Frank was a paunchy, middle-aged guy in a too-tight pharmacist’s smock. “Y’all got your license?” Ben presented the paperwork, and Frank glanced over it disinterestedly. “All right, then. Let’s get started. Doris, you wanna witness?”
Doris, the lady in the half-glasses, presented Lily with a bouquet of red plastic carnations — the kind that would decorate graves in a cemetery near a trailer park. “A bride needs a bouquet,” the old lady said, beaming.
And a blushing bride Lily was, with a baby in one arm and a tacky plastic bouquet in the other, wearing her Good Vibrations T-shirt, cutoff Levi’s, and Doc Martens. If there were a magazine called Postmodern Bride, she would be its cover girl.
“Ben McGilly, do you take this woman, Lily Fox, to be your lawful wedded wife, to have and to hold, in sickness and in health, as long as you both shall live?” Frank droned. Clearly this ceremony was no more magical for him than it was for the bride and groom.
“Sure, okay,” Ben said. “I do.”
“Lily Fox, do you take this man, Ben McGilly. ...” While Frank finished his litany, Lily’s eyes wandered to a nearby display shelf where she saw a box marked MEDICATED DOUCHE. When Frank finished the as-long-as-you-both-shall-live bit, Lily replied, “I...I douche,” and collapsed in a fit of nervous giggles.
“Then you may kiss the bride.” Frank apparently hadn’t even heard her joke. Heterosexuals were a humorless lot, Lily decided.
Ben leaned over to kiss Lily’s cheek, but she turned so he caught her on the lips. He was the one who had said they had to make this look real, after all. The kiss was completely bland, like pecking an old aunt’s powder-scented jowl.
“Smile!” Doris said after their perfunctory kiss. She snapped a Polaroid of the three of them. Mimi was chewing on the plastic bridal bouquet. Doris handed the Polaroid to Ben. “Something to show your grandchildren.”
“Thanks.” Lily threw the god-awful snapshot in the trash as soon as they were out of the store.
“That was certainly romantic,” Lily muttered, strapping a complaining Mimi into her car seat. “It’s okay, honey,” she cooed to the little girl, “you won’t be in your nasty old car seat much longer, I promise.”
Ben started the car. “So ... ready to go meet the in-laws?”
“Why not? Might as well make this day as surrealistic as possible.” Today had been like a dream for Lily, though not in the sense that bubbly straight girls might say their wedding day was like a dream.
Just like in her dreams, today Lily had been performing one bizarre action after another, and as in the dream world, no matter how bizarre her actions were, she had no choice but to perform them.
Ben drove them into the rolling hill country outside of Versailles, where the only businesses were the beautiful working farms and the ugly corrugated aluminum buildings that housed textile companies.
Ben slowed down when they passed one of these buildings. “Well,” he said, “there’s the source of the fortune you just married into.”
The slate-blue aluminum building hardly looked like the source of a family fortune. On the building’s side was a block-lettered sign reading THE CONFEDERATE SOCK MILL. Next to the lettering was a line drawing of a cartoon Confederate soldier, who resembled a Civil War-era Beetle Bailey, leaning against a cannon, asleep in his sock feet. “Well...” Lily searched desperately for something to say.
“I know it doesn’t look like much,” Ben said. “But we do an incredible international business. You see, back when he was playing sports in high school, Daddy got frustrated because he couldn’t find any socks that didn’t start sagging after several washings. So after he graduated from technical school, he developed a special kind of elastic and patented it.
