Things I Want My Daughters to Know_ A Novel - Elizabeth Noble [159]
“They’re men, though.”
“Basically big hairy kids allowed to purchase and consume alcohol.”
“Drink your champagne and stop worrying.”
Lisa wasn’t worrying. They’d be back. Andy would be back. And in about ninety minutes she’d be walking toward him in the weirdly slow, stilted gait the church and organist apparently required, on Mark’s arm, dressed in the prettiest, palest dress she’d ever owned, ready to say the most serious, permanent things she’d ever said out loud.
“Do my legs look orange to you?” Hannah was staring at herself in the full-length mirror on the back of the door, suddenly worrying that the fake tan treatment she’d given herself two days ago hadn’t quite worked out.
“Dunno. They just look long and thin to me,” muttered Jennifer.
“Don’t know why you bother with that fake stuff, Hannah. Never looks real.”
“It’s all right for you, Mand. You’re always bloody brown.” The insinuation, and the subject of Amanda’s parentage, hung in the air for a nanosecond before they all ignored it. Not a subject for today. Today was too happy.
Lisa turned around and looked at Hannah. “You don’t look orange at all. Don’t listen to them. You look fabulously sunkissed.” She did, in fact, have a distinctly Tango hue, and her ankles and knees really didn’t bear close examination, but that was clearly an unhelpful observation this late in the day. And it was a long dress she’d be wearing…so long as the color didn’t run in the heat….
THEY WERE ALL—BELIEVERS AND DEVOUT ATHEISTS—GRATEFUL for the cool, still interior of the church. Outside, it was already in the high 80s by the time the enthusiastic organist began pounding on his keys, and guests were mopping their brows as they came in and sat down. Men ran their fingers inside their collars, and women wondered whether their makeup was streaking on their sugared-almond-colored dresses. The strapless dress had been a good choice: Lisa congratulated herself as she stood and waited for her cue. The dress was long and lean, ivory silk, with an overlay of fine, old lace. Not so weddingy that she felt ridiculous, nor so unweddingy that you could wear it again to parties. She’d eschewed a veil, chortling that veils were for virgins, until Jennifer and Hannah, ignoring her protestations, pushed the comb of a short one into her French pleat in the changing room of the bridal salon and made her cry sudden, unexpected tears. “I look like…a bride!” she had exclaimed, amazed. So there was a veil—filmy and long, and trimmed with crystals and seed pearls. Even Hannah had given her sartorial seal of approval. Jennifer had checked for the somethings old, new, borrowed, and blue. (Mum’s drop pearl earrings, which they knew to be a present from her parents on her first wedding day, almost forty years ago. These were a resolutely unemotional choice, since none of them could remember ever seeing their mother wearing them, her taste veering latterly toward the far more showy; the dress, which had been the first one she tried on in the shop; the Christian Louboutin—one concession to designer fashion—sale shoes beneath, borrowed from Jennifer, who had bought them half a size too small, for £150, in the red mist of one shopping jag, because they were so very beautiful, and, presumably, because she believed it possible that her feet might one day shrink to the point where the shoes fit; and the ubiquitous baby blue polyester lace garter, purchased by Jennifer and Hannah in a pink-cheeked and giggling foray into Anne Summers one afternoon.) Amanda had been less anarchic and more sentimental than one might have expected. Seemed she was changing her views on quite a lot of things lately….
SHE COULD SEE HER SISTERS NOW, AT THE FRONT OF THE CHURCH. Thank God the new vicar was progressive and had agreed to marry divorcés. A register office wouldn’t have felt the same, and a blessing would have felt hypocritical to her. She wanted to be here, for the whole thing. Not because of God, of course. The last time they had all been in here, she had sat with them, and none