"I haven't seen such a lovely pattern in all of my life!!" Sarah picked up the china plate and let the light bounce off all the pretty colors. "Mommy would love this! Greg , my mother would just, she would die. Ace why can't my mommy be here!?" I feared for the life of the plate. They don't last very long when smashed over my head. Not an uncommon experience with brides.
"Sarah, look at me. Sarah. Come here and look at me." I pulled her in by the shoulders until her nose touched mine. "Mommy can't be here."
"But Ace!"
"Mommy loves the colors and the silverware, but she loves something else much more."
"Me?"
"No.
"She lives for surprises!" From what I remember mommy did love this better anyway. "If you covered her eyes and walked her into the perfect wedding the look on her face alone would last in your memory forever!" The sentimental tears that I was now pulling from Sarah were accompanied by girlish gasps of surprise.
"Greg, she will so love this plate!" She handed it to the clerk that was following us. her tears crashendoed as she said,"Wrap it." Then bam! a wail that would match an over pleased banshee.
"That girl is gentle." Greg was following his love at a safe distance examining everything in the shop as if each object held a new and precious soul for sale. "She cares so much about the simple things, I'm not sure how much longer she could have lived without me." He looked down at me and smiled with his eyes. He obviously believed that he had made a joke. Greg was funny that way. When the three of us had been hunting out a venue Greg had researched each of the places at one point or another in his lifetime. He made jokes about how half the locations had suffered some terrible murder and the rest were assisted with bad luck. That irony alone was super funny.
Yes, he was certainly funny in some way.
Sarah laughed the whole way through, even though I swear she mostly was laughing out of her kindness.
"He's just so smart Ace. He can't help that most of his humor goes right over our heads." Sarah whispered this to me just as we were pulling through the ten foot gates to the driveway of Greg's family manor. I laughed for the first time all day. His humor was most certainly far, far above our heads.
A handmade wood shop project, the single-story sheet-cake made its own furniture seem like it had come from a little cobbler in a tree. But as Greg so brilliantly pointed out, "Even if some ghost did try to drop something on us during the wedding we'd hear it in time to get away!" Sarah laughed.
This backwoods gentleman certainly seemed like he could have once been mistaken for normal. His house had been designed to cater to the great height that Greg's family had accumulated, his own head was a foot and a half higher than mine but once you get to his face he's just another dashing dark haired man. Revoltingly normal.
So now I have the very simple task of making my dear friend feel like an angel out of heaven in colors that matched mold, dead grass and dog hair. I decided to start as far away from the actual beauty as possible, the reception.
"Sarah! Don't even think about touching one of those glasses!" Greg jogged up the isle to were Sarah was holding a gold trimmed crystal flute.
"This glass shimmers Greg, don't yell at the shimmer." She put one finger to her lips and cradled the champagne glass in her other hand. Greg didn't laugh. Maybe that joke didn't quite reach his head.
"The shimmer," Greg whispered. "has to be sacrificed, we're using my Grandma's wedding glasses. Darling you know how much this means to her." Sarah placed the glass back on its shelf, running her slim fingers along it as she let go.
"Ace," Sarah addressed me while looking at her love. "It's hard to choose punch bowls."
This statement was true, the last choice was almost always the jerk punch bowls, but Sarah is a woman who likes things to finish quickly. The three of us Sarah, myself and the disapproving eyes of a giant, developed a precise method of making the decision. Sarah lined all of her favourites up in the parking lot so we could throw wedding mints at them. The rule was whichever bowl had the most mints would be the bowl we used. As often happens we underestimated the number of mints we had. The parking lot was covered in pink and white sample mints.
By the time we had convinced Greg to join in we still had half a bag left, And he only began to throw his fair share when he noticed I was aiming for the bowl that had the two headed dragons.
"Oh man you are so in for it!" he then landed each and every mint into the large bowl with one plain rose stretching from the center. Even though the activity was loads of fun the men were disappointed when the girl broke the only rule and wrapped up the bowl that had had the fewest mints in it. This bowl looked like it was expertly embroidered together.
"I like how this one reminds me of my grandma." Why women can never follow logic is still beyond me at my old age.
Greg treated us all to dinner. Sarah had been comparing everything we passed in the car to a type of stake. When she finally got the first piece of rare sirloin into her mouth in over six months Greg got an urgent call on his cell. I sat and watched Sarah eat, my meal had not yet arrived.
"You know that I am not a child." Sarah didn't look away from her plate but I felt the seriousness.
"Sarah, you keep acting as if..."
"I know, sometimes I wonder why my bottom lip doesn't pop right out. I hate having to pout for every little desire." she put her fork down and held her mouth with both of her hands, almost subconsciously holding her lips in position. Her blond curls fell back across her face as she looked up into my mine.
We sat in silence communicating the frustration and confusion of the day. Somehow I got that it extended much further back than that but she refused to let herself believe. My potatoes a gratin came along with the rest of the 70 dollars I had put on Greg's tab.
"I'm so sorry it's hard." I whispered to my food.
"Oh Aviran, it's not all that hard. Marriage is hard."
My water glass had begun to bead. "you're not even married, sometimes Sarah, hard is just har..."
"You know he is so wonderful!" Sarah was eating her stake much too fast to chew now. "I can't believe I forgot about his grandmothers glasses! He cares so much about his family, even though they are rich they still all care, not as rich as you but who really is, and you don't even talk to your dad, but I knew that and. Yo u know I have yet to meet the woman but I hear Grandma is kind, they say that is her biggest character flaw...is her...kindness..."
I messaged my eyes, "How is Nanny anyway?"
"My nanny? Still living with Mommy and Daddy." She began to laugh at her own secret joke, "she, she has the most wonderful wish for her birthday this year..." She broke off, still laughing softly.
I reached out to fix her hair with unsure movement, "You really don't deserve hard."
Then Greg's urgent phone call was over.
Dreams are often disturbing, those are the ones expected to leave a person laying awake in their bed staring at the ceiling. When the sun rose at six thirty the dream I was pondering disturbed nothing but my sleep. I had been in a short suburb home walking along a long hallway toward a white opened door, the smell of roast beef wafting around me. "Aviran, Aviran" was echoing down in the voice of a little girl that couldn't have known more about life than that pretty things first came out of Pandora's box. I suddenly turned and was overwhelmed by a room that was embroidered from carpet to ceiling fan. The pit in my stomach suddenly became very noticeable and I turned to try to run. An old woman sitting in an armchair had frightened me. The woman called, "Aviran, come see what I am making." The sound of my name had made the pit in my stomach so heavy that I could not run. I moved closer and watched the wrinkled long fingers shake and poke, shake and pull, shake and poke a needle through a piece of stretched cloth. The thread on it was bunched and random, stripes of white red and pus overlapped and knotted making the work appear as if it were a foggy Monet.
"That stuff's ugly!" I heard myself exclaim. I watched, I laughed, I listened, I told. The things that I told this strange old woman. Flipping the cloth she revealed swallows, birds flying parallel into an orange glowing sunset.
"Sometimes," Her voice seemed to be coming from the birds in flight. "life looks ugly and difficult to understand, when you see the right angle, what was hard is easy, even beautiful. This bird just could not be without all the horrible complicated ugly." I heard myself promise to never forget, to never forget, to never forget...
Yeah, I didn't ever get to sleep.
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