Callie Wells stood in what was normally the sewing room, just off the parlor. Both doors were closed behind her. She was wearing the old Welsh wedding gown, but she seemed hardly to know it, standing with her hands folded, looking out the window. The room, the weather, the round blue mountains in the distance all seemed to defer to her stillness. The house around her hummed like a hive, but Callie scarcely noticed that either.
It seemed to her the first chance she’d had to be alone in weeks. Every time she turned around there was something to be fitted for, some decision to make—where to put Uncle Russel and Aunt Kate (who were coming from Cleveland after all), what to do if the rings didn’t come from the place up in Utica in time for the wedding, how to get Aunt Anna to the rehearsal since she flatly refused to ride in Uncle Gordon’s truck. But it couldn’t be weeks, or anyway it couldn’t be more than two, because it was just two weeks and three days ago now that they’d decided.
Her father had come into the kitchen blinking like an owl, holding up his flannel pajama bottoms with one hand, scowling, cross enough to eat roofing nails, and Henry had said formally, holding her hand, “Mr. Wells, I’d like your permission to marry your daughter.” Callie had glanced up at him sideways and had seen again, as if it were a new discovery, how much she truly admired him, comical as he might seem to some, and she’d felt awe that he should be going through all this for her. He was painfully embarrassed, and scared as well, though he was older than her father. He was feeling, no doubt, as ridiculous as he looked—a great fat creature in steel-rimmed glasses, his ears pressed flat to his head as though he’d spent his whole life in a tight-fitting cap.
Her father said, “At two A.M. in the morning? You crazy?”
“I’m serious, Frank,” Henry said. All the house and the surrounding night seemed to echo his earnestness. He’s serious.
She’d broken in quickly, holding Henry’s hand more tightly, “Daddy, I’m going to have a child.”
His face went white, then red. He was angrier than she’d ever seen him, angry enough to murder Henry (but Henry could break her father in half as easily as Prince snapped hambones between his teeth). Her father began swearing but she broke in again, “Not by Henry, Daddy. By somebody else.” He just stared at her then, and then at Henry. Then he pulled out the chair from the kitchen table and sat down. His stubbly cheeks were hollow and there were shadows between his ribs. He chewed his lip and wrung his hands, tears washing down his nose and whiskers. After a minute he called her mother, and she came in at once—she’d been standing just behind the door—her plump white hands catching the bathrobe together.
She said, “Mother, we’re going to be married.”
Her mother’s face squeezed into a grimace and she started crying with a great whoop, splashing up her hands and running to her, falling on her, hugging her tightly and sobbing. “Oh, Callie! My poor baby! We’ve failed you!” Immediately Callie was crying too, sobbing her heart out. It must have been two minutes they cried like that. Then it came to her that Henry was there, and that they didn’t understand at all.
“Mother,” she said, “I love Henry. I’m happy.”
“Child. My child!” her mother said, and a new burst of sobbing overwhelmed her.
She felt a strange sensation: as if the floor were moving, shifting gently, carrying her somewhere, as in the old story, and telling her something. She accepted her mother’s tight embrace but felt unresponsive, separated in a way that in a moment there would be no repairing. Her mother felt it too, or realized that Callie was not crying now, that something had changed.
“Mother,” she said again, “I love him.”
After a moment her mother drew back to look at her, trying to read her face like a word left by Indians. She said, “Love, Callie! You’re only seventeen years old.”
Callie said nothing.
Her mother was baffled; grieved and frightened, but more than that, filled with an emotion too deep for separation into grief and fear: as though Callie had gone down to a small boat at night, and her mother stood on a towering ship that was drawing away and could never turn back. Without words, Callie knew—with a sinking feeling—that her mother could never know for sure—anymore than she could know of her mother—that she was happy. For the first time now, her eyes still baffled, Callie’s mother turned to look at Henry. She stared as if she’d never really noticed, in all her years, that he was grotesque. He endured the look in patience like an elephant’s, an enormous hulk of misery, his hands folded behind his back, huge belly thrown forward, his head slightly tipped and drawn back a little. (Could she see that, inside that suit like a mortician’s, he was a gentle man, and a good man besides?)
Her father said, “This calls for a drink!”
Everything called for a drink, to her father. Her mother said, “I’ll put some coffee on.”
“Hell,” her father said, “it don’t call for coffee. Damn coffee, that’s what I say. Is that what you say, Henry?”
Henry smiled, showing his overbite. “Mmm,” he said, noncommittal.
“Don’t curse, Frank,” her mother said.
“Right,” her father said. “Fuck cursing!” He got out the Jim Beam and two of the painted glasses from the gas station and some ice. He was so nervous he could hardly get the cubes from the metal tray. He waved Henry to a chair and opened the bottle.
Her mother went over to the stove. When she’d turned on the butane under the pot she looked around, horrified, weeping again. “I forgot to say congratulations!” She came back to Callie and hugged her as tightly as before, and now once more both of them were sobbing, but happily this time, Callie anyway, her mother still undecided.
“Congratulations, you two!” her father said, exactly like someone on television. He stood up and reached over to shake Henry’s hand, his other hand clutching the pajama bottoms.
They’d sat up all night after that, talking, her father and Henry drinking whiskey, she telling her mother how happy she was, and looking fondly at Henry (growing more and more erect and dignified as the drinking wore on, smiling more and more foolishly, his speech increasingly labored and solemn—her father’s, too). She had wanted to shout, Oh Mother, look at him, look at him! And every glinting glass and dish in the cupboards understood. But how could her parents understand it? What was important was unspeakable, both on her side and on her mother’s. And so instead they had talked about plans, and she had wondered, Is that what everybody does, in every marriage. She and Henry had meant to be married by a justice of the peace, but her mother insisted on a wedding in church. You only get married once, she said; a church wedding was a sacred thing; the relatives would be hurt. Aunt Anna would be the organist, because it wouldn’t do for her own mother to be organist at her own daughter’s wedding. Callie would wear white. “Mother, I’m pregnant,” Callie said, “I’m already beginning to show.” “People expect it,” her mother said. She’d given in to everything. It didn’t matter. In fact, she was secretly glad she’d be married in church. She’d said, “Henry, what do you think?” “Ver-y good,” he said, nodding, judgmental. “A ver-y Solomon cajun.” When dawn came and the robins started singing, Henry and her father were fast asleep, her father lying on his arms on the table, Henry sitting erect and placid, mouth open, like a sleeping child.
From that day to this she’d been running every minute. When they’d told Aunt Anna it was to be in two weeks, she’d looked instantly at Callie’s belly, her old eyes as sharp as when she threaded a needle, and she’d said, “Well, well, well, well.” Callie’s mother had cried as though the sin were her own. (Sin was the only word for it in Aunt Anna’s house, pictures of Jesus on every wall, sequin and purple velvet signs reading Jesus Saves and I Am the Way.) Then, to Callie’s astonishment, Aunt Anna’s wrinkled-up leathery face broke into a witchly grin.
But all the preparations were over, finally—the rushed-out wedding invitations, the fittings, the telephone calls, the far-into-the-night planning of housing arrangements for relatives and transportation to the church. All the relatives were assembled, mostly from her mother’s side, more Joneses and Thomases and Griffiths than she’d seen in one place in all her life. It was like an Eisteddfodd or a Gymanfa Ganu. Her father said you couldn’t spit without knocking down fourteen Welshmen. (Great-uncle Hugh had liked that. He’d slapped his knee and rolled it over and over on his tongue, getting it wronger every time he said it. Her father would be quoting it for the next fifty years, the way he’d been quoting for the last twenty-five, “Fool Ahpril, Bill Jones! Fly-horse on door-barn! Fool Ahpril!)
And so at last she could be alone. In half an hour Uncle John would drive her to the church, and there would be the last-minute bustle, the anxious fuss, the fear that every minute detail might not go perfectly, according to proper ritual. She thought: We should have gone to a JP and told them afterward.
In the old Welsh wedding gown she felt unnatural—false. It would be different if you were pretty, she thought. She’d been shocked when she’d seen herself in the mirror the first time, trying it on. The gown was scratchy and tighter than she’d expected. It was yellowed by time, yet, in spite of that, mysteriously pure, she thought; serene. But at the lace cuffs her wrists were bony, and her hands were like a man’s. With the veil lifted up her face showed angular and grim: She looked neither innocent nor gentle and wise, merely callow. She had said, “It doesn’t fit.”
“Don’t be silly, Callie,” her mother had said. “We just need to alter it a little, that’s all.”
She’d said frantically, “I mean, it isn’t right for me.”
Aunt Anna said, “Breathe in.”
When they had it pinned up, her mother stepped back to study her, and she smiled, teary, blind to how terrible Callie looked. And now her own tears came gushing. “Mother,” she said, “my feet are too big.”
“One wedding I played at, the girl tripped and broke her wrist,” Aunt Anna said.
“Mother, listen to me,” Callie said. “Look at me once.”
“Hush,” her mother said. “Callie, you look lovely.”
She had clenched her teeth. But she had given in, to the gown as to the rest. Soon it would be over.
It was a beautiful day. She stood as still as the glass of the window, with her hands folded, the veil drawn over her face. Across the road lay golden stubble where Mr. Cook’s wheat had been, a few weeks ago. Off to her right the land dropped sharply, falling away toward Mr. Soames’ diner and the lower valley, at the end of the valley gray-blue mountains rounding up into blue-white sky. It was pleasantly warm, a light breeze moving the leaves of the maples on the lawn. She watched the bakery truck slow down at the mailbox and turn in. A beautiful day for a wedding, she thought. She meant it to be a happy thought, but she couldn’t tell whether she was happy or not. Children were singing, around the corner of the house, out of sight.
Karen is her first name,
First name, first name,
Karen is her first name,
Among the little white daisies.
The song made her remember something. She had whispered to her friend that her boyfriend’s name was David Parks—knowing perfectly well the rules of the game, that all of them would now find out that Callie Wells liked David Parks—but when her friend turned and told the others, and when the whole ring of children began to sing it, their voices gleeful and merciless, she felt sick with shame and believed she would never dare look at him again. The memory brought a sudden, fierce nostalgia, a hunger to be once again and forever the child she could now see with fond detachment, loving and pitying her, laughing at her sorrow as once her mother must have laughed. For some reason the memory triggered another, one that was intimately related with the first, but she couldn’t think how:
Poor Howard’s dead and gone,
Left me here to sing his song. …
Panic filled her chest. It’s a mistake, she thought. I don’t love him. He was ugly.