Joan Corwin



Gone Missing

The first thing to go missing was the lace. Thirty-nine yards, direct from Belgium, from the strangely deft fingers of old women, crocheting by the light of windows overlooking the Dender. The fillets were so fine that the dressmaker had to wear gloves while working them. But none of that meant anything now—it had all gone missing. Elyse's mother and grandmother, aunts and family friends had chipped in. Not with money. It was too late for that, for ordering anything except ready-made, which was unacceptable to her. So it was her mother's veil, the edging from Aunt Lucy's train (stitched temporarily to her own), Aunt Dodie's collar, Aunt Evie's over-skirt, Grammy's cuffs. All of Elyse's bridal lace would now do for Something Borrowed, Something Old. And while it made her feel like patchwork, old lace, even mismatched old lace like this, was better than settling for something inferior at the last minute.
     Matt, who was not the groom, found it funny. Her father had brought Matt to her mother's house. Her father himself was only there on her mother's sufferance—to give the bride away—and was drunk most of the time. There might have been a scene, over the drink, over Matt, but the two men managed to avoid Elyse's mother as she swept this way and that, followed by a retinue of caterers, florists, dressmakers, who made a buzzing cloud around her when she paused. Elyse had no idea where Matt slept, but there was never a moment when she didn't sense him in the house.
     "Old women…" Matt laughed, when she told him, "…and lace. Oh, 'Lee-zee." Laughing, he threw his head back and closed his eyes and his dense hair hung behind him and she could see the black stubble where his razor missed. But he touched her arm when she tried to go. And he dried her tears with the tail of his shirt, his best, Elyse knew, his silver-grey, which he washed, she knew this, too, by hand every night and ironed in the morning, so that he would be wearing it when he saw her again, over jeans.
     Evan, who was the groom, did not laugh. "Poor darling," he said to her when they talked that night, cell-phone-to-cell-phone, she in her old bedroom in her mother's house. She wouldn't sleep with him the whole week before the wedding. It would have been unlucky. She wouldn't use the house phones for fear of someone listening in.
     "Someone is always whispering," she complained, "and giggling."
     "They are just jealous." Evan always said the right thing. Held doors, chairs. Hailed cabs. His timing was impeccable. She made herself see him in her mind. The hairs on his arms were translucent, and his lashes. She knew the underside of his chin, too, he was so tall. Racquet-ball slim. Eyes—blue, of course. Light hair (blond in the sun), an executive trim. Widow's peak—but he didn't have a widow's peak. A wry smile, but no, he had no irony about him.
     The giggling grew loudest when her mother appeared, but her mother was too occupied to notice it, or was growing old. "There," Elyse would interrupt her mother, holding up a finger, "do you hear?" Her mother would frown. The caterer would steal a glance at the florist. No one would claim to hear what her mother could not.

The next to vanish were the tiny dark tortoise-shell hair combs. Elyse had discovered them in a boutique in San Francisco. Each only two thirds of an inch long, with one glistening diamond chip at its center. She'd bought them all—three dozen, at $27.00 apiece, while the store clerk struggled vainly to empty the shock from his eyes. She designed the upsweep herself, two hours to dress, in soft layers of her auburn hair, to suggest twinkling stars, constellations of them, the depths of the universe, in heavy tresses buoyed halo-like around her face.
     Now they were gone, the stars . . .