The Fifth Part of Chapter 7: A Turn

Mary pointed out the time to her mother.

“Really? Then I’d better get going! Oh, where’s Hyram?”

“He’s over there,” said Mary, who had noticed Hyram, glass of wine in hand, talking to a shortish black woman and her husband.

“Good,” and she walked over.

“Hyram,”

“Oh, Margaret! I was just talking to Clarissa’s neighbours,”

“I’m Eunice,”

“Mario.”

“It’s nice to meet you, Eunice. Hyram, we have to go soon.”

“This wedding was really nice; too bad about the cake, though.”

“Yeah, I think that was poor planning on James’s part; I have seen much better weddings than this one. Better organised, I mean; who would want to be in an artificially cold room on such a beautiful day?”

“I think it was very lucky for Jim to have booked such a good ballroom,” said Mario.

“Oh, here, let’s exchange phone numbers,” said Eunice, handing Margaret her cell phone. Margaret obliged her, and returned the gesture. Margaret and Hyram promptly left; at this rate, they would be lucky to make it back home after midnight, if they were not lucky, two in the morning.

“I think I could have planned a better wedding,” Said Margaret.

“I think it was decent,” replied her husband, matching her long strides with his own.

“Surely you noticed the wedding cake; whose idea was it to place the thing under bright lights, when they knew full well it was butter cream?”

“It still tasted good,”

“Then there was the inscription; the whole thing looked like a rush job. I think those ugly blobs were supposed to be flowers, but I couldn’t tell.” Given that the icing was a pale brown, it also reminded her of something most unsavoury, and that cost her part of her appetite for dinner, which for a wedding was unmemorable; she had already forgotten what it was.

“The duck was delicious,” said Hyram.

“So that’s what it was,”

“You’re not impressed by duck? Seriously? Perfectly done duck, with tender meat and crisp skin?”

“Now that I know, I’ll be sure to make it some time.” Margaret, however, had no real intention of looking for anything exotic like duck at the local grocery store; she preferred conventional fare such as chicken, pork or beef. The conversation continued in this fashion until they entered the car, Margaret saying that she would drive to Kingston, after which Hyram would take over.

“Fair enough,” he said in reaction to the arrangement. They left the party, just before the dancing was to start.

James, meanwhile, was leading Clarissa on the dance floor; they would have the first dance, and some sentimental, soppy music was playing. This was, perhaps, the best day of his life, and the week preceding the wedding was the best week of his life. Granted, it was also one of the busiest, but it was a happy kind of occupation; the past week, when he was simultaneously working and preparing for the wedding, hiring people to cook the food, ordering the cake, buying the decorations and then putting the decorations up gave him a joyous feeling; it was the sense of accomplishment. He was feeling at peace as he guided her around the dance floor formed from tables pushed aside; others joined in, starting with Clarissa’s brother and sister, and their husband and wife, Alice joining them after she crossed the hall. At the same time, Sean was wandering around the hall, saying hello to everybody, and most people thought he was cute.

“Oh, look at the adorable little boy,” said Patricia to Ryan as he walked by, grinning. She wanted a grandchild like that, and was full of happiness and hope for her son’s future, which was looking brighter every day.

“He has chocolate all over his hands, did you notice? I think he’s been wiping them on his pants, too.” Ryan also noticed a brown streak on one of the tablecloths that looked suspiciously like Sean had used them as a napkin. “What a rascal,”

Sean approached David and Pia, and became excited when he saw that Pia was carrying a baby.

“Do you think we should dance, Davey?”

“Sure. Oh look, there’s that little boy Clarissa’s mother was terrorising,”

“He looks so nice,”

“Hello,” said Sean.

“Hello,” said Pia. Jason woke up in Pia’s arms.

“Who’s dat?”

“This is Jason,”

“Hi,” Sean waved his hands, and Pia saw that they were messy with a brown substance, likely from the pudding they had for dessert; it looked like Sean had abandoned his spoon and treated the pudding as finger food.

Back on the dance floor, more people joined James and Clarissa, and James noticed only Clarissa and her prettiness; it seemed as if he were floating in a cloudy haze, as he directed more of his senses to his wife, and away from his surroundings. Tomorrow would be a very happy day at work, he thought. Indeed, the rest of his life would be happy and cheerful, and stress as a mental condition was banished from his mind for the evening. Life, at this moment, was munificent for him: there was an abundance of food, friends surrounded him, and he had a loving wife. What more could he ask for? He then drifted back into an increased awareness of his surroundings; in front of him was Clarissa, beaming at him; over her left shoulder he could see David with Pia, Ryan with Patricia beside them, and over her right shoulder, he could see Jacob with Alice, Courtney with Kevin, while Maurice was talking to someone he thought he recognised from the meeting where he and Clarissa met. His attention went elsewhere again; he was thinking of the honeymoon and the plans he had made; they were going to Newfoundland, as Clarissa, like him, liked the advertising campaign portraying the province as an idyllic place, with wonderful people and rugged, untamed geography. Most of the details had been dealt with early on: they would be leaving the next Friday, and their car rental was similarly over with; they made a deal to pick it up in St. John’s and drop it off in Halifax; there just remained hotels outside of the capital; they had little structure to their honeymoon off the Avalon peninsula, and James had said that they would simply show up at whatever hotel and look for vacancies.

“You know, I think I should retire in three years,” said Ryan to Patricia

“Sounds good.”

“We’ve both earned the right to relax,”

“Mmhm,”

Ryan looked over his right shoulder at Maurice, and thought he recognised the person Maurice was talking to; it was the sprightly director-general who was Clarissa’s boss, but that was not how Ryan knew him, as they had met in 1985 when Ryan was lecturing in Guelph and the director-general was a student there.

“James,” Clarissa called her husband back into the present.

“Hm?”

“I’m so happy right now,”

“So am I,”

“I love you,”

“I love you too,”

James was sure the music drowned out their voices, but he didn’t care about that now. While dancing, one only had to enjoy the present; worrying about the future, preparing for the inevitable, saving money and things like that were not to be concerned with while one was dancing, and anyways, it would be bad manners to burden one’s mind with cares while with a dance partner. The rest of the night passed in a similar way, and at the end, just after 10:15, James and Clarissa returned home with their five overnight guests, James and Clarissa with Mary and Andrew, while the younger Varrettes accompanied Mario and Eunice on their way home.

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