The Wedding People

by Alison Espach

Phoebe gives the man twenty dollars, and he seems surprised to be tipped for doing nothing, but to Phoebe it is not nothing. It’s been a long time since a man has stood up immediately upon seeing her get out of a car. Years since her husband emerged from his office to greet her when she got home. It is nice to be stood for, to feel like her arrival is an important event. To hear her heels click as she walks up the old brick entranceway. She always wanted to make this sound, to feel grand and dignified when walking into a lecture hall, but her university was made of carpet.

Some are reading off their phones, like they’re prepared to be in this line forever and maybe they are. Maybe they don’t have families anymore, either. It’s tempting for Phoebe to think like this now—to believe that everybody is as alone as she is.

They are engaged in whispery debate over whose flight here was worse and how old is this hotel really and why are people so obsessed with Kylie Jenner now? Are we supposed to care that she’s hotter than Kim Kardashian? “Is she?” Neck Pillow asks. “I’ve actually always thought they were both ugly in some way.” “I think that’s true about all people, though,” High Bun says. “All people have one thing that makes them ugly. Even people who are like, professionally hot. It’s like the golden rule or something.”

Another “Oh! You’re here for the wedding!” and Phoebe begins to realize just how many wedding people there are in the lobby. It’s unsettling, like in that movie The Birds her husband loved so much. Once she spots a few, she sees them everywhere. Wedding people lounging on the mauve velvet bench. Wedding people leaning on the built-in bookcase. Wedding people pulling luggage so futuristic it looks like it could survive a trip to the moon. The men in burgundy pile it all into high, sturdy towers of suitcases, right next to a large white sign that says WELCOME TO THE WEDDING OF LILA AND GARY.

“Oh, I believe you,” Pauline says, typing as she speaks. “I just think that someone here has made a very big mistake. It might have even been me! You’ll have to excuse us, we’re a little understaffed since Covid.” Phoebe nods. “Labor shortage.” “Exactly,” Pauline says.

Would she like a normal pillow or a coconut pillow? “What’s a coconut pillow?” Phoebe asks. “A pillow,” Pauline says, “with coconut in it.” “Are pillows better that way?” she asks. “With coconut inside them?” That’s what her husband would have asked. A bad habit of hers, a product of being married for a decade—always imagining what her husband might say. Even when he’s not around. Especially when he’s not around. Phoebe didn’t think she’d end up being a woman like this. But if the last few years have taught her anything, it’s that you really can’t ever know who you are going to become.

cabin. “I have a very large family,” the bride says, like it’s a big problem. “Well, I’m not in your family,” Phoebe clarifies. “But you have to be in one of our families.” “No,” Phoebe says. “I’m not in any family.” It had been a crushing realization, one that started slowly after the divorce, and got stronger with each passing holiday, until she woke up this morning to such a quiet house, she finally understood what it meant to have no family. She understood it would always be like this—just her, in bed, alone.

“But if you’re not here for the wedding, then what are you here for?” the bride asks in a much lower pitch, as if her real voice has finally emerged. Because now in this private space with a person not attending the wedding, the bride doesn’t have to be the bride. She can speak however she wants. And so can Phoebe. Phoebe is not High Bun or Neck Pillow. She is nobody, and the only good thing about being nobody is that she can now say whatever the fuck she wants. Even to the bride. “I’m here to kill myself,” Phoebe says.

It is going to be quick, beautiful, and entirely bloodless, because Phoebe refuses to make the staff clean like her friend Mia cleaned after her husband Tom slit his wrists. That’s just selfish, Phoebe’s husband said when they heard, and Phoebe agreed, because Tom survived.

“Of course it does!” the bride says. “This is my wedding! I’ve been planning this my entire life!” “I’ve been planning this my entire life.” It’s not until Phoebe says it that she realizes it’s true. Not that she’s always wanted to end her life. But it’s been an idea, a self-destruct button Phoebe never forgot was there, even during her happiest moments. And where did this sadness come from? Did her father pass it on like a blood disease?

There is no such thing as a happy place. Because when you are happy, everywhere is a happy place. And when you are sad, everywhere is a sad place.

I will never have another Oreo, Phoebe thinks. And it’s these small things she can’t accept. The never drinking wine again. The never again feeling her husband’s finger down her spine. The body always wanting to be a body.

But she wanted to do something for him. Something she had never done. Something fun. “When you get home, I want to make you cum,” she typed out on her phone to her husband. But just looking at the word cum made her nervous. So she deleted it, wrote come instead of cum, and then turned it back to cum, because she didn’t know if it was better to be correct or fun, and why did it feel like she always had to choose between the two?

And that was okay then, because they were married and had enough love and money between them to buy a house and do the things that people who recently bought houses do, like start a garden and renovate the kitchen with a quartzite slab and make six embryos at a lab.

His intelligence was one of the reasons that she fell in love with him. But it was annoying to see young women worship it, because nobody worshipped hers. People were either surprised by it or disapproving of it.

the canyon again.” “Fine, but you can tell Harry that if we wind up staying in that really shitty motel one more time, I will kill myself,” Phoebe said. They both laughed a little because Harry opened his eyes and looked at Phoebe like he had understood, but also because they knew that Phoebe was not the type to kill herself.

“I wish I saw your text earlier,” Matt said. “I really wish I did.” When he leaned over to kiss her, she flinched at his tenderness. She hated his softness. She had been fantasizing, lately, about him doing terrible things to her. Things so awful she couldn’t ever tell him, because she knew it meant something was changing inside of her, some darkness was hardening into sludge. So, she just said, “I love you.”

The bride’s hand is wrapped in gauze, and Phoebe wonders who wrapped it. Gary, the groom with the barely receding hairline? Her loving mother? Is the bride the kind of woman who has a loving mother? Yes, Phoebe decides. Phoebe has become good over the years at detecting who has a loving mother and who does not, because Phoebe believes a loving mother gives a person a kind of confidence to exist that Phoebe never quite had. Phoebe could never burst into someone else’s room and give orders like it’s her own.

When Phoebe left for graduate school, she had very clear and beautiful ideas about art, how art is what elevates us, art is the magnificence wrung from the ugly dish towel of existence. Art helps us feel alive. And this had been true for Phoebe—Phoebe used to read books and feel astounded. She used to walk around galleries, inspired by the beautiful human urge to create. But that was years ago. Now she can’t stand the sight of her books. Can’t bear the thought of reading hundreds of pages just to watch Jane Eyre get married again.

“But what if you go to Hell?” “There’s no such thing as Hell,” Phoebe says. “How do you know that?” “I don’t know. It’s just what I believe,” Phoebe says. One of the few things Nietzsche wrote that she agreed with in graduate school. “Seems more plausible that Hell is some revenge fantasy concocted by unhappy people so they could punish all the happy people in their minds.”

But Phoebe hesitates. The old Phoebe never made the first move. Not even with her husband after years of marriage—she always waited for him to initiate. She was always too embarrassed to admit that she ever wanted anything, as if there was something humiliating about being a person with desires. But what would it feel like to be different? To be totally honest about what she wants?

“Thank you,” Phoebe says to Juice’s dog, but also to Harry. Thank you for keeping us company. Thank you for being the only witness to our marriage. Thank you for always waiting for us in the mornings outside our bedroom door, and especially that night you sat outside the shower, keeping careful watch. Because Harry always knew when something was wrong. And something was very wrong—Phoebe was ten weeks pregnant and she was bleeding. Look at the blood, she kept saying—and Matt brought her to the shower, put his hands between her legs, as if to catch it. Or maybe just to feel it. To be a part of it. After, Harry followed them silently to the bed, and Matt curled around Phoebe, and Phoebe curled around Harry. “I really loved you,” Phoebe says, because now that the horror of it is over, Phoebe can feel the good part—this love for her little family, the one she had and the one she never will have.

“What about Nat and Suz? You could tell them.” “Not really.” Lila admits she does not do the best job of keeping in touch with her friends when they are no longer right in front of her face. She has no idea what’s going on in their lives, really. She knows that Viv is somewhat responsible for repopulating the Atlanta Zoo with the giant panda. She knows that Nat is married to the third violin in the Detroit Symphony. And she knows that Suz has a baby, and she thinks it’s weird how she calls the baby a little worm, but also maybe it’s cute. The point is—Lila doesn’t know. She wishes she could ask, but they don’t ask each other real things like that anymore.

But Phoebe is starting to understand that on some nights, Lila is probably the loneliest girl in the world, just like Phoebe. And maybe they are all lonely. Maybe this is just what it means to be a person. To constantly reckon with being a single being in one body. Maybe everybody sits up at night and creates arguments in their head for why they are the loneliest person in the world.

It is so easy to hate Mrs. Dalloway for worrying so much about her stupid party, the way it’s so easy to hate the bride, she thinks. But in the end, everybody goes to the party and that’s the point. It’s Mrs. Dalloway who brings them all together in a modern world full of railroads and wars and illnesses that are always tearing people apart. If the problem is loneliness, then in this way, and maybe in only this way, Mrs. Dalloway is the hero for giving everybody a place to be.

On the way, Phoebe slips, falls, scrapes her knee, but does not slide into the water like the little man on the warning sign. “She always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day,” Woolf wrote.

The whole exchange is so businesslike, Phoebe wishes she could go back and speak the same way when in bed with her husband. She wishes she could have had the courage to ask for what she wanted, even if it sounded weird. Because she is starting to suspect that she actually likes weird things.

We used to be what you might call friends before her father got sick. Not that I believe in the whole mothers-and-daughters-being-best-friends thing. That’s, frankly, unnatural. But I do miss her. The real Lila, the one who used to sit in my bed and talk my ear off. Do you know what a talker Lila really is?” “I do, actually,” Phoebe says. “God, as a little girl, she was even worse. Total stream of consciousness. Like living with a little Salinger novel. When she lost her teeth, I heard every gruesome detail. When she got her period, I was the first one she told. Besides her guidance counselor, but that couldn’t be helped.

“She’s always been like that, though,” Patricia says. “Like what?” “Every man she dates, she thinks they’re going to solve all her problems, make her this better woman, the one she ought to be. The woman she doesn’t know how to make herself be. But she never got engaged to any of them. She never took it this far.

“I mean she loves Gary the way that I love this cocktail. The way that I have come to love a foam body pillow. The way I loved Henry at the start, when I thought love was about getting something from people. I fell in love with what Henry gave me. And he gave me so much. He truly did. But loving someone like that doesn’t make you a better woman. Only losing them does.”

“It’s not easy being angry at your own creation. It’s like being angry at yourself.”

Marla goes to the hottest pool, and Phoebe gets in the cold one simply because it’s the one that promises to cure depression, though she knows that’s not how depression works. There is no quick fix, and sometimes trying to fix it only made it worse.

She turns off all the lights and scrubs herself with something called Oat Milk Soap for Human Beings. It works. She sits on the watery floor and feels more like a human being than she has in years.

“And what is this? Your King of Cups is here,” Thyme says. “Your great love. Cups are love. And the king, well, he has, like, obviously the most of them. But this is in the future. This is not right now. The cups are moving toward you, but not here. Do not be impatient for it. Do you understand?”

“Nat is right,” Lila says. “I never think about what I might actually like.” “What do you mean?” “I mean, I just worry,” Lila says. “I don’t think about what I want, I just worry about what might happen to me and then figure out how to keep those things from happening.

That’s the first time I saw her, standing in front of this painting that was entirely red, and it was like she knew I didn’t get it. ‘It’s thirty shades of red,’ she said, and still I couldn’t see it. Not until she started pointing them out to me. And I fucking loved this about her. She could always see things I couldn’t. Seriously, all I could see was one giant blob of red. But then, a few days later, I saw all these different colors. And it was amazing.” “I think that might be the best description of falling in love that I’ve ever heard,” Phoebe says.

“Well, I think it’s amazing,” Gary says. “How much work we’ll do just to feel something. I don’t think there is anything more human than that.” Phoebe agrees. She feels such tenderness for him, but she doesn’t know how to say that, so she says, “I’ve missed talking like this.” She loves deep, winding conversations that go up and down, especially in the dead of night when everyone should be sleeping. She has forgotten the way conversations, really good ones, can change her—shape-shift her like a tree. Sometimes leave her bare, sometimes leave her fuller.

She must be really high. She turns over on her side like she does in yoga class. Under the bed, she notices something. She pulls out a credit card folded in half. “Jim,” she says. “This folded-up credit card is from 1991.” “So?” “Why would it be from 1991? Isn’t that weird?” “Is it?” “What do you think happened to this guy?” “I think focusing on the credit card is a bad idea right now.” “But what is this credit card doing there, under the bed, folded up from thirty-one years ago? I mean, I can’t think of any reasonable non-weird reason for it still being here.”

Does she feel proud of her choices? Does she feel trapped in the spectacle of her own making? And how did weddings get like this? How did they get so big, come to be so important, that a woman couldn’t see her way out of it? That a woman would sacrifice her entire life for it? These are big questions, Phoebe thinks, and good writing is always driven by a big question.

“Do you think a woman who collects art like this is the happiest woman?” Phoebe asks. “Or the least happy?” “The question presumes that we can be happy,” Gary says. “Can we not?” “I think we talk about happiness all wrong. As if it’s this fixed state we’re going to reach. Like we’ll just be able to live there, forever. But that’s not my experience with happiness. For me, it comes and goes. It shows up and then disappears like a bubble.”

Yet she feels glad that he tracked her down. Glad that he worried about her, glad to find out that his love did not disappear. And then she feels shame that she feels glad that a man has stalked her. Then she remembers she is not supposed to be feel shame, according to her therapist and Thyme. She is supposed to be kinder to herself, because this habit of tearing herself down every three seconds in her mind makes her feel ashamed. But at least she notices it. At least she is becoming aware of these things now.

“We were married,” he says. “I honestly don’t think I realized what it meant to be married until I left. How do you know, until you can look back at what it was? After I left, I could see it so clearly. I saw this beautiful thing that I had destroyed.” He clears his throat. He sits down on the bed. “But during it, I somehow stopped seeing the big picture. I was thinking so narrowly. I kept thinking everything had to happen a precise way.

Phoebe says. It is good practice, speaking with finality. Being direct. Saying the hard truths in front of the wedding people. Phoebe wants to get better at that. Phoebe will get better at that. Phoebe knows this is the only way she wants to live. She must say the terrible thing, even when it’s hard. She must think the terrible thing, even when it’s scary.

“But then all the people would go home or we’d be on the airplane, and there’d be nothing to say. Or I felt like everything I said annoyed or bored her. And I guess I kept trying because it felt like my fault. Maybe I was annoying? Or really boring? And here was this wonderful woman who was offering me a second chance at a normal life, a wonderful woman who just booked us a trip for two to Paris, and Germany, and all the places I dreamed of going, so don’t screw it up.

becoming who you want to be is just like anything else. It takes practice. It requires belief that one day, you’ll wake up and be a natural at it.