The Accidental Tourist - Anne Tyler [108]
“This is Rose’s first time, though,” Macon told her.
“Yes, but even so, people can say, ‘It sure took you long enough.’ I can hear my mother now; that’s what she’d say for certain. ‘Sure took you long enough. I thought you’d never get around to it,’ is what she’d say. If I was ever to marry.”
Macon braked for a traffic light.
“If I was ever to decide to marry,” Muriel said.
He glanced over at her and was struck by how pretty she looked, with the color high in her cheeks and the splashy shawl flung around her shoulders. Her spike-heeled shoes had narrow, shiny ankle straps. He never could figure out why ankle straps were so seductive.
The first person they saw when they arrived was Macon’s mother. For some reason it hadn’t occurred to Macon that Alicia would be invited to her daughter’s wedding, and when she opened the front door it took him a second to place her. She was looking so different, for one thing. She had dyed her hair a dark tomato red. She wore a long white caftan trimmed with vibrant bands of satin, and when she reached up to hug him a whole culvert of metal bangles clattered and slid down her left arm. “Macon, dear!” she said. She smelled of bruised gardenias. “And who may this be?” she asked, peering past him.
“Oh, um, I’d like you to meet Muriel Pritchett. And Alexander, her son.”
“Really?”
A politely inquisitive look remained on her face. Evidently no one had filled her in. (Or else she hadn’t bothered to listen.) “Well, since I seem to be the maître d’,” she said, “I’ll show you out back where the bride and groom are.”
“Rose is not in hiding?”
“No, she says she doesn’t see the logic in missing her own wedding,” Alicia said, leading them toward the rear of the house. “Muriel, have you known Macon long?”
“Oh, kind of.”
“He’s very stuffy,” Alicia said confidingly. “All my children are. They get it from the Leary side.”
“I think he’s nice,” Muriel said.
“Oh, nice, yes. All very well and good,” Alicia said, throwing Macon a look he couldn’t read. She had linked arms with Muriel; she was always so physical. The trim on her caftan nearly matched Muriel’s shawl. Macon had a sudden appalling thought: Maybe in his middle age he was starting to choose his mother’s style of person, as if concluding that Alicia—silly, vain, annoying woman— might have the right answers after all. But no. He put the thought away from him. And Muriel slipped free of Alicia’s arm. “Alexander? Coming?” she asked.
They stepped through the double doors of the sun porch. The backyard was full of pastels—Rose’s old ladies in pale dresses, daffodils set everywhere in buckets, forsythia in full bloom along the alley. Dr. Grauer, Rose’s minister, stepped forward and shook Macon’s hand. “Aha! The best man,” he said, and behind him came Julian in black—not his color. His nose was peeling. It must be boating season again. He put a gold ring in Macon’s palm and said, “Like for you to have this.” For a moment Macon imagined he was really meant to have it. Then he said, “Oh, yes, the ring,” and dropped it in his pocket.
“I can’t believe I’m finally getting a son-in-law,” Alicia told Julian. “All I’ve ever had is daughter-in-laws.”
“Daughters,” Macon said automatically.
“No, daughter-in-laws.”
“Daughters-in-law, Mother.”
“And didn’t manage to keep them long, either,” Alicia said.
When Macon was small, he used to worry that his mother was teaching him the wrong names for things. “They call this corduroy,” she’d said, buttoning his new coat, and he had thought, But do they really? Funny word, in fact, corduroy. Very suspicious. How could he be sure that other people weren’t speaking a whole different language out there? He’d examined his mother distrustfully— her foolish fluff of curls and her flickery, unsteady eyes.
Now here came Porter’s children, the three of them sticking close together; and behind them June, their mother. Wasn’t it unusual to invite your brother’s ex-wife to your wedding? Particularly when she was big as a barn with another