Dana Spiotta - Innocents and Others

“I liked it.”

Meadow shrugged. “I liked it too,” she said. “And it captured the desperate hope of a wedding, how underlined in futility it is.”

“Said the maid of honor to the bride,” Carrie said.

“C’mon. I don’t mean you and Will. You and Will are great.”

Meadow was Carrie’s entire wedding party, and Carrie had requested she wear some kind of blue dress. Meadow wore a long vintage blue sleeveless silk slip-style dress with a black evening jacket that made her look even taller and leaner than usual. Carrie wore a mutton-sleeved size-ten wedding gown that she had starved herself to fit into, and secretly she worried that Meadow’s thin body would make her look fat, but then she willed herself not to think such things.

After the wedding and the dinner and the cake, after the first dance and the thrown garter, things began to wind down and the band played the kitschy pop songs Will had requested for the end of the reception. Will danced flamboyantly with Carrie, then Will danced with Meadow, and Carrie danced with Kyle, who spun her around with mock seriousness. Kyle’s appeal became more apparent to her as the night went on. But the last two songs Carrie danced with Meadow as the boys sat on the sidelines drinking together. At eleven the band — also friends of the groom — had to go to another gig and the allotted five hours at the emporium were done. The wedding was over, and Carrie thought it was both too long and too short for her. After months of planning, it seemed like some difficulty overcome and accomplished, and she was relieved it was over. Which also made it seem like the lamest party ever, stingy rather than carefree. But that is what they could afford, five hours (with her mother and father helping, and Will’s parents, but no one could pay much). They still ended up exceeding their planned budget and spending most of their savings.

Earlier in the evening, at the start of the reception, Meadow had handed Carrie an envelope from Meadow’s father. Meadow’s parents couldn’t attend the wedding, but they sent a check for five thousand dollars to help with Carrie and Will’s costs. Carrie started to cry, but Meadow ordered her to stop or her makeup would run. Carrie sat in her throne next to Will, drinking champagne, and felt very lucky.

After the reception was over, Carrie said goodbye to Meadow and her lovely boy, and she grabbed Will’s hand. They took a cab back to their apartment with all their gifts. Carrie couldn’t wait to get out of her dress, out of her shoes, out of the control-top hose. Barefoot in her silk slip, she went into the kitchen and grabbed the phone. She ordered a pizza for delivery.

“I’m starving,” she said.

“What about all the food at the wedding?” Will said. “All those pierogi and the suckling pig.”

“I couldn’t eat! I was too excited and my dress was too tight,” Carrie said.

“Me too,” Will said. “My dress was too tight.” And he slapped his belly as he undid his belt.

“Will you still love me after I eat too much pizza?”

“Yes.”

“If I become fat?” Carrie asked as she put her arms around him. He put his hands on her hips.

“Of course.”

“If I become enormously fat?”

“Yes, but is that part of the plan?”

Carrie laughed and shrugged. She leaned down and pulled a bottle of rosé champagne from the refrigerator and handed it to Will. He began to peel at the foil capsule and then began tugging hard on the cork. Carrie took it from him and placed a kitchen towel over the top and gently twisted the cork until it came loose with a low pop. She handed him the open bottle and picked up the glasses. “I can’t believe Meadow’s father gave us so much money,” Carrie said.

“He has a lot of money to give,” Will said.

“Of course. But it was so generous of them.”

“Meadow must have a big trust fund—”

“So generous,” Carrie said, and held up her glass.

Will poured the champagne fast and the glasses overflowed a little. Carrie said, “Whoa!” and tried to catch the overflow with her tongue and started laughing. They sat on the floor, looking at the gifts and cards. They ate half a pizza and drank most of the champagne. All at once, Carrie felt completely exhausted. They went to bed the way they usually did, and they didn’t have wedding-night sex. Just before Carrie fell asleep, she worried that one day she would look back at not having wedding-night sex as a bad omen, like that drop of blood on the wedding dress in The Deer Hunter. She thought, briefly, I have to tell Meadow that, about the omen. Then she fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.

After the success of Portrait of Deke , Meadow applied for various grants, “borrowed” money from her father to pay some expenses, and cobbled together enough money to make two new movies, Kent State: Recovered and Play Truman. Around the same time she tried to make a third film, which she abandoned in the early stages.

Kent State: Recovered (1992)

A few years earlier, during Meadow’s first spring in Gloversville, she had read in the paper about the fifteenth anniversary of the Kent State shootings. She had cut the article out and put it on her studio wall. It fascinated her ever since. What a thing, students shot at by the National Guard, students killed and then that photograph of the dead student and the girl on one knee beside him. Young people now didn’t think or talk about it, but Meadow had kept thinking about it. There wasn’t film, though, of the shootings. Unlike other famous acts of violence, this one did not have an amateur with a handheld to give us a grainy glimpse to watch over and over. Still, Meadow had some ideas. Maybe there was a way.

First she had the idea to track down the girl in the photograph — Mary Ann Vecchio. Meadow could easily imagine her as a compelling subject. Here was one moment in her life, a moment of anguish, and then it comes to define her life. She is kneeling in the quad by a dead college student, crying out to the world. She is a runaway, a flower child in pursuit of a college boy she liked, Jeffrey Miller. Her face has anguish, yes, but also, with her arms outstretched, an expression of disbelief, almost a plea. Mary Ann can’t believe this happened, students shot for protesting, right in front of her, in the United States. This was supposed to happen in other countries and on TV. We were supposed to watch and say tsk tsk , should we help these poor people? Instead the whole world watched us. Everyone felt that way, and so the photograph became a pieta for American purity. But the next morning she is just a girl again. She is fourteen, and this will be the thing people note about her for the rest of her life. Not because she was there, but because she was photographed. The photo will win a Pulitzer Prize. Because of the photograph, Jeffrey Miller is the most famous of the four dead students at Kent State. The photo is carried in papers around the world. Governor Claude Kirk of Florida will label the girl a Communist sympathizer. She is pictured on her knees, in her genuine anguish, on t-shirts. Her parents will sue people for a share of the proceeds. She will try to move on, but the photo will affect her life for years to come. Not to her face, but at the edges of her. When she leaves her kid’s PTA meeting, a parent will lean over to another parent and whisper, “You know who she is, don’t you?”

The parent shakes her head.

“She is the girl in the photograph at Kent State. The girl on her knees, the crying girl.”

“Really?”

“Yes. Crazy, huh?” And they will smile in awe: a piece of history right in their lives with them. Maybe eventually Mary Ann will decide not to tell anyone about the photograph. She will keep it a secret from the people in her life. She is not ashamed, but she doesn’t want it to be so important, so defining. She wants room for other ideas about her, other selves. She remembers the day vividly, though. She loved the boy who was killed. You don’t forget seeing someone shot right in front of you, and then die as you kneel over him. They are there, protesting the invasion of Cambodia, doing what they think is right, and then, instead of going off to smoke a joint and make out in his dorm room, Jeffrey is bleeding on the pavement, a facedown deadness all over him. The event — not the photo of the event — did change who she was, did mark her for years to come.