A Wedding on the Banks (5 page)

Pearl sat softly and watched the bluish light from the turned-down television set as it bounced off the bronze laces of Junior's first pair of shoes. She had bought them at The Blessed Stork, a children's store now long swallowed up by a swath of shiny new office buildings.

“If he hadn't married Thelma,” she said resolutely.

“Thelma Shmelma,” Marvin said, as he always did. “You'd put the blame on anyone he would have married. If he had married
Elizabeth
Taylor
you'd have blamed her.” Marvin had Liz Taylor on the brain, since all the funeral home employees had commented many times on Monique Tessier's resemblance to the star.

Pearl tried to imagine Junior driving up to the front door of the Ivy Funeral Home with Elizabeth Taylor happily ensconced in the front seat, the three Ivy grandkids bobbing noisily in the back. “Large breasts,” Pearl thought, visualizing Elizabeth—no, she would call her Beth—opening the car door and waving a warm, diamondy hello to her in-laws. Pearl could even see the angle of Portland sunlight as it bounced along Beth's ample cleavage. She was reminded of the tiny path that wound between Thelma's walnuts, with not even the slightest trace of curve or hint of a hill. “Yes,” thought Pearl. “Beth Taylor Ivy. It might have worked.”

“Ever since he was a kid,” Marvin went on, “you blamed other kids for his wrongdoings. You're not helping him any, Pearl. Believe me. I know. I work with him—when he's there.” And with that, Marvin had gone up the stairs to take a long leisurely soak and ponder the new no-corpse situation befalling Portland, Maine.

“Something in the water, maybe?” he wondered as he turned the tap and warm water gushed out to fill the tub.

Pearl sat alone on the sofa, staring at her wedding band, wondering how all that young skin around it had grown so miserably wrinkled and dry. When she married Marvin, he had been studying to become a lawyer, and thus she felt she was marrying a lawyer. But she had married an undertaker instead. Sicily was right. Funeral director. Undertaker. It made no difference. The end result was the same. Somebody died. Somebody
undertook
to bury them. It had been going on since time immemorial, this dying-burying business. Someday, and someday soon, no matter how she looked at it, someone at the Ivy Funeral Home would take Pearl McKinnon Ivy in as a houseguest and drain and stitch and powder her to a lasting perfection. This would happen to Marvin. It would happen to Junior. It would happen to his wife, Thelma. To the Ivy grandchildren. Someday.

“I am sixty years old,” Pearl said softly, and the television flickered a blue response. Junior's baby shoes sat gathering the dust of the years. Petrified. Embalmed. “I am sixty years old now,” Pearl said again. And she tried to call her mother's face to her mind, to picture a visage that was soft and loving and peaceful. But instead of her mother, she saw Thelma Parsons Ivy. Pale and breastless. Thief of sons. Purloiner of only children.

“Damn her,” Pearl thought. One day soon, she would take a hammer and chisel and pound away at those bronzed baby shoes, just to see how the soft leather inside, like the aging meat of an old nut, had been holding up.

She struggled up from the sofa and turned off the TV set. It was an older set, a model with tubes, but Pearl still hadn't the heart to chuck it out for a newer one. Junior had watched his favorite cartoons on this set. And Ed Sullivan playing straight man to Topo Gigio. Arthur Godfrey, the redhead, dug up the best talent in America. And Milton Berle dressed up as a woman on Tuesday nights with Texaco sponsoring. Pearl had read that the streets of America emptied on this night, so folks could gather around televisions and radios to see and hear Uncle Miltie. “Where does the time go?” Pearl asked again. On the television screen, the white line of the picture tube drew slowly inward, until it became a white, flickering dot. It hung there like a tiny soul, like the ghost of every one of the old television performers who had come and gone in the lives of curious, forgetful Americans.
I
Married
Joan. You Bet Your Life.
Edward R. Murrow chain-smoking on
Person
to
Person.
The picture screen fell to a grayish haze and grew darker. Then the white dot was gone and the screen turned black as death. “I am sixty years old now,” Pearl said again, as though it were the latest answer to the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question.

***

One of the
adult
shoes belonging to Junior pressed down on the accelerator as he flew down Beacon Street and swung into his wide driveway. He saw the curtain flutter gently in the window. Birdlike.
Thelma.
Junior walked around the back end of the car after he parked it. It was the longest route to the house, but even a few extra feet would give him added time to think. His eye spied a sticker on the rear bumper that one of the kids had pasted there during the family's spring vacation. I WISH I WERE IN FLORIDA, it stated.

“Ain't that the truth,” Junior thought, as he saw the curtain go limp in the window.

Inside, Thelma popped a Valium into her small mouth, and it disappeared down her throat in a wash of ginger ale. She hurried across the room and flopped onto the sofa in front of the evening news. She straightened her dress and waited. Junior stopped to pet the family's miniature collie on the front steps. More time to think. Thelma glanced out nervously and saw her husband's head bobbing up and down outside the window.

“There, boy,” she heard him say. “Good dog.”

“That's me,” Thelma thought. “A good dog.”

Junior came in and closed the door softly.

“Whew. What a day!” he said. He threw his suit jacket on the sofa and leaned over to lightly kiss the top of Thelma's head. “And how was your day?”

“The same,” said Thelma. “Nothing new.” He heard the thin layer of ice forming among the words, molding them into a cold sentence.
What
now?
He moved nervously to the bar and poured himself a gin and tonic.

“Where's the kids?” he asked. This would be okay. There was no trap in this sentence waiting to snap shut. Something had riled her, to be sure, so he must step the way soldiers do to avoid live mines. He was good at this. Very good. He'd had plenty of qualified training. He dabbed a napkin at the bottom of his glass. If it hadn't been for the funeral home, he might have tried his hand at drama. His confidence pushed the words out again. “I said, where's the kids?”

“Where's Monique Tessier?” Thelma asked suddenly and Junior's glass slid a full inch down, out of his hand. He caught the bottom of it with his other hand, but Thelma had already seen the damage caused by her remark.

“Who?” Junior asked. The Muse had abandoned him, the bitch. Now his feet hurt, as if he were wearing shoes that were too small.
Mama,
his subconscious mind all but shouted. His clothes began to shrink, to hurt him, an embalmed suit of skin.

“Monique Tessier,” Thelma said again, and turned to look at him. He had grown even more portly, this man she had married. He had grown chins, and unusual habits, and away from her. She took a Polaroid picture from beneath the sofa cushion and handed it to him.

“Look familiar?” she asked. Calm. Beneficent. This surprised her. Wasn't she usually flighty, illogical, overly emotional? This must be, then, the new her. She must have grown already from the news of this nasty business. In truth, she had forgotten the day's handful of Valiums.

Junior took the picture and gazed at it. Polaroids. How he hated them. What ever happened to the old-fashioned way of processing film? How nice it would have been if Thelma had had to drop her film off at the mall for three days. Or send it to Boston. Or Hong Kong. It would have given him
days
to think. Yes, there they were, him leaning on the door of Monique's old Buick, just about to give her a little good-bye peck. His lips were moving with words. What had they been? Oh, yes.
You'll see. Things will get better, honey.
That's what he had been foolishly saying just as the blasted Polaroid had snapped and frozen his guilt forever. Bronzed it.
Things
will
get
better.
Sure, but for whom, that's what he hadn't asked himself.

“Is that,” Thelma asked, “or is that not Monique Tessier?”

Junior struggled for an answer. He pondered heavily, as if to be of help to Thelma in her identification of the culprit, to ingratiate himself, to fling himself into her side of the ring. His eyebrows knitted with disgust. He wanted to say, “What's she doing away from her desk? She's supposed to be working! Me and the old man will need to look into this tomorrow.”

“Ah,” was all he said. He was struck with the fullness of Monique's breasts in her cotton sweater, with their pendulous appeal. And right there, even upon the burning coals of this fiery inquisition, he wanted to bury his head between them. “She
does
look like Elizabeth Taylor,” he thought.

“What are you looking at?” It was Cynthia, his oldest daughter, engaged to a young dental student.

“Nothing,” said Junior, and stuffed the photo into his hip pocket.

“A picture,” said Thelma. She had no idea she was capable of such composure.

“Where's Regina Beth?” Junior asked quickly, hoping to lead Cynthia to the sidelines and away from the heat of the action. If Thelma kept it up, the goddamn picture would be in the
Portland
Telegram
in the morning.

“In her room reading. Where else but with her nose in an book?” asked Cynthia, and turned up her own nose, which looked as if it had never even
smelled
a book, much less been in one. She tugged at the legs of her jeans, pulled them down, away from her. She had been born, Cynthia Jane Ivy had, long-waisted. At least that's how Thelma described the malady. Shorts and pants tended to ride up into the crotch area. Cynthia was chafed constantly as a young child, and Thelma had kept a steady supply of talcum as a powdery buffer. But as she got older, Cynthia found the best remedy was a constant relocation of clothing and she perpetually tugged her garments down into more comfortable locations. As a result she fidgeted constantly, and was even sent to the principal's office in the fifth grade by an insensitive teacher who incorrectly diagnosed a kind of civil disobedience as the cause. Thelma had gone, red-faced, to the principal's office to explain. “A birth defect,” she had told the man, her eyes lowered to the floor by the weight of what she thought was a family secret. “She lives with pain,” she had added. The nervous affliction had even kept the poor child off the cheerleading team. At tryouts, while the other five girls flew like balloons into the air with shouts of “Give me a
P
, give me an
O
, give me an
R
, give me a
T,”
Cynthia had remained with her feet flat on the gymnasium floor, trying desperately to come to amicable terms with the stiff red cheerleading panties.

“A lovely, lovely picture,” said Thelma, and smiled. Junior flinched.

“Listen,” he said to Cynthia. “Why don't you go get your sister and we'll all go out to a nice little dinner? That way your mother won't have to cook. What do you say?” Junior was grasping—surrounded by the children, he would be temporarily safe. How far had Thelma gone in uncovering his deceit? Had she hired a detective? A lawyer? God, he hated lawyers. Smug sons of bitches. They almost never smelled of formaldehyde. But no, there was her Polaroid camera sitting on the table in the entryway where she'd obviously left it, hastily, on her way in with the spoils. Her purse sprawled in a nearby chair. She'd done the act herself, no doubt. Yes, her car had been in the garage when he'd come home for lunch, and now it was parked haphazardly near the curb in front of the house, threatening to tip over. She must have nearly broken her neck driving there and back. It saddened him that she seemed in such a great rush to catch him red-handed. What had happened to honor, and trust, and emotions like that? Couldn't she at least have given him the benefit of the doubt? He was suddenly angry at her lack of faith in him. He glared out at the little yellow Corvair, Thelma's accomplice. Her right-hand man. Her sidekick deputy.

“I never should have bought her that car,” Junior thought. “She keeps this shit up and she's losing it.” But how the hell had she pursued him in that canary-yellow thing without his seeing her? He imagined her following him, her mind somewhere in the ozone as she sneaked from stoplight to lilac bush to stoplight, all the way from the funeral home to the Ocean Edge Motel. How downright disgusting of her! No! Of course. Now he had it. She had followed Monique. Men were too damn smart to be followed in bright yellow cars by their wives. Especially if they were on their way to a rendezvous. But one woman following another, well, that was a different story. Thelma could have followed Monique in the
Queen
Mary,
in the Goodyear blimp, and gotten away with it. Monique rarely thought to look up or even ahead sometimes. She was too busy with inspecting herself in the car mirror, fluffing her hair, smoothing her lipstick, checking for food particles in her teeth. He'd seen her do this a thousand times, had followed her to the Ocean Edge Motel so often he knew every detail. Thelma could have maneuvered the Hindenburg up behind Monique's old Buick and no one would have been the wiser for it. There now. The intrigue was over. The next part would be planning the defense. He hadn't lost the battle yet. Not by a long shot. Thelma would have to start getting up a whole lot earlier in the morning if she was gonna play detective with Junior Ivy, vice president of the Ivy Funeral Home.

“Well, what do you say, girls?” Junior asked. “Is it a night to eat out or what? Where's Randy?” The more children he had around him, the better.