even weddings aren’t sacred

I’ve told the story about how my family behaves at funerals. I swore we were normally quite polite in public. But I’m not sure that’s true anymore.
My mom likes to make phone calls when she’s in the car and someone else is driving. She’s bored, I guess, so she uses the time productively. Somehow the times when my mom is riding and phoning always seem to coincide with the times when I am watching a movie on DVD, or eating, or doing something else that I don’t really want interrupted.
She called on Saturday night when we were watching Shattered Glass to tell me that she and my dad were on the way home from a wedding reception. It is not always easy to get my mom off the phone quickly, and other people were waiting to watch the end of the movie too, so I may have been a little brusque. To assuage my guilt, I called my parents’ house as soon as the movie ended.

My dad answered the phone. He doesn’t hear very well, so I had to be loud. I went into my bedroom so my boyfriend and his mom wouldn’t be subjected to the noisy conversation.
“We just got back from Alex’s wedding,” he told me. (Alex is the daughter of some friends of my parents.)
“How did that go?”
“Well, it was fine, but there were a lot of assholes there. We’ve known some of these people on and off over the years, and they’ve become assholes.”
“Anyone I know there?”
“Sure. Little Rick was there.” He’s Alex’s brother. Their dad is Big Rick. “He was asking about you.”
“Oh, that’s nice.”
“Little Rick and I decided, we’re going to write a book together. This one woman, this asshole, she tells everyone, ‘It’s not how old you are, it’s how old you feel.’ And I said, that’s bullshit. I told her, for men, it’s not how old you feel, it’s how old your penis feels.”
“Daddy!” I yelled. I know my boyfriend and his mom heard me in the other room. Possibly the neighbors heard me. You’d think after all these years my dad wouldn’t shock me anymore, but then he comes up with something entirely surprising.
“That’s right. So Little Rick and I are gonna write this book, My Penis and I.”
“Oh, really?” I suspect Little Rick wasn’t nearly as enthusiastic about this as my dad made him sound.
“And then this other woman, she’s telling us about how her father-in-law treats her so terribly, and there isn’t anything she can do or say, and I said, ‘He’s an asshole! Tell him he’s an asshole.’ And she tells me, no, she can’t because he’s married to her husband’s mother, and he loves her husband’s mother so much, and I said, ‘He tolerates her! He doesn’t treat her any better. You need to call him on it.’ I told her.”
“Uh-huh.”
“We’ve gotta see all these assholes again tomorrow for the brunch,” he told me. “Maybe I can think of some more ideas for the book by then. But your mother’s completely disgusted with me. I have no idea why.”
“I can’t imagine.”
“Here she is now.”
My mom got on the phone.
“Mom, I think you shouldn’t let Daddy drink at these events. He must have had one too many beers.”
“Oh, you know he acts just the same if he hasn’t had anything to drink.”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t know what I’m going to do with him. I can’t take him anywhere anymore.”
“How was it otherwise?”
“Oh, Jette, you would have liked it. I wish you could have been there. This is exactly the kind of wedding you would want.”
No comment.
“They had it in the backyard, it was very low-key, and everything was very simple. Nice, but simple. They had these three musicians, and a judge did the ceremony, and the food was wonderful.”
Okay, admittedly if I ever did get married, which I do not admit, I would want the food to be wonderful. (I have not told my mom about the Elvis-at-Gingerman wedding fantasy yet.)
“It was catered by this wonderful place, Stellaluna.”
“Stellaluna?”
“No, Bella Luna.”
“Oh, okay. Stellaluna is a bat. You know, from the story –”
My mom was not particularly interested in the saga of Stellaluna. (Too bad for her.) “Bella Luna. It’s a very nice restaurant in the Quarter. Of course, your father hated it, but that’s because they didn’t have any of those little hot dogs.”
“No muffalettas!” I heard a voice in the background shout.
“And they didn’t have any of those little muffalettas,” my mom added. “But they did have this delicious asparagus rolled in prosciutto.”
“That does sound good.”
“And the cake! They had a regular wedding cake, and they had a chocolate cake with this rich chocolate icing. I had some of both,” she confessed. My mom likes to pretend that she rarely eats sweets.
(I checked the Web. She’s right. The restaurant is not named after a bat, and their wedding catering menu sounds wonderful. But not wonderful enough to induce me to get married in New Orleans.)
“Did your sister tell me about the outfit we picked out for the brunch tomorrow?”
“Oh yes.” My sister had called earlier in the evening with a blow-by-blow account about how she refused to let my mom wear any of her old standby outfits any longer, would not let her go to Target or TJ Maxx to buy new clothes because my mom can certainly afford something nice, and dragged her to Ann Taylor Loft, where Sis then suffered for an hour while my mom tried clothes on, and dithered, and hesistated, and finally bought a skirt and sweater set. When they got home, they noticed a hole in the sweater set and because my mom was about to leave for the wedding, Sis had to drive all the way back to Loft and exchange it. Which she did because she is a Nice Person but it screwed up her day in a million different ways, each one of which she recounted for me.
“I told her she didn’t have to take back that sweater. I could have worn that white dress I showed her. She’s so particular sometimes.”
“Well, she wanted to do the nice thing.” Also, she has a horror of people committing what she considers to be fashion atrocities.
“The woman checking us out should have noticed it. If I were returning that sweater myself I would demand a discount.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Well, we’re going to watch the news and go to bed. Pray for me that your father behaves better at the brunch tomorrow.”
Rumor has it that he behaved even worse and my mom is completely pissed off. I’ll keep you posted.