“Tell her not to send you back here either,” James says. MacDonald thinks that if James were his size he would have hit him instead of only speaking.
“Come back and hit me if you want,” MacDonald hollers. “Stand on the arm of this chair and hit me in the face.”
James does not come back. A dwarf in the hallway says to MacDonald, as he is leaving, “It was a good idea to be sarcastic to him.”
*
MacDonald and his wife and mother and Mrs. Esposito stand amid a cluster of dwarfs and one giant waiting for the wedding to begin. James and his bride are being married on the lawn outside the church. They are still inside with the minister. His mother is already weeping. “I wish I had never married your father,” she says, and borrows Mrs. Esposito’s handkerchief to dry her eyes. Mrs. Esposito is wearing her jungle dress again. On the way over she told MacDonald’s wife that her husband had locked her out of the house and that she only had one dress. “It’s lucky it was such a pretty one,” his wife said, and Mrs. Esposito shyly protested that it wasn’t very fancy, though.
The minister and James and his bride come out of the church onto the lawn. The minister is a hippie, or something like a hippie: a tall, white-faced man with stringy blond hair and black motorcycle boots. “Friends,” the minister says, “before the happy marriage of these two people, we will release this bird from its cage, symbolic of the new freedom of marriage, and of the ascension of the spirit.”
The minister is holding the cage with the parakeet in it.
“MacDonald,” his wife whispers, “that’s the parakeet. You can’t release a pet into the wild.”
His mother disapproves of all this. Perhaps her tears are partly disapproval, and not all hatred of his father.
The bird is released: it flies shakily into a tree and disappears into the new spring foliage.
The dwarfs clap and cheer. The minister wraps his arms around himself and spins. In a second the wedding ceremony begins, and just a few minutes later it is over. James kisses the bride, and the dwarfs swarm around them. MacDonald thinks of a piece of Hershey bar he dropped in the woods once on a camping trip, and how the ants were all over it before he finished lacing his boot. He and his wife step forward, followed by his mother and Mrs. Esposito. MacDonald sees that the bride is smiling beautifully — a smile no pills could produce — and that the sun is shining on her hair so that it sparkles. She looks small, and bright, and so lovely that MacDonald, on his knees to kiss her, doesn’t want to get up.
Snake’s Shoes
The little girl sat between her Uncle Sam’s legs. Alice and Richard, her parents, sat next to them. They were divorced, and Alice had remarried. She was holding a ten-month-old baby. It had been Sam’s idea that they all get together again, and now they were sitting on a big flat rock not far out into the pond.
“Look,” the little girl said.
They turned and saw a very small snake coming out of a crack between two rocks on the shore.
“It’s nothing,” Richard said.
“It’s a snake,” Alice said. “You have to be careful of them. Never touch them.”
“Excuse me,” Richard said. “Always be careful of everything.”
That was what the little girl wanted to hear, because she didn’t like the way the snake looked.
“You know what snakes do?” Sam asked her.
“What?” she said.
“They can tuck their tail into their mouth and turn into a hoop.”
“Why do they do that?” she asked.
“So they can roll down hills easily.”
“Why don’t they just walk?”
“They don’t have feet. See?” Sam said.
The snake was still; it must have sensed their presence.
“Tell her the truth now,” Alice said to Sam.
The little girl looked at her uncle.
“They have feet, but they shed them in the summer,” Sam said. “If you ever see tiny shoes in the woods, they belong to the snakes.”
“Tell her the truth,” Alice said again.
“Imagination is better than reality,” Sam said to the little girl.
The little girl patted the baby. She loved all the people who were sitting on the rock. Everybody was happy, except that in the back of their minds the grownups thought that their being together again was bizarre. Alice’s husband had gone to Germany to look after his father, who was ill. When Sam learned about this, he called Richard, who was his brother. Richard did not think that it was a good idea for the three of them to get together again. Sam called the next day, and Richard told him to stop asking about it. But when Sam called again that night, Richard said sure, what the hell.
They sat on the rock looking at the pond. Earlier in the afternoon a game warden had come by and he let the little girl look at the crows in the trees through his binoculars. She was impressed. Now she said that she wanted a crow.
“I’ve got a good story about crows,” Sam said to her. “I know how they got their name. You see, they all used to be sparrows, and they annoyed the king, so he ordered one of his servants to kill them. The servant didn’t want to kill all the sparrows, so he went outside and looked at them and prayed, ‘Grow. Grow.’ And miraculously they did. The king could never kill anything as big and as grand as a crow, so the king and the birds and the servant were all happy.”
“But why are they called crows?” the little girl said.
“Well,” Sam said, “long, long ago, a historical linguist heard the story, but he misunderstood what he was told and thought that the servant had said ‘crow,’ instead of ‘grow.’”
“Tell her the truth,” Alice said.
“That’s the truth,” Sam said. “A lot of our vocabulary is twisted around.”
“Is that true?” the little girl asked her father.
“Don’t ask me,” he said.
Back when Richard and Alice were engaged, Sam had tried to talk Richard out of it. He told him that he would be tied down; he said that if Richard hadn’t got used to regimentation in the Air Force he wouldn’t even consider marriage at twenty-four. He was so convinced that it was a bad idea that he cornered Alice at the engagement party (there were heart-shaped boxes of heart-shaped mints wrapped in paper printed with hearts for everybody to take home) and asked her to back down. At first Alice thought this was amusing. “You make me sound like a vicious dog,” she said to Sam. “It’s not going to work out,” Sam said. “Don’t do it.” He showed her the little heart he was holding. “Look at these God-damned things,” he said.
“They weren’t my idea. They were your mother’s,” Alice said. She walked away. Sam watched her go. She had on a lacy beige dress. Her shoes sparkled. She was very pretty. He wished she would not marry his brother, who had been kicked around all his life — first by their mother, then by the Air Force (“Think of me as you fly into the blue,” their mother had written Richard once. Christ!) — and now would be watched over by a wife.
The summer Richard and Alice married, they invited Sam to spend his vacation with them. It was nice that Alice didn’t hold grudges. She also didn’t hold a grudge against her husband, who burned a hole in an armchair and who tore the mainsail on their sailboat beyond repair by going out on the lake in a storm. She was a very patient woman. Sam found that he liked her. He liked the way she worried about Richard out in a boat in the middle of the storm. After that, Sam spent part of every summer vacation with them, and went to their house every Thanksgiving. Two years ago, just when Sam was convinced that everything was perfect, Richard told him that they were getting divorced. The next day, when Sam was alone with Alice after breakfast, he asked why.