Come to the Edge_ A Memoir - Christina Haag [62]
Two of the Lawford girls stepped aside, and it was our turn.
“Happy Birthday, Grandma. It’s me, John.” She didn’t speak and kept nodding her head.
“It’s John, Grandma.”
The nurse told him to speak louder.
“There’s someone I want you to meet.”
I knelt down by her wheelchair. She was so frail, so small, it surprised me. And I remember pink all around her. A dress, a blanket maybe. Her hair was done just so, and she wore lipstick. The desire to look pretty had not left her. I took one of her soft blue-veined hands, and she smiled. Her grasp was strong. John held her other hand. He spoke about me, how we had met and the play I was doing, and that he would start law school in the fall. With a gleam in her clouded eyes, she motioned as if she wanted to tell him something. He leaned in. “Why, yes, Grandma,” he said with a wary smile. “You’re right—that’s true.”
As we walked back across the lawn, I asked him what she had said.
“Nothing,” he answered. “I just pretend I understand her. She likes that.”
“Really …”
He thought for a moment. “She said it’s time I settle down and you seem like a lovely girl.” He squeezed my hand hard and kept walking. “I’m glad you came. I’m glad you were here for all this.”
I would see him in a week, after the play opened, but I began missing him right then.
We reached the corner of Scudder and Irving, and as he loaded my bags into the waiting Town Car, I asked if he wouldn’t mind taking my dress and dropping it at the designer’s showroom when he returned to New York in a few days. I wouldn’t be back in the city for weeks. “No problem,” he said. I learned never to do that again. He would leave it on a wire hanger, out of the hanging bag, in the back of his Honda with the window down at LaGuardia short-term parking. The dress wasn’t stolen, but a rainstorm bled the dye of the fragile silk. No dry cleaner would touch it. My boyfriend, I learned that weekend, was the man of the hour in a striped sarong, a toastmaster par excellence, and a dancer who made my knees weak. He was not, however, one to trust with prosaic errands involving couture.
He’d been lukewarm about the dress to begin with, I could tell. He was always complimentary about what I wore, always noticing small details, but this dress, he said, was “fine.” Maybe it was the bone and black pattern or the sheer organza ruffle at the neck, but I suspected it wasn’t sexy enough for him. It was a dress other women liked. At the reception, even his aunt Lee, a frequent fixture on the best-dressed lists, had asked who the designer was. Ever politic, he did say, “Mummy loved your dress. She thought you looked very pretty.” Any praise from his mother I took in tenfold; I wanted to please him, but I wanted to be accepted by her.
As the plane lifted off the runway in Hyannis, I pulled out my script to run lines. I glanced down for a moment, then turned it on its spine. The last two days had been exciting. I was glad I had come, glad I had danced into the small hours, glad I had seen his sister get married. Mostly, I was happy to have been a part of something that meant so much to him.
In time the Rockies may crumble, Gibraltar may tumble, / They’re only made of clay. The lyric from the night before wouldn’t leave my head, and I turned to look out over the arm of the Cape, the territory that was his. I tried to make out the white tent or the flagpole or the many-gabled house, but there was only a puzzle of shoreline. Just then, the plane banked, and the sun bounced off the silver wing and blinded me.
I lowered the shade. I felt lucky. And my dress, I decided, had been right. It had been just right.
Holding
Come quickly—as soon as
these blossoms open,
they fall.
This world exists
as a sheen of dew on flowers.
—IZUMI SHIKIBU