Wedding Band
by Hana Mason
Sometimes the only thing that gets you off is the thought of your own success. That, or the thought of the neighbour coming over and taking you behind the rotting old woodshed. The housing co-op where you live, where you used to live with your aunt but now just live alone, has backyards from which you can see every other backyard. The only thing separating them is one shed every two units, and broken-down wooden trellises where in the summer sour green grapes hang down low over the balconies. You’ve never actually met your neighbour, just seen him through his window from where your shower window looks into his kitchen. You like the idea that he might be able to see back up to your bathroom. You don’t act extra sexy when you’re in there and think he might be looking, you act normal, because the idea that he’d find you acting normal sexy is more exciting than putting on some kind of performance. What you imagine is that he’s been seeing you up there in your shower, washing your hair, shaving your pits, and he likes what he sees. And one day you’re out in your backyard in a soft cotton dress, the kind no one actually wears anymore, and he comes out to the woodshed to get his lawnmower out from behind the stacks of cedar wood, and really just the idea of the smell of the cedar is enough to get you going a lot of the time. In your mind, he lifts up the hem of your soft cotton dress and says something totally tender, because always at the last minute, you need to be in love with him, too, even though for the whole rest of the fantasy the point is that you don’t even know him. If that doesn’t work you go back to imagining sold-out shows and going on tour and Juno awards and magazine covers and sometimes even the freaking Met Gala if you have to, even though all of that is sort of dumb and maybe not even something you’d want.
Once you’re finished, whether or not you finished, whether or not you got off to the neighbour or the success, there’s band practice. Before that was the morning shift and before that was a run, or at least the intention of a run. You meet the band in Joey’s garage, which you have to cut across six backyards to reach. Not everyone in the band lives in the housing co-op, just you and Joey. He was always signing up for the laundry slot you wanted so you confronted him about it and then you got to talking about music and he said he had a band, what did you play, and all of a sudden you were hanging with his weird friends in his garage every day. You became a wedding band because it was good practice learning songs fast and it paid not-not-great. You also play retirement parties and bat mitzvahs and twenty-five-year-anniversary parties and that one time a wake. There’s Joey on lead guitar and you on rhythm and Paul on bass and KFC on drums. Joey calls them KFC because they can sing and play at the same time, “like Karen Fucking Carpenter.” KFC has a real name, but no one ever calls them by it, and they seem pretty pleased with the nickname.
When you get to Joey’s place, the boys are setting up and KFC is splayed out on the nasty old couch you all rescued from the alley across from the co-op. They’re talking about how the person they were talking to three months ago ghosted them three months ago. KFC’s anger comes and goes. Really KFC’s problem is that they like to date people who don’t like to date them. Your problem is that you never seem to want to date the people who want to date you, so probably you’d be perfect for each other, except you’ve got this thing going with the neighbour and also Joey is in love with you. And Paul has said he’d leave the band if anyone started fucking, and Paul is really fucking good.
“It would be nice if he’d say he’s not into me, at least,” KFC says. “Or that they don’t have the bandwidth or whatever.”
Paul rolls his eyes. You know Paul knows that what KFC really means is that anything but a no still means maybe. Joey knows this too, but Joey probably agrees with KFC, which means at some point you’ll have to turn him down for real.
You pull your guitar out of its case and plug it in. You all let KFC go on talking because it’s better to get these things out of the way, or they start playing too fast. The guitar wasn’t always yours; it was your aunt’s. You found it in her closet when you were a kid, and she said you should try it out. She was sitting in the kitchen then, folding other people’s laundry. She did the old people’s laundry in the co-op, like John Travolta in the Hairspray movie, so the kitchen was always full of pyjamas and funky red blouses. You don’t do the old people’s laundry and you’re not sure who does instead of you. The fact you’ve all been playing that long and never had any real career wins means you’ll probably never be successful in the way your fantasies play out. But sometimes you also think about being an actress and winning an Oscar or being a writer or going to the Olympics. Like, you want to be on the cover of a magazine, for being good at something as well as being hot. You want someone to want to interview you and care what you have to say. Actually, you’re pretty happy being a receptionist/wedding band guitarist, but that’s not the kind of person anybody actually loves. Except maybe Joey, but what does he know? Once KFC is done talking and the boys have given them the right kind of pep talk and you’ve said jokingly that you’d kick the ghoster’s ass even though you’re the least likely of everyone to kick anyone’s ass, and you’ve all warmed up, practice actually begins.
There’s a wedding this weekend and they like your usual setlist of jazz standards and soft-rock ballads and something funky thrown in here and there, and they even like all the weird stuff on your repertoire that you actually like playing. The only song they requested is one none of you knew how to play, which means extra rehearsal time because you really can’t mess up someone’s first dance song. You think maybe you’ve heard the song before based on the name, but you can’t place it. Joey’s got you doing this thing where you all sight-read the tabs for the song before even listening to it, supposedly so you can all bring your unique artistry to the piece, but usually it sounds like shit. You know Joey wants you to think he’s a real artist, a real musician, that he’s got some sort of poetic about it. Like that will make you want him. When you imagine your future, that success, the band is there but none of them are real, they’re ideas. Really, you’re just an idea in the fantasy, too. Object, not subject.
You play through the song and realize you do know it from somewhere, actually you’ve played it before, when your aunt was first teaching you to play, years and years ago but not actually long enough ago that you should have forgotten, in the kitchen with the door to the backyard open, sour green grapes in a bowl on the table, guitar in your lap, fingertips still soft and your nails too long. Plunky and awkward then, seamless but not-quite-right now. KFC is still going too fast and Joey yells out rushing and they slow down and everything clunks into place, and for a minute you stop picturing your aunt at her kitchen table with the grapes or how one of these days Joey’s gonna ask you out for real or how it’s started raining so your trek back home through the backyards will be all muddy, or how there’s probably something wrong with you even if you can’t quite put your finger on it. You picture the people getting married doing their first dance, how probably they’ll take it really seriously at first but then they’ll catch themselves taking it really seriously and start laughing, which you’ve never done when you catch yourself taking something really seriously and probably is the sort of thing you can only do when someone really, really loves you, and how when the song ends they’ll be hugged up close to each other and won’t let go right after the song ends, they’ll keep on holding each other for a minute, even though they have the rest of their lives to just hold each other for a minute.
When you get home there’s a notice on your door from the housing co-op management about your last cheque bouncing and how anyway you haven’t been coming to the meetings enough. What this really means is that your aunt’s money is out, the post-dated cheques drawing from nothing. You email management to switch your payments to e-transfer and do the mental math. You can pay rent for a few months more, but you’ll probably need a roommate after that. Your aunt left you all that money so you could keep living in the house, but she didn’t say how long she’d be gone when she went off-grid with her boyfriend who used to be the neighbour before the neighbour moved in, and you haven’t heard from her since. Sometimes you pretend she’s dead, because that would be better than if she’d just abandoned you, but sometimes you think the fact you think you’re pretending she’s dead is foolish and protecting yourself from the truth which is probably that her off-grid boyfriend took her off-grid to drown her in a lake or something.
You tear up the notice which is printed on this stupid purple printer paper then head up for a shower. The neighbour’s kitchen is all covered in tulle and flowers and there’s a woman in there you’ve never seen before. The neighbour is packing the flowers and tulle into boxes and the woman is drinking water from the biggest water bottle you’ve ever seen, and the water is yellowish like it’s got powdered electrolytes in it, and it’s stupid but that yellow electrolyte water is what makes you realize that she’s a bride, that’s what the tulle and flowers are for, that actually you may have just been practicing their first-dance song, because you and Joey put up fliers for the band in the laundry room. All this really puts you off the idea of him seeing you up in the bathroom, really makes you uncomfortable for the wife. You look down at your body and you’re repulsed, the bareness of it, the very fact of your flesh, soapy and goose-pimpled and actually positioned just so, not necessarily to be sexy but to be seen. You resolve to put a screen up or something.
At the wedding KFC isn’t angry anymore, actually they talked to the person that ghosted them and got whatever one might consider a reasonable explanation/apology/hopeful maybe and you’re all relieved because it really was messing with your groove. Joey is hanging around you so close like he always does at the weddings maybe waiting for you to realize that it’s really romantic, coming to all these weddings together always wearing nice outfits and whatever. Because you know now you don’t actually have anything going with the neighbour you consider it for a moment, but if you actually dated Joey you’d have to start seeing him like a real person all the time, even in your fantasies about success, and you’d have to let yourself be seen like a real person. You prefer the removed version of yourself from your daydreams, who doesn’t and won’t ever exist, like how now you’re secretly thinking how great it would be if one of the guests was like an agent or something, even though they won’t be and also you do like your life the way that it is. You feel like if you got famous it would really show people, but you aren’t sure which people you’d want to show. Paul sometimes looks at you like he can read your mind and now you make eye contact, and he nods like, yeah, going out with Joey would be a mistake, so you nod back and enjoy for a moment the idea of the absolute chaos that would occur if you fucked Paul instead.
It turns out it is the neighbour’s wedding. Things like this make you feel like you can tell the future, like you’re really so intuitive. Some people would believe they’d manifested it, brought it on themselves, but that shit’s not real. If it was, you’d be famous by now. Intuition is real, like how you know you’ll never be famous and never stop living in the co-op, and how you know one of these days Joey is gonna try to kiss you, and that your aunt isn’t dead but she’s never coming home either.
For the first few songs you think KFC is rushing again but at the break Paul says no it’s you, you’re dragging. He puts a hand on your shoulder and makes you look him in the eyes, and Joey’s over his shoulder looking so forlorn you shake him off.
“What’s up with you tonight,” Joey asks. You all pretend to be tuning your instruments so you can catch your breath.
“I think the wedding thing is getting old,” Paul says.
“I could have told you that,” KFC says. “It gets so nihilistic.” You’re not sure they know what that word means but you’re all nodding like you agree and maybe you do.
“Okay,” Joey says. “No more weddings.”
“No more weddings,” Paul says.
“No more weddings,” KFC says. “People in love can go fuck themselves.”
Turns out the couple didn’t want the new song for a first dance they wanted it for a last dance. So they take it pretty seriously, actually, and just hold each other the whole way through, and now that you can see the neighbour’s face you can see how handsome he is and you can see the look on it when he looks at her while they hold each other, which suggests that something tragic and long happened before they could get down the aisle, but now they’re here and so in love it’s actually kind of nauseating you and you think you’ll never be able to get off to the neighbour or anything to do with music again so things are about to get extremely tense. KFC is rushing again. The couple doesn’t notice, no one does. You just play the song, and they dance and so many of the guests are crying and you think you must be too because you have to close your eyes to get through the song. Now that you never have to do this again, you find it pretty beautiful, the whole loving-someone-and-being-loved thing. Fuck.
Instead of practice, the band comes over to help trim the grape vines and you pick all the grapes till the vines are bare and KFC thinks they can figure out how to make wine. You put all the grapes into a big tin bucket you found in the woodshed, and they wash them with the garden hose, and you all take turns drinking from the sweet hose water. Once the grapes are washed you sit in the grass in the backyard and eat them. The wine was just an idea.
Paul says something that makes Joey laugh so hard he chokes on his grapes which gets KFC going. The sun is low in the sky but it's still warm outside and all your friends are laughing. Paul plays a new riff on his acoustic guitar, hums a melody. You write down the tabs as he plays them. The neighbour and his wife are away on their honeymoon, so Joey mows their lawn for them. You watch him go into the woodshed and pull out the mower, and the scent of cedar follows him. Paul hands you a beer with that mind-reading look again, but maybe, you think, he’s not reading your mind, he’s just seeing you.
ABOUT THE CREATOR
Hana Mason is an MFA student at the University of Victoria, where she also received her BFA. While at UVic, she served as Managing Editor and later Editor-in-Chief of This Side of West, and is a founding editor of Over/Exposed Lit. Her fiction and poetry have been published in various literary magazines, including Little Fiction, Riddle Fence, Carousel, carte blanche, and Room. You can find her on Twitter @hanamasonwrites.