Rumaan Alam - Rich and Pretty

“A fine number, anyway,” Huck interjects. Ever the diplomat. “A fine number.”

“I told you we want to do something small.” Sarah doesn’t want to argue the point. And she doesn’t want to bring up the obvious: that her parents are going to pay for this wedding, so they’re within their rights to want to have it at their house.

“But seventy, that’s minuscule. In my estimation. Much too small. I’m just saying.” The pitcher comes down on the table with a thud. “Have it with the butter, it’s the salty butter.”

“It’s fine, it’s fine this way,” Sarah says.

“You know, we still have half the bottle of that cabernet from the other night,” Lulu says.

“That was a good one.” Huck nods enthusiastically.

Lulu disappears up the stairs. Her father leans closer to Sarah. She sits at the head of the table, always has, since it was her high chair stationed there, decades ago. “Seventy people?”

“Maybe more. But small, Papa, intimate. It’s embarrassing.”

“What embarrassing? You’re getting married. A community rite. That’s what it is, you know. It’s not for you. It’s for — your people. Your mom and your papa.”

“You eloped,” she says. “You sidestepped this whole minefield.”

He puts his hands up in surrender. “I’m only saying what your mother is too sad to say. She wishes her parents had been there, when we got married. She likes that whole business, the aisle, the flowers, the music.”

Sarah nods. “Well, the flowers. The music. Everyone likes that stuff.” She doesn’t want to disappoint — she never has liked to disappoint.

Book club is every three weeks.A month was too long, by group consensus. You lost momentum. You didn’t want to get together, or you didn’t remember that you were supposed to or the nuances of the relationships in the group. Two weeks isn’t long enough to read a book, or it can’t be guaranteed. Three weeks is just about right. There’s a page limit on the books they’ll read. They’re on Didion now. It’s fine, but it’s irritating, somehow. Part of Sarah suspects people only like to read Joan Didion because she’s thin and glamorous, or was, anyway. The edition she’s reading has a prominent photo of the author on the cover, looking chic.

Sarah’s hosting tonight. It’s good timing. The cleaning lady comes alternate Wednesdays, so it’s only been a day, and the bathroom isn’t covered in errant blond hairs, which proliferate, surprising even her, and the stove gleams. Even the inside of the refrigerator is orderly, clean, everything lined up in order of descending height. The cleaning lady has a touch of the obsessive-compulsive. Sarah leaves the house with a list: wine (there’s always wine at book club), snacks savory and sweet (everyone will bring something, but her conscience won’t allow her to be caught unawares should everyone forget their obligations), flowers (you can’t have people into your house without buying flowers first, it’s like putting on lipstick before a meeting).

She’s read the Didion before: She went to college. Arrived there with dreams of reading books, smoking cigarettes, having sex, staying up into the night feverishly discussing something, anything, with someone, anyone. Lauren had gone into it with much the same expectation. They’d been on the same page about it. They’d chosen the college together.

High school was demanding, of course; they’d read Pale Fire, they knew about Marx, Ned Rorem, Watson and Crick, and the salon at 27 rue de Fleurus. Sarah didn’t need to discover too much, didn’t need scales to fall from her eyes, didn’t need Judy Chicago or Cindy Sherman or Mary McCarthy (well, not her; they didn’t read her at their college) or John Cage to give her a whole new way of thinking. She had that way of thinking. Mostly, Sarah looked forward to more of the same — lots of A’s, the respectful pride of the professors — while she indulged herself in a little badness. A little exploration. A little shedding of inhibition. She could never get up to that, in high school. Her heart wasn’t in it. But she would go to college, and no one would know what she was already like, no one but Lauren. So she’d cut her hair, maybe, or wear peasanty dresses, or learn to sing Joni Mitchell songs in a quavering, quiet soprano, or fuck a girl.

They knew so many girls like that. That’s the thing about clichés. There’s a reason they persist. So many girls — women, they were women, everyone said so, some of them even proclaimed themselves womyn —from so many schools like their own, from their city or other cities or other places, who arrived on a campus still drunk on summer, verdant and sunshiny. Thirty thousand dollars a head got you a lot in terms of landscaping: flowers everywhere, popping through fresh mulch. Huck, conservative hero, wasn’t expecting much in the way of a welcome. He was used to visiting campuses and being met with creatively angry signs, or students disrupting his discourses to stand, turn their backs to him. They never discussed this, but he treated it, as he treated everything, with a mild bemusement, and preferred to spend his time with graduate students.

“You see, the drive is not so long,” Lulu kept saying, then sighing because it was, actually, sort of long, the traffic of matriculating teenagers and their parents like the salmon congesting a stream. Her meaning was clear though: You’ll come home, often . It was forbidden for freshmen to bring cars of their own, but the train was more than serviceable.

This parting was hard on Huck and Lulu. They were a small family, just the three of them, now, and of course, things had gone so horribly wrong with Christopher. Sarah was their second child and their second chance, the opportunity to redeem themselves, to do it right.

Her roommate was a delicate and angry girl named Ariel, who had grown up in Berkeley and was horrified when eventually she figured out who Sarah’s father was. There was a damning assertion about Huck — an assertion, Sarah wasn’t sure, she never investigated — in a documentary that was much talked about at the time, something about U.S. involvement in domestic politics in Latin American countries. Latin America was, for some reason, a pet cause of Ariel’s — all of it, the whole continent. She read Marquez for pleasure and overly enunciated her Spanish words. After two months, Ariel requested to have her room reassigned. The authority overseeing this kind of thing was not pleased — the very idea of having a roommate, in college, was to further your experience of the world, to meet, and engage, and learn to live, in a very literal sense, with people different from you. Ariel was not buying this. Sarah wanted peace, prevailed on Lauren to swap, and for the next four years was wholly ignored by Ariel.

There’s a great florist in the Sixties, so Sarah will end there, so the flowers don’t get bruised and beaten on her other errands. Her to-do list isn’t so long. Maybe she’ll walk, she thinks. It’ll be a nice alternative to going to the gym, which though she has time to do she doesn’t have the will, just isn’t in the mood. You go, you run, you sweat, you listen to music or watch the television, then you shower and it’s hours later and you feel nothing in particular, or not different enough anyway, just a little smug, very hungry. Walking is good exercise.

She’s always enjoyed this kind of time, the dead time in which her body is engaged in a pursuit for which her mind isn’t required. Showering, walking somewhere, driving that familiar path from the garage to the house in Connecticut. In these moments, she makes her mental list, orders and reorders it. The list is, as ever, a hydra. For every matter that’s settled — the house, of course it’s the house — a new concern arises. She wants to tell Lauren about it, strategize on how to cram the cast of thousands her parents are evidently planning on inviting. Lauren knows the place, she’ll have ideas. She should call her, adds that to her list. Not tonight: Tonight is book club. Lauren is not a book club friend; book club is something else: Meredith, who loves it — in fact, she organized it; Iris, a coworker of Meredith’s; Valerie, an old friend of Iris’s but also a friend of Meredith’s; Simone, the wife of one of Dan’s workers, who mentioned to Sarah once, at a party, that she wanted to join a book club. It’s not Lauren’s crowd. Not tomorrow: Sarah’s supposed to go to Carol’s for a working dinner, Chinese takeout and grants and details. Not Friday: work, then in the afternoon, a tasting at a caterer’s; in the evening, dinner with Dan’s coworker Steven and his wife, Amy. Not Saturday: Lulu’s birthday is coming and she’s going to get her a present — what she’s yet to determine — and then meet Dan when he’s off work — he always goes into the office Saturday afternoons, while she shops or reads or whatever. Not Sunday, sacrosanct, reserved for just the two of them, first at home, then dinner with her parents. But soon. And then she can tell Lauren about how they’ll be having the wedding at the house, and how Lulu mentioned that maybe she’d like to sing a song at the reception, and how Lulu has started asking questions about what it’s appropriate for the mother of the bride to wear. Basically everything that’s happened around the wedding, Sarah’s first thought has been to tell Lauren about it.