. It seemed to be more in the manner of one leading the other. I just wasn’t sure which one was which.
I took a quick peek at my parents, who were clasping each other’s hands tightly, my father keeping his eyes down. Then I looked back toward Josh and Meryl. They were at the front now, facing the judge, both of them sweating from their walk down the stairs, thin parallel lines running down their backs, Meryl’s hair sticking tight against her head.
Josh looked over at her, squeezed her hand harder, before he leaned in and said something to the judge.
“If you’ll all take your seats,” the judge said. We did as we were told, quickly, everyone keeping their gaze straight on the two of them.
This is when they turned around and faced us.
Josh tried to give everyon
e a smile. “We wanted to thank you all for coming,” he said. “That’s first.”
“And waiting,” Meryl added.