In fact, it did. Lil understood now why jewels were once considered amulets, investing their wearers with supernatural powers. With the large diamond glinting on her left hand, she felt herself to be a new and different Lil, one capable of doing anything, going anywhere. At night, she and Tuck drank brandy out of tumblers and talked about writing novels and making documentaries and moving to Romania. By day, whispering furtively into her office phone, she negotiated with caterers and jazz quartets and the Sisterhood of Temple Emanu-El, the Peregrines’ synagogue, and the only venue Lil considered acceptable for the ceremony, despite the fact that she was not, of course, a member, nor was she from the sort of family that belonged to Emanu-El, with fortunes in banking, real estate in the vicinity of Park, and rarefied German lineage. Her grandfather had sold black bread from a cart on Orchard Street and her father was a plastic surgeon who catered to the faces of Hollywood’s third tier, preferred pastrami from Langer’s to sushi, and on Fridays brought home prune danish from Fairfax, where the Orthodox lived in large pink houses. But Lil had Rose Peregrine—secretary of the Sisterhood, member of every possible committee, and the preschool’s board of directors—and thus, by July, Lil had a date in the Beth-El Chapel, and by September a dress, heavy and autumnal, from the sample rack at Kleinfeld, where she’d journeyed alone, taking perhaps too much pleasure in the fuss the saleswomen made over her small waist. As the month wore on and the hot, humid weather continued unabated, she began to wonder if she should have gone with her second choice: a dead-white ballerina dress, with delicate off-the-shoulder sleeves and a full tulle dancing skirt. But she kept such fears to herself, for Sadie and Emily were irritated that they hadn’t been invited on the buying trip. In fact, she avoided talking about the wedding whenever possible, as her friends, she was realizing, were, despite their alleged enthusiasm, a bit, well, weirded out by it. Beth grew silent when Lil told her, gleefully, that Tuck had found them a new apartment, a loft big enough to hold the reception. Dave got crabby when she recounted the talents of the jazz band they’d enlisted—a bunch of NYU students—for a cut rate. He’d just dropped out of Eastman, moved back to New York, and joined a band himself, though not the sort of band that played at weddings, of course.
“They’ll probably suck,” he said.
“No, they’re great,” she assured him. “We heard them play at Aggie’s.”
“Aggie’s,” said Dave. “Whatever.”
Only Tal seemed, however vaguely, to approve of the nuptials in general, and Lil’s plans specifically. After college he’d broken from his parents almost completely—they still barely spoke—but he’d never quite shaken their conservative bent, at least toward things like marriage and family. He smiled at babies in the park and had, on occasional Sundays, been caught reading the “Vows” column. “It’s sweet,” he said. “Especially the old people.”
But as the day approached, the girls began to grow excited. This wedding—which had seemed some elaborate game of make-believe, some goofy lark—was really, actually, truly going to take place. Lil was going to walk down the aisle in a big dress, with a fluffy veil and maybe even a bouquet (her mother and Rose Peregrine were insisting, offering to pay), get married, and become Lillian Roth-Hayes.
“It sounds like a bank, doesn’t it?” Dave said the night before the wedding, after the rehearsal dinner, as they sat around Tal’s big apartment on Union drinking beer, their toes picking at the frills of mismatched linoleum that emerged from the floor. Lil and Tuck had gone home to bed. Beth was, at that moment, stranded in Pittsburgh. She’d had to stay in Milwaukee later than she’d anticipated, and Lil was pretty put out that she’d cut it so close and missed the dinner (“She couldn’t have flown in yesterday?”).
“No, a law firm,” insisted Emily, who had temped at many such firms. “I can totally see the letterhead.”
“A midlevel brand of dress shirt,” suggested Sadie.
“It sounds pretty great, actually,” said Tal. His friends looked at one another, unsure if he was kidding. “I like it. It’s kind of regal.” He wrinkled his nose with self-deprecation. “Or British.”
“Sort of,” said Sadie, prodding his corduroyed thigh with her foot.
“It’s nice,” he said. “You guys—” He shook his head. “It’s nice that they’re combining their names.” And they all grew silent, ashamed, looking down their noses into their sweating bottles of beer, for the truth was, they agreed. Some of their mothers—feminists, children of the 1960s—had kept their own names, even if just professionally, which the girls thought dry and unromantic. They had all been thinking, separately, that when they married (if they married), they would do as Lil did and hyphenate, or turn their original family names into middle names.
The next morning, at promptly nine o’clock, Emily arrived at the Peregrine house on East Ninety-second, breathless and apologetic, her dress stuffed into a crumpled grocery bag, followed a few minutes later by Beth, pale hair rising statically from her head, her plump, freckled face arranged in an expression of mild agony. Rose had insisted they meet at this early hour, at her house, to “strategize,” though they’d simply have to journey downtown on errands and then over to Brooklyn to help set up the loft for the reception, and then back uptown to dress for the wedding.
“You look exhausted,” Rose told Beth, once she’d seated the girls at her kitchen table, a massive slab of scarred oak, and placed cups of coffee in front of them. “You just got in last night?”
Beth nodded. “Midnight.” She took a tentative sip of her coffee. “I am exhausted. It took me two hours to get here this morning.”
“Two hours?” Rose cried. “You took the train in? You’re staying at your parents’?”
Beth shook her head.
“She’s in Astoria,” Emily explained. Beth was subletting an apartment from a CUNY prof, an alum of her program who was in Finland on a Fulbright. When she’d signed the sublease, she’d thought, of course, that she’d be arriving in the city at the start of September—the start of the fall semester, her favorite time of year—but there’d been that problem with her credits, which she’d worked out, sort of, by teaching the first section of a “special topics” class. Now her credits were in order, but she had—most likely, it wasn’t entirely clear—lost her New School job, at least for the fall. And paid double rent for a month, which she could ill afford. But she was in New York. That was all that mattered.
“Astoria?” repeated Rose. “Queens?”
“Ye—”
“Isn’t it all Greek there?”
“Not anymore,” Emily told her, spooning a scant bit of sugar into her coffee. “There’s a big Middle Eastern community, too. There’s this great Egyptian restaurant on—”
“You’re living in Astoria, Queens?” Rose repeated, frowning at Beth and cocking her head suspiciously, as though the girls were playing some sort of practical joke on her.
Beth nodded.
“We told her not to take it,” Emily told Rose, giving Beth a little smile. “But she didn’t listen.”
“Well,” said Rose, pulling out a chair and sitting down on Emily’s right. “It’s all the same.” She shrugged. “I don’t understand why you girls insist on living way out in Brooklyn.”