Fiction from The Literary Review
How to Plan a Wedding
ROBIN BRAUDWELL
By the time Bob Dylan got around to singing the chorus of "Like a Rolling Stone," I had already tasted my date's tongue. We were sitting in the front seat of Harry Giles's Chevrolet Impala, which was parked in the middle of an open field about five miles down Crawley Road. Behind me and Harry, stretched out on the Impala's spacious back seat, Harry's friend Glen Dyer was kissing my sister Bonnie.
I leaned back onto the seat's nubby fabric and picked up the liner notes to Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits, which I had found on the floorboard of the date's car. I had recently decided that Bob Dylan was really something. What I liked most was the lonesome sound of his voice, which reminded me of peanut butter stuck to the roof of my mouth.
"What are you doing?" Harry Giles asked me. "Reading the Bible?"
Outside, the crickets were singing their own mysterious songs.
"I woke up this morning and realized I was dreaming about you," Bonnie said in a quiet murmur voice.
She was talking to Glen Dyer, who was her fiancé. They were getting married in two days and always carried on with this sort of nonsensical baby talk.
Then I heard Bonnie say: "And in the dream you were selling Eskimo pies."
"Bonnie," Harry said, his eyes studying the top button of my blouse, "your sister's up here reading the fucking Bible."
"What? Oh, don't mind her. Mary Alice reads anything. But we should get going," Bonnie told him. "Little sis here has a midnight curfew these days, you know, and I need some beauty sleep before the wedding."
Harry muttered something and started the car with a mean jerk of the keys.
On the way home, I thought of many things:
How his tongue moved in my mouth with the frantic movement of a dying fish.
How he was probably the kind of man who borrowed his sister's hair spray to tame his cowlick.
How all of his kisses had tasted strangely like stale bread.
Bonnie and I had double-dated a lot that summer.
I'd graduated from high school in June, and Bonnie announced her intentions of broadening my experience before I headed off to Duke University in the fall.
"Little sis," she would say, using her Buddha-on-the-mountaintop voice, "they eat sweet girls like you for breakfast up there."
Bonnie liked to say things like that. She was a theater major at Western Kentucky University. Her life was one big whirling disco ball of activity that pulled everyone else into its orbit; she loved anything that smacked of the dramatic.
I, however, was not dramatic. I was the pale brown shopping bag next to Bonnie's flaming chartreuse snakeskin purse. We had always been kind of complementary sisters: the homecoming queen and the valedictorian. What's more, I wasn't really sure that I cared; I had accepted my fate and identity as Bonnie's Little Sister. Now all I wanted to do was go to college and become a lawyer because I knew how things were and how they should be. I wanted to change the world; Bonnie just wanted me to change my hairstyle.
But there were other motives for the double dates as well. Glen Dyer was Bonnie's constant companion that summer. They had been going out for over a year and were getting married at the end of August, right before I left for school. My parents, however, were strictly traditionalists, and the fact that Glen Dyer and Bonnie were engaged only made them more suspicious about what was going on between the two of them, so I was employed as a chaperone for the couple.
"I don't care what you do up there in Bowling Green," my mother would say, referring to Bonnie's dorm at Western Kentucky, "but while you live in this house, you certainly will not play bad piano on my nerves by running around all hours of the night with that boy."
That boy was my mother's not-so-affectionate term for Glen Dyer. Neither of my parents was thrilled about the impending marriage. Glen Dyer and Bonnie had been the golden couple for two years of high school, young and popular and beautiful, but they broke up right before graduation. Instead of going on to college, Glen Dyer worked as a groundskeeper at a country club in Brentwood. While my sister was busy pledging her sorority and skipping early morning classes, Glen Dyer had gained something of a reputation around town as wild and troubled. They had been dating pretty seriously ever since meeting up again at Mina Long's pool party last summer, but my parents still had little patience with this scrubby gardener who would come to call on their oldest child in a beat-up red Ford truck. Being religious people, they secretly prayed for some small miracle that would intercede in the couple's eternal bliss: maybe a disfiguring industrial accident for Glen Dyer, or perhaps a modeling contract in New York for Bonnie.
However, we had made it through June, July, and half of August without any hint of divine intervention. The wedding was set for that Saturday afternoon, and the caterers, florist, organist, and photographer were all busily preparing for the happy day. Everything seemed to be running curiously on schedule.
Bonnie had her dress; for the past few weeks, she had been in the habit of trying it on every afternoon and staring at herself for hours in the mirror of her dressing table, her mouth moving slowly in strange and silent speeches. Sometimes I would stand invisible in the doorway watching this, surrounded in the hall by boxes of stuff I was taking to Duke, and I understood then that the sad, tired look in my family's eyes when we talked of the wedding had nothing to do with the endless hours of preparation, but with this image of Bonnie dressed in stiff white lace, her lips smiling as they formed incomprehensible words.
I knew, as I leaned unnoticed against the doorjamb, that the gulf of sorrow came from this fact: Bonnie was becoming a stranger to us.
"Thank you for the movie. Thank you for such a wonderful evening," Bonnie said to Glen Dyer and Harry Giles.
My sister and I were standing on the road in front of our house. We lived on the outskirts of Murfreesboro, a town about fifty miles from Nashville. My father bought and renovated this old farmhouse when I was in kindergarten, a few years after he started his own pediatric practice in town, and it was one of the dividing points in his and my mother's relationship. My mother did not like the house: it was old, drafty, and too far from the city. My father, however, often announced his plans of being buried in the backyard.
"I'll call you tomorrow, Piglet," Glen Dyer said to Bonnie, his hands still holding onto hers as she stood beside the car.
"Okay, Pooh Bear," she said, leaning down to kiss his nose one last time through the open window.
Bonnie and Glen Dyer were the type of couple who liked to sit on the same side of the booth at McDonald's, even when no one else was there.
I said goodnight to Harry, but he only made a strange huffing noise by blowing air through his nose. Then the Impala disappeared quickly down our street.
"That," I said flatly to Bonnie, "was true misery."
Bonnie laughed and put her arm around me.
"You don't even give them a chance, little sis," she said. "You read song lyrics, for God's sake. I don't know what you're going to do without me up there in Durham. I just don't know."
I looked up at my older sister in the wavy moonlight and saw the twelfth-grade Bonnie, my glittering sister, the one who had played Hedda Gabler to a packed house in the senior play, the one who later snuck me, a gawky freshman, into the backstage party. Her laughter now sounded like tiny bells ringing against the balmy night air. She was smiling, her teeth strong and straight and white. She looked happy.
"I'll probably study," I told her.
It was after eleven when Bonnie and I got home, and we expected everyone to be asleep. But the first thing we heard inside the house was my nine-year-old sister Minnie sobbing loudly. She ran into the foyer when she heard the door.
"Simsim is gone," she said after catching her breath. "Gone, gone, gone, gone, gone."
Simsim was our cat, a gray and white tabby.
"Minnie, dear, please calm down and get some sleep. Simsim will come back when he gets hungry in the morning. He certainly knows where to find a good meal when he's ready," my mother said.
Minnie only rolled her eyes towards the ceiling and cried even harder. She sat on the stairs and buried her face in her lap.
"Well, you two, how was your evening?" my mother asked as she picked up one of ten bridal magazines lying on the coffee table and started looking at silver place settings.
My mother may not have liked Glen Dyer, but she certainly had found her calling when it came to coordinating the wedding.
"Bad movie, bad food, bad company," I said. "Good music, though."
"God, Mary Alice, you are such a bore!" Bonnie said. She flopped her body languidly across the couch and started playing with my mother's hair. "Harry Giles is a perfectly nice boy. And you should have been nicer to him because he's going to escort you down the aisle on Saturday."
Harry Giles was Glen Dyer's best man. As Bonnie's maid of honor, it was my great pleasure to be paired up with him during the wedding ceremony.
"Harry Giles is a prick," I said to Bonnie, thinking about the floating movements his rough fingers made around the rim of my shirt.
"Mary Alice Deerfield," my mother broke in. "You may be going up to Durham next week, but you still live in this house for now. And you know that we have certain rules about that kind of language."
I could have told my mother how ridiculous I found the idea of love and marriage and this whole business of holding hands outside of cars. I could have told her that people can talk themselves into love for all sorts of reasons and that I knew Bonnie was settling for less than she deserved when she married Glen Dyer. I could have told her all these things and many more, but she and Bonnie had already started talking about what exactly should be packed for the honeymoon. Bonnie smiled in satisfaction: she knew she was the only real winner here. The rest of us were being forced to share publicly in her happiness. I decided to go to my room and pack up some more of my belongings while I listened to "Maggie's Farm." Dylan, at least, understood my frustration.
As I passed the ball of Minnie's body on the stairs, I heard her muffled, nasal voice.
"He's a prick, prick, prick, prick, prick," she said.
There were some things we did not talk about in my family. One of them was Glen Dyer's past.
The summer after he graduated from high school, Glen Dyer went to work at his father's landscaping company. He spent his days digging up trees and hauling dirt in a white truck with the words Dyer and Sons Landscaping stenciled on the side. After work, he would spend his nights at Beverly's, a really seedy bar out Highway 52 that didn't mind serving minors as long as they were paying in cash. Every week, reports of knife fights and gun play at Beverly's would surface and ride through town like a cresting wave, but the regulars didn't seem to mind. Glen Dyer knew most of them through his job at the landscaping company or because they were awkward, experimenting kids just like himself.
This went on most of the summer. Then, one bright afternoon in late August three years ago, Glen Dyer killed a woman with his truck.
It happened like this. He was riding home after work to shower and change clothes before heading over to Beverly's. Maybe he was in a hurry and that caused him to be careless. Maybe he was tired from all his late nights and started to doze off as his tires moved methodically down the straight road. Whatever the reason, he did not see the dog, a two-year-old Golden Retriever, that ran out in front of his truck. Nor did he see Mrs. Mangrum, a thirty-seven-year-old housewife and mother of four, who chased her pet into the street.
The whole thing took about ten seconds. Later, the police looked at the road around the accident and said that Glen Dyer never even put on his brakes. The dog made it safely to the other side of the street. Mrs. Mangrum, however, took the full force of Glen Dyer's truck traveling at about fifty miles an hour. People as far away as Deacon Street heard the metallic thud followed by the ringing sound of shattering glass and came out of their homes to investigate. They found Mrs. Mangrum's body thrown thirty feet, back up into her own yard. They found Glen Dyer huddled in the bed of his truck, his arms around his knees, saying the days of the week over and over and over again.
After the accident, Glen Dyer started spending more and more time at Beverly's and quickly gained the reputation of being the worst kind of drunk: mean, sullen, and violent. After about four months, Glen Dyer's own father fired him from the landscaping company. Glen Dyer was often spotted wandering around the scene of the accident in a drunken stupor, and more than once, he tempted the fate of going out of this world in the same way as Mrs. Mangrum by tottering too near the edge of the highway as the cars zoomed by.
About a year after the accident, Glen Dyer checked himself into Vanderbilt Psychiatric Center in Nashville. He spent two months there and started on anti-depressants. The doctors said Glen Dyer would be fine after dealing with the initial emotional trauma brought on by the accident. When he got out of the hospital, he went to AA meetings four times a week and got the job at the country club.
Last May, one year, ten months, and twelve days after he killed Mrs. Mangrum, Glen Dyer started dating my sister Bonnie.
The next morning after our double date was Friday, the day before the wedding. We were going to have the rehearsal at the church that evening, and then head into Nashville for dinner at 101st Airborne, a fancy downtown restaurant. My mother and Bonnie had woken me up early to say they were going to buy gifts for the bridal attendants. I was sleepily eating my breakfast, a whole-grain blueberry bagel, and flipping through my mother's current issue of Southern Living when the phone rang.
"Hey, hey, hey, Airy Malice."
Glen Dyer did not believe in calling people by their given names.
"Bonnie's not here," I said, still reading the magazine as I spoke. "She and Mom went up to Nashville."
"Oh," Glen Dyer said slowly. "I told Bonita I was going to call her this morning."
Behind me, Minnie walked into the kitchen, still wearing her pajamas. Her mouth was moving. She had taken up the habit in the past few weeks of moving through the house like a stiff-limbed zombie, mumbling, "Bonnie Dyer, Bonnie Dyer, Bonnie Dyer."
"I don't know," I told Glen Dyer. "I think they went shopping."
"Oh," he said again. Silence. "Well, just tell Bonita I'll see her tonight at the rehearsal. Seven o'clock."
Glen Dyer didn't sound happy. I hung up the phone and thought about what a strange disease love can be. How it makes people forget how to be alone.
Until death us do part.
This is what I was thinking as I walked up the road near our house later that afternoon. I told my father I would look around the neighborhood for Simsim, who still had not returned home, but really I just wanted to get out of the house, stuffed with wedding presents still in boxes and R.S.V.P. cards for the reception.
I thought about my parents as I walked. Whenever I tried to imagine Glen Dyer and Bonnie standing up in front of the church, the image always turned into one of my mother and father. Then I saw my mother standing over my father's orange chair, her face flushed and beating. She was yelling at my father for something. That she hated the house. That my father was being mean and cheap to say they couldn't go to London for vacation when the Youngs down the street were going. That he had forgotten to take out the garbage after dinner, again.
This, then, was my idea of love and marriage, and I wanted nothing to do with it.
As I neared the entrance to Forest Hills Cemetery, about half a mile from our house, I saw someone---a tall, dark figure---walking unsteadily a little further down the hill. He stopped in front of the cemetery and then went in.
It looked like Glen Dyer, so I followed him.
I stayed about fifty feet behind him, as he wove around the different grave markers and flower arrangements. Then he stopped in front of a raised headstone and nearly fell down on top of it. He turned around and looked right at me.
"Airy Malice," Glen Dyer yelled. "You come down here and you talk to me."
His words sounded as if they were being spelled with big bubble letters. What could I do? I walked down the hill to where Glen Dyer stood. I didn't see the bottle of Wild Turkey until I got to the bottom.
"Beautiful Airy Malice. Wanna drink?" Glen Dyer asked, holding out the bottle.
I said no.
"Aw, come on, girl. You're not gonna be like your sister, are you? Always trying to ruin my fun?" he said.
"What are you doing here?" I asked.
I didn't know what else to say. The cloudy look in Glen Dyer's eyes scared me.
"Where is my little Bonita on this fine summer day?" he said. "Where is the woman I love? Why isn't she here enjoying this beautiful day before her wedding with the man of her fucking dreams?"
"Bonnie went shopping," I said. "In Nashville. Remember?"
Glen Dyer moved closer to me, and I stepped back. It felt strangely like we were dancing.
"Harry Giles thought you were the bees knees," he said. "How about a double wedding, Airy?"
I looked down and saw the name on the gravestone in front of us, the one Glen Dyer had almost tripped over. It said Evelyn Mangrum, the name of the woman he killed.
"Are you okay, Glen?" I asked.
He was crying.
"I killed her, Airy Malice. Do you understand that, you fucking genius bitch? I killed her."
He lifted the bottle and took a long drink. Then he laid down on the ground in front of the tombstone.
"It was an accident," I said. "Everyone knows that. We all know."
"You're just like your sister," he said. It might have been the first time in my life someone had told me that.
Glen Dyer's body was shaking in front of me. He touched my ankle, and his finger gave me a little electric shock. I knew there was a line connecting us somehow, a line that ran between Bonnie, a line that started with the need to be cushioned somehow by human flesh and that threaded us all together. Maybe Glen Dyer wasn't the monster I had made him out to be, the thief who had come in our window at night and stolen Bonnie away from us. Maybe he was just lonely. And then I understood the attraction my sister felt for this broken and vulnerable man. I sat beside Glen Dyer and slowly rubbed his head.
"You didn't mean to do it," I murmured as he cried.
We stayed like that for a while. Then Glen Dyer sat up suddenly. His body was close to me. He smelled like freshly mowed grass.
"Mary Alice," he said, and my own name sounded strange.
Then he leaned over and kissed me, his mouth soft and shaking. He tasted hot and mysterious, from the Wild Turkey. I closed my eyes, and then I kissed him back, my fingers curling tightly in his hair. I kissed him hard. I wanted to pull him closer to me, to pull him down further and further until he was part of my body, until I swallowed him whole and he swam around inside of me.
But I didn't. I thought of Bonnie kissing that same mouth and I pulled away.
"I should go home," I said.
Glen Dyer's face crumpled.
"Please don't tell Bonita," he said. "You're going to school soon. There's no need to tell her."
But I wanted to tell her.
I wanted her to know what awful people Glen Dyer and I were.
I wanted her to know that he was drunk and insane.
I wanted her to know that I was lonely and jealous.
I wanted to explain to Bonnie how the world was so much more than the simple black and white photograph I had always imagined it to be. When I looked closer, it was actually made up of all these grey and greyer dots, forming shapes that I did not recognize and I could not understand.
I heard people laughing when I got home.
I followed the oddly rhythmic sounds to the den and found my mother, my father, Bonnie, and Minnie all sitting in the middle of the room. Their heads were bowed and the room was dark and Minnie turned to me, her eyes rimmed red, and said:
"Simsim is dead, Mary Alice. Dead, dead, dead."
The laughing sounds came again, harder, sharper; then I realized it wasn't laughter at all, but crying.
Bonnie told me that Mr. Bryant, our neighbor, had found Simsim drowned in his swimming pool that morning. Our father had gone over and fished Simsim's body out of the water with a cleaning net. He brought the cat home and buried him in the backyard before even telling anyone the news, so the rest of the family wouldn't have to see the bloated, foreign thing that once was our pet.
I sat in front of the fireplace. I missed my cat and the smooth feel of his fur on my bare leg. This is what forever meant. I missed my sister, too, and the light grace with which she carried the weight that was hers in being firstborn. She was sparkling. She was remarkable. And yet she was leaving us, to give these charms to another.
Then, my mother did a strange thing: she asked my father if he remembered to get the napkins for the reception. My father raised his head. He was a gentle man, and his grief was intense. He told her no. The room was quiet. My mother took responsibility seriously, and any lapse was subject to severe admonishment. At that moment, I hated her smoothly painted lips and her frosted hair and her cardboard questions.
But my mother did not yell. She did not scream. She did not ask my father why he always made her life so difficult. Instead, she got up and sat in his lap. She took his hands, still wet from his tears, in her own, and whispered something in his ear. Just before she put her head against his, I saw the look that softened her features. It was the same look I had seen when Bonnie was with Glen Dyer.
"Bonnie," I said suddenly. "Do you really love Glen Dyer?"
Bonnie looked at me. Her gray eyes were swimming.
"Yes," she said.
And a part of me believed she did and a part of me believed she only thought she did, and I thought about the difference between these two things and how, maybe in love, there is really no difference at all.
I wrote down everything for Bonnie. I wrote about the slant in the hill at the cemetery and the sideways smile on Glen Dyer's face when he spoke and the vibration of his lips when he kissed me. I wrote about the way Glen Dyer leaned and how my fingers curled in his hair. I told her not to marry him. I told her she was better than that, she didn't need his wagon hitched to her star.
I wrote all of these things down on a yellow piece of paper from one of the notepads in my father's office. I wrote them down and folded the paper, first in half, then in fourths, then in tiny eighths. I walked through the house.
I passed Bonnie's room, where she was wrapping the gifts to give her bridal attendants that night at the rehearsal dinner.
I passed Minnie, in her pink Sunday dress and hose without shoes, who was testing which of the stairs was the highest she could jump off without breaking her ankle.
I passed my mother and father, both strangely calm, flipping through the thin book of pictures from their wedding, which I knew had taken place in the tiny courtroom on the town square up in Franklin. The only family to attend was my father's sister because, for reasons unknown to me, neither side approved of the match.
I walked down to the creek that ran behind our house and placed the note I had written in the water. The creek was not deep or fast, and it took a few moments for the current to catch the paper. But then the note began to float slowly away, bobbing, bobbing, until it disappeared behind a tree. The paper would be like a boat. It would run along, I knew, to the Harpeth River, to the Tennessee, to the Mississippi, to the Gulf of Mexico, where the sand is white like bleached wood and the shrimp jump magically into fishermen's boats. My father once took our family there for a month by the sea, and Bonnie taught me the trick of floating on my back in the water.
I was still staring at the slow movement of the creek when I heard Bonnie's voice.
"There you are, Mary Alice," she said and she was standing beside me. "We can't start the rehearsal without my maid of honor, my best girl."
I looked up and saw my sister, her blond hair blowing sideways in the wind. She held out her hand, its sparkling ring on the third finger, and I took it.
"Bonnie," I said.
