My Best Man by Andy Schell (unputdownable books .txt) 📗

or whatever they ordered. The black waiters, in their white waiter’s jackets, keep the water glasses and the wineglasses filled. A trio plays in the background. And Winston compliments my grandmother for the third time this evening only this time he adds a little fire. “Grammie, that’s such a lovely silk blouse. Alacrity has been eyeing it all night. You’ll have to leave it to her in your will.” My mother slams her knife on her plate.

Grammie smiles and tells Winston, “Maybe I will.”

Amity jumps right in. “I do love silk, Mrs. Ford,” she says to my grandmother, “but I’m not interested in taking the clothes off anybody’s back unless it’s coming directly from the silkworm itself!”

Everybody laughs, including Winston with a forced sotto prof undo

“Actually, silkworms aren’t worms at all,” Amity explains, buoyantly still afloat after Winston’s shot across the bow. “They’re caterpillars. We just refer to them as silkworms.”

“I never knew that,” my grandmother says. “And I’ve been all the way to Japan to buy a kimono robe.” “I remember that robe,” Aunt Shirley chimes in. ‘

blue with yellow swans on a river. Pagodas in the background.”

“How lovely,” Amity says. “Did you know it takes about thousand silkworms to make a kimono?”

Everyone is charmed. They’re all looking to Amity now, enjoying her trivia. Winston is rolling his eyes and cutting his meat. “Go on, Calamity. Tell us more,” he snivels.

“They’re little eating machines, y’all. They have to their body weight ten thousand times during their lives and only live about twenty-eight days!”

“So do some girlfriends,” Winston digs.

“Like Patty?” I ask, poking him back.

My mother steers the conversation back to Amity. “What do silkworms eat?”

“Ham hocks and grits?” Winston spouts with a bad Southern accent.

“They just love mulberry leaves,” Amity chirps, ignoring Winston

“Don’t we all,” Winston chirps back.

“A little known fact is that they’re very fragile,” Amity states, no longer ignoring Winston but looking pointedly at him. “Anything can upset a freshly hatched worm: the bark of a dog, the crow of a cock, a foul smell.” She’s labeling Winston as she goes.

“What about a female dog?” Winston asks, striking right back.

“Oh, I’m sure she could upset a worm,” Amity replies, “if she put her mind to it.”

Aunt Shirley takes an off ramp from the Competition Highway. “What about a horrible singer?”

Everyone laughs as the small trio with a female vocalist labors on the far side of the room. Aunt Shirley, with her wickedly caustic wit, nearly collapses with laughter as the off-key vocalist hits a dreadfully wrong note while butchering “Fly Me to the Moon.” Her slack tempo and dull ear betray an obvious overdose of Valium.

“She’s got to be deaf,” my aunt wheezes with laughter. “She ought to just sign the words.”

“Mother,” Ellie, her oldest daughter, scolds. Ellie is home for summer break from law school at Tulane.

“For God’s sake, it sounds like she’s singing “Drive Me to the Moon,” ” Aunt Shirley counters.

Mary, her other daughter, who was studying English literature at Sarah Lawrence, but scandalously dropped out to open her own bookstore in Boston, comes to her mother’s defense. “She is pretty awful.”

“Wait till she scats,” my aunt chokes, practically falling into her plate. “Let’s write a request on a napkin and make her sing really fast.”

We’re all laughing now. Thinking of fast songs.

” “Fascinating Rhythm,” ” I suggest.

” “Anything Goes,” “Amity says, scoring a winning laugh from the gallery.

“The Theme from HR Puffinstuff.t” Mary adds.

I’ll bet no one’s ever requested that before,” my uncle Jack contends.

“Why not request something really hard to sing like an aria from an opera?” Winston suggests, ever the wicked one.

“Good idea,” Aunt Shirley says, laughing harder still, tears pooling in her eyes.

Donald doesn’t really understand our family’s humor, and he tries to defend the poor gal. “I don’t think she’s that bad. Why not let her do what she’s prepared?”

Boos and hisses ensue, and everyone strikes him down. My mother comes to his defense. She never questions him, but we know she secretly enjoys the game because she’s secretly still one of us.

Winston, to impress Amity, snaps his fingers and condescendingly summons a black waiter. We all cringe at his manner, but we know he always addresses the help in this way, and we’re used to it. He requests a cocktail napkin and a pen.

“What’s a good aria?” he asks.

“The one from Madame Butterfly,” Aunt Shirley suggests.

“And make her sing it in G sharp.”

“What does it sound like?” Brad asks.

Silence. Then a couple feeble attempts to hum it.

“We all know what it sounds like,” Winston dismisses.

“I’ll sing a little,” Amity offers, smiling wickedly at Winston.

My mother is overly impressed. “You will?”

“Sing us a little!” Donald cries.

“Yes,” Uncle Jack agrees.

“But sing it quietly, so she can’t hear you,” Aunt Shirley cautions, referring to the legit singer.

Winston looks pissed off. Amity has stolen his thunder.

She sings twenty seconds of the aria. She’s soft and has no vibrato, but she sings it evenly and on-key.

Everyone applauds. Everyone but Winston.

After dinner, Winston quickly volunteers to take my grandmother home I assume to accomplish two things: remove himself from “Amity Night” and ingratiate himself further with Grandmother in order to receive more in her will. The rest of us stay behind and make our way to the piano bar. My family has always been too stuffy to indulge themselves with drunken, off-key singing while sipping cordials, as a few select families do after dinner. But having Amity among us has made the evening a very special occasion, and everyone seems years younger and somehow more childlike around her.

After a few songs like “I Left My Heart In San Francisco,” which Brad changed to “I Left My Harp In Sam’s Clam Disco,” and “Guantanamera,” which everyone modified to “One Ton Tomato,” Amity leads everyone in her favorite little song the “Bee I Go, Bee I Go, Bee I Bicky Go, Bee I Go, Bicky By Go Boo.” Or something like that. It’s from a scene in a Three Stooges movie. We’re all