I said all the expected things: How would the bridal couple feel about that? Wouldn’t they want to have the celebration inside their parents’ house if the weather was bad? It seemed that the answer was complicated by the problem of Etta Rae’s blood pressure. There were so many antiques, and she didn’t know what she would do with them. She knew that I knew how disrespectful young people were now. They’d put out a cigarette, which they’d had the nerve to light up on the step right outside the kitchen door, in a Limoges dish. One of her daughter’s friends had picked up a bisque figurine of a beckoning mermaid and used it as a back scratcher! Etta Rae always made me laugh. It makes me sound superficial, but I don’t like to hear other people’s problems, though I’ll tolerate most anything if they take me aback and make me laugh. Etta Rae was the perfect storm in that way.
I tried to change the subject, but she was having none of it. She’d already lost ten pounds, and the blood pressure had not come down. She was determined to lose more weight. She’d just bought a book called Wheat Belly and was surprised I hadn’t heard of it. She was not going to cleanse, however. (As she was elaborating on her opposition to cleansing, the waitress approached with the pitcher of iced tea, but quickly turned away before refilling our glasses.) By the time more iced tea was poured, Etta Rae had sweetened the deal (and I’m not talking sugar packet dumped in tea): she and Gilly would like to express their appreciation by giving me a day at the spa and buying Jamie an expensive putter they knew he coveted. People would tend our yard before and after the ceremony. All we had to do was say yes, save Etta Rae’s life, and enjoy the party along with fifty or so other people. I said that I’d speak to Jamie. She clasped my hand. “This is not blush on my cheeks,” she said, hovering her fingers.
As you might expect of someone who’d make this request of a friend, she’d had many ideas I thought were odd over the years. One had been to buy an empty building in Asheville, North Carolina, and to convert it to an old-age home for five couples (we could be the first to choose our floor). She sent me photographs of the building and floor plans in a mailing tube. Another time, she asked us to invest in a business that would involve protecting the reef off Key West by hiring people in shark costumes to scare people snorkeling or scuba diving, because their flippers inadvertently caused damage to the reef. She always had some crazy idea. While I found many of them amusing (not so the dreadful building she’d found in North Carolina, with fire damage and the roof caved in), I was perturbed by her most recent request.
“Let’s say no,” I said to my husband. “Why should someone have a wedding reception in our backyard, where years ago they deliberately killed a poor defenseless turtle?”
“He’s turned into a nice young man,” my husband said. “I once threw a dead raccoon down a well because I hated the people who ran the summer camp.”
“She acts like some sitcom character, always spewing complications. I don’t want a smelly Porta Potti in our backyard and people trampling the flowers.”
“Then call her and tell her that.”
“I’d sound like some neurotic, uncharitable woman who needed to lighten up.”
“Well, isn’t that the case?”
“Every time I tell you a problem that involves something Etta Rae wants, you take it as an excuse to let me know I have deficiencies,” I said. “She provokes fights in our marriage.”
“Call her and tell her that.”
“Why don’t you call Gilly, man-to-man, and say we don’t want to volunteer our backyard.”
He lowered the newspaper. “Tell me exactly why we can’t do it,” he said. “Portable toilets?”
“She probably thinks the guests should go inside the house!” I said.
“We do have two and a half bathrooms. Certainly some guests would want to do something that day other than pee.”
“What about my own antiques?”
“You’re a big girl,” he said. “If you don’t want to do this, be honest about it. She’ll understand. She’ll have to. Or they won’t be our friends anymore, if that’s the way it turns out.” He shrugged. On the front page of the New York Times, Obama’s sideways expression was one of intense sorrow.
“That’s part of the problem,” I said. “I’m a big girl. They’re so self-conscious about their height. It seems like we’re lording it over them that we’re big and powerful and can make any decision we want.”
“Well, we can, about our house.”
“She’ll give me that look,” I said. “Like a crab who’s just had one claw ripped off so somebody can eat it, who knows before it’s tossed back in the water that it’s going to have to regenerate.”
“I appreciate the analogy, but ask yourself: do I sound rational?”
I didn’t, but neither was Etta Rae. Her house was far superior to ours. Why should we go along with her rather audacious request? But I did hate to disappoint her, and the truth was she had to go through life wobbling everywhere in her high heels and dealing with her husband’s insecurity because he’d been so picked on during his childhood. For years, before they married, Gilly had seen a psychologist in Chelsea about his feelings of inferiority. One night, fishing around in his martini, standing with the three of us on our front porch, he’d scrutinized the dripping green olive and said, “If they’d invented bowling with midgets back then, I’d have been a human bowling ball.”
Zelda-land. That had been her proposed name for our old people’s apartment building. Zelda-land.
The next day I called and told her no. I apologized for being so uptight. I invoked my inherited collection of Steuben glass birds and mentioned the many expensive art books on the floor-to-ceiling shelves. I exaggerated the problem with our toilets barely flushing. I said I had to entertain my great-aunt, and I wasn’t sure when she and her companion would be visiting (true). As she listened silently, I added a few more qualms, then invited them to dinner. She said, “I am so surprised and disappointed, I cannot think what to say.”
They did come to dinner, but it was awkward. She didn’t call again all summer, though somehow her husband sent a signal, and he and Jamie had a couple of games of golf. Then came the end of July. The situation had ruined my summer. We didn’t know when the party was given, and we certainly weren’t invited. We found out about it from the FedEx man, who’d been hired to play music with his band. I will always feel as guilty as I imagine an older, wiser boy would feel for having lawn-mowered a turtle in his youth.
The weather that day was everyone’s worst scenario. It was overcast, then fiercely sunny, then gray clouds accumulated and raced forward like cars escaping rush-hour gridlock. Then began a pounding rain. They’d found a tent company earlier in the week that had come from Boston — cocky guys who said that barring a tsunami, their tent would hold. It didn’t, and the groom was leaning against a pole when the entire thing lifted up like an enormous parachute that carried him out over the beach, where rain pounded down like arrows in the Iliad. He went up, up, then down. His hands must have lost their grip on the cloth. While the few drunks who didn’t know what was happening partied on, he was launched like a sailor wrapped in a broken topsail, then fell from a great height onto the rocky beach, where he lay unconscious with a broken pelvis, broken arm, and three snapped ribs.
When I heard this, it made me remember a guide my husband and I had once hired, who’d told us, at the Cliffs of Moher, that the updraft was so fierce that if you threw someone over the edge, they might blow right up again — except in this case the groom didn’t reappear. By the time we found out, the FedEx guy had written a song about it, but as he said to me, “It’s no ‘Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.’ ”