Built in a Day (Mint First Edition)

Book by Rinehart Steven

1
Isabel and I got married in her backyard, on a cold fall day under a tent that had once had banners sewn on it advertising cheap tequila and now just showed the outlines of the letters "Santa Rosa."

All the guests were from her side; a couple of her physical therapy patients were there, along with her boys, Russ and Alex, Russ's beautiful girlfriend Jule, big old Rosie, and a few others I couldn't really place. We had one very expensive bottle of champagne that we managed to hit every glass with, even mine, although I didn't drink it, I just toasted Russ's bang-up job as best man and carried it around the tent afterward. At that point I had been sober for a year and was still being extra cautious.

"Assembled guests," Russ had said, his teenage voice artificially grave. All of us stood with our glasses and listened. Russ was only fourteen but he had that effect on people.

"It falls upon me to say a few words about the couple before you. First, it's been a long road, a very long road. Many of us thought it was too long . . ." A few of us smiled; others nodded. I looked at Isabel next to me but she was staring at her son.

". . . but they persevered." He stumbled on that a bit and this clearly irritated him. Isabel's hand tightened on mine.

"They hung in there and now they stand before us, husband and wife. Please join me in saluting them."

A cheer rose up from the happy little bunch. One of Izzie's physical therapy patients even said Huzzah. The other, a guy named Carl, made a big show of tilting his plastic champagne glass vertically above his mouth and shaking the last drops off the lip.

"I should have been a scientist or a chemist," Carl said to me later, both of us hovering near the edge of the tent. Izzie was dancing with the younger twin, Alex, next to Russ and Jule. Rosie was loaded and had dragged some stranger out onto the parquet.

"My best class in high school was Advanced Chemistry," he said. "Do you remember oxidation-reduction reactions? I could do those in my sleep."

I'd been bored by advanced-placement chem and had kept myself occupied by cheating on my yields while designing elaborate water pipes. At that point in my life my questionable morals had gotten me passed over for valedictorian and kicked out of the Honor Society and I'd be damned if I was going to weigh out crystals and read thermometers like it meant something. Even now, at thirty-two, it seemed ridiculous.

"Doesn't high school seem like an old, really long movie you once saw?" I said. "Like The French Connection or Barry Lyndon?"

"Did The French Connection have Telly Savalas?" he asked. "Do you remember him, Telly Savalas?"

"Yes, I do. I don't think he was in it but I remember him. Wet lips, right? Sort of bags under his eyes?"

He nodded. "And bald as a cue ball," he said, as I knew he would.

"I don't think so," I said. "Not the way I remember him, anyway."

Carl looked as if he hadn't heard me right. "I'm sure he was bald," he said. "That's what I remember most."

"I bet we're just mixing up two different actors. I'm usually wrong about stuff like this, so let's just go with bald."

But he couldn't leave it alone. He just waded right back in. "You know, he had that Popsicle all the time." He began to look distressed and searched the tent for someone to back him up, but there was no one handy.

"Definitely the guy," I said, "but it was a lollipop, I think, not a Popsicle. Lollipop with the little white stick always wagging back and forth. And an Afro. A big natural with a comb in the side."

He seemed to squeak a little. "I think that was someone on Baretta," he said.

"You're right," I said. "I bet it was. And he always said, 'Who loves ya, baby?' "

Now he was wringing his hands. His ailment had been a kind of psychosomatic paralysis and he'd gotten attached to Isabel at some point in the eight weeks she pumped his legs up and down and made him walk between the parallel bars.

"That's him, but he's bald, I swear," he said. "It's a trademark." Just then Isabel showed up and took my arm.

"What's up?" she said. Her grip on the sharp bone of my elbow was something she must have learned as part of her training.

"Carl and I were reminiscing about high school," I said. "He remembers it a lot better than I do."

"Was Telly Savalas bald?" he asked Isabel, slightly out of breath. "He was, wasn't he?"

"I think so," she said.

"And white, right?"

"Definitely," she said. "Excuse us, Carl, we've got to do a few things." She steered us away and toward the card table holding what was left of the cheap cake.

"Honey," I said. "He was asking for it. You weren't there, he was really being awful."

"Like last time?"

At the engagement party I'd convinced him that vanilla was an element, on the periodic table and everything.

"I'm worried about Russ," I said.

"Baloney," she said. "Don't change the subject."

"Okay, I'm not worried about him but I'm afraid he's growing up too fast." This was true. A lot of things about Russ worried me, and the fact that he might catch up and pass me was somehow not a ridiculous thought. That toast was typical. That kid had his shit together way too much for fourteen.

Isabel took the champagne glass out of my hand and sniffed it.

"Still there," I said. "Still smells just as awful."

"I know we don't say things like this but I'm crazier than ever about you," she said. "It's our wedding so I thought I'd take a chance and get mushy."

"Oh, Izzie," I said. "You can say whatever you want anytime you want. I will too."

"You will?"

"I'll try." I meant it, even though I'd proposed to her in tears, blubbering, practically speechless. Afterward I'd laid my head in her lap and hiccuped, feeling as if I'd been plucked from the surf by a helicopter and deposited in a soggy pile on the beach.

Under the tent Isabel was looking at me the same way she had that day.

"So try now," she said. "Say something."

"Okay," I said. "I'm absolutely nothing without you. I'm less than nothing. My whole life begins today."

"Hmm," she said. "Not really romantic for a wedding." But she had colored a bit, so I was not far off. "Keep going."

I could tell I was scrunching up my face, like a child squeezing out the answer to his mother's possibly entrapping question about his whereabouts or the smoky odor lingering around his clothes.

"When you're not around I think for a second that my life hasn't changed, and that I can go back to the way I was. Then I realize that Holy Shit you aren't around and I panic a little and think, Why isn't she around? Where is she? So I go find you or find something that reminds me of you." I licked my lips, they had gone dry.

All of it was true--what I usually did if I couldn't get to her was look for Alex, twenty minutes the baby of the family, but sometimes it seemed like twenty years. The boys were fraternal twins--Russ stocky and handsome, Alex thin and boyish. I'd find Alex and we'd play Nintendo or backgammon or throw a football around until I got it out of my system.

She didn't say anything for a moment.

"That's maybe all for today," I said. "I'm sorry."

She put the champagne glass down on the cheap card table. She took one of my hands and moved close, and I could feel her start to move her hips, and I instinctively started to move away.

"No, come on," she protested, pulling me back. "You said."

We started to dance, and everyone looked at us. We danced the way we had practiced to the video we had rented, a modified swing. I tried not to count out loud and stare at my knees and actually succeeded for seconds at a time to look like I knew what I was doing.

"All my life I thought I was better than everyone else," I said. "And now I feel like a failure because I can't dance at my own wedding with my own beautiful new wife."

She pulled me a little closer. "You are better than everyone else. You could be President. Why do you think I let you badger me into this marriage?"

Badger. She'd said yes even before I started blubbering.

Then we fell into the groove and we actually danced like regular people, loosening up, working it a little the way the freaks on the tape had, ballroom pros with waxy expressions and colitis, both of them.

But God they were good dancers. They were fabulous, whatever I thought of them personally.
Izzie had been married once before, at eighteen, her boys born that same year. Her husband was an orphan raised by the high school librarian. All he ever wanted was a family so he wooed Isabel all through junior high and high school and he succeeded in knocking her up after a homecoming hayride. When the boys were five he moved them all from Kansas to Iowa City so he could take a job at the Procter & Gamble factory making Pert Plus. She got a job bartending at Rosie's where she could go to work after he got home. That's where she met me. The first time she saw me she stared at me so long I thought I must have known her or done something to her drunk and not remembered. I had been taking a poetry workshop and had been ostentatiously scribbling on notepads and coasters for weeks at one corner of Rosie's fake-Irish bar. I still remember the first thing I said t...