Happy All the Time (16 page)

She was getting married. The thought of it astounded her. This great leap forward made her feel like her own shadow. When other girls got married, they were filled with joy, not rumination. Each event in the walk toward marriage was supposed to be taken with untainted gladness—wasn't it?

The truth was that Misty had never given the notion of marriage any thought at all. Now she was infusing it with all manner of sentimentality. This, she felt, was the price you paid for never envisioning your father walking you down the aisle, or a little cottage by the sea, or a honeymoon spent touring the château district or bicycling in Bermuda.

She had never thought about the mechanics of marriage: she had thought only about love. The mechanics, however, were there to be dealt with. These preyed on her mind and made her grim, but they expanded Vincent's boundless optimism: all life was an adventure. All events contributed to the gaiety of nations. All people were flowers embroidered on the rich, entertaining tapestry of life.

Misty was thinking about family. She and Vincent had broken the news to their respective sets of parents and soon their families would be united. Vincent found this a charming prospect and thought about it very little. Misty faced this with alarm and thought about it constantly.

Vincent's parents lived in the small town of Petrie, Connecticut. The family had lived in and around Midland County since the beginning of time, it seemed. Life, for the Cardworthys, was patterned. The family had helped found the Petrie Country Day School and all members of the family were sent to it. The women of the family were community pillars. They ran the library subscription, the garden club, the Petrie Lecture Society, the Midland County Improvement and Preservation Society, and the annual hospital art show. Once in a while, a Cardworthy ran for local office and was elected. One of these Cardworthys had served in the state senate and had eventually gone to Washington. Mostly they were country lawyers or country doctors. Vincent's father was a lawyer. His mother was an Edith Whartonite and a fanatic gardener. The only eccentric in the family was Aunt Lila, who had bred the rose named after her cleaning lady. Now she was working on another she intended to name after the man who serviced her car.

Vincent's family was tranquil. Misty's family, on the other hand, was far too exciting. Her family included Communists, Trotskyists, socialists of every stripe, union organizers, professors of political science, neurophysiologists, and lay analysts.

Misty's great-grandfather had come from Russia with his brother, who was a tin broker. In the United States, they did not settle in a large urban center but went west as tin peddlers and smiths. In Chicago they accrued a little capital with which they repaired to the town of Medicine Stone, Wisconsin. There Misty's great-grandfather bought a dairy farm and his brother opened a dry goods store. Misty's father and her uncle Bernie were grandsons of the pioneers. Uncle Bernie said that when he wrote his autobiography he would call it
Jew Boy of the Prairie
. Berkowitz cousins still ran the dairy farm and the dry goods store. Misty's father had been sent to Chicago to be educated and had stayed there. He was a labor lawyer. Uncle Bernie had gone to Chicago too, but Uncle Bernie was a crook.

The family put its communal hand over its communal heart when Uncle Bernie's name was mentioned. No one was sure what his crime had been or if, in fact, there had been any crime. But after a career as a song plugger, Uncle Bernie had done something funny in the sheet music business and had absconded with a large sum of money to the Bahamas. He came back to the States only to see his lawyers. Uncle Bernie had also written a song that had had a brief vogue in the forties when it had been recorded by Dan Staniels's Gopher Band. The song was called “Dancing Chicken” and it celebrated the courtship rites of Prout's Hen, a cousin to Attwater's Prairie Chicken, whose rituals Uncle Bernie had observed as a young boy. This is what Vincent's family had in store.

“I can't marry you,” Misty said to Vincent. “My family is too weird.”

“Your father is a lawyer and Stanley's father is a professor,” said Vincent. “That seems very dull to me.”

“That's only two out of many,” said Misty.

“Not to worry,” said Vincent. “Wait until you meet my cousin Hester.”

Misty did not want to meet Vincent's cousin Hester or any other family member. The whole idea of family meetings, weddings, apartment searches put her off. What did any of this have to do with love, anyway?

The subject of family kept cropping up. It sprouted one evening during a dinner with Stanley and Sybel Klinger. They were sitting on the floor of a restaurant called the True Life Inn, one of the few eating places in New York that served what Sybel thought was food.

Vincent poked his chopsticks into a large bowl of vegetables and pulled out something punctured with holes.

“Do you eat this?” he said. “Or did it fall off someone's shoe?”

“That's lotus root,” said Sybel.

“And what's this stuff that looks like green hair?”

“That's seaweed,” said Sybel primly. “It purifies your body and puts minerals in. There are certain tribes of Indians that live on it and they never get any blood diseases.”

“Don't ask what it is,” said Stanley. “Just chow it down. It's great for you, man. So you guys are getting married. That's really far out. Did you tell everyone yet? I mean family.”

“It's entirely official now,” said Vincent.

“That's really something,” said Stanley. “Wait till you meet all of us. Wait till you meet my brother Michael, but we don't call him Michael. We all call him Muggs. He married this girl named Nancy and we all call her Ninny. Muggs and Ninny.”

“What do Muggs and Ninny do?” Vincent asked.

“Well, Ninny teaches children how to be more artistically aware,” said Stanley. “And Muggs is carrying on the great Berkowitz song-writing tradition. Did you tell Vincent about Muggs's opera?”

“No,” said Misty.

“What opera?” said Vincent.

“Muggs wrote this opera,” said Stanley. “It's called
Thirteen in Miami
. It's about how the apocalypse takes place during this lavish bar mitzvah at the Fontainebleau Hotel, but no one will produce it because they all think it's too strange. So Muggs writes movie music and makes a lot of dough.”

Misty sighed. Getting married changed everything. Here she was sitting on the floor eating out of a communal pot with her husband-to-be, her cousin, and her cousin's girlfriend. This was the sort of evening you preserved in amber, against your will, and found it years later as a pre-nuptial memory. Perhaps she would remember it with fondness. Perhaps she would remember Sybel as adorable. Perhaps she would remember herself as adorable. How she hated it all. What she wanted to do was to go down to City Hall and get it over with. She stared glumly at her plate. Sybel was giving them a lecture on nutrition.

“You can kill your cells with bad food,” she said. “People won't face the fact that the way they eat is just like suicide only slower. Another thing is that your spine is the center of your energy and what you eat goes directly into your spine. If anything happens to your spine, that's it. This masseur I go to can tell everything that's wrong with you from your spine. I mean, he told me that I had a potassium deficiency and he was right. He could tell just from my back. This dancer I knew had stomach trouble only he didn't know he did and this masseur diagnosed it. I mean, if you eat wrong, your spine starts to atrophy. People think neurosis is in your mind but it's in your spine.”

Misty uttered a silent prayer that Stanley would never marry Sybel or anyone like her. Finally, they finished their mint tea, Sybel finished her lecture, and it was time to go home.

Sybel and Stanley walked ahead. Misty and Vincent strolled some distance behind.

“Is Sybel a runaway slave?” said Vincent. “Or is there something wrong with her feet? She seemed to have some sort of shackles on her ankles.”

“Those are her leg weights,” said Misty. “She says they keep her calf muscles clear and full of physical intelligence.”

“She ought to try wrapping one around her head,” said Vincent.

“Vincent,” said Misty, “can we go to City Hall to get married? Just the two of us? Can't we elope?”

“Are you ashamed of marrying me in public?” said Vincent.

“We can have a reception afterward. Please, Vincent, if we're going to do it, let's just do it.”

“Okay,” said Vincent. “It's nice to know you want it done. Of course, this will break our mothers' hearts. My father called today and told me that no time has been wasted. Your mother wrote my mother and my mother wrote your mother and their letters crossed. Now they've been on the telephone cooing to each other. They've dug up this ecumenical team—a rabbi and minister act who are all set to go.”

“I can't stand this,” said Misty. “I will not have drippy relatives talking to me about mixed marriages. I want to get a blood test, a license, and get married.”

“Think of the presents we won't get,” said Vincent.

“Don't you worry,” said Misty fiercely. “We'll get.”

That night, they made a few decisions. Misty's apartment was well equipped but small. Vincent's was bare, but large. He also had furniture in storage, left to him by a childless great uncle. Therefore it was decided that Vincent's apartment would be painted and that they would move into it. Misty's lease was almost up, which Vincent took as providential.

The next day, she began to pack her books, arrange her clothes, and get estimates from moving companies.

That evening, after dinner, they went to Vincent's to get the lay of the land. His kitchen, which had been used only to boil water in, was bigger than Misty's. The living room looked out over the tops of the London plane trees on the street. There was a big bedroom and a small, empty room that looked perfect for a double study. Vincent had two large closets. One was filled with clothes. The other was filled with junk.

From this closet he removed a large steamer trunk and began to unpack it. Inside there was a Santa Claus costume; a soccer trophy; crumpled diplomas from the Petrie Country Day School and its kindergarten; a Boy Scout banner and a good citizen award on a scroll; a needlepoint tennis racket cover that bore a portrait of Alex, the Cardworthy terrier who had died when Vincent was fifteen; a copy of a book entitled
Your Tropical Fish
by someone called Eugene Cardworthy, who was not a relative; and an unopened pack of Hawaiian cigarettes. Vincent looked at the cigarettes with puzzlement.

“I've never been to Hawaii,” he said. “I didn't know they made their own cigarettes. I wonder where I got them from. Don't smirk at that Santa Claus outfit. I was a Santa Claus for charity at college.” He rummaged happily in the trunk. “Look at this!” He held up a blue T-shirt on whose front the words
GARBAGE HERO
had been stenciled.

“I hired myself out on a sanitation crew for two weeks when I was doing a time-motion study,” he said. “The fellows made this up for me. One of them said: ‘You think of us as garbage collectors, but we think of you as garbage producers.'”

“This is like living in a museum devoted to adolescence,” said Misty.

Misty had almost no souvenirs. It took her three days to pack. The only thing she carried over by hand was her glass photograph and a bronze lamp she had bought in Paris that had two tulip-shaped glass shades. The people in the photograph were her ancestors—the Jewish homesteaders of Medicine Stone, Wisconsin.

Within a month, Vincent's apartment began to look less like a waiting room and more like a home. His furniture was out of storage and there was now an oak dining table with four chairs, a settee, a desk for the study, and a large painting of a sandhill crane to hang over the fireplace.

Vincent hung the glass photograph in the bedroom.

“Medicine Stone,” said Vincent musingly. “What a wonderful name.”

“It was immortalized in song by my Uncle Bernie,” said Misty. “He wrote the song about Prout's Hen that Stanley told you about.”

“Sing it,” said Vincent.

“Okay,” said Misty. “It's the Berkowitz family anthem, which as you know is called ‘Dancing Chicken':

I've been to London, England

And I've been to Paris, France

Now I wanna go home

Back to Medicine Stone

And watch Prout's chicken dance.

I wanna watch them chickens dance

It's more like a strut but it means romance

Back to back, feather to feather

When Prout's chickens get together.

“Sing it again,” said Vincent. “I have to memorize it. Is that Uncle Bernie's only song?”

“He wanted to write a follow-up about Attwater's Prairie Chicken, but he never got around to it.”

A few days later, Vincent and Misty had blood tests and, much faster than Misty had anticipated, obtained a marriage license. They decided they wanted witnesses after all. Vincent would have Guido and Holly, and Misty would have Maria Teresa Warner and Stanley. Sybel was not allowed to come. The night before their excursion to City Hall, they were stricken with insomnia.

“My hands are cold and my feet are burning,” said Vincent, throwing off the covers.

“I'm starving,” said Misty.

“I don't understand that. We had a huge dinner.”

“We didn't have dinner,” said Misty.

“We didn't? I don't remember not having dinner.”

“I don't feel very well,” said Misty.

“I've lost my memory,” said Vincent. “Let's get up and be nervous.”

They stood in front of the refrigerator.

“You can have yogurt, bananas, or yogurt and bananas,” said Misty. “Or you can have peanut butter and jelly or you can have a bunch of wilted watercress.”