Sister of the Bride Read online

  “Did you want something, Gordy?” asked Mrs. MacLane.

  “I was just thinking,” said Gordy. “Don’t people have music at wedding receptions?”

  “Why yes, Gordy, sometimes they do,” answered his mother. “People who can afford it.”

  “My trio would play for free,” volunteered Gordy. “Just to get experience. It wouldn’t cost a cent.”

  “Oh no!” Barbara burst out without thinking. “That wouldn’t do at all.”

  Gordy turned on his sister. “Why not?” he demanded belligerently. “We’re getting good.”

  “Now, Gordy,” soothed Mrs. MacLane. “What Barbara means—”

  Gordy interrupted. “I know what she means. She means—”

  It was Barbara’s turn to interrupt. “What I mean is, nobody has folk singing at weddings. I didn’t mean that you weren’t good.” She was anxious to soothe Gordy’s feelings if she possibly could. She knew he had not forgotten that kiss on the front steps.

  “Why not?” demanded Gordy. “I bet Rosemary would like folk songs at her wedding. She’s so modern and all. They have folk singers over at the university all the time.”

  This was exactly what Barbara was afraid of. Rosemary, with her do-it-yourself, let’s-keep-to-fundamentals approach to her wedding, might approve of folk singing at the reception.

  Mrs. MacLane exchanged a glance with her sister. This was a difficult situation, calling for tact on everyone’s part.

  Barbara decided to try the reasonable approach. “But, Gordy, you just can’t sing songs about having twenty-nine links of chain around your leg or about a frog going courting. Not at a wedding. People would laugh, and you don’t want to be laughed at. At wedding receptions people have things like a string quartet playing selections from Rosemarie. It says so in the wedding book.”

  “Rosemarie!” Gordy was contemptuous. “Anyway, it isn’t your wedding. You keep out of this.”

  “What Barbara means,” persisted Mrs. MacLane, “is that folk songs are not exactly appropriate to a wedding. So many of them are sad, and a wedding is a happy occasion.”

  Gordy was more willing to listen to his mother than to his sister. “We could learn some happy songs,” he said hopefully.

  Barbara wondered about Gordy’s idea of a happy song. She’ll Be Comin’ Round the Mountain? Old MacDonald Had a Farm? Probably. The Boy Scout camp type of thing, like The Man on the Flying Trapeze. The picture of the trio, Tim with his horn-rimmed glasses, Al with his blotchy complexion, and Gordy with his hair uncombed, singing at a wedding reception, was so incongruous it was hilarious—or would be, if the wedding was to be in someone else’s family.

  “No, Gordy,” said his mother gently. “This is a small wedding, and I really don’t think a trio would be appropriate. Music is used only at large wedding receptions.”

  Gordy was not willing to give up. “You are sending out an awful lot of invitations,” he pointed out.

  “A lot of them go to people in the East who won’t be coming to the wedding,” said Mrs. MacLane patiently.

  Gordy seemed to slump. “Okay,” he said. “I just thought I’d ask.” He slouched out of the room, while his mother looked after him with a worried frown. “Poor Gordy,” she murmured when he had gone.

  In spite of the wedding the activities of the rest of the MacLane family continued. Mr. MacLane came home later and with more printer’s ink on his shirt than usual, because his classes were printing the school yearbook. Mrs. MacLane struggled with lesson plans for her poor students. Gordy, morose since his trio was not permitted to play at the wedding reception, spent his time after school collecting folk songs at the public library.

  Barbara was working on a junior-class committee, which was responsible for putting on a banquet for the seniors. She divided her time between the committee and her bridesmaid dress, which she was eager to finish before Saturday. She hoped then to go to San Francisco with her mother to meet Rosemary and shop for the wedding dress that she, too, would wear someday.

  One afternoon, when Barbara returned home after arguing about decorations with the banquet committee, she found that she had forgotten to shut her bedroom door before she left for school and that Buster was asleep on her bed in the midst of her family of stuffed animals. Pooh Bear, she was sure, had another rent on his fat stomach from the cat’s claws. “Oh, you!” Barbara muttered, flinging her books on the bed.

  Startled, Buster opened his eyes and glared evilly at her. Barbara snatched him from the bed. “You get out of my room and stay out!” She tossed the Siamese into the hall where, not quite awake, he blinked at her. “Scat, scram, shoo!” she said, and clapped her hands at him.

  Gordy, barefoot and wearing a pair of old jeans torn off at the knee, appeared in the door of his room. Barbara had not known he was home. “You leave my cat alone,” he said, picking up Buster and petting his dark head.

  “You keep your cat out of my room,” she retorted.

  “Why should I?”

  “Because he tore another hole in Pooh Bear, that’s why!” Barbara seized her bear and showed it to Gordy. “See!” she said indignantly.

  “Aw, grow up.” Gordy did not bother to look at Pooh’s most recent wound.

  This stung Barbara, because it was so close to her feelings about herself. She should grow up. Now that Rosemary was old enough to get married and she soon would be, she had begun to feel that her animals were childish. They were childish and they were things that should be put away, but somehow she never found time to do this. “Don’t you tell me to grow up,” she retorted. “Don’t forget I am three years older than you are.” She should grow up in her relation to Gordy, too. She was tired of their childish bickering. She wanted to stop, but she could not bring herself to give in and be the first to declare a truce.

  “Yeah, old enough to smooch on the front steps with old Bill Cunningham,” said Gordy. Her remarks about his playing at the wedding reception had not helped his feelings toward her.

  “We weren’t smooching,” cried Barbara. “I wish you wouldn’t use that word.”

  “When is he going to stop stuffing himself with our cookies and take you out?” asked Gordy.

  This stung even more, because Barbara had been wondering the same thing. Until now she had persuaded herself that her family had not noticed this omission on Bill’s part. She had been sure her family thought she and Bill were just good friends—pals, buddies, that sort of thing. “Don’t worry. He will,” she prophesied, and sincerely hoped her prophecy would come true. She had a lot of cookies invested in Bill.

  “Ha!” said Gordy darkly. “That’ll be the day.” Even Buster, draped over Gordy’s arm as if he had no bones, seemed to leer at Barbara.

  “Oh, keep quiet!” Somewhere, Barbara was not sure at exactly what point, she had lost the argument, and she felt humiliated at having to retire in defeat before her brother.

  “Why should he take you out when he can hang around eating cookies and smooching on the front steps?” asked Gordy with a grin. He could afford to grin. He had won the argument.

  Barbara tried to salvage a few shreds of dignity. “After all, Bill gives me a ride home. The least I can do to repay him is offer him a cookie and some milk.”

  Gordy merely laughed and retired to his room, where he began to strum his guitar. There was nothing left for Barbara to do but retire to her room also, but she closed her door a little harder than necessary when Gordy began to sing Careless Love.

  Sadly she picked up Pooh and her stuffed penguin and hugged them while she reflected that Gordy had been irritatingly right about a couple of things that afternoon. She was too old for stuffed animals, and Bill had never even hinted at anything more than a ride home on his Vespa, even though he was about to be graduated from high school and would be going to the all-night party sponsored by the P.T.A.

  Barbara began to open dresser drawers until she found one of Rosemary’s empty. She appropriated it for her animals, because Rosemary would no longer need it.
She hugged each animal and pressed it to her cheek before she laid it away. Then, carried away with the idea of getting rid of nonessential things, she cleared her mirror of a clutter of party invitations, dog-eared snapshots, and last year’s football pom-pom, and swept them all into the wastebasket.

  Barbara was looking around the room, thinking how uncluttered it looked and how much easier to dust, when she noticed that Gordy was no longer singing to taunt her. He was experimenting with a new song that sounded like Ten Little Indians, but the words were different. She sat down on her bed to listen.

  “Unos et duo tres parvi Indi,” sang Gordy, fumbling with chords. “Quattuor quinque et sex parvi Indi, septem et octo et novem parvi Indici, decem pueri Indici.” Gordy was singing Ten Little Indians in Latin. “Unos et duo tres parvi Indi,” he began again with different chords.

  Barbara understood at once that Gordy’s trio was going to sing at the junior high school’s annual Latin banquet. Their first public appearance. And as angry as Barbara was with her brother, she was also glad for him. He had worked so hard. She sat on the bed remembering her own Latin banquet, always the high point in junior high school social life in Bayview. Some students were thought to elect Latin just so they could go to the banquet, wear Roman costumes, and eat lying on the floor.

  “Septem et octo et novem parvi Indici,” sang Gordy, and this time he played his chords with more assurance.

  Remembering, Barbara smiled, and at the same time she got up and opened the drawer of stuffed animals, gave Pooh one last pat on his fat stomach, and closed the drawer again.

  As the week wore on, it became evident to Barbara that a homemade bridesmaid dress and ushers with wives were not the only disappointments in store for her. On Wednesday her mother talked to Rosemary and arranged to meet her in San Francisco Saturday morning to shop for a wedding dress and a mother-of-the-bride dress. Although Aunt Josie had offered to buy Rosemary a wedding dress at a discount in the store in which she worked, Rosemary insisted this would not do. She did not want her aunt to choose the dress, and that was how it was sure to work out. Nothing was said about Barbara’s going to the city.

  “Just think, I will be wearing the same dress someday,” remarked Barbara, dropping what she hoped was a tactful hint.

  “Maybe,” agreed her mother, who was trying to sew her way through a cloud of sea spray organza on the dining-room table. “But I can’t go through another wedding for years. At least ten years.”

  “Mother!” objected Barbara. “I would be twenty-six.”

  “Maybe nine years,” conceded Mrs. MacLane.

  “Oh, Mother!” Barbara was impatient. “I’ll be too old by then.”

  In spare moments during the week Barbara helped her mother make her dress for the wedding. Still nothing was said about Barbara’s going to San Francisco. It isn’t fair, she told herself. It just was not fair for Rosemary to get to choose a dress that they both would wear. When Saturday morning came and she still had not been included, she gave up hoping and somewhat resentfully accepted her mother’s instructions to fix a good lunch for Gordy and for her father, unless he decided to work at school. What a disappointment this day was turning out to be—left to mind the home fires while her mother and sister went off for a day of fun and shopping in the city. She felt like Cinderella, left behind while the wicked stepsisters went to the ball.

  “Mother, please don’t buy any dowdy old lace for your mother-of-the-bride dress,” Barbara said as her mother was leaving.

  Mrs. MacLane laughed. “I’ll let Rosemary wear the lace in the family. And don’t worry. She will be there to keep me from buying the wrong thing.”

  With her mother and father away, Barbara had nothing to do but hem her dress and feel forlorn. She wished she was in the city helping select the family wedding gown. She loved San Francisco. The flower stands…the cable cars…the pigeons wheeling over Union Square…the air of excitement. Missing a trip to the city for any reason was disappointing, but to have to stay home and prepare Gordy’s lunch when she could be shopping for her own—and Rosemary’s—wedding gown was almost too much to bear. Rosemary always had all the fun.

  Naturally Barbara took her feelings out on Gordy. She put Buster out the back door in such a way that Gordy was sure to hear. Buster sat outside the door and cursed in Siamese. Gordy let his cat in just as noisily as Barbara had let him out. He draped Buster, who went limp and boneless, around his neck like a fur piece and went off to his room to sing, “Te canno patria, candida libera.” America in Latin.

  By lunchtime Barbara had hemmed the dress, but in her Cinderella-in-the-ashes mood her attitude toward her brother had not softened. Her father was working, so she made Gordy two peanut-butter sandwiches, which she laid on a plate along with one dill pickle. It was a stark but filling lunch. She left it on the counter in the kitchen and took her own sandwich out to the patio to eat while she wondered if her mother and Rosemary had found a wedding dress that could be worn with a lace jacket, and if Rosemary was making certain that the mother of the bride would not be dowdy.

  Barbara spent a fidgety afternoon waiting for her mother to return. She pressed her dress, and when it was hanging in her closet ready for the wedding, she telephoned a friend and talked for almost an hour about school and friends and the wedding. Her friend wished she had a wedding in her family. Barbara ended the conversation when her father came home, put on his green eyeshade, and began to add up bills at his rolltop desk on the sun porch. He and Gordy were at opposite ends of the house, which was exactly where Barbara wanted them since her most recent quarrel with her brother.

  Barbara glanced out the window to see if her mother might be coming from the bus stop, but she was not in sight. She tried to settle down to read a magazine, but thoughts of the shopping trip she was missing flitted through her head. Rosemary and her mother were probably having such a good time they had forgotten all about her.

  Barbara was startled out of her Cinderella mood when the doorbell rang. Glad for any interruption, she opened the door and was confronted by two junior high school boys, Tim and Al, the other two-thirds of Gordy’s trio, who were dressed in Roman costumes. They were a startling sight. Al, who was lugging a bass violin, was a Roman soldier, complete with cloak, helmet, and wooden sword. Tim was also a soldier, but he was wearing armor of gold-painted metal over a tunic. Their mothers must have worked hard. It had taken hours to sew the braid on those tunics, and there was a day’s work on Al’s helmet alone.

  Barbara could hardly keep from laughing. They looked so ridiculous—Al with his horn-rimmed glasses beneath his helmet, Tim with his blotchy complexion, and both of them with skinny legs and knobby knees. But along with her desire to laugh, Barbara was also touched. They looked so pleased with themselves. This was to be their first public appearance as a trio.

  “Come on in, boys,” said Barbara. She called out, “Gordy! Your trio is here.”

  Guitar in hand, Gordy came out of his room.

  “Gordy!” cried Barbara involuntarily. He, too, was in costume, a costume he had made himself. It consisted of a sheet draped around him and held in place with visible safety pins. On his feet he was wearing zoris, or go-aheads, as they are sometimes called. “You can’t go that way.”

  Gordy scowled at his sister. “How else am I going to go?”

  “You…well, I mean….” Barbara did not know what to say. Gordy’s sheet looked bunchy, and it was arranged so awkwardly she did not see how he could play his guitar. As for the safety pins—the Romans had a lot of things, roads and aqueducts and coliseums, but she was sure they did not have safety pins. “Why didn’t you say you needed a costume?” she asked.

  “The whole family knew I was playing at the Latin banquet,” Gordy reminded her.

  “Yes, but—” Barbara was exasperated. “You could have said something.”

  “Aw. Everybody was so busy buzzing around about Rosemary’s wedding, nobody would have even heard me.”

  And suddenly Barbara felt s
orry for her brother. She understood, because no one seemed to hear her lately either. They were both just the bride’s relatives. He had been feeling, just as she had felt that day, shoved aside, neglected. Only it must be worse for a boy. She at least had a part in the wedding, but all he could possibly have was a left-out feeling. He was too young even to be an usher. He had been too proud to ask for help on a costume from a sister he had been bickering with, and no one else in the family had time to help him.

  Barbara was ashamed of herself, and with her feelings of shame came the realization that no matter how much she and Gordy quarreled she cared about his feelings. He was family. They had to stick together. “I’ll fix you a costume, Gordy,” she offered. There was not much time. She did not know what she could do, but she could try, and the results were bound to be better than Gordy’s arrangement of sheets and safety pins. “Get me your Latin book, so I can get some ideas from the pictures.”

  Gordy eyed her with mistrust.

  “Aw, go on, Gordy,” urged Al. “You look crummy.”

  “Sure,” agreed Tim. “This is our first engagement. Nobody will ask us to play anywhere if we don’t look good on our first engagement. Anyway, what have you got to lose?”

  “Nothing, I guess,” admitted Gordy, and went to his room for his Latin book, which he handed to Barbara.

  “You go ahead and practice while I look for a fast inspiration.” Hurriedly Barbara thumbed through the book, seeking illustrations. From Gordy’s room the trio began to sing, “Unos et duo tres parvi Indi….” She was surprised at the improvement they had made since the last time she had heard them. They were quite good—for a trio of old Roman folk singers.

  If only Barbara had more time. She flipped past a diagram of a Roman house and a picture of gladiators in the arena. She could not turn him into a gladiator on such short notice. Even if he used the garbage can lid for a shield, there was no time to make a helmet and, anyway, he needed his arms free to play the guitar. She examined a picture of three Roman soldiers, a legionary, a centurion, and a Praetorian Guard. No time for those either. It would have to be a toga, after all, but surely she could improve upon what Gordy had created. A picture of Julius Caesar, stabbed, at the foot of a statue of Pompey was finally her inspiration. Pompey was wearing a wreath of laurel leaves. The MacLanes did not have a laurel bush, but they did have a rhododendron, with similar leaves, growing at the side of the house. She searched the book for a closer picture of a laurel wreath and found one in an illustration of a coin, showing the head of Constantine. The wreath appeared to be tied at the back of the head with a bow of ribbon. Roman hair was different, too. It was combed down over the forehead.