The Solace of Leaving Early (24 page)

“Good morning,” he whispered.

“Amos, I was having a dream,” Langston said quietly, without raising her head.

“What was it?”

“I was in the yard at Beulah’s, sitting at the picnic table; the girls were on the sidewalk, pretending to be a marching band. And I saw this butterfly, a very big, beautiful butterfly, sailing around the roof of the trailer and up near the power lines. I called out to the girls, ‘Look! It’s a monarch! You might never see another of these,’ but I couldn’t get their attention. And then it flew toward me, and it was really quite big, like the size of a small cat, and landed on my arm. It was very light. I called the girls again, but they still wouldn’t look. So I picked it up by the body part, you know, not the wings, and raised it up to look it in the face, and it was a woman, it was Mary, I recognized her right away. She just looked at me, she didn’t say anything, but I realized I’d been wrong about her, I could see it in her face. That whole humility and patience thing? that’s completely bogus, that’s not her at all. She’s quite competent and smart; she has a lot on her mind, and she wants us all to get busy.”

“She didn’t speak to you?”

“Didn’t open her mouth.”

“And then what happened?”

“And then you woke me up by staring at me.” Langston sat up and tried to straighten her spine.

“Beulah is alive.”

Langston stopped moving. “She is?”

“No—I mean—
yes
. We all thought. She had a heart attack, but the damage wasn’t—I can’t remember the words he used. She’s very tired, feels terrible, the doctor said, but she’ll probably be home in a week or so. On medication. Diet and exercise and do something about her cholesterol, he said.”

She sat back in the chair, watching him.

“Langston, we need to talk, and my knees are starting to worry about how long I might stay on the floor.”

“Here,” she said, scooting her chair back. “Sit on the edge of the bed. You won’t bother Immaculata.”

Amos sat down and rested his elbows on his knees. He found it difficult to face Langston in this half-light; he didn’t know if he could trust himself to speak. “The girls can’t live with their grandmother anymore,” he began, and Langston nodded. “She has named us, you and me, I mean, their legal co-guardians.”

Langston blinked repeatedly, and Amos hadn’t expected this, this frightened look. He thought she’d come out swinging, especially when she realized they had equal power, that Amos couldn’t make decisions about the children without her.

“And so, it’s going to be your decision, too, where they live, and maybe you think they should move in with you and Walt and AnnaLee, but I’ve been hoping—”

“I don’t want them to live there,” she said.

“Well, now see, I don’t want them to, either. Because it wouldn’t be, I don’t think it would be fair to your parents, and also the parsonage is so big, I have three bedrooms and that great big study, I just rattle around—”

“No, no, that’s good. That would be perfect for them.”

“Wait, it’s not just—” Amos actually reached out and rested his hand on her knee, not caring if he crossed boundaries or behaved inappropriately. He was so afraid she’d misunderstand, then flee before he could mend the damage. “—it isn’t just the girls I’m thinking of here, Langston. I think the three of you should stay together, anything else would hurt them immeasurably, and what I want is—”

She didn’t say anything, just continued to stare at him (her eyes were the oddest color, some crazy mixture of green and gold and dark brown), and so finally he just said it. “I want you with me, I want us all together, the four of us, and you can—oh, and Germane! of course, I want Germane there, too—and you can share my study. You can work right at my desk, and I’ll add more bookcases, I’m gone most days, but! but I can be in and out and do anything you want, I’m very self-sufficient, I would be responsible for all the housework and the cooking, I would never see you as a—”

And before he knew what had happened, before he saw it coming at all, Langston had her face buried in his shirt, she was crying so hard the whole bed began to shake. So he stood and pulled her to him, as close as he’d ever held another person, and she cried and cried, there seemed to be no end to it. He thought she might very well cry until morning, and he wouldn’t have minded. There were worse ways to spend the last hours of a long night.

“This is a small town,” he whispered into her hair, “and we can’t just live together. Do you understand what I’m asking you?” She nodded.

He could cover her back with his hands, he could enclose the long, thin nape of her neck with just his fingers, the back of her head could rest in his palms. They stood that way a long time, Langston crying as if she would never recover, and Amos standing still and taking his measure of her.

 

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

LANGSTON

“To be perfectly honest, I never thought I’d see the day,” Grandma Wilkey said, taking the lid off the box Walt had carried down from her attic.

“No, neither did I,” Langston said, sitting on the edge of the chair in her grandmother’s bedroom, a beautiful rocker trimmed in mahogany and covered in dusky pink velvet.

“You never seemed much the marrying kind.”

“No, I’m really not.”

“Here it is,” her grandmother said, taking out a yellowed newspaper clipping sealed in plastic. She handed it to Langston.

Rev. W. T. Thompson, pastor, read the vows. The setting for the ceremony included palms and two baskets of Fall flowers. Illumination was provided by tapers in candelabra.

“The veil isn’t usable, of course, even though I had it cleaned and placed in storage right after the ceremony, and it’s been packed in mothballs ever since. But look here, it’s completely, what’s wrong with this, good heavens.”

The bridal colors in the flowers and gowns were shades of brown graduating from deep brown to copper to beige.

“But the dress is . . . here, let me unfold this . . . Langston, dear?”

She wore a gown of ivory satin with a small train and portrait neckline. The veil of white net embroidered with flowers fell from a braided white satin coronet of seed pearls.

“Just like new. You’re a bit thin for it, of course.”

She carried white roses on a white Bible with rosebuds knotted in white satin streamers.

“Do you want to try it on?”

“This was all so long ago,” Langston said, still looking at the newspaper announcement.
For the ceremony, the bride’s mother chose a cocoa colored gown accented with gold beading at the neckline. Her corsage was white gardenias.
“It all seems so . . .” She lay down the newspaper and pressed her fingertips against her eyes. When she opened them, for a moment all she could see were ghosts: the glowing outline of the oval, full-length mirror; her grandmother in the bright afternoon light, holding the dress aloft; spots in the air, floating like flowers. “Oh,” she said, blinking, “that’s beautiful, Grandma, what a beautiful dress.” Langston stood and walked toward it, the slippery satin spilling from the hanger like milk.

“We’ll have to take it in at the waist,” her grandmother said, gathering up an inch on each side. “Women were more substantial in my day.”

Langston held the dress up in front of her as her grandmother continued to sort through the contents of the box. The dress would be perfect, after the alterations.

“Your mother tells me you’ve asked her just to plan everything? You’re not taking any role in your own wedding?”

Langston shook her head. “I wouldn’t have the first idea how to conform to the mores of small-town weddings, Grandma. I know there’s supposed to be that white cake and the icing made from Crisco, but that’s all. Oh, and the nuts and things. But I wouldn’t know whom to invite, or if one simply issues an invitation to the whole town, or how far afield I should . . . yes. Yes, I’ve asked Mama just to take care of it all.”

Her grandmother sat down on the edge of the bed, smoothing out her skirt.
For traveling, the bride changed to a three piece navy and white checked suit. Her hat was navy blue velvet and her other accessories were navy.
“Sit down here with me, Langston.”

Langston sat down, reluctantly.

“You may know that when your grandfather proposed to me he already had two hundred acres of land, and a fair amount of livestock, nearly three hundred head of Hereford cattle, and I came with a hundred acres as a dowry.”

“I didn’t know that, no.”

“Your grandfather and I worked on this farm from the day we married; three hundred acres isn’t much, and we had to be smart. But we started out knowing what sort of plan we had to follow and how to go about it. We were thrifty and worked as a team.”

“I’m not exactly profligate myself.”

“I never said you were. I just wonder if you’ve really thought about this, about what it means to be someone’s right hand. Amos Townsend is a decent man, I’m sure, but his prospects—”

“You find it hard to imagine me a preacher’s wife?”

“That’s the long and short of it, yes. I wonder if you know what it entails? I wonder if you know about the church picnics and the phone calls in the middle of the night—”

“Grandma,” Langston began, holding up her hand.

“Do you realize that he’ll never earn a decent wage, that you don’t own your own home, that you’ll never have anything but secondhand cars? And now you’ll be raising someone else’s children?”

Langston felt as if she’d been slapped; or worse, as if Amos and the girls had been slapped in front of her. “When you got married, Grandma, did you know you’d lose a son? And that your grandson would become a manufacturer of drugs and flee the family? Did you know you’d outlive your husband by so many years? Didn’t you fail to reckon on far greater griefs than church picnics and banal sermons?”

Her grandmother looked away from Langston, her back stiff. “I never said anything about banal sermons.”

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry I said all that.”

“Langston, just tell me this one thing,” her grandmother said, looking her in the eye. “Are you doing this for those children, or for yourself?”

Langston stood, then bent and kissed her grandmother’s cheek. She thought of the things she might say:
I’m doing it for all of us,
or
I’ll know who I am because I did it
. But all she said was, “I don’t know, Grandma, honestly. Whoever knows what they’re doing at a wedding?”

*

At the Holiday Dry Cleaners in Hopwood, Langston asked the teenage girl at the counter if she could speak to the person who did alterations, and was led back to a small room. A Korean woman in her late sixties stood up from her sewing machine, a tape measure draped around her neck, and offered Langston a slight bow.

Langston bowed in return. “Hello,” she said.

“Hello, I am Mrs. Li.” She bowed.

“I’m Langston Braverman,” she said, bowing.

“You have a dress?”

“No. I do, but I don’t think I want you to change it.”

“Yes?”

“I’d like a new dress. I’d like for you to make it for me.”

“Make a new dress? You have a pattern?”

“No, there’s no pattern, but I have it in my mind and I can tell you all about it. I’m sure you can do it. All you need is a good eye and a steady hand.”

“Okay.” Mrs. Li bowed.

Langston bowed and drew her a picture.

*

When Langston got home the girls were on the front porch playing with the new dolls Amos had given them, Astronaut Barbie and Doctor Barbie. Germane lay beside them, in the shade. Langston sorely disapproved of the whole concept of Barbie, and was able to quote at length the many feminist theses on the early identification with distorted body image (including the well-worn statistics of what Barbie’s measurements would be if she were a real woman) and had explained as much to Amos, who listened with care and then asked the children if they wanted to play with the Barbies and they said yes and so he gave the dolls to them. There were bugs to be ironed out yet in their arrangement.

“Hello, chiclets,” she said as she passed them.

“Hello, Langley,” Immaculata said, as Langston opened the screen door.

“Hello, Spangston.”

She stepped back out onto the porch. “Did you say ‘Spangston’?”

Epiphany nodded.

“I rather like that one.”

Inside, her mother was sitting at the dining room table going over the guest list. In the past few weeks AnnaLee had taken to wearing reading glasses of the half-moon variety, which Langston thought suited her splendidly.

“Mother, I’m not wearing Grandma Wilkey’s wedding dress.”

AnnaLee looked at her over the top of the glasses.

“And I don’t want that Crisco cake or any nuts or lard mints. And I’d like to decide what will be said at the ceremony—along with Amos, of course—and I don’t want any traditional wedding music, none at all, I want only the Schubert in E-flat, and also the aria from
The
Marriage of Figaro
. And I’d like to have the reception outside, in the meadow next to the church, under a tent.”

“Is that all?”

“I would like Giant Fizzies available for the children. And we can have cake, but not that kind.”

“I understand. Has something happened you’d like to tell me about?”

Langston shook her head. “No, nothing has happened.”

AnnaLee looked back down at the notebook on the table. “Would you like to go over the guest list with me, then?”

Langston waved the list away, heading back outside to the children. “Mama, I
told
you—I don’t care who you invite. This is essentially your social affair.” She stepped outside, and then back in. “But make sure you invite Dr. Harrison, because he’s been so good to Beulah. Oh, and send an invitation to Aunt Gail, just as a gesture.”

“Aunt Gail is crazy, Langston.”

Langston stopped, half in and half out of the door. “Half of the people you’ve invited are crazy, Mama. We must not let that stop us from having a good time.”