Each week, new developments emerged in the planning of Bette’s wedding. Gloria found a caterer, and she and Bette and I went to sample cakes at a bakery. We spent an hour taking bites from each sample and eventually chose a lemon cake with vanilla frosting. The following week, Bette and Benjamin arranged for the pastor from Grady and Gloria’s church to perform the wedding. Then a week later Dennis was instructed to make sure his suit was ready and I was asked if I had a dress. Both Bette and Gloria asked me this, on separate occasions, and I had the feeling they’d discussed the question beforehand: Does Frances have anything to wear? What if Frances shows up at the wedding in the same sundress she’s worn every other day for two months? (I’d packed two large suitcases, but they were not nearly enough—I’d been in Miami three months at this point.) Marse and I went to Burdine’s and spent an hour trying on clothes in the same dressing room, until the sales matron told us that our behavior—we were laughing and talking loudly—was disturbing the other customers, and we were asked to quiet down or leave. I ended up with an avocado-green shift and matching sandals from a consignment store, and Marse bought a wide-brimmed straw hat to wear with a white Easter suit she already owned. Instead of going back to Dennis’s that night, we called him from a pay phone and had him meet us at Scotty’s, and the three of us ended up going from one bar to the next, until at dawn we found ourselves at a tavern in Coconut Grove, sitting at a sticky wooden table in front of a dozen empty beer bottles.
I’d decided to stay in Miami through the wedding. The question of what would happen after was unresolved. I was out of money, of course. Dennis gave me some from time to time; he left twenty-dollar bills on the kitchen counter and joked that I was his courtesan, which I’d let him know I did not care for. I told myself that if Bette’s wedding came and went and no plans had been formalized and still I didn’t care to return to Atlanta, I would get a job and maybe even an apartment. Whether I would make these changes without a ring on my finger was not a question I allowed myself to consider.
But at this point I was so removed from my previous life that when I called home and my mother inquired about the future, I lied to her. I told her that I’d found a secretarial job at a bank, which I had not, and was looking for an apartment, which I wasn’t. I told her that my supervisor’s name was Millicent (she’d asked if I liked my supervisor, possibly because she suspected that I was fibbing, though I never knew for certain) and that Millicent was very strict. She asked if I could afford an apartment on my wages, and I said I was making almost twice what I’d been making in Atlanta. I told her I saved money by eating lunch in the bank’s cafeteria and keeping half for my dinner. The cafeteria served a very nice meat loaf, I told her. I tried to avoid mentioning Dennis, as if my lies would reflect poorly on him. Every time I hung up the phone after having expanded my story in some way, I cried a little. I didn’t recall ever having lied to my mother about anything more important than whether I was eating well or keeping my apartment clean. When my mother hinted that she thought I might be behaving irresponsibly—if only she’d known the truth—I rushed to reassure her. The fact that I lied to her so easily, with some regret but every intention of continuing, made me feel hardened and sad. When I told Dennis that I was lying to my mother, he took a breath and nodded, as if he understood the toll this exacted. This was the only pressure I ever put on him to move things along.
The weekend before the wedding, six of us—Dennis and I; Marse and her brother, Kyle; and Benjamin and Bette—packed into Dennis’s station wagon and drove north on Highway 27 toward Lake Okeechobee, to Fisheating Creek. We stopped at Fisheating Creek Inn—a shack in the middle of a freshwater marsh, with a lunch menu that featured frogs’ legs and alligator tail—and rented three canoes, then set off to a campground eight miles down the river. Dennis shared a canoe with Benjamin, Marse shared one with Kyle, and Bette and I canoed together. She sat in front and paddled distractedly. We took our time. The creek was wide and high for the season, and we portaged only twice during the trip. Fisheating Creek was flanked on both sides by bald cypress swamp and hardwood hammock dotted by oak trees and palm trees and ferns. Air plants clung messily to the trunks of the oaks; during the summer red and yellow flowers would sprout from their bellies. Along the edges of the water, between the knees of the knobby cypress roots, bloomed brilliant yellow flowers. “Butterweeds,” Bette said, pointing. The flowers’ bright faces were reflected in the black water. Bette pointed out an ibis, a hawk, an osprey. In the narrowest parts of the creek the forest encroached so heavily that the sunlight reached us in ribbons. Bette said that a century earlier, the creek had functioned as a highway to Lake Okeechobee, which supplied freshwater to all of Florida. She said that in the summer, thousands of swallowtail kites migrated to the creek to gorge themselves on water snakes and fish and rabbits, to prepare for the long flight back to South America. She told me to keep an eye out for panthers, black bears, burrowing owls, and of course alligators. It was like she was listing all that there was to fear around us, and as we passed I peered into the shadows of the swamp, alert for creatures that might strike or swoop. The first to appear was an alligator skulking among the cypress roots, its eyes hovering above the waterline. Once I’d seen one, I saw another, and before we’d gone a mile I’d seen too many to count on both hands, including babies as thin as snakes, sunning themselves on roots. The larger gators slunk into the water when we came close, and I tried not to think of them under the still black surface, swimming inches below my feet.
The others had already pitched the tents by the time Bette and I arrived at the campground, which was little more than a small island rising from the marsh, enough room for the canoes and tents and a picnic table and a few folding chairs. A tributary ran behind the mound of land, and a stand of cypress trees provided privacy that turned out to be irrelevant: we wouldn’t see another human the entire weekend. Dennis used a machete to lop off the knobs of cypress roots that grew through the island’s flattest parts, and the boys started a fire. We wore jackets over our swimsuits and cooked beans and hot dogs. We’d forgotten to bring bowls, so we ate out of mugs and cans, and once we’d settled in and darkness had fallen, the wildlife closed in around us. Owls made their strange humanlike calls, and every so often the muscular tail of an alligator splashed and a bullfrog croaked. “This place is creepy,” said Marse, “but I can’t seem to go a year without a visit.” Her grandfather owned an old swamp house nearby, in Big Cypress—the government had been trying to buy him out since the preserve had been established twenty years earlier—and she told stories about using the outhouse and listening to panthers scavenging in the trash cans. During a lag in the conversation, I heard a grunt, and when I asked what it was, Bette answered, “Those are swamp pigs, rooting. They only come out at night.” I could barely tell where the sounds were coming from, there were so many, and when finally Dennis and I crawled into our sleeping bags, I lay awake for an hour or more, listening.