Split (44 page)

"I'm so glad you're here," he said, pulling me into the room and shutting the door. His face was wild. "I was watching this nature show, it was about rats, and they were writhing around in their little dens, squeaking and squeaking."

Normally Mau loved a nature show. But this time it failed to have its usual calming effect. He was pacing around the hotel room.

"So, what happened?" I asked, following him back and forth.

"I don't know, I just lost it."

During the year the wedding was in the works, Mau had behaved as if he would be a guest at the party, albeit a special guest with special privileges. When I was trying to pick a caterer and decide between seven fixed menus—each one pre-planned from hors d'oeuvre to entrée—I asked him if he wanted input. "Look, I can either explain all the choices," I said, the menus in a jumble before me, "or I can just make a decision without you."

"Oh, no," he said, "I want to have input."

I had to admit I was relieved.

"I'd like a green salad to start," he said, cocking his head to the side as he imagined the plate, "with a vinaigrette, a simple pasta, maybe pasta primavera, a fruit salad (fresh, no syrup), nice bread." He waved a hand in the air, animated by his order, then caught sight of my face. "What? What's that look?"

That look—blanched, slack jawed—was: my god, I'm going to live with this man for the rest of my life.

But under the huppah, I managed to remember the things I'd scribbled on hotel stationery during the night, and I held on to his hand and said them to him.

Then the glass was stomped, and we went into the hall to dance, limp with relief and amazed to see all the people that we loved, together for a night under one roof. Mau's mother and stepfather pushed aside their plates and did a tango in a corner before the dinner was finished. My father was roused to some vintage disco moves by the Commodores' "Brick House," and when I joined him the guests opened into a ring. At first I felt embarrassed, but my father, who never disappointed a crowd, got some superhuman burst of energy and started doing floor taps and scraps of the hustle. His shirt was soaked through. He was ecstatic. I tried to keep up, laughing so hard I could scarcely breathe, and as I spun I caught flashes of my friends' faces. Wendy, in particular, was hysterical with delight to see those gestures, which I had tried to render during our college days, performed by the true original.

My little brother, by then ten, had been assigned to videotape the occasion, based on a piece of roving video reportage he made for fourth-grade show-and-tell. In the end he was too discouraged to bring it to class, but I thought it was a hoot: a cinéma vérité tour of the family medicine chest and the graffiti on my sister's bedroom wall, complete with doleful voice-over. But as a wedding videographer, he was a disaster. The tape, when we watched it later, was mostly black, as Little Jim, soured by the party for which there had been so much buildup and which turned out to be a loud occasion for grownups, toured the patio and the far reaches of the lawn, beyond the reach of the lights.

"I really can't see much out here," you could hear him mumbling. "There are some people out by the trees. There—if I press Backlight I can kinda get a bead on them." Once in a while he would make a quick pass through the party. There was a blurred glimpse of Jim Senior against a wall, smiling and mum. Mia and me dancing to some tinny Caribbean music—"I know how to make 'em dance," the DJ said—filmed before my father gave the man guidance.

At one point my cousin thrust his face into the frame, baring his teeth and flipping his eyelids inside out. "Hey, Danny," my brother said, snickering from behind the lens. "We can watch this when we get back to the hotel."

When I first saw my brother's tape, I wanted to throttle him. But after a while it seemed just as well. I had wanted to fix that day down to its particulars, wanted to revisit the whirl from a fresh angle, but it couldn't be fixed. That was the poignancy of arriving at a moment of such completed feeling; half our delight came from the knowledge that we couldn't linger, that time would keep carrying us away.

 

Toward the end of the evening, I went to the bathroom to cool off and dry my face, and when I returned I caught sight of my mother and father across the room. They were lost in conversation, seated at a table with their heads bent together, my Grandma Leila between them. Someone spoke—I was too far off to make it out—and they all threw their heads back and laughed.

Over the years, my mother and father had held terse phone conversations, brief exchanges in motel parking lots, and shared five stiff minutes on the sidewalk at my college graduation, but I had never seen them together like this. I could tell from across the room it was an exchange of another order.

When I walked over, my mother turned toward me and smiled, a smile that seemed to reach through me, to some ap preciation of a glad hour. My father leaned back in his chair, surveying the room—my sisters bent over a table of my college friends, Leslie talking to Mau's great-grandmother, and finding out, we would later learn, that she hailed from a Polish village much like the one my great-grandmother had left a century before. My father has a nose for social phoniness, but I could see from his expression that it came up real. Or at least that's how it seemed to me then. I don't know why I should be any authority on them, these people who raised me. I come to them with such expectations.

"Look, here's the bride," my grandmother said, waving me to a chair. "I was just telling your mother she should write a book. You know, I still remember her letters?" She twirled the stem of her water glass. "She could take a casual day and make it interesting."

I smiled at her. I had heard this before, enough times to wonder how far the thread traveled. "What about you, Grandma, did you ever want to write?"

"Who, me?" She squinted slightly and looked away. "I was never any good at writing."

My father leaned forward and covered his mother's hand. "How could you have been a writer, Ma? No one encouraged you."

We sat for a moment in silence, the party whirling around us: my mother, my father, my grandmother, and me. Sometimes, we are peopled by our gratitude. Just then it seemed that I'd become what they—that sleek couple from the Grand Central photo booth, posed here together after thirty years—had given me, a girl with enough wild days to fill a story, and the faith to think I could tell it.