“And so now my mother is convinced that I’m making a mistake marrying Gary, just like her,” Lila says.
“How do you know?”
“She tells me! When she’s really loaded at two in the afternoon, she just says these things. She’s like, Lila, you don’t have to get married just because your father’s dying wish was to see you get married. What does it matter? He’s already dead! And then she goes off about how I might want to think twice about marrying an older man in waste management like she did.”
“I thought Gary was a doctor?”
“My father owned landfills. Gary is a gastroenterologist. Totally different jobs, but my mother is just like, Like I said, they’re both in waste management. Two men, on a mission to help the country deal with their shit.”
Lila is quiet for a moment, like she is considering something deeply, perhaps the entire trajectory of her life.
“Can you imagine having a mother who talks to you like that?”
“My mother is dead,” Phoebe says.
“Oh. Well, you’re lucky then. My mother, she just monologues,” Lila says, as if she were not doing the same exact thing right now. “Which is absolutely why she is not getting a speech at this wedding. I kept telling her, Mom, the mother of the bride doesn’t even get a speech, and she was like, Yes, and why do we think that is, Lila? Why do you think the men have always wanted the mother of the bride to be silent?”
The bride takes another sip.
“And I’m like, It’s not about men! It’s about you! Why would I trust you with a speech? You’re just going to get loaded and stand up there and talk about how Gary is too old for me or something!”
Phoebe wonders how long Lila could go on without a response. Again, she wonders if this is the difference between growing up with and without a mother. Having a mother helps you believe that everybody wants to hear every little thing you think. Having a mother helps you speak without thinking. It allows you to trust in your most awful self, to yell and scream and cry, knowing that your mother will still love you by the end of it. In her teens, Phoebe was regularly astonished by how awful her friends were to their mothers, and the mothers just took it, because the mothers knew that sometimes they were awful, too. The mothers had made their own mistakes.
But Phoebe’s mother sat high up on the fireplace mantel, in a gilded frame, like a martyred saint. Under her gaze, Phoebe was careful never to make any mistakes. Phoebe was quiet and obedient, never talking too fast or too loudly, because she never wanted to be a burden to her father. She had felt this way in her marriage, too—careful never to cry too hard or tell meandering stories at dinner. Careful always to wear nice pajamas to bed. Careful never to lose control. Even at the end, when she learned about the affair, she stayed so calm that her husband was confused. “You’re being so nice about this,” Matt said.
But Lila talks without end, without clear transitions from topic to topic, assuming that Phoebe, a total stranger who has already announced multiple times that she wants to die, is interested in hearing every detail about her personal life. Phoebe can’t tell if it’s the most appalling or most impressive display she’s ever witnessed.
Either way, Phoebe is interested.
“How much older than you is Gary?” Phoebe asks.
“Only eleven and a half years,” the bride says. “He’s forty, but you can barely tell.”
“Oh,” Phoebe says, genuinely not impressed. “That’s not bad. I’ve seen much worse.”
“Like what?” The bride looks hopeful.
“Like this seventy-five-year-old historian at my university had an affair with the twenty-six-year-old admin.”
“Jesus. That’s just weird.”
“Especially since she wasn’t even trying to get her PhD,” Phoebe says. It feels good to talk about her old life so casually like that. As if it were all just funny subject material to share in conversation with Lila. “I mean, we could never figure out why she was doing it exactly. Like what would this admin with no aspirations in higher ed gain from dating a married geriatric academic?”
“Maybe she was in love,” the bride says. “Not everything is a pathology, you know. I was like, Mom, not everything is about Dad dying! I didn’t even know Dad was dying when I met Gary. Gary just randomly came to our art gallery looking for some paintings to fill up his new house, and then two days later, I took my dad to his GI because we were expecting bad news, and I was shocked to see that Gary was the doctor. I mean, truly a wild coincidence. Gary and I both knew it had to mean something.”
But her mother was not convinced.
“My mother is like, We all knew on some level that your father was going to die. And I’m like, Well yeah, I’ve always known that someday my father will die. But maybe, just maybe, it’s possible that Gary and I love each other? I mean, why does everything have to be about my father one day dying? And my mother is like, I didn’t make the rules, sweetheart. Take it up with Freud.”
The bride sighs.
“We should have just gotten married right after he proposed,” Lila says. “My father was actually doing really well then, responding to the treatments the way Gary said he would. But we had just gone into lockdown, and so we kept postponing the wedding, thinking the lockdown would end at any moment. And then my dad got so much worse and after he was hospitalized, it didn’t feel right to celebrate anything. I mean, he hardly made any sense at the end. He was so high on morphine, it became unbearable to take his phone calls. We’d put him on speaker and be like, Hi, Dad, but then there would be nothing but this long dramatic pause until finally, he was like … Herbbbbballll Essences!”
Phoebe is confused. “Herbal Essences?”
“I don’t know,” the bride says. “That’s what he said. It made no sense. It was just … silence … and then Herbbballlllll Essences! And I was like, Okay, Dad. What about Herbal Essences? But he hung up. And then he died. And those were literally my father’s last words to me.”
Phoebe looks at Lila and Lila looks at Phoebe. The sadness of the story is so stark, her voice so monotone when she delivered it, they erupt into a laughter so intense it surprises Phoebe. Every time they are about to calm down, the bride says, “Herrbbbballl Essences!” and Phoebe starts laughing all over again. It makes her feel high.
“Stop,” Phoebe says. “I can’t breathe.”
“Isn’t that your goal?” the bride asks.
The snipe makes it feel serious between them again. Phoebe can’t remember the last time she laughed like that. Maybe that time with her husband in the Ozarks when they found the Sax for Lovers CD? But that was so long ago. And they didn’t even really laugh—they smiled and joked and then had sex. But they had never, Phoebe thought, really laughed.
Phoebe looks down at the reception, sees waiters in white shirts passing out tiny dots of food. Women in cocktail dresses eating olives off toothpicks. People already on their second drink. Phoebe wonders why Lila is so worried about her million-dollar wedding being ruined yet doesn’t seem concerned to be missing the start of it.
“It’s actually Gary’s sister, Marla, who is the worst about it all,” the bride says.
“The worst about what?”
“Our age gap.”
“I thought we were talking about your dad.”
“I am tired of talking about my dad. My dad is dead. It’s been a year and a half and it is time to finally accept that, even if my mother cannot.”
“Okay, so Marla.”
