I’m observing (and sometimes being) a woman staying at a friend’s vacation cabin in a small town. She leaves to take a bike ride in the dusk. When she returns, three other women friends of her friend are sitting on the treated railroad ties that serve as edging for the gravel path. They say hello, and nicely ask how long she’s staying. She thinks they should get a turn in the cabin, too, so she says, “I think I’m moving to another place tonight.” These women will all be bridesmaids in the cabin-owning friend’s wedding the following evening.
She goes inside and the phone rings. (Now it becomes mostly me.) It’s our bride-to-be friend, asking me to arrange for the band; she’s heard of a great guitar duo out of L.A. Can I get them? “I’ll give them a call,” I reply. She materializes on the gravel path to give me the money to pay them, wearing a Jackie Kennedy-style pastel pink suit and pillbox hat. She hands me a $410 dollar bill, which I fold and put in my pocket. Then she’s gone and I think that with only 24 hours’ advance booking, the duo’s airfare is going to be much higher than usual. I pull the bill back out to look at it and am relieved to see that two more of them are attached to it end-to-end, accordion-style.
I need to go downtown to make the arrangements. Another member of the wedding party, a man, drives me there in a convertible; we stop in front of a store that is more like a display. There is no front wall; the entire shop consists of a mock kitchen counter with a built-in Tokero range. (That’s the name printed on the wall above it, anyway.) I’m a bit disappointed. “This is all there is?” I ask of no one in particular. But there IS something else–in my hand I’m now holding a white object about the size of a playing card, half an inch thick, that has a tiny lens in the center front. I’m pretty sure it’s a camera, but can find no shutter release button, no zoom toggle, no controls of any kind; only a bit of small print on the top where all these would normally be.
The wedding preparations are taking place at the spacious home of a member of the bride’s family. The bride herself is trying on her gown in the loft of an outbuilding, bridesmaids fluttering around her; I can see them from below, through the ladder hole. These peek-a-boo views would make great pictures, I think–but the photographer hasn’t arrived. I try to use the little white camera I brought from the shop. All I can do is point the lens and press the little letters on the top. No click tells me I’ve taken a shot, so I have no idea if it’s working or not.
Two Lotus-style sportscars, one red and one silver, materialize in the circular driveway. Friends and family members gasp. Four of the younger bridesmaids want to go for a ride; two of them jump into the front seat of each car and take off. When they get into town two of the groomsmen are standing on the curb. They gape at the cars–and then they see who’s driving. The girls in the red car pull over and say they can come along if they want. DO they! Gingerly, the two climb into the back seat; the fit is tight and there’s a sunroof to contend with. As the first one scoots in from the curb side the driver warns, “Watch the hard edge” (meaning that his leg could jam into the tortoiseshell plastic console between the two front seats). The second man follows and the driver repeats, “Watch the hard edge.”
They zoom off down a California-feeling street. The silver car follows. The steering is so effortless and the car so powerful that they have no idea how fast they’re going until they notice that the buildings flanking the road have changed to thatched-roof white stucco. They’ve driven all the way to Mexico!
Back at the scene of the wedding preparations, I’ve started to notice something strange. I’m standing indoors beside an Olympic-sized swimming pool that extends underneath a glass wall so that the larger part of it is outside. A few large koi had been swimming here a minute ago, but they have just disappeared. My attention is drawn to two Plexiglas tubes two feet in diameter and fifteen feet apart, running parallel to each other down the length of the pool a foot beneath the surface. In one of the tubes a steady stream of particularly pretty tropical goldfish swims; in the other tube the goldfish are flatter and rounder–more like tangs, their orange fading to a peach shimmer in two vertical stripes. In both tubes the fish on top are swimming toward the inside end of the pool and the ones on the bottom are swimming back outside–it’s almost like they’re delivering something, but I can’t see anything but fish. I don’t know what’s going on, but I know the fish are sentient.
No one else notices any of this until a little girl comes to stand beside me and watch. The khaki-clad female aquarium keeper walks by the outdoor end of the pool with some equipment slung over one shoulder. We can only see her from the waist up, because the pool now seems to be part of an exhibit in a public aquarium and is elevated above sidewalk level. “She hasn’t noticed yet,” I tell the little girl (meaning the calculated behavior of the fish). “Watch what happens when she does!” Sure enough, at that instant the woman glances at the pool–and does a massive double-take. The little girl and I laugh.
Now we’re back in the living room of the house, which T’s into the dining room. Female relatives of the bride (and now of mine, too) are going through family photo albums; they first photograph, then remove and destroy anything that might be sensitive for other family members before they arrive. All this is done amongst great giggling. As I sit on the floor flipping through one album–the old kind with black pages and stick-on photo mounting corners–I come across some black and white photos of my dad as a young man. Stuck onto the page beside it is what I understand is a small, empty foil package of his favorite cookies. I get the camera so I can photograph this stuff; I’m going to get rid of it before Mom sees it. (They divorced when I was twelve.)
A few people are with me outside in the garden now. It is partly open, partly cloistered; gravel paths wind around flowerbeds both at ground level and in stone-walled circles three and four feet high. Out of the corner of my eye I see–elves? fairies?–dash past the far side of one of the raised circular beds. These weren’t in the first version of this movie, the edited-for-television one that daughter Vixie and I saw together recently. I decide this must be the feature-length film. Vixie will want to see these creatures. As she comes out of one of the doors under the cloister roof, two lines of the earthtone-clad, three-foot-tall fairies form up near her. Vixie joins me and we watch as they prepare for some kind of human/fairy interaction ceremony. It is all very joyful.
*****
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