Wedding Bell Blues Read online

  Wedding Bell Blues

  Julia Watts

  Wedding Bell Blues

  The things a woman will do for love… and Lily had love, lots of it. But her partner Charlotte is dead.

  Their daughter Mimi keeps her sane—until Charlotte's family claims they have all the rights to Mimi,

  who is their blood kin, and no “real” relation to Lily. With what’s left of her world balanced on a

  razor’s edge, any choice to find safer ground seems reasonable.

  Even getting married. Married to her Bugle Boy-wearing, trust fund-spending gay neighbor, Ben.

  Married and relocated to rural Georgia where Ben’s powerful family will make sure Lily gets custody

  of Mimi.

  Just one little trick involved: convincing Ben’s parents their marriage is the real thing. It doesn't seem

  like keeping up appearances will be that hard. But the charade gets more difficult when a beautiful

  country veterinarian offers Lily a taste of what she’s pretending she no longer craves…

  CHAPTER 1

  “Widowhood may cause some major changes in my life, but it sure as hell won’t affect my wardrobe,” Lily muttered as she surveyed the dozens of black dresses in her closet. Of course, even though all of her dresses were black, most of them wouldn’t be appropriate for the memorial service—or the funeral, as Charlotte’s parents insisted on calling it.

  The black minidress printed with images of Jackie O’s face was definitely out, although Lily couldn’t help but think that Charlotte—wherever she was—would get a kick out of seeing Lily show up at her memorial service in a dress paying tribute to that most famous of professional widows. Lily would have to wear something with long enough sleeves to cover her tattoos —the woman’s symbol in Celtic knotwork she’d gotten on her right bicep to celebrate her lesbianism and the matching band in knotwork she’d gotten just below it, to mark her commitment to Charlotte.

  After Lily and Charlotte had been together three years, they were surprised to find themselves yearning for a symbol of the permanence of their relationship. The media flooded consumers with images of heterosexual commitment: diamond engagement rings, virginal white wedding gowns, and honeymoon suites reserved for church-and-state-approved hetero hanky-panky. But for same-sex couples, symbols of commitment were hard to find.

  They had toyed briefly with the ring—and-commitment—ceremony route but gave up the notion when they tried to picture themselves in a jewelry store, crooning over diamonds like a former frat boy and his bleached-blonde bride-to-be. Besides, the only pieces of jewelry Lily wore regularly were the silver rings in her ears, nose, and navel, and Charlotte was a professed socialist who eschewed status symbols.

  Neither of them was the diamond-ring type.

  And so they had settled on the armbands. The tattooing had been their commitment ceremony. Charlotte had held Lily’s left hand while the lesbian tattoo artist inked her right arm, and Lily did the same for Charlotte when her turn came. After their artwork was complete, they had kissed.

  That night, Lily and Charlotte had enjoyed a night of passionate but awkward lovemaking, as they wallowed in connubial bliss while trying to avoid each other’s bandaged biceps.

  The past two weeks, the image of Charlotte’s armband had haunted Lily. When the highway patrolman told her that Charlotte’s car had been run off a rain-slick road in southern Georgia, Lily’s mind flashed to Charlotte’s tattoo. Charlotte had left the house the morning of the accident wearing a black T-shirt with the sleeves cut off so she could show off her ink and shock her uptight academic colleagues.

  Later, when Charlotte’s body was being cremated, Lily thought again of the tattoo, of the symbol of their love, burning away to ashes.

  Maybe all couples should get tattoos as a sign of commitment, Lily thought as she yanked on the pantyhose she resented wearing. A wedding ring could be put in a drawer and forgotten after one’s partner passed on, but a tattoo was a constant reminder to remember. No matter what happened, Lily would always be marked by Charlotte’s love.

  Lily regarded herself in the full-length mirror: her plain black vintage dress with its tattoo-concealing sleeves, her black stockings, and the black Mary Janes with chunky high heels, which were the closest thing to a respectable-looking pair of shoes she owned. She had pulled her white-girl dreadlocks into a messy bun so her hair didn’t look too wild, and she had replaced the silver hoop in her nose with a tiny silver stud. She had considered removing her body jewelry altogether, but she couldn’t bear to. Her multiple piercings were the only thing that prevented her from looking like someone’s grandmother from the Old Country.

  Lily walked to the room at the end of the hall, where Mimi was still asleep in her crib. Lily hated to wake her up to take her to this damned thing. Charlotte’s real funeral had been last week — a small, private service in which Charlotte’s friends had gathered to remember Charlotte the way she really was.

  They had told stories and read poems by Adrienne Rich and Audre Lorde to the accompaniment of a softly strumming guitarist, and Lily had cried until she marveled that there was any fluid left in her body.

  But today’s service had nothing to do with Charlotte. Had she been alive, it would have been the kind of thing you couldn’t have dragged her to. Today’s service was about Charlotte’s parents and how they wanted to remember her — which, of course, was in complete contrast to her. Now that Charlotte was dead, her parents could shape her into what they had always wanted her to be: a dutiful, passive, Christian daughter. Of course, the only reason they could make this transformation was that Charlotte was no longer around to defend herself.

  But Lily was still around — a fact, she was sure, that troubled Charlotte’s parents no end. And for as long as she was around, she would defend Charlotte’s real memory. Charlotte’s parents might not like it, but they would have to put up with Lily’s troublemaking for one reason: Mimi, the bearer of Charlotte’s genetic material, who was snoring sweetly in her crib.

  The story of Mimi’s conception, like the conception stories of all children of lesbian parents, was a long one. Lily and Charlotte had often discussed the fact that if straight couples had to go to the same trouble as lesbians to get pregnant, there would be fewer cases of abused and neglected children because there would be no instances of “oops, a pregnancy.” Every child would be wanted because the parents would have gone to a whole hell of a lot of trouble in order to conceive.

  Even though Mimi’s conception was the result of many frustrating months and so many intimate encounters with a turkey baster that Thanksgiving would never be the same again, the method by which Mimi’s biological parents were chosen had been as simple as a game at a children’s party.

  Lily and Charlotte’s best friends were Desmond and Ben, who lived in the condo adjoining theirs.

  Ex-lovers whose personalities were as different as RuPaul’s and Bruce Bawer’s, Desmond and Ben had continued to share the same living quarters even after they had stopped sharing a bed. It was as if they had decided that now that they were no longer lovers, they would be brothers instead — with a special emphasis on sibling rivalry.

  On the evening Lily and Charlotte had naively thought their baby’s conception would take place, Lily had made a pan of her famous eggplant parmesan while Charlotte had gone out to buy the biggest jug of decent wine she could find. That night, after Lily, Desmond, Ben, and Charlotte had eaten dinner and swilled down enough wine to giggle away any awkwardness, Lily had set two black hats on the coffee table, one labeled sperm and one labeled egg. The slip of paper drawn from the sperm hat would determine the sperm donor; the egg hat would reveal the biological mom’s identity. Since Lily and Charlotte’s cycles were in s
ync, they figured they were equally likely to conceive.

  “Who gets to pick?” Charlotte asked.

  “Well, one of the boys should get to pick from the sperm hat,” Lily said.

  “You do it, Ben. I’m too nervous. I feel like I’m a game-show contestant or something,” Desmond said, his amethyst pinkie ring glittering as he poured himself another glass of wine.

  “Oh, for god’s sake—” Ben closed his eyes, picked a slip of paper out of the hat, unfolded it, and glanced at it. “It’s you, Dez.”

  Dez leaped out of his chair and began dancing around the room, singing, “I get to be the patriarch!

  I get to be the patriarch!” The sight was made all the more comical by the fact that Dez’s large body was clothed in a purple flowered caftan at the time.

  “Are you girls sure you want him to be the father?” Ben asked. “I mean, what if the kid turns out to be a boy? Do you really want a son prancing around with Dez’s genetic material?”

  “Oh, I want you to listen to her,” Dez said. “Just because she’s got a closetful of Tommy Hilfiger, she thinks she’s the butch one.” He turned to Lily and Charlotte. “Any objections to the kid calling me Big Daddy? It’s what Ben used to call me...once upon a time.”

  Ben looked down to hide his red cheeks. “Shut up, Dez. It’s the girls’ turn to draw.”

  Lily held out the egg hat, and Charlotte shut her eyes, selected a slip of paper, and glanced at it.

  “Omigod! It’s me!” she whooped.

  Ben laughed. “The queen and the diesel dyke! What kinda morphodite are you two figuring on making?”

  Lily smiled. “Fortunately, a normal child was never what we were shooting for.”

  “Well, I, for one, am completely comfortable with the idea,” Dez said. “This child will be yet another fine collaborative effort between Dr. Charlotte Maycomb and Dr. Desmond Reed.”

  Colleagues at Atlanta State University, Charlotte and Dez had collaborated on a number of academic papers and one book, The Lust That Dared Not Speak Its Name: A History of Nineteenth-Century British Homosexual Scandals.

  After another round of wine, Lily, Charlotte, and Dez retreated upstairs while Ben flipped on the TV to catch the financial report on CNN. Once they were upstairs, Lily presented Dez with a glass jar.

  “Oh, so now that you’ve wined me and dined me, you want me to put out, is that it?” he said.

  “I guess that’s about the size of it. Uh...maybe you’d like to use the spare bedroom. Charlotte and I will be in our room whenever you’re, uh, ready.”

  “Give me that issue of Premiere with Mark Wahlberg on it, and I won’t be a minute.”

  Four minutes later, Dez knocked on Lily and Charlotte’s bedroom door. “Here it is, ladies — my cuppa, cuppa burnin’ love.”

  Lily gingerly accepted the jar, and Desmond bowed out of the room, with the comment that he was confident they had things under control from there. Lily did her business with the turkey baster, and then Charlotte stood on her head because she had read somewhere that it aided conception.

  But the evening of eggplant parmesan was not to be the night of conception. Only unlucky teenagers get pregnant after just one ejaculation. Soon Charlotte, Lily, and Dez had done the jar-and-baster routine so many times that they lost all their self-consciousness. It became a running joke. One afternoon Lily had rung Dez and Ben’s doorbell and greeted them with, “Excuse me, but could I trouble you for a cup of sperm?”

  On their last attempt, Dez delivered his jar to their door and said, “This better do the trick. The hair I’m growing on my palms is starting to cause some painful friction.”

  It did the trick. And nine months later, little Artemesia Gentileschi Maycomb (Mimi for short) was born. Lily, Dez, and Ben were all present in the birthing room, although Ben had to excuse himself to throw up when he saw the placenta.

  Charlotte and Dez had lived long enough to see Mimi’s first birthday. And if it hadn’t been for Dez’s morbid fear of airplanes, they might be alive still. But he refused to fly, so if he and Charlotte were going to attend a conference, no matter how far away it, they always rented a car. So instead of flying into Miami for the gay/lesbian studies conference, they drove, and the rainy roads of southern Georgia robbed Mimi of her Mommy and Dezzy, Lily of her lover and her friend.

  Lily gently shook her daughter’s shoulder. “Wake up, sweetie. Time to go see your grandma and grandpa.” Who are batshit crazy, she thought, but obviously she wasn’t going to say this to a one-year old.

  “Mama?” Mimi’s blue eyes, the image of her mother’s, were droopy with sleep. “Mick.”

  “I’ll get you some milk, Mimi-saurus.” She supposed it was lucky that Mimi had been weaned from breast milk just before her first birthday, since the only kind of milk Lily could provide for her came in a can.

  She carried Mimi downstairs and heated up some formula. After Mimi had sucked it down, Lily changed her diaper and brushed through her unruly baby hair — more out of habit than because it did any good.

  Lily sighed and wished for a drink, a joint, an excuse. But there was no time for the first two, and her mind was too clouded by grief to think up an excuse. She grabbed her car keys and Mimi’s diaper bag.

  It was time to go to church.

  CHAPTER 2

  Lily felt empty and unsettled as she drove out of downtown Atlanta and into Cobb County. She imagined it was much the same feeling native New Yorkers got when they crossed the line into New Jersey: the feeling of being among “them” instead of “us.”

  Downtown Atlanta had character, history, and the tolerant do-what-you-want quality of the city.

  Hole-in-the-wall Thai restaurants sat next door to gay leather bars. You could see the church once pastored by Martin Luther King, the Margaret Mitchell House, or (if your tastes ran to the morbid the street corner where Ms. Mitchell was fatally hit by a taxi. The junk-food establishments even had character and history: the Varsity, where comedian Nipsy Russell had once worked as a carhop, and the Majestic, the seedy all-night diner where Jack Kerouac used to kill time.

  Driving through Cobb though, it was rare to see buildings that had been erected prior to 1975.

  Restaurants consisted mainly of the usual suspects: McDonald’s, Chuck E. Cheese, Steak n’ Shake. The stores were links in multinational chains and were housed in sterile strip malls. If someone blindfolded me and dropped me in the middle of Cobb County, Lily thought, there would be no way I could figure out where the hell I was. The area had no distinguishing characteristics.

  Calvary Baptist Church, the church where Charlotte’s family were having their little denial-fest of a memorial service, was the biggest, ugliest Protestant church on a street lined with big, ugly Protestant churches. Calvary was especially aesthetically offensive because of its puke-yellow brick and cream-colored, plantation-style columns. The plantation image was appropriate for the church, though, since the only black person ever seen on the premises was the janitor.

  “Damn,” Lily muttered when she saw that according to the church clock, she was five minutes late. According to her battered Timex, she was two minutes early, but apparently her watch didn’t run on Cobb County time. She scooped Mimi up out of her car seat. “Okay, kid, you’ve never been to one of these before, and hopefully you’ll never have to go to one again. It’s called a church service.”

  Once inside, Lily followed the sound of the maudlin organ music and slipped into a back pew in the sanctuary. An old lady in a wig that was slightly askew pounded on the pipe organ — one of those droning songs from the Baptist Hymnal. Was it “Rock of Ages” or “Blessed Assurance”? Lily could never keep those oldies-but-oldies straight, and her memory wasn’t aided by the fact that the goal of most WASP church musicians seemed to be to make all the songs sound as much alike as possible.

  The stark white sanctuary was huge, but fewer than twenty people sat in the pews: Charlotte’s parents, recognizable because of Ida Maycomb’s helmet of rigidly coiffed
brown hair and Charles Maycomb’s shiny bald pate; Charlotte’s brother Mike, there with his wife and two kids; and a few of Charlotte’s aunts and uncles. Lily figured that the other people in attendance were the types who waited around for the church doors to be unlocked so they could dart in and warm a pew. If this had been a real memorial service, instead of Ida and Charles Maycomb’s half-assed attempt to mark the passing of the daughter they never approved of, the turnout would have been pathetic.

  After the pipe organ breathed its last, a puffy man whose gray hair matched his gray three-piece suit took his place behind the podium. “We gather here today,” he said, his voice dripping with mock solemnity, “to mourn the passing of the daughter of two of our congregation’s most beloved members, Ida and Charles Maycomb.”

  Lily saw where this was going. Charlotte wasn’t even going to get top billing at her own memorial service.

  “As Scripture has shown us,” the reverend continued, “there are few experiences more painful than the death of a child. When God tests Job, he takes his children from him. And just as Job wept for his lost children, today we join Ida and Charles Maycomb in weeping for their lost child, Charlotte Maycomb.”

  Lily shifted Mimi’s weight on her lap. Lost child? Charlotte had been thirty-eight years old.

  “And as always, Charlotte’s passing gives us the opportunity to ask ourselves: Are we really living our lives in a way that would make Jesus proud?” The rev was curiously puffy — not fat, exactly, but bloated, as though someone had given him an enema with the air from a bicycle pump. “Or when our time comes and we stand before Saint Peter at the pearly gates, are we going to have some explaining to do?