Bride of the Living Dead
Chapter 1
The Incredible Shrinking Bride
I hate weddings. If you had an older sister like Sky, you would too. Sky was perfect. Her wedding was perfect. It almost killed her.
I'm Daria, the rebellious indie film critic, the fat sister. Nobody expected me to get married. Eight years after Sky's wedding, the rose petal perfection of it all still hung over me like mocking pink cloud.
Not that I didn't have a love life—or at least a sex life—but I'll talk about the Worst Boyfriend Awards later.
Our hippie parents named their new child Skylark, but the lark got lost during elementary school. Even so, I figured Sky's name sealed her fate as a super-achiever. Her law school yearbook contained an abnormally high percentage of future litigators with flinty eyes and granola hippie names like Karma, Moonrise and Weed. One unfortunate guy named Peace Train wound up on Wall Street specializing in hostile takeovers—he just uses the initial P.
Sky chose her weapons and polished them every day. Platinum blonde hair, starved-thin body and a smile that dazzled people, even when she was rolling right over them.
By the time Sky got to high school she had the marriage thing all figured out. I was still in junior high, so I was very impressed when she broke it down for me into five steps. It sounded pretty simple.
Step 1. Find a man
Step 2. Get him to propose
Step 3. Plan the wedding
Step 4. Do it. "It" meant get married, not to Do It with the guy. We laughed about that later, but at the time Sky was so focused on her goal that "It" could only mean getting the ceremony completed. She said there might be some obstacles like finding the right dress, but after the wedding you can get to the next step, which is the whole point, right?
Step 5. Proceed to married life
Even then, I thought if I ever got as far as Step 2, I was planning to skip directly to Step 5, with the briefest possible stop at the formalities of Step 4.
Sky was a little vague on how she got through Steps 1 and 2 of her plan, finding the man and getting him to propose. I was going through a cynical phase the summer she got engaged, so I asked her if tranquilizer darts were involved. She told me I must be confusing her social life with my own. I do love my sister, even though we are such polar opposites that we drive each other crazy.
When she found a fellow attorney to marry and raise little attorneys, she planned the perfect wedding. By the time she told me she was getting married, Sky was already hip deep in Step 3—Planning the Wedding. Even her notebooks had notebooks. Her diagrams had footnotes, and her checklist had breakaway sheets for delegating tasks. She was hard to be around, but she was hardest on herself.
Sky had been starving herself even more than usual for months. You could count every rib and her collarbone stood out like a coat hanger. Christmas Day she decided she was ready to try on our granny's ivory silk, pearl-encrusted, lace-trimmed wedding dress. It was one of those holiday seasons when we all observed that Sky was eating—at least a little. She might have gone in the bathroom afterwards to get rid of it. I tried not to think about that. Even our parents couldn't get her to eat when she was in starvation mode, and nothing I did or said made any difference.
Standing barefoot on the linoleum floor of the basement rec room, Sky stepped into the dress and held it up, while Mom pulled gently, but hopelessly, on the gaping back.
It didn't even fasten around her rib cage, the bones of which were prominently visible.
Sky twisted violently away, took a half step and started to cry, sitting down on the floor with a spatter of seed pearls bouncing around her like spilled rice.
I wanted to cheer her up with a joke about how if she had a rib or two removed, the damn thing might fit. Mom could see me taking a breath to speak and she shook her head. "No joking, Daria," she whispered to me.
She didn't have to say that. I probably wouldn't have made the wisecrack. Even I could see that, unhinged by severe malnutrition and impending matrimony, Sky might not get that what I said was in fact a joke.
I've been blamed way too many times that kind of thing.
Mom went to get a box of tissues. Sky kept crying. I sat down on the green Naugahyde chair a few feet away. I wanted to hug her, but she had drawn her knees up and hidden her face in her hands. When she did that it scared me much more than when she went into tank mode and rolled over everything.
I took a deep breath, "Sky, you have to remember that the grandmother who wore that dress was practically microscopic. The woman was five foot nothing and tiny. Maybe we have leprechauns in our family tree on our mother's side."
Sky sat with the dress crunched up around her waist, her hair covering her face, silently sobbing. I clasped my hands, helpless. Our father's side of the family was built to dig ditches and lift heavy loads, but telling her this was our sturdy peasant heritage would not comfort her. As the designated fat sister, I wasn't about to remind Sky that if she ever ate normally she might get like me.
"Come on, Sky, you remember, we used to lose track of Grandma when we were in the same room."
"That was because she was old and fell asleep all the time." Sky still clutched the antique lace handkerchief that had been packed in with the dress. She raised it to wipe her face and started to sneeze. We had moved several dusty boxes to find the one that held the wedding dress.
"Okay, I grant you, it would have been easier to keep track of Granny if she snored louder. But if you sat her down in a chair behind a lamp or something, she disappeared." I took a deep breath and risked it. "You and I are obviously big-boned while she was not."
"Oh, right, Daria. Big-boned." Sky sneezed again and Mom came in with the tissue box. "That's just an excuse."
"In this case, it's reality, Sky. You can't shrink your rib cage." That was as close as I came to the joke about taking out a few ribs. I gave up on it. I'd never be able to use it—certainly never in front of Mom, who took away the handkerchief and handed the tissues to Sky.
Mom got down on the floor next to Sky and started picking up the pearls. "We could get the dress altered," she said. "Maybe the seamstress could put in a matching lace panel."
"No, thanks, Mom. It would look funny." Sky took a deep shuddering sigh, struggled to her feet with Mom's help and started to shrug out of the dress. "It has to be perfect. I still have time. I'll find another dress." She raised her face and as her platinum blonde hair fell back, her usual expression fell into place. Tank girl was back, pleasant but unstoppable, calm but driven, a force of nature in a shiny gold package.
You would have had to look hard to see the resemblance among the three MacClellan women in that rec room. Our mother, round-faced and apple-figured, her brown hair gone mostly gray, with calm, empathetic brown eyes. If worrying ever became an Olympic event, she would be on the team. Sky, artfully blond and impossibly thin, her eyes the same dark brown but slightly sunken, with a feverish gleam. Then there was me—plus-sized and deciding to be defiant about it. Dark hair, dark eyes—dark thoughts.
© Lynne Murray