Flight (11 page)

Carol looks surprised. “From South America,” she says. “They were flown in this morning.”

Margaret shrugs and goes to the drawer that holds plastic wrap and tinfoil.

“Well, it’s dripping,” she says. “I’ll have to rewrap it.” She finds the plastic wrap and begins rolling the package of shrimp in a long piece. “There must be almost six pounds here,” she says, trying to regain her generous spirit.

Trevor weighed six pounds at birth. He was three weeks early. She was home alone the night she went into labor, David still at the office. Later, she found out he’d been having take-out food with one of his grad students, an attractive Asian woman named Mei. Margaret had gotten angry about it, and David had laughed.

You’re just flooded with hormones,
he had said.
You can’t help but start spouting the dogma of mandatory monogamy. Don’t worry, it’ll pass.
Why didn’t she remember that line when David was getting so furious about Vasant? Spouting the dogma of monogamy.

“This might be more shrimp than we need,” Margaret says as she rewraps the bundle. “How many of us are there, only six, right?”

Carol looks uncomprehending for a moment. “Oh no,” she says, getting it. “Those aren’t for us to eat. Those are for the party Friday night. For shrimp cocktail.”

“Shrimp cocktail Friday night?” Margaret pauses, the package in midair. “Mom, you can’t be serious. We can’t eat these Friday night.”

“Why not?” Carol’s eyes take on the hardness they get when she’s gearing up to be stubborn in her own defense.

“Because, Mom, it’s Wednesday. You can’t freeze them if you want to use them for shrimp cocktail, and you can’t keep fresh shrimp in your fridge for two whole days. They’ll go bad.” Margaret glances at her sister for support, but Leanne looks away, out to the dining room where Trevor is unpacking his goodies. She hates conflict.

“South America to Michigan,” Margaret adds, annoyed to have to explain something so obvious. “They’re at least a day old already.”

Carol looks confused, and Margaret feels bad. She saw the price tag on the paper package. Immediately, however, her sense of rightness overrides her sympathy. It’s so typical of Carol to rush into buying something without even understanding all the exigencies, to grasp at an ideal of luxury without securing the means to achieve it. She wants Leanne’s party to be elegant and sophisticated, but she hasn’t thought through every step of it with the care a real sophisticate would know was required.

“I’m sorry, Mom,” Margaret says, softening her voice a bit, “but you don’t want to feed your guests rancid shellfish.” She glances again at Leanne, who has disengaged completely. “They’ll all get food poisoning and be too sick to come to the wedding.”

Carol’s face falls. It’s clear she was preparing to fight back, to insist that Margaret was being ridiculous, but the vision of the wedding emptied of guests, Leanne herself hunched over a toilet in her wedding gown, trumps every argument in her head. She surrenders completely.

“Oh no,” she says, visibly shrinking. “What do we do now?”

Margaret squelches a feeling of guilt. Maybe she’s being over-scrupulous, but it’s for the best, just as lying was for the best. Somehow, disaster is going to have to be averted for three days, so her little sister can get married and fly back to New York, and Margaret can go home and sort out the wreckage of her imploded life. Neither Carol nor Leanne seems up to the task, and her father will be charging ahead on his own track, so the anticipation and prevention of disasters is clearly falling to her. Now, one crisis headed off, the next is already brewing in Carol’s downcast face. Her mother’s dismay at the shrimp debacle is going to leach into the fabric of the next two days and color all their preparations unless a way can be found to stop it.

“Don’t worry, Mom,” Margaret says. “We can cook this tonight. We can make a really nice dinner. I can make gumbo from it. I just need a chicken and a few other things.”

“Gumbo?”

“A celebratory dinner, just for the family.”

“Five pounds of shrimp? Isn’t that going to be a giant gumbo?”

“We can freeze the leftovers. Gumbo freezes well.”

Carol shrugs. Now that her vision of a gorgeous platter of shrimp has been dashed, she’ll refuse to care what happens to them. “They still have their heads on,” she says glumly, but Margaret just smiles.

“All the better,” she declares. Encouraged by her mother’s lack of objections, she begins digging around in the fridge to make space for the shrimp.

“Oh, Margaret,” Carol says. She has turned to the sink now and is busy scrubbing the label off a jelly jar. “I ran into your old boyfriend Doug in the grocery store last week. You should see what a nice man he turned out to be.”

Margaret rummages in the fridge, only half listening. Carol presses on. “He was talking about his mother, and then I mentioned Leanne’s wedding to him, and he seemed truly excited and happy to hear about it, so …” She pauses and leans over the sink, attacking a particularly tenacious piece of label.

“And so … what?” Margaret demands, her attention captured at last. She turns from the fridge and uses the dish towel to wipe her hands dry while fixing Carol with a no-more-nonsense stare.

“Oh, well …” Carol stops scrubbing and sets the jelly jar on the counter before turning around to reply. “I invited him to the cocktail party. I hope you don’t mind.”

Margaret knows what this declaration is: immediate revenge for the shrimp but also, at a deeper level, a belated revenge for the very
fact
of Doug, for the way Margaret tortured her mother with the possibility that she might just run off with a farmer, abandoning every hope Carol held so dearly for her future.

“No, I don’t mind,” she says coolly. “It will be good to see him again.”

She meets her mother’s gaze, her calm footing reestablished, but if Carol is disappointed in Margaret’s failure to be upset, she gives
no sign. Instead, she turns to the sink and gives her jelly jar a pat, then whirls back around to confront Leanne.

“Sweetie, your dress!” she cries. “I haven’t seen it in person yet! Let’s go try it on!”

In a cotton tank top and underwear, stepping into a pooled circle of wedding dress, Leanne nurses a secret happiness. David isn’t coming. From Margaret’s expression, the way she cast her eyes down when she answered their mother’s question, it was clear there were parts of the story she wasn’t telling. But it’s not just that. Leanne has never really liked David. As she thrusts her arms through the dress’s tulle armholes, she asks herself whether she disliked him from the first time Margaret brought him home, or whether it started with Margaret’s wedding.

“Oh, Leanne,” her mother breathes. “It’s stunning.”

“You
are
planning on wearing a bra with it, aren’t you?” Margaret asks. “Because that bodice isn’t doing a whole lot for you.”

“Yes, I’m wearing a bra. Here, zip me up.”

Everyone else seemed to like David. He was smart and sophisticated, and ambitious, like Margaret. He had grown up in a wealthy Connecticut family, spending summers on Martha’s Vineyard and getting his bachelor’s degree from Princeton, but he didn’t act like a snob. When he came to Michigan, he complimented the food and acted interested in Will’s farming tales. He seemed to fit into the family better than Margaret. He was clearly the motivation behind his and Margaret’s push to get jobs in Chicago, and he even talked about buying a summer cottage on the lake in Michigan, the way a lot of Chicago people did. He gave Will and Carol every reason to approve of him.

And yet Leanne can’t help but suspect that they never warmed to him. Perhaps it was a lingering discomfort with his upper-crust background, or maybe he seemed too good to be true. Their coolness was never apparent in things they said or did, but in what they didn’t do. Carol made elaborate formal dinners when he visited, but
never the cozy grilled-cheese-and-tomato-soup dinner the family traditionally had on Sunday nights. Will answered questions about the farm, but he never dragged David out to the barn to inspect his new backhoe or offered to let him drive the combine.

For Leanne, David was a more familiar problem. He was the kind of man who raised eyebrows, dropped hints, let his eyes linger, and held goodbye hugs for a second too long. It never extended into anything that could be considered a breach of manners, and she never thought anything of it—until Margaret’s wedding.

“What shoes are you going to wear?” Carol asks, and Leanne points to her suitcase. On the top rests a small flannel shoe bag. She didn’t want standard bridal shoes, something she’d never use again, so she went to Bergdorf Goodman in the city and picked out the most beautiful pair of white shoes she could find. They are so exquisite she can hardly stand the thought of wearing them.

“These are really nice,” Margaret says as she takes the shoes out of their soft bag, and Leanne can’t help but feel a stab of pleasure. It’s rare for Margaret to compliment Leanne’s choices.

“Are they high enough?” Carol asks. “Put them on.” Leanne does as she’s told, bunching up her dress to slip them on. The three of them contemplate the image in the mirror. Leanne scrutinizes the hem, but her eyes keep being drawn back up to take in the full effect. The dress is simple and barely ornamented, but it hugs her body tightly before dropping to the ground in a dramatic sweep of satin. She looks like someone else in it.

“It’s too long,” Margaret says at last.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Carol says hopefully. “As long as she can walk, it will be fine.”

Leanne kicks one foot in front of her and watches the dress drift slowly back into place. The bottom edge just touches the carpet. “Margaret’s right,” she announces. “It’s too long. I didn’t have the shoes when they hemmed it, and I guess they thought I’d go higher. They left half an inch too much.” She leans over. The white satin rests lightly on her mother’s carpet. “I look like somebody cut off my feet.”

“Oh no, you’re right.” Carol’s face seems to wilt. “And if the ground is still a little bit wet from all this rain …”

“I don’t suppose there’s anyone around here who can do anything for us.” Margaret’s lips are a thin line in anticipation of Ryville’s usual shortcomings.

“It’s okay,” Leanne says. “I can do it.”

“What do you mean you can do it?” Margaret raises her brows, and Leanne fights the familiar feeling of intimidation. “Hemming a wedding dress is complicated. Even a professional seamstress won’t do it unless she’s really good.”

Leanne turns back to the mirror, where the reflection of an unfamiliarly beautiful woman looks back at her. “I can do it,” she says simply.

“Leanne is as good as a professional seamstress,” her mother says, jumping to her defense. “You should see how people in Cold Spring come to her store for advice.”

Margaret, obviously calculating this particular argument’s importance, raises a hand to stop it. “Okay,” she says. “Mom, why don’t you get us some pins?”

Pins in hand, Margaret and Carol drop to the floor to debate the merits of various lengths. Leanne tries to join in, but whenever she leans over, they both sit back in annoyance and cry, “Stand up straight!”

“This skirt is fuller than mine was,” Margaret says, on her hands and knees. “You’re going to be hemming for a while.”

“Your dress was beautiful, Margaret,” Carol says, conciliatory now that Margaret has acquiesced on the hem issue. “Your whole wedding was picture-perfect.”

“Well,” Margaret is scooting around to the back, concentrating hard on the evenness of the hem, “I had a lot of good people to work with. People who understood the idea of standards.”

Leanne thinks of the people who worked at the Drake Hotel.

They were certainly accommodating. Margaret had a cocktail reception there the night before her rehearsal dinner. Leanne wore a mint green dress that she bought at a secondhand shop on St.
Mark’s Place for two dollars. Drunk, she fell into bed wearing it. The next morning, when the housekeeping staff made up her room, they picked the dress up off the bathroom floor and hung it carefully in the closet, as if it were an Armani suit.

Mostly, she remembers the bathtub. After the rehearsal dinner, she floated there for hours. The water cooled down, but she didn’t want to get out. She had a stack of empty bottles from the minibar by the side of tub. She just lay there, watching the bubbles on the surface pop and vanish. She had used the entire bottle of hotel bath and shower gel, and that still wasn’t enough to make her feel clean.

Even then she couldn’t quite remember how David had ended up in her room. She recalled him telling her mother he’d get her home safe. In the hallway, he had cupped her elbow in his hand, like a nineteenth-century gentleman.
Oh, I’m so glad you’re here,
she had joked.
I couldn’t have made it without you.
She meant it to sound sarcastic and wry, but it came out sounding stupidly true. She could have taken a cab home; that’s what she would have done in New York.

When they arrived, David took Leanne’s key and opened the door. She had her shoes off and her dress unzipped before she realized he had followed her into the room. He was leaning against the closed door, watching. They exchanged some more banter, and then somehow David had her up against the wall and was slipping one hand into the back of her dress while hiking up the hem with the other. She felt his finger slide up her thigh and under the elastic of her underpants, and she wondered disinterestedly if his touch felt good because he was used to Margaret, if sisters liked the same thing. But she and Margaret never had. Like David, for instance. Leanne certainly wouldn’t be marrying him in under twenty-four hours. That was enough to make her put her hands on his chest and gently push him back.

“I think you should go,” she managed to get out.

“I know you do,” he said, and then he moved his hands onto her hips and his mouth to her collarbone. Leanne felt oddly reluctant to push him away. She didn’t want to be rude. She leaned her head
against the wall, hoping he would get bored with her lack of response. After a few moments, when his enthusiasm wasn’t appearing to slacken, she shimmied down the wall and slipped sideways away from him.