It’s so long—the kind of line she expected to see at the airport, and not at a Victorian mansion overlooking the ocean. Yet there the line is, stretching all the way through the lobby and past the historic oak staircase. The people in it look wrong, too—wearing windbreakers and jeans and sneakers. The normal shirts Phoebe used to wear. They look comically ordinary next to the velvet drapes and the gilt-framed portraits of bearded men lining the walls. They look like solid, modern people, tethered to the earth by their titanium-strength suitcases. Some are talking on their phones. Some are reading off their phones, like they’re prepared to be in this line forever and maybe they are. Maybe they don’t have families anymore, either. It’s tempting for Phoebe to think like this now—to believe that everybody is as alone as she is.
But they’re not alone. They stand in pairs of two or three, some with linked arms, some with single hands resting on a back. They’re happy, which Phoebe knows because every so often one of them announces how happy they are.
“Jim!” an old man says, opening up his arms like a bear. “I’m so happy to see you!”
“Hey, Grandpa Jim,” a younger man says back, because it seems practically everyone in line is named Jim. The Jims exchange violent hugs and hellos. “Where’s Uncle Jim? Already on the course?”
Even the young woman working the front desk seems happy—so dedicated to looking each guest deeply in the eye, asking them why they’re here, even though they all say the same thing, and so she replies with the same thing: “Oh, you’re here for the wedding! How wonderful.” She sounds genuinely excited about the wedding and maybe she is. Maybe she’s still so young that she believes everybody else’s wedding is somehow about her. That’s how Phoebe always felt when she was young, worrying about what dress to wear for a month, even though she sat in the outer orbit of every wedding she attended.
Phoebe gets in line. She stands behind two young women carrying matching green dresses on their arms. One still wears her cheetah-print airplane neck pillow. The other has a bun so high the messy red tendrils dangle over her forehead as she flips through a People magazine. They are engaged in whispery debate over whose flight here was worse and how old is this hotel really and why are people so obsessed with Kylie Jenner now? Are we supposed to care that she’s hotter than Kim Kardashian?
“Is she?” Neck Pillow asks. “I’ve actually always thought they were both ugly in some way.”
“I think that’s true about all people, though,” High Bun says. “All people have one thing that makes them ugly. Even people who are like, professionally hot. It’s like the golden rule or something.”
“I think you mean cardinal rule.”
“Maybe.” High Bun says that even though she understands she’s baseline attractive, something that has taken her five years of therapy to admit, she knows that her gums show too much when she smiles.
“I’ve never noticed that,” Neck Pillow says.
“That’s because I don’t smile all the way.”
“This entire time I’ve known you, you haven’t been fully smiling?”
“Not since high school.”
The line moves forward, and Phoebe looks up at the coffered ceiling, which is so high, she starts to wonder how they clean it.
Another “Oh! You’re here for the wedding!” and Phoebe begins to realize just how many wedding people there are in the lobby. It’s unsettling, like in that movie The Birds her husband loved so much. Once she spots a few, she sees them everywhere. Wedding people lounging on the mauve velvet bench. Wedding people leaning on the built-in bookcase. Wedding people pulling luggage so futuristic it looks like it could survive a trip to the moon. The men in burgundy pile it all into high, sturdy towers of suitcases, right next to a large white sign that says WELCOME TO THE WEDDING OF LILA AND GARY.
“Your rule is definitely not true about Lila, though,” Neck Pillow says. “I mean, I seriously can’t think of one way she’s ugly.”
“That’s true,” High Bun says.
“Remember when she was chosen to be the bride in our fashion show senior year?”
“Oh yeah. Sometimes I forget about that.”
“How can you forget about that? I think about how weird it was once a week.”
“You mean because our guidance counselor insisted on walking down the aisle with her?”
“I mean more like, some people are just born to be brides.”
“I actually think our guidance counselor is coming to the wedding.”
“That’s weird. But good. Then I’ll actually know someone at this wedding,” Neck Pillow says.
“I know. I pretty much don’t know anyone anymore,” High Bun says.
“I know, ever since the pandemic, I’m like, okay, I guess I just have no friends now.”
“Right? The only person I know now is basically my mom.”
They laugh and then trade war stories of their terrible flights here and Phoebe does her best to ignore them, to keep her eyes focused on the magnificence of the lobby. But it’s hard. Wedding people are much louder than regular people.
She closes her eyes. Her feet begin to ache, and she wonders for the first time since she left home if she should have brought a pair of sensible shoes. She has so many lined up in her closet, being navy, doing nothing.
“So what do you know about the groom?” Neck Pillow whispers.
High Bun only knows what Lila briefly told her over the phone and what she learned from stalking him on the internet.
“Gary is actually kind of boring to stalk,” High Bun says, then whispers something about him being a Gen X doctor with a receding hairline so minor, it seems like there’s a good chance he’ll die with most of his hair. “How did you not stalk him after Lila asked you to be a bridesmaid?”
“I’ve been off the internet,” Neck Pillow says. “My therapist demanded it.”
“For two years?”
“They’ve been engaged that long?”
“He proposed just before the pandemic.”
They inch forward in line again.
“God—Look at this wallpaper!”
Neck Pillow hopes that her room faces the ocean. “Staring at the ocean makes you five percent happier. I read a study.”
