Panther at the Wedding
My best friend from childhood, Darla, was getting married back on Long Island, and I brought my now-husband, Blair, home for the wedding.
They were holding the rehearsal dinner at Darla’s mother’s house. There were a lot of people, only a few people I recognized. I had been gone a long time.
I remember Blair was wearing a bright blue button-up shirt. He was polite to everyone and made a point to introduce himself around, shaking hands with the groomsmen. I could tell they were the types who didn’t shake hands a lot. These were the kinds of guys I grew up with, who slapped each other’s backs and punched arms. They side-eyed each other when Blair spoke in his southern accent. They asked him what he did for work, and he said he taught math. He might as well have dropped a bag of shit in the middle of the room. Suddenly they were telling stories of their work. Two guys delivered for Pepsi-Co and said everyone they worked with was an asshole, but they got good benefits, and their dads had also been drivers, and it was honest work. “We’re no math teachers!” they kept saying. One guy kept daring Blair to do math in his head. Another guy bragged that he worked as a zookeeper at the Long Island Game Farm and once had to throw a chimpanzee over a fence.
Darla and I sat on the L-shaped couch for twenty minutes, mashed together and hugging each other like we were trying to catch up by becoming one body. But I could tell Blair needed some air, so he and I went for a walk.
I showed him where I used to live, a two-story condo with a rickety balcony we never used and a small fenced patio near the front door. The house numbers my father nailed to the fence were still hanging, two decades on. I had an urge to peek through the windows or try the doorknob, but I was too afraid the owners would come out and be angry.
I showed him a path that led deeper into the woods, and we sat on a bench back there. I apologized for the guys’ bravado and their rudeness. I said not all New Yorkers are like that. My parents hadn’t been like them, but Darla was the closest thing I had to a sister since everyone in my family had passed away. He said, “I didn’t mind meeting them. I wouldn’t choose them as friends, but I’m glad to have met them this time.”
I don’t know why this made me so angry. What are you saying, you wouldn’t choose them as friends? We argued the whole way back to the motel. In the morning, I went with Darla and the other bridesmaids to get our hair done. Darla drove. The floor of her car was all stamped-out cigarette butts. Her car still smelled like fried fish, the same as from when we were teenagers and she worked at Long John Silver’s. When we were at the salon, her mom pulled me aside and told me she would pay for me to have acrylic nails so I’d match the other girls in the bridal party. I told her I liked my nails short and neat. I might as well have dropped a bag of shit on her head—that is how she looked at me.
* * *
When we were teenagers, Darla and I ran in different circles. But I loved her and cherished our long friendship. We were both sentimental and remembered the tiniest of details. Even when we were young, we’d play games of “remember when.” When she called one day and said we should do something with our moms, I was excited to help make the plans. We’d go to dinner (like four adults) and then go to the local Halloween hayride (like four kids). I looked forward to that night for weeks, but when the evening arrived, she called and said she had to work a late shift at Long John Silver’s—but her mom could still go.
I didn’t know what to do, so I said okay… and her mom came with me and my mom on a Halloween hayride that was weird and awkward. Her mom screamed when a skeleton jumped out from a cornfield, and she rolled all the way across the hay bales in her puffy coat. I remember feeling so betrayed by Darla. I had wanted us to grow old and remember, together, her mom almost bouncing off the hayride that night.
* * *
On Darla’s wedding day, I arrived in my magenta bridesmaid gown with pearls in my hair and Blair on my arm. The wedding was being held in a reception hall the next town over. The lobby was like her mother’s living room, all the walls covered with mirrors. I remember there was a panther statue covered in mirror mosaic pieces glinting in the corner. And that is where Darla was taking her wedding pictures. Next to that disco ball panther. I was urging the photographer to move his setup near the pretty potted plants, and I was so focused on that, I almost didn’t notice when the groomsmen came over and started talking to Blair.
All their chests were puffed out. I could tell they were all already drunk. They were talking and Blair seemed fine, but they surrounded him in a way that made it look like he was pinned against a wall. I went over and grabbed his hand, pulled him away. I swear I don’t know what was happening there, but if I hadn’t intervened, I think they would have beaten him up.
There was a back room off the main reception hall for the bridal party to get ready. After the ceremony, Darla spent most of her time in there and not on the dance floor. I didn’t know if it was nerves or shyness—her mother had invited hundreds of people to this wedding. I don’t think Darla knew most of the people there.
She did emerge from the back room to throw her bouquet. Her new husband threw her garter, and the men in the room toppled over each other to win it. Then Darla retreated again to that little room.
I was worried about her, and I told Blair I was going to go try and see what was going on. But the DJ suddenly called the young woman who caught the bouquet to come sit in a chair in the middle of the dance floor, and the groomsman named Jimmy, who’d caught the garter, went up, and the DJ said that he had to put the garter on her, up her dress in front of the whole group.
People were shouting and hooting. It was something that I’d seen a bunch of times at weddings. I’d even been that girl once when I was fifteen years old, and I’d never thought of it as being weird before. But now I was seeing it through Blair’s eyes, and I could see that Blair was uncomfortable with it all, how Jimmy was gyrating as he slid the lace garter up the poor girl’s leg. Across from us, Jimmy’s girlfriend, a bridesmaid named Tara, was watching him perform for the audience with tears in her eyes.
When it was all over, Jimmy returned to the table, saw Tara crying, and patted her head. A waiter brought a big silver tray of cannolis dusted with powdered sugar to our table. Jimmy was high-fiving some other guys and laughing about the garter thing. Tara was furious and couldn’t let it go. They argued for a few minutes, and then he tried to feed her a cannoli. She took a bite and fed him a cannoli, dabbing a bit of the sweet cream on his nose. Then he picked up the enormous silver tray and smashed her in the face with it.
Everyone screamed and pushed back from the table at once as though it were falling through the floor. Powdered sugar was everywhere, settling like a dust cloud, and when we looked at Tara, her magenta dress was white with it. Her face was caked with icing, and you could see the path of her tears streaming down.
“No! That’s not okay!” I shouted. I had been teaching at a preschool, and that was the voice I used.
I grabbed Tara’s hand and led her to the back room where Darla had been all night. That’s when I saw her. She was standing in front of the mirror, ripping open the envelopes for her wedding cards, pulling out the checks and cash bills.
“Her boyfriend hit her with a metal canapé tray!” I shouted to Darla, who was licking her fingers and counting money.
She didn’t even look at us. She reminded me of a banker counting out cash. “I told her not to bring him,” she said.
I helped Tara clean her dress. I sat with her as she cried. I asked Darla, “What are you even doing?”
“I’ve gotta pay the DJ,” she said. “He said if we don’t, he’s just gonna stop.”
When I went back to the cream-covered table, Blair was gone.
* * *
When I was seventeen, my mother caught me with my boyfriend in my bedroom. She told him to leave the house. I was putting on my jacket to leave with him, and she said, “Diane, if you go now, you can never come back.”
She had never made a threat like that with me before. I had always been a good kid, and we had a great, close relationship. I didn’t take her seriously. So I left. I went to his house for a few hours, felt awful about the fight with her, decided in my mind to break up with him, and drove home.
The door was locked. My mother had deadbolted it, and I couldn’t even turn the knob. On the small patio, I saw she had dumped my overflowing dirty clothes hamper, my Apple IIc computer, and my flute.
I carried that humongous computer tower to Darla’s and knocked on her door. Her mother took me in without question, and I stayed with Darla and her parents for two weeks. Every morning, I would go back and try my doorknob. Every night I’d eat dinner with her parents and then sit in the living room with all the mirrors on the walls and talk with them. I slept in Darla’s bed with her. She had a poster of Patrick Swayze from Dirty Dancing on her closet door. Her beautiful black and white dog would sleep beside us on the floor, breathing like a person. I think they would have let me stay there forever, but one morning, when I tried the doorknob to my home, I was able to get inside. But yes, I think they would have let me stay with them forever.
* * *
I ran out of the reception to find Blair. Near the disco panther in the lobby, the other groomsmen were punching into their hands and saying they were going to beat Jimmy up for what he did to Tara. They couldn’t find Jimmy, but I found Blair sitting with him in our rental car, calming him down. Blair wanted to make sure he had a safe way to get home.
I was so proud and in love with Blair in that moment. He got Jimmy a cab home, then took my hand and led me back inside, where it was all slow songs for the rest of the night. The guys liked Blair after that, saying to each other that he was pretty cool-headed. Darla’s mom was smiling at me from her table. I caught a glimpse of Blair and me dancing along the mirrored back wall. I had a feeling that we’d be dancing with each other for the rest of our lives. At the end of the night, one of the groomsmen and his date approached us and asked if we wanted to have sex with them. We didn’t, but it was nice to be included like that.
Diane Zinna (@dianezinna) is the author of the novel The All-Night Sun (Random House) and Letting Grief Speak: Writing Portals for Life After Loss, a forthcoming craft book on the art of telling our hardest stories. Her short work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and appeared in Brevity, The Bellevue Literary Review, CutBank, MER, and elsewhere. Since 2020, she has led the free online class Grief Writing Sundays. Meet her there or at www.dianezinna.com.