That Summer

Within a month you could see the change. My mother was wearing sandals and even the occasional sequined shirt, frosting her hair, and going out every Thursday night to Ranzino’s, the bar at the Holiday Inn that featured easy-listening hits, dancing, and tons of paunchy men in toupees out for a good time. My mother came home with her cheeks flushed, tossing her newly frosted hair, saying she couldn’t believe she’d ever go to such a place and Lydia was such a card and it wasn’t her thing, not at all, only to head right back the next Thursday. I sat upstairs and listened to my mother pour her heart out to Lydia Catrell over coffee, thinking these were things she could never share with me. She cried and cursed my father as Lydia clucked her tongue and said Poor dear, it must have been so hard for you. Ashley had Lewis and my mother had Lydia but I was alone on Thursday nights, waiting for the rumble of the Town Car in the driveway and my mother’s key in the lock on the kitchen door. I couldn’t get to sleep until I heard her trying to tiptoe past my door in an effort not to wake me.

The newest thing was the trip to Europe. Lydia belonged to a travel club called The Old-Timers, which was a bunch of single women over forty who got a cheap group rate by taking trips together to exotic locales, usually Las Vegas. My mother had been on one of those trips a few months after Lydia moved in. I’d spent the weekend with my dad and the Weather Pet, picturing my mother playing blackjack, seeing Wayne Newton, and going to the Liberace Museum, all of which were listed on The Old-Timers travel itinerary. After three days and four nights my mother had returned with a new white shorts-and-sandals set, winnings of about fifty bucks, and a million stories about these middle-aged women taking Vegas by storm. She said it was the best time she ever had, so it was no wonder she was interested in the trip to Europe. That was a four-week extravaganza through England, Italy, France, and Spain, with stops along the way to see the bullfights, tour Buckingham Palace, and sunbathe nude in the South of France, the latter being something my mother chose to pass on. If she went, she’d be leaving two weeks after Ashley got married.

“Just think,” Lydia was saying as I came in from work one afternoon, “four weeks in Europe. It’s what you wanted to do in college but could never afford. Now you have the money, so why not go?”

“I don’t have the money,” my mother said. “With the wedding so close and Haven going back to school too, I just don’t know if the timing is good.”

“Haven is a big girl.” Lydia smiled at me. “Look at how tall she is, for Godsakes. She can take care of herself for a month. She’ll love it.”

“She’s only fifteen,” my mother said, and I could tell by the way she was biting her lip that she hadn’t made up her mind yet. I felt bad about it but there was some place in me that didn’t want her to go. Europe seemed too far away. I couldn’t picture her anywhere there, except standing in front of famous landmarks from my history books. My mother and Lydia, in front of the Eiffel Tower, Westminster Abbey, the leaning Tower of Pisa. My mother and Lydia, topless in France—the landmarks were easier.

I watched my mother from across the table as she talked with Lydia. Now and then I’d catch her eye and find her smiling at me, that same smile I remembered from when times were better and my father looped an arm around her waist, pulling her in closer the way I so often wanted to do now. To scoop her away from Lydia and the rest of the world and have her all to myself—if only for a while.

Meanwhile, the wedding continued to take over our lives. It hung over the house like a storm cloud, refusing to budge, promising possible disaster at any second. Every surface from the coffee table to the top of the television seemed to be filled with small scraps of paper detailing wedding reminders in my mother’s small, neat hand.

Bridesmaids: orders in by?

Ashley meets with caterer again July 30

Haven shoes, pantyhose, hair?

RSVP list, final version

Europe???????????????

She left them around like clues, a way I had of keeping up with her concerns from day to day. Just like I’d sat in my bathroom and listened through the vent to her crying to Lydia all those mornings. I was only able to share my mother’s concerns from a distance, unknown to her at all.

Meanwhile my father had returned from honeymooning for a week in the Virgin Islands, with a tan, more hair, and a grin that seemed pasted on that my mother noticed even from the front window when he dropped me off after my weekly dinner with him. She tossed her hair and kept whatever sarcastic comment was twisting her face to herself before she headed out again with Lydia, the Town Car’s horn beeping three times to summon her off to the Holiday Inn.

And then there was Ashley, who after dealing with Carol’s on-again-off-again participation in the wedding (now back on, after many tears and much long-distance wrangling and a promise that she could leave immediately after the wedding pictures were taken) was on to another crisis, this being her first sit-down dinner with Lewis’s parents, the Warshers. I sat in my room and listened to her tearing through her closet, hangers clanking, until I was summoned in to judge which dress was best.

“Okay,” she said from inside the closet, where she was busy bumping around, “this is the first option.” She came out in a red dress with a white collar, tugging at the hem to make it appear longer than it was.

“Too short,” I said. “Too red.”

She glanced at herself in the mirror, then gave up on the hem and headed back into the closet. “You’re right. Red is the wrong message to be sending. Red is a warning; it just screams out. I need something that makes me blend. I want them to welcome me into the family.”