After a quick trip to the Piggly Wiggly for cold Cokes and Pampers, Ben and Lily returned to the doctor’s office. “Congratulations!” Maybelle crowed when they walked in. “Y’all are healthy and compatible.”
At the sound of the word compatible, Ben and Lily both burst out laughing.
The Faulkner County Courthouse was typical of small-town courthouse architecture: brick, columns, clock tower. In a stark, fluorescently lighted office, Lily and Ben waited for their license to be processed along with another soon-to-be wed couple. The man looked to be in his late thirties. His beard and mustache were tinged with gray. His bride-to-be, however, couldn’t have been more than sixteen years old. She was big-eyed and bony except for her belly, which was swollen with pregnancy. The girl nodded at Mimi, who was standing up while holding onto Lily’s knee. “How old?” the girl asked.
“Thirteen months,” Lily said. “She’s working on learning how to walk.”
“She’s pretty,” the girl said, with a wistful smile on her face. “I can’t wait til my baby comes, so I can play with him.”
Lily smiled at the girl, but looking at her made her sad — this little girl who was going to play with her baby like a new doll. Lily couldn’t even look at the grown man who had taken his bride’s girlhood away.
Finally the clerk returned with Ben and Lily’s paperwork. “There ya go,” she said brightly, “and congratulations.”
Lily was exhausted from hauling Mimi around. “So, where do we go to get this thing over with?”
“Over to the City Drug,” Ben said. “The pharmacist there’s the justice of the peace.”
Lily followed him down the stairs. “We’re getting married in a drug store?”
“Yup.”
“Well, it’s handy, I guess. We can get married and buy condoms for our wedding night in the same convenient location.”
Ben stumbled on the stairs, steadied himself on the railing, and looked back at Lily with an expression of animal terror.
“I was joking! God.”
The old lady in the half-glasses at the City Drug eyed Ben. “You’re Big Ben McGilly’s boy, ain’tcha?”
“Yes. Ma’am, and we’re here to get married.”
“A McGilly getting married in the City Drug? I’ve never heard the like! Why, when your little brother got married, they had it over at the country club. I heard tell they floated candles and flowers in that pond out by the golf course —”
“I know,” Ben said impatiently. “I was there. The thing is, we’re in kind of a hurry.”
The woman looked Lily up and down. “I don’t see why. She ain’t showing yet. And that little girl’s just about big enough to be a flower girl.” When neither Lily nor Ben responded, she shrugged and hollered, “Frank! Wedding!”
“Bring ’em on back,” a gruff voice called from the back of the store.
Frank was a paunchy, middle-aged guy in a too-tight pharmacist’s smock. “Y’all got your license?” Ben presented the paperwork, and Frank glanced over it disinterestedly. “All right, then. Let’s get started. Doris, you wanna witness?”
Doris, the lady in the half-glasses, presented Lily with a bouquet of red plastic carnations — the kind that would decorate graves in a cemetery near a trailer park. “A bride needs a bouquet,” the old lady said, beaming.
And a blushing bride Lily was, with a baby in one arm and a tacky plastic bouquet in the other, wearing her Good Vibrations T-shirt, cutoff Levi’s, and Doc Martens. If there were a magazine called Postmodern Bride, she would be its cover girl.
“Ben McGilly, do you take this woman, Lily Fox, to be your lawful wedded wife, to have and to hold, in sickness and in health, as long as you both shall live?” Frank droned. Clearly this ceremony was no more magical for him than it was for the bride and groom.
“Sure, okay,” Ben said. “I do.”
“Lily Fox, do you take this man, Ben McGilly. ...” While Frank finished his litany, Lily’s eyes wandered to a nearby display shelf where she saw a box marked MEDICATED DOUCHE. When Frank finished the as-long-as-you-both-shall-live bit, Lily replied, “I...I douche,” and collapsed in a fit of nervous giggles.
“Then you may kiss the bride.” Frank apparently hadn’t even heard her joke. Heterosexuals were a humorless lot, Lily decided.
Ben leaned over to kiss Lily’s cheek, but she turned so he caught her on the lips. He was the one who had said they had to make this look real, after all. The kiss was completely bland, like pecking an old aunt’s powder-scented jowl.
“Smile!” Doris said after their perfunctory kiss. She snapped a Polaroid of the three of them. Mimi was chewing on the plastic bridal bouquet. Doris handed the Polaroid to Ben. “Something to show your grandchildren.”
“Thanks.” Lily threw the god-awful snapshot in the trash as soon as they were out of the store.
“That was certainly romantic,” Lily muttered, strapping a complaining Mimi into her car seat. “It’s okay, honey,” she cooed to the little girl, “you won’t be in your nasty old car seat much longer, I promise.”
Ben started the car. “So ... ready to go meet the in-laws?”
“Why not? Might as well make this day as surrealistic as possible.” Today had been like a dream for Lily, though not in the sense that bubbly straight girls might say their wedding day was like a dream.
Just like in her dreams, today Lily had been performing one bizarre action after another, and as in the dream world, no matter how bizarre her actions were, she had no choice but to perform them.