The Four Corners of the Sky_ A Novel - Michael Malone [34]
“Oh my God, oh my God, don’t do that! We didn’t mean that.” Melody tried to kiss Teddy, who growled at her.
After the ceremony, at Hôm Qua, the local Vietnamese restaurant that D. K. had chosen for his wedding gift dinner party, young Wirsh gave a speech about America’s imperial destiny that Sam could only endure by eating an entire steamed sea bass.
Annie overheard Mama Spring Hopper lamenting to Brandy that the whole bridal party was “nothing but a parade at the g.d. Mardi Gras!” with Sam a make-no-mistake-about-it pervert, and who ever heard of a purple satin tuxedo? With Clark, Annie’s uncle, who wasn’t even her uncle but just a man who lived with a Lesbian, never saying two words a bat could hear through a megaphone. With the maid of honor, Georgette Something, looking like Madonna half way through a Kahlúa and chocolates binge—Madonna the rock star not the Virgin Mary—shouting out wedding toasts that would have been worse had they not been incoherent; so drunk she had fallen flat on her face, unable to catch the bride’s bouquet, despite the bride’s having tossed it straight at her.
Plus those two horrible dogs had run off with Mama Spring’s purse and torn it to shreds.
And to top it all off, that big crippled black man with dirty cornrows, wearing black pajamas and sitting in a wheelchair with Move the F Over! on the back of it, that man had told Daddy Alton that Daddy had only himself to blame for even being in a wheelchair, whereas the black man claimed he had gotten his disability by being shot out of a plane for his country. The whole thing had so upset Daddy (admittedly not a veteran, except of thirty years of two packs a day) that he’d ordered three mai tais in a row from a waitress talking Asian gibberish and had made a fool of himself by singing “Strawberry Fields Forever” with that awful Sam playing it on the piano. In Mama Spring’s view, and Brandy could take it to the bank, the bride’s entire wedding party was like one horrible preview of what Liberals would do to America if given a chance. It assuredly wasn’t the kind of wedding party anyone would want to paste in a book of Treasured Memories.
At this point, Annie had heard enough. Thrusting her champagne glass at Georgette (who drank it), she tapped Brad’s mother on the shoulder. “A parade? How about my bridal party,” she said with her icy smile, “is a paradigmatic symbol of progressive democracy?” When that produced a blank stare from Mrs. Hopper, Annie jabbed her with a finger. “I’ll rephrase. Drop the g.d. subject of my wedding right now, you racist bitch.”
Mrs. Hopper wailed, “Daddy Alton!” and sobbed convulsive tears. The tears brought Brad running, followed by Daddy Alton as fast as he could get there, drunk, with his oxygen tanks weighing down his wheelchair.
Brad’s mother cried that Annie’s remark had “devastated” her; she was no racist; she made turkey sandwiches for the homeless and served them herself in her church community room.
Brad asked both bride and mother to apologize, “just to smooth things over this little bump.”
Mother and bride stared at him ominously, their eyes warning: “You think this is a ‘little’ bumpy? Stand back.”
At 1 a.m., Georgette (unaccustomed to heavy drinking) succumbed to alcohol poisoning, throwing up on Mama Spring after spinning both D. K. and Daddy Alton around in circles in their wheelchairs to an MTV number on the television above the bar. She’d been working hard to get a little dancing going—the Vietnamese restaurant was not really made for dancing—an excuse that did not make Brad’s mother feel any better about being vomited on.
In the women’s bathroom, where Annie was trying to wash off her maid of honor’s face and hair, Georgette kept insisting that Brad had put the make on her two summers ago when he’d run into her at the Atlanta airport.
“You wish,” retorted the disbelieving Annie. “Georgette, keep your damn head down.” She bent her friend over the sink.
Georgette threw up again and passed out.
She wasn’t the only one. Daddy Alton, who’d had