Part 10 (1/2)

Chapter 25

The only wedding I've ever been to was Sid and Nancy's, when I was five. They got married at City Hall, and the ceremony was brief, anticlimactic, and itchy--Nancy made me wear this horrible pink frilly dress that caused a rash to break out on my chest and back. I didn't know what to expect for Wallace and Delia's wedding, but I knew they were planning a double-dose party: a joint wedding and New Year's Eve celebration packed into one long, festive night. I a.s.sumed the night would suck--any event that requires that much planning, money, and drama is destined to be a letdown--but I was still eager to see how it turned out. Bonus.- Since Sid and Nancy were out of town, I could stay out as late as I wanted because Alexei had agreed to stay in the guest room next to Josh's room for the night, in exchange for my code of silence regarding certain s.e.xual indiscretions he'd admitted occurred between himself and his former boss, Lord Empress Kari. Well, he also agreed because in addition to being a quasi-Horrible, he's basically a good guy. I've decided to look past the Kari thing anyway, because Alexei claims his older woman thing is not about age so much as that he's attracted to really smart women, who, according to Alexei, just tend to be older. Whatever, College Boy. I've ever been to was Sid and Nancy's, when I was five. They got married at City Hall, and the ceremony was brief, anticlimactic, and itchy--Nancy made me wear this horrible pink frilly dress that caused a rash to break out on my chest and back. I didn't know what to expect for Wallace and Delia's wedding, but I knew they were planning a double-dose party: a joint wedding and New Year's Eve celebration packed into one long, festive night. I a.s.sumed the night would suck--any event that requires that much planning, money, and drama is destined to be a letdown--but I was still eager to see how it turned out. Bonus.- Since Sid and Nancy were out of town, I could stay out as late as I wanted because Alexei had agreed to stay in the guest room next to Josh's room for the night, in exchange for my code of silence regarding certain s.e.xual indiscretions he'd admitted occurred between himself and his former boss, Lord Empress Kari. Well, he also agreed because in addition to being a quasi-Horrible, he's basically a good guy. I've decided to look past the Kari thing anyway, because Alexei claims his older woman thing is not about age so much as that he's attracted to really smart women, who, according to Alexei, just tend to be older. Whatever, College Boy.

I did the unthinkable and raided Mrs. Vogue's closet for the occasion. Normally I wouldn't be caught dead 178.

wearing any pieces from her fas.h.i.+on mag wardrobe, but the wedding was a black tie/evening gown occasion, and Mrs. Vogue did have a small selection of pa.s.sable dresses to go along with her puke princess ball gowns. Nancy had told me not to wear black or white to a wedding, so as not to appear somber or to compete with the bride's dress, so I chose a slinky gold lame, spaghetti strap number that dipped low at the b.r.e.a.s.t.s and was cut high on the legs-- especially high on me, because my legs and torso are longer than Nancy's, so the dress fell only a few inches below my b.u.t.t. I tried adding a pair of Mrs. Vogue's Blahnik Choo or whatever-they-are shoes, but I kept wobbling on the spiked heels. How does Nancy walk in those f.u.c.kers and make it look so effortless? I traded the couture shoes for a pair of flat gold-sequined slippers with red patch flowers that I bought at the dollar store next to Helen's family's restaurant on Clement Street. I twisted my long black hair at the back of my head and placed two red chopsticks from the same dollar store in my hair to hold the twist, applied the dark Goth Chanel Vamp lipstick to my mouth, and I was ready to go.

”No,” Alexei stated when I came downstairs, where he was waiting to give me a lift to the hotel on n.o.b Hill because I promised paranoid Nancy I would not drive on New Year's Eve, which she considers to be like Halloween for drunk drivers. ”Go back upstairs and change. You're not wearing that.” Alexei would not look like a Horrible in a tux, I suspected, admiring his buff bod decked out in sweats for his big New Year's Eve boys' night watching movies and playing video games with Josh. I so need to find for him an older woman who is not Lord Empress Kari.

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I shoved Alexei's rock-hard chest. ”Shut up,” I said, walking out the front door toward the car. Alexei remained standing at the doorway, as if he expected that I would, in fact, return to my mother's room to choose another outfit.

Standing outside, goose pimples forming on my bare arms from the night fog and chilly Bay breeze, I said, ”Seriously, Alexei, drive me or don't, but I am freaking freezing out here, and if you don't get out here now and put the heater on in that car, I am calling a cab.”

Alexei, defeated, grabbed his keys from the hallway table, but then walked to the coat closet, rifled through it and pulled something out. When he came outside, he placed a long black pashmina wrap around my shoulders. ”Modesty,” he said as he opened the car door for me. ”Learn about it.”

In my eagerness to go to this wedding, I arrived way too early at the hotel, so I milled around alone for a while. I read a trashy celebrity tabloid in the gift shop, but that felt like bad karma so I left. Then I walked around the lobby fountain until I decided to kill the remaining time by taking a stroll around the little park across the street from the hotel. From the street at the top of n.o.b Hill, I could see the Bay Bridge and the Transamerica Pyramid, but what I particularly noticed was a familiar figure standing under a palm tree in the park, smoking a cigarette.

Wallace must have been nervous, because he is not a cigarette smoker. But how beautiful did he look in his tuxedo, his long brown hair falling in waves from his head, the front strands tucked behind his ears, and his big beautiful eyes staring off into s.p.a.ce. If I were an artist I would have mummified him on the spot, to perfect him for eternity. Wallace whistled when he saw me. ”Whoa! You sure 180.

weren't named Cyd Charisse for nothing!” He smiled, but the hand he held out to me, offering me a smoke, was shaking a little, and not from the cold Bay wind.

”You doin' okay?” I asked him, feeling a blush hot on my cheeks. I shook my head to the cigarette offer.

Wallace said, ”I'm good. It's all good. Last-minute jitters, you know. How you you doin'? Just think: A couple years from now, this scene could be you and my brother taking the plunge.” doin'? Just think: A couple years from now, this scene could be you and my brother taking the plunge.”

I've never thought of myself as being the marrying kind, but Wallace's comment made me realize that (a) Wallace thinks of Shrimp and me as a couple, not ”just friends,” and (b) I am getting to be old enough where marriage wouldn't necessarily have to be this vague idea; it's something I could actually do if I wanted.

”Hardly,” I said. ”Marriage is stupid.” Marriage to me is something that lonely people or pregnant people do. It's a nice enough inst.i.tution, I suppose, for the right type of person, but not one with which I plan to bother. True loves don't need an official wedding license to validate their lives together.

”You're not helping,” Wallace said with a laugh.

d.a.m.n me and my foot-in-mouth disease. ”I didn't mean, like, stupid waste-of-time stupid. I meant I'm too young to think about it for myself.” That was a lame recovery, but the best I could come up with in the moment. ”Delia is a great girl, and I know you two will be very happy.”

Wallace let out a little snort. ”Happy, yeah. If we can ever get Iris and Billy out of our house. I tell ya, when the parents move back home... The slackers have no respect for the time and money it takes to maintain a household.

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Parents today--what are ya gonna do?” Wallace stubbed out his cigarette on the ground. ”Guess I'd better head back in; it's getting to be show time. See you in a while?”

Wallace leaned over toward my face, like he was going to kiss my cheek good-bye, but instead his lips grazed mine for an electric second. The kiss was romantic but at the same time innocent, as if he was saying adios adios to his single life and I to my crush on him. The fact that Wallace is a perfect ten-point-ohhhhh on the babe scale forgave the fact of his cigarette breath. After he'd pulled back I took a tissue from my purse to rub the slight Chanel Vamp lipstick stain off his mouth. Then I gave him a playful slap on the cheek. He winked at me before taking off back to the hotel across the street. to his single life and I to my crush on him. The fact that Wallace is a perfect ten-point-ohhhhh on the babe scale forgave the fact of his cigarette breath. After he'd pulled back I took a tissue from my purse to rub the slight Chanel Vamp lipstick stain off his mouth. Then I gave him a playful slap on the cheek. He winked at me before taking off back to the hotel across the street.

I found Shrimp lounging around the hotel lobby fountain when I went back inside, giving directions to the ballroom to an arriving guest. If I thought Shrimp looked best in a wet suit, that's because I'd never seen him wearing a tux. ”That's some dress,” he mumbled when he saw me. It's a good thing I didn't wear Nancy's shoes, otherwise I truly would have towered over him instead of just standing above him by several inches.

”I thought you were planning to wear a powder blue tux with a blue carnation,” I said. I flecked a piece of dust from his black jacket, but really I just wanted to cop a feel of him in his tux. I straightened the daisy in his lapel.

Shrimp said, ”Delia didn't go for that idea. Go figure. She thought a best man should wear the same style tux as the groom. Women! No imagination, I tell ya.” He smiled. He looked and sounded just like his brother: nervous but happy.

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I took his arm and we walked to the ballroom, where he left me to join the wedding party, and I took a seat. I've never been a girl who dreams about her wedding day from the time she's able to play Barbie Bride Dress-up Set, Ash's favorite activity, but I was awed at the beauty of the room: ivory and crimson roses everywhere, gold candles glowing, a string quartet playing in the corner, and from the top-floor ballroom a stunning nighttime view of the San Francisco skyline outside the windows, with bright stars made visible in the sky by the cold night wind.

Like Sid and Nancy's wedding, Wallace and Delia's ceremony was brief and anticlimactic, so at first the whole deal seemed like a lot of trouble for such a quick interlude. Delia, who had gone the puke-princess-dress route but did look stunning in her strapless ivory satin gown with beading around the bodice and a train extending a few feet, must have gone to hours of trouble to transform herself into a bride. Her red frizz of hair was straightened and pulled into an elegant updo, and I can't imagine how long she sat in the makeup chair to smooth out all her freckles and get that cover-girl look. I could never sit still that long to be beautified for a ceremony that lasted all of twenty minutes. You couldn't deny the genuine emotion of the ceremony, though. Delia's dad burst into tears when he lifted the wedding veil over her head to give her away, which started a chain reaction of parental tears: Delia's mom started weeping, then Iris and Billy, then Delia's stepmother and her stepfather, and when I looked over at the groomsmen, even Shrimp was wiping a tear from his cheek! In the middle of the ceremony Shrimp stepped to the podium to read a love poem. He looked at me in the audience while he was reading, which 183.

made my eye sockets go all wet, and when it came time for Wallace and Delia to say their vows they were both in tears. Waterproof mascara: great invention. I'm not saying all the universal bawling means Wallace and Dee's marriage is destined to last and will be the happiest one ever, but even my cold nonmatrimonial heart warmed from the true love you could feel rising between Wallace and Delia and dispersing through the ballroom like pixie dust.

But true love blahbitty blah blah, let's talk PARTY. A swing band played until midnight, and I mostly stayed at my a.s.signed table, watching people dance. Not knowing many of the two-hundred-something guests, and being skeeved out by all the guys finding Mrs. Vogue's dress to be more stare-worthy on her daughter than I appreciated, I was more than happy to fade into the background for the first hour or so of the reception. Plus, I was dodging my ”pal” Shrimp, who seemed caught up in official best man duties anyway, as I was determined we would not get locked into a cliche clock-strikes-midnight New Year's Eve kiss. 12:08 or 1:42, negotiable. The view from my seat offered plenty of entertainment. Delia is a professional dancer, as were most of her friends, so the dance floor could have been a USO party back in WWII from how great these people knew the old moves.

When I returned to my seat from a bathroom interlude, the lady sitting next to me said, ”You just missed it, but Shrimp gave a lovely toast to Wallace and Delia. You're Cyd Charisse, right?”

I nodded. ”Who are you?” I asked her. She introduced herself as Priscilla, Delia's half-sister from Alaska. Priscilla seemed as desperate for a friend in this room full of 184.

strangers as I. She looked like she was in her late thirties and she had curly carrot-colored hair like Delia's. Priscilla told me she'd hadn't decided to come to the wedding until almost the last minute; she was much older than Delia and hadn't been raised in the same house as her sister, and she liked Delia a lot although she didn't know her sister very well and hadn't seen her in a few years, but she was hesitant to come because the only family she knew at the wedding was their dad, and otherwise all the family members came from Dee's mother's side. Priscilla ended up coming to the wedding when her husband back in Anchorage told her that she needed a break from her kids, and he gave her the trip to San Francisco with some girlfriends as a Christmas present. As she spoke I could see that Priscilla thought she'd be getting some peace and quiet with her short adventure away from home, but I suspected on this New Year's Eve she would take rambunctious kids running wild all over her house to not be orphaned in this wedding ballroom. I will probably feel the same as Priscilla if my half-sister lisBETH ever gets married--that is, if I even get invited to lisBETH's wedding. You never know with lisBETH when she's going to go all embarra.s.sed about ”Daddy's little indiscretion.”

The bubbly I'd been consuming throughout dinner caught up with me after midnight, when the swing band was replaced by a deejay. ”C'mon, fellow wallflower,” I told Priscilla. I grabbed her hand to lead her to the dance floor as the deejay got the floor pumping with ”Dancing Queen” by Abba. I literally had to drag Priscilla from her chair--she really didn't want to go--but once she was on the floor there was no stopping her. There was no stopping CC either, 185.

because apparently the deejay had the same five-dollah CD from the remainder bin at Amoeba Records that practically wore out my audio player: Soul Train--The Dance Years: 1977. Soul Train--The Dance Years: 1977. By the end of ”Got to Give It Up” by Marvin Gaye, Priscilla and I had both tossed our shoes under the table, and we burned up the dance floor for a good half hour, laughing and b.u.mping and grinding, celebrating. Priscilla taught me how to dance the Hustle during ”Fm Your Boogie Man” by K.C. & The Suns.h.i.+ne Band (best song ever) and I showed her it was possible to dance the Macarena to ”Don't Leave Me This Way” by Thelma Houston. Priscilla and Delia's semibald carrot-topped father joined us for ”Boogie Nights” by Heatwave and showed us his old disco moves from when he was young, but when it came time for the slow disco era song ”If I Can't Have You” from the By the end of ”Got to Give It Up” by Marvin Gaye, Priscilla and I had both tossed our shoes under the table, and we burned up the dance floor for a good half hour, laughing and b.u.mping and grinding, celebrating. Priscilla taught me how to dance the Hustle during ”Fm Your Boogie Man” by K.C. & The Suns.h.i.+ne Band (best song ever) and I showed her it was possible to dance the Macarena to ”Don't Leave Me This Way” by Thelma Houston. Priscilla and Delia's semibald carrot-topped father joined us for ”Boogie Nights” by Heatwave and showed us his old disco moves from when he was young, but when it came time for the slow disco era song ”If I Can't Have You” from the Sat.u.r.day Night Fever Sat.u.r.day Night Fever soundtrack, he took Priscilla out for a twirl, just the two of them. soundtrack, he took Priscilla out for a twirl, just the two of them.

Nancy claims I am a punk girl but she is wrong about that. A punk girl cares as much about the politics of the music as she does the sound of it. She knows what's going on in the world, she's fierce, a music sn.o.b, and completely dedicated to a punk ideology, f.u.c.k all the rest of y'all. I wish wish I could be that girl. Helen is that girl. No, my dirtiest little secret is that I like almost all music, from punk to opera to serious soul, but if you insist on slapping a label on me, you should know that in my heart I am a straight-up disco queen, a good-time girl. I could be that girl. Helen is that girl. No, my dirtiest little secret is that I like almost all music, from punk to opera to serious soul, but if you insist on slapping a label on me, you should know that in my heart I am a straight-up disco queen, a good-time girl.

After Priscilla's dance with her dad, she returned to our table for cake and more champagne and we watched Wallace and Delia dazzle the crowd with their Sat.u.r.day Night Fever Sat.u.r.day Night Fever dance moves. Wallace had pa.s.sed on the Arthur dance moves. Wallace had pa.s.sed on the Arthur 186.

Murray ballroom dance lessons in preparation for his wedding and had opted for a disco dancing cla.s.s at the Ocean Beach senior center, and may I just say, the guy was a regular John Travolta. He and Delia looked amazing on the dance floor, a king and queen in all their glory.

About half past one in the morning, the crowd was thinning out and the music beat simmering down. Priscilla and I shared a last dance to ”Strawberry Letter 23,” joined by Shrimp, whose official best man duties were finished. His tux jacket was long gone, the tie hanging loose around his neck, and his white s.h.i.+rt unb.u.t.toned halfway down his bare chest. He was sweaty from dancing as well--never looked hotter. We three danced the b.u.mp, Priscilla's specialty, before Priscilla decided to call it a night and return to her hotel room. She hugged me extra hard and whispered in my ear that I'd made an evening she'd been anxious about into a fun one after all. As she left I saw her share a brief conversation and hugs with Wallace and Delia.

”Well,” Shrimp said. The dis...o...b..ll hanging over his head flecked his exposed chest with bursts of light. ”Did you save the last dance for me?”

The hotel staff was busy folding away chairs as I took the sweaty hand Shrimp extended to me. The deejay was closing up shop too, and his last song was a slow ballad. ”Thanks for looking after Priscilla,” Shrimp said. ”Delia wanted to spend more time with her, but then Dee got caught up in all that bride business. Delia told me every time she was worried about Priscilla hardly knowing anyone here, she'd see her dancing with you and knew she didn't have to worry about Priscilla after all.”

You know how a single song can change everything?

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That's how the romantic Aaliyah ballad the deejay was playing affected me. I danced with my head on Shrimp's shoulder, my brain still pondering the pulsating disco anthem by Thelma Houston where she expressed how she was full of love and desire and she couldn't stay alive without her man's love, but my heart tuned to the slow, bittersweet Aaliyah song the deejay had spinning. That song got me thinking about that beautiful angel girl, who died at such a young age, without getting to live what appeared to be a great life ahead of her.