Beautiful Day(41)
Pauline Tonelli (stepmother of the bride): I’m wearing blue tonight, nothing flashy, just a St. John suit I got at Bergdorf’s that does a good job of camouflaging my midsection. I let the nail technician at the salon talk me into a color for my fingers called “Merino Cool,” which is a sort of purplish gray. Very au courant, she said. They can barely keep it stocked, she said. I think it looks like the color my nails will turn naturally after I’m dead.
Kevin Carmichael (brother of the bride): Tree branch lifted! I can’t believe Margot was going to let them chop it off.
Nick Carmichael (brother of the bride): I think Finn has gotten hotter since she got married. I’ve seen this happen before. Women get married, they get hotter. Then they have kids, and… (motion with finger indicating downward spiral). Then���some of them—bounce back. These are the ones who have affairs with their personal trainers… or some lucky guy who happens to be in the right place at the right time.
THE NOTEBOOK, PAGE 10
Readings
When Daddy and I were in our late twenties, there was one six-month period when we attended eight weddings, and it nearly bankrupted us. I was a bridesmaid in three, and your father was an usher in two. At nearly every one of these weddings, the readings were Corinthians 13 and a selection from Kahlil Gibran���s The Prophet.
I beg you, avoid these choices. If you use Corinthians 13, you will hear a collective groan.
I am, as you know, a fan of song lyrics. You are the only one of my children who inherited my taste in music. Your sister and brothers listened to the punk stuff—the Dead Kennedys, the Violent Femmes, the Sex Pistols, Iggy and the Stooges, the Ramones—oh, how I wearied of the Ramones! But you were a Rolling Stones fan from a young age, you loved Springsteen, Clapton, and Steppenwolf, especially “Magic Carpet Ride.” Remember Halloween in sixth grade when all your friends dressed up like Courtney Love or the girl in the bumblebee costume from the Blind Melon video, and you went as Janis Joplin? They made fun of you, and you came home from trick-or-treating a little weepy, but I explained that you couldn’t help it. You were my daughter.
This is a long way of saying that song lyrics often make good readings. Try the Beatles. No one has ever gone wrong with the Beatles.
MARGOT
When Margot pulled into the driveway at a quarter to five with her three sand-encrusted children in the backseat, she let out a shriek of awe and amazement. The backyard of their house had been transformed into a wedding wonderland.
“Look!” she said to her kids.
No response. When she turned around, she saw all three kids absorbed in their iDevices. She couldn’t complain, however. It had been a magical afternoon at the beach, the exact kind of afternoon Margot remembered having as a child. Drum Jr. and Carson had boogie-boarded with their cousins like fiends all afternoon; Margot could barely get them out of the water to eat their sandwiches from Henry Jr.’s. Ellie had collected shells in a bucket, and then she sat on the shoreline and constructed an elaborate sandcastle. Margot, who was exhausted, drifted off to sleep under the umbrella. When she awoke, Beanie was sitting with Ellie, helping her mosaic the walls of the castle with shells. Margot watched them, and though she felt a twinge of guilt, she knew that Beanie loved spending time with Ellie because Beanie had only boys, and a little girl was a treat for her. Furthermore, Margot didn’t want to sit in the sand; she had never been the kind of mother who got down on her hands and knees to play with the kids, and if she left the shady confines of the umbrella, there would be the issue of freckles. Margot was vain and lazy; she wasn’t as nurturing as Beanie, perhaps, but she reminded herself that her own mother had never been a castle builder, either. Beth used to sit in her striped canvas chair and needlepoint and dole out pretzel rods and Hawaiian Punch from the thermos.
Margot had enjoyed the beach immensely, even as she spooled the conversation with her father and the conversation with Griff through her mind. She decided that it was a blessing she’d sunk her phone because it freed her from worrying about whether or not there would be any texts from Edge. And she wouldn’t worry herself about what the text from Edge last night had said. She would ask him tonight when she saw him at the yacht club.
It was only as Margot got out of the car and took in the staging for the wedding that she appreciated what a very special day tomorrow would be. She and Jenna had been talking about the backyard wedding for over a year, but that didn’t prepare Margot for the excitement she felt now.
The tree branch had been lifted so that the ropes were barely visible. And under the tree was the large, circular center-pole tent, which was bigger in square footage than the Manhattan apartment where Jenna and Stuart would live. Inside, the tent was decorated with ivy, entwined branches, and white fairy lights. There were hanging baskets of limelight hydrangeas and hanging glass bowls filled with sand and one ivory pillar candle. There were fifteen tables, ten of which were swathed in the antique linen tablecloths, embroidered at the edges with green ivy, that their grandmother had used at her wedding, and five were the replica tablecloths that Margot and Jenna had hired an exceptional Irish seamstress in Brooklyn to make. Margot could barely tell the difference. She and Jenna had set the new tablecloths out in the sun for three weeks to get them to age properly. The Irish seamstress, Mary Siobhan, had also made 150 matching green linen napkins, which were tied with strands of real ivy. The centerpieces were white and limelight hydrangeas and the pink climbing roses, cut from the house, nestled into large glass jars encased in a mesh of woven twigs. The bone-white china was set over dark rattan chargers, and Roger had found 120 Waterford goblets in the Lismore pattern, which was the pattern Beth and Doug had collected, and Stuart and Jenna would now collect. The overall effect was one of simplicity and beauty; the white and the green evoked the house and the yard, and the entwined branches and wooden baskets evoked Alfie. The pink of the climbing roses was the softest of accent colors. All of this had been her mother’s vision, and Margot had doubted it; she had cursed the grasshopper green dress, but now she saw how the green dresses and Jenna’s white dress would all make perfect aesthetic sense once they were under this tent.