“I would like to go to your wedding someday,” June said to me that evening. I knew it was coming. “I am truly grateful to have had love in my life. I hope you have love in your life.” She meant it all with caring, but I couldn’t take it. I hoped that no one would ever, ever again make me take them to a wedding. “Don’t make me uncomfortable,” I wanted to say. June was never one to pick up cues, not surprising. I am often subtle.
The architect who married the guy with the Mohawk, the guy I was crazy about at this time, was on my mind. He had designed a farmhouse near a town on the Hudson for a friend of mine, a fashion writer. I had told her how talented he was, introduced them, essentially convinced her of his talent and got him the commission. I wanted to see the house. I want to see his work, maybe let myself imagine how it would be to live in a place he built, up by the river. I hinted. But he never invited me. After that, my search for companionship just stopped. I shut down without ever realizing it had happened.
For a little moment, I wanted to tell June about this man, wanted to let her know that I had tried to find someone though I really never wanted to be married. That night at the wedding, because I knew the wishes she had for me made her sad, I wanted her to understand that for some of us there is nothing bad in having a less conventional life. I wanted to tell her things I wish I had said to my father. But all I could say was that Hazel wanted her to take home one of the centerpieces.
All around that night at the wedding were people I had grown up with—friends of my parents, our lawyer and accountant, a judge or two, the bridge club ladies, people we had always known from church, those who used to run things around here. All my childhood was gathered around me. This was not just a collection of the elders of Paris, Missouri; it was more to me. It was Bettyville, my mother’s home, her place, with most of its surviving souls, those who had known her as a girl and who had been kind to me and watched me grow. They were older suddenly, much older, my people—men in white shoes fit for a bandbox, striped suits from other decades; women in outfits that looked to have been stored away and worn only occasionally—and all I wanted, all of a sudden, was to stay with them forever. I love my town; I love my home. I went from table to table to hug them as the younger guests spilled out of the banquet room into the summer night to dance on the patio. I thought of asking my mother to dance, but did not. My father would definitely have been dancing. But probably not with her. He had given up on things like that many years before. Betty was not a dancing girl.
That night at the wedding where Betty was young again, the bride and groom headed out into the world. Hazel cried, big tears falling on her big, bountiful corsage. “She’ll have a hard time letting that one go,” remarked June.
“That’s the way it is,” Betty said. “We’re old ladies now.”
Overall, the evening seemed a kind of farewell to two women I loved who were leaving nights like this behind. Betty sat beside me, a row of silver bracelets on her wrist, surveying the scene, holding court as people came to greet her. She let some kiss her on the cheek as, behind their backs, she rolled her eyes at me and wrinkled her nose.
On the way home, June praised the festivities, said Hazel had always been the type to “do it up.”
“Didn’t you see their faces?” June asked my mother. “I know that look,” she said as I noticed in the rearview mirror, as the headlights passed, Betty looking amused but fondly at her sister-in-law.
“What do I know?” Betty asked. “I was an old maid.”
“But you were so pretty,” I reminded her. “Lots of men must have asked you out.”
“I didn’t fall into all of that so easily,” she said.
When we pulled into June’s driveway, Bill’s face was in the window, waiting, on guard for the arrival of his wife, eager to help her out of the car and usher her safely back into their home. Bill didn’t like to let June out of his sight after it got harder for her to get around.
“You okay, my dear?” he asked as he opened the passenger door, looking at me as if I could barely be trusted to get anyone back from a wedding without broken bones.
. . .
Bill Baker, when discharged from the navy, was unwilling to pay for train or bus fare. He hitchhiked from San Francisco to Missouri with the mumps. My picture of Bill is a young man, sick and running a fever, sticking his thumb up by the side of the road in some unfamiliar place.