“What’s the point?”
“The point is, I don’t get why Jim has to be around all of the time. They’d never be friends if Gary didn’t marry his sister.”
She explains that her fiancé, Gary, is this handsome doctor who lives in Tiverton and spends his one day off running science experiments in the garden with his daughter, and Jim is an engineer who can’t keep a girlfriend longer than a month so he is always kind of hitting on everyone.
“Even me,” she says. “He like, bought me a skirt for my birthday. I mean, isn’t that weird?”
“I don’t know. Did you need a skirt?”
“That’s exactly what Gary asked, and I was like, It doesn’t even matter if I needed a skirt! Why would my fiancé’s brother-in-law buy me a skirt for my birthday? It’s not even a normal skirt.”
“What’s a normal skirt?”
“Whatever kind of skirt you can buy a woman and it wouldn’t be weird.”
“I don’t think that skirt exists.”
“This was some kind of professional skirt. The kind you’d buy at Macy’s or something to wear with a matching jacket. And when I showed Gary, he was just like, Yeah, I don’t think Jim understands how to buy presents for women.”
Phoebe likes how Lila does Gary’s voice, too. Lila, it seems, is good at voices.
“He was like, Lila, this is a man who used to buy his own sister tampons in bulk whenever they were on sale at Costco.”
“That’s kind of nice, actually,” Phoebe says. Phoebe’s father mostly pretended her period didn’t exist, and so Phoebe pretended it didn’t exist. She felt criminal throwing a tampon in the trash, like she was throwing out a bloody carcass, because her father didn’t think to keep the can lined, so she often flushed them down the toilet. When the toilet backed up once a year, she knew it was her fault but watched her father with the plunger and said nothing.
“Gary thought so, too,” she says. “Gary is such a doctor. He like, truly only sees the good in everybody.”
“That is … not my experience with doctors.”
“Well, maybe he’s just got this blind spot when it comes to Jim. It’s like, Wendy died and Jim did their dishes for a year straight, and took his daughter to school when Gary didn’t have the strength, and now Jim is a forever hero. And so is Wendy. That’s the dead wife.”
The words dead wife land hard at Phoebe’s feet.
“Might I suggest alternate phrasing?” Phoebe asks.
“There’s seriously no other way to describe her,” she says. “You can’t use her name. Anytime her name is spoken, somebody is required to have a complete mental breakdown. Sometimes it’s his daughter. Often, it’s me. But still.”
Lila clutches the wine bottle, looks back down at her party.
“We’ll all be having a nice time sitting at the beach or something, and out of nowhere, Jim will just be like, Remember when Wendy tried to make a kite out of beer cans?”
“Is that possible?”
“Apparently, it didn’t fly,” Lila says. “And fine, I get it. In his eyes, I’m his dead sister’s replacement and he always wants me to remember that. But this is my wedding week. And I can’t stop having this horrible feeling that somehow Jim is going to ruin it. I mean, if you don’t beat him to it.”
Then Lila scans the reception with the binoculars again like she’s looking for Jim. When she finds him, she narrows her eyes with alarm.
“Oh my God, is Jim seriously hitting on my mother?”
She hands the binoculars to Phoebe.
“Which one is your mother?” Phoebe asks.
“The one who looks like she’s just about to go on Dancing with the Stars.”
“Can you be more specific?”
“That’s actually very specific,” Lila says. But then she points to a woman in a yellow dress.
Even with the binoculars, Phoebe can’t see much beyond a man and a woman talking with drinks in their hands. Every so often, Jim leans in, puts his hand on her mother’s shoulder. But it doesn’t look especially flirtatious. More familial.
“They look like they’re just, you know, talking,” Phoebe says.
“Oh, there is no just talking with my mother,” Lila says. “With her, it’s like always this intense spewing of information, like here is the last book on Gaudi that I just read and now I am going to tell you all about it verbatim. And my father used to just sit there and take it for thirty years, until he finally exploded and told us that he hated modern art. He actually confessed that to us on his deathbed. Isn’t that awful?”
“Wait, what?” Phoebe asks. “Your father confessed on his deathbed that he didn’t like modern art?”
“That’s right,” Lila says. “My father called from the hospital and asked to be put on speaker, and we were all gathered around, because we never knew which call was going to be his last, and he was like, My darlings, every man must come to terms with his true nature at the end of his life, and it is time I do the same, and my mother was like, Are you sure that’s a good idea, Henry? And my father was just like, I have always despised modern art, particularly the Cubists and everything that followed.”
Her father blamed Picasso, especially, for bringing dignity to the whole movement away from painting as representation.
“And maybe in some families this wouldn’t seem like a big confession, but my parents’ marriage had basically been built on the fact that they were these great, benevolent supporters of contemporary art,” Lila says. “My father bought my mother her first painting.”
Buying art together was how they fell in love. They made a name for themselves building one of the country’s most important collections of contemporary artists. They gave a five-hundred-thousand-dollar grant to the NEA each year. All of this helped make sense of the millions her father made in waste management. Helped give meaning to the landfills of trash her father owned across the country.
“So to find out that he only did all this just to impress my mother in the beginning,” Lila says. “Insert a montage of monologues from my mother about how her mother was right, how she never should have married a much older man who was literally in the business of trash, and how dare that man call anything a waste, let alone Cubism, and she knows now she really should have married her cousin’s cousin Gregory Lancaster like her mother had suggested, because the joke’s on her. Gregory is still alive.”
Phoebe looks through the binoculars and watches Jim walk away. She waits to see if anything comes over Lila’s mother’s face. She wonders if it’s hard to be at this wedding alone after her husband’s death. Is she worried about who she is going to talk to next? How long she’ll have to stand there alone?
