The problem, of course, was the cake.
The trouble began early one chilly afternoon a few days before Christmas in 1986. We’d all gathered at St. Aloysius Church with the groom’s parents and his five siblings for a couple of hours of pre-wedding torture known as Wedding Photo Time. The idea was to get the pictures out of the way early in order to enjoy an afternoon ceremony and evening reception. It was a simple misunderstanding, really. Margaret thought she would get wedding cake after the wedding photos were over. She did not understand that the pictures came first, and then we sat around in scratchy taffeta, freezing our asses off in the unheated church basement in the middle of winter, waiting for the wedding to start. Then came the two-hour ceremony in a frigid, cavernous church. After that we went to the reception and went through the niceties of the receiving line, heartfelt speeches, and special dances. THEN came the cake. This was just too much information for my sister; I’ve come to believe that it’s too much information for anybody, really.
As this miscommunication unfolded, we were about in the middle of the grueling picture-taking process. There we were, seven Garvins and eight Modarellis in our new shoes and nice clothes being poked and prodded and repositioned by the grouchy photographer, who was wearing way too much Old Spice. Our families barely knew each other, and here we all were, crowded shoulder to shoulder, just hours before the ceremony that would clinch the lifelong union of the oldest children. It was awkward, but just in that regular wedding way. The tension mounted to an irregular level when it became clear that Margaret was winding herself up for a supreme blowout.
She made it through the pictures with a few tears here and there, asking where in the hell the cake was. And then she simply came undone, throwing herself on the floor of the church, kicking and screaming in her beautiful maroon taffeta dress that our mother had stitched by hand. “You want cake and punch! You want cake and punch! Cake! And! Punch! Noooooooo!” She rolled around on the floor in front of everyone, banging the sturdy plastic handle of her bridesmaid’s bouquet at our feet. “Noooooooooo! You want CAKE AND PUNCH! Ahhhhhhhhhhh! Nooooooooooooooooo!”
This was pretty much what my brothers and I had been waiting for all day; we knew it was just a matter of time before Margaret lost her grip. But I will never forget the silent horror on the Modarelli kids’ faces. I mean, who yells in church? Who pounds her dyed-to-match satin pumps against the marble altar steps? Who kicks and screams and throws her legs over her head so you can see the white crotch of her pantyhose? My sister, that’s who.
When it became clear that she was not going to calm down in the next half hour, let alone make it through the service, my mother announced that she would take Margaret home, and nearly missed the wedding of her firstborn. Happily, a kind friend of Ann’s stepped up and volunteered to take Margaret to her place and hang out with her until the wedding was over. Meg somehow managed to coax Margaret out of the church and into her car. The rest of us started breathing again, pulled ourselves together, and soldiered on, because that’s what you do at a wedding. Ann and Rob suffered the minor awkwardness of having an extra groomsman at the altar, but I doubt anyone even remembers that.
In later years, I couldn’t remember if Margaret actually made it to the reception, because I had been too busy getting drunk in preparation for my big throw-up scene. So I recently asked Ann, and she confirmed that Margaret had, in fact, made it to the party. “Oh, yes. Yes, she did. She had CAKE! AND! PUNCH! Mom said she had such a good time that her nylons were in shreds by the time she got home,” Ann said, adding “I have no idea what that means.”
BY THE TIME I got married, twelve years later, I’d had a lot of time to think about what to do about Margaret. I knew that I had to approach this situation assuming that something would probably go wrong, and with great gusto. But I wanted Margaret to come, and that was just fine with Brendan, who was so overwhelmed with the complications of planning a wedding that he just said yes to everything and then left the country for two months. However, in an attempt to learn from history, I thought it might be useful to decrease my mother’s status as a flight risk. So I suggested that one of the staff members who worked at Margaret’s group home come along and be her date. That suited everybody just fine.
Felicia drove Margaret to Seattle from Spokane and the two of them shared a motel room at the same place everyone else was staying. Felicia brought my big sister to a party we had the day before we got married, and the two of them did some sightseeing on their own. They even came together to an impromptu ladies-only breakfast the day of the wedding, and because Felicia was in charge of Margaret, I got to visit with my mother and Ann without worrying about which one of us was going to have to leave the table and deal with Margaret if she decided to chuck her French toast
