Keep Your Mouth Shut And Wear Beige Part 18

She was a good person, and she cared about me. But she needed me to be okay, she couldn't afford to lose one of her best nurses. So pretty soon I heard myself telling her what she wanted to hear and what I wanted to believe: that this was just situational stress; it would pa.s.s.

I could have talked to my father. He would understand, but he would worry. He was still enough of a dad that he would try to fix it. He would offer to pay my tuition if I wanted to go back to school. He would encourage me to go to Africa for a year and help with the AIDS babies. But I didn't want to go to Africa. I needed to fix this in my own way.

I felt as if I were losing everything I cared about. Of course, I'd known that my boys would grow up, but I hadn't expected it to be like this. What if I also lost my job? What if I couldn't be an ICU nurse anymore?

I needed someone to talk to.

I needed Rose.

A.

t least one thing was going well for her. I was getting information about Annie through the family grapevine. The girl was suddenly working hard and doing very well in school.

Obviously I had been wrong about her having ADD. I was surprised, but as a nurse, nothing annoys me as much as a doctor who clings to his first diagnosis even when all the evidence says he is wrong. Apparently Annie had simply been underperforming, and once she set her mind to it, she was able to motivate herself.

Good for you, I thought. And thank you for doing it now. Your mother needed you to be doing well. It was the best Mother's Day gift you could have given her.

T.

hen it was finally here, the week of the wedding.

This was the third time that I'd gone to the Hamptons- although I now knew that if I lived in New York and had any degree of understated cool, I would never say that I was going "to the Hamptons." I would be going "out east."

My other trips had been in November and December, and it was now June. Everything was lush and green. The trees were thick with leaves, and the hydrangea bushes were promising their heavy blossoms. The farm stands were open. Quart baskets of ripe strawberries were arrayed in crimson lines on the weathered plank tables. Bits of dirt clung to the roots of the feathery lettuce while the round heads of cabbage were piled in bushel baskets under the tables. Some stands already had peas and broccoli. I would love to be here in July when the corn and tomatoes would come in, the blueberries and the melons, followed by the fruits of August, the peaches, pears, and plums.

There had to be people who did this right, who didn't come "out east" for status, who weren't burdened by twelve-bedroom faux chateaus filled with professional a.s.sociates for guests. I could tell by the number of older homes, by the people on the sidewalks with strollers. They came to the Hamptons for the beauty and the peace. They came to be with their families and closest friends. The true heart of these villages was not the glittering fund-raisers that the rest of us read about in the society pages, but what happened inside the houses, behind the hedges.

What had gone wrong for the Zander-Browns? They were good people. Their values were solid; their hearts were in the right place. They had faced Finney's challenges with courage and flexibility.

Was it just the house? Had they simply bought the wrong house in the wrong place? People came to Mec.o.x Road with different expectations than they would have had if they were visiting a rambling cottage in the Adirondacks. In the Adirondacks, you wouldn't have been surprised if someone handed you a wrench and asked you to see if you could get the hot-water heater working. In the Hamptons, people seemed to expect that someone else would have gotten up early, squeezed the orange juice, and gone out for fresh bagels.

But you couldn't blame a house.

The problem was with them as a family. They'd been so open and welcoming to outsiders that there was no longer an inside, a core. Guy kept inviting people to Mec.o.x Road. He should have painted the master bedroom instead.

C.

laudia was already settled at Mec.o.x Road when I arrived on the Monday before the wedding. She came out to greet me, dressed in what was probably perfect summer-in-the-Hamptons gear, khakis and a white polo shirt, a narrow navy belt, and navy boat shoes, Top-Siders without a single scuff.

This wasn't The Brand. Her white clothes had always been creamy or pearly, not as crisp and bright as this shirt. And these navy accents? Hadn't she told Annie at Thanksgiving that she never wore navy?

Why was she dressing differently? Was she becoming flexible; was she recognizing the difference between a public and a private self? Or was she ident.i.ty-hopping? I'm now playing golf and visiting the Hamptons with "Michael," so I'm going to dress that part.

She reached to help me with my luggage, and I handed her the buff-colored Neiman's garment bag.

"Oh, is this your dress?" she asked. "Can I look at it?" Without waiting for an answer, she lifted the bag higher and unzipped it. "Oh, Darcy, this is perfect. It's absolutely perfect."

She sounded surprised.

"I'm not a total moron, you know," I said. "I can follow directions."

She wasn't used to people speaking so directly. "I thought . . . since you don't like to shop . . ."

"I don't care about the things you care about, but I can respect it when something matters to someone else. I try to cooperate. It's part of playing well with others."

"I didn't mean to-"

I waved my hand, stopping her apology. "It's okay. Is Rose here?"

"No. She sends her apologies. She took Finney to get his hair cut. She said to tell you that you're in the front corner room on the third floor."

I reclaimed the garment bag and carried my suitcase up to one of the nannies' rooms. My dress for the Friday-night rehearsal dinner was already hanging in the closet. It was lavender, pretty much the color of the dress that Grandma Bowersett had worn to my wedding. The back neckline was low and quite complicated with multiple diagonal straps. From the front, Grandma Bowersett's dress had been more interesting.

I went downstairs. Guy had finally persuaded Rose that, at least during the week of the wedding, she had to have some staff in the house. So, from seven in the morning to ten each night, at least one of Mariposa's two nieces would be with us, keeping on top of the dirty coffee cups and empty toilet-paper holders. A private chef was coming in every afternoon to make dinner and to leave something for the following day's lunch.

Both nieces were now in the kitchen, leaning against the counter, talking softly to each other in Spanish. As soon as they saw me, they straightened and stopped talking. I introduced myself. They answered politely, and we stood there looking at one another awkwardly until I moved out of the kitchen and they resumed their quiet conversation.

They'd been working hard. The kitchen gleamed, and in the family room the morning newspapers were neatly folded. A coffee service had been set up on the sofa table; the cream was covered with Saran wrap and nestled in a little bed of ice.

There were no dirty cups for me to load into the dishwasher, no wadded-up kitchen towels to take downstairs to the laundry. As Rose had said, she could pay people to do the things that I did. I guess I wasn't much use to people who have a staff.

I went outside. What the landscaper had called the "permanent installations" were finished. Flagstone walks now carved lawn into interesting shapes. Low walls and elevated terraces were screened with weathered, white trellises. Moss grew around the stones, and vines climbed up the terraces and spilled over the walls. A cl.u.s.ter of lilac bushes flowered in the sunniest part of the yard, and ma.s.ses of ferns grew in the shade. Everything looked as if it had been there forever.

The swimming pool was uncovered and filled with water. It was rectangular, but boulders and ma.s.ses of plantings had been brought in to soften its harsh shape. A ma.s.sive yew shrub, its thick, twisted branches the result of years and years of unplanned pruning, had been transplanted to balance the borders, and an arching wooden bridge had been built across the pool.

Cami and Annie were standing on the bridge, watching the workmen unload the tents. "This is amazing," I called out as I went to join them. It was the first time I ever remember seeing the two of them standing together.

"Mom said to apologize," Cami said immediately, "about not being here, but she thought Finney needed to get away from the chaos."

"Although we were just saying," Annie added, "that it wasn't only Finney who needed to get away."

"But don't tell her that we said that," Cami added quickly. "She's hoping that we haven't noticed how stressed out she is."

I didn't make any promises. "How are the two of you doing?"

"Fine," Cami said. "I should be writing thank-you notes, but I'm fine."

"Actually," Annie said, "we were wondering if everything doesn't look a little fake. If it's just too perfect somehow. Too much like a stage set."

A bird bath, its stone nicked and weathered, was surrounded by silvery-green lamb's ear. Beyond it were raised beds designed to look like a cutting garden with daisies, sweet peas, gladioli, and cornflowers. The feathery white of the Queen Anne's lace was a background to the colors . . . but the Queen Anne's lace plants were going to be dug up two days after the wedding. Otherwise they would take over, ruining both the local ecology and any chance Rose had of joining a garden club.

I could see Annie's point about everything being too perfect. It was a fantasy of an English cottage garden, purchased and transplanted into the backyard of a multimillion-dollar faux chateau.

"That's not the sort of thing I have a good feel for," I said. "What does Claudia think?" Claudia was now on the other side of the yard, talking to the landscaper.

"She says that it will look wonderful in the pictures."

And that, I suppose, was all that mattered.

Cami excused herself to go work on thank-you notes. Annie and I watched as the workmen began to unroll the first tent. "I hear that you did just great the last month of school."

"I guess so . . . yeah, I guess I did."

The tent was big, and one of the workmen almost stepped on one of the rose bushes. Claudia and the landscaper went rushing over.

Annie spoke again. "Claudia and Jeremy's dad . . . they aren't engaged or anything, are they?"

It was a moment before I could answer. Why are you asking? What have you heard? Tell me. Let's gossip like two girls standing in front of our junior-high lockers.

But that would have been stupid. Gossiping about Claudia might have made me feel better for the moment, but if she and Mike did end up getting married, I had to figure out how we would go on being a family.

"You didn't have anything to do with this rehearsal dinner, did you?" Annie asked.

I shook my head.

"I figured . . . because it's totally bogus. It's completely wrong . . . to get all dressed up on a Friday night. That's not what people do around here. Rehearsal dinners should be clambakes on the beach. n.o.body wears c.o.c.ktail dresses on Friday night. Getting all dressed up like this is going to look so nouveau. I'm sure everyone's going to think that we're major wannabes."

I looked at her. She didn't have as much jewelry on as usual, but her eyelashes were heavily mascared, curving thickly up toward her eyebrows She was right. It suddenly seemed obvious. After a week at work and the long fight with rush-hour traffic, the understated people, the ones who did this right, wouldn't want to put on panty hose and high heels. They would want to slip into their worn, beat-up Top-Siders and go to a clambake on the beach.

I'd never been to a clambake on the beach. It sounded like fun.

But Claudia was a "major wannabe." She hungered for ident.i.ty, for status and elegance. What could be a greater achievement, a clearer definition of a person, than a dinner in the Hamptons with pictures in a fashion magazine?

I didn't have much to do over the next few days. The first niece arrived at six thirty in the morning, and although I was out of bed before then, all I had to do was plug in the coffee urn which the other niece had set up the night before. She had even unloaded the dishwasher before leaving.

Dad arrived on Tuesday and put himself in charge of Finney. The chef packed them corn-free picnics, and they would disappear for the day. They flew kites, played catch, dug holes on the beach, and perfected their four-in-hand knots.

For all his adult life my father had been a problem-solver. People had turned to him when they had an infected finger or a flat tire. He'd always had whatever anyone needed. Besides what had been in his medical bag, he'd had the pocketknife, the match, the right map. He'd been the indispensable Dr. Bowersett, but he was retired now, living in a duplex in a retirement community. No one needed matches there; too many residents were on oxygen to permit open flames. Nor did they need maps; even the ones still driving never went anywhere new. An experienced RN was on the premises at all times, and physicians specializing in geriatrics were on call. Dad was no longer indispensable, and although he did not complain, he felt as if he had lost a part of himself. Finney gave him a chance to be indispensable again.

But Dad wasn't the only one who needed Finney. When Finney was around, everyone tried to hide the stress. Everyone spoke in bright, cheerful tones. On Monday, the day before Dad arrived, we played crazy eights after lunch and, after the workmen left, freeze tag among the new flagstones and terraces. We did it for Finney, but everyone felt better for the distraction. But with Finney off flying kites on the beach, Rose and Cami could give in to stomach-clawing anxiety.

Each day the fantasy in the backyard became more elaborate. The ceilings of the tents were draped and swagged with hundreds of yards of billowing blush-colored silk and rose-pink tulle. Inside the house, everyone was feeling more burdened by the ma.s.sive number of details. Gifts were piled unopened on the floor of the home theater; Cami was too overwhelmed to open any more.

I was dreading Thursday, picture-taking day. The photographer scheduled to shoot the wedding on Sat.u.r.day was of the photojournalism school of wedding photography. His goal was to capture the spirit of the occasion through unposed moments. I had seen his portfolio; the pictures were fresh and creative.

But he did not do posed, perfect headshots. So a different photographer was coming on Thursday to take Cami's formal portraits. I had seen his portfolio too; his pictures were detailed and exquisite.

Of course, such detailed, exquisite pictures would require the hair stylist and makeup artist, scheduled for Sat.u.r.day, to come on Thursday as well. Guy then thought that as long as those people were coming for Cami, it made sense for Annie to get into her bridesmaid's dress and have her hair and makeup done too. Then they would have formal portraits of the two sisters together.

Then Claudia asked if Cami and Annie could-just for a moment, it wouldn't take long at all-slip into their rehearsal-dinner dresses. A few posed portraits would serve as supplements to the candid shots to be taken at the rehearsal dinner on Friday night. It would be so simple, Claudia a.s.sured Rose, that it wouldn't take more than a few moments.

But nothing nothing nothing a.s.sociated with this wedding was simple. There were too many different people with agendas that had nothing to do with Cami and Jeremy getting married.

Claudia's Friday-night photographer was giving her a break on his rates because he wanted his work to appear in the fashion magazine. He wasn't going to share credit with the more established Thursday-morning photographer. So if Claudia wanted posed pictures, he would come Thursday afternoon. She went to Rose again. As long as Claudia was having to go to this expense, then . . .

Each request Claudia made only added a little more inconvenience to the plan, so Rose had said yes to each one. But there'd been so many of those "little more's" and "as long as's" that we were now looking at a screaming nightmare. Cami, Annie, Rose, Claudia, and I, all five of us, were getting our hair and makeup done, putting on our rehearsal-dinner dresses, and transporting ourselves to the actual site of the rehearsal dinner where a dummy version of one of the tables would be set up. There we would all pose for "candid" shots.

Oh, and Finney and Zack were coming to provide the sense of a crowd.

Claudia was out of control. She didn't look it; she was still her neat, trim self, wearing crisply ironed khakis and her newly purchased Top-Siders. She wasn't eating too much, drinking too much, or talking too much. It was her own ideas that she was unable to resist. In her heart, she must have known that each of her requests would burden other people, but each new step seemed so useful that she couldn't tell herself that she'd gone far enough.

Despite my misgivings, Thursday started well enough. The hair stylist and his a.s.sistant arrived on time. The makeup artist and her a.s.sistant were only fifteen minutes late. The bouquets actually arrived early.

Cami was upstairs when the flowers arrived. Annie lifted the lid off the box. There were supposed to be two bouquets-a copy of the bridal bouquet and one of the bridesmaids' bouquets. They were supposed to be camellias, roses, Queen Anne's lace, and various foliage. There were indeed two bouquets with the camellias, the roses, and the various foliage. There was something that had bursts of little white flowers, but it wasn't Queen Anne's lace.

"This is not acceptable," Rose snapped, flipping open her phone. "I swore I wasn't going to be a monster about every little detail, but we are not leaving out your flowers, Annie."

"It's okay, Mom. It doesn't matter."

"It matters to me," Rose said.

Rose spoke very patiently first to Pamela-the-floral-designer's a.s.sistant, then to Pamela herself. A mistake had been made. It was small, but it was important to the family, and these two bouquets would need to be remade in the next hour. Rose listened and then muted her phone while Pamela went to check something. "This is ammi majus, what people use instead of Queen Anne's lace. It's even called false Queen Anne's lace, but it's really something called bishop's lace."

"Mom, it's okay," Annie said again. "Cami's not going to notice."

"You're being sweet, Annie, but this woman cares more about what the garden club thinks of her than what we want."

Another person with her own agenda.

Pamela came back on the line. Rose listened, then said, "We have some in the yard you can use if you send someone over who can remake the bouquets . . . forty-five minutes, yes, that will be great . . . yes, yes . . ." The call seemed to be ending when something occurred to Rose. "Wait a minute, how can you have no Queen Anne's lace in your workroom when every single thing you're doing for Sat.u.r.day, every bouquet, every centerpiece, every little floral doodad has Queen Anne's lace in it?"

Annie and I were quiet as Rose listened again. "You only ordered bishop's lace? You were going to use it in everything? Didn't the contract say Queen Anne's? . . . Yes, I know the contract absolves you if something is completely unavailable, but you can't declare it unavailable simple because you haven't ordered it. . . . No, we discussed that over New Year's . . ."

This conversation could go on forever. The florist wasn't going to let up until Rose agreed to the bishop's lace.

So let the florist try that with Mr. Roadkill. "Rose . . . Rose," I hissed at her. "I'm going to go get Guy. Let him handle this."

I hurried to the library, where Zack was helping Guy unpack the books that he had been meaning to unpack for the last twelve months.

"This could be fun," he said after I explained the situation. "I don't know why Rose doesn't ask me to do more of this." He took the phone from her. "This is Guy Zander-Brown." His voice was entirely pleasant. "I hear that you're trying to give me a bishop when I ordered a queen."

Annie tried to protest that it didn't matter, but Guy held up his hand, silencing her.

Ten minutes later, the makeup artist called out that Cami was coming downstairs. The rest of us hurried out to the front hall.

She looked extraordinary. Her dress was wonderful, perfect for a summer garden wedding. When she was standing still, it was simple and light, but when she moved, it was as if hundreds of little fairies were shimmering around the dress, making it sparkle and dance.

But Guy was not in the hall with us. Still negotiating with the florist, he'd retreated behind the closed door of the library so that Cami wouldn't hear. That seemed a shame. Seeing their daughter come downstairs in her wedding dress was something for which Guy and Rose should have been together.

Twelve.

W.