Don't Sweat the Petty

Excerpt from How Other People Make Love by Thisbe Nissen by permission of Wayne State University Press. © 2021 by Thisbe Nissen.

They dispatched Georgia to fetch the best man. The midwestern humidity was relentless; she fiddled futilely with the car’s non-functional AC controls. Best man John Smith had flown in from California to Iowa on the same flight as the groom’s father, stepmother, and half sisters—über-blonde seventeen-year-old triplets, each more gorgeous than the last—and Georgia had to wait in Will and Carolina’s old Subaru with the blinkers on while John lingered outside the baggage claim flirting shamelessly. The girls were only a few years younger than Georgia but made her feel particularly spinsterly as she watched them chitchatting in the rearview mirror.

Finally, John bid them all an obsequious farewell and made his way toward the Subaru. He tossed in both his backpack and himself with exaggerated desperation. “They’re still driving this piece of shit?”

“Guess so,” Georgia said.

“I’m John.” He flashed a quick, toothy smile, his eyes still on the blondes being herded into the back seat of a rental car by their impatient and overheated mother. “Groom’s best friend, best man, best all around.”

Georgia shook his hot hand. “Georgia,” she said. “Baby sister of the bride.”

“Ah!” John sighed. “Caro . . . a bride!” He fluttered a palm dramatically to his heart. “How long do I still have to steal her away from this Will guy?” He stared out at the landscape in dismay.

Georgia glanced at the dashboard clock. “About twenty-seven hours.” Will and Carolina had been together since boarding school, eleventh grade.

“Well, let’s get going . . .” John’s voice was mournfully resigned. He made no move to put on his seatbelt. “There is truly nothing here . . . That’s fucking incredible. Nothing.”

Georgia started up the engine. John still made no motion to strap himself in. She waited another moment, then finally reached over, grabbed the buckle of his safety belt, and secured it herself. He succumbed without resistance.

They pulled out of the airport turnaround and onto the two-lane highway. “That’s not true anyhow,” Georgia said. She’d arrived the day before, surprised to find herself quite taken with the endless rolling green, and now directed John’s gaze to one side of the car and then the other. “The tall stuff is corn, the short stuff is soybeans, anything else is a cow.”

“Man, I don’t know how they’re making it . . .”

They drove in silence.

“No,” John said suddenly, emphatically. “Now I’m in love with Will’s sister.”

Georgia shook her head. “You mean the triplets? Walter and Regina’s girls? They’re Will’s half sisters,” she told him. John was Will’s best friend; that he did not know Will’s relation to the triplets was virtually inconceivable.

“Whatever,” said John.

“Which one?” asked Georgia.

“The gorgeous one.”

“Justine.” The gorgeous one was what Will and Carolina called her too.

“Justine . . .”

A school bus stopped on the road ahead of them, its lights flashing, and Georgia braked cautiously. A child jumped from the steps and scampered down a dirt road of rust-eaten mailboxes. The bus door slid closed and the driver continued on. Georgia could never remember the exact rule about passing school busses. She followed at a respectable distance.

In the passenger seat, John bounced his legs like a hyperactive teenager. And then suddenly, like he was under attack, he flung his arms in front of his face for protection. “Holy fucking shit!”

Georgia concentrated on not driving off the road. She tried not to panic. “What?” she demanded.

“Look.” John pointed desperately at the bus’s back window, pointing and punching the air with his finger.

Georgia craned to see. “What? I can’t . . . what are you seeing?”

“Someone just passed a machine gun across the aisle of that school bus! There’s a fucking AK-47 in there—this is where it happens. Out here in the middle of nowhere, on a goddamn school bus!”

“Je-sus,” Georgia said. “Paranoid much?”

John looked sheepish. “Maybe it was an umbrella . . .” He shook his head. “Man, this is going to be more than I can handle.”

“You haven’t been here before, I take it?”

John shook his head again. He and Will had been college roommates in California, an odd couple but fiercely devoted to one another. Will was the hippie, the intellectual: mild-mannered and bitterly funny when he got a few beers in him. John was the playboy, the showman who’d gone on to Hollywood, “The Industry.” He waited tables for a living and had landed, in the two years since college, a walk-on bit on Friends and the lead in someone’s undergrad thesis at USC—a ten-minute film about date rape, Jesus, and goldfish. John was good-looking, irresponsible and neurotic, a guy who showed up at college parties not with the usual six-pack of Rolling Rock, but bearing whatever he appeared to have found in the house: unshelled peanuts he’d dumped into an empty marshmallow bag and secured with a twist tie, half a block of cheddar cheese Will had bought to make nachos the week before, an open liter of Coke. But Will spoke of John with the greatest affection, and Georgia felt inadequately prepared for the mess of nerves she was now chauffeuring through the Iowa farmland.

John gazed out the window at the passing cornfields. “That’s cool,” he conceded. “The way the wind makes the corn look like waves, like water . . .”

Georgia turned off the paved road and a cloud of dust bloomed in the car’s wake. They passed a dilapidated farmhouse, its old stone silo looming like a lighthouse.

“It’s fucking In Cold Blood wherever you look,” John said.

“Don’t say that around my mother,” Georgia advised. “She gets upset.”

“Fucking Children of the Corn . . .”

Rocks banged the car’s underbelly, then rolled off into the ditch. A bullet-pocked sign for FUNK’S Fertilizer bent backward as if pummeled by a heavy wind. Snagged in the cornstalks, a white plastic bag shivered as they passed. John said it looked like a bride’s veil, lost as she fled the altar and disappeared into the corn.

The weekend forecast—“Thank god for small favors,” said the bride’s mother—was not for rain. It was, in fact, for sun. Lots of it. “Lows in the eighties,” said the weatherman. “Highs in the upper nineties, humidity bringing the heat indices up to a hundred and five.” It was an amazing thing about the Midwest, Georgia thought: they had real people on the news. The anchor was overweight, in a flowered dress and big, round purple-framed eyeglasses. The sports guy looked like he’d set his beer down backstage and slipped into his suit as an afterthought. The weatherman smiled a gap-toothed smile and wiped the back of his hand across his forehead as though he too, in that air-conditioned studio in Cedar Rapids, were subject to the dramatic heat.

“Join us for our wedding”—Carolina laughed—“in hell.”

They held the ceremony and reception in an 1883 octagonal barn that felt more like a cathedral than a hay loft, shards of colored light filtering in through a stained glass cupola at the peak of its great arching dome. The buffet was nestled in beds of melting ice that dripped from old horse troughs and streamed across the sawdusty stable floor. It was six in the evening and the temperature hadn’t dropped below ninety-five. In an attempt to compensate, the bride’s parents, Jake and Genevieve Oster- man, had gone and rented four enormous fans from an industrial supply company in Cedar Rapids.

“My wife wants me playing god,” Jake boomed. “I’m supposed to regulate the outdoor temperature.” From a table by the corncrib he kept up the hollering even as Carolina’s Grandpa Harry stood to make a toast. “He’s going to make the same damn speech he gave at my wedding thirty years ago!” Jake shouted.

“Thirty-one,” his wife corrected.

“You betcha I am.” Grandpa Harry was a fiscally conservative son of a bitch, with eyebrows like great clumps of alfalfa sprouts that small children were often unable to refrain from grabbing onto and yanking gleefully. He cleared his throat. “When I married my beautiful wife”—he gestured to Grandma Maxine, who waved away the attention, batting her eyelashes modestly—“my own father, rest his soul, had a few pieces of advice for me. He said there are two things you need to check before you go and pledge the rest of your life to this woman: her teeth and her brassiere straps. Now, we’ve already taken care of the orthodontia—look at that beautiful smile!” He stuck a hand in Carolina’s direction. She and Will were curled on a hay bale, grinning and sweating. “And just in case your old ones are getting ratty”—Grandpa Harry reached into the inner pocket of his suit coat, which he’d only put back on to make the toast and which was already soaked through with sweat, pulled out a damp envelope, and handed it to Carolina—“there’s a little something to get yourself some new skivvies.”

“It’s the same goddamn speech he made at our wedding,” Jake kept saying.

And Grandma Maxine said, “His father really told him those things, you know. A real bastard, my father-in-law, god rest . . . And now, who’s the one with dentures, Harry? Who’s the one without a real tooth left in his head?”

The barn smelled of hay and sweat and sweet hydrangea. By sundown everyone had shed shoes, socks, ties, even shirts. The temperature dropped a few blessed degrees. Cake was cut and served. Grandma Maxine pushed aside her plate and leaned provocatively over from the next table.

“Georgie,” she said. “How’s my Georgie these days? There’s a man in your life, my beauty?” She nudged her head toward John as he headed out the barn door.

“Not exactly, Grandma.”

Maxine’s eyes lit at the intimation of intrigue. “Oh there is someone, now, isn’t there? Come on, Georgie, make an old woman’s day. Who’s your fella?”

“No fella, Gram. Sorry.”

“No? A beautiful girl like you should have a companion. Now, I know someone, maybe you’d like him . . . ? A man from the synagogue, very clean . . . You’d like me to introduce you, maybe . . . ?”

Georgia was exhausted. She felt like a boiled turnip. “Actually I already have a companion.”

Maxine’s mouth opened in an O of joy. “You’re holding out on me, Georgie! Come, tell me about your friend . . .”

Georgia sighed. “Maybe when you get a little more liberal, Grandma . . .”

“What’s not liberal? I voted for Gore . . .”

Georgia chuckled again. “A little more open-minded then . . .”

Maxine’s face froze. She leaned closer, laid a hand on Georgia’s arm, and spoke as though wary of spies. She said, “He’s not a Jew?”

“Not a Jew,” Georgia repeated. “Not even a he, Gram.”

Maxine’s brow furrowed in confusion. “A girl?” she said, and then her eyes widened in surprise.

Georgia nodded. So this was how it felt to come out to your grandmother. She’d gone too far to backtrack now. “She’s British. I met her when I studied in London last spring. She’s in med school there.”

Maxine’s eyebrows shot up, her chin drew back into the folds of her neck, and her face spread in pleasure. “Oh,” she said. “A doctor!”