There is a wedding in each of the Inn’s two banquet halls and the other bridal party has already arrived. They fill the lobby’s couches and chairs with their dresses, suits, and accoutrements. Another bouquet and photographer. Another bride. Another groom. Another frigid afternoon.
The other bride leans against a pillar, an attendant bustling her train.
“Fight, fight, fight,” whisper-goad our groomsmen.
A sign directs our bridal party to the correct banquet hall.
The members of the other bridal party smile as I walk by. In the presence of options, the mind leaps to compare. Rose assures me I am prettier. But I like the other bride’s wide, kind eyes, her eating-disorder hair. She does not wave but emotes toward me as she gets tied tighter into her dress.
Simone is not in the lobby, or on the flight of stairs, or in the hall’s side room, where our guests hold abbreviated plates of food and sip cocktails. Seeing us, they use their free hands to applaud soundlessly against their wrists. Someone hands me a plate with shrimp and bacon.
After the groom is taken away by coworkers, I discard my plate and walk to an elevator in a brief and empty corridor. I press the button for down, pulling the silken body of a cigarette from the dress’s infrastructure. The doors open and I press the button for the lobby. After a few moments, the doors reopen with a dinging sound and I step out, imagining the pleasant burn of nicotine against my tongue. But I am again in the cocktail room. The elevator has taken me exactly nowhere. I retreat into the glowing box and stab the lobby button. The doors close. A stomach jump of movement. Dinging open, the same scene is revealed, cordials being exchanged over hors d’oeuvres.
James pushes a cart of ramekins by. “Everything okay, ma’am?”
“Everything’s great, James!” The doors close. The stomach lift of movement, thank god, the ding.
The doors open onto the same scene. I experience a sensation of having blown up a balloon too fast. Every elevator in this building is a Borgesian nightmare. My mother there-she-ises through the nonspace that connects the cocktail party to the elevator vestibule. She appears pin-lit, always asking a sympathetic audience if they can even believe me.
She uses my elbow to steer me into the arms of Aunt and Uncle Henshaw.
“You’re married!” they say.
Behind them, dressed in green, Simone lifts a glass to toast me. The sight of her heavy-lidded gaze, demure sweater dangling from her forearm, brings me to tears. I excuse myself and walk over.
“Are you in there?” she says.
“I am. Are you?”
“Not sure. Ask me something only I would know,” she says.
“How much do you want to murder Mom right now?”
“Her taupe stockings are enough to make me flee. But I’m here.”
“You are.” I try to hide a tear but she sees, waits for me to compose myself. “How was it?”
“I can’t remember. You’re sitting with the one-offs,” I say. “The groom’s college friends.”
“Grabby, athletic types, I imagine.”
“Only when they’re sober.”
Waiters in formidable button-downs escort the guests to a bigger room with round tables. The groom and I sit at what’s called a sweetheart table. Just he and I.
We eat steak in lobster sauce and have a choice of three desserts. I watch Simone on the other side of the room make polite conversation.
“You look happy,” the groom says.
The wedding cake arrives on a rolling table, containing ingredients you can’t even taste.
My mother informs us that we must greet each table as a couple. She knows the groom’s tendency to join any clump of unfit men discussing the game, and my tendency to wander. “It’s etiquette,” she says. “Them’s the rules, spring rolls.” She uses old-timey slang when uncomfortable. A droplet of gravy clings to her cheekbone where she has applied bronzer. The tenor of her voice makes the gravy quiver.
Table nine is as good a place as any to begin: the bipartisan remnant bag of friends and colleagues. Among others, it includes Coleen with one l, Colleen with two l’s, LaShonda and her girlfriend, and Simone.
“You look beautiful,” Simone says.
Everyone pauses over their desserts to say congrats. The groom makes a joke about a cabinet at work, which isn’t funny, however because of the benevolence of weddings, the table erupts into laughter.
Simone gazes serenely at the groom. Someone asks what the groom thinks about the late slide that ended a beloved shortstop’s season. This cannot be discussed from a seated position, yelling over centerpieces. They pull him into a suited huddle.
“The bride would like a cigarette,” I tell Simone. “What do you think is the fastest way to get outside?”
She points to a door on my left. “I’ll join you.”
I fit a cigarette between my lips and hear the whooping that the groom reserves for male friends. It’s a sound that gets stronger as it proceeds, that simultaneously divides and singes, that prompts the world’s insecure girls to stay in the classroom instead of joining the others for recess, that reaches a silly bend near its middle, so that a few guests glance over.
The door leads to a salmon-colored hallway. To our right hangs a portrait of the Inn’s proprietor, a ruffled older woman. To the left, her equally ruffled husband. Nameplates pose beneath their chests.
Simone reads. “Estelle and George Paradigm.”
The hall is long and smells like chicken soup, not the expensive kind with garden-thick carrots, but the canned kind you buy when obliterated by fever. The jovial cigarette bounces, fastened to my lip by saliva. I slide my hands along the smooth walls. I lunge to see how deep I can go.
“You’re having fun,” Simone says.
“You’re here,” I say. “What changed your mind?”
She looks down the hall, pivots, looks the other way. “You’d do it for me.”
Under the skirt’s satin exoskeleton are eight sighing layers of crinoline. In this quiet space I hear them whisper. There is an interior and exterior zipper. Double-zipped into my wedding day. No bride can handle this shit herself, the skirt reasons, demanding attendants or mothers. A decade has passed since the night Ada and the husband stared at me in disgust. I’ve already put it up for sale on the same website, using the original listing’s photographs. A buyer messaged me immediately, a woman who lives in my neighborhood and uses a criminal amount of exclamation points. She will be the third bride to wear the dress.
“I’m going to leave soon,” Simone says. “Seeing Mom has put me in a bad mood.”
“I understand.”
At the end of the hallway, where we expect a door we find a turn that leads to another run of hallway. I silly-walk down that one, too. Simone trots on her perfect heels. We reach what we assume will be a door but find another curve where two paintings hang.
“It can’t be,” Simone says. “The Paradigms again? Hey,” she says. “This is a…” She circles the figures with her hands dramatically. “… false paradigm.”
I light a cigarette and she takes a drag. “How did you find this place?”
“On one of our trips to see his family,” I say. “We signed the contract and then they renovated so we felt like we got a new building for a good price.”
The weakness of this logic seems to depress her. “This building has been renovated?” she says. “To look like the hotel from The Shining?”
“Long Island,” I say.
“Estelle dear, your taste sucks.” She blows smoke at Estelle’s image.
I take the cigarette back. “I look forward to seeing your rendering of my wedding onstage.”
“Cheap shot.”
Passing the cigarette back and forth we reach—it cannot be—another hall. In front of us, as far as I can see, is indistinguishable from where we came from, a salmon-colored future.
Simone says, “Is this the longest fucking hallway on earth?” at the same time I say, “We’re trapped.”
I debate going back. No hallway is endless. But this one is doing a good impression. I take a deep drag. “You won’t, will you? Use this?”
“It’s a story. I can’t always know. Like what you do?”
“Help injured people tell their stories in court to get them money so they can afford medication?” I use the cigarette to “point” at the jury, the client, the medication, the idea of justice.
“When you put it that way it is very different,” she admits. “Still. You understand the sociological impulse.”
I hand her the cigarette. “I understand that you strip-mined the worst day of my life.”
She exhales an angry plume of smoke. “You keep saying—”
“Because you haven’t acknowledged.”
A loud ding startles us both. A series of clicks. An overhead sprinkler activates, sending water against us and the walls. Simone’s dress is speckled with wet. “Run.”
We argue as we jog down the corridor away from the twitching sprinkler, cigarette bobbing on my lip, chased by the sound of my hushing skirt, around a bend, where we halt. A hallway double the length of the others combined stretches before us, so long the end appears blurred.
“Don’t yell at me because you married a normsie.”
We run, no longer talking. The skirt whispers faster. HUSHHUSHHUSHHUSH. I’m only half aware that the cigarette is ashing into the drape at my neck that Ada’s listing described as a décolletage dream.
A cry builds in my throat. If there is no door at the end of this hallway, I will scream.
Another turn, and we finally reach a vestibule with a door leading outside flanked by two more portraits. George and Estelle again.
I push through anticipating outside air but we end up in the reception room, groom still huddled in a corner with his work cohorts, fork poised over cake, listening to LaShonda. Mother and stepfather across the room. The smell of coffee and raspberry. Flickering votives because they were cheaper than candelabras. After-dinner music has begun. The bridesmaids conga around the floor. Again I’ve tried to leave the reception and failed.
“Something is happening.” I heave like I’ve been held underwater. “I can’t leave.”
Simone’s voice betrays concern. “Are we having identical breakdowns?”
But then there’s the groom’s aunt Grace! Suddenly batting around my neck! Can she see what’s inside my locket? I show her—grandmother on one side, empty on the other. She calls a few others over. Everyone wants to touch my dress and hair.
“Simone,” I say through gritted, smiling teeth.
“Ladies,” Simone says. “Would anyone like to see the tattoo I got to commemorate my transition?”
The ladies turn to her, rapt with attention.
“Go,” she says.
I walk with purpose through the guests. People part, assuming as the bride I have urgent business, but what business could I have? Like the President of the United States, my personal effects have been removed and are being stored elsewhere. They’ve only allowed me a compact mirror and a tiny comb. Simone is right. I am having a breakdown. My grandmother has come to me as a bird. I’ve inhabited my mother. My brother returning to my life as a woman is the only thing that makes sense.
In the bathroom, toiletries preen in baskets. I spray deodorant to see the mist. I unroll a stick of gum into my mouth, then another. I decide to see how many I can fit into my mouth. If I can fit the whole pack, everything will be okay. On the sixth something catches in my throat and I choke. On the seventh I pause, wait for nausea to clear. On the eighth, a pep talk. The ninth won’t make it in. I spittoon the gum into a toilet. The challenge has blurred my lipstick, but someone who owns a lot of baskets has thought of that. I have my pick of shades, choose a dark one, and take a long time making my lips perfect.
I gather the skirt and climb onto the toilet. Tonight, these people will drive to their homes on desolate highways. Tomorrow these people will not be wearing these clothes or eating slices of shoddily conceptualized cake. They will not be thinking of me or this wedding, so I will be free from obligation. In a day they will return to their jobs and I to mine. This event will move into the realm of that which is mentioned occasionally. Later, if I happen to say that I felt like a photocopy of myself, membrane-y, barely able to understand how I got here, perhaps time will enhance their ability to empathize. If I can be patient. But that doesn’t help me, balanced on a toilet in a bathroom stall. The room swishes its hips. Light bulbs dim and buzz. Everything rights itself for a moment during which I doubt my perception. It happens again. The room switches sides with itself. The bride is certain. Overtaken, I fall through space and time. My forehead hits the stall door and the momentum easily breaks the flimsy lock.
Every time I’m offered something with almond, the same promise: You won’t even taste it. It shares this with coconut, another ingredient recommended by its inability to make a goddamned difference. Why not just stop using both? I know people like this. Recommended by their inability to influence. But they are dependable, they fill out the party and are more liked than I, subtle as anchovy. Jesus Christ, what are we all doing?
The floor rushes forth like a hard hug. Sometimes I mistake presence for fondness. Even though those who are absent are normally the ones I love most. Perhaps because so many in my life have said, “I’m here, aren’t I?” when I’ve asked to feel their love.