The Children's Hospital

49

Jemma never had much of a hand in planning the wedding. After her roller-boogie display all sorts of unsolicited advice had begun to pour in. It was to be expected, that everyone should want to touch her pregnant belly, and she was as much touched as annoyed when five different people asked if she was taking her vitamins and when practical strangers rushed up to her as if to deliver news of an emergency only to tell her she looked tired, and that she should take a nap. But news of the pregnancy stirred up interest in the wedding. “Oh, we’ll do it sometime,” she kept telling Rob, whenever he tried to set a date. “The important thing is that we made the decision,” she said, and while he was not exactly happy with that, he knew better than to pressure her, and she might have delayed indefinitely, or at least until landfall, if the Council hadn’t taken up the issue. She reported to the chamber one morning to find that it was the fourth item on the agenda, after the question of whether it should be legal to eat fish but before the question of whether it would be legal to keep them as pets. “There seems to have been a mistake,” Jemma told them. “A piece of non-business has slipped into the business.”

It was entirely on purpose, though. The First, Second, and Third Friends had met secretly to discuss the matter and the Council had agreed with them that a great opportunity was being wasted. “Don’t you know what this means?” uninvited, unwanted Dr. Sundae asked her from her usual seat, a chair pulled up into the vicinity of the Council’s long table, right to the edge of propriety — she had been confirmed as the chiefest of the six magistrates, but she still wasn’t supposed to be butting into their business. Jemma didn’t really know what it meant, or what it was for. She knew she was pregnant, that she loved Rob Dickens, and that she had taken a solemn vow with her brother never, ever to marry but that she was going to do it anyway.

“Of course,” Jemma said, trying to come off as authoritative but only managing to sound a little snooty. “It’s all very serious. But it’s really just between Rob and me.”

“Yes, of course,” said Dr. Snood. “Except it’s not.” Didn’t she realize, he wanted to know, what it would do for their community, to celebrate a marriage? What better way to truly inaugurate a new beginning? Jemma suggested that somebody else might want to get married; they replied that there was only one Universal Friend, duly and spontaneously elected by the remaining population of the world, a Friend, they pointed out, who was already engaged to the father of her unborn child. “We don’t want to make you do anything you don’t want to,” they said. Except they did, and they would. Maybe it would be better, Jemma suggested, to wait until they were at their destination; no one knew how long that would be, but it was almost sure to be too long. She had always sort of envisioned a tiny little ceremony; they responded that plans change and dreams are not life, this must be something in which every single body among us can participate. I might do it but I won’t like it; Oh come on, of course you’ll like it.

“It’ll be some party,” said Monserrat. She sat back in her chair and a dreamy expression came over her face.

“Well, let it be recorded,” Jemma said, “that this wasn’t my idea.”

They took that for a yes. After that it was as if the whole hospital filled up with well-intentioned but annoying mothers-in-law. People no longer accosted her about their health, or her health, or with vapid pleasantries, but everyone had an idea about the wedding. Had she considered a fifteen-foot tower of cupcakes instead of, or in addition to the cake? Did she realize that a gardenia bouquet could lend a bold, classic aspect to her look? If she just would put her cheek against this swath of purple velour, she would certainly choose it for the bridesmaids’ dresses. White-gold rings were especially distinctive, and had the added advantage of giving you superpowers if you happened to be called away by God into an alternate universe. “Believe it or not,” Jemma would tell each chattering busybody, “I’m not that involved.” She’d give them one of Vivian’s cards and walk away.

She really wasn’t that involved. Vivian and Dr. Snood were in bed together on account of the wedding, and they both told her the same thing: This wedding isn’t for you and Rob, it’s for the hospital, it’s for the people. She thought that made it sound like a funeral — it’s not for you, you’re dead! If she had been one of those girls who had been planning a dream wedding since she first donned a toilet-paper veil at the age of nine, instead of someone who had been obsessively planning against her wedding since about the same time, then it might have upset her not to be very involved in the details. As, it was she was rather relieved — they were going to put on a better show than she ever could. She was able to veto almost all the stupid stuff, and absolutely everything that would have humiliated her, like the plastic window in the belly of the dress, designed by Vivian to showcase her baby and her newly popped belly button.

There were more suggestions about the dress than about any other aspect of the wedding. It seemed like everybody had an idea, and everybody got to express them in a contest: every citizen of the hospital was invited to submit their design to the Council. There would be no reward except the work itself, a dance with the bride, and the satisfaction of clothing the Universal Friend on what many (recalling memories, candified by nostalgia and drunkenness, of their own weddings to husbands and wives now lost) thought should be the happiest day of their life, but hundreds of people submitted designs and proceeded to lobby for them. With the angel to help them, everyone was an expert tailor, and most everyone was a capable promoter. Signs appeared in the halls: The Empire Dress: It Was Good Enough For Josephine, It’s Good Enough For Us, and A-Line? Super-Fine! and Slip Dress or Bust! Rival designs unfurled from the balconies; five and six stories tall, they faced each other across the lobby and made Jemma think of battling giantesses in organdy and chiffon and lace. For some people, making a sign or inflating the paper design wasn’t enough; they had the dresses made and wore them as they went about their day. Jemma actually liked this idea: the hideousness of some of the dresses could only be appreciated in the flesh. For all the variety of hideousness Jemma only vetoed a few: a dress with big lacy wings that were supposed to flap gracefully as she said her vows; Vivian’s window dress; a sweeping, misty thing with a hood and eyeholes that was supposed to make her look like a spirit (the spirit of perseverance, said the notes, which will marry the spirit of hope) but actually would have made her look like a Klan bride; and an awful fortress of silk and charmeuse and guipure lace whose train was meant to stretch up the spiral ramp all the way to the ninth floor.

“You should wear a hat with birds in it,” said Kidney. On the day before the wedding Jemma’s class degraded within minutes of starting into idle speculation. They were on the roof again, sitting in the garden, the field having been taken over by empty tables, set up for the reception.

“Live birds,” said Valium. “Attached by strings so they can’t fly away. You’d need a real strong chin strap, though.”

“There are no more birds, dorky,” said Ethel Puffer.

“I meant robots, dorky.”

“Can we make them?” asked Josh Swift.

“The angel can make anything,” said Juan Fraggle.

“I will make something wonderful,” Pickie Beecher said.

“Let’s talk about inflammatory bowel disease,” Jemma said.

“Inflammatory bowel disease,” said Jarvis, “was where your guts get all ruined from nobody knew what. It would make you shit in your dress. Bloody shit all over the nice white dress. It wouldn’t be pretty.”

“Watch your mouth,” said Magnolia.

“It would ruin the party,” said Josh Swift.

“Inflammatory bowel disease ruins the party of life,” said Ethel.

“It used to,” said Magnolia.

“Or a big spider on you head,” said Kidney, “and a dress made all of webs. Like in a Halloween wedding.”

“Let’s make a dress,” Magnolia said. “Can we make a dress?”

“There have been enough dresses made already for everybody in this place to get married twice,” Jemma said.

“Come on. We’ll make it right on you.”

“I’ve already got the last fitting this afternoon, Magnolia. You can come to that, if you like.”

“It won’t be like we could do,” said Ethel.

“I got an idea!” said Cindy Flemm, who up until now had been lying on her belly with her head pointing away from the group, braiding three dandelions together. She jumped up, dragged Jemma up by an arm, and pushed her toward the elevator.

“I don’t think…” Jemma said, and, “We really had better not…” and, “I have to meet Rob in ten minutes.”

“We’ll dress him up, too,” said Ethel. The others swarmed around her — even the ones who weren’t particularly interested in dressmaking were happy to help push her, and to participate in the bullying.

“Sometimes they scare me,” she said to Rob, after they had made her into Cindy’s vision of a space bride. They pushed her straight to the big replicator in the old rehab unit and sat her on a stool while the boys worked on the veil and the girls made the dress — not so much a dress as a sparkly bodysuit with a skirt that rode out stiffly from her hips and made her look like she was wearing a flying saucer. The veil was a helmet with a veil in place of the faceplate and a solar-system mobile stuck on the top, each planet a glass marble, a model of the model in the gym. On her hip, just under the skirt, she wore a holster, upon which she carried a white wedding blaster, in case the groom should get prematurely fresh, or aliens attack. They put Rob, when he got there, in a one-piece suit of black scales, and gave him a cape that was silver on one side and black on the other, except if you stared at the black side for long enough you would see that there were faint iridescent stars shining out from within. They made him a black glass helmet shaped like a giant chess castle. He complained that it made him look evil. By the time they were fully dressed, half of the kids had lost interest and wandered away — class had been officially over for fifteen minutes, anyway. She and Rob left the others in the gym, telling each other stories about the marriage of the rebel space princess to the dark emperor, who was actually her father.

“I mean,” she said, “Pickie is just weird, and closed, but him aside, I still think Jarvis would as soon punch me in the face as say hello to me, and Ethel pretends like she’s normal but I can see how sad and ruined she feels. It’s like beetles in her head, a big swarm of them crawling over and over each other.”

“These are neat,” Rob said, carrying her helmet and looking at the marbles. The planets with atmospheres had simulated weather. He flicked his finger against Jupiter and sets storms raging.

“Rob, are you listening to me at all?”

“Of course. You just don’t like kids very much. That’ll change. My mom said she never liked kids, when she was young, but then after Gillian everything was different.”

“But I love kids. I can’t believe you said that. I love kids.”

“No you don’t. I mean, not in general. Any one of them, you’re fine with. But the big groups, when they stare at you with those big eyes, and don’t say anything — it makes you all sweaty and nervous. I’ve seen it.”

“Are you really not scared of Pickie?”

“A little,” he admitted. “He just needs some loving.”

“And an exorcism. And Ethel — there’s nothing wrong in her head, but everything wrong in her head. There’s nothing I can fix. It’s… dispiriting. And the two of them are concocting something together. I try to keep them on separate projects in class, but they hang around together on the outside and they’ve got this secret project going.”

“Blood and black paint,” Rob said. “Holy shit.” They’d come up to the balcony on the ninth floor, and looked down at the preparations happening in the lobby. Far below, Ishmael was hanging festoons of ribbon from the toy. Jemma waved when he looked up at them. He pointed at his watch, and started to climb down. “Is that all really for us?”

“It is expressly not for us,” Jemma said. She took his arm and started down the ramp, headed toward the Council meeting and, like Ishmael, already a little late. Wedding dresses and formalwear had been popping up all over lately — people trying out their wedding-dress designs, or trying out their own outfits, so the Space Groom and Bride did not draw the attention Jemma expected, although a couple people stopped to ask them if it was already tomorrow, or if the rehearsal was starting already, and they attracted a wedding train of seven-to-ten-year-olds who marched solemnly behind them. When one of them threw a doughnut Rob whipped around and sprayed them with confetti from the wedding blaster.

He stayed for the Council meeting, which was just a final run of Dr. Snood’s big list. He rolled out all six feet of it while everyone else made checks on the screens of their notebooks. It was formally determined that everything was ready: every dais and platform had risen in time; every festoon was hanging in its proper place; every performer in every exhibition had mastered his part; every rocket was in place on the roof; every flower-petal bag was tied with a piece of green or white ribbon. “And what about the couple?” Dr. Snood asked finally, marking off an item on his list that was not on theirs. “Are you ready?” Rob took her hand and they each took a side of the room to smile at.

“You’re not going to wear that dress, are you?” asked Dr. Sundae.

“It’s my dancin’ dress,” Jemma said. She and Vivian left Rob behind then, though he tried to follow them.

“Some things still hold,” Vivian said, “No matter what fucked-up bouffanterie we’ve made of this. Not until she comes leaping down the aisle with her hundred and sixty attending virgins do you get to see her in the real dress.”

“That’s only the day of the wedding,” he said, but she wouldn’t relent, and Jemma, who for all that she largely did not care what happened with the ceremony, and probably would not have complained if someone had insisted on her actually having a hundred and sixty virgin attendants, found that she was getting rather excited about a few things, like the blue garter she’d been wearing off and on all week, and the prospect of hiding from Rob in her crazy dress. They went to Vivian’s room, which doubled now as her atelier. Jemma wondered about that: the dress on its mannequin looming by the window all night long. Did Vivian wake at night to find it gesturing rudely at her, or did it ever loom over her, or did the veil ever wave at night with such moon-infused beauty that it made her heart ache a little, from bitterness or desire? It was one of the things that had drawn them together, how they had both forsworn marriage, but Jemma wondered if Vivian still meant to proceed through life using up and discarding men now that they were in such short supply. “The little ones will grow,” she’d said to Jemma. “There’s still plenty.” But she threw herself into the dressmaking and the wedding planning like someone who wanted one of her own.

Jemma stood up on a wooden box in front of the covered mirror while Vivian fussed and mumbled. “I got it,” she said, meaning she had correctly anticipated how much bigger Jemma would be when she made the final alterations on the dress the week before. There was practically nothing to do now except pat it down and sigh over it. Jemma looked out the window while Vivian fluffed up the veil and draped and redraped the train. The sun, setting on the other side of the hospital, colored the foam of the wake pink and orange. She thought she saw a whale blow, and a flash of wet blue skin, halfway to the horizon. She was squinting and leaning forward, looking for it again, when Vivian whipped the silk off the mirror.

“Well, how do you like it?” she asked.