Flesh of My Flesh: Short Story by Barbara Gowdy Read Free Book Online

father’s friends, flew down for the ceremony in a private plane. John went as Marion’s fiancé. He kept asking how much Grace had spent—he was comparing what they planned to spend on their own wedding in June, even though he had agreed to a small ceremony in the living room of Marion’s house, where Marion’s parents had been married thirty years before.
    “What does it matter what she spent?” Marion said. Finally John leaned across the aisle of the plane and asked Grace. Marion cringed, but Grace couldn’t have cared less.
    “This here shuttle bus,” Grace asked, “or the whole shebang?”
    The whole shebang came to just under thirty grand. It was an amount that haunted John, and more or less ruined their own wedding. He made last-minute changes, hiring a drummer and electric guitar duo who played so loud people had to go upstairs to talk. He had a canopy erected behind the house, a complete waste since it was a cool, rainy afternoon and there weren’t enough guests to spill outside anyway. Because he was paying for the liquor he brought in crates of it and yelled at everyone to drink, drink. By the end of the night there was a line-up to be sick in the toilet. There was a fistfight between the drummer and the accordion player her father had hired weeks earlier. Marion’s last memory, before she passed out on the trundle bed, was Aunt Lucia’s bare stomach … Aunt Lucia with her red silk dress pulled up over her black bra, pointing ata snarl of purple scars under her navel and whispering,
“Guarda! Guarda!”
and Marion thinking that the scars had something to do with the birth of babies, that there was a Bucci baby curse Aunt Lucia was warning her about.
    Apparently she was carried by John and her brother to John’s car, and then carried by John alone over the threshold of the Meadowview Motel’s honeymoon suite. They spent three nights there, a mini-honeymoon that John promised to make up for with a trip to Italy, when he could afford to take some time off. From the motel they moved straight into their new house, a two-year-old five-bedroom, three-bathroom, white-stuccoed back split on ten acres. It had pillars on either side of the front door, a four-car garage, a sunken ebony bathtub and acres of white carpeting in which the imprint of a foot remained all day.
    John had never had any intention of living on his Aunt Lucia’s property. He bought the house back in April, assuming a mortgage so high that Marion left off one of the zeroes when she told her father about it. Her father was still thrown for a loop. He and Grace gave them the five major appliances. The black leather chesterfield, two red velvet easy chairs, black veneer bedstead and black veneer dining-room suite John bought with the money his business associates sent in Congratulations cards. He wanted everything to be modern and either black or red. In a linen store in Ayleford, Marion found a red bedspread and black-and-red-striped pillow cases. She kept her eye out for coasters, towels, vases, lamps, ashtrays in red or black. She capitulated completely to John’s taste because she didn’t have any. Pointing out the dress she liked in a store window or in a catalogue had been one sure way to make her mother laugh.
    She planted red and white carnations along the front of the house. She put in a vegetable garden. And three mornings a week she still went into the pet store. John wanted her to quit,but he said he’d let it ride until she got pregnant. Now that she was his wife, he was more easygoing about things, he was back to being his hearty, adoring self. He brought her long-stemmed roses and bags of seedless grapes. He wasn’t home much—he liked to close the shoe store himself on the nights it was open, and he was always having to go to the gravel pit or the gas station to take care of some problem—but when he
was
home he followed her around, kissing her, undressing her, telling her how beautiful she was. He ran her bubble baths