My cousin got to stand in the middle of the couch and sing the solo in the Bonnie Raitt song “Something to Talk About.” We have it on tape. I was incensed. She is four months younger than me and is always getting the better end of the deal. She’s getting married in a month.
I was always jealous of her. She was taller and tanner and skinnier and blonder and she liked to shop and I didn’t, which made my mother mad. She danced and tapped and wore pretty handmade dresses and makeup. Her pictures were on my grandmother’s refrigerator, her in satiny green gowns with bright blush and mascara dripping off her eyes. I counted the pictures, to see if there was an even number of her and me on the fridge. I rearranged the frames in the living room, shoving her and her brother’s to the back. I hated her when she picked out the best of our cousin’s makeup or when she got the better party favor.
In the summer, we would go to the beach with our families and stay in a house on the bay. The floor was gritty with sand and the bed that we shared was scratchy and there were roaches that made me yell. We wore matching outfits and played UNO and sat in the rocking chairs on the screened porch and swung in the hammock. We set off bottle rockets, jumped off the pier and I was scared of creatures in the water and pinecones so I wore my swimshoes. She could walk barefoot on the gravel.
When I was eleven I would swear all the time and she and her brother were surprised. I was bossy and demanded to be the best characters when we played pretend. We ran through her house playing laser tag on the stairs and in the attic. I went with her to church and sang in the children’s plays. We slept in a tent in the living room and I had to go home in the middle of the night because I was homesick.
In high school she was always buying dresses for dances and had pictures with her dates and was in beauty pageants. She taught the little children at church and hung out there with her friends. I was at a different school far away. I didn’t like going to church. But when we would visit, I would cry as we left.
I met her boyfriend one summer when we were swimming at her house. We played tennis with him and visited him on his lunch break from cutting lawns and she talked about him all the time. She was at church more and more. He was going to be a preacher. She wouldn’t listen to the radio anymore because she thought it was vulgar and I had to watch my mouth around her. We didn’t like the same movies and she didn’t like to read. I would walk in her room and stare at the pictures covering the walls, of her and him together.
She didn’t like college and she missed him. I was busy and we never talked. One day she called and asked if I had heard the news. I knew, but I denied it. She said she thought I would have heard. She was getting married. She’s nineteen. She never asked me to be in the wedding, it was always assumed that I knew I would be.
I tried on my bridesmaid dress last week. It is black with pink at the bottom. She helped with the fitting and told me I could get my hair done with her. I saw the gifts piled on her dining room table, crystal cake platters and vases and lingerie spilling into the kitchen. I brought her punch while she stood in the receiving line, smiling at all the old ladies congratulating her. I drove with her to get her makeup done for her wedding pictures. I helped lace up her dress and watched the photographer joke with her. That night we went to get Blizzards at the Dairy Queen.
In a month she’ll be married. She’ll live in a real house all her own and have to cook and clean and be a wife. When I stand beside her at the front of the church it will be surreal and I will watch her and wonder what it’s like.
Kathryn King is a sophomore in the School of Foreign Service. The only one who could ever reach her was the son of a preacher man.
