The four houses up and down from theirs had offered their kitchens to Rose and were poised to bake their portions of the five hundred cookies needed for the reception. At ten o’clock, Emeline was due to run from house to house and shout, Now! The cookies would be slid into the ovens simultaneously.
The wedding would be at St. Procopius at noon, and then a wine-and-cookies reception would be held in the church’s side yard. Julia’s dress had been made by an Italian seamstress two streets over. Rose had been laundering the seamstress’s dresses and fabrics for free for months in exchange for the wedding gown. Rose was a world-class barterer. In the back left corner of her garden, she grew a specific varietal of squash only because the local butcher missed it terribly from his childhood in Greece; she gave him the entire crop each year in exchange for cuts of chicken and beef for her family. She’d orchestrated everything they needed for the wedding except the wine. Charlie was drinking buddies with the owners of the four liquor stores within walking distance, and Rose insisted that after all the business he’d given them, the least they could do was donate a case each for the wedding of his eldest daughter.
“Sylvie, you’re not going to marry and leave me, are you?” Charlie was in his armchair in the living room, wearing an old white T-shirt. He held a mug of coffee with both hands.
“Oh, Daddy.” Sylvie crossed the room and kissed the top of his head. “No matter what,” she said, “I wouldn’t leave you.”
“Emmie? Cece?”
“Don’t be silly, Daddy,” one of the girls called from their bedroom. “Of course we’re going to get married. Someday.”
Charlie leaned back in his chair. He looked older than Sylvie had ever seen him. He turned toward the window, which was just beginning to show the first light of day, and nodded. “You’ll all set sail, as you should, and leave your mother and me here. It’s a tale as old as time.”
After breakfast, Sylvie walked to the florist, which was six blocks away. Mr. Luis, a tiny Ecuadorian, sniffed at her from behind the counter and told her that the flowers would be delivered to the church on time. He was insulted that she had checked on him. “Surely you have something better to do with yourself on a day like this. Do your hair, put on lipstick. Do something to make yourself look special, child.”
Sylvie frowned. Did she look that bad? She was the maid of honor, which meant she would stand at the front of the church next to her sister during the ceremony. She wanted to look pleasing for Julia, but that required one of those magical good-hair days; Sylvie was never able to convince her own hair to look presentable. She hadn’t checked in the mirror this morning, but Mr. Luis seemed to suggest that she wasn’t in luck. Sylvie thanked him and left the shop. She counted how many steps she had to travel away from the door before she could no longer smell roses: thirteen.
She passed the library, which was just about to open, and waved through the window at the girls behind the desk. She felt an urge to duck inside and work a shift. To spend this day within the library’s cool stacks. The wedding, the sunlight, the mandatory smiling—it all seemed exhausting to her. She knew it was a strange contradiction, but despite her interest in love, weddings made her uncomfortable. They were too showy, too public. Deep love between two people was a private, wordless endeavor, and to place the lovers in fancy clothes in front of a crowd seemed antithetical to the nature of the thing. No one could see love—this was what Sylvie believed, anyway. It was an internal state. Watching that moment between two lovers felt wrong to her, almost blasphemous.
Sylvie was happy for Julia and William, but still, she would have to pretend the kind of girlish joy that she knew weddings were supposed to elicit in her. She would be kissed by all the old women in the neighborhood. You’re next would be said to her again and again, and this would make her feel melancholy too, because her true love hadn’t yet appeared, and what were the odds of him showing up at the Lozano Library, where she spent most of her time? What if she never found him?
Sylvie almost tripped over Cecelia, who was sitting on the curb just beyond the library. “What are you doing here?” she asked, surprised. Had Rose built time into the schedule for sitting on curbs, staring into space?
“Oh,” Cecelia said. “I’m waiting for Emeline. She went into the pharmacy.”
Sylvie sat down on the concrete, next to her sister. If there was time built into the schedule for this, she wanted part of it. She could use a quiet moment before reentering the manic energy of their house.
“I’m Beth today,” Cecelia said.
Sylvie nodded. This was from a long-running conversation between the four Padavano sisters. When Julia had first read Little Women, she told her sisters about the four fictional sisters in the book, and they began to argue over which of them was which March girl. Julia and Sylvie both saw themselves as the feisty Jo, and they were both right, Sylvie thought. They had Jo divided between them. Julia had Jo March’s exuberance and passion, and Sylvie had her independence and literary leaning. Emeline and Cecelia passed the identities of Meg and Amy back and forth between them, but whenever any of the sisters was sick or forlorn, she’d declare herself Beth. One of us will be the first to die, they would take turns telling one another, and all four girls shuddered at the thought.
“What’s wrong? Do you not feel well?”
“I have a secret,” Cecelia said. “You can’t tell Julia. I’ll tell her after her honeymoon. Maybe.”
Sylvie waited. The neighborhood streamed around them. Loud teenagers jostled each other as they walked; a kid bounced a basketball, waiting to cross the street; a row of Hasidic men turned the corner. People with ancestors from every part of the world headed in every direction. It was a Saturday, and a beautiful June morning, so everyone looked a touch happier than normal, a touch more free.
“I’m pregnant.”
A breath caught in Sylvie’s throat, and she coughed. She thought, But I haven’t even had sex yet. She said, “No, you can’t be. You’re seventeen. You’re wrong.”
Cecelia shrugged. She and Emeline had just graduated from high school, an event that was overshadowed by Julia’s college graduation and wedding. Charlie had looked older this morning; Cecelia did now too. “It was a boy in my class who I’ve always liked. I drank too much at Laurie Genovese’s party. He doesn’t know. I’m not sure what I’m going to do.”
Sylvie’s second reaction was anger. She had been so careful, only kissing boys, only allowing herself moments of risk-free pleasure. Julia had been planning and executing her life with military precision since grade school. Neither of them had left room for any surprises. Sylvie could see now that they’d believed their sheer example would keep Emeline and Cecelia safe, following directly behind them on the path to adulthood. Keep them careful. But that had been lazy on Sylvie’s part. She knew about third doors. If she and Julia had been marching in and out the same door, of course there was a chance that Emeline and Cecelia would find another exit. Cecelia was adorable: small and curvy. She had a generous laugh and drew portraits of her many friends for their birthdays. Boys had swarmed to her, and her older sisters hadn’t told her how and why to fend those boys off. As Charlie had said this morning, it was a tale as old as time.
Sylvie felt welded to the curb. Even when she stood up, when she walked home with her two little sisters, when she let Rose bustle her into her pink maid of honor dress and tried to improve her unruly hair, she felt like she was on that curb, watching life rush past. The library to her back, Cecelia a walking time bomb, Julia so happy she appeared to be shooting off sparks, William on the cusp of joining a new family, Rose and Charlie unaware that a new generation was already on its way. When the sun was high overhead, and Sylvie was standing at the altar—a smile affixed to her face—she was still sitting on that curb, trying to figure out if she was too late to pull everyone back.
William
MARCH 1982–JUNE 1982