"The Wedding People"

[fiefoe]

Given the generically cutesy cover, I wasn't expecting much, but Alison Espach delivered a surprisingly down-to-earth and charming group of characters muddled in love. Even the literature professor heroine rose above the cliche.

• She and her husband never did anything fancy enough for it. They were professors. They were easygoing. Relaxed. So comfortable by the fire with the little cat on their laps. They liked regular things, whatever was on tap, whatever was on TV, whatever was in the fridge, whatever shirt looked the most normal, because wasn’t that the point of clothing? To prove that you were normal?
• Could not go to work and stand at the office printer and hold her face in a steady expression of interest while her colleague talked at length about the surprising importance of cheese in medieval theology.
• They look like solid, modern people, tethered to the earth by their titanium-strength suitcases.
• 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.
• a pair of sensible shoes. She has so many lined up in her closet, being navy, doing nothing.
• Phoebe always loved his laugh, the way it sounded from afar. Like a foghorn in the distance, reminding her of where to go.
• The bride smiles, proud of herself. Proud to be the kind of woman who thinks of other, less fortunate women while traveling Europe with her doctor fiancé.
• * it’s her husband’s family’s name. Whenever she hears herself say it, it somehow pushes her outside of her body. It makes her see herself from up above like a bird, the way the wedding people must see her, and she’s sure from up there, they can spot the one thing that is ugly about her, too: her hair.
• “Is each room a decade?” Phoebe asks. She pictures each room having its own hairstyle. Its own war. Its own set of stock market triumphs and failures. Its own definition of feminism.
• * when her therapist asked her to close her eyes and describe her happy place, she pictured herself on that canopy bed because she could only imagine herself happy in a place she had never been, a bed she had never slept in.
• “But you have to be in one of our families.”
  “No,” Phoebe says. “I’m not in any family.”
  It had been a crushing realization, one that started slowly after the divorce
• Phoebe begins walking down the hall, leaving the bride fully caught in the web of her wedding, the one she spun for herself as a small girl, dreaming of this moment.
• But just looking at the word cum made her nervous. So she deleted it, wrote come instead of cum, and then turned it back to cum, because she didn’t know if it was better to be correct or fun, and why did it feel like she always had to choose between the two?
• Every time she opened her dissertation on the computer, it felt like sitting down for coffee with an old boyfriend she couldn’t imagine ever loving again.
• * because they were suspicious of money, of grand gesture. The bigger the gesture, the emptier the feeling. The more wedding you need, the less happy you must be. <> Phoebe truly believed this then. But now the utter simplicity of their lives felt crushing.
• she knew it meant something was changing inside of her, some darkness was hardening into sludge.
• Phoebe sat back down at the table, and all of a sudden Mia’s beauty seemed different. It was not just a basic fact. It was a situation.
• It was a fantasy, in which there were children and the children always needed her. She had to imagine leaving only so she could imagine staying. She had to imagine herself at the door and her husband shouting, “No, Phoebe, no!” like she was a dog.
• * “How was your day?” she asked, and felt like one of the awful characters in a T. S. Eliot poem. _What shall I do now? What shall I do? I shall rush out as I am, and walk the street with my hair down, so. What shall we do to-morrow? What shall we ever do?
• He once liked that Phoebe did not run around feeling the pressure to conquer each worldly experience. <> Yet Phoebe thought it was wrong to leave the world before seeing the ocean, the way she thought it was wrong for Matt to ask for a divorce thirty miles away on Zoom.
• Phoebe expected more from the ocean, maybe because she read too many Herman Melville books in which the ocean knows everything about the future—foreshadows death with every wild and loud crash of a wave.
• there has been too much to do and not enough time. There was the dissertation that needed to become a book, the research that needed to become PowerPoints, the sex that needed to become a baby, and the students that needed her to run their lives.
• Then Bob had given away her old office to the new hire after Phoebe chose to continue teaching virtually during the second year of the pandemic. And now that she was back, Bob was at a loss. There was nowhere else to put her except next to the Keurig and the pound cake that Jane the admin brought in.
• * “No, I love him,” Phoebe said. “He’s my husband.” <> It made her feel silly, fighting over her husband with a female colleague who had her arm wedged in drawer five, like she was about to help birth a document. This was not how it was supposed to go.
• And she always loved circular endings in literature, even if they were completely unrealistic. Probably why she was the only one in her Victorian literature class who actually liked the ending of Jane Eyre. She liked the endings of all marriage plots. The books were orderly and deliberate. They succeeded on their own terms. The endings always reflected the beginnings. The authors had powerful control of the narratives. The deaths were put into a kind of cosmic order that made everybody feel better about being alive, because they happened offstage, in the South of Italy or at the seaside, where characters were given the grace and dignity to die on beds more beautiful than their own.
• She does not want to go out frantic and through a window like Septimus in Mrs. Dalloway, a scene that upset her so much, it became the only book in graduate school that she never finished reading.
• At least I’m on the top floor, she thinks—up on the balcony from where she can stare and pass judgment without being noticed, like the seagulls that circle high above. From here, she can see it all, even what it will be like to be dead, because that is one of the few gifts that depression gives her: aerial vision. She already knows what the world will look like without her,
• Told me it was his dying wish to see his only daughter get married before he died. But then before we could have it, he died. And then there was a global pandemic for two years. So the least you could do is not die, too.”
• * “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,
• “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.”
• “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.
• not that Phoebe understands what that is. Phoebe was raised by a father whose most complicated relationship was to televised sports.
• Phoebe will not get to know how the speech ends—or how anything ends. And Phoebe does not like this. Phoebe always finishes a book or a movie, even a bad one. “Don’t you want to know if they get married?” she asked, when Matt suggested they turn it off. But Matt did not need to know. Matt said, “This is a terrible movie. Of course they’re going to get married.” And Matt could do that—turn off the TV, quit a marriage—right in the middle of the climactic scene.
• she can't just insult her own daughter’s imagination in front of all these people and then take a bow. Phoebe can’t bear it, thinking of Lila getting ready this afternoon, laying out her dress, putting on her lipstick, combing her hair, feeling so beautiful, only to wind up with her fists clenched under the table, trying not to cry.
• “I came here to kill myself,” she blurts out. <> This is the gift random strangers can give you, Phoebe is realizing—the freedom to say or be anything around them.... But all he says is “Shit,” like she stepped in a puddle of mud. It makes what she said sound small and fixable. Like something he understood.
• “The therapeutic cures of drug deals gone awry.” <> “You joke, but by the end of it, I felt actual relief that I was not Walter White. Like, at least I didn’t shoot myself with my own machine gun after being hunted by my own brother-in-law.”
• And how ridiculous is that? That she made rules about not being attracted to people who were too attractive for the same reason her husband refused to hire a philosopher with an agent... Is someone that handsome going to want to wipe up the spills on the counter? Hold our daughter’s hair when she vomits with the flu? Listen to me talk at length about the ideological underpinnings of the Victorian beard trend?
• right now, she feels equally beautiful. More beautiful. She is alive. Enchanted. I have fingers, she thinks, and brings them to the surface of the water. Look at these magical fucking fingers.
• * So she read the novels about slow, incremental improvement, about sisters who were also good friends, women who were too witty for the sincerity of their landscapes, women who were above marriage and its conventions and, yet, got to be beautiful and experience the joys of it anyway.
• She needed to believe these people were out there looking for her, these good and moral people with big estates and bigger hearts who would fall madly in love with just how alone she was, because wasn’t life fucking hard enough?
• Everyone had been obsessed with the eclipse for two days now. Even their friends who didn’t believe in things seemed to think it meant something. There was a metaphor in it. Somehow, it represented something. And she wanted to feel it, whatever it was, so she looked straight at the dark center that was once the sun. The red light was supposed to be blinding, but they were fine, protected. They were in love, not to mention wearing special glasses, holding hands in a park, surrounded by mansions built during the World’s Fair. Phoebe thought it was all so beautiful.
  “Hey,” Matt whispered in her ear, “want to get married here?”
  He whispered it so casually, it stunned Phoebe. The same way he said, Hey, let’s have a beer. Like their marriage was a thing so natural, so organic, it grew all around them like grass.
• * She doesn’t want to explain last night. It feels like a secret that she has with only the universe—and the man in the hot tub—a secret that will become a foundational memory she will carry with her everywhere she goes. Like the memory of meeting her husband, which was so life-affirming, it sustained her for a decade.
• A kayak around the lake is wonderful. Those tiny soufflés that you have to order an hour in advance at restaurants are wonderful. But Garys are not wonderful. That’s just not what they are meant to be.”
• So don’t even bother telling me you have plans, because I know you were planning on being dead right now.”
• “I’ll be sure to put that on my tombstone. Phoebe Stone: the only acceptable rando.”
• Lila looks unconcerned. Lila sits perched on the boat like she’s sitting in her own living room—upright, poised, with the confidence of a woman who has systematically removed all of her body hair. Nothing bad can happen to a woman like that during her wedding week, not even in the middle of the ocean.
• “You stole sacramental wine?” Jim asks, looking at Lila like he’s both surprised and proud.
• it’s more like, Gary is the house and Lila is the chandelier. Blond and dazzling in the way that suggests she’s never bought a loaf of bread at the store. And Gary, so handsome and sturdy, a man who is always bringing bread home from the store. <> And yet, when she looks at Gary, she can only see the man in the hot tub, the man who once wanted to die. The man who read romance novels in college. She can feel that invisible wire between them, until Gary pulls Lila onto his lap and holds her close, as if he’s protecting her from his overbearing sister.
• Phoebe wonders if she’s lying, but then Marla pulls out her wallet, starts typing things furiously into her phone. This is too much for Gary to ignore. <> “Are you really reregistering your car while we’re sailing?” Gary asks.
• Phoebe can’t help it—Marla is too much. But Phoebe doesn’t want to laugh at another woman for being too much, not even Marla.
• “And now do other people say something about Human Princess?” Juice asks. <> Phoebe thinks it’s amazing how easily children ask questions. They don’t think there’s anything wrong with it. They know that they don’t know everything, and it’s a little jarring to Phoebe, a woman who spent her entire career pretending that she had been born knowing everything... Things children know that Phoebe has forgotten, like how to look at a green plastic circle and see a beloved dog.
• And why does she do this? Why does she have a nice day with people, feel connected to them, and then, when alone, think only about the possible horrors of her isolation ahead? <> “You catastrophize,” her therapist said to her once. “Depressive realism.”
• * The thing she is starting to love about Lila is this: She begins to shampoo Phoebe’s hair without a word and continues her angry chatter in such fixed tones, it becomes soothing to Phoebe. <> “Do you think it’s weird that you’re the only one I can tell all this stuff to?” Lila asks... “It is sad,” Lila admits. “It’s really sad. And how did that happen? How did I end up becoming a person who has nobody?”
• * That was how Phoebe felt at the end of her marriage. They reenacted the beginning—went on date nights, invited each other to things.
• Maybe this is just what it means to be a person. To constantly reckon with being a single being in one body. Maybe everybody sits up at night and creates arguments in their head for why they are the loneliest person in the world. Lila has no maid of honor and Phoebe has never been a maid of honor. It has always been a mark of shame for her, that no woman in this world was willing to claim her.
• Phoebe was too familiar with it, the way she was too familiar with her own house. She could walk to the bathroom in the middle of the night, no problem—she knew the knobs on every door, could feel the walls of her house like they were the walls of her own body. To be stuck inside her house was to be stuck inside herself and all the choices she made over the years.
• * It is so easy to hate Mrs. Dalloway for worrying so much about her stupid party, the way it’s so easy to hate the bride, she thinks. But in the end, everybody goes to the party and that’s the point. It’s Mrs. Dalloway who brings them all together in a modern world full of railroads and wars and illnesses that are always tearing people apart. If the problem is loneliness, then in this way, and maybe in only this way, Mrs. Dalloway is the hero for giving everybody a place to be.
• How easy to be dead. How lucky to be alive, even for just one day. Charlotte Brontë’s father understood this—the man had lost every single one of his children except for Charlotte
• * At Land’s End, she had been unknown, an unhappy married woman. She had not yet become the real Edith Wharton. Not yet divorced. Not yet a novelist. Not yet a war correspondent in France. She wonders how terrifying it felt, not to know any of this about herself, to sit out on this big lawn, looking at the sea, feeling like she was at the very end of it all. She wonders what it was that made her realize there was somewhere else to go.
• “It’s fine,” Juice says. “I’ll lick it up like I’m a priest.”
  “I’m sorry,” Phoebe says. “You’re going to have to explain that one.”
  “Grandma said that when the priest spills the wine, he has to lick it off the floor,” Juice says. “Because it’s literally Jesus. And if you don’t, then Jesus will just sit there on the linoleum for the rest of time.”
• “A woman is asked out as much for her clothes as for herself,” Phoebe says. “It’s a line from an Edith Wharton novel.”... “I think she wants us to think about the secret things people reveal through their clothing choices. Like when we admire someone’s dress or jacket, we’re really admiring something else.”
• Phoebe is fascinated by Juice’s relentless embarrassment. Phoebe wants to know everything about it, study it like a book... “It’s humiliating to not be rained on?” <> “It’s humiliating to be so … prepared.”
• “My daughter doesn’t fully love people yet,” Patricia says. “Not the way she will.”... The way I loved Henry at the start, when I thought love was about getting something from people. I fell in love with what Henry gave me. And he gave me so much. He truly did. But loving someone like that doesn’t make you a better woman. Only losing them does.”
• Of course, I didn’t realize that he had turned into a Cubist over the last thirty years. But that’s beside the point. The point was to be standing there in the garden, knowing he was considering me, every muscle, every vein. To be fully seen like that. To be fully myself in front of someone else and not ashamed one bit... “I didn’t want to be saved from myself. Nobody does! All we want is permission to stand there naked and be our damned selves.”
• She was hysterical, kept saying, Dad is sick and you strip naked for another man? So I said, Honey, your father loves Cubism.” She laughs to herself. <> “Of course now I know it took Henry his entire life to admit the truth about who he was, too,” Patricia says. “I hope it doesn’t take Lila that long.”
• * The past is like the Gran Cavallo and you can’t fix the Gran Cavallo, right? I mean, sure, who doesn’t fantasize about drawing in the rest of the horse, and maybe the sky around the horse. But what would the painting be worth then? Absolutely nothing. So it is what it is. Imperfect, unfinished, forever. We just have to move on, call it a masterpiece, even if it’s not, and start working on a new goddamned painting.”
• getting old: “Pamela, it is all about moving on. Saying goodbye to whoever you thought you were, whoever you thought you would be.
• “Jim, you don’t need to set the scene,” Lila says.
  “I literally said one sentence,” Jim says.
  “Well, it was a run-on,” Lila says. “Just get to the point.”
  “I would already be at the point, if you hadn’t interrupted.”
• The women don’t know. None of them can begin to understand the psychology of car-fucking, except for Marla.
• “All their needs were met. There was no flirtation, no foreplay, no delicate dance, because through captivity, we eliminated almost all of the natural Darwinian factors in panda mating. What we know now, what we all know now, is that we can’t just put two animals in a room and expect them to have sex. We can’t even expect them to want it. So why do we expect this of ourselves?” <>  The Sex Woman, and her colleagues, spent years teaching the pandas how to remember to want it.
• Phoebe laughs a little. Cubism facts on demand. <> “Well, it was an artistic and intellectual movement in the early twentieth century,” Phoebe says. “They believed if you aren’t seeing something from all sides, you aren’t seeing it fully. Should I seriously go on?”
• ‘It’s thirty shades of red,’ she said, and still I couldn’t see it. Not until she started pointing them out to me. And I fucking loved this about her. She could always see things I couldn’t. Seriously, all I could see was one giant blob of red. But then, a few days later, I saw all these different colors. And it was amazing.” <> “I think that might be the best description of falling in love that I’ve ever heard,” Phoebe says.
• * She loves deep, winding conversations that go up and down, especially in the dead of night when everyone should be sleeping. She has forgotten the way conversations, really good ones, can change her—shape-shift her like a tree. Sometimes leave her bare, sometimes leave her fuller.
• * the same thing that repulsed her when she was young is the same exact thing that draws her near now. There is something incredibly sexy to Phoebe about Gary’s gray hairs, his exhaustion, his genuine confusion about life, and she’s not sure she even understands why. She is drawn to the exhaustion of a lived life, to the man who has loved deeply and then lost suddenly and carries on. A man who has buried his wife and walked away and woke up to peel potatoes for dinner. A man who has lived through enough to appreciate the stones beneath his feet.
• They sit next to an elderly couple with matching fleeces and Phoebe likes how they order the same drink but one with a twist and one extra dirty. They say it like they have become proud of the minor differences left between them.
• she finds she’s not sure how to begin. Not after her conversation last night with Lila. And then her conversation with Gary. Writing a maid of honor speech now feels like writing a lecture on a discipline she doesn’t believe in.
• They’re playing chicken again. But all Phoebe will say is, “It’s not as black and white as you’d think.” <> “So that means she wants me a little,” Jim says, and smiles. “At least I can go down in my seaplane knowing that.”
• “I agree,” she says. “How are we not supposed to talk about the slow decay of our bodies?” <> “It’s truly the most dramatic thing that will ever happen to us,” he says. “It’s basically like being on a sinking ship. Except you’re never allowed to acknowledge that the ship is sinking.”
• * He asks what experience she has caretaking nineteenth-century mansions, and she tells him she has no experience, though researched many for her dissertation. She doesn’t harp on the fact that most of them were fictional estates, often discussed primarily as metaphors for colonialism. <> “In my line of work, I research historical buildings a lot,” she says. “I have a chapter in my dissertation about Victorian domestic interiors.
• “I think the collector’s impulse is both beautiful and repugnant,” she says. <> To collect is to care more than most. But it is also to hoard. To take things out of the world and make them only yours.
• * She wonders if her feelings for Gary could be a new form of love, one she’s never known before: love without expectation. Love that you are just happy enough to feel. Love that you don’t try to own like a painting.
• “What do you mean, in the traditional sense of the word?” <> “Like when people back in the day used to say phenomenal to describe something celestial made visible.” “Like a shooting star was phenomenal, because they believed it to be a sign from God.”
• * Every so often Marla and her husband talk to each other by asking Oliver to do something completely inappropriate, like publicly conjugate a Latin noun, which makes the table supremely uncomfortable, though everybody does a good job of not showing it.
• But Phoebe can’t let herself fully believe this. It seems truer to say that friendship is just hard. It requires radical honesty. A kind of openness that Phoebe felt for the first time in her life that night she arrived at the hotel, so free and unburdened by anything. So ready to leave this world. But now she is no longer free—she is a person at this wedding, and the responsibilities of being a good friend have already started to change her. She can feel herself wanting to hide things from Lila.
• “I hope you’re donating them,” Marla says.
  “Do people donate palate cleansers?” Phoebe asks. “That just seems … cruel.”
  “Oh my God, can someone just tell me what a palate cleanser is?” Juice asks.


• She can see the whole thing, how he will spread her legs, how he will enter her, how good it will feel to touch this total stranger, even before it happens. It makes her feel excited and sick all at once. It feels like the worst part of her that wants him. But it has been so long.
• “Anyway, I just wanted to say I’m sorry for being out of line last night. I’m sorry for a lot of things. Hopefully you’ll accept my apology in the form of … one hundred and fifty-nine spoons. They’re actually pretty tasty. Very … cleansing.” <> After Jim leaves, Juice eats twelve in a row.
• Brides who plan weddings this expensive actually go through with them. People do what’s expected. People get in their grooves and never crawl their way out. They make their decisions about plate patterns, then eat off them for the rest of their lives. She can’t think of one real person she knows who ever called off their wedding the day of.
• She has spent too much time killing him off in her head. Killing herself off in her head. And now they are back, but they are different, because nobody comes back from the dead the same. You emerge always with a little bit of the underworld on you, the lesion, the scar, having seen unspeakable things.
• “Every wedding, even a successful wedding, is a waste,” Phoebe says. “Every wedding is an egregious amount of money that could have, yes, been spent on much more practical things, like say, a house, a down payment, a school in a small, dying mill town. A wedding is always a fleeting spectacle that is one hundred percent going to become packed down into a teeny tiny garbage square that’ll wind up in your father’s landfill someday.”...
  “But it’s also true that this wedding will never be a waste,” Phoebe says. “Because I came here to die. And now look at me.”
  This is when they both start to cry.
  No, Phoebe will never be a mother. Phoebe will never know what it’s like to create life inside of her. But there are other ways to create. Other ways to love. Other reasons to live.
• * “Jim was right,” he says. “I was a totally different man with Wendy. A better person. Because I was in it. But with Lila, I really was just standing there. I let her run the whole relationship. Like she was my camp counselor or something. And I did love her for it. How could you not? I felt such … gratitude, if that makes any sense. Such appreciation. She made things happen. She performed life very well. If it’s her birthday, she throws a party.
• It is so much easier to sit in things and wait for something to save us. For the past two years, Phoebe sat in the bad things the way she used to sit in the snow as a child. An hour would go by and it would be very hard for her to get back up.
• * It’s too easy to turn the bride into everything we want to be or everything we once were and can never be again. Too easy to forget that she is brave, too, her heels clicking as she circles the pool, dreaming up a whole life.