She only lost two pounds in September. But she had lost eleven in all, so she was halfway to her goal, and looking fit, when Gracie announced in October that she was coming for the weekend to look at wedding gowns, and pick bridesmaids’ dresses, and she wanted Victoria’s help. Victoria wasn’t sure she was ready to do that, but Gracie was the baby sister she loved and could never deny anything to, so she agreed, despite a stack of papers she had to correct that weekend. Her shrink asked why she hadn’t asked Gracie to come some other time. The wedding wasn’t until June.
“I couldn’t do that,” Victoria said honestly.
“Why not?”
“I’m not good at saying no to her. I never do.”
“Why don’t you want her to come this weekend?” They were into total honesty.
“I have work to do,” Victoria said easily as the doctor looked at her and called her on it.
“Is that really the reason?”
“No. I haven’t lost enough weight, and I’m scared she’ll pick a bridesmaid dress I look awful in. All her friends are the same size she is. They’re all a size two or four. They’ve never heard of a size fourteen.”
“You are you. You won’t be a size fourteen by next June,” the doctor reassured her. Victoria hadn’t wavered in her resolve.
“What if I am?” she said with a look of panic. Her dream was to be a size eight. But even a ten would have been thrilling if she could maintain that weight.
“Why do you think you won’t succeed?”
“Because I’m afraid my father’s right, and I’m a loser. Gracie just proved him right again. She’s going to be married at twenty-two to the perfect guy. I’ll be thirty by the time she gets married. I’m still not married. I don’t even have a boyfriend, or a date. And I’m just a schoolteacher.”
“And a good one,” the doctor reminded her. “You’re the head of the English department at the best private high school in New York. That’s not small potatoes.” Victoria smiled at what she said. “Besides, you’re the maid of honor. You can wear a variation or even something entirely different, if she picks something that won’t look good on you. She’s giving you a chance to choose.”
“No,” Victoria corrected her. She knew her baby sister. She might be willing to let Harry run the show, but she had her own ideas about some things. “She’s giving me a chance to watch her choose.”
“Then this is an opportunity to do things differently with her,” the therapist suggested.
“I’ll try.” But Victoria didn’t sound convinced.
Gracie arrived on Friday morning while Victoria was still at school, and she rushed back to the apartment to meet her as soon as she could. She had left the key under the mat outside the apartment, and Gracie was inside, waiting for her, walking at a brisk pace on the treadmill.
“This thing is pretty good,” she said as she grinned at her sister. She looked like an elf or a child on the big machine.
“It should be,” Victoria answered. “It cost us a fortune.”
“You should try it sometime,” Gracie said as she hopped off.
“I have been,” Victoria said, proud of the weight she’d lost so far, and disappointed that Gracie didn’t notice. Her head was totally into the wedding, as she hugged her older sister. She wanted to go downtown right away and start shopping. She had a list of stores she wanted to get to. Victoria had been at school all day and felt like a mess. She’d had to get there early for a department meeting. But she got ready in five minutes, and they left to go downtown. It was hard not to be distracted by the giant rock on her finger. “Aren’t you afraid you might get hit on the head wearing that thing?” She still worried about her. She would always be her baby sister, no different than the day she’d walked her into first grade.
“No one thinks it’s real,” Gracie said nonchalantly as they got out of the cab at Bergdorf’s.
They went upstairs to the wedding department and started looking at gowns. They had a dozen of them hanging on racks and spread out around them as Gracie looked around and shook her head. None of them looked right to her, although Victoria thought they were gorgeous. Gracie shifted gears then and asked to see bridesmaids’ dresses. She had a list of designers and colors that she wanted to check out. And they brought everything they had to her. It was going to be a formal evening wedding. Harry was going to wear white tie, and the groomsmen black tie. And so far she was thinking of peach, pale blue, or champagne for the bridesmaids, all of them colors that Victoria could wear. She was so fair and had such pale skin that there were some colors she just couldn’t get away with, like red, for instance, but Gracie assured her that she would never put her bridesmaids in red. She looked like a little general marshaling her troops as the saleswomen brought her things. Gracie was in full control, and planning what appeared to be a major national event, like a rock concert or a world’s fair or a presidential campaign. This was her finest hour, and she was going to be the star of the show. Victoria couldn’t help wondering how her mother was dealing with it. It was a little overwhelming at close range, and their father was sparing no expense. He wanted the Wilkeses to be impressed, and his favorite daughter to be proud. In the heat of her intense concentration on what she was doing, Gracie still hadn’t noticed the weight Victoria had lost, which hurt her feelings, but she didn’t want to be childish about it, and she paid attention to the gowns that Gracie was picking out. She had three maybes in mind when they left. And there were going to be ten bridesmaids. It occurred to Victoria, when Gracie told her, that if she had been getting married, she didn’t even have ten friends. She would have had Gracie as her only attendant, and that was it. But Gracie had always been a golden child. And now she was the star, and loving every minute of it. She was becoming more like their parents than Victoria wanted to admit. She came from a family of stars, and Victoria felt like a meteor that had fallen to earth in a heap of ash.
They went to Barneys after that, and finally wound up at Saks. And for the following day Gracie had made an appointment with Vera Wang herself. She also wanted to see Oscar de la Renta, but hadn’t had time to set it up. Victoria was beginning to realize just how big an event it was. And the Wilkeses were giving a black-tie rehearsal dinner that was going to be bigger and more elaborate than most weddings. So it was going to be a double header in terms of the dresses that they’d need. Gracie said that their mother had already decided to wear beige to the wedding, and emerald green to the rehearsal dinner the night before. She was all set. She had gone to Neiman Marcus, and the personal shopper had found the perfect dresses for her for both events. So Gracie could concentrate on herself.
She didn’t like the bridal gowns at Saks either, and made it clear that she was looking for something extraordinary for her wedding. Gracie, the baby sister, had come into her own. Suddenly nothing was special enough for her. Victoria was a little shocked at how determined she was. And Gracie wasn’t excited about the bridesmaids’ dresses she saw either, and then she gave a gasp when she saw a gown.
“Oh my God,” she said with a look of amazement, as though she’d found the holy grail. “That’s it! I’d never have thought of that color!” It was without question a spectacular gown, although Victoria couldn’t picture it at a wedding, particularly multiplied by ten. Brown was the color of the season going into the fall. It was softer than black, the saleswoman explained to them, and very “warm.” The dress that had caught Gracie’s attention was a heavy satin strapless gown, with tiny tucks close to the body to just below the hipline, and then it widened into a bell-shaped evening gown to the floor. The workmanship on it was exquisite, and it was a deep chocolate brown. The only trouble with it, from Victoria’s perspective, was that only a tiny, wraithlike flat-chested woman could wear it. The place where it stopped hugging the body and flared at the hips would make Victoria’s bottom look like the broad side of a barn. It was a dress that only a girl with Gracie’s proportions could wear well, and most of her friends looked like her. The sample she was looking at would have been too big for her and was a size four. Victoria didn’t want to imagine what it would look like on her even if she lost weight.