Elly In Bloom (14 page)

The reception was located in the Vault Room, which was filled with St. Louis artifacts and a kaleidoscope of mirrors that reflected hundreds of candles and twinkling lights above. Huge beautiful vaulted doors led to an outdoor patio, complete with views of downtown St. Louis and its famous Arch. Working in perfect synchronization, Elly and Snarky Teenager placed the long centerpieces of pale blue hydrangea, hyacinth and lavender parrot tulips on the tables, surrounded by tiny mirrors. The overall effect was of ghostly romance, and it was sheer perfection.

Snarky Teenager was staring out the window at the groomsmen. “Hey – could I pin that guy, you think?”

Elly rolled her eyes and shoved the boutonnieres toward her.

“Yes. Go, and try not to give ALL of them your number.”

Snarky Teenager tightened her ponytail with the determination of a soldier going into battle and trounced out the door. Elly straightened her apron, sighed loudly, and headed toward the bride’s room. From outside the door she heard a heated argument, accompanied by loud shrieks, which were no doubt coming from Brooke.
Oh Lord
, she said in her head,
please don’t make this last very long
. She pushed open the wide door, which was flanked by stone gargoyles. Brooke stood in front of her in a white corset and a thong…and nothing else. Elly tried not to stare at Brooke’s bare cheeks, and instead focused her gaze on the ceiling.

“How are things going in here?”

Brooke let out a warbling sigh and threw herself dramatically on the couch, veil and all.

“I can’t believe so much has gone wrong.”

Elly patted her head. “What’s wrong?”

“The deejay isn’t here yet…..I don’t think he’s coming!” Elly glanced at the clock. It was still two hours before the ceremony.

“What time is he supposed to be here?”

Brooke looked up from her Kleenex. “3:00?”

“Brooke, its 2:15.”

“So? He should be early!” Brooke wailed.

Elly rolled her eyes. “I’m sure he’ll be here. You seem really upset. What is your actual problem?”

Brooke pointed toward the bathroom. “My mother won’t wear the dress I picked out for her, and the dress she wants to wear is HIDEOUS!”

Hanging on the bathroom door was a pale lavender dress with an overlay of intricately beaded plum flowers. It was a perfect gown for the mother of the bride. The door swung open, revealing a short, solidly built woman with short, no-nonsense hair. She was smacking her gum loudly.

“Brooke, honey, I can hear you talking about me. Who is this?” she asked in a flat Western accent.

“It’s my florist. MOM, just put on the dress!”

Brooke’s voice was now reaching banshee levels. Her mother’s steely gaze lingered on the hanger.

“I am not wearing this fancy, expensive, ridiculous dress. I’ll be the laughing stock of my friends. What I’m wearing is just fine.”

Brooke’s mother was wearing some sort of prairie garb – a long brown skirt with brown loafers and a neon blue short sleeved button-down shirt with what appeared to be a mustang running across the chest. Elly held her face together with an act of impressive will.

“Mom, please! You’re ruining my wedding!” howled Brooke.

Elly firmly grasped Brooke’s shoulders and turned her toward her the mirror area with strict authority.

“Go put your dress on and get ready. I’ll talk to your mom.”

Brooke flounced away, her bridesmaids trailing behind her like ducklings. Elly approached her mother gingerly.

“Ma’am, I’m just here to help. Can you tell me why you don’t like the dress that Brooke has picked out for you?”

The woman looked at Elly, obviously annoyed.

“Look at this thing. This looks like it cost over a hundred dollars!”

More like five hundred
, Elly thought,
but I’ll keep that to myself
.

“Who in their right mind would spend that much on a dress? I buy all my clothes at the thrift store in town, and I never spend more than three dollars on pants or shirts.” She looked around the empty room and lowered her voice to a pleading whisper. “I never wear dresses. I ride horses all day. All my friends from the ranch are here, and they’re going to laugh at me wearing that, I just know it. I don’t understand why I can’t wear my church clothes. This outfit is just fine for church at home– but she’s not interested in that, oh no, with her uppity fiancé and his fancy parents...”

She looked ready to cry. “My daughter does whatever they want. She had this fancy city wedding because his Mom wanted it. I wanted her to get married on the ranch, under the stars, wearing her grandmother’s cowboy boots, with our pastor there... But no, no one cares what I say anymore…”

Elly instantly saw the underlying issue. This wasn’t about the dress. This was about a mother’s pride. She put her arms around the mother’s shoulders.

“Your daughter will always be your daughter. No matter how much money or swank the new in-laws come with, you will always be HER mother. Nothing can ever change that. No one can ever take your place in her life.” Elly’s voice caught in her throat. “I think about my mother every day. She is always with me.” She tried to gain control of her unexpected surge of emotion.

“What I’m saying is, this is one dress. One day. It’s not a surrender, or a grand statement. It’s just a dress, and it would make your daughter happy if you wore it. You might not know this, but your daughter is kind of high maintenance.”

The mother laughed and put her hand on Elly’s shoulder. “She really is.” She looked at the dress pensively. “It’s just a dress?”

Elly nodded and looked into the woman’s kind, worried brown eyes. “It’s just a dress.”

The mother grabbed the hanger on the back of the door and backed into the restroom. Elly smiled happily. Her work here was done. Brooke emerged from the bridal suite, looking resplendent in an elegant A-line dress, with fabric swaging that cinched at the waist with delicate pearl embroidery. She saw Elly inching towards the door and rushed over to her.

“Thank you so much, I knew you could convince her! So, I just have one more question. My hair person just told me that muscari can cause some people to have an allergic reaction, and so I was wondering if it is too late to change that.”

Elly looked at her. “Brooke,” she said sternly. “GO. GET. MARRIED. No more worrying, no more questions.”

Brooke gave a shy smile and mouthed. “Okay.”

In that moment, Elly saw a mature woman behind the frantic bridezilla who had driven her crazy for the past few months. She gave Brooke a quick hug and dashed for the door, before the bride could find anything else to complain about.

Ten minutes later – the time it took to coax Snarky Teenager away from six adoring groomsmen – the Posies van roared up Wydown. Snarky Teenager, to her credit, sensed the sudden change in Elly’s mood and was oddly silent for the drive. Elly rode in the passenger seat, watching lights smear out the rain-drenched window. She silently wiped a tear off her face as they turned up the drive to Posies. Missing her mother was like this; a stray thought, and then she was drowning in grief, drifting in a sea of grey memory.

CHAPTER

TEN

Sarah Jordan had been an anomaly in many ways. First of all, she was both strikingly beautiful and quite plump. Elly had seen men gaze at her, totally confused, wondering why they were drawn to this woman who was fleshy and soft, not unlike their own mother.

In Sarah’s youth, she had thick curly strawberry blond hair that was tinged with wheat highlights. Her bright blue eyes – a mirror image of Elly’s, down to the thick black lashes that rimmed them – had sparkled with life and laughter. Sarah Jordan loved her daughter, practical jokes, funny television shows, and the ironic side of life. She was fond of pinching the bottoms of her friends when they stood, and Elly had sat on many whoopee cushions as a child.

Elly’s most distinct memories, however, were of her mother in one of two places: church and her garden. Every Sunday and Wednesday night was spent at the Mt. Zion Baptist church just down the street from their home in Peachtree City. Sarah would lay out Elly’s dress for her the night before. Elly had a large collection of pastel dresses, many adorned with lace and ribbons that would cinch at the waist. On Sunday morning, Elly would be woken up at seven to the smell of pancakes and sound of sausages sizzling in the frying pan. She would take a bath, and then put on her Sunday dress, and slip her feet into her white Mary Janes. Down the hall, counting the steps and skipping the creaky one, she would skip into the kitchen where her mom would serve her breakfast on her special Sunday breakfast plate: a pale blue china plate with tiny white flowers painted across the middle in a wavy line. After breakfast, Elly and Sarah would walk, hand in hand, up the small hill to worship.

Mt. Zion was a small church – about 200 congregants – but they were truly the salt of the earth; elderly women who smelled of hand lotion, grumbling old men who ushered visitors in with a grim smile, about ten young couples with children who always ran loose like wild zoo animals, and everyone in between. The church was led by the Revered Hein, a Red Sox fanatic with a boisterous voice and a love of all people great and small. Elly and her mother were among the few white people in the church, but they had been going since Elly was small, and she had never really noticed that they stuck out. They would always sit in the second pew, on the right side, and as soon as the organ started playing, all the women in the church would begin fanning themselves rapidly, their white fans fluttering like butterflies in the damp air.

Elly remembered watching her mother in church. She would close her eyes, lean forward and mutter to herself, repeating whatever the pastor said. She would clutch Elly’s hand fiercely as the pastor yelled out about redemption, and she would hold her close when he talked about sin and death. Sarah Jordan also sang in the choir – a gift that had
not
been passed down to her daughter – and Elly loved watching her mother, clapping and swaying, alive in the spirit in every way. As the music barreled down from behind the pulpit, Elly’s eyes would sit fixated on her mother. Her hands raised to heavens, with her strawberry blond hair sweaty across her forehead, Elly would think how her mother looked like an angel. Elly would try to sway to the music, which once prompted an elderly black woman to call her “poor white child” and take her hand in hers.

After church, Elly and Sarah would have warm morning buns – cinnamon and sugar, toasted and rolled up inside pecan bread with a cold glass of milk. After Sarah’s second shower of the day – church was an aerobic activity in Georgia – Elly would grab her tin bucket, her pink polka dot garden boots and together they would head out for their day of gardening as her mother hummed hymns to the roses.

Sarah Jordan’s garden was the talk of Peachtree City. Her mother’s garden wrapped around the backyard and exploded out from both sides of the house. It lined the stone path to the door, and trickled up the porch. Cotton candy pink laurel, pale yellow and tangerine azalea and white camellia blooms, hanging like tiny lanterns, shaded the rich quilt of flower beds. As Elly ran around with her butterfly net, stopping occasionally to sip sweet tea from the porch, Sarah would be perpetually bent over, her round behind peeking out from a Cherokee rose bush, with dirt furiously flying out from around her. All day, sometimes to Elly’s annoyance, her mother would tend, love and worship the garden. Orange tea-olive plants, pale winter wood berries – these were the things that were discussed around the dinner table, with grilled cheese sandwiches, a heart carved lovingly on the top.

Elly’s father had never been in the picture. Her mother described the night she was conceived as, “the best worst night of my life.” He had found out she was pregnant, confessed he was still married back in Tennessee, and left her with money to “take care of it.” Sarah had taken the money, put a down payment on a small cottage home and bullied her way into a well-paying accounting position at the local law office. Over the next 20 years, she made a life, a beautiful life filled with flowers, faith and love for her and her funny, chubby daughter.

When she left for college, Elly would count the hours until she could return to her mother’s house on Wright Street. She would pull up in her tiny Toyota Tercel, open the windows and let the sweet smell of hundreds of gardenias wash over her. Her mom would be waiting, hand on hip and a cheesy casserole in the oven. They would talk openly, without boundaries, until the early morning hours. Elly found herself waking many times, snuggled against her mom’s shoulder, smelling of earth and White Shoulders perfume, on the couch, fully dressed. Her mother was like her own skin. She was the rock which Elly’s life crashed against, water settling around it. She could never be moved. Like her garden, she was always there, growing with the seasons, returning in bloom every time Elly needed her.