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| CEREMONIES: continued |
| 12.06.05 (12:21 pm) [edit] |
I do get my pages done. I am--with the help of my friends--up to snuff. We will stay up late; we need to work on the newspaper. We are wired and on Vivarin and I’m starting to feel good again. I feel like things mean something here. I don’t feel like a little brother anymore. I suddenly understand my addiction to the yearbook and the paper and school and my addiction to being Jayson Laujinesse. None of us will make it home tonight, that is apparent. We will wake up in our clothes like losers and go to class and do it all over again…
THE FIRST TIME JAYSON BATHES is Wednesday night. The hot water on him feels so good. He feels like he can rest, like he has earned the right to rest. He leaves the bathroom, towel wrapped around him, and goes to his room to get dressed in the old soft jeans and tee shirt, the black turtleneck. It’s chilly tonight. Downstairs the door opens. He can hear Anne who is coming to take him away.
“You look so tired,” Anne tells him when she comes into his room.
“The yearbook’s coming along excellently,” Jayson tells his cousin.
“Anne I can’t wait till it’s out. I can’t wait till you see it. It’s gonna look so great.”
They walk the half mile through College Heights to the O’Muil house on Bernard Street. Everything is so quiet that for a while Jayson can hear the silence. And then he hears the real night. It’s not quiet at all. Dogs bark and cats meow. Cicadas start singing and crickets get ready to chirrup. The train whistles are in the background, and cars pass by. On far away Aramy Street where Isaac lives, the sound of traffic is unending.
“You think it’s stupid don’t you?” Jayson says suddenly.
“What?” Anne looks genuinely shocked.
“The yearbook. You think it doesn’t mean anything.”
Anne doesn’t talk for a while. Jayson loves his cousin. They bicker a lot but she’s not evil. She’s good, really good. She says the right things. She says: “Do you know something?”
Jayson waits for her to say something.
“I would die before I, A.--went on yearbook committee or B--joined the band. But I love both. I love flipping through my yearbooks. I could do it for hours sometimes. Read the little messages people write, the way I forgot people felt about me.”
Suddenly Anne wraps an arm around her cousin as they come up the hill where Bayonne intersects with Bernard.
“People always think that important things have to be really big, and really serious,” Anne says. “But what’s it matter if you just enjoy them?”
And then she smacks him on the back of the head.
“....I WILL NEVER.... BE HUNGRY... AGAIN!” And then the score to Gone With the Wind swelled up as the camera zoomed away from the outline of Scarlett O’Hara and Part One of the movie came to an end.
“Time to the get the second tape,” Jinny said, getting up.
“But not until the music for the intermission is over,” Isaac said.
“Are you serious?” Cecile looked at him.
Isaac looked a little injured as he stood up and turned on the light.
“Yes. Yes I was. I thought we were going to do it just like we were at the movies.”
“Well, I say let the music run.” Jinny told them. “I need to take a piss. And you,” she told Anne, “could make some more popcorn.”
Beside Jayson, Anne said, “Excellent idea,” and was up.
“I never thought it would be possible for any Black man to say this,” Efrem confided in Jayson, “but Scarlett O’Hara is my new hero.”
As Efrem began quoting in a southern accent, “As God is my witness, I won’t let the Yankees lick me....”
“Everyone’s got a Scarlett in ‘em,” Cecile said. “Just waiting for the right tragedy.”
“What about you?” Jayson looked at her.
“I hope I’ve already had my tragedy,” she said blandly.
There was a knock at the door. Anne came out from the kitchen where the bag of microwave popcorn was beginning to pop, but then the door opened and Cecile betrayed herself by shouting, “Ryan!” Jinny, came downstairs commenting, “It’s just like Ashley coming back to Melanie!”
“Only Melanie owned slaves and Cecile would have been OUCH!--” Isaac turned to Efrem who had just pinched him.
“Aw, hey gang!” Ryan sounded incredibly tired. Jinny was next in line to hug him.
“I’m sorry we missed it,” Jinny said. “Oh, my God--you look so tired.” she pulled back, surveying him. The intermission music played on.
“You do look rough.”
“Thanks, Ef!” Ryan tried to laugh tiredly. “I’ve been on the road three days.”
“Next time take me,” Anne demanded.
“No, next time, take me,” Jayson faced his brother now. The two looked at each other and everything stood still.
“You had school,” Ryan told him. He was smacking his gum.
That was that, then.
“I’m glad you’re home, Ry,” said Jayson.
“I’m glad to be back.” They embraced quickly, then separated before sentiment could set in. Time resumed and Cecile cried, “Well thank God the intermission’s done. Time for tape two.”
When Aaron Weaver gots off the phone he told his son, who was coming into the kitchen from down the hall, “That was your Aunt Louisa. She’ll be in tomorrow evening.”
“Wonderful,” Isaac looked up from the sheet he’d been studying.
“You have to be nice to her.”
“Of course,” Isaac said. “I always am.”
Aaron cocked his head.
“Oh, by the way,” Isaac added, “Sandy Perizzi called. You should call her.”
“Oh.”
“You know,” Isaac said as his father’s foot hit the step, “I invited her to the wedding.”
“You wha?”
“You needed a date.”
“I don’t--”
“Well, you do if you’re going be at my wedding.I’m not having my father come like some sad old bachelor.”
“Thanks a lot.”
“You’re welcome a lot. You’re only forty-five, Dad. You’ve still got it. You just don’t want to work it.”
Aaron Weaver looked at his impertinent son with a half smile and a raised eyebrow.
“Besides, I like Sandy Perizzi. And she likes you and I think you like her.”
“You just want me to marry her so that I’ll have to be a Catholic too.”
“Yes, Dad that was foremost in my mind. Plus you haven’t dated anyone since mom died.”
“Yes I have.”
“No, Dad, you’ve slept with a lot of women is what you’ve done.”
Aaron raised an eyebrow.
“I don’t suppose there’s anything taboo with you,” he said to his son. “Something you might not say to your old man.”
Isaac shook his head, “Not today, sir. And you are going with Sandy Perizzi to the wedding. That’s an order.”
Aaron turned around, muttering as he headed down the stairs, “I have dated.”
“You said that to your dad!”
“Yeah, well,” Isaac shrugged as Efrem signaled to Trisha, and the waitress approached.
“Man, let me bum a cigarette,” Ryan held out a palm, still chuckling.
“Sure thing. I’ll be glad when you’ve stopped quitting. Then you can buy your own,” Isaac pushed them across the booth. Out of nowhere, Ryan cuffed his little brother on the head and winked at Jayson.
“What’ll it be?” Trisha says.
“Are you coming to my wedding on Saturday?”said Isaac.
Trisha looked amazed.
“Nothing should amaze you anymore,” Efrem told her.
“This is...”
“Well if you’re repulsed by the whole idea then just say no,” Isaac shot a pillar of smoke out of his mouth.
“No, I’m just surprised.”
“Even if I didn’t like you. It would be pretty shitty to plot out my wedding in front of you for six months and then not give you an invite.”
The waitress was so beside herself she forgot to take their order, which Isaac pointed out. Chicken Feast, All American Burger, Reuben, Big Fish Platter.
“It’s just a wedding.” Isaac told her. “Your invitation should be in your mailbox when you get home.”
“How--?”
“Come you didn’t get an invitation earlier?” Isaac guessed. “We just started sending them out. I know,” he said. “I’m slipshod.”
“No,” Trisha waved that away, sticking the notepad in her apron. “How’d you get my address?”
“Ef--” Isaac pointed to his quiet friend, who was paying too much attention to the dessert card, “He looked it up. Didn’t you, Ef? The guy’s a marvel.”
Trisha bent down, kissed Efrem on the cheek, and then vanished.
“Well, well,” Efrem murmured.
“You are a marvel, Ef. That was a great idea,” Isaac said. “If you were my slave. I’d free you.”
Efrem screwed up his face.
“I’ve still got Gone With the Wind on the brain.”
“Well, in that case,” Efrem returned, “If you were in Auchwitz, I’d make sure--”
“Hey! Hey!”
“Tit for tat.”
JINNY
IF MY COUSIN IDA HADN’T been there that summer who knows what would have happened? It would have taken more than Cecile to bring me out of my closet. My TJ Max closet. High school ended. It was the first time I had felt cute... ever. Sometimes I felt desirable. With Isaac. But I never felt cute, and I was sure I would never be desirable to anyone else.
My mother didn’t approve of it. You think that your mother is going to be the one to want you to look like a woman, especially after you’ve been looking like a lard ass for all those years.
I can hear Cecile saying, “You’re too hard on yourself. That’s your problem. You don’t see anything cute about you. How will anybody else?”
And that summer when Cecile and I came back from the mall with Sara and Amanda, I remember Ida telling my father to put a sock in it.
“I think everyone’s mad because for the first time you can see Virginia’s pretty.”
My cousin Ida, our cousin, is my father’s first cousin. He married late and is younger than Ida. Ida married pretty young and so she has grandchildren around Anne’s age. Some of them are pretty much like Anne. We never see them even though they live in Ohio too, on the Indiana border. A long time ago Ida came to go to school here, at Saint Clare’s in fact, and she hated it. She had never really lived here and thought she’d find a nice downhome Irish Catholic family. But, as she told me later on, when she came to live with my grandfather, her uncle, he proved to be a big snob. No one ever treated her well and she left. My great grandmother put her sons into school, but one of her daughters didn’t have time for school or decency and that was Ida’s mother who shot out kid after kid to a different father. Ida’s world was not nearly as polished as the one we lived in. Years later I’m sure she’s got more money than us and she’s definitely got more class, but there is something stuffy about our part of the family. She says we’re not really Irish anymore. She says we’ve gotten Anglo-Saxon.
“You all are the whitest people I’ve ever met,” she says, taking out a cigarette. “You might as well be Episcopalians!”
I think she’s right about that. She doesn’t come often, but when she does there are presents for me and Anne, whom she loves, and nothing but derision for my father and his siblings... Who, I’m not too fond of myself.
So that summer she convinced them that I was pretty and they were jealous, and she helped convince me.
“If you ever get tired of this one horse town,” Ida told me. “You can come down to my one horse town. We’ve got a great school down there.”
So Ida is one of those people who’s helped me to feel beautiful through the years. There are too many people who will make you feel ugly, and we spend too much time thinking about them. What they say, how angry we get. I don’t think about Ida enough. Or Amanda and Sara, who I haven’t seen in a long while, hardly saw in high school. Or Cecile who was with me all the way.
The summer I met Isaac, my first and really my only boyfriend, the love of my life, ra, ra, ra, was also the summer that a doctor told me I was fat. And I was. But I cried. And what’s more, he called me morbidly obese. Do you know what that does to a girl? And my mother railed and said, “You are not obese, Virginia.” But she would also say, “Why don’t you not have seconds, honey,” when I’d reach for more roast beef at dinner.
The truth was that I wasn’t morbidly obese, and Efrem said it to me. He said, “If you just forget about it the weight’ll go. That’s what I’ve heard. If you’re always thinking about how fat you are and how you can’t eat you’ll eat. If you just eat when you’re hungry, no problem. If everytime you get hungry, you make yourself aware that you’re about to eat... no problem. You just need to pay attention to your mouth and no attention to everyone elses.”
This was such good advice that I forgot it. I mean I forgot I was doing it. The second bit of advice came a long time later and helped me realize that because I wasn’t skinny didn’t mean I was fat. It was a long time before I realized that some women were big and bigboned and that was all there was to it. Up until then every girl I’d met who called herself big boned I could look at and realize was really fat as hell. I’d encountered very few actual big boned women so it took me awhile to realize I was one. What Isaac got was not a fatty. What he got was a frump.
But he was a frump too. Hell, we were frumpy together that whole summer. We were frumpy when we hung out with Cecile. We were frumpy at the movies. We were frumpy at home. We were frumpy making out. And we knew it. We were hopelessly frumpy in our own world of frumption which is why I think sex came so early. At the technical end it came late, but in actuality we were rolling around almost instantaneously. If we’d been pretty, I don’t think this would have happened. But we didn’t live in the world of pretty people. We lived in the Frumpy Kingdom. And in Frumpyland we could do what we wanted because both of us were pretty sure that no one else was going to do it with us.
But that hadn’t happened the day that I was crying over the phone to Cecile, either forgetting or just not caring that she was a year beneath me.
“Isaac’s going to the public school. He’s going to Whitman.”
“Then why don’t you go to Whitman with him?”
“I can’t. My parents are making me go to Little Flower!”
“Girl, tell them Little Flower’s twelve hundred a year and Whitman’s free. It’s that easy. You better put your foot down.”
Well, I put my foot down and my father said that Whitman wasn’t in our district anyway. Rogers was--which I did not want to go to. I was bowled over to realize that the cut off line for the Whitman district was the other side of my street.
My Aunt came into the picture now.
“It’s love, isn’t it?” she said.
“What?”
“You’ve got a crush on a boy, don’t you?”
“Well that, and I don’t want any more Catholic school.”
My Aunt nodded. “I can’t blame you for that,” she said. “Well, I’ll tell you what. You can live here. I mean, for the records. This will be your address.”
“What?”
“This is the Whitman district,” Aunt Catherine told me.
And so it was settled.
I came over to the bookstore and told Isaac. It never occured to me that I’d be cramping his style by going to his high school. Of course at thirteen Isaac didn’t have any style to cramp.
We were so emotional. It was just like Romeo and Juliet, the Franco Zefirelli version. Isaac closed the store and we went up to his room and we just kept fooling around until we were both thrilled as hell and naked on his bed and then I had my first orgasm. I saw Isaac naked for the first time. I was seen naked for the first time. I knew what it was like to hold a human body between my left and right hands, feel it shudder and come. We lay on our backs, and then turned to each other and went to sleep.
Frumpyland!
JAYSON
Friday night Jinny’s cousin Ida cames. I see the way she and Pierce talk to each other and think, they’re like me and Anne, a little bit. Ida’s the earthy one. She is fed up with Pierce’s pretension, but they’re family. She’s hardly ever lived in Rhodes, but her blood is here and so she knows all the Irish families, the Brennans that my mom and Aunt Maureen come out of. She never waits to malign the Brennans, and the Laujinesses, which she says aren’t even Irish. So the whole time she’s going on about old times and old families I think she won’t have anything good at all to say about me or Ryan.
“Good looking, though,” she says. “The both of you. One thing you couldn’t do is call the Laujinesses ugly. I just hope you all aren’t bastards.”
“Oh, Ida!” this from Uncle Pierce. Only I don’t think he’s as embarassed as he pretends, and I remember hearing from Aunt Maureen how he was never good enough for the Brennans or the Laujinesses.
Even worse--or better--than Ida is her granddaughter she’s brought with her. And her granddaughter’s sort of boyfriend. All I can think of is the word wild when I see them and they smell like thunderstorms. They’re so electric and God, they make me seem so pale; bland. Her name is Tina and she laughs and smiles and smokes she runs right for Jinny and Anne. She has Anne’s build but is darker than Anne with long hair, tea colored, She looks nothing like her, but you can tell the two of them are what my grandmother would call “birds of a feather.” They just start talking the same language.
And the guy with her, who should be moody, who looks like a much edgier version of me or Ryan, who’s name is Luke, is right there laughing and joking and handing out Lucky Strikes and Isaac forgets himself and gagging cries, “Fuck! These are strong!”
“I know,” Luke is very pleased.
Tina and Luke are going to Europe in September. They’ve spent their whole lives down south in Jamnia. Luke was homeless. Neither one of them ever cared about good grades. Tina’s an actress which is where she and Jinny hit it off, and she’s not worried about good universities or impressing people. She just keeps on blowing out smoke and laughing and smacking Luke’s thigh and saying, “Fuck it! Just fuck it!” The two of them are so free! I want to be like that so bad. I just want to go down to Jamnia and drink some of that water and go crazy.
“Isaac and Efrem are musicians,” Anne says by way of a hint and she looks at her cousin’s guitar.
Tina gives Isaac a look that just makes him start barking with laughter and then she murmurs, “Sounds like we might have to have a jam session? Whaddo you say, Music Man? After the hitchin’, tomorrow?”
“Hitching,” Jinny comments, “like we’re a bunch of goddamned horses.”
Saturday afternoon finds them in two sections of Saint Antonin’s, the women in the practice room for the choir, the men in the sacristy. Efrem, once again a surprise, brings out a bottle of Wild Turkey and shot glasses. Tina’s Luke is with them, along with Sean Wallace, Efrem’s best friend from childhood, the color of unfinished wood, curly haired and four eyed.
“This? After the bachelor party?” Isaac says, looking like he just got slapped in the face.
“Hair of the dog,” says Efrem, putting out the glasses and pouring hooch into them.
“One for me too?” Jayson notices.
“Today, you are a man!” Efrem proclaims like a rabbi.
“Oh, that reminds me,” Isaac said, “I have to wear a yarmulke.”
“What?” Ryan looks at him with a crooked smile.
“My Aunt Louisa talked me into it.”
“Is she that serious?”
“About me wearing a yarmulke or about being Jewish?” Isaac says.
“Both I guess.”
Isaac looks at Ryan a little ticked off, “She only goes to Temple on Yom Kippur, but damnit, she’s serious about me being a good Jew. Even if I’m Catholic now.”
“Hair of the dog,” Efrem says again, and he is the first to do his shot.
My eyes burn. I want to cry. But I don’t gag. I won’t. My mouth is burning, but I’m holding my own. It’s Sean who coughs.
“You’ve been away from the bottle too long,” Efrem notes.
“She wanted me to wear a tallith too,” Isaac says.
“A huh?” Ryan looks at Efrem for explanation.
It’s Luke who says, “It’s a Jewish prayer shawl.”
“That is so stupid,” Isaac declares.
“It’s cool. Do it,” Tina is saying as she pulls at the back of Jinny’s dress. “Then you all get to smash the bowl too? I wonder what the priest’ll think of all this Jewishness.”
“Well, hell, Jesus was a Jew,” Cecile said, straightening Jinny’s veil and tucking back a bit of her hair that had escaped the bun.
Jinny comments: “Maybe Isaac’ll make the water into wine.”
“Hey,” Anne notes, tucking a sprig of baby’s breath into the veil, “If you can wear white anything’s possible.”
Jinny’s eyebrows fly up and Anne smirks.
“Relax. Mom and Aunt Catherine are in the next room and if you’re a virgin I’m the Flying Nun.”
“Um,” Tina comments. “Bowl smashing, wine making and flying nuns. All at one wedding. I’m glad I came.”
A WEDDING WAS A WEDDING. There wasn’t much to be said except for that at this wedding everyone thought the groom was as handsome as the bride was beautiful. Louisa coaxed Isaac into wearing his tallith and the white yarmulke with its blue patterned border was perched on his head. Jinny was all in white and when Isaac lifted her veil and kissed her, they held hands lightly and with a look of grim determination, cracked the bowl beneath their feet.
And then there was singing and laughing and crying and Isaac kept on saying he had something in his eyes and everyone was surrounding Jinny and him. Aaron Weaver was crying beside Sandy Perizzi and trying not to and Jayson looked over and saw that Anne, of all people, was sitting next to Aunt Maureen and Ida and Tina and all of these indomitable women were blubbering into their handkerchiefs.
Cecile Turner did not cry. The crowd seemed to always push her and Efrem nearer so that they did not have to fight to be close to Isaac and Jinny. Cecile only whispered something in Jinny’s ear, and then her best friend went white.
“What?” Isaac looked at his... wife?... Laughing.
“She said, ‘How’s it feel to be Mrs. Weaver?’”
“Oh my God!” Isaac laughed, but it sounded almost like he was going to cry. “You’re my wife now! You’re Virginia Weaver!”
The reception was held in the basement of the church. All of Isaac’s relatives converged on him at once, then giving all the hugs and kisses and insults they had in them, they fell upon the Catholic girl he’d married. After a while, Jinny looked up from where she sat beside Aunt Louisa and said, “Where’s Isaac?” And then she looked around. “Where’s Efrem?”
Jayson, who had been talking to Luke, got up and threaded his way to the crowd and into the bathroom. He did not know who was comforting whom but Isaac and Efrem were crying and hugging each other and then they both looked over and saw him and, just like that, swept him into their embrace.
“We need to get drunk,” Efrem decided. “We need to get really drunk.”
And Jayson felt so good. He felt like it was his day, him included in this moment.
When Jinny threw the bouquet, her cousin Tina caught it and she stood looking at Luke. Her grandmother stood looking at both of them.
“Martina Madeary,” said Tina. “What a cute monogram that would be!”
The room cleared for Jinny to sit in the chair and stretch out her legs so Isaac could remove the garter. On his knees suddenly Isaac searched the room with a look in his green eyes that dared the crowd. Then he turned around and stuck his head under his bride’s dress removing the garter with his teeth to the wild applause of the crowd, the stricken look of his Aunt Louisa, and Aaron Weaver clapping an embarassed hand to his face. But it was Aaron who caught the belt and Sandy Perizzi kissed him and then the father and the son looked at each other across the room and Aaron turned scarlet.
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