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Three Weddings by Luke Whisnant 1 Here we are again, Carter thinks. Junk. Under buzzing fluorescent bulbs, with gray
rain beating on the plate glass windows up front, he and his mother wander
the well-worn aisles of the Goodwill. Or is it the Salvation Army? Or the VFW
Bargain Basement? Carter doesn’t remember and sees no reason to care. One is
the same as another to him: they’re all just junk stores. That’s what his
mother has called them all his life, not thrift stores or secondhand shops,
but junk stores. Junk assails him from all sides: cast-off, stained,
tattered, faded, used-up, washed out, the thousand shirts and slacks and
tacky jackets on their screeching squealing wire hangers; the grubby,
misshapen, scuffed-up shoes--suede chukka-boots and pebbled wingtips, velvet
high heels and sling-backed pumps in faded red; the musty rows of Readers
Digest Condensed Books and broken-backed novels and ancient encyclopedias
missing random volumes, tomes about Nixon and the Beatles and the Korean War;
and record albums, lurid splashy cover art he had long forgotten, the
scratched vinyl inside harking back to pre-digital music, mechanical sound, a
needle surfing a spinning groove, no wonder everything back then was groovy,
he thought; and brown-stained primitive coffee-makers and boxy toasters, clunky
first generation answering-machines and the battered keyboard from an old PC,
things ugly with chrome trim, smeared with fingerprints and use, things
outmoded and abandoned, things usurped and replaced, things that had been
around the block, that had history, that increased his sense of cluttered,
squalid, unhappy lives, of life as drek. Things too sad to be kitsch.
"Mom," he says--he always says--"all this junk." "Honey," she says, "it’s
chaff. There are diamonds in the rough if you sift long enough. You know
that." He does know it, because she says it every
time. She zones in on the diamonds; she homes like a pigeon, like radar, like
vibes. He doesn’t understand how she does it. He’ll watch her shopping and
it’s as if she’s guided by auras--her hand reaches out; the desired object
seems to float into it; he blinks in a kind of muted amazement: again she has
come up with another gem, a $200 navy blazer with the pockets still sewn
shut, six bucks; an Armani dress with a tiny tear under the arm, ten dollars
even; a perfectly good clock, still in the box, fifty cents because blue tags
are half price on Tuesdays. He studies his mother’s face on the other
side of the clothes rack. She is not quite in her middle fifties, but still
beautiful, with china-doll skin, fine and unblemished; she wears her dark
hair pulled back in a French braid, like a young woman; but her green
wide-set eyes always seem sad to him, full of abandoned hope and resignation.
Her life, he fears, has been a disappointment, one wrong turn after another,
and Carter somehow understands that her junk-store sprees are partly
compensation; she’s bagging consolation prizes, so he is careful to chide her
gently. "You’re like a little girl collecting dolls that she never plays
with," he’ll sometimes say. "Why do you buy all this stuff? You
never wear it." "Bargains make me happy," she
says. "Take happiness where you find it." "Nobody wears polyester pants
anymore." "They’re coming back in style, Jay. I
read it in the paper." "Mom, this wool blazer. Who do you
know that wears a 42 long?" She hangs it back on the nearest rack,
frowning. Last Thanksgiving in this same store Carter
had barely been able to prevent her from buying a $400 plaid camel-back
sofa--a steal, she’d said; all it needed was recovering, the springs were in
great shape and these sofas were all the rage now, every Victorian living
room had one. Carter pointed out that she had redecorated with Chinese motifs
the year before, putting all her Victorian stuff in the basement.
"That’s because I’m ahead of the curve," she said. "Now who do
we know that needs a sofa?" He couldn’t believe she was about to buy
this thing for no reason other than Because It’s There, and he put his foot
down. It did no good. She came back the next day without him and charged it. "You are nuts, you know that?" he
says now, tenderly, but his mother isn’t listening. She parts the sea of
frocks and blouses with one hand, and with the other, nearly in slow motion,
almost hovering, she reaches and lifts a perfectly unremarkable yellow linen
dress and holds it up in wonder. "My God," she says. "What?" Carter says. "This dress. I don’t believe it." "What?" "This is my wedding dress. This is the
dress I wore when your father and I got married." "You mean it’s just like it?" "No, I mean it is it. The exact same
dress." "No way." "It is, Jay." "Mom, how could it be?" "I never thought I’d see this dress
again," she says. She doesn’t look at him; she’s staring at
the dress. Tears stand in her eyes, and suddenly Carter realizes with a
nearly physical rush of certainty--a knowledge carried in his blood and
bones, it somehow feels like--that she’s right, this is the dress. "What
in the hell is it doing here?" he says. She had given it to the cleaning woman,
years ago, when she and Carter's dad were still married; she’d gotten rid of
it one blue moody day in a fit of pique, regretful that she’d ever wed . . .
or maybe she’d been cleaning out closets and tossing things that were dated
or didn’t fit anymore. She couldn’t remember. All she knew was she had given
it to old Bessie; Bessie had had a daughter who could wear it, she said. But
how did end up here, all these years later? Carter wanted to know. His mother
said she had no idea. Then she recalled that Bessie had lived nearby. "Don’t
you remember? We used to take her home sometimes when she missed the bus or
if we needed her to stay late." So possibly that could account for why
the dress was here, in this particular junk store, as opposed to one across
town or even across the country. Still, Carter thought, amazed, still, it
was a miracle. It had been twenty-some years since she had given the dress
away; it had been thirty-seven years last week since she had stood uneasily
on her mother’s lawn in that dress, clutching his father’s hand and sipping a
glass of punch at her hastily-arranged reception--if you could call it that.
She’d always said it felt more like a wake. She had eloped. She was already carrying
Carter; she was seven weeks pregnant. It was half an hour to South Carolina,
where there was no blood test, no waiting period, only a ten-dollar fee at
the courthouse and a quick exchange of vows in the clerk’s office. "Oh,
it was quick," she says. "Of course I wanted a formal gown, you
know, lots of lace and a train and a veil and everything, but we didn’t have
time for that, and it wouldn’t have really looked right for a civil ceremony.
I don’t remember what your daddy wore, a dark suit, I think, probably just
his church clothes, but I went down to Belk’s and got this dress the afternoon
before, brand new off the rack--I think it was thirty dollars, which up to
then was the most I had ever spent on a dress in my life." Over the years, Carter has imagined the
reception many times, until it has achieved a kind of snapshot clarity in his
mind’s eye: his mother in the yellow dress, in the warm late-April sun, at
first contrite and then defiant, kicking off her shoes to dance barefooted in
the backyard clover. His mother’s mother frozen in a disapproving frown; her
father, an old man Carter barely remembers, smiling and trying to put the
best face on it. Carter's father’s parents stand to one side, the mother
weeping, whispering, It’s all so sudden. His father’s brother and his
girlfriend, his mother’s brother, some of the neighbors, women in
housedresses and men wearing hats, that’s how Carter has always envisioned
them. There were no wedding photographs--no one thought to load a camera.
There was no cake. They drank punch hastily improvised from ginger ale and
Orange Crush, and behind the garage some of the men snuck swigs from a flask.
We’ll have a real reception sometime, Carter's parents promised each other;
we’ll have good food and music and champagne, and invite all our friends and
everyone from church and we’ll look them straight in the eye. Maybe after the
baby’s born. This was how Carter imagined it, how he thought they might feel.
Of course they never had any kind of reception. They left town the next
morning and set up house on the other side of the state, so his mother could
endure her pregnancy free from prying eyes. In the following years he dimly
remembered her wearing the yellow dress around the house and sometimes
crying, for no reason he could discern. By no means was the marriage
unendurable--his father was never abusive or unfaithful--but always hovering
over Carter's childhood years was the feeling that his mother was bored and
unhappy, that she longed for more, that she had been trapped at an early age
and could not bring herself to make the best of it. And for much of his adult
life, Carter, though he knew it was not his fault, had felt in some vague way
responsible for his mother’s unhappiness. Now she holds the dress up for him to
examine. "How much?" Carter asks. "It’s only four dollars. I’m going to
get it. Since I don’t have any daughters to pass it down to, I’ll give it to
your wife when you get married." "Dream on," Carter says. "Jay, you’ll get married someday.
That’s just a fact of life." She sighs, regarding the dress wistfully at
arm’s length. "You know, all this dress ever brought me was bad luck. I
never should have married your daddy. That was my big mistake. That’s where
my life jumped the tracks and I went down into the ditch." "Thanks a lot." "Oh, honey, I don’t mean you. You know
that. I’m talking about your daddy. I know there wouldn’t be any you without
him, but still . . . oh, shit." "It’s okay, Mom." "Well," his mother says, avoiding
his gaze. "If it’s bad luck, maybe you should
put it back on the rack," Carter says. "No, I want it," his mother says.
"I think it’ll be good to have around, to remind me how things work out.
You know?" "Then let me buy it for you,"
Carter says, taking the dress from her and reaching for his wallet. "Don’t be silly," his mother
says. "I’m not," he says. "I just
want to. C’mon." At last his mother smiles. "Oh, all
right," she says. At the register they’re rung up by a
brown-skinned crone with a wad of gum like a cud. Any moment Carter expects
her to spit. She stabs at the cash register buttons and announces the total
out of the side of her mouth; Carter hands her the bills and she makes change
slowly with arthritic trembling hands. Carter's mother helps her fold the two
shirts she’s bought for her other son. The old lady strokes the linen dress
as if it were angora. A smile wrinkles her face. "That’s a right purty
dress, Missy," she rasps. "It’s the dress I got married
in," Carter's mom says. 2 "And I really think it was, man,"
Carter says to his brother a few days later. "Aw, man, how could it be?" his
brother says. "If you could have seen the look on
her face," Carter says. "Well, no doubt she thinks it’s the
same dress. She’s always off in the ozone somewhere." His brother, a
dope-smoking fiend who is even then steering with his knees as he lights a
bong with both hands, speaks without irony, and Carter grins behind a raised
hand. They’re clattering down the two-lane in
Jim's work truck. He owns both a work truck--an ancient battered blue
Ford--and a play truck, what he called the Saturday night truck--a brand-new
gleaming black Toyota that lodged, covered, in his mother’s carport all week,
untouched until the weekend. Out of his work truck Jim did odd jobs and
landscaping; the back rattled with shovels, picks, rakes, tool-buckets,
post-diggers, dusty bags of concrete mix, black plastic pots, and who knew
what else, all covered with rust and red mud. "There’s enough dirt in
there to grow your own," Carter told Jim once, and he shook his head:
"Probably is some seeds dropped back there and will be sproutin any day
now." Carter puts both feet on the dash and gives
his brother a sideways glance. Jim had inherited their father’s
physique--lean, long-boned, big capable hands--and he has the same green eyes
as their mother with her same sad look. He’d been an unhappy baby; Carter
remembers rocking him incessantly, singing to him, dangling toys before his
tear-stained face and tickling his plump bare belly, but nothing seemed to
work. Jim had spent his waking hours crying or moping. "I’m at the end
of my rope with him, Jay-Jay," his mother would say a half-dozen times a
week, or, "I’m about to tear my goddamn hair out." She swore that
between his daddy and his brother she was ready to pack her bags and he’d
just have to take as good care of them as he could. Carter, caretaker,
confidante, was eight at the time. Every bad day he steeled himself for the
worst, but somehow she had never gotten much further than the end of the
driveway. It was Carter's dad who, fed up, had finally left. His mother was
relieved and then heartbroken. With both boys in the bed beside her, she’d
cry herself to sleep every night. Carter wonders if his brother remembers
that. "You ought to ease up on her some,
Jim," Carter says. "Ease up, hell." Jim says.
"Easy for you to say."v Though Jim was past thirty, he still lived
with their mother, and nearly every week there was some kind of crisis
between them for Carter to adjudicate from across the state. They pull into a grimy grocery for gas. Jim
pumps while Carter heads in to pay, noting the Confederate battle flag flying
over the concrete-block building. A crude stars- and-bars mural features the
words "Dixie Mart" in gothic letters. Carter marvels. His brother
calls from the pump, "Hey man, get me a soda," and Carter
half-turns and throws him a salute. He ducks his head and steps inside over
the low threshold. To his amazement, there are two black men
working the counter. He scrounges a couple of Nehi strawberry
sodas in bottles, way at the back of the case. At the register he adds two
sticks of beef jerky. "And five dollars unleaded," he says. The
clerks seem neither sullen nor interested. One man rings him up while the other
bags solemnly. "Look what I found," he tells
Jim, back outside. "Cool," Jim says, taking the
drink. "You don’t see too many Nehis anymore. You pretty much have to go
out in the country to find ‘em." They drive another few miles on a twisting
two-lane highway before Jim announces that he’s made a wrong turn. "This
place is not all that easy to find," he mutters, "and I haven’t
been out here for a good long while." He pulls off the blacktop and
makes a three-point turn. Wary black-and-white cows gaze at them from behind
barbed wire. In the next field over, the dry brown corn stalks stand
abandoned. To Carter everything seemed sad and washed-out in the weak winter
sunlight. "I think she’s been unlucky in love,
you know?" he says. "Well, if she’d quit marrying morons,
that would help," Jim says. He tears open his beef jerky with his teeth. "Seeing her with that dress the other
day, I felt sorry for her that she never had a big church wedding. I think
she always wanted that." "I was just trying to remember,"
Jim says, "what kind of dress she wore when she got married to Don. I
ought to remember that." "Black and gold dress, with a gold
jacket," Carter says. "Man. How did you know that? You
weren’t there." "I’ve seen the snapshots, fool." "Oh." Carter had not attended his mother’s second
wedding. He’d been away at college, studying for his comprehensive exam; no
one had even told him about it ahead of time. But he knows the photos. He
kids Jim about dead brain cells and too much dope. "You stood right next
to her and don’t remember?" "Man, I was sixteen years old. I
didn’t notice dresses back then." "I don’t think she’s ever told me much
about her and Don," Carter says. "He was an asshole," Jim says.
"He could have married her in a church. You know, with her and dad, they
didn’t really have any choice. I mean, they were on a deadline." Carter
laughs. "But Don, naw, man, he just, well, he was just a dick about it
the whole time. We’d been living with him two years and I think he finally
married her just so she’d stop bitching about it. Did you know," Jim
asks, "that on his income taxes, before they were married, he was
writing her off as ‘housekeeper’?" Carter laughs. "Bet she loved
that." "Oh, man, she was livid. He’d been
giving her like eight hundred bucks a month for groceries and stuff, and she
found that on his taxes as a deduction for housekeeper and she hit the roof.
It was nuts, you know? She was talking about turning him in to the Feds. Then
the next thing I know, she shows up at school on day, pulls me out of gym
class to go down to the courthouse with her, and Don was there on his lunch
break with his boss and his secretary, like they were the best man and the
witness, whatever, and it was all over in about five minutes. They were all
dressed up, you know, suits and ties and business clothes, and I was wearing
jeans and torn-up sneakers. But mom wanted me there." Carter pictures it. It should be comic, he
thinks, it should be fodder for sit-coms or a story you told on yourself at a
party. It is not high tragedy. Yet in his present mood it strikes him as
such. He feels like weeping. "One other thing I remember," Jim
says suddenly. "That bitch woman, Don's secretary. We went to this
swanky restaurant afterwards and she threw a fit over their hearts of palm salad.
She kept saying how ‘divine’ it was, and how she ‘adored’ hearts of palm, and
I didn’t know what the hell she was talking about. I looked over at Mom, and
all of a sudden I saw that she didn’t know what it was either. She’d never
had it, and it was just . . . man . . . it just sucked. It was like this
pompous bitch just had to do something to put mom in her place, like she was
so refined and mom was just an ignorant little hillbilly." Jim shakes
his head. "You know why I remember all that?" "Why?" "‘Cause two years ago Mom took me out
on my birthday to a place that had hearts of palm salad, and she ordered it.
And she didn’t like it. She told me she’d been waiting all that time just to
see what it was like, and now she knew, and it wasn’t anything like what she
thought it would be." "Christ," Carter says. "What
a sad frigging story." "Naw, man, it ain’t sad. She finally
got to put that thing to rest. She’d been obsessing about that hearts of palm
for fifteen years." Carter sees his mother and brother in a
candlelit restaurant holding salad forks. He sees his mother in jeans and
tee-shirt with a yellow dress folded over her arm. He sees his dad with a .22
rifle at the top of the stairs and some boyfriend of his mother’s at the door
below and his mother standing between them with his dad yelling for her to
get out of the way and he and Jim, children, trying to hold his father back.
I could weep, he thinks; I could actually cry real tears right now. What’s
wrong with me? "Jay, you worry too much," his
brother says. "It just seems so sad to me."
Carter looks blankly out the window. "Things seem to be one thing, but
maybe they’re something else," Jim explains. "And in the
meantime," he says, downshifting, "here we are." He turns into
a dirt parking lot by a bright red-and-white sign: hoyle’s u-pull-it
junkyard. 3 "Hey, Mr. Hoyle," Jim says as
Carter follows him inside. An old man in greasy overalls tells them
hey. "What you fellas need?" he asks. Lifters is what they need, Jim explains,
lifters for the hatchback of their mother’s Honda. "Hatch won’t stay up?" old man
Hoyle asks, and Jim nods. "Thing’ll fall shut and chop off ye head, will
it?" "That’s about it," Carter tells
him. He has a bruise at the base of his skull to prove it. "Things get wore out, boys,"
Hoyle explains. "Ever last thing on God’s earth." Squinting at
Carter, he asks the year of their mother’s car. "Eighty-nine Honda Civic
hatchback." After a moment’s reflection, Hoyle reckons
he’s got maybe two dozen of those. Most pretty picked over, though. All the
way to the back, second to last row, he tells them. "Got ye metric
socket? Lifters is ten bucks apiece. Run you thirty-five or forty new, so
that’s a deal." "Thanks, Mr. Hoyle." Jim leads
Carter out into the junkyard. They pass a sign that reads enter @ yr own
risk. The old man calls after them and they turn. He laughs. "Watch out
ye don’t drop the hatch on ye head once ye get them lifters off." Carter waves him an okay. "Man,"
he tells his brother, "I’d hate to pay the liability insurance on this
place." "I doubt seriously he’s got any
insurance," Jim says. They wander among the wrecked cars, Carter
thinking about his mother’s third wedding. For some years after she had left Don--moving
out in the middle of the night, Carter and Jim loading her furniture while
Don slept--she had not dated at all. She told Carter she had given up on men.
They were liars, cheats, not to be trusted; they brought nothing but misery.
She didn’t need a man in her life; she could be strong and happy on her own.
Then she met Gene in a 24-hour Stop Shop. He was standing, hungover and lost,
in front of an endcap display of cases of beer. "He looked so
pathetic," his mother said later, "he looked like a little stray
dog somebody had been kicking," and though Carter had never known his
mother to take in strays, there was something else about this man, with his
haunted blue eyes and unkempt hair. He reminded her of someone--exactly who,
she couldn’t say--and then she could. Her father had sometimes had that same
look. "My heart just melted," she told Carter. "I was stupid.
I couldn’t see straight. I suppose I thought the third time was a
charm." She bought him a twelve-pack and took him home and they drank it
together. For the next year she bought his beer and drove him around--his
license had been permanently revoked--cooked for him and occasionally paid
his overdue child support to keep him out of jail. Carter and his brother
hated Gene. To his face, Jim called him a pathetic blood-sucking leech and a
scumbag, and Carter stopped visiting home altogether. "It was a big lifestyle change,"
his mother had admitted later. She wasn’t used to alcohol, not regularly or
in volume, but at Gene's insistence, she drank to keep him company. One
night, drunk, they’d gotten married in the same convenience store where
they’d met. Gene had a buddy who worked there on the graveyard shift, a
fellow AA dropout who had once been an ordained Full Gospel preacher. Usually
he did not marry people who’d been drinking, he told them, but Gene was a
buddy and had slipped him $50 to boot, so he’d made an exception. No forms
were filed, no rings exchanged, just a recitation of vows, a kiss, and an
extended prayer to bless the union. " ‘God does not require a piece of
paper in a cabinet at the courthouse,’ " Carter's mom quoted the
preacher as saying; " ‘You stand here as man and wife in the eyes of God
and that is all that is required and let no man put asunder, amen.’ "
When Carter had heard the news, he’d insisted that the marriage had not been
legal, that as there was no record of it, it was not binding, but his mother
didn’t care; whether or not it was a marriage, she said, it had been a
wedding. In jeans, a teal sweatshirt, and tennis shoes, she had stood before
God and witnesses--a high school girl buying cigarettes and the other
cashier--and declared that she would love and honor and obey ‘til death did
them part, so there. Carter could not talk sense to her; she was beyond
logic, he saw, so he let it go, and he shook Gene's hand and welcomed him
unhappily to the family. It hadn’t lasted long. One day Carter's mom
came home to find his closet cleaned out and her jewelry box missing. The
note on the kitchen table said only that he was sorry and he’d call in a few
days. The next time she’d heard from him was a week later, and he was in
Utah, drunk. He called again, twice more over the next month, and after that
she had heard nothing. In another few days it would be three years since
she’d seen him. Good riddance, Carter thinks now. Lowlife.
Better that she be miserable without him than dragged down with him. He and his brother head uphill past Fords
and Chevys, Dodges and AMCs. "They would put the Hondas at the
back," Jim says. Carter grunts. Everywhere he looks, sunlight bounces
from chrome and glass, like a thousand tiny flares exploding one after
another. They walk past a dozen trucks of the same make as his brother’s,
several twisted and smashed horribly. There’s a wrecked row of red Toyotas
like their father’s, and then a line of British sports cars. Carter, who had
once owned an MG, shudders. "This is damned creepy," he says. He
has never seen so much twisted metal, such blatant records of violent impact.
He watches a blacksnake slide under a yellow Jaguar. When they finally reach the Honda section,
Carter stops at the first hatchback. "That’s not an ‘89," Jim tells
him; "see, the taillights are the wrong shape." He points.
"There’s one." They stand before a blue Civic that
doubtless once had been identical to their mother’s, but now is pitted with
rust and missing a passenger door. Dockweed grows around the flattened tires.
"Pop the hatch," Jim says, peering in through the back window,
socket wrench in hand. Carter opens the driver’s door and gropes
on the floor for the hatch release. The last driver of this car, he noticed,
had hit the windshield hard; over the crumpled steering wheel the safety
glass is fractured like an unbroken puzzle. Looking around the familiar black
and gray interior, he cannot prevent himself from envisioning his mother’s
death. It’s not fair, he thinks, holding up the
hatch up as Jim ratchets the lifters loose. She didn’t deserve this life,
this tapestry of loneliness and disappointment. He realizes he’s thinking childishly;
he doesn’t care. It would have been a simple thing to make her happy. "What’s wrong?" his brother asks,
looking at him. "I feel like we ought to say a
prayer," he says, "for whoever drove this car last." But Carter is not a praying man. Nor is it
the unknown driver he finds himself invoking. Instead, he imagines a wedding.
He gives the bride a dazzling white dress, lace and crinoline and a veil and
white slippers. He gives her a candlelit church, pews lined with happy,
approving friends and family. He makes the mother of the bride, in lavender,
beam from the front row; he places the father in the aisle in a gray tuxedo.
Carter shapes a groom, tall and good and kind, waiting faithfully beside the
altar. And he puts himself and his brother there too, in tuxes, both weeping
small happy tears, weeping with joy for their mother. And this is what I
would do, Carter whispers to himself, just this, if only I could. Amen.
Luke Whisnant is the author of Watching TV with the Red Chinese, a novel, and Street, a chapbook of poems. His work has been reprinted twice in New Stories from the South: The Year’s Best. He is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Graduate Creative Writing Program at East Carolina University, in Greenville, NC.] |
