But St. Catherine’s was plain and white, pretty stained-glass windows set into the doors. Maybe because it was so many people’s summer church the builders thought it proper to dress it like a vacationer: sweet and only informally gaudy. When we went inside, an usher took us to the front pew, the family spot. Stella had thought this out; she knew the front was the only place James would fit. He took the aisle; I sat next to him, and eventually an unspeaking grandmother of some sort took the seat next to me.
James wore a necktie that Caroline had sewn for him; I recognized the print from one of her fall skirts. I wore a blue dress and a silly hat of feathers balanced on top of my head; Astoria had lent it to me. It was designed to cling to a hairdo without interfering, and so when I’d clipped it onto my uncoifed head that morning, my hair pinned up, more pins in the hat to affix it, the thing looked like a stuffed bird nailed to a tree branch. By now, having been knocked about by the wind through the car window, its grip was loose. I tried to fix it.
As entertainment, the wedding wasn’t much. The principals kept their backs to us. The priest mumbled and flubbed Stella’s name. I wanted some sort of dramatic ceremony, with wailing or hysterical laughter. James beside me was silent. Then the priest said something, the happy couple kissed, and it was over without bloodshed or tears.
Despite everything, I never felt jealous at weddings. I longed for love, yes, but I never saw that love was in greater supply at weddings than in butcher shops or department stores. The sight of a couple furtively holding hands beneath a restaurant table was more likely to remind me of the hopelessness of my life than any number of ladies dressed in giant christening gowns reciting words to become joined to a man in a rented suit. I do not like public ceremony, not graduations, not weddings; not pep rallies, nor church. Perhaps I simply do not understand trying to share one emotion (love, relief, faith, pep) with a quantity of strangers.
The reception was in a restaurant down the street, close enough to walk. Once there, James found a cluster of kids from school, who’d been seated in less prime spots near the back of the church and so were among the first to leave. I recognized Eric from the cottage, but the rest were an assortment of lean boys and sweet girls (girls! I hadn’t imagined that Stella knew, or would acknowledge the existence of, any girls) whom I had never met. That Stella had other friends — that she had, in fact, a life outside of the cottage — never occurred to me.
Food was served in a willy-nilly buffet. I decided I would rather be alone than be one adult among teenagers and said good-bye to James. I took a seat at a table on the other side of the room. There was no seating plan, which meant that Stella was more civilized than I’d thought: seating plans, in my opinion, are a form of social incarceration.
“What the hell is that?” a woman next to me said as the band set up by the door. She was forty, maybe, a blonde in coral lipstick that looked like a medicine meant to prevent infection. I followed her gaze, sure that it would end at a musician carrying an instrument she could not identify. Instead she was looking at James, returning from the men’s room.
I started to answer her; her date, a man in thick glasses, did instead: “Jesus Christ. How tall is that?”
They had been drinking beer in bottles, which amplified their amazement.
“That’s James Sweatt,” I told them. “He goes to school with Stella.”
“He’s a freak!” exclaimed the man, as if what I said was impossible, that the sight James presented, his jacket off and his tie loosened, could not possibly know Stella, go to school, walk the floor of the dark wood restaurant in Wellfleet.
“He’s tall,” I said casually. But the woman shook her head. Well, he shouldn’t be, she seemed to say.
By then the bandleader had stepped to the microphone to make some announcements, and Sean and Stella, the train of her wedding dress drawn up like a curtain so she could dance, took to the floor for an inane song by, according to the bandleader, “Mr. Irwin, um, Berlin, ladies and gentlemen.” (“A doll I can carry / the girl that I marry will be.…”) The people who sat next to me eventually forgot James, but I didn’t forget them: I wanted to be a movie thug who could pick them up by their shirtfronts and shake them like maracas. Even they would not know whether they were trembling from fear or physics.
Instead, I drank coffee till I was the one shaking. Stella took the middle of the floor, and the bandleader called for all unmarried women to take the floor around her. I thought I saw James look for me, but his gaze skittered past.
“You should go up,” said the despicable woman next to me. Did I look so unmarried?
“No.” I smiled. “My husband wouldn’t like it.”
The drummer rolled his sticks low, and then hit the cymbal as Stella turned her back and pitched her bouquet into the arms of the plumpest bridesmaid, a dour girl in her peach-colored dress who caught the package with a sigh, as if this were what she was used to all her life, picking up after careless Stella.
Then the floor in front of the band filled with dancing couples. When I looked across them, James was talking to Eric and a girl even smaller than Eric. James drank a beer, smoked a cigarette. Maybe he was taking up all his mother’s old bad habits. He looked like an adult. Then Eric and his date excused themselves as the band started a new, apparently meaningful song. Stella approached, asked James a question while holding his hand. He shook his head, and she went away. I waited until he finished the cigarette, then went over to him.
“You going to dance?” I asked.
“Doubt it. You?”
“Nobody’s asked me.”
“Ah,” he said. “I’m more popular than you. Somebody asked me.”
“So why don’t you?”
“I can’t dance.”
“Look at that dance floor,” I said. “Look closely at the men. Most of them can’t dance, but all of them are dancing.”
He watched them for a while. “Well,” he said. He picked up the beer. I sat down in the chair next to him. “Let me put it this way. I don’t aim to make a spectacle of myself.”
“You—”
He laughed. “Peggy, listen, imagine it. Me dancing. You don’t think that would be a spectacle?”
The song ended, and some couples drifted back to the table. James didn’t make a move to introduce me. In fact, he turned his back toward me and spoke to them in conspiratorial tones. Teenagers.
A man with a belly and a bow tie approached and asked me to dance. “I’m Uncle Fisher,” he said by way of introduction, which seemed to be enough. He was around forty, with black hair, good-looking enough if you squinted. On the dance floor he asked me whose side I belonged to, and when I said, “Bride’s,” he answered, “Ah. She’s a pip.”
I smiled. “And what side are you on?”
“Nobody’s,” he said. “I’m totally impartial.”
He was a good dancer; I’d forgotten how easy it was to dance with a man who really knew how. Suddenly he said, “Excuse me,” and reached for my hat, which he plucked from my head. The bobby pins clattered to the ground and my hair fell to my shoulders, as if my whole hairdo were a breakaway movie prop designed for this moment. “Much better,” he said. He stuck the hat in his jacket pocket. “Now I can concentrate.”
“I’m not much for hats,” I said. “It was a loaner.”