Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In An Alphabet Endgame

“It sounds like a football play,” Roger Barr grumbles, “with my little girl in the middle of a scrimmage. If I do not trip on that foolish train I deserve a Most Valuable Player award.”

“Gosh, Dad,” my Miss Temple says, “everything goes out over the mic. Remember, we are being taped.”

“It is my ribs that will be taped if you do not wrangle that five feet of train well. All that filmy white stuff kinda looks like you stepped on a roll of toilet tissue That Time Forgot.”

“Dad!” But she is laughing. “Play nice. This is your only time at bat.”

Oddly, those are sobering words to me. If I were inclined to think I was on anybody’s mind right now, this is my only and last time “at bat” too. It was one thing to act as Ring Bearer for Mr. Matt’s sadly mistreated Mama after she found true love in midlife, but now I am doing it for my own fate-chosen roommate.

Ah, the times we have had together, when I ripped the face off an assailant and she cradled me and praised my sharp claws and velvety little ears. The times when my place of pride on her zebra-stripped coverlet with the red piping so reminiscent of my best dueling scars was shifted aside for an interloper of her species.

Luckily, there were not many such of those occasions. At least she is choosier than Ma Barker before her recent involuntary celestial conversion.

And now my Miss Temple has committed the terminal human sin against my kind. She has chosen a dude of her kind over me, forever and ever, amen.

Hmmph. Forget zebra-striped anything. I get custody of the faux goat hair area rug and the TV remote.

Watch me and weep.

25

Here Comes the Bride

Temple stood at the back of the church, her right arm hooked onto her father’s left one clad in a his new tuxedo jacket.

He winked at her.

Behind her, her mother, Karen, and Matt’s mother, Mira, fluttered in tandem at the fringes of Temple’s ankle-length hem, then her fluid filmy train, then the “fingertip” length Illusion lace veil that arched like a thunderhead cloud from the crown of her head, giving her— hallelujah!— that so deeply desired attribute , height.

As did the diamond dazzle of the Midnight Louie Stuart Weitzman Austrian crystal-studded pumps on her feet.

Aunt Kit, Matron of Honor, flitted in front of her, fingernails fluffing the mounded red-gold curls atop her head, teased into giving her height . She last fluffed the longer side curls framing Temple’s face and shoulders.

Kit sighed. “You are so perfectly Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, my dear. If she’d been a redhead. Or worn a wedding dress.”

The real Audrey Hepburn had worn such a gown in her real life, Balmain in the fifties. High neck, long tight sleeves. She’d starved as a child in Europe during World War Two, this elfin actress. She probably hated her bony frame, even as it became ultra fashionable and thrived when the post-War fashion world went to emaciated models, like Audrey and Twiggy and Kate Moss.

Temple, always the cultural cataloguer, was happy to celebrate and share Audrey’s forever girlish style. Little women, the title of an iconic girl’s book by Louisa May Alcott for almost two centuries, could grow up to do very big good things. Audrey and her charity work for UNICEF, being one example.

The organist began an introduction.

Temple checked the three wrist buttons of her elbow-length white satin ruffle-topped gloves. She would have to undo them during the ceremony so Matt could slip the wedding rings, diamond guards and the engagement ring, on her finger and she put his gold band on in turn.

She liked that the process involved legerdemain. Some silly hidden tradition. She was beginning to appreciate church ritual.

“Oh, if only I could get married again,” her Matron of Honor whispered.

“That was just months ago, Kit.”

“I’d waited almost a lifetime for Aldo.”

Temple took a deep breath. A bride knows when she has embarked on the right lifetime. She knows when she has found the exact ritual gown for the journey.

Aunt Kit knew too.

The gown was a halter-style, cut away at the shoulders, but demurely filled in over the chest. The stunner was a high elegant neck ruffle to the chin, too frilly to be Victorian and framing Temple’s face and hair. The fabric lines gathered tight at the breastbone in front and under the bare shoulder blades in back, and then flared with the grace of a Greek statue to the ankle-length in front like a ballerina’s skirt. The back pooled into a loose liquid cataract of embroidered and crystal-studded silk ending in a long, airy white train.

The style was girlish, yet subtle and elegant. Not pretentious, but pure of line. It was perfect for a short woman, it was perfect for a sincere woman. It was perfect for her.

“If I’d had a daughter,” Kit whispered. “I could not be more proud. Thank you for sharing your wedding moments with me. My sister Karen behind you is so choked up with Minnesota stoicism she can’t say this herself, but I’m sure she’s as blown away as your bridegroom will be.”

Wow. Temple looked down the long crimson carpet and along all the pew-ends draped in flowers, candelabra, and white silk falls of petals, and the backs of familiar heads to the small, all-masculine group waiting at the end of her march. Father Hernandez in shining satin vestments, the men in silver-gray white tie and tails, the edge of a zebra-print carrier visible behind Eduardo’s shiny black-patent formal slipper, stationed at the first pew on the right.

Matt’s blond head blazed like a candle flame in the dark-of-evening nave of the stained glass-crowned church.

A Fontana brother, princely in mien…but Temple was suddenly too throbbing with stage fight to identify him specifically, darn it…offered her mother his arm.

Practical Karen was a vision in a jade-green silk suit topped, for the first and probably last time in her life, by a totally frivolous veiled hat that tilted over her crown of silver-and-red curls, marched down the aisle for real.

Beside Temple, her father sighed to observe Karen’s dainty erect figure. Temple glanced over to see his own wedding replaying with pride in his eyes.

Kit pranced solo down the aisle, sizzling as always in an orange organza ballerina-length gown that thumbed its nose at her well-maintained red hair. No envisioned lilac for her, but Totally Kit.

Little blonde Crescent in yellow organdy frills and black patent leather Mary Jane shoes went last, scattering white rose petals on the red aisle runner.

And then the full-throated church organ played the song Temple had first heard Matt playing on the little Hammond organ in Electra’s wedding chapel, “Love Minus Zero, No Limit”. And she heard a mother and daughter in the choir loft singing counterpoint, entwining the lyrics from the organ melody in a way that spelled Harmony with a capital H.

She scanned so many familiar backs and heads in the pews—Electra had brought her soft-sculpture Elvis from her Lovers’ Knot wedding chapel, she noticed. All of them blended through her loving gaze into a soft-focus blur. What terrific friends and relations she and Matt had, Temple thought.

She smiled at her father, slightly sweating brow and all, and stepped forward into the rest, and the best, of her life.

26

The Wedding Party Party

Well, somebody here must keep his eyes undimmed, his ears unstoppered and his powers of observation unsullied.