How to Plan a Wedding - Short Story

Literary Review, Summer, 2000 by Robin Braudwell

By the time Bob Dylan got around to singing the chorus of "Like Rolling Stone," I had already tasted my date's tongue.

We were sitting in the front seat of Harry Giles's Chevrolet Impala, which was parked in the middle of an open field about five miles down Crawley Road. Behind me and Harry, stretched out on the Impala's spacious back seat, Harry's friend Glen Dyer was kissing my sister Bonnie.

I leaned back onto the seat's nubby fabric and picked up the liner notes to Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits, which I had found on the floorboard of the date's car. I had recently decided that Bob Dylan was really something. What I liked most was the lonesome sound of his voice, which reminded me of peanut butter stuck to the roof of my mouth.

"What are you doing?" Harry Giles asked me. "Reading the Bible?"

Outside, the crickets were singing their own mysterious songs.

"I woke up this morning and realized I was dreaming about you," Bonnie said in a quiet murmur voice.

She was talking to Glen Dyer, who was her fiance. They were getting married in two days and always carried on with this sort of nonsensical baby talk.

Then I heard Bonnie say: "And in the dream you were selling Eskimo pies."

"Bonnie," Harry said, his eyes studying the top button of my blouse, "your sister's up here reading the fucking Bible."

"What? Oh, don't mind her. Mary Alice reads anything. But we should get going," Bonnie told him. "Little sis here has a midnight curfew these days, you know, and I need some beauty sleep before the wedding."

Harry muttered something and started the car with a mean jerk of the keys.

On the way home, I thought of many things:

How his tongue moved in my mouth with the frantic movement of a dying fish.

How he was probably the kind of man who borrowed his sister's hair spray to tame his cowlick.

How all of his kisses had tasted strangely like stale bread.

Bonnie and I had double-dated a lot that summer.

I'd graduated from high school in June, and Bonnie announced her intentions of broadening my experience before I headed off to Duke University in the fall.

"Little sis," she would say, using her Buddha-on-the-mountaintop voice, "they eat sweet girls like you for breakfast up there."

Bonnie liked to say things like that. She was a theater major at Western Kentucky University. Her life was one big whirling disco ball of activity that pulled everyone else into its orbit; she loved anything that smacked of the dramatic.

I, however, was not dramatic. I was the pale brown shopping bag next to Bonnie's flaming chartreuse snakeskin purse. We had always been kind of complementary sisters: the homecoming queen and the valedictorian. What's more, I wasn't really sure that I cared; I had accepted my fate and identity as Bonnie's Little Sister. Now all I wanted to do was go to college and become a lawyer because I knew how things were and how they should be. I wanted to change the world; Bonnie just wanted me to change my hairstyle.

But there were other motives for the double dates as well. Glen Dyer was Bonnie's constant companion that summer. They had been going out for over a year and were getting married at the end of August, right before I left for school. My parents, however, were strictly traditionalists, and the fact that Glen Dyer and Bonnie were engaged only made them more suspicious about what was going on between the two of them, so I was employed as a chaperone for the couple.

"I don't care what you do up there in Bowling Green," my mother would say, referring to Bonnie's dorm at Western Kentucky, "but while you live in this house, you certainly will not play bad piano on my nerves by running around all hours of the night with that boy."

That boy was my mother's not-so-affectionate term for Glen Dyer. Neither of my parents was thrilled about the impending marriage. Glen Dyer and Bonnie had been the golden couple for two years of high school, young and popular and beautiful, but they broke up right before graduation. Instead of going on to college, Glen Dyer worked as a groundskeeper at a country club in Brentwood. While my sister was busy pledging her sorority and skipping early morning classes, Glen Dyer had gained something of a reputation around town as wild and troubled. They had been dating pretty seriously ever since meeting up again at Mina Long's pool party last summer, but my parents still had little patience with this scrubby gardener who would come to call on their oldest child in a beat-up red Ford truck. Being religious people, they secretly prayed for some small miracle that would intercede in the couple's eternal bliss: maybe a disfiguring industrial accident for Glen Dyer, or perhaps a modeling contract in New York for Bonnie.

However, we had made it through June, July, and half of August without any hint of divine intervention. The wedding was set for that Saturday afternoon, and the caterers, florist, organist, and photographer were all busily preparing for the happy day. Everything seemed to be running curiously on schedule.

Bonnie had her dress; for the past few weeks, she had been in the habit of trying it on every afternoon and staring at herself for hours in the mirror of her dressing table, her mouth moving slowly in strange and silent speeches. Sometimes I would stand invisible in the doorway watching this, surrounded in the hall by boxes of stuff I was taking to Duke, and I understood then that the sad, tired look in my family's eyes when we talked of the wedding had nothing to do with the endless hours of preparation, but with this image of Bonnie dressed in stiff white lace, her lips smiling as they formed incomprehensible words.