A Disorder Peculiar to the Country by Ken Kalfus

Author:Ken Kalfus
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

BY THE FOLLOWING MORNING they were all moving in a grief-stricken stupor, as if preparing for a funeral. Even Deke was upset by his younger daughter’s predicament. He asked her to clearly, soberly, repeat everything Neal had said the night before. He called Harold Weiss, who was no less dismayed by his sons’ flight to Brooklyn. “I don’t know what’s in that boy’s mind,” he muttered. The mind he referred to belonged to Joel. Around ten o’clock Neal called Flora to say they had made it to Brooklyn in record time. Unfortunately, the chuppah was located at the guy’s parents’ house in Queens, but close by. Flora said, “Just come back, forget it.”

Hardly speaking to each other, Amanda, Flora, and Joyce went to have their hair done. Even with makeup Amanda’s face had gone gray and hard. She was probably wondering how she had raised these two daughters, one who was disastrously ending her marriage and another apparently incapable of beginning one.

Neal didn’t call again until two, as the wedding party was being assembled. Now Flora just grunted and hung up. She dropped the phone at her side, her eyes misted with frustration.

“He said they just crossed the Triborough Bridge.”

“They’ll get here at four-thirty, at the earliest,” Joyce guessed.

“And he sounded so chipper. He was congratulating himself for having found a chuppah! Like he hadn’t done anything wrong. Like he had just gone down the street for a bagel.”

She must have thought her mother was out of the room, but Amanda had hurried in when the phone rang. She was wearing a brocaded jacket with a matching skirt in pale sage. She barked, “This is no time for jokes.”

If the wedding began late it wouldn’t be the end of the world, especially with the end of the world elsewhere so palpable—but there was no way Joyce could tell her mother and sister so without seeming to make light of the situation.

The afternoon’s remaining hours swiftly passed as the family and the other members of the wedding moved in their prescribed courses, as if there were a groom present. No one asked where Neal was, not even Gottschall. Viola raged when Joyce said she’d have to wait before she was allowed to hold the flowers. At the chapel the guests soon arrived. Amanda greeted them each with a cold, bony handshake, her smile as fragile as the wedding glass that had been procured from her cupboard. She mumbled to a few people that there would be a delay, but she couldn’t bear to say it more than twice. Five p.m. came without Neal. Joyce presumed all the guests knew about his absence by now. The organist worked her way down her repertoire. Amanda and Joyce took shelter in the alcove next to the dressing room, where Flora was in tears.

Amanda said, her voice tremulous, “I have never been so humiliated.”

Joyce was startled by her mother’s confession; it made her feel closer to her than she had been in years, since before she was married.

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