Lily was afraid of women.
In groups of women, she heard the echoes of the sneering ugliness of the girls from school; skinny, never satisfied ticks feeding on Lily’s unstyled hair, her wrong shoes. In the cool politeness of women, their social graces, she saw the smooth evasions, the small and large betrayals of her own mother. And this was why she dreaded meeting Ben’s family. His elegant, beloved mother. All of his brothers’ wives. Ben swore they’d love her. Lily didn’t see how they could.
The first time Lily met her in-laws, Ben’s three brothers sat around their mother’s long dining room table with their wives, holding playing cards, and passing them, dispatching to the left and picking up on the right.
Gina looked up at Lily and winked.
The game quickened, cards slapped and grabbed, until a brother yelled, “Out.”
Everyone hollered. And acted mad, but weren’t really. Then the brothers stood, extended their hands to Lily, slapped Ben on the back.
Ben puffed up proud, but his ears glowed red and he kept his hand around Lily’s waist, his anchor. His mother was still at church, the evening Mass. Lily wished she’d return so that they could get on with it.
She knew about Ben and his brothers. When they were children, the brothers dashed ahead, and Ben watched their heels, he breathed their dust. But now Lily saw the brothers of legend, three Irish triplets so close in age, with their golf shirts tucked in over soft bellies, next to her iron Ben. She thought: No contest.
The women peeled away from the men, beckoned Lily to join them outside. Ben nodded, patted her on the butt, and Lily went, but she didn’t want to. These men had soft hands and upturned collars, but she could talk football, politics, even golf.
Gina stood at a round glass table under the mulberry tree in the back yard, and poured Lily peach iced tea from a dewy pitcher. Then she poured out for everybody else, and they sat around, ice rattling, legs crossed. Gina, Catherine, Teresa. Their long acrylic nails gleamed like the backs of rose metallic beetles, clicking against their glasses, ticking out code. All three brothers’ wives wore light tan pants, sandals with pedicures, ironed pastel blouses. Strawberry, raspberry, lime.
“Ben says you were in the Army,” Gina said.
The others looked at Lily, waited for her to speak. She thought, how I must seem to them.
“Eight years,” Lily said. “Right out of high school.”
“I totally admire that.” Catherine.
“How old are you? Thirty?” Gina asked.
“Twenty-eight.”
The women sighed all at once.
“You are so young,” Gina.
“I can’t imagine going through boot camp.” Teresa.
“It was hard. But you just get through it. You know.” They were staring. She should have filed her nails at least. Ironed her t-shirt.
“Did you have to do guy push ups?” Catherine.
“I’m sure she had to do push ups,” Gina refilled the ladies’ iced tea till everyone had the same level.
“I got really strong in the Army.”
“You still are,” Gina said, reaching out and running a long nailtip along Lily’s bicep. Lily’s skin shivered under the cool, feminine touch. Then, one of Gina’s sons needed her, and she was gone, following him across the lawn.
“We’re so glad Ben found you,” Gina said over her shoulder.
Lily regarded the roses, resplendent in the afternoon sun, worlds away from where a good number of her old friends hunkered down in tanks, patrolled Baghdad streets or delivered supplies down ambush alleys as she sat there in a garden, with ladies, like a toad in a fairy’s tea party discussing her Army time like it was a health club membership.
Catherine leaned in. “When are you two getting married anyway?” she said. Lily looked down at her rough hands.
***
They all had saints’ names, Ben explained. His brothers Matthew, Mark, Paul. Himself, St. Benjamin of Persia. She looked up St. Lily in a book of saints. Surprised to find it. Lily of Quito. Lily of Madrid.
Two months after that first meeting of the Saints Ben did propose. He took her to a fancy fish place for dinner, so jittery that Lily knew, secretly. He kept rubbing his palms together, taking sips of water, and then he knelt beside her chair, on two knees, a penitent man. Other people looked at them, over their plates of oysters and filet of sole. A waiter almost stumbled over him, but Ben did not falter. He had a ring, in a box.
“Yes,” Lily said.
Ben got off his knees. They kissed and held hands across the table. Other diners clapped. Lily smiled at them. How they must look, Lily thought. Young, in love. All of life ahead of them. All of a clean life ahead.
***
A week after the wedding, Lily moved the last of her stuff out of her mother’s house. She took down the last brown cardboard box, soft and fuzzy with age and use. Her mother wanted the closet, an empty cave for her new thin things. The tags hung like strident white flags, flapping wildly every time she held up a blouse or dress by its bony hanger.
“Soon I’ll be able to wear this,” she said, a ribbed black sweater dress wedged under her neck. Lily thought to herself, maybe.
Lily wouldn‘t be around to witness the latest greatest transformation of her mother Eva Richman Wiley. Miss Eva Richman had survived single motherhood and the degradation of an acute love affair (and the recovery thereof) with vodka, marijuana, pills. Eva Richman had in recent years taken up with the Church of the Open Bible, and one of its more handsome congregants, Steve Wiley.
Steve Wiley stayed on the porch while she moved her stuff out. He wore black leather chaps, a busy moustache, and a winged haircut so outdated she couldn’t imagine where he went to get it done. When he first started going out with her mother, he rode up to the house for their dates on a Harley with a loud baritone engine that shook the walls before he cut it off and ascended the porch stairs in his hard heeled boots. Eva would smile at the advent of that rumbling machine, and barely wait till he knocked before opening the door. Steve Wiley looked at Eva with such admiration and reverence that Eva blossomed and shook, unfurled. She lost thirty-five pounds, and became ever more devout in her new born-again religion.
They were married in less than a year, a month before Lily’s own wedding. Lily wanted to be happy for her mother, she did. But she couldn’t handle the laying on of hands and falling down in the spirit that took place at Open Bible, and Eva was hard to be happy for anyway if you were her daughter. She sucked up all the air and everything else in the room like a miniature but very potent tornado.
“I might have tried to diet down into this one for your wedding if I could have gone,” she said.
“A black dress to your daughter’s wedding. Classy.”
“Don’t you be mad at me.”
Lily wasn’t mad. Mad wasn’t the word.
Eva couldn’t go to Lily and Ben’s wedding because although they got married at the Unitarian church, Ben remained Catholic, and Eva would not condone her daughter marrying a man not saved by the Lord Jesus Christ. She didn’t want to have to answer to her God in the Hereafter as to why she supported Lily’s non-Christian wedding. Even just by going.
Eva’s wedding to Steve Wiley was a simple affair at the Open Bible church with a few witnesses, presided over by the Most Reverend Burt Fellows. Lily stood beside her mother in a high-necked pink sateen number, holding a mixed bouquet from Safeway. Her mother gazed into Steve’s eyes, and mooned over him as though in front of movie cameras. The Reverend Burt Fellows’ wife Dagna had the only actual camera, a disposable black and white the woman clicked and cranked all during the ceremony. “Black and white is so elegant,” Dagna said afterward, handing Lily the camera. “So professional.”
Lily did like Eva better Christian than she did a practicing drug and alcohol addict, but the injustice of her mother not coming to her own wedding was just somehow the last straw. After everything, that was it.
Not that Eva noticed.
She stood in Lily’s empty closet, the space she needed for her new for the holiday season and its ensuing revival meetings, Bible study sessions, and alcohol free cocktail parties.
“I’m a new woman,” Eva said. “Praise the Lord.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And I am so grateful that He hath seen fit to send me a man to complement me and to share fellowship.”
Lily hefted a stack of boxes out. Her mother felt like a new woman, but every minute Lily herself spent in that house made her feel very, very old.
Outside, Ben took the boxes, and loaded them into the back of his work truck. He’d emptied out the tools and lumber to have room for the last of her things. Then he stood on the sidewalk, hands in his pockets while Lily hugged her mother, their bodies making a stiff A.
“I will pray for you both every day,” Eva said. “I will pray that you come to know Jesus as your personal Lord and savior.”
“See you,” Steve called out from the porch.
Eva made a show of wiping a few tears away from her eyes. Lily put on her sunglasses and resisted the urge to look back. “And fade to black,” she said. Ben chuckled, held her hand while he drove.
***
Ben and Lily agreed to lie to Ben’s mother about why Eva did not come to the wedding. Eva had cancer, they agreed to say, and couldn’t travel the fifty miles nor sit for a wedding ceremony and reception.
“The thing about my mother,” Ben said, “She likes you to lie to her.”
“Can the brothers and the wives know about my mom?” Although, she didn’t know how she’d explain it to them either, that her mother lacked manners, good sense. Any sense.
“Sure. Everyone has secrets. You know, Michael and Gina lived together for a year before they married. Mom never knew.”
“How could she not know?”
“Michael never had her over, and Gina never answered the phone.”
Having a tacky mother wasn’t that bad, compared to living in sin for a year. But where did Ben’s mother think he went for those five years when he never came home? Ben drove with his strong, square hands on the steering wheel, strictly at ten and two. His solid, muscular arms were covered with tattoos, but clean, and long healed of needle sores and picked scabs.
She’d met him after his five years of hard drinking and harder drugs, in the beginning of his first year of recovery. She’d met him at the warehouse store, where she got a new job out of the Army as manager of the hardware and tools department, and he, for a while, unpacked and shelved inventory. He got a better job on a solid construction crew, and though he quit the warehouse store, he didn’t quit Lily.
They stopped for lunch at the halfway point at a family style restaurant that Ben liked. Lily sat across from him in the booth and he put on his reading glasses to see the menu and he was so sweet she started to cry a little bit.
“What are you looking at me for?” he asked.
“You’re pretty.”
“Aw shucks.”
Lily watched him order, watched him eat.
“Want some?” he asked. Lily shook her head. She never ate before visiting Ben’s mother and his family. Her nervous stomach would not allow it.
***
Lily straightened her own spine to match the broomstick back of her mother-in-law. The elder Mrs. Rourke’s hair swept back from a face of hard planes and hollows.
Lily took a sip of hot, bitter tea that made her teeth feel like chalk. Mrs. Rourke had raised her eyebrows at Lily’s refusal of sugar and milk. How was Lily supposed to know what to do with tea? An impossible drink, really just boiled water, too hot until it became too cold. A miserly thing, without the friendliness of even the most mediocre cup of coffee.
“So,” said Ben’s mother. “You’re still a manager at a warehouse?”
“Yeah. Yes,” Lily said. She smiled in a way she hoped was right.
“Are there any other girls who are managers there?”
“There are three of us on the morning shift.”
“Well, no reason why not, I suppose.”
Lily looked around the living room for some sort of clue, something else to talk about, to take them away from herself. Ben worked in the garage, taking apart a busted lawn mower. She wished she could be the one fixing the mower. She knew how. Resentment swelled in her belly like a rogue tide.
“What are you looking for?” Mrs.Rourke asked.
Lily snapped back to attention. The old lady knitted her brow, her forehead creased in deep vertical lines. Lily bet herself she could stick a dime in one of the creases and it would stick. She tried not to stare, tried to focus past Ben’s mother through the white lace curtains behind her.
“What I don’t understand is why a young woman would choose to join the Army,” Mrs. Rourke said.
“I did it to give back.”
“Give back what, Dear?”
“You know. To my country.”
“Women don’t belong in the Army.” She set her cup down on a translucent saucer.
Lily tried to imagine the kind of girl Mrs. Rourke would have for Ben. A Catholic girl, from a good family, who would never have believed a person like Eva Richman Wiley could exist, let alone have her for a mother. Someone pale and quiet, someone who could make Ben go to church.
Lily felt her own inadequacy heavy as oil. Her skin was too tight, her blouse wet and tight under the arms.
“Now what are you looking at?” Mrs. Rourke craned her long neck around to look around—through the lace and to the street outside.
“Just wondering where the others are.”
“My children are so often late. No one cares about being on time any more.”
“Ben is always on time.” Hope glimmered, sharp and bright, even as she hated the sound of her own reaching.
“Gina especially thinks she can come an hour late and it doesn’t matter. Michael was never like that as a youngster. He was the one I could count on.”
Mrs. Rourke turned to the window, her face bathed in the soft early evening. Her cheekbones stuck out at angles, pulling at her thin skin. Lily thought they could be a cause for alarm, the depths of the plum colored caverns under her mother-in-law’s eyes.
“I know so little about you,” Mrs. Rourke sighed.
“How well do you know any of us? You didn’t meet any of us until we started going out with your sons.”
“I knew Catherine’s mother through church. And as a matter of fact, Teresa went to high school with Paul. I knew her family from when they were in grammar school.”
Lily felt the full wattage of the woman’ piercing blue eyes upon her.
“Your father has passed away, you say?” Mrs. Rourke leaned in, tired and steely at the same time.
“Yes.” This had a chance at least of not being completely untrue. Lily didn’t want to have to make up anything new. There would be too many lies to uphold. She might sink into the quicksand of this conversation, with nothing to grasp among the gleaming dust free surfaces of the coffee table, sideboard, shiny pewter framed wedding pictures of the brothers and their brides.
“You weren’t brought up with any religion?” Mrs. Rourke asked. “That must have been horrible.”
“I still had morals. I never lived with a man before I got married.” Lily felt herself harden on the inside, felt the downward slope, picking up speed.
“Well I should hope not.”
“Gina did. She lived with Michael before they were married.” Lily’s words were like a bee’s stinger, doing the damage and then pulling out all her entrails. She gasped for air.
Mrs. Rourke stopped short as though she’d been struck. The lace curtains, still in the close, airless room, framed the old woman sitting before them, in the straightbacked chair, with its hard arms, its curling legs. Lily squared off, faced her straight on. Looked into her eyes. Recognized something. Wondered how she could have missed it. How any of them could.
“You’re sick,” Lily said.
“I knew about Gina and Michael. For Heaven’s sake.”
“Does anyone know that you’re sick?”
“I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Outside, car doors slammed. The broad front lawn filled with children, somersaulting, spinning, tackling one another on the grass.
“What can I do?” Lily said, and she sounded more like herself, not such a wheedling, hopeless monster.
With what looked like great effort, Mrs. Rourke pulled herself up to stand.
“You can keep it a secret,” she sighed. “Just for a while.”
Lily nodded, and in spilled three of the children, then Michael, then Gina, holding a long casserole dish in front of her.
“I made pesto lasagne for you, Lily,” Gina said, lifting up the foil covered dish as if an offering, a sacrifice. “This is your first dinner at Mom’s house as a Mrs. Rourke.” Lily and Ben’s mother stood like statues, turned half towards each other. Gina came over and kissed the old woman’s cheek, then went into the kitchen. Michael carried a brown paper grocery bag, bulky with bottles of wine, loaves of French bread, macaroni and cheese for the kids. He leaned in to kiss his mother as well, and followed Gina into the kitchen. Then came the others, and their children tracking grass and mud through the room without noticing. Lily retracted, fell back, ignored Gina calling from the kitchen, and slipped into the garage, where Ben knelt over the flipped lawn mower, working a screwdriver in short, quick twists.
“I fixed it,” he said, a flop of hair over his eyes. “It runs now. Is anybody here yet?”
“They’re all here,” she said.
He stood up, brushed off his hands, kissed her. Lily leaned into him, her giant, and rested the side of her face against his chest, listened to his big heart beating.
“All the saints,” she said, and took his hand, led him inside to join the others.
***
Maureen O'Leary Wanket
Maureen is a writer and teacher living in Sacramento, California. Her fiction appears in Issue 11 of Esopus, and upcoming issues of Fiction at Work and Blood and Thunder: Musings on the Art of Medicine. She is an alum of Squaw Valley Community of Writers, and one of her stories placed as a finalist in Glimmertrain’s first Family Matters short story contest.
