Going to the Chapel (23 page)

When we leave the restaurant and I get ready to get into Jerry’s pickup, I go over to Elaine and give her a quick hug.

“Don’t worry about your wedding,” I whisper. “It’s in good hands.”

Elaine looks at me as if I’ve taken leave of my senses and maybe I have.

“What was that about?” Jerry says when I climb into his pickup.

“I thought I’d try this new-rules thing with Elaine,” I say. “It didn’t work.”

“Yeah, well, it’s Elaine,” Jerry says as he backs out of his parking space.

I go to sleep that night counting stained glass sheep while waiting for my mother and Aunt Ruth to finish measuring the chapel. I wonder if the thing Aunt Inga wanted me to notice was that neither one of them can add. And they both were whipping those cloth measuring tapes around like they were ropes. Or long, skinny scarves.

I wake up in the middle of the night with those tape measures on my mind. Isn’t it a little unusual that both of them had the same hand movements, as though they’d spent hours and hours flipping long scarves off of their necks for no other reason than that it showed they had style? Just like my grandmother had done?

I wish it wasn’t too late to call Aunt Inga.

I do manage to go back to sleep even after I have The Revelation. Before I know it, morning is here and I am wondering if this “ah-ha-I-get-it” feeling is what prophets felt thousands of years ago. I’m sleeping on the air mattress in Cassie’s bedroom and the sun is just beginning to rise so it’s easy to imagine I’m an Old Testament prophet in a cave somewhere with all of the grayness around me. If I had some of Jerry’s old socks in here to bring up the wet, musty smell, it would be totally convincing.

I can’t believe it. I would never have wondered how prophets managed to sleep through the night with all the things they had rattling around in their heads until those conversations I’ve been having with Doug and Jerry and Cassie about things in the Bible. Who knew the Bible people were like, well, real people who couldn’t sleep at night?

I wonder if those prophets felt the way I do now. I can’t wait to tell Aunt Inga what I’ve concluded. Of course, Aunt Inga is not too likely to behead me if I’m wrong so maybe this enthusiasm I’m feeling wasn’t quite the same for the prophets of old. Especially because they didn’t just have to worry about being wrong. They were often in more trouble if they were right.

Oh. That makes me ask myself if I could be in trouble if I’m right about Aunt Ruth and my mother doing the scarf thing as my grandmother used to do. And, even if I’m right, I’m not sure what it means. Were they like little ducks being imprinted on my scarf-waving grandmother? Maybe my aunt Ruth
gives my mother such a hard time because she wanted to have my grandmother for her real mother, too.

I debate about waking up Jerry. He would love to get in on this duck and prophet conversation. But then I decide to be kind. Jerry asked Cassie at dinner last night to ask if he could invite everyone over for oatmeal this morning and, in the shock of the moment, she agreed. So, he will be up and wishing he were either a dead prophet or a dead duck soon enough anyway.

I hear a soft knocking on the bedroom door and a whisper. “Julie?”

I don’t answer because I don’t want to wake up Cassie so I just grab my robe and go into the living area.

Jerry has taken every dish out of the cupboard. Cassie bought that set of white dishes when she moved down to Hollywood from Blythe two years ago.

“We don’t have enough bowls,” Jerry whispers. “There’s only six bowls and there will be eight of us.”

I take pity on the poor boy. He’ll realize soon enough that he only has three chairs, counting the box he turns upside down for himself. “I can use my coffee cup.”

His face brightens. “I can do that, too. So we’ll have enough.”

I walk over and turn the switch on for the coffee to begin brewing.

“And I can sit on the floor beside the coffee table,” I add just to give him a clue.

“Oh, that’s right,” Jerry says as he looks around as though he’s never seen this room before. “We need to have chairs.”

Fortunately, it’s early and there’s a hardware store not too far from here that opens at six every morning. Jerry takes off to buy a couple of folding chairs and I go to take a shower.

By the time Cassie gets up, Jerry is back with the four folding chairs and has even managed to buy a dozen bagels with different kinds of cream cheeses: strawberry, cinnamon, blueberry and onion.

“It’ll be a feast,” I say. “The aunts will love it.”

It turns out I might have a knack for this prophetic stuff. Just as Jerry has a knack for entertaining. Two hours later, we are all sitting in Cassie’s place and everyone is looking well-fed and relaxed. Well, except for Elaine, but that’s to be expected since she’s getting married so soon.

We’ve been talking about ways to decorate the hallway between the wedding chapel and the courtyard so that the guests will not even see the doors that go into the rooms the Big M uses for their final viewings.

Aunt Inga has asked if there’s a church nearby and I think we are all going together to a service. I am just starting to become aware of how much Aunt Inga is the mother of our whole family. I used to feel that she was just my substitute mother, but I sit there realizing she’s probably been a fill-in mother to at least two other people. If I’m calculating the dates right, Aunt Ruth was two years old when the aunts’ mother died. Aunt Inga was the oldest and she must have stood in as the mother figure for the ten years until my grandmother came along. And, since Aunt Inga was the oldest, she was probably the substitute parent again for my mother when my grandmother died.

I sit and try to puzzle it out. Why aren’t Aunt Ruth and my mother imprinted on Aunt Inga instead of my grandmother? I look at Aunt Inga more closely. She’s neat in her appearance, but there’s no swirling scarf style to her at all. Her hair is cropped in a short no-nonsense style. She wears the same style of basic cotton dress. She must have a half-dozen dresses in the same style. Only the color is different and even that doesn’t range too far from the drab colors. There’s no fuchsia or turquoise or red in her wardrobe.

All of a sudden it hits me. Aunt Inga is like her mother. And then it hits me again. I wonder how Aunt Inga felt about Aunt Ruth and my mother idolizing my grandmother when she, Aunt Inga, had the hard task of raising them both. Aunt Inga probably did all of the housework, the cooking and the kissing of any bruised knees. Actually, she is still doing Aunt Ruth’s housework. And, all that time, my grandmother was the one who got the glory. If I was Aunt Inga, I would feel jealous and maybe even a little betrayed.

I’m not so sure I like this prophet business anymore. I only have to take things one step further to wonder if Aunt Inga’s insistence on us being a family is her way of trying to fix all of those earlier feelings of jealousy, betrayal and discouragement. She’s still doing the hard part of trying to make us a family.

Wow. I am still looking at the scene of my family spread out before me, but everything has changed. I stand up from where I am sitting on the sofa and just casually walk over to put my hand on Aunt Inga’s shoulder. She’s sitting on the folding chair closest to the kitchen area.

“Jerry and I will get the dishes,” I say as I give Aunt Inga’s shoulder a squeeze. “You guys just sit a minute and rest some more.”

For the first time in my life, I really listen in church that morning. I have purposely sat beside Aunt Inga this morning. I want to know what has given Aunt Inga her strength for all of those years. If I had drawn her lot in life, I think I would have been bitter. She gave herself up for her family in some ways.

There was always a little girl in Aunt Inga’s life who needed some mothering even though the little girl idolized some other woman. It has, of course, by now occurred to me that it can’t have been easy for Aunt Inga to patiently live with my blind adoration of my mother all those years when it was Aunt Inga who clearly gave me the love and care that every child needs. Aunt Inga was my rock; she just wasn’t my hero.

I reach forward and put my hand on Aunt Inga’s knee. She doesn’t think twice before covering my hand with her own. She has never held back any affection from me because I haven’t been focused on her.

The minister is talking about planting and harvesting things. It’s not the most exciting sermon in the world. But I realize it doesn’t need to be. I’m no longer just looking for the things and people in life who have flair. Bright colors and giggles are good, but sometimes the steadfast love of an aunt who sticks with you is even better. I rest my hand on Aunt Inga’s knee throughout the sermon. I like the feel of her hand on mine and I think she likes it, too, because she gives me a little squeeze every once in a while.

T
he rest of the week I keep thinking of the children’s hide-and-seek game that begins with “Ready Or Not, Here We Come.” That’s what it feels like here. Friday night is coming and, with it, over two hundred wedding guests who have no idea they’re coming to a mortuary. Our job is to see that they leave having no idea they’ve been to one, either.

On Monday, my mother builds a fantastic tunnel out of chicken wire and covers the inside with hundreds of pieces of crepe paper so that the wedding guests will be able to go from the chapel to the outside courtyard and not even see anything that might make them suspicious the Big M is not a wedding chapel. Walking through the tunnel itself will keep them distracted. I’ve walked through it and it’s like being inside a kaleidoscope with all of the shades of crepe paper that my mother used.

The tunnel is one step forward.

On Tuesday, Elaine has a major meltdown when she
hears that Gary’s sister, Lynda, has the flu and isn’t coming to the wedding. I don’t even make Elaine beg me to fill in as her maid of honor. When she asks, I accept. Which surprises her a little, but I decide to wait until after her big event to talk to her about my cease-fire hopes for the two of us. I’m tired of us giving each other The Look when, hello, life is happening out here and we could each use another person on our side.

I didn’t just think of this cease-fire on my own, by the way. I’ve been watching Aunt Ruth and my mother for days and, in my opinion, they are worse than Elaine and I ever thought of being. They don’t just have one Look, they have dozens of them. And they compete at everything. They even tried to outdo each other, climbing the ladder higher and higher, to fill tiny gaps in the tunnel cover. By the way they went at it with each other, you would think they were saving lives instead of plugging holes in chicken wire with crepe paper.

I’ve pretty much figured out that the two of them are still competing for my grandmother’s attention, which is bizarre, but not as bizarre as the fact that Elaine and I somehow took on the competition, too. Neither Elaine nor I even
knew
my grandmother. How lame is that?

By the end of the day on Tuesday, I am bursting with my realizations and want to talk to Elaine, but decide it will have to wait. She is a nervous wreck about this wedding and I can’t blame her. I’ve already decided that, if I get married, I’m going to elope. This real wedding business is nothing like the pretend
weddings Cassie and I used to have when we were kids.

Speaking of Cassie, she’s been working hard. On Wednesday, she went down to the central L.A. Flower Mart and picked up the shipment of roses she had ordered on Monday for Aunt Ruth. I’ve never seen so many roses—yellow ones, coral ones, and those white roses with reddish-orange stripes coming from their centers.

On Thursday, which is Thanksgiving Day, Cassie, Jerry, Doug and I are at Cassie’s shop for hours, making bouquets for the courtyard tables and big floral sprays for the chapel. We even put water tubes on some of the long-stemmed roses so we can insert them into the walls of the tunnel to add fragrance.

It’s a wonder neither Aunt Ruth nor my mother thought of the flower idea. That would get them some points with whoever they’re trying to impress. Instead, Doug thinks of it. I know. That impresses me, too.

We take the tubed roses over late on Thursday and put them in the walls of the tunnel. The colors of the crepe paper and the smell of those roses made me think of fairy tales. It’s all pastels and sweet fragrance. Even Gary’s parents will have to agree this wedding is nice.

Speaking of Gary and his parents, I have admitted to myself that I am a little concerned that we hadn’t seen Gary around here much. Well, at all, really. Elaine says he’s keeping his parents occupied and that’s probably true, but the fact that he feels he needs to do that is worrisome, don’t you think?

Of course, maybe it’s for the best. Uncle Howard had a very nice sign made to slip over that little brass
Hollywood & Vine Mortuary sign that is out front of the Big M, but Gary’s parents might still stumble onto something that would tell them this is a funeral home if they came here and wandered around. No one, of course, has told them the real story of the Big M. But that’s not surprising. Aunt Ruth still hasn’t told them she really doesn’t live in Palm Springs.

Before I know it, Friday morning is here and I’m lying on the air mattress in Cassie’s bedroom wondering what will go wrong today. I have this feeling that something is going to go wrong, but I don’t know what it is. It’s how I used to feel about all of my toppling. I would dread not knowing what situation I was going to get myself into. And the dread only made it more likely that, when I toppled, it would be sooner and harder than if I were not so nervous.

Fortunately, it is Elaine’s wedding so my toppling nerves shouldn’t ruin anything. Besides, we have a lot of professionals on board. Aunt Ruth was in an ordering frenzy earlier in the week so I know that a huge wedding cake will be delivered to the Big M this afternoon and that the caterers will be setting up at five o’clock for the evening reception meal. That should all go well.

We have another professional coming, as well. I asked Miss Billings to help Cassie and me with our makeup around five o’clock and she was delighted. I’ve told Elaine she’s welcome to join us for our makeup session, but she looked too harried to make the decision when I asked so I told her she could just come to the women’s lounge if she wanted help with her eyeliner around that time. There’s a huge mirror in there and the lighting is good so it’ll be perfect.

I roll over and look up at Cassie’s alarm clock. It is ten minutes after seven and I decide to lie back down until the alarm goes off at seven-thirty. Today is going to be frantic when it starts. I try to empty my mind of all my worries in sort of a meditation thing, but it doesn’t work. I feel I have a wheel of details rolling round and round in my mind and I can’t stop it.

Since I can’t fight it, I go with it and keep checking things off in my mind.

Aunt Gladys and the rest of the cousins are driving over this morning so they can help set up all of the chairs in the courtyard and move all of the floral arrangements to the chapel. The time of the rehearsal has been changed to four o’clock this afternoon so that Gary will only have to make one trip into Hollywood with his parents. The wedding itself will start at five-thirty and the reception dinner will be served after that.

By eight o’clock we’ll be home free. Well, we won’t be home actually, but I figure that anything that happens after dinner becomes a colorful anecdote and not a disaster. By then, the knot is tied and people are fed. Everyone will be relaxed. I know by then I intend to be walking around the courtyard with Doug trying to give everyone the impression that we’re just friends and neither breakup material nor engagement material. I don’t want to announce I was a fraud before, but I would like the record to be accurate.

The alarm goes off and I get up without complaint.

We don’t have oatmeal this morning for breakfast. We haven’t taken the time to make it all week even though it’s the instant kind. We’ve been reduced to
drinking our coffee and eating an energy bar as we ride in the cab of Jerry’s pickup to the Big M. It’s November and the mornings can be chilly so Jerry usually turns his heater on before we back out of the parking lot. By midmorning the temperature will be fine outside, though.

I get a call on my cell phone when we are halfway to the Big M and I answer it.

“Julie?”

“Hi, Elaine,” I say as I listen to the ragged breathing on the line. “Calm down. Whatever it is, we’ll figure it out.”

Cassie gives me an anxious look and I nod to her. Jerry just keeps driving down Melrose Avenue. He’s used to this. I have said those words to Elaine more times than I’d like to count this week, but they always seem to make Elaine take a deep breath so she can at least breathe enough to explain the latest crisis.

“But this one is different,” Elaine says with a hiccup and I begin to wonder if this is the ultimate problem.

“Did Gary call? Is something wrong?”

I’ve been wondering all week if Gary would call the wedding off at the last minute. I don’t know if he’s off having fun with his parents or if they are giving him such a hard time that they require his full attention. The whole thing doesn’t seem right, though, and if he’s going to call it off, I’d just as soon he did it before Elaine is standing up there in front of all those people.

“Your dress isn’t here.” Elaine hiccups again. “Lynda shipped the dress back to Blythe and Aunt Gladys just called to say it didn’t come today. Aunt
Gladys checked with the shipping company and the package is still in Atlanta, Georgia.”

“Well, we don’t need the brown dress,” I say. I think of what Aunt Inga would do. I’m doing that a lot lately. “I could always wear one of those orange ones. I think you have one in a size ten, don’t you?”

Elaine has cut back on her attendants until it is only going to be me and Gary’s best friend walking down the aisle with them so it doesn’t make any difference whether I am wearing the maid of honor dress or one of the bridesmaids’ dresses.

Elaine’s hiccups stop and it’s quiet on the line for a minute. “Really? You said you wouldn’t wear the orange dress.”

“Well, I will,” I say. “I’m sure Miss Billings can help me put enough brown streaks in my hair that the orange will look okay with it.”

There’s more silence. “But you love your hair the way it is. You call it your titian crown. Titian is red, not brown streaks.”

I close my eyes. These truly are the kinds of things we’ve always bickered about. Hair. Clothes. Who could make who do what.

“I’ll still have my hair. Those brown streaks will wash out tonight.”

“Well, then, thank you,” Elaine says a little uncertainly.

“You’re welcome,” I say with conviction as Jerry turns into the parking lot that’s behind the Big M.

Cassie, Jerry and I are silent as we climb out of the pickup and head toward the back door at the Big M. The wedding guests will go in through the courtyard
and then take the tunnel to the chapel tonight, but for us, it’s easier to just put the key in the lock and walk down the side hallway.

“What was that all about?” Jerry says as I turn on one of the hallway lights.

I look over at him. “Huh?”

“You and Elaine, all buddy-buddy,” he says. “Am I missing something? Are you going to get her later?”

I chuckle. “No, it’s new rules.”

Jerry grunts as if he doesn’t believe me.

It’s not long before we are working away. Doug gets there about a half hour after we do and he helps Jerry finish stringing some wires in the chapel for the sound system. Then Cassie wants to have a few of the tables set up in the courtyard before we pick up the flower arrangements so we set those up. My mother’s singer comes and we show her where she can practice. Fortunately, my mother had the foresight to ask the singer to bring one of the piano players with her.

I go through the tunnel again to make sure all of the crepe paper pieces are securely attached to the chicken-wire frame. Then I check out the kitchen to be sure everything is ready for the cake delivery and the caterers.

It’s about eleven-thirty when Aunt Gladys and Jerry’s brothers show up and start lifting things around. I see that I’ve never truly appreciated the value of having all of these male cousins before. The first thing the cousins do is finish setting up all of the tables and chairs in the courtyard. The caterers will put the tablecloths on later so all we do is position the tables. About this time, Elaine and her parents arrive in their car. They tell us Aunt Inga and my mother will be along soon.

It feels good to have us all together. Aunt Gladys probably figured it would feel that way because she sends one of her sons to the car to get the cooler out of the trunk.

“I knew we wouldn’t have time to go out to eat,” Aunt Gladys says. “So I fixed us a picnic lunch. It won’t take long to eat.”

“Actually, I think we’re in pretty good shape for time,” I say as I look up at Aunt Ruth to check my impression.

Aunt Ruth nods. “We certainly have time to eat.”

Elaine holds back a little as Aunt Ruth and Uncle Howard walk over and sit in chairs next to Aunt Gladys. Everyone likes to be around Aunt Gladys when she has food. Having all those boys meant she’s had lots of practice cooking and she’s very good at it.

“You okay?” I ask. Elaine and I are standing in front of the entrance to the courtyard.

Elaine nods, but she looks a little pale. I wonder if that’s why brides wear those white veils so no one will see how pale their faces are. Marriage is a big step. I hope Elaine joins Cassie and me later for our makeup session. Miss Billings will make Elaine look alive no matter what her pulse says.

My mother and Aunt Inga arrive just as Aunt Gladys is putting plastic containers on one of the tables. The two of them signal they are going to go inside the chapel and they walk back to the courtyard through the tunnel just to check it.

Of course, Elaine is oblivious to who is doing what. She is just standing there.

“Would you look at that?” I say to cheer Elaine up. “Aunt Gladys made her deviled eggs.”

Aunt Gladys always makes these really good deviled eggs for any family picnics. We used to beg her to make them for us when we were kids. We had some peaceful times as kids while eating deviled eggs, which may be why we’ve all maintained a fondness for them over the years.

I hear the short breaths to my right and I turn to Elaine. “You okay?”

Elaine’s hair is perfectly styled and all of her buttons are done up. But something is starting to unravel.

“I’m never going to have deviled eggs again,” Elaine says in a soft wail that fortunately doesn’t reach the rest of the family.

I’m not used to this comforting thing when it comes to Elaine, but I do my best. I put a hand on her shoulder and give her some pats. “Now, now, that’s not true. I’m sure Aunt Gladys will even give you the recipe if you want it.”

The short breaths are a little shorter now and, when she looks up, Elaine has a tear running down her cheek. “I can’t cook.”