I woke up the next morning to a wedding crisis. By July I could sense one from miles off, but I didn’t have to go that far thanks to the vent in my bathroom and the fact that all major family confrontations seem to take place in our kitchen below. I was lying in bed at eight A.M., already awake but staring at the ceiling, when I heard our neighbor Lydia Catrell knock at the back door and come in with a flurry of high-pitched chatter, matched by my mother’s lower, softer voice as they sat at the table drinking coffee and tinkling spoons. I listened as they talked about the invitations and the guest list; Lydia Catrell had married off four daughters and was our senior advisor on Ashley’s wedding. It was Lydia who arranged for the hall and the church and Lydia who recommended the flowers and Lydia who bustled around our kitchen acting important and dispensing advice, most of it welcome. And so that morning I knew even before Ashley did that she was about to have more problems from the troublesome bridesmaid.
The bridesmaid’s name was Carol Cliffordson and she was twenty-one, a distant cousin who had spent one summer with us when her parents were splitting up; she and Ashley had bunked together and giggled and driven the rest of us crazy being twelve-year-old best friends. They were inseparable. At the end of the summer Carol returned to Akron, Ohio, and we never heard much from her again except for Christmas cards and graduation announcements. When Ashley picked her bridesmaids she was firm that Carol be included even though we hadn’t seen her since she was twelve and even then only for that one summer. Carol accepted and then proceeded to cause more problems than you could ever imagine one little bridesmaid being capable of. It started with the dresses, which Carol objected to because they are low cut in front. Being that she is rather flat chested (although she would never admit it), she called Ashley to say they were too revealing and could she please wear something else. Lydia Catrell and my mother and Ashley all sat around for hours talking about that one five-minute phone conversation, dissecting it and discussing its issues etiquettewise, before Carol called again to say she didn’t think she’d be able to attend the wedding at all because her fiance’s family would be in town that weekend and they expected her to partake in the annual family cookout and square dance. With this, it looked like we might have gotten rid of her altogether, except that the dresses (still low cut but a different style) had already been ordered and it was too late to find anyone else. This set off another round of arguing and consoling between my mother and Ashley, not to mention Lydia Catrell, who wondered out loud several times if this girl was raised in a barn. Finally it was decided that Carol would still attend the wedding with her fiancé, then leave immediately afterwards to make the square dance.
Now there was another problem. Apparently Carol had called early in the morning, hysterical, and cried and cried on the phone, saying her fiancé had decided he would not attend and neglect his own family for the wedding of someone he had never even met. They’d had a big fight and Carol had called to cry to my mother, who clucked sympathetically and said she’d have Ashley call back right away. Then Lydia came over, was filled in, and I lay in bed listening to them go on and on about it, fretting about what Ashley would do when she was clued in to the situation. I heard Ashley going down the stairs and then their voices suddenly jerked to a stop.
“What?” I heard Ashley say after a few solid silent minutes. “What’s going on?”
“Honey,” my mother said smoothly, “maybe you should eat your toast first.”
“Yes,” Lydia echoed, “have something to eat first.”
Of course Ashley was suspicious. The toaster-oven timer rang but I didn’t hear her open it, only the scrape of a chair being pulled away from the table. “Tell me.”
“Well,” said my mother, “I got a call from Carol this morning.”
“Carol,” Ashley repeated.
“Yes,” Lydia said.
“And she was very upset, because she and her fiancé are fighting and she said”—a pause here, as my mother prepared to drop the bomb—“that she will not be able to be in the wedding.”
There was another silence. All I could hear was the sound of someone stirring with a spoon and hitting the sides of a mug. Clink, clink, clink. Finally Ashley said, “Well. Fine. I probably should have expected this.”
“Now, honey,” my mother said, and I could tell by the way her voice was moving around that she had probably gone to put her arms around Ashley, pinch hitting for Lewis. “I’m sure she didn’t realize what a problem this would be for you. I said you’d call her back....”
“Like hell I will,” Ashley said in a loud voice. “This is just the most selfish, bitchy thing she could do. I swear if she wasn’t in Ohio I’d go right to her and punch her face in.”
“My goodness!” Lydia said with a nervous laugh.
“I would,” Ashley said. “Goddamn it, I have had it, I can’t take this anymore. No one can just do one simple thing that I ask them to do and this whole wedding is going to be a total disaster and it will all be her goddamn fault with her goddamn flat chest and her goddamn fiancé and who the hell does she think she is anyway calling me crying when she’s ruining my wedding and she’s such a damn idiot!”
Lydia Catrell added, “You’d think she was raised in a barn. You honestly would.”
“I hate her. I hate all of this.” There was a crash as something fell to the floor. “I don’t need her. I don’t need anyone but Lewis and we’re going to elope, I swear to God we are.”
“Honey,” my mother said, trying to be calm, but there was that crazy edge creeping into her voice, the family hysteria swelling to full force. “Ashley, please, we can figure this out.”