John Gardner - Nickel Mountain

From that day to this she’d been running every minute. When they’d told Aunt Anna it was to be in two weeks, she’d looked instantly at Callie’s belly, her old eyes as sharp as when she threaded a needle, and she’d said, “Well, well, well, well.” Callie’s mother had cried as though the sin were her own. (Sin was the only word for it in Aunt Anna’s house, pictures of Jesus on every wall, sequin and purple velvet signs reading Jesus Saves and I Am the Way.) Then, to Callie’s astonishment, Aunt Anna’s wrinkled-up leathery face broke into a witchly grin.

But all the preparations were over, finally — the rushed-out wedding invitations, the fittings, the telephone calls, the far-into-the-night planning of housing arrangements for relatives and transportation to the church. All the relatives were assembled, mostly from her mother’s side, more Joneses and Thomases and Griffiths than she’d seen in one place in all her life. It was like an Eisteddfodd or a Gymanfa Ganu. Her father said you couldn’t spit without knocking down fourteen Welshmen. (Great-uncle Hugh had liked that. He’d slapped his knee and rolled it over and over on his tongue, getting it wronger every time he said it. Her father would be quoting it for the next fifty years, the way he’d been quoting for the last twenty-five, “Fool Ahpril, Bill Jones! Fly-horse on door-barn! Fool Ahpril!)

And so at last she could be alone. In half an hour Uncle John would drive her to the church, and there would be the last-minute bustle, the anxious fuss, the fear that every minute detail might not go perfectly, according to proper ritual. She thought: We should have gone to a JP and told them afterward.

In the old Welsh wedding gown she felt unnatural — false. It would be different if you were pretty, she thought. She’d been shocked when she’d seen herself in the mirror the first time, trying it on. The gown was scratchy and tighter than she’d expected. It was yellowed by time, yet, in spite of that, mysteriously pure, she thought; serene. But at the lace cuffs her wrists were bony, and her hands were like a man’s. With the veil lifted up her face showed angular and grim: She looked neither innocent nor gentle and wise, merely callow. She had said, “It doesn’t fit.”

“Don’t be silly, Callie,” her mother had said. “We just need to alter it a little, that’s all.”

She’d said frantically, “I mean, it isn’t right for me.”

Aunt Anna said, “Breathe in.”

When they had it pinned up, her mother stepped back to study her, and she smiled, teary, blind to how terrible Callie looked. And now her own tears came gushing. “Mother,” she said, “my feet are too big.”

“One wedding I played at, the girl tripped and broke her wrist,” Aunt Anna said.

“Mother, listen to me,” Callie said. “Look at me once.”

“Hush,” her mother said. “Callie, you look lovely.”

She had clenched her teeth. But she had given in, to the gown as to the rest. Soon it would be over.

It was a beautiful day. She stood as still as the glass of the window, with her hands folded, the veil drawn over her face. Across the road lay golden stubble where Mr. Cook’s wheat had been, a few weeks ago. Off to her right the land dropped sharply, falling away toward Mr. Soames’ diner and the lower valley, at the end of the valley gray-blue mountains rounding up into blue-white sky. It was pleasantly warm, a light breeze moving the leaves of the maples on the lawn. She watched the bakery truck slow down at the mailbox and turn in. A beautiful day for a wedding, she thought. She meant it to be a happy thought, but she couldn’t tell whether she was happy or not. Children were singing, around the corner of the house, out of sight.

Karen is her first name,

First name, first name,

Karen is her first name,

Among the little white daisies.

The song made her remember something. She had whispered to her friend that her boyfriend’s name was David Parks — knowing perfectly well the rules of the game, that all of them would now find out that Callie Wells liked David Parks — but when her friend turned and told the others, and when the whole ring of children began to sing it, their voices gleeful and merciless, she felt sick with shame and believed she would never dare look at him again. The memory brought a sudden, fierce nostalgia, a hunger to be once again and forever the child she could now see with fond detachment, loving and pitying her, laughing at her sorrow as once her mother must have laughed. For some reason the memory triggered another, one that was intimately related with the first, but she couldn’t think how:

Poor Howard’s dead and gone,

Left me here to sing his song. …

Panic filled her chest. It’s a mistake, she thought. I don’t love him. He was ugly.

All around the room — everywhere but in front of the closed doors and the window where Callie stood — the wedding presents were laid out for show on borrowed card tables covered with linen cloths. With the sunlight streaming in (burning in the great, red, antique bowl from Cousin-Aunt Mary, gleaming on all the silver plate, the silver candlesticks, the cut-glass napkin holders, lacework, china salt and pepper shakers, glass and china bowls, mugs, painted vases, popcorn poppers, TV trays, steak knives, wooden salad forks), the presents seemed too beautiful to be real. Like the gown, they had, to Callie’s mind, a serenity and elegance she could not match. They overwhelmed her — the hours that had gone into the crocheted antimacassars from Aunt Mae, the expense of the candlesticks from Uncle Earle, who had bought them, she knew, without an instant’s hesitation or so much as a fleeting thought of the expense: In all her life she would never crochet as Aunt Mae could, not if she worked at it week in, week out, and she’d never be as rich as Uncle Earle, or as calmly, beamingly confident of all she did. Why had they done it all? Over and over that question had come to her; not a question, really, an exclamation of despair, because she knew the answer, no answer at all: They had sent the presents — hardly knowing her, hardly even knowing her parents any more — because it was her wedding. She thought: Because brides are beautiful, and marriage is holy. Again and again she had watched them come down the aisle, transfigured, radiating beauty like Christ on the mountain, lifted out of mere humanness into their perfect eternal instant, the flowers they carried mere feeble decoration, the needless gilding of a lily too beautiful for Nature; and again and again she had seen them later, making their first formal visits as wives, the lines of their faces softened, their eyes grown shrewish or merry. How she had envied them, she the poor virgin, novice, barred from their mystery! She knew well enough what it was, though not in words. She knew it was not the marriage bed, was only feebly symbolized by the bed. They went up the aisle white forms, insubstantial as air, poised in the instant of total freedom like the freedom of angels, between child and adult, between daughter and wife, and they came down transformed to reality, married: in one split second, in a way, grown-up. It was that that the relatives lifted up their offerings to: the common holy ground in all their lives. But that common beauty would not be for her. Her marrying Henry Soames was almost vicious, an act of pure selfishness: she was pregnant, and he — obese and weak, flaccid in his vast, sentimental compassion — he had merely been available.

I’ll run away, she thought, standing motionless, knowing she would not run away. Tears filled her eyes. I’ll run away somewhere — to New York City, yes — and I’ll write to Henry later and explain. It’s the only honest thing to do. She closed her eyes, hurriedly composing.