The groom’s mother, shimmering blue watersilk with shoes dyed to match, dabs perfume behind her ears, saving a drop for the lacy handkerchief she slips in her purse, the very same handkerchief she carried when she and John said their vows. “Oh beautiful dress,” she sings, twisting to get a view of herself in the bathroom mirror. “You were there on that rack when I needed you most.” She believes steadfastly in omens of good fortune and looks for them everywhere. “Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue.”
She is the something old, the bride is the something new, her dress is the something blue; and if only the bride will ask, her handkerchief will be the something borrowed.
Randy, elder brother and best man, fully and impeccably dressed, stands and folds a tiny square of flannel. The mother fidgets as he tucks the flannel carefully into his shoe kit, recognizing the pattern as belonging to his once-favorite pajamas. That would also be something old, but the best man does not traditionally have superstitions. Perhaps Clifford, the groom, will wear a penny in his shoe for good luck, or should she be the one to wear a penny in her shoe, her luck having deserted her so long ago when the boys were mere babies and she lost their father. Will today be one of her heightened awareness days, she wonders and pours the second cup of coffee that she almost drank down the lavatory drain. Even so, she is likely to remember too much, to see and hear too clearly.
“Extremely alert,” Randy says, “You look extremely alert, Mother dear,” and she asks if he means to bless or curse her.
Clifford, half dressed, opens the hall closet and pokes at a set of golf clubs. “Can’t find my black shoes.”
“You’ve never put shoes in there,” the mother says. She hears a tinge of hysteria in his voice.
“I’m looking for the flashlight; where is it?” Clifford straightens. “The blooming light’s out in my closet.”
“Flashlight?” the mother says, remembering the flashlight dead and leaking a month ago and writing it down on her grocery list but not remembering to buy one. No point now in making a full confession… Full confessions never make anybody feel better.
Clifford grins, “I had my teeth cleaned. Nobody can say I didn’t have my sweet little old teeth cleaned.”
Randy shakes his head. “The poor bride. Poor, poor Nancy.”
“Don’t say that.” The mother sighs and puts her arm around Randy’s waist. Be quiet, tongue. She cannot stop this banter between brothers. Their father should be here to deal with them man to man. It isn’t fair that widows should be left with everything to do. She hums the wedding march.
“Do shut up,” they say like twins.
“I still think we should have a limo.” Randy holds up his new wallet, a gift from the groom. “I can afford it.”
“I know you can, dear, but I couldn’t. Conspicuous consumption makes me feel ridiculous.”
“Obviously.” Randy looks pointedly at the sofa bed he has slept the night on and at the coffee table pathetically in need of refinishing. He has offered to replace both pieces and been shushed.
She thinks this very minute, when they have not even left for the church he is picturing her returning to this wreck alone—their home sweet home. No apologies. Too late for being in the kitchen baking cookies. Too late for making the children’s beds.
Randy picks up a purplish ashtray and empties it in the fireplace. “I might have been an artist—professionally, I mean. This work shows real promise.”
She watches him handling the precious objects from her desk—his perfect hand in plaster from the Mother’s Day he was five, Clifford’s balsa-wood hotrod painted fluorescent pink. She silently screams, “My collection—don’t touch.”
“Look at that glaze.” He holds the ashtray under the lamp. “The purple blob. Outstanding.”
She remembers the expression of pride on his first-grade face. “You took it out of your bag so calmly and handed it to me as if you made ashtrays every day of the week.”
“The teacher kept saying, are you making that for your father and I didn’t want to admit that my father was dead or that my mother smoked so I said it was for myself.”
He smiles as if the faraway boy didn’t really need the father he was once embarrassed not to have.
The mother frowns and tries to remember how she felt when she was not yet a widow. “I thought you were happy in school. Naïve of me.”
“Not at all. Looking back—as a man of experience… First grade teachers are viewed somewhat uncritically.” He touches her shoulder “… while Mothers are always Mothers.”
“Of course, what else could we be?” She thinks, now it is open to question with surrogate mothers all over the place but for me it was an absolute state. She wants to say, “And you might have had (almost did have) a different mother.”
She checks again to be sure the lacy handkerchief is in her purse, the handkerchief John’s mother gave her for “something borrowed”—still beautifully white and perfectly ironed in case Nancy should turn and ask if she has “something old.”
“Perhaps I do,” she would say and offer the handkerchief. No reason really she should expect Nancy to ask. Weddings were fantasy enough without adding her own, but she would have it if Nancy should want it, though probably brides didn’t have those little superstitions anymore. Nor grooms.
Clifford all dressed now except for shoes, comes into the living room, twirling about in his stocking feet, coattails flying straight out like a turkey cock’s feathers.
“Not in your closet?” the Mother says.
“Did you send them out to be polished? That might be it.”
Randy, as always, thinks of the one logical course of action the bridegroom might have taken and a conversation from weeks ago about dress suits and black patent shoes comes back to her, some vague admonition she gave to have his shoes smartened up and marking that off her mental list of things to mention. He is a grown man, after all, about to become “head of household” or is there any such thing anymore?
“What am I going to do?” Clifford for the first time looks stricken. “I thought I was all set. I did every stupid thing on Nancy’s list.”
The Mother starts. Nancy’s stupid list? Does the bride make a list for the groom? She doesn’t remember making a list. She pats her tiny hat into place and stands back from the hall mirror to check her slip. Hang in there underwear. Don’t give up the ship garter belt. Don’t have a sneezing fit nose.
“I can’t believe you expected me to provide you with a pair of black shoes,” Randy says. “Nancy didn’t give me a list and mine won’t fit you.”
“No, I’m sure I didn’t expect you to provide shoes. I bought the ring.”
She looks at Randy’s watch and remembers John slipping her ring on and how totally married she felt from that moment on.
“What am I going to do? Go barefoot?”
She wonders if Nancy has ever heard that in his voice, a kind of hysterical silliness. John couldn’t stand silliness.
“I know my feet are bigger than yours.” Clifford glares at Randy as if he meant to punch him, but instead brings out from behind his back a pair of black basketball shoes covered with dust.
“Don’t breathe, Mother.”
“Clifford, look at your knees.”
Randy opens his suitcase and offers his clothes brush.
She holds out her hand. “I’ll do it.” Adrenaline sweeps through her body. She orders Randy, “You get the taxi.”
Clifford stands stiffly for her to brush his suit.
She tries to remember what their father wore on their marriage day and can only remember his sweet smile, his sweet arms around her.
“Are you sure you didn’t take your shoes to the shop? Look in your wallet and see if you have a ticker.”
Clifford turns his wallet out onto the table: credit cards, driver’s license, and small crushed ticket saying Shoe Renew.
They look at one another and smile. If nothing else the shoes exist, did not jump unwittingly into the Goodwill bag or self-immolate.
“Put on your loafers and we’ll swing by and get them.” Randy locks the door and pushes the elevator button.
“They say that stuff about selling things if you don’t pick them up, but they don’t really do it.”
“Right.”
How handsome he is hurrying down the street while Clifford stands serenely gazing at the stone steps across the street. What can he be thinking? She cannot believe that in forty minutes he will stand beside his bride and repeat the holy bonds of matrimony. Should she tell him about the birds and the bees?
“You look lovely, Mother-of-the-Groom,” Clifford says.
She squeezes his arm and thinks how easily she found her white gloves, how perfectly her shoes match her dress, how unlike herself she looks today.
“You’re absolutely psychic,” Clifford said every time she turned up a missing cufflink and she basked in it. Now she is suffering from her eternal mother’s pride. The Groom’s mother has so little to do, she might have remembered shoes. Too late, too late.
They climb into the taxi, mother in the middle, the place she claimed—keeping them apart because each always wanted a window. Now Clifford would have his own ally and she would keep still. No matter what happened she would not speak. They could have babies or not have babies; she would never speak. They could live in Timbuctoo if they wanted—but no, no, no.
Randy leans across her lap. “Do you remember where the shop is?”
Clifford glares back. “I walk by the place every day.”
“Don’t start that.” She puts a hand over each big fist. How small their father would have looked between them. They were huge horses beside him. They would think him too small, too delicate. But he would be with her, not them, and he would not be too small.
“Why didn’t you pick them up if you went by the shop every day?”
In that moment the mother knows that Randy will never marry, that his standards are too high, that he is not foolish and inconsiderate enough to marry, that he can settle for nothing less than perfection, and that she will never see his children.
“Driver, stop right here.” Clifford jumps out of the cab and points triumphantly to the window where finished shoes are lined in a row. He bangs on the door. “Anybody there?”
If this were a movie, she thinks, he would put his fist through and pluck out the shoes, without a scratch, while upstairs over the shop a couple would hear the commotion and frown down at the madman banging on the door and calmly close the shutters.
Randy gets out of the taxi and points to the CLOSED sign. “It won’t matter, Cliff. Nobody ever looks at the groom.”
Clifford lets Randy push him towards the taxi.
They settle on either side of her again, breathing heavily, saying nothing. Closing her eyes, she feels a memory break loose from where it has hovered all day waiting its chance to float free, a story John’s sister told her long after he died, how he courted a young woman for more than a year and planned to propose marriage, how the sister packed a picnic for him and he borrowed the family car to drive to a particularly romantic spot in the country to declare his intentions, and how just after they got started the car broke down totally. In his efforts to repair it, he covered his white linen suit with grease and dirt and was too embarrassed to propose. She looked away quickly from the laughing sister, feeling her heart pierced for poor John and the woman who might have been his bride.
She has never told the boys because she does not want them to think of their father as ridiculous and because they were never the right age to understand how nearly she had not been their mother. Now it comes rushing out, one word tumbling over the other as the taxi gets closer and closer to the church.
Randy pats her hand. “That was a bit of a close call, old dear.”
Clifford stares out the window as if he has not heard one word.
Perhaps she should not have told the story today, or ever. They could care less that they exist quite by chance.
The church looms in front of them, covering a city block with its sanctuary, inner courtyards, library, and fellowship hall. Randy leans over and hands the driver a bill. “Take us to the side entrance and then drive slowly around and leave our mother at the front steps.” He turns to her and whispers, “Our extremely alert mother.”
She watches them enter by the choir door, Randy with his arm around Clifford’s shoulder, showing him with the other hand that the ring is safe in his waistcoat pocket. They turn and throw her a kiss, as if it were a lark, some debutante party they are attending in search of a wife and might yet emerge from with unsettled feelings. She feels quite the wallflower in advance and longs for John to hold her, to give her his arm for the long walk down the aisle.
“Tears, get back where you belong.” She leans back hard against the seat, clutching her purse with an edge of old lace caught in the clasp.
[Undated short story by Virginia McKinnon Mann.]
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