— He probably was a really good father to you.
— He was, Mom.
But getting back to that awful Bernadette. I chat with Victor during the cocktail hour, and of course, just the way Fred thinks I’m his daughter, Victor thinks I’m his stepdaughter; we haven’t seen each other in some years, not so much a falling out as maybe a predictable drift after a late remarriage. He doesn’t know I’m the dead love of his life. Bernadette’s shoving pigs in the blanket in her mouth; she’s a rather crude eater, I have to say, and she looks god-awful, not that she was ever all that attractive but now she’s got her hair dyed dark black, she could use an eye job, and her dress is 100 percent polyester if it’s 1 percent, and it’s been hanging in her closet since 1982. She excuses herself to go to the bathroom. I ask Victor if he’s happy. He says Sure, you know me, I say I mean, with Bernadette. He tells me it’s a different kind of relationship after you lose your wife. She takes care of me instead of the other way around. Yeah, but do you love her like you loved. . Mom? I ask. I love her, he says, but I can tell it’s not in that way that means someone is head over heels. So not like you loved Mom? I ask. It’s just different. She’s a different person. So, different, but also not just as great, I say, and he looks at me like he knows what I want him to say, except I know he doesn’t, he says Sweetheart, what do you want me to say? and I tell him I want you to say that you loved me the best, and he says What? and I realize how that might have sounded, so I say I want you to say that you loved Mom the best, and he says I’m not going to say that, and I say Well, I can tell the difference when you look at her, and he says You don’t know everything, and I say I know more than you think, and I walk away, and I know he knows I’m right.
— Does that make you feel better, being right?
— Kind of.
— We’ve still got some super-weird blendy point-of-view science here. Maybe we’re inventing a new genre. POV-sci.
Betsy’s Wedding #2
Okay, so here’s my real wedding, with you thrown in. You’re not my sister in this scenario, you’re the plain old mother of the bride, as it should be. Not that there’s anything plain or old about you. Are you back from the dead? Okay, yes. You’re back from the dead. But not in a zombie way. You’ve just risen. But not in a Jesus way either. Let’s say it’s like you went on a death vacation and then came back.
You show up at my house the night before, because in the afterlife when people get married there’s a notification system for dead parents, who are then given a day pass to come back. Most of the time, the parents opt not to totally freak out their kids and possibly all of the guests as well. After I recover from this shock myself, I introduce you to Ben. We sit down with a cup of tea; he’s now wondering where his mom is, but we can probably assume that his mom was one of the many who opted not to freak people out. You look around the room, and seeing all the traces of you — afghans, photos, furniture, little needlepoints — you get misty. Ben says I’ve heard a lot about you, and you laugh, I can only imagine, you say, and he says he can see now where Betsy gets her beauty from, and you smile at me, you can tell he’s a good one. He thinks I’m beautiful. Maybe all you need to know. We catch you up on some of the other major developments. I’ve published my first book. Am I in it? Yes, Mom, you’re in it. Ben says The common response to news like this is “Congratulations.” Oh, well, yes, that goes without saying. No it doesn’t, he says. You’re actually supposed to say it. It’s okay, honey, I say. How were the reviews? you ask. Seriously? Ben says. The reviews were good, I say. Well, that’s wonderful, you say. What if they were bad? Ben asks. There’s usually a grain of truth in them, you say. Honey, don’t, I say. There’s no point. No, I want to know, what if they were bad? I’ll tell you what if, you say. I only ever got one really bad one in my entire career: the Kansas City paper said I overshadowed the tenor in my death scene in Bohème, but Christ, what a bunch of bullshit that was. I took it down, I’m supposed to be dying of consumption, but that guy couldn’t have sung his way out of his own ball sack. But what if, Mom, what if, I felt confident enough about the work that I wasn’t concerned about the reviews? You may have thought that, but if you didn’t get any bad reviews you wouldn’t know what it would be like. Most people get bad reviews at one time or another. So I shouldn’t be a writer because I might get a bad review? If someone told you before you started that you might get a bad review someday, would you not have become a singer? That makes no sense, Betsy. Right, Mom, it makes no sense.
You may end up being just as surprised as everyone else tomorrow, I say. I suppose that’s true. Victor’s remarried. I knew he would be. That’s as it should be. Okay, good. I go to fix up the guest room, and while I’m gone, you tell Ben you had your doubts about whether I’d ever get over my issues with my dad enough to have a healthy relationship. He laughs; he’s not going to take that bait, even though he’s heard another side of that story a few times. She’s good at it, is all Ben says, but when he says it, you get it, and you guys have a little moment.
In theory, you don’t want to upstage my wedding day, you just want to be there like any mother of the bride. But you’re you, and there’s no way around the fact that you’re you and you’re dead, and that’s likely now to be what everyone remembers about this day. So you agree to watch the ceremony from the bedroom window so that Ben and I can at least have our ceremony be about us. When I come back from the hairdresser’s ready to lose it about the overly fancy updo they’ve given me, you help me loosen it up a bit, make it more daytime-y; it’s a big improvement. Your eyes start to fill up. Cut that out, Mom! You’ll make me mess up my makeup. I can’t help it. My little girl. You can be a big fat pain in my ass, Mom, but I’m glad you’re here, I say. Better than a pain in your big fat ass, ha! I wouldn’t have missed it.
The ceremony is in our backyard on Noble Street in Chicago. The trees are decorated with garlands I made from paper and string; I sewed the skirts for the bridesmaids and the ring pillow myself. My dress. . you made my dress. It’s the bridesmaid’s dress you made me when I was a bridesmaid in that all-white wedding in the eighties. We got that brocade fabric on Thirty-Seventh Street; you left the seams extra wide in case I ever needed to let it out and wear it again. I had a designer help me update it by taking off the sleeves and making straps and a kind of a mini-train; I’d kept the leftover fabric. You, for reasons that shouldn’t mystify me as they do, are wearing a heavily sequined Bob Mackie gown you got at the afterlife Loehmann’s. It was a bit much. I had to take off some of the sequins, you say. I try to picture this dress before you worked on it, because it’s still as flashy as a fireworks display. I was never a big Loehmann’s fan, but my other option was Forever 21. Did you come from hell? I ask. No one really says, you say. My stepbrothers walk my bridesmaids down the aisle: Nina, my sister Susan, and another friend who did all the flowers. We got them from Trader Joe’s and she arranged them in mismatched thrift-store vases I picked up for a quarter or fifty cents each, wrapped with tulle.