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pricey, but absolutely stunning, and after all, you only get married—”
    I skipped ahead again. The trio’s messages always gave me a headache and further confused me with urgent, urgent decisions to be made, none of which made particular sense. I envisioned them cackling over who’d bombard me with what question next as they stirred the cauldron in which they were boiling me.
    The third message was from my future mother-in-law, a self-declared honest-to-goodness witch. The good news was that she wasn’t interested in dieting. Other than that, there wasn’t so much good news. Although she’d married off a small army of people already, and I’d have thought she’d be blasé about the event, she seemed at a fever pitch of excitement about marrying off her lone bachelor son. I think she also said that she’d see me next week at the shower, but I wasn’t sure. When she’s sufficiently animated, I can barely understand what she’s saying.
    She’d told me that the mothers of grooms were supposed to do only two things before the wedding: keep their mouths shut and wear beige. At the time, she’d laughed loudly at the very beigeness of the idea, as she was fond of the pulsating hot color combos last featured in the acid dreams of the sixties.
    She hadn’t even bothered to laugh at the other supposed obligation, that of keeping the mouth shut. She simply ignored it. And with her delicious, barely intelligible Louisiana accent, and her sweet Southern ways of being bossy in the most oblique manner possible, she was having a high old time planning my wedding. “Sweetie,” she now said. That was a sign I was considered part of the family. She had mothered so many children that remembering their names all the time was too time consuming, so everybody’s basic name was Sweetie Mackenzie. “Sweetie, I do hope you take this in just the best possible way, as an idea that maybe hasn’t crossed your mind quite yet.”
    My extremities chilled in anticipation.
    “I woke up with this vision, pure and simple, and I was overwhelmed by the beauty of it.” It wasn’t a good sign that she was rushing forward, her bayou words slushing one into the other. “So I thought—well, nobody’s said otherwise so far, you know, so wouldn’t it be absolutely the loveliest thing if Amanda and C.K.—” At this point, she was proving how much she cared about us by demonstrably knowing our specific, non-Sweetie names—“had a Wiccan wedding. And best of all, love—I could officiate! Wouldn’t that be
fun
!”
    It would not be fun. Or it might be fun. I didn’t care. It was another suddenly-urgent-though-never-once-thought-of-before item in a basket already burdened with too many of them.
    She rambled on. “. . . such an important day—after all, you only get married—”
    Holy Wicca! What was I going to do?
    The best that could be said was that the trio had now reported in. The fourth message couldn’t be from them. They seemed to have a once-a-day pact, as if they were vitamins I dearly needed, but they were afraid of my overdosing.
    The truth was, there were now four well-meaning pests. My friend Sasha claimed to have returned from England because of the wedding, and because she felt beholden to make me a shower. And even though the shower was not the main event, it had seemed to require almost as much planning, which translated into almost as many questions.
    Even now that the shower was scheduled for next week, and notwithstanding our long friendship, the questions didn’t seem over. As soon as I heard her voice, I tensed further, dreading the inevitable repeat of the already-asked and unanswered questions, about whether anybody attending had unusual eating habits, or allergies, or whether we should sing—sing!—or play games to break the ice. Also, as a tagline—of course—the concept that all this insanity was justified because I’d only get married once, a motto that became ridiculous when Sasha said it.
    She’d been