Keep Your Mouth Shut And Wear Beige Part 16

Ten.

S.

pending those hours in the Stone-Chase College dorm made it easy for me to imagine Zack living there. If Zack were living there, then I would-and this was something I needed to face-be living alone. Probably for the rest of my life.

I have trouble admitting that I'm no longer twenty-five. I was always stronger, faster, more agile than all the other girls on the playground and a fair number of the boys. I can still pound the stairs down to the Emergency Room when they can't get an IV into a failing baby. I can lift patients and can wedge myself into tight s.p.a.ces to look at the back of a machine. I'd mind losing those abilities as much as other women must mind the crow's feet and sagging b.o.o.bs.

I'm as effective at work as ever, but the cost is higher. When I started this schedule of three twelve-hour shifts, I could come home, make dinner, do the laundry, and help the boys with their homework. Now I barely check my e-mail.

And I couldn't live with myself if something happened to a patient because I couldn't get down the hall fast enough.

I had the skills to do a variety of other things-I could help run drug trials for pharmaceutical companies; I could review cases for HMOs or insurance companies; I could even be director of nursing at a midsize hospital. But those were desk jobs; I would hate them, and I would never be as good at them as I was at this.

The one thing that interested me was nursing education. I watched the new nurses. Some were well trained and confident. Others were ill-prepared and didn't know it. Nothing is worse in a hospital setting than people who think they know more than they do. Of course, to get a faculty appointment to teach nursing, I would need to have a Ph.D. in nursing. Thanks to Ritalin, I could flog myself through the first part of such a program. In fact, I probably already had a lot of the course credits. And the research part of a dissertation would interest me, but the actual writing of a book-length ma.n.u.script? That was daunting. If I couldn't stay awake during a Shakespeare play, how was I supposed to write a dissertation?

W.

hile I made no progress on figuring out what to do with the rest of my life, I did finally solve a more urgent problem. I got a dress to wear to the wedding.

Mike had already been instructed twice by Claudia to ask whether I had found a dress, and if not, could she help? Each time I had told him not to worry. Even though I hadn't then found the dress, I definitely did not want Claudia's help.

I had gone out twice on my own and had not even come close to locating a low-contrast print with soft colors, Impressionistic rather than distinct outlines, and an even balance between figure and background. But I was not as pathetic as Claudia probably thought I was. I did grow up in East Grand Rapids. I have some sense and some experience. I called the personal shopping service at Neiman Marcus and told the representative what I needed.

"Oh, my," she said after I had read off the list of requirements. "I thought I had seen it all. Mothers of the groom have to jump through a lot of hoops, but this . . . I've never heard of anyone getting such very detailed instructions."

"It's not the bride's family who's insisting on this." I wanted to defend Rose. "It's my ex-husband's girlfriend."

"Ah, yes," she said knowingly. "These not-quite family members are sometimes the worst."

She called me back several times to say that she was working on it, that she hadn't forgotten me. Finally she located three dresses, but as she had told me over the phone, only one of them was really right.

I went to the store and tried it on. The background was a pale amethyst; the design was layers of some blurry leaflike things in shades of what she called "champagne and gold" and I was going to call beige. There was something drapey going on at the neckline, but otherwise it seemed a perfectly ordinary dress.

Except for the price. This dress was unimaginably expensive. In a normal year I don't spend half that much on my whole wardrobe. I hated the thought of spending so much money.

"I understand," the saleslady said. "You should definitely go on looking, but remember how hard it was for me to find this." She a.s.sured me that as long as the tags were still on the dress, I could return it at any time. "Take this as a backup in case you can't find anything else."

I handed her my credit card.

A.

t least I didn't have to find something to wear for the rehearsal dinner. Claudia had taken everyone's measurements over New Year's, and she was working hard on those unifying diagonals of hers.

The rehearsal dinner was becoming more elaborate by the minute. Although Guy and Rose had told us countless times that we could limit the rehearsal-dinner guest list to the wedding party and family members, many of the other wedding guests were coming to the Hamptons for the weekend, and Claudia was eager to invite as many of them as the restaurant would hold. "She says that we need to remember," Mike told me, "how high a profile Guy has. People won't want to feel slighted."

I didn't know how high or low a profile Guy had, but I did know that the more people at the dinner, the more important Claudia could make herself sound on her blog. I now only occasionally went to her Web site because the blog was entirely about the construction of those dresses. For the first time in her career, she had placed the article with a fashion magazine, not a sewing one, and that was a big deal to her.

Although she didn't mention names or even identify me as the groom's mother, I knew which dress was mine. I learned, along with the rest of the population of cybers.p.a.ce, that she was sewing bust pads into my dress to compensate for my "youthfully boyish" figure. I am not a modest person, and anyone looking at me closely would figure out that a few bust pads wouldn't hurt, but did we have to talk about it at such length?

M.

ay and June were going to be full of rituals. Cami and Jeremy were graduating from college the second weekend in May; Zack was graduating from high school the first weekend in June, and the wedding was two weeks after that.

Jeremy's graduation was the weekend of Zack's senior prom, so Zack wasn't going to California with me. I was also happy to learn that Claudia couldn't go either. She had a professional commitment in Cleveland that had been scheduled more than a year earlier.

Finney was also not going to the graduation. It was unusual for the Zander-Browns to travel without him, but his school was having a little carnival on that Sat.u.r.day. Rose and Guy knew that if they told him that he wouldn't mind missing the carnival, he would believe them. He was easily manipulated. But it didn't seem fair; he would have a grand time at the carnival. So Rose had arranged for him to stay with a family that she knew through the corn-allergy network. The Zander-Browns had kept their children before; this was the first time Finney was going to stay with them. A family from the school would chaperone him at the carnival. He was excited about the plan even without someone telling him to be.

Mike called me the night before I was leaving for California. "It's about these invitations to the rehearsal dinner." He sounded hesitant.

"What about them?" I glanced at the buff-colored garment bag that Neiman Marcus had used for my overpriced mother-of-the-groom dress. The sight of it did not make me feel very charitable toward Claudia.

Mike said that Claudia had used three different printers, one for the maps, one for the vellum pocket, and a third for the little luggage tag . . . which did not seem like the actions of a person who was managing her perfectionism particularly well. As soon as the maps and the pockets were completed, she'd quickly turned them over to the person she'd contracted to sew the pockets onto the maps and stuff the tags into the pockets. When the final invitations had been delivered to her this morning, she realized that my name was still misspelled.

"She is devastated," Mike said. "She's been on the phone all day, trying to get it fixed. She needs to have both the map and the vellum pocket reprinted, and neither printer is being very accommodating about redoing them in a timely way."

"I thought printing could be done overnight these days."

"Apparently these were pretty complex jobs. The map guy already had to redo the maps once at his own expense."

"So she's used up all her chits."

"I don't know about that," Mike said. "I've told her that she needs to go with a simpler invitation, but she's very pa.s.sionate about these."

What on earth was this wedding doing to people? I wondered if I was getting as crazy as the rest of them and simply hadn't noticed.

"She was going to call you," Mike continued, "and ask you if you wouldn't mind having the invitations sent out like this, but that didn't seem fair. She wouldn't mean to be difficult, but she cares so much about this that I don't think she would let up until you said that it was okay. So the compromise was that I would ask you."

"I don't love this," I admitted. "It was already a little humiliating to have my name last on the invitation, to be listed after her, and then to have it misspelled; yeah, it does feel like a slap in the face."

"She didn't mean it that way. She really didn't. But I agree with you. I do think she needs to come up with something simpler."

"I didn't say that." Mike standing up for me really made a difference; I was surprised by how much. "You know I don't obsess about things like this. If these invitations really matter to her, then tell her to go ahead and use them."

"You're such a good sport, Darcy," he said with relief. "You really are. She shouldn't be asking this of you."

I noticed his p.r.o.noun. She was asking this, not we.

I hung up and went back to packing for graduation. I wondered if I had given in too easily. Where was the line between standing up for yourself and being a pointless pain in the a.s.s, fighting about everything? I had already insisted on seeing the seating chart; I wasn't going to let Claudia put me at the losers' table again. I wasn't going to let her pretend to be the mother of the groom.

But an extra e in my name? I supposed I could live with that. It would, as Annie had said earlier, thrill Finney to see that I was "Darcey."

Very early the next morning Guy Zander-Brown called. "Oh, good, I knew you'd be up." They were already on their way to the airport. "Rose got an e-mail from Claudia about the invitations. Claudia wanted to let us know that you don't mind, but let me tell you, we do."

"It's not that big a deal, Guy. It's not like she left my name off the invitation altogether."

"Nonsense," he said in his brisk, high-energy way. "And this is going to be fixed, Darcy. This is going to be fixed. Claudia's expressing the master copy of the map to my office. I've already got an intern working on it, and my interns are very scary people. They would kill to please me."

"For heaven's sake, Guy, it's just an e."

"This is nonnegotiable," he said. "There's nothing to discuss. This is going to be fixed. End of subject. And if you go on protesting, I'm going to a.s.sume that you're doubting my ability to make negotiation roadkill out of you."

I could never outnegotiate Guy. "Yes, I would be roadkill. In fact, I'd drive myself straight to the mortician, save everyone the bother of picking up my corpse."

Guy had encouraged me to let his a.s.sistant Mary Beth make my travel arrangements so that we would all be staying in the same hotel and could use the same ground transportation. When I tried to give her my credit-card information, she a.s.sured me that the family had a gazillion frequent-flyer miles, some of which she had cashed in to cover all the tickets, including mine.

She might well have been lying. I wouldn't have put it past Guy to pay for my ticket, but I have too much sense to pick a fight that I knew I would lose. Mary Beth had gotten my seat a.s.signment, so when I printed up my boarding pa.s.s Friday morning, I hardly looked at it, just double checked the time of my flight. It was only when I was actually at the gate that I realized I had a first-cla.s.s ticket.

Well, well, well. This was nice. Very nice indeed. Free champagne, my own little TV; a blanket thicker than a sheet of copy paper. A person could get used to this.

Mary Beth had instructed me to go to baggage claim even if I didn't have bags. A handsome young man, his blond surfer hair neatly combed into a ponytail, was near the carousel a.s.signed to my flight. He was holding a sign: MRS. VAN AIKEN. He escorted me to a luxurious but reasonably sized car and then drove to a very posh hotel.

We were on the "concierge floor." The bellman showed me how to use my key card to get the elevator to go to that floor and then led me to a cl.u.s.ter of rooms that could have been a one-, two-, or three-bedroom suite. Guy and Rose had taken all three bedrooms as well as the living room. I tipped the bellman and explored my room, checking out the toiletries in the s.p.a.cious bathroom and rolling my eyes at the prices of the snacks in the minibar. There was a big arrangement of silk flowers on the low table in front of the love seat. Except that they weren't silk, I realized as I got closer to that end of the room. They were real and, according to the little white card tucked into the foliage, for me from Rose, Guy, Cami, Annie, and Finney.

Fresh flowers to a hotel room? I was going to be here only two nights, and I couldn't haul them back to DC in the overhead compartment of an airplane. It seemed like a waste.

But a mighty nice waste.

Ten minutes later I heard Guy, Rose, and Annie at the outer door. They had come out to California early in the day so that Guy could meet with a client while Rose and Annie visited a college.

"How was your flight?" Guy was the first to speak. "And you found Drew and the car? Is your room okay?"

"Everything was perfect, from the champagne on the plane to the flowers here."

"You have to thank Guy for the flowers," Rose said. "They were his idea."

"It was more an impulse than an idea," Guy said. "After we checked in, we were saying how glad we were that you were staying with us, so I called the front desk. And I've also heard from my office. The corrected invitations will go in the mail on Tuesday."

For a moment, this very successful, very dynamic man looked like an overgrown puppy, eager to please.

That was it; that's what explained him. Guy liked to please the women in his personal life. He wanted their approval. That's why he bought Rose the expensive handbags that she didn't carry: he was trying to please her. That's why his wallet was always open for Cami and Annie: he wanted to make them happy. He was, at his core, playing to an audience of three-his wife and daughters. And now I had been added to the list. He wanted to do nice things for me. Not seduce me, thank goodness, just please me.

I wondered-did Rose give him the appreciation and the recognition that he wanted? She was ambivalent about the luxury of their lives. While rationally she valued the lifelong security that Guy had provided for Finney, a part of her was nostalgic for the days when all the clients could fit into her kitchen for Sunday-night suppers that had to be pasta because that's all anyone could afford. She didn't want to be the rich-b.i.t.c.h boss's wife. Did that mean that she had trouble mustering sufficient enthusiasm for Guy's expensive little treats?

Not me. This luxury was a major deal for me, and I was going to show it. So I took a breath and said my piece. I wasn't used to first-cla.s.s plane tickets or luxury suites. It was a wonderful treat. I felt very taken care of, very pampered, and I loved it.

A slight flush rose up Guy's neck and his eyes shifted toward the corner of the room. I'd hit the mark.

"Do you ever," Rose asked me, "let other people take care of you?"

"Oh, probably not. It's an occupational hazard among nurses. We're caregivers. We aren't so great at taking."

"Then practice on us," Guy said warmly. "We'll see that you get used to it."

No, I thought. Don't take care of me. Figure out how to take care of each other first.

We had an hour to kill before we were supposed to meet up with Cami, Jeremy, and Mike. Guy went to return some phone calls. With the RSVPs coming in, Rose was starting to work on the seating charts. I offered to help her.

"You can't." She sighed. "But do think of me as being on a suicide watch and promise you'll come into the bathroom and cut my body off the shower-curtain rod before I stop breathing entirely."

I promised to do so and then asked Annie if she wanted to go for a walk.

She agreed, but without much enthusiasm. As we rode the elevator down, it occurred to me that she might be bracing herself for a lecture about her behavior at Spring Fling. I wouldn't have dreamed of doing that. I immediately started jabbering about other things to show her that I wasn't going to.

The hotel was on such a busy street that, once we were outside, it was hard to talk, and I was relieved to shut up. Annie was walking more slowly than she usually did. I don't like walking slowly; it takes the fun out of things. I glanced at her and wondered if she was a little depressed, not just teenaged-girl moody but actually depressed.

We turned down a side street, hoping to find a more pleasant path.

She spoke first. "It's odd to be here without Finney."

"But isn't that less responsibility for you?"

She shrugged. "I suppose so." She didn't seem to care about that. "But we're different when he isn't around. Because of the time change, we got here really early this morning. We checked in and had room service. Mom did wedding stuff, Dad returned calls, and I watched TV. If Finney had been here, we would have set up his action figures on the coffee table or played cards or something. And on the plane, the only time we spoke to each other was when Mom or Dad nagged me about this stupid SAT-prep stuff."

"Oh, honey . . . every parent of a high-school kid is guilty of that."

"No, no." She was suddenly alert, energetic, and urgent. "It's more than that. Everyone's folks b.i.t.c.h about the college c.r.a.p. I know that, but we're different. I sometimes feel as if our family life is an act we put on for Finney. You know how we're always saying how sweet Finney is? How he always wants everyone to be happy?"

I nodded.

"It's sort of true. But people only need to seem to be happy. He can't tell what's real and what's fake. He wants people to seem happy because he gets nervous if they aren't. I'm not blaming him. It's not like he has a choice about it. It's just the way he is. So whenever he's around, we pretend to be happy. We tell jokes and laugh; we act like a real family. But the minute he goes to bed, the curtain goes down, and we all disappear. That's why I love it when you come up, Darcy. You get us all to have fun together, and it's not an act you're putting on for Finney. Even when Finney's gone to bed, we're all still doing stuff together."

This girl wanted more from her family. "Is that why you have such good memories of your grandparents' cottage? Because everyone did things together?"

She nodded. "And this stupid place on Mec.o.x Road just makes everything worse. We never go alone; it's never just us. People are always sucking up to Dad, and Mom has to worry about what we're going to have to eat." She stopped walking. "I've tried, I really have, but Mom and Dad . . . I know it seems like I don't care about anyone but myself, but I've said all year that if they wanted to go out for brunch on Sunday, I'd get up and take care of Finney. Even for their anniversary I made sure that I was going to be home so they could go out together, but they ended up taking him and me with them."

Kids can't save their parents. They can't stop their drug addiction or alcoholism. A ninety-two-pound girl can't restart the heart of her two-hundred-twenty-pound-father no matter how much CPR training she had in Girl Scouts. And, above all, children can't save their parents' marriages.

But some of them sure do try.

"If something ever happened to him"-she was trying not to cry-"we'd all just be strangers."

"Oh, Annie . . . sweetie." I put my arms around her. It was different from hugging my boys. She was smaller than me, pet.i.te and delicate. "Maybe things will be better when the wedding is over."

She leaned against me for a moment, then stepped back and pushed her tangle of strawberry-gold curls off her face. "Mom will be less distracted, but the problems will still be there."

She was probably right, and I wasn't going to patronize her by pretending otherwise. "You're very insightful."

She looked up at me. Her expression brightened. "Do you think so? I mean, I know it probably seems like I'm stupid because I get such c.r.a.ppy grades, but I do see things, I notice things. The way people behave and stuff. Nine times out of ten it doesn't get me anywhere; I don't know what to do, but I still notice."

"That's one nice thing about growing up. You get better. Trust me. I don't know what to do half of the time, but that's better than one-tenth of the time, which is how I felt when I was your age."

"Did you really feel this way?" she asked urgently. "That sometimes you understand everything about yourself, but then suddenly there is this little nugget that just doesn't make sense, that you can't explain to yourself or anyone else."

"Yes. I felt that way a lot, but it got better."

"I hope it happens soon," she said with a sigh.