Bride & Groom

Althea with two great big parties one right after the other. The doorbell rang for the first of what nonetheless seemed like many times, and Rita greeted my dear stepmother, Gabrielle, who had driven all the way from Midcoast Maine. As I watched Rita, I admired her strength in putting up a brave front.
    Before long, new guests arrived, and I was busy making introductions and replying to questions about the wedding and honeymoon. The collective sound of women’s voices reminded me of the twittering of a flock of birds. I kept the perception to myself. The People’s Republic of Cambridge had made me paranoid about expressing gender bias. In the vicinity of Harvard Square, I’d have been afraid to observe aloud that women were shorter than men. Or that men were taller than women? The safe course was to limit myself to reporting that in Alaskan malamutes, the American Kennel Club standard called for a height of twenty-five inches at the withers for males and twenty-three inches for females, the withers being the part of the back that’s above the shoulders and below the neck. In assessing the height of dogs, we don’t measure heads. If we figured human height at the shoulders instead of at the top of the cranium, women would eventually turn out to be shorter than men, but it would take ages to remeasure everyone, and we’d all enjoy a politically peaceful interlude during which we’d have no idea how tall or short anyone was and would thus be temporarily liberated from the hideous possibility of causing height-related political offense. Just to prove how weird Cambridge is, let me add that it was perfectly acceptable in Cantabrigian circles to say that women possessed greater emotional intelligence than did men. I thought that the assertion was a sneaky way to suggest that women were stupid. But maybe I’d better be quiet about that topic, too, and confine myself to stating that although the American Kennel Club standard for the Alaskan malamute said nothing about preferred IQ differences between males and females, the girls were, in general, smarter than the boys.
    Birds. We did sound like them. Our striking plumage was, however, more characteristic of avian males than of females. Steve’s vet techs and assistants weren’t wearing scrubs, and my friends from dog training weren’t in kennel clothes. Still, I’d have bet that almost every outfit had pockets and that a lot of those pockets contained dog treats. Faith Barlow, Rowdy’s handler, wore a dress I’d seen in the showring. Its color was a pale rose, chosen, no doubt, to hide dog hair, as Faith’s dress almost did. Rowdy’s breeder, Janet, wore a rather severe gray suit, but large sterling silver malamutes dangled from her ears, and her hair bore a startling resemblance to the stand-off coat so desirable in our breed.
    Birds. I wouldn’t mention them to Rita, who had, of course, met Artie when she’d taken up birding. Didn’t some feathered species mate for life? Not Artie. As I chatted with friends, I kept darting glances at Rita. She’d discovered Artie with the gushy, perfidious Francie in this same neighborhood only the night before. To preserve our friendship with Rita, Steve and I would have to tell her about the scene I’d witnessed at the Wayside Wildlife Refuge. But not yet, not until she regained some strength. At the moment, she was in animated conversation with Gabrielle, who was due to spend the night in Rita’s guest room. Rita held a cup and saucer in her left hand, but she wasn’t drinking anything, and she wasn’t eating, either. She’d told me that she’d been unable to swallow more than a bite of the scrambled eggs she’d fixed herself for breakfast. My concern for Rita made me realize that many of my best friends were absent. One of the few disadvantages of forming friendships through dogs is that you end up with close friends who live thousands of miles away. Some of mine would be there for the wedding, but they couldn’t make separate, expensive trips just for a shower.
    The one guest who wasn’t exactly a friend of mine was Carla Guarini, who was doing the flowers for our wedding. Carla also had the distinction of being the only guest invited because her husband was a Mob boss and I’d consequently been scared to exclude her. For once, Carla’s dog wasn’t with her, and for once, I was glad that someone had left a dog at home. Under my tutelage, her tiny dog, Anthony, had progressed beyond disobedient