The Cruel Weddings of Ivy Lockton.
They called them “cruel weddings” not because they felt Ivy was marrying for all the non-marrying reasons, but because they found them difficult and hard and taxing and almost impossible to endure. They felt this way because all of them were accustomed to soft easy weddings of their older cousins or younger uncles or sisters or brothers. They knew they were the last of an era to attend weddings with smooth transitions from church to reception hall to honeymoon, weddings that were identical to the millions of weddings that happened before they were born. They knew Ivy Lockton shared this history of traditional unspecialness with them and they also knew Ivy Lockton wanted to rush away from that past as fast as her gartered legs could carry her.
They speculated Ivy Lockton was either a witch or had purchased a particularly accurate almanac for the years of her first three weddings as it rained the entirety of her first, snowed the second, and reached the apex of a heat wave on her third.
The belligerent rain on her first wedding lasted from dawn until midnight. It made roads slick or flooded, ended plans for outdoor photography, and cast a solemn weepy pall over the occasion. They arrived with insufficient umbrellas and improvised slickers. They squished in their soaked dress socks and new hose. They damped their way from blazing church to nearly submerged banquet hall, uncomfortable and rubbery in their humid skin. They burgeoned with fresh mildew as they sat down to their prime ribs, trouts, or grilled vegetables. The first dance of the newlyweds was performed to the off-rhythms of small band competing with rain drumming on the roof. They thought they and the world would never be dry again, although they and it were the very next day.
They have little if anything to say about the snow of the second wedding; many of them suffered because of it and never wanted to mention it again. It snowed from dawn to midnight, fat and impetuous snow that halted everyone’s progress except the determined wedding party. Most of them by evening’s end were forced to book overnight rooms at the hosting hotel secondary to disappeared roads and arctic conditions. Many of them could not get rooms and had to huddle around a roaring fire in the massive lobby’s fireplace. Two of them were swallowed up by the weather when they insisted on braving their way home because the vehicle they owned was big and powerful and expensive and they were never seen again.
The heat wave that occurred during the third killed a further three of them directly and indirectly. This wedding had been held outside on the unshaded tee-off of a golf course. One of them dropped dead of sunstroke during the vows. One of them suffered heart failure while seated on the cool commode of the country club’s men’s room. One of them died the next day of unconfirmed causes but the rest of them knew it was because of the heat and humidity of the previous day.
Ivy Lockton continued. Her fourth wedding required all of them to travel to a distant state at their own expense. A quartet of them perished when the chartered plane they had booked to take them to the obscure mountain retreat smashed into an aggressive wall of rock.
The fifth wedding was a trifle easier on them. It resulted in no deaths but provoked an infestation of fleas on one of them and snapped ankles for two of them. The weather was clement the entire wedding, the food inventive but palatable, the Gulf view tranquil, the surf sound hypnotizing, the dolphin sightings awe inspiring, and the vows gently unintelligible due to the roaring tide. That they were unaccustomed to walking on soft sand was their own problem as they had lived their lives prior to this in asphalted cities. They are not sure, but some of them are convinced that one of their number actually sank in the sand and never returned.
Ivy Lockton endured as she always had, marrying, divorcing, falling in love, naming the date, sending out the invitations, attending parties and showers thrown in her honor, tasting proposed menu items, selecting floral arrangements and centerpieces, auditioning bands, and confirming a steady trickle of gifts, dresses of white satin, and avowals of love and honoring and obeying.
They began to suspect that Ivy Lockton’s perpetual weddings were her way of winnowing her mass of friends down to the truest and heartiest and lovingest. They felt this because it was a cold and sinister feeling they felt whenever a thick pastel envelope slid through their mail slots. They noticed that fewer and fewer of their original set attended the weddings while their number stayed the same because Ivy Lockton was constantly making new friends and acquaintances. Yet they continued to R.S.V.P., bracing themselves for hardships ahead.
They did this because they knew Ivy Lockton was Ivy Lockton as she always had been and was likely always to be and because they had a fascination for her and whatever could or would happen when next she brought them together in fancy dress. They found the wedding registries and ordered the stainless steel toasters and crystal cocktail shakers and turquoise place settings. They dry cleaned their suits and bought new dresses. They hired babysitters and made sure their last wills and testaments were in order and checked to see if their insurance policies were paid up. They filled their wallets and clutches with embossed cards bearing the contact information of their next of kin.
They began small clubs to honor those of them who had not survived the weddings and celebrate those of them who had. They met monthly and dined and drank and swapped stories and listened to lectures on the hazards of the world. They toasted the perished over end-of-evening brandies and fell into recollective silence.
The invitations continued. The sixth, the seventh. The eighth, the ninth.
They travelled to the edge of nowhere for Ivy Lockton’s tenth. They checked into the sole hotel in this rim of obscurity, each of them arguing with the pimpled clerks who told them their reservations were for the day before. They stepped around gray puddles in the warped bathrooms, wrinkled their noses at decades-old cigarette smoked woven into the scratchy gold coverlets, were elbowed aside by an exuberant high school baseball team rushing to the pool and causing a shortage in towels, and hoped Ivy Lockton’s tenth would be her last.
They piled into overly air conditioned charter buses and crawled deep into uncharted woods, inching along a narrow dirt path. Eager trees swiped against their bus windows. They did not talk amongst themselves. They watched civilization regress to nothing as they inched past neglected homes fronted by shirtless, bloated, grilling men and saggy, drinking women who watched them pass with yellow eyes. The homes gave way to trailers, then cabins, then shacks. Ancient foliage pressed in on them. The sun was engulfed by a high canopy of lowering trees. They pressed on in their heavy machines, creeping to some shadowy central retreat where Ivy Lockton waited with her latest groom.
They arrived. They drank murky liquors from huge spigoted glass urns. They were eaten alive by mosquitoes. They filled up on slushy ethnic food of unclear origin served from great heated pans. They didn’t dare dance.
Ivy Lockton thanked them all for coming as she always did. She told them the ceremony would happen as soon as night fell, after the food and booze and insect repellant and music. Ivy Lockton then spent many minutes with each of them, old friends and new, calling herself the luckiest woman in the world for being blessed with so many good and supportive and solid and game people who were always prepared to follow her through all brands of weather and all stripes of terrain to celebrate her newest bout of fresh happiness.
They felt the darkness come. Ivy Lockton instructed them to follow her down a minimally marked trail that supposedly wound down to the water or a little distance from it. The more sober of them were given torches to light the way. They went, holding onto each other, down through the black vegetation and hidden animals. They crowded around a circular clearing in the density, a clearing not clearly made by man or nature. Someone quoted a stiff passage from an ancestral tome. Someone dipped a hollowed gourd into a murky liquid. They were instructed to face one direction, then another, then another until all points of the compass were honored and they were thoroughly confused.
A guitar played.
They could barely see one another.
They were packed together, trying to focus on the inky whiteness of Ivy Lockton, who smiled by torchlight and performed a short slow dance with feathers.
They lost track of where they were and who they were. They were filled with thoughts of love or what it means to be in love or show love or promise love or if their homes and cars were locked and safe and unmolested. They felt sleepy and lulled and aware of their necks, or rather the weight of their heads as they sat on their necks. They heard music, smelled fire, wondered where the dog had come from.
They huddled together, closer than they ever had, arm seeking arm, chin finding shoulder, palm grasping hip. They sensed something was finally going to happen to them, something once and for all, something liberating for Ivy Lockton, dear Ivy Lockton, gorgeous Ivy Lockton, loving Ivy Lockton, blurry Ivy Lockton, friendly Ivy Lockton, always Ivy Lockton.