Sister of the Bride (12 page)

“Addie, do you ever worry about using your mind?” one Amy asked another.

“Using it!” Addie Smith said with a laugh. “With four children it's all I can do to keep from losing it! Meals to plan, washing to do—why, just the laundry alone…”

She needn't sound as if she bent over a scrubbing
board, thought Barbara, her feelings still ruffled by the laughter she had brought forth. She knew perfectly well that Mrs. Smith had both an automatic washer and a dryer.

“The chauffeuring to ballet lessons and dental appointments,” continued another mother.

“The P.T.A.,” chorused several.

“Brownies and Cub Scouts,” someone added.

“But I used to feel exactly the same way as the girls,” said one of the members, taking Barbara's side. “When I was first married I conscientiously went to the library once a week and followed a reading list on world affairs. I didn't want to stagnate just because I was married. Until the children came, that is. After that I didn't have much time for world affairs. I was too busy on the home front.”

Thank you, thought Barbara.

“Why, that's right,” said someone, remembering. “When the Amys first became a club we used to give book reviews. I remember giving Jan her bottle while Addie reviewed
The Grapes of Wrath
.” Jan was now married and had two babies of her own.

Gramma leaned over and patted Rosemary's hand. “May all your troubles be little ones.”

The Amys all laughed affectionately at Gramma's
old joke and at Rosemary's pretty confusion. Each had her own memory of the early days of the Amys to share with someone, and soon the club had broken up once more into chatting groups. To cover up her embarrassment Barbara passed cookies and helped Mrs. Bodger carry plates and coffee cups into the kitchen. She felt somewhat better when she overheard an Amy murmur, “The MacLane girls are both lovely girls.” But her pleasure was immediately tempered when the woman added, “Their mother has done such a good job on them.” Barbara did not like to think of herself and her sister as a job her mother had done, as if she and Rosemary were pieces of silver to be polished.

Barbara was glad when the party was finally over and they could say good-bye to the Amys and carry Rosemary's gifts out to the car. She rode in the backseat beside the gifts with a casserole on her lap.

“It was a nice party, wasn't it?” remarked Mrs. MacLane, as she backed the car around and headed toward home.

“Just lovely,” agreed Rosemary.

“Marvelous loot,” was Barbara's comment. She was looking forward to talking over the party with Rosemary when their mother was not present. She
and Rosemary always talked over parties while Rosemary put up her hair, a custom she was going to miss when Rosemary was married.

The only place in the MacLanes' crowded house to store the gifts was in the corner of Barbara and Rosemary's room, and when all the boxes were neatly stacked on the floor and the door was shut, Barbara flopped on her bed and kicked off her shoes. “You said there would be a present from Mrs. Bodger's Secret Pal,” she crowed.

Rosemary smiled but said nothing as she pulled off her dress and slipped into her robe.

“And wouldn't you just know the Amys would think up something like hiding alarm clocks with all the presents?”

“Oh, I don't know,” murmured Rosemary, as she sat down at her desk. “I thought the whole thing was sweet myself.”

Barbara sat up and stared at her sister. “Did you even think it was sweet when they talked about their diets?” she asked incredulously. “All that talk about no starches and Metrecal for lunch.”

“Some of them do have to watch their weight,” Rosemary pointed out. “Lots of people do in middle age.”

Well. This was a surprise. Barbara was both
disappointed and hurt. Her sister had gone over to the enemy camp…well, not the enemy camp exactly. Mothers weren't enemies. She was a…traitor to her own generation. No, traitor wasn't the right word either. Barbara wondered why such warlike words came to mind when she thought about the friction between the generations. “You'd better look out,” she said, “or you'll turn into an Amy yourself someday. You'll go around laughing at your children and talking about diets. You might even have a Secret Pal who gives you pot holders trimmed with sequins.”

“I doubt it,” said Rosemary as she opened her notebook, “but next semester I think I'll join the Dames.”

“And what are the Dames?” demanded Barbara, beginning to undress.

“A club for wives of students,” answered Rosemary.

“What do they do?” Barbara was always curious about university life.

“Oh—things like having someone talk on nutrition and how to get the most out of the food dollar,” said Rosemary.

At least this was on a higher plane than the Amys, who were inclined to exchange cookie recipes. It
was evidence that the Dames used their minds.

“And at the end of each semester there is a party,” continued Rosemary with a mischievous smile. “That is when the girls who work while their husbands go to school are awarded their PhT degree.”

Barbara had heard of a PhD degree, but never of a PhT. This was a new one. “What does that stand for?” she asked, pulling on her nightgown.

“Putting Hubby Through,” answered Rosemary, laughing.

Barbara groaned. “They sound every bit as bad as the Amys. Worse even.”

“Maybe,” agreed Rosemary, “but they have fun.” She thought a moment before she said, “And so do the Amys.”

Barbara slipped into bed and snapped off her light. “You just wait,” she said darkly. “Someday you will have a Secret Pal.”

“It might even be fun,” said Rosemary calmly from the circle of light cast by her study lamp. “And in the meantime I will use my mind by applying it to Plato.” She, too, might have been making fun of Barbara's remark, even though it had been hers to begin with.

“You're not going to study,” protested Barbara
incredulously, “not after a party!”

“Far, far into the night,” answered Rosemary, reaching for a roller for her hair. Since she had gone away to college, she had learned to put up her hair while reading. It was a great time-saver.

Barbara closed her eyes and pretended to be asleep, but for a long time she lay awake, engulfed in a new feeling of loneliness. She was losing Rosemary, and it hurt. She was going to miss poking fun at her mother's club; she was going to miss talking over parties. She already missed sharing the same instant understanding of a situation…. She missed a lot and was going to miss a lot more…. But Rosemary was right about one thing. It had been sweet of the Amys to give the shower…alarm clocks and all.

One evening a few days after the shower Rosemary telephoned to say that because Millie did not have much money, she had decided the bridesmaids should make their dresses for the wedding. This meant Mrs. MacLane and Barbara would have to make the maid-of-honor dress. The patterns and material had been chosen and Rosemary, in a burst of efficiency, had bought Barbara's material and was having the store send it to Bayview. It was sea spray green organza.

Barbara was disappointed at this news. She had pictured a day of shopping and lunch in San Francisco. And what did she get? A sewing job. Mrs. MacLane, although she was glad to save
money, was even more disappointed. She could not imagine when they would find time to make a dress, particularly a dress of organza, which was so slippery to work with. Rosemary seemed to think she was the only member of the family who had anything to do. Perhaps it was natural for a bride to become self-centered with all the attention showered on her, but…

The second bit of news that affected Barbara was even more of a disappointment. Greg had chosen his brother, Bob, a premedical student, to be his best man, which was what Barbara had expected, but the two ushers he chose were both married. This sharply reduced the eligible-man-per-bridesmaid ratio and would, Barbara felt, spoil some of the fun. Oh well. She still had—sort of—Bill Cunningham, even if, in the press of wedding preparations, she was reduced to buying a bag of cookies at the bakery.

“Now, Barbara, you mustn't be disappointed,” said Mrs. MacLane when Barbara had expressed her feelings about ushers with wives. “It is Rosemary's wedding, you know.”

“I know,” agreed Barbara. “But weddings are supposed to be fun.”

Mrs. MacLane looked amused. “There's no reason why you can't have fun.”

“Oh, Mother, you know what I mean,” answered Barbara. “A lot of old married men—”

“I'm afraid I do know what you mean.” Mrs. MacLane looked even more amused. “You were counting on falling in love with someone in the wedding party.”

Barbara did not answer. Her mother need not have put it so directly. Besides, it was not true. She had Bill Cunningham, didn't she? Well, didn't she?

One evening Aunt Josie came over with a copy of
Vogue
to show Mrs. MacLane a picture of a wedding gown. It was a linen dress, worn with a lace veil. Wouldn't it look smart on Rosemary? Barbara studied the picture without enthusiasm. A bride should not look smart. She should look beautiful and romantic. While the two women were discussing wedding dresses, Gordy slouched into the room and leaned against the doorjamb, his arms folded, listening without expression to this feminine conversation. He did not say anything. He just listened, bringing the conversation to a standstill.

“Did you want something, Gordy?” asked Mrs. MacLane.

“I was just thinking,” said Gordy. “Don't people have music at wedding receptions?”

“Why yes, Gordy, sometimes they do,” answered his mother. “People who can afford it.”

“My trio would play for free,” volunteered Gordy. “Just to get experience. It wouldn't cost a cent.”

“Oh no!” Barbara burst out without thinking. “That wouldn't do at all.”

Gordy turned on his sister. “Why not?” he demanded belligerently. “We're getting good.”

“Now, Gordy,” soothed Mrs. MacLane. “What Barbara means—”

Gordy interrupted. “I know what she means. She means—”

It was Barbara's turn to interrupt. “What I mean is, nobody has folk singing at weddings. I didn't mean that you weren't good.” She was anxious to soothe Gordy's feelings if she possibly could. She knew he had not forgotten that kiss on the front steps.

“Why not?” demanded Gordy. “I bet Rosemary would like folk songs at her wedding. She's so modern and all. They have folk singers over at the university all the time.”

This was exactly what Barbara was afraid of.
Rosemary, with her do-it-yourself, let's-keep-to-fundamentals approach to her wedding, might approve of folk singing at the reception.

Mrs. MacLane exchanged a glance with her sister. This was a difficult situation, calling for tact on everyone's part.

Barbara decided to try the reasonable approach. “But, Gordy, you just can't sing songs about having twenty-nine links of chain around your leg or about a frog going courting. Not at a wedding. People would laugh, and you don't want to be laughed at. At wedding receptions people have things like a string quartet playing selections from
Rosemarie
. It says so in the wedding book.”

“Rosemarie!”
Gordy was contemptuous. “Anyway, it isn't your wedding. You keep out of this.”

“What Barbara means,” persisted Mrs. MacLane, “is that folk songs are not exactly appropriate to a wedding. So many of them are sad, and a wedding is a happy occasion.”

Gordy was more willing to listen to his mother than to his sister. “We could learn some happy songs,” he said hopefully.

Barbara wondered about Gordy's idea of a happy song.
She'll Be Comin' Round the Mountain? Old MacDonald Had a Farm?
Probably. The Boy Scout
camp type of thing, like
The Man on the Flying Trapeze
. The picture of the trio, Tim with his horn-rimmed glasses, Al with his blotchy complexion, and Gordy with his hair uncombed, singing at a wedding reception, was so incongruous it was hilarious—or would be, if the wedding was to be in someone else's family.

“No, Gordy,” said his mother gently. “This is a small wedding, and I really don't think a trio would be appropriate. Music is used only at large wedding receptions.”

Gordy was not willing to give up. “You
are
sending out an awful lot of invitations,” he pointed out.

“A lot of them go to people in the East who won't be coming to the wedding,” said Mrs. MacLane patiently.

Gordy seemed to slump. “Okay,” he said. “I just thought I'd ask.” He slouched out of the room, while his mother looked after him with a worried frown. “Poor Gordy,” she murmured when he had gone.

In spite of the wedding the activities of the rest of the MacLane family continued. Mr. MacLane came home later and with more printer's ink on his shirt than usual, because his classes were printing the school yearbook. Mrs. MacLane struggled
with lesson plans for her poor students. Gordy, morose since his trio was not permitted to play at the wedding reception, spent his time after school collecting folk songs at the public library.

Barbara was working on a junior-class committee, which was responsible for putting on a banquet for the seniors. She divided her time between the committee and her bridesmaid dress, which she was eager to finish before Saturday. She hoped then to go to San Francisco with her mother to meet Rosemary and shop for the wedding dress that she, too, would wear someday.

One afternoon, when Barbara returned home after arguing about decorations with the banquet committee, she found that she had forgotten to shut her bedroom door before she left for school and that Buster was asleep on her bed in the midst of her family of stuffed animals. Pooh Bear, she was sure, had another rent on his fat stomach from the cat's claws. “Oh, you!” Barbara muttered, flinging her books on the bed.

Startled, Buster opened his eyes and glared evilly at her. Barbara snatched him from the bed. “You get out of my room and stay out!” She tossed the Siamese into the hall where, not quite awake, he blinked at her. “Scat, scram, shoo!” she said, and
clapped her hands at him.

Gordy, barefoot and wearing a pair of old jeans torn off at the knee, appeared in the door of his room. Barbara had not known he was home. “You leave my cat alone,” he said, picking up Buster and petting his dark head.

“You keep your cat out of my room,” she retorted.

“Why should I?”

“Because he tore another hole in Pooh Bear, that's why!” Barbara seized her bear and showed it to Gordy. “See!” she said indignantly.

“Aw, grow up.” Gordy did not bother to look at Pooh's most recent wound.

This stung Barbara, because it was so close to her feelings about herself. She should grow up. Now that Rosemary was old enough to get married and she soon would be, she had begun to feel that her animals were childish. They were childish and they were
things
that should be put away, but somehow she never found time to do this. “Don't you tell me to grow up,” she retorted. “Don't forget I am three years older than you are.” She should grow up in her relation to Gordy, too. She was tired of their childish bickering. She wanted to stop, but she could not bring herself to give in and
be the first to declare a truce.

“Yeah, old enough to smooch on the front steps with old Bill Cunningham,” said Gordy. Her remarks about his playing at the wedding reception had not helped his feelings toward her.

“We weren't smooching,” cried Barbara. “I wish you wouldn't use that word.”

“When is he going to stop stuffing himself with our cookies and take you out?” asked Gordy.

This stung even more, because Barbara had been wondering the same thing. Until now she had persuaded herself that her family had not noticed this omission on Bill's part. She had been sure her family thought she and Bill were just good friends—pals, buddies, that sort of thing. “Don't worry. He will,” she prophesied, and sincerely hoped her prophecy would come true. She had a lot of cookies invested in Bill.

“Ha!” said Gordy darkly. “That'll be the day.” Even Buster, draped over Gordy's arm as if he had no bones, seemed to leer at Barbara.

“Oh, keep quiet!” Somewhere, Barbara was not sure at exactly what point, she had lost the argument, and she felt humiliated at having to retire in defeat before her brother.

“Why should he take you out when he can hang
around eating cookies and smooching on the front steps?” asked Gordy with a grin. He could afford to grin. He had won the argument.

Barbara tried to salvage a few shreds of dignity. “After all, Bill gives me a ride home. The least I can do to repay him is offer him a cookie and some milk.”

Gordy merely laughed and retired to his room, where he began to strum his guitar. There was nothing left for Barbara to do but retire to her room also, but she closed her door a little harder than necessary when Gordy began to sing
Careless Love
.

Sadly she picked up Pooh and her stuffed penguin and hugged them while she reflected that Gordy had been irritatingly right about a couple of things that afternoon. She was too old for stuffed animals, and Bill had never even hinted at anything more than a ride home on his Vespa, even though he was about to be graduated from high school and would be going to the all-night party sponsored by the P.T.A.

Barbara began to open dresser drawers until she found one of Rosemary's empty. She appropriated it for her animals, because Rosemary would no longer need it. She hugged each animal and pressed it to her cheek before she laid it away.
Then, carried away with the idea of getting rid of nonessential
things
, she cleared her mirror of a clutter of party invitations, dog-eared snapshots, and last year's football pom-pom, and swept them all into the wastebasket.

Barbara was looking around the room, thinking how uncluttered it looked and how much easier to dust, when she noticed that Gordy was no longer singing to taunt her. He was experimenting with a new song that sounded like
Ten Little Indians
, but the words were different. She sat down on her bed to listen.

“Unos et duo tres parvi Indi,”
sang Gordy, fumbling with chords.
“Quattuor quinque et sex parvi Indi, septem et octo et novem parvi Indici, decem pueri Indici.”
Gordy was singing
Ten Little Indians
in Latin.
“Unos et duo tres parvi Indi,”
he began again with different chords.

Barbara understood at once that Gordy's trio was going to sing at the junior high school's annual Latin banquet. Their first public appearance. And as angry as Barbara was with her brother, she was also glad for him. He had worked so hard. She sat on the bed remembering her own Latin banquet, always the high point in junior high school social life in Bayview. Some students were thought to
elect Latin just so they could go to the banquet, wear Roman costumes, and eat lying on the floor.

“Septem et octo et novem parvi Indici,”
sang Gordy, and this time he played his chords with more assurance.

Remembering, Barbara smiled, and at the same time she got up and opened the drawer of stuffed animals, gave Pooh one last pat on his fat stomach, and closed the drawer again.

As the week wore on, it became evident to Barbara that a homemade bridesmaid dress and ushers with wives were not the only disappointments in store for her. On Wednesday her mother talked to Rosemary and arranged to meet her in San Francisco Saturday morning to shop for a wedding dress and a mother-of-the-bride dress. Although Aunt Josie had offered to buy Rosemary a wedding dress at a discount in the store in which she worked, Rosemary insisted this would not do. She did not want her aunt to choose the dress, and that was how it was sure to work out. Nothing was said about Barbara's going to the city.

“Just think, I will be wearing the same dress someday,” remarked Barbara, dropping what she hoped was a tactful hint.

“Maybe,” agreed her mother, who was trying to
sew her way through a cloud of sea spray organza on the dining-room table. “But I can't go through another wedding for years. At least ten years.”

“Mother!” objected Barbara. “I would be twenty-six.”

“Maybe nine years,” conceded Mrs. MacLane.

“Oh, Mother!” Barbara was impatient. “I'll be too old by then.”

In spare moments during the week Barbara helped her mother make her dress for the wedding. Still nothing was said about Barbara's going to San Francisco. It isn't fair, she told herself. It just was not fair for Rosemary to get to choose a dress that they both would wear. When Saturday morning came and she still had not been included, she gave up hoping and somewhat resentfully accepted her mother's instructions to fix a good lunch for Gordy and for her father, unless he decided to work at school. What a disappointment this day was turning out to be—left to mind the home fires while her mother and sister went off for a day of fun and shopping in the city. She felt like Cinderella, left behind while the wicked stepsisters went to the ball.