My Time Among the Whites

by Jennine Capó Crucet

  Two months later, Freddy played “Gasolina”—the top song on my no-play list—not once but twice during the reception, prefacing it the first time by announcing to the crowd that it was my favorite song. As predicted, when he played merengue or salsa songs, certain guests would stand and move to the dance floor, and when the music shifted to something more contemporary and in English, those guests would sit and my college friends would head out. I remember only one song where almost every Cuban sat down and every American got up to dance: a weird mash-up medley of songs from the late 1950s and 1960s that included “Rock Around the Clock.” The spectating switched up for that one, with my relatives watching as white folks paired off and busted out dance moves heretofore unseen by their eyes. When the music turned to dance hits from the 1970s, that’s where Freddy succeeded best: Everyone seemed to know what to do. He could’ve answered my thorny interview question with that: The answer is always disco. Perhaps nothing brings people together on a dance floor, regardless of ethnicity, more than the voice of Gloria Gaynor singing “I Will Survive”—a hit I would’ve been happy to hear twice.

  * * *

  In the intervening decade, I’ve gained much more experience with white people’s weddings. Were I to marry a white man now, I would have a much better idea of how to construct an experience in which all the white folks present could feel comfortable partaking. For instance, say you want your wedding to be classy yet understated: The answer is you hold it in a tastefully restored barn, and not a parrot-infested jungle island theme park in Miami Beach, which is where I held mine. (And which is why, within minutes of saying “I do,” my groom and I were handed a skunk for a photo op, the skunk being the “other additional animal available” that was contractually promised to us by the venue, along with some parrots, for said photos. Please note that skunks and parrots are not traditional elements of a Cuban wedding reception.) I owe the bulk of this new white wedding knowledge, ironically, to my divorce.

  A handful of months after my marriage ended, I moved across the country to Lincoln, Nebraska, with the narrative of “starting over” in my head. Just as the narrative of a wedding usually includes one (or two) white dresses, the divorce narrative typically requires the renting of a fantastic downtown apartment that has nothing in common with the suburban home my former husband and I had just put on the market. The one I found was gorgeous (twenty-foot ceilings!) and quirky (it used to be a major government building—you can live in what used to be the city mailroom!) and seemingly perfect for the young hip professional single person I would undoubtedly become once I moved in. I felt this way about my new place pretty much up until the first weekend I lived there. That’s when the weddings started.

  That first summer alone, I attended more than a dozen white people wedding receptions without ever leaving the comfort of my bathroom. The building I’d chosen to live in liked to think of itself as Lincoln’s premier wedding venue. I was not told this when I signed the lease, but a glitch of duct work sent the sounds of every single event in the building’s reception hall straight through the exhaust fan of my apartment’s bathroom, so loud and so clear that I could hear the names of everyone in the wedding party as they were announced—not just in the bathroom, but from the living room. I could hear when people were clapping, each clap an individual sonic event—I could almost always make out the crisp echo of the last person clapping. I heard every word and every song every DJ played, and my former husband had been right to classify them as straight-up cheese.

  The building manager also neglected to mention that the apartment next to mine was at that time not an apartment at all, but was rented out as the bridal suite, and so I often ran into the brides on my way back from the gym (going to the gym a lot is also part of the divorce narrative) or while grabbing my mail. I always wanted to say something to them, something wise and funny but mostly anything other than congratulations; I was, after all, still someone fairly fresh off a failed attempt at what they were now trying out, and I wasn’t so much bitter as I was sort of protective of these women. I didn’t want to stop them from getting married. I just wanted to ask them if they were sure—really sure—that they knew what they were doing, that this wasn’t some automatic decision they made because they’d been with someone a prescribed amount of time, or they had hit (or recently passed) the age their parents were when they got married, or they were scared to be alone, or any of the dozen or so reasons I kept cycling through as being why I’d gotten married years earlier, none of them feeling exactly right. Every time I encountered a bride this way—almost always slamming into her and her entourage as I was coming or going somewhere—I said nothing, and the lack of an automatic compliment or a congratulations from me was usually registered on her face as an omission I hoped would turn into some sign, if she was looking for one.

  The building’s receptions became a crash course in the white American weddings Emily Post’s book had been talking about, the ones I’d been looking to borrow from. (In the two years I lived there, I witnessed zero receptions where the couple wasn’t white and heterosexual. That said, I eventually got so sick of the weddings and their DJs invading my apartment that I sometimes went out of town on the weekends—perhaps the brown/black/queer wedding receptions happened then?) I started keeping track of patterns I heard from my bathtub. What follows here are my carefully observed and extremely scientific findings, should the twenty-three-year-old version of me out there need them.

  About two-thirds of the time with these weddings, there is a moment deep into the reception when the DJ stops the party to say that the groom would like to dedicate a special song to his bride, and that song is almost always Sir Mix-A-Lot’s “Baby Got Back.”

  You must have a bridesmaid named Ashley or Katie.

  The white people version of “Gasolina” seems to be either Garth Brooks’s “Friends in Low Places” or Billy Ray Cyrus’s “Achy Breaky Heart” or Rednex’s “Cotton Eye Joe,” depending on how well-off the family seems.

  The following interaction occurred several times my first summer living there: A bridesmaid and her boyfriend or a groomsman and his girlfriend stumble down my hall, thinking my doorway is a safe place to sit and have The Conversation She Needs to Have with Him Right Now. In all my time living in the building, this only happened with straight white couples, which speaks to the power of the privilege they have—that they can have arguments about their most intimate relationship problems in random hallways without fearing harassment or stigmatization. Typically, one of the people involved in this bold dispute is named Taylor or Tyler. In each of these instances, Taylor/Tyler wants to know where this is going. The male partner is very confused as to why they have to talk about this right now when they were not even five minutes ago having a great time on the dance floor at their big sister’s/brother’s wedding reception. The stakes feel very high for the suddenly weeping female partner because she’s just witnessed an event that makes her judge her own life as lacking: She wants the dress, the flowers, the cake. The woman in these exchanges, every time I’ve seen her, has been in tears, careful eye makeup obliterated, face patchy with red. Both have been drinking; their words are slurred, their postures sloppy, the points and evidence they each try to bring up poorly argued. I know this because I could hear their entire conversation word for word from my bedroom as clear and as loud as if they were in bed with me.

  The cake at these receptions is pretty basic. I know because I started going to the receptions and eating the cake. I considered it fair compensation for hearing “Baby Got Back” and/or “Cotton Eye Joe” twice a weekend. And it was the least these families could offer me after having to politely and repeatedly ask Taylor/Tyler to please, please, please take their conversation elsewhere so I could go to sleep. I didn’t want to cost the couples and their families any more money than they were likely already spending, which is why I only went for the cake. I knew firsthand that each place setting at dinner had a price tag.

  From my bedroom, I could cle
arly hear the DJ announce when it was cake time, and after hearing everyone either laugh (because the bride and groom had shoved cake in each other’s faces) or say, “Awwww” (at choosing not to do that), I would throw on a black dress and head down the hall.

  The very first time I did this, it hit me hard that I wasn’t in Miami anymore—most if not all of the guests were white. There was no way I could pretend to be related to anyone in the bridal party. From that moment, I knew I couldn’t pass as a relative like I could back home. Here I’d have to be someone’s friend from work, or maybe someone’s nanny, or maybe part of the catering staff. Over that summer, I tried them all out with varying degrees of success. I watched people the way my former husband’s family had watched mine: with curiosity and judgment. All these white people were dancing to anything and everything the DJ played, and then it hit me: Their DJ was one of them, and they were all on their own turf. I never danced, knowing whatever I did with my body on a dance floor would make me stand out among the white folks (I’d already learned this years earlier at college parties). I never tried to drink, never approached the bar. And I made sure to stay far away from the gift table.

  Sometimes, along with a slice of cake, I took a centerpiece. Sometimes I did this near the end of the reception, but sometimes I waited until after, when I’d just pull them right out of the building’s garbage. Many Cubans claim centerpieces early in the reception by dragging them right in front of their plate at the table the minute they sit down. I once went to a wedding where the mother of the bride had the DJ announce to us guests to please leave the centerpieces in the middle of the table until after dinner so they’d look good in the photos. It’s a known tendency, is what I’m saying. Nebraskans apparently had no such tradition, which I found shocking and even wasteful. So that summer I almost always had fresh flowers in every room of my apartment, a fact that usually offset the depressing nature of the manner in which they’d been obtained in the first place.

  I did not keep this activity a secret. In fact, I told people about my wedding crashing, though I didn’t call it that for fear of evoking Vince Vaughn. When asked, I would say that I did it to prove a point: If your reception is invading my apartment, then I’m going to invade your reception. But in hindsight, I think I was going to these receptions to punish myself. I’d been the one to initiate my divorce, and I had no clear, tangible reason for doing so except that, when I was honest with myself, I could admit that what Jennine in her twenties needed most from marriage was emotional stability and future security (qualities that had even tinged my search for a DJ, the person I wanted to be responsible for making everything go smoothly), and then, as I got older, that need fell away. And I knew we each deserved more than I was giving. In the video of my wedding—which we watched for the first time on a whim years after, on some anniversary—minutes after saying “I do” and just after cradling a skunk in our arms, the person filming asks me how I feel. “The same,” I say, looking straight at the camera. “I feel the same. Marriage is just a piece of paper.” As we sat on the couch and those words hung in the air, “the same” seemed like a very fucked-up answer. I couldn’t look at myself on the screen or at my then husband. We never watched the video together again. We discovered, in that one and only viewing, that I’d accidentally taped over almost the entire ceremony weeks earlier. The footage overriding the ceremony was of me whisper-laughing as I recorded a white man doing what he’d called “authentic karate” on stage at a physics department talent show. I got to keep the tape in the divorce—more punishment, I think. I never thought I could be the kind of person who would accidentally record over their wedding video—irresponsible, careless—but I also never thought, long before anyone ever proposed, that I would be someone who was divorced.

  Despite my new ambivalent feelings toward marriage and its limits, I understood that weddings weren’t marriages; a wedding has little bearing on a marriage, in the end, except as perhaps a metaphor for the seeds of its discontents. I now see that my wedding was, for me, a self-designed rite of passage into adulthood (and perhaps into the privileges of whiteness) that I desperately needed, one my family could understand and definitively accept, one that would have the side effect of making my choice to pursue a writing career acceptable to them because a highly educated man from a good American family had agreed to be legally attached to me for all time.

  I saw a version of this desire in the receptions I was crashing; all first marriages (from what I could tell), a sense of having just crossed the threshold into adulthood suffused every party. In grabbing a slice of cake off a table, eating it calmly while standing near some great-aunt as she discreetly tried to place this short, dark-haired, definitely-too-brown-to-be-a-relative guest standing before her, I assuaged any feelings of guilt at crashing by thinking of myself as contributing to the uniqueness of the bride and groom’s event, as helping to sweep them into this new phase of life. I was part of the Unique Package, “unique” being the quality I’d learned every Nebraskan couple aims for, at least to some extent.

  I learned this fact, too, in the building’s reception space, when it played host to an annual wedding fair. I’d never been to one while planning my own wedding, perhaps this was where all the ideas were handed out? It was open to the public and on a Sunday. I went, slightly hungover, in my pajama pants.

  “We make sure every wedding is unique,” one vendor told me while gesturing to a mason jar with a candle in it. I’d wandered over because she was giving out chocolate samples.

  When asked, I told most of these well-meaning vendors I was a bride-to-be or the sister of a bride-to-be (and thus a very invested maid of honor). The one thing I learned quickly not to say was that I was divorced, as this got me politely shunned from whatever free sample they were offering up to the blushing first-timers. “You only get married once!” they kept telling me whenever the subject of something’s cost came up. Being too honest about myself meant acknowledging that people were spending a hell of a lot of money on something that ultimately had no guarantee, no matter what promises we make to ourselves and others. Outing myself as divorced threatened their whole shtick, the very thinking—you only get married once!—that’s helped make weddings a seventy-two-billion-dollar-a-year industry.

  “The mason jar thing is so over,” another vendor told me. Mouth full of bacon-wrapped dates, I asked what, then, is the new thing.

  “Industrial Modern or Bohemian Classic.” I nodded like I knew what this meant and she added, “We’re seeing a lot of unique things come out of those themes.”

  Weddings need themes, I’d just learned. No wonder DJ Freddy J had had such a hard time: I hadn’t given him an appropriate theme to work with! And I should’ve been aiming for “unique” rather than searching out the kinds of things that would’ve made my wedding more like the ones our white American guests had likely already been to. Based on what I was hearing from my apartment every weekend—the DJs’ playlists barely varying from reception to reception—one of the most unique things a Lincoln-based bride could really do was hire and fly in DJ Freddy J. This choice alone would make it the most unique white wedding ever.

  Once I had enough free food in me and been plied with enough brochures and price lists to paper the walls of my apartment, I confronted one of the DJs—the cheesiest looking one, who’d set up all his lights and was talking into a microphone even though it wasn’t on. He was why I was really there, wasn’t he? He was the one my former husband had envisioned playing at our wedding, the one I couldn’t imagine. Now I couldn’t get away from him. He was the one filling my bachelorette pad with a cacophony of reminders that lots of people were in love and happy, reminding me that I was no longer someone’s bride, reminding me that I’d known from the very beginning that I was worrying about the wrong things. He was the one making me feel as if I’d devolved into a sad little rat scurrying around the fringes of a wedding reception, picking at leftover cake and flowers in an effort to figure out why I couldn’t be happy inside
of something that I’d been taught was designed for my happiness.

  I did not say hello or introduce myself. I spoke to him with the kind of barely contained rage that, in Miami, you reserve for the person ahead of you in line at a bakery when you overhear them order the last pastelito de coco.

  “Do you do a lot of weddings in this building?” I said.

  “Oh yeah, yeah, I do most of them, actually.” He winked at me and it was such a forced, ugly thing that I didn’t even think of DJ Freddy J when he wooed my mom into giving him the job. “I’m in high demand,” he said.

  “That’s great,” I said. “Do you realize that everyone on the west side of this building can hear every word you say inside their apartments?” I didn’t know if this was actually true—in fact, I’m now fairly certain it was just my apartment—but I didn’t want to sound alone in this.

  “Whoa, that’s weird!” he laughed.

  Elton John’s “Crocodile Rock” came on over his speakers. The DJ had a mustache and a mullet and was wearing a gold vest. My former husband’s worst DJ nightmare, right in front of me for the first time. My hands went numb. Like watching the coconut pastelito go into the box.

  “You say the same thing at every wedding,” I said. “You play the same songs in the same order.”

  This was a fact. I’d started listing the songs in a notebook once I’d suspected it was happening. This laziness offended me so much that I wanted to tell the brides afterward even though it absolutely didn’t matter.

  He said, “Yeah, well…” and then dropped his eyes to his laptop as if there’d suddenly been some iTunes emergency.