“Mother!” the bride replied, elaborately ill-tempered. “I’ll be showing by then.”
“Let’s get this thing over with,” said father, and led the way heavy-footed up the path and into the church.
Snickering cousins of the bride came next, some to be ushers and flower girls, some just to hang out, and two burly fellows in blocky wool jackets who’d volunteered to be parking lot attendants, to see to it that all of the cars of all of the guests would fit in this space at the end of Church Lane.
Relatives of the bride continued to predominate for the first ten minutes or so; giggling awkward large-jointed people wearing their “best” clothes, saved for weddings, funerals, Easter, and appearances in court. Soon this group began to be supplemented by members of the groom’s family: skinnier, shorter, snake-hipped people with can-opener noses and no asses, dressed in Naugahyde jackets and polyester shirts and vinyl trousers and plastic shoes, as though they weren’t human beings at all but were actually a chain dental service’s waiting room. Intermixed with these, in warm-up jackets and pressed designer jeans, were the groom’s pals, acne-flaring youths full of sidelong looks and nervous laughter, knowing this was more than likely a foretaste of their own doom: “There but for the grace of the Akron Rubber Company go I.” The bride’s girlfriends arrived in a too-crowded-car cluster and hovered together like magnetized iron filings, all demonstrating the latest soap opera fashion trends and each of them a sealed bubble of self-consciousness and self-absorption. The groom, a jerky marionette in a rented tux, a wide-eyed pale-faced boy with spiky hair and protuberant ears, appeared with his grim suspicious parents and entered the church with all the false macho assurance of Jimmy Cagney on his way to the electric chair. The church door shut behind him with a hollower boom than it had given anyone else.
As the hour of the service approached, the last few cars, each with its couple snarlingly blaming each other for causing them to be late, came tearing up Church Lane and was slotted into one of the remaining spaces by the volunteer attendants. And then it was TIME. The attendants grinned at each other, pleased with their accomplishment, and were about to turn and enter the church themselves when headlights alerted them to one last car load of wedding guests. “They are gonna be late!” one attendant told the other, and both stepped out to the road to wave frantically at the oncoming car to get a move on.
Instead of which, at first it slowed down, as though the driver were suddenly uncertain of his welcome. “Come on, come on!” shouted an attendant, and ran forward, still waving. The car was a new Caddy—a lot better than most of the cars here—and the driver had the narrow nose and bewildered expression that suggested to the attendants (cousins of the bride) that these people represented the groom’s side.
“Park over there!” the attendant yelled, pointing at one of the few remaining slots.
The driver had lowered his window, the better to display his confusion. He said, “The church…?”
“That’s right! That’s right! There’s the church right there, it’s the only thing on this road! Come on, will ya, you’re late!”
Someone in the car said something to the driver, who nodded and said, “I guess we might as well.”
So then at last the Caddy was driven to its slot, all four of its doors opened, and a bunch of extremely unlikely wedding guests emerged. The attendants, waiting for them, exchanged a knowing glance that silently said, Groom’s side, no question. Along with the sharp-nosed driver were a short fat round troll, a gloomy slope-shouldered guy, and a mean-looking old geezer. Shepherded by the attendants, these four made their way up the walk and into the now-full church, where the ceremony hadn’t yet begun after all, having been delayed by both a sudden loss of courage on the groom’s part (being treated now from an uncle’s flask) and a screaming cat fight between the bride and her mother.
A tuxedoed usher approached the latecomers, while the attendants went off to the seats saved for them by other cousins. Leaning toward the new arrivals, the usher murmured, “Bride or groom?”
They stared at him. The sharp-nosed one said, “Huh?”
The usher was used by now to the wedding guests being under-rehearsed. Patiently, gesturing to the pews on both sides of the central aisle, he said, “Are you with the bride’s party or the groom’s?”
“Oh,” said the sharp-nosed one.
“Bride,” said the mean-looking old man, but at the same instant, “Groom,” said the pessimistic-looking guy.
This under-rehearsed was ridiculous. “Surely,” the usher began, “you know whi—”
“We’re with the groom,” the pessimist explained. “They’re with the bride.”
“Oh,” the usher said, and looked around for empty seats on both sides of the aisle. “Here’s two for the bridal party,” he said, “and two over—”
He broke off, astonished, because the group seemed to be arguing fiercely and almost silently among themselves as to which of them was to be with which. Noticing him noticing them, they cut that business short and sorted themselves out with no further trouble, except for sharp looks back and forth. The usher seated the pessimist and the little round man among the bride’s family and friends, then placed the mean-looking old man and the sharp-nosed fellow in among the partisans of the groom.
As he did so, the uncle with the flask (tucked away out of sight) emerged from a side door down by the altar and made his somewhat unsteady way (he’d been medicating himself as well, since the cap was off anyway) to his seat on the aisle down near the front on the groom’s side. He was still settling himself and grinning his report on the groom’s condition to his neighbors when the mother of the bride, rather red of face and grim of expression, but with shoulders triumphantly squared, came from the rear of the church, escorted by an usher, and marched down the center aisle to sit in the front row.
A moment of extremely suspenseful silence ensued, during which the minister’s wife, out of sight in the vestry, placed the needle on the turning record, and a scratchy but full-throated version of Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March” poured forth from the speakers mounted high in the four corners of the nave.
As the music swelled and the minister came out of the vestry to stand by the chancel rail, the mean-looking old guy with the bridal party gave a disgusted look across the aisle at the pessimist among the groom’s people. The pessimist gave him the disgusted look right back, then shook his head and sat back to watch the wedding.
The music stopped. The speakers in the corners of the nave said, “Tick… tick… ti—” And stopped.
The minister stepped forward, crossing the front of the church behind the chancel rail, smiling bland encouragement at the parents and immediate family in the front row. He was a round-faced round-shouldered slender amiable man with a round sparsely haired head and round highly reflecting spectacles, and he wore thick-soled black shoes like a cop and a long-sleeved black dress with a white dickey at the neck. The black dress showed off his round potbelly as he crossed to the pulpit and climbed the circular staircase.
On the bride’s side of the aisle, the mean-looking old guy leaned forward and looked significantly across the aisle at the pessimist, who didn’t seem to want to have his eye caught. But the old guy kept nodding, and widening his eyes, and waving his eyebrows, until finally everybody else in the immediate area was in on it, so then at last the pessimist turned and nodded—“I know, I know”—which didn’t keep the old guy from pointing very significantly with his eyebrows and ears and elbows and nose and temples toward the general area of the pulpit and the climbing minister. The pessimist sighed and folded his arms and faced determinedly forward. The little dumpling beside him kept looking back and forth between the pessimist and the old guy, open-mouthed and eager. Next to the old guy, the sharp-nosed fellow ignored the whole thing, concentrating instead on the cleavage in the dress of the friend of the bride on his other side.