Outside, a cool evening wind tossed around the first fallen leaves. The air smelled faintly of wood smoke, from the fireplace of some nearby brownstone, Sadie knew. A fleet of town cars ordered by Dr. Roth—Lil had thought everyone could just take the subway—stood at the curb, waiting to ferry guests to Williamsburg. The conventional part of the wedding was over. The unconventional would now begin: instead of a sit-down dinner, with carefully contrived seating charts, guests would sit wherever they liked and eat the fried chicken, ribs, sautéed greens, pickled beets, macaroni and cheese, mashed potatoes, and corn bread laid out on long tables in the back bedroom. “It’s all served room temperature, like a picnic,” Lil had told them that afternoon, ignoring Rose and Elaine’s shared sigh.
The trees along Fifth formed a dark outline against the darkening sky, and the synagogue’s doorman guided the guests into the polished, snub-nosed cars, which glided off down the avenue, streetlights stringing a long chain behind them. Beth, Emily, and Sadie walked through the synagogue’s oversized doors, Dave and Tal close on their heels. They breathed in the smoky air and turned to one another, smiling.
“That was beautiful, wasn’t it?” said Beth brightly, reluctantly pulling her old brown raincoat over her thin dress, a maroon satin she’d purchased at Milwaukee’s one good shop, Dave maddeningly in mind. A week before, she thought it beautiful, perfect, magical, but the moment she zipped it up, at Sadie’s, she saw that it was wrong, horribly wrong—nothing like the sleek, fitted things the other girls wore—with its childish row of buttons down the front, its prim little collar, its empire waist and tie at the back, the sort of style they’d worn in college, over engineer boots and tights.
“You did good,” said Emily, elbowing Beth. “Not a dry eye in the house.”
“We better get down there,” Beth said, flushing with embarrassment and flinging her hand south, in what she thought to be the general direction of Brooklyn.
“Definitely,” said Sadie.
But, it seemed, there were no more town cars left. Dr. Roth hadn’t ordered quite enough, or perhaps there were more guests than he’d accounted for.
“It’s those friends of Tuck’s,” said Sadie, shaking her head. She had, in the end, worn her hair down. “They just showed up!”
“What?” asked Beth. “They weren’t invited?”
“No,” Emily told her, eyebrows raised. “You didn’t hear about this?”
“They’re a band,” Sadie explained. “I can’t remember what they’re called, and they’re in town for the weekend, staying with that couple, Tuck’s friends from Atlanta—”
“Not the people with the baby,” clarified Emily. “The others. The woman has a Southern accent—”
“And she told them that they should just come along.”
“Does Tuck even know them?” marveled Beth.
Emily nodded. “They were friends in high school.”
“Oh,” said Beth. This didn’t seem so terrible. Though, she supposed, to Rose Peregrine it was more terrible than terrible. From time to time Sadie vehemently agreed with her mother, to her friends’ surprise.
“They just showed up,” she said now, shrugging her shoulders furiously into her shiny mass of curls. “With their girlfriends. You saw those girls, right, in the fifties dresses?”
“Crazy,” said Emily, smiling at Beth.
“It is,” said Sadie, settling her mouth in an angry line.
“Hey,” said Tal, touching his long fingers to Sadie’s arm. “I’ll get us a cab.”
“We’ll need two.”
“Then I’ll get us two.”
“Okay.” Sadie appeared chastened, cowed. She looked up at Tal through her lashes. “Thank you.”
“What band?” Dave asked.
Sadie looked at him and sighed.
“What?” he said, holding up his hands in a gesture of exaggerated innocence. “There are a lot of good bands coming out of Atlanta right now.” But Sadie already had her arm stretched up and out into the night sky, her face eclipsed by the yellow lights of an oncoming cab.
The Times and the Voice and Time Out and New York had all declared Lil and Tuck’s neighborhood—a section of Williamsburg east of the BQE and generally referred to as Graham Avenue, for the L stop that serviced it—the next spot for artists and writers, which meant, of course, that it would really be the next spot for whoever could afford the newly inflated rents and newly opened bistros. But Lil and Tuck’s block—a treeless stretch of Bushwick Avenue, punctuated with twisted subway grates—radiated a forcible menace after dark. “Isn’t that a gang tag?” asked Tal, pointing at a swath of graffiti on the steel gate of a bait shop.
They stood on the curb, poised to enter the loft, from which emanated a few tentative strains of Coltrane, a hundred chatting voices, and the faint odor of cigarette smoke.
“Crips,” confirmed Dave. Since moving back to Brooklyn a few months earlier, Dave had come to consider himself an aficionado of street culture, to the amusement of his friends.
“Yes, Dave, the Crips operate all the bait-and-tackle shops in Greater Brooklyn,” murmured Sadie, furtively running lipstick over her mouth without the aid of a mirror.
“Um, I’m sorry,” said Dave, “but aren’t you the person who visited this borough for the first time at some point during our junior year of college. And aren’t you the person who had to ask Emily for directions to Prospect Park—”
Emily held up her hands like a conductor. “Enough, peoples. We’re going in.”
Inside, they found themselves packed into a throng of ancients: the white-headed aunts, innumerable thin, tan ladies in dramatic evening gowns (leopard-print chiffon, yellow sari silk shot through with gold) and slim-cut suits, a half dozen corpulent, balding men possessed of a vaguely mafiosi demeanor, scads of professorial types in bow ties and wire glasses (“Columbia people,” whispered Sadie knowingly, though Emily, who was from the South, suspected they were Tuck’s Atlanta relatives). As they pushed their way back to the bar—set up in Lil and Tuck’s second bedroom, a luxury afforded by Tuck’s new job—the crowd grew progressively younger: First, baby boomers, the women in rough-weave shifts. Then, Tuck’s thirtyish friends: the baby people, drinking Perrier; the band guys, in threadbare suits and skinny ties, and their girls, hair cut in retro bobs; a troupe of handsome preppy types, indistinguishable from one another in their dark suits and pale blue shirts. And finally, their own friends, the corollary members of their little group, like Maya Decker, who’d flown in from Houston, where she was dancing with a big modern company, and Abe Hausman, who was back at Oberlin, strangely, on some new philosophy postdoc, and Robin Wilde, Lil’s freshman-year roommate, whom they all found a little quiet and dull (“but sweet,” Beth was always quick to add).