“And an exorcism. And Ethel — there’s nothing wrong in her head, but everything wrong in her head. There’s nothing I can fix. It’s… dispiriting. And the two of them are concocting something together. I try to keep them on separate projects in class, but they hang around together on the outside and they’ve got this secret project going.”
“Blood and black paint,” Rob said. “Holy shit.” They’d come up to the balcony on the ninth floor, and looked down at the preparations happening in the lobby. Far below, Ishmael was hanging festoons of ribbon from the toy. Jemma waved when he looked up at them. He pointed at his watch, and started to climb down. “Is that all really for us?”
“It is expressly not for us,” Jemma said. She took his arm and started down the ramp, headed toward the Council meeting and, like Ishmael, already a little late. Wedding dresses and formalwear had been popping up all over lately — people trying out their wedding-dress designs, or trying out their own outfits, so the Space Groom and Bride did not draw the attention Jemma expected, although a couple people stopped to ask them if it was already tomorrow, or if the rehearsal was starting already, and they attracted a wedding train of seven-to-ten-year-olds who marched solemnly behind them. When one of them threw a doughnut Rob whipped around and sprayed them with confetti from the wedding blaster.
He stayed for the Council meeting, which was just a final run of Dr. Snood’s big list. He rolled out all six feet of it while everyone else made checks on the screens of their notebooks. It was formally determined that everything was ready: every dais and platform had risen in time; every festoon was hanging in its proper place; every performer in every exhibition had mastered his part; every rocket was in place on the roof; every flower-petal bag was tied with a piece of green or white ribbon. “And what about the couple?” Dr. Snood asked finally, marking off an item on his list that was not on theirs. “Are you ready?” Rob took her hand and they each took a side of the room to smile at.
“You’re not going to wear that dress, are you?” asked Dr. Sundae.
“It’s my dancin’ dress,” Jemma said. She and Vivian left Rob behind then, though he tried to follow them.
“Some things still hold,” Vivian said, “No matter what fucked-up bouffanterie we’ve made of this. Not until she comes leaping down the aisle with her hundred and sixty attending virgins do you get to see her in the real dress.”
“That’s only the day of the wedding,” he said, but she wouldn’t relent, and Jemma, who for all that she largely did not care what happened with the ceremony, and probably would not have complained if someone had insisted on her actually having a hundred and sixty virgin attendants, found that she was getting rather excited about a few things, like the blue garter she’d been wearing off and on all week, and the prospect of hiding from Rob in her crazy dress. They went to Vivian’s room, which doubled now as her atelier. Jemma wondered about that: the dress on its mannequin looming by the window all night long. Did Vivian wake at night to find it gesturing rudely at her, or did it ever loom over her, or did the veil ever wave at night with such moon-infused beauty that it made her heart ache a little, from bitterness or desire? It was one of the things that had drawn them together, how they had both forsworn marriage, but Jemma wondered if Vivian still meant to proceed through life using up and discarding men now that they were in such short supply. “The little ones will grow,” she’d said to Jemma. “There’s still plenty.” But she threw herself into the dressmaking and the wedding planning like someone who wanted one of her own.
Jemma stood up on a wooden box in front of the covered mirror while Vivian fussed and mumbled. “I got it,” she said, meaning she had correctly anticipated how much bigger Jemma would be when she made the final alterations on the dress the week before. There was practically nothing to do now except pat it down and sigh over it. Jemma looked out the window while Vivian fluffed up the veil and draped and redraped the train. The sun, setting on the other side of the hospital, colored the foam of the wake pink and orange. She thought she saw a whale blow, and a flash of wet blue skin, halfway to the horizon. She was squinting and leaning forward, looking for it again, when Vivian whipped the silk off the mirror.
“Well, how do you like it?” she asked.
50
“I do,” said Jemma. “And I will. Yes. Forever.” But did she, and would she, and could she, and really forever? She had made a lifelong habit of thinking better of her decisions after they were made; this one was no exception, though she fervently hoped that this time it wouldn’t be like before, when she would lie all day on the floor regretting the purchase of a couch, or like the night she slept with her first boyfriend, and had answered falsely when he asked, “Is it in?” because she realized, just before she answered, that an opportunity had settled on her, a chance to do it and not do it, to have a thing taken from her and then receive it back. He humped and gasped, and Jemma shouted with him as much from relief as from pleasure, because she knew how it always changed how you wanted something, once you had it, and when she made the decision again just an hour later, on the other side of the experience, it was not traumatic at all. Why couldn’t everything be like that?
She liked rehearsal dreams, the ones anxiety provoked — the richer the anxiety the richer was the dream, the more detailed the false, practice experience. She took her boards before she took them, and had watched the letters on the screen disassemble out of the question and into a statement: you are entering the wrong profession, honey; and she’d peered at a piece of diseased liver and seen it look more and more and more real, until it oozed and pressed out of the screen to fall softly on her keyboard and overwhelm her with its rotten, bloody smell. Before she took the exam for her driver’s license she’d driven with the instructor over the most incredible terrains, glaciers and moonscapes and lava flows and war zones, asking over and over of the tiny instructor with the forbidding hair bun, Are you sure we’re supposed to be here? But she only spoke back after she’d grown fangs and fastened them around Jemma’s throat, and then she only said, through a mouthful of blood, Keep your eyes on the road! She’d had a medical-school admission interview with a small, elderly radiologist whose two-foot erection stood out of his fly the whole time they talked; it tried to engage her in conversation, too, but she knew that if she paid it the slightest mind she’d never be admitted. And she’d spent days at dream-colleges, all-girls schools where every night a fraternity boy was lured onto the campus and slaughtered for a feast, and Jemma sat at a table next to a dean of students dressed only in waist-long black hair, a horn on her forehead, and two sharpened thimbles placed over her nipples, who told her, Go ahead and eat, my pretty-pretty. It won’t make you any more evil.
Or she could just imagine the consequences of her decision. Rehearsal dreams were rare, and life could be depended upon to provide only a limited number of false-insertions. She never dreamed of her wedding until after it was over, and Rob Dickens could not, after all, be convinced to have a preliminary, secret ceremony where they jumped over a broom and proclaimed their troth three times to each other, something so small and secret it could have been done away with a simple set of words, on second thought, or maybe it’s all a little hasty, or even just one word, nevermind. It was too late for that, he said, and she realized that a month before she could have bought him off with a kiss and a candy ring.
She imagined they were already married; it wasn’t very difficult. She didn’t think they would behave very differently, afterward. She put a piece of black tape around her finger and pretended it was a ring, and gave it an invisible, intangible weightiness. The days would go on and nothing would change. They’d rise every day from the tiny bed they shared, and check outside their little window on the unchanging state of the world. They’d go and teach their classes, Rob with better success every day, his students mastering every day another flip or twist until they could all just stay in the air flipping and spinning indefinitely, and Jemma every day teaching her kids some new sort of silliness in place of the power to undo sickness. Their child would be born and they would become a family, contented, but barred from true happiness until the waters should recede and they should all step out onto a green mountain.