by Jen Doll
There are other times when a person has no idea what will happen, but is pretty sure whatever it will be will be interesting, and so chooses to stick around and see. Lucy was right. Anything for a story.
I took the cup he handed me and drank.
• • •
The reception took place steps away from the spot where Lucy and David had, earlier that evening, said their vows before their collection of guests and the ocean. Boyd and I were seated next to each other at a table covered in a white linen tablecloth and scattered with bright flowers. He was wearing a pink collared shirt. I had on a blue silk dress, turquoise like the color of the pool under full sun, and a necklace of matching blue beads. My fair, freckled skin glowed with its own pinkish hue. In my week poolside I had managed to acquire some semblance of that much congratulated “bit of color” wan East Coasters traveling to beachy locales crave.
When I arrived, he was already there, and he smiled up at me as I set my clutch down at my place setting. “Well, hello, there,” he said. This was the first time I’d seen him all day. The night before, we had sat outside and talked until the sun was rising and I was forced to sneak back to my room so that no one would see where I’d spent the night. There had been one kiss, or two, possibly more? It had blurred around the edges in the end, but I’d pulled myself away and gone back to my room. I’d woken up excited, eager to see what would happen now. And now. And again, now.
With him staring at me in his preppy wedding clothes, his face sun-pink and shiny, I had no idea if what I’d felt the night before—a certain fondness for him, a camaraderie paired with that antagonistic jousting that could, in some situations, resemble a kind of sexual attraction—was even remotely real or just some sort of wedding-induced haze. After a brief intermission, the wedding play was coming to its last act. So what would it be? I grinned back at him. “Hello.”
“You should get food,” he said, looking down at his already full plate. I made my way to the buffet, where I was served coconut chicken, tilapia cooked in banana leaves, and a medley of greens grown locally. There was an ice sculpture adorning the table, two great swans, their necks entwined. I paused at it for a moment, considering the plantains below and watching water from the ice slowly drip onto the tablecloth. I wondered how long we had until the statue melted entirely, given the temperature, and why there was any need for an ice sculpture in Jamaica, anyway. It seemed an odd motif for a celebration of forever.
Interrupting these thoughts was a sharp cracking noise as one of the swan heads broke off and plummeted down. I gasped and involuntarily reached up to grab it in what may be the only truly athletic effort at hand-eye coordination I’ve ever made, at a wedding or otherwise. I succeeded, though the rest of the sculpture came crashing down soon after that. As the resort staff gathered to take care of the detritus, for a few long moments I was left standing, figuratively and literally frozen, a cold chiseled swan head in one hand and my plate in the other.
The crowd of guests had hushed, and someone punctured the silence, asking, “Are you okay?” I looked down at my plate, full of water and chunks of ice, the Titanic of wedding dinners, just before it was whisked away and I was offered a new one upon which was quickly served a replacement meal. I took it and returned to the table, where I showed everyone the remains of the ice ball. It was speedily whittling itself down to a chip. “You hate swans!” said Fred, adding to me alone, “You either have some serious wedding mojo or some serious anti-wedding mojo.” I laughed nervously and set down the piece of ice, which melted into a damp smudge on the tablecloth and was gone.
The reception had begun. “To Lucy and David!” we shouted, lifting our glasses. Boyd caught my eye, winked ostentatiously, and raised his drink toward me.
Well after the pool had turned a dark, muted blue, the party continued. There was a makeshift tequila bar set up just before the cliffs began, and I stepped over to it in my high heels. They were silver and gold with an intricate crisscross weave on the tops. If worn too long, they would leave a contrasting pattern on the tops of my feet. I had worn them too long.
“Tequila shot?” asked the bartender, a jovial man in a short-sleeved, collared shirt and pastel bow tie. I nodded, holding out my hand to accept his offer. A pleasant burning sensation traveled down my throat and into my stomach as I drank. Boyd appeared next to me and requested his own shot. For some reason, I took this to mean I should have another. We clinked glasses for the second time that night, simultaneously put our drinks to our lips, and gulped.
That was a mistake. There was a queasy churning in the depths of my stomach, a roiling that I knew from experience would not end well. Without saying a word—there was no time—I stepped away from the bar and out onto the jagged terrain surrounding the resort, toward the ocean water, darker and more sinister than the contents of the pool, though its surface was smooth as glass. In the distance, music played under the cabana, where couples were still dancing. That would serve as a noise muffler, I hoped. I quickly, neatly vomited between a pair of jutting rocks, wiping my mouth with a wadded-up old tissue discovered in my clutch. I suddenly thought I knew the real reason they didn’t allow children at the resort. It wouldn’t be fitting. After all, you never knew when a wedding guest might have to puke and rally on the cliffs.
An hour or so later, as I was preparing to jump into the pool, fully clothed, with the remaining, still-standing guests, Boyd grabbed my arm and pulled me toward a quieter area, away from everyone else. “Let’s go,” he said, glancing back at the now-defunct tequila bar, and then beyond, where I’d made my clandestine trip earlier that night. “Let’s go get your toothbrush, and then we’ll go to my villa.”
There are times when you’re nearly struck by a collapsing ice swan but escape unharmed. There are times when you drink one too many tequila shots, but you fight back, and you win (or maybe you lose, but press on just the same). There are times when your wedding hookup has been predetermined since long before the wedding itself. And there are times when you’ll do anything so you can later say you did, because when all is said and done, the party favor you’ll take home with you is the story.
What can I say? I wanted to see what those premium villas were like inside.
I brushed my teeth and put on shorts and a T-shirt, then walked with him to his room, where we spent the night making out as I would have in high school on his fancy four-poster bed. Early the next morning, I crept back to my room and packed up my things, and without the need for a proper good-bye, we all flew back to our respective cities and homes. For the rest of that summer, I blogged and freelanced. Boyd and I Gchatted a few times, but soon stopped. The wedding, its characters, my tan, and eventually my layoff, too, faded, and I found myself with a boyfriend and another job. Even when we’re not going to weddings, the stories of our lives continue to unfold.
I still don’t know why the swans chose to collapse on me, or if the fact that they did has any importance or a greater cosmic intent. Ice in the tropics is a risky endeavor. It could have happened to anyone. Perhaps my timing was wrong or, better, just right. We all have things we want to experience, if only so we can share them later, and we bring these nascent yarns and hoped-for renderings with us wherever we go—most especially to weddings—in pursuit of an ending that suits our beginning, and if we’re lucky, the middle, too.
4.
First Comes Love, Then Comes Marriage
The first wedding I remember attending was when I was eight years old. There had been weddings before, but they were events at which I was a tiny, monosyllabic figure, barely even a person, held by the hand or carried by a relative when I was included at all. I’d stumble upon pictures of these moments in my occasional perusals of the big family photo album, and my mom would notice and come over to point me out, reminding me of a me I didn’t remember—Oh, weren’t you adorable in that bonnet and ruffled diaper; it matched the place settings! Here’s a photo of you at three month
s old, sleeping through a wedding in Vegas!
Sometimes I’d hear about weddings by keeping a sharp ear to the adult conversations percolating around the dinner table. These frequently had to do with couples my parents and their friends had helped usher off into “for better or worse,” who were heading now, in later years, toward worse—and often divorce. But all stories, from the silly to the dramatic and even tragic, seemed to garner new import when linked to the main events of life, and one of the main main events of life, it became clear, was a wedding. A ruined cake was one thing; a ruined wedding cake was something very different. Weddings were just a bigger deal, inherently or because they helped us remember the important moments better, or both. Whose children were at which weddings was a time stamp of sorts: My cousin Vince, for instance, had been at my parents’ ceremony as a little boy, which made him privy to something I’d never be able to experience. I was somewhat envious of that, and in awe of its strange permanence. Even after he grew up, to my family he would always exist as the adorable, suit-wearing toddler present at the church that day.
The most interesting bits of the wedding stories, though, had to do with me. Yes, it’s narcissistic, but isn’t it true? Information related to ourselves is almost always fascinating, no matter how mundane (my diapered presence at my uncle’s wedding was hardly the showstopper of the day), especially when that information pertains to a previous version of the self that one must rely on others to define: You wailed during the vows and Dad had to take you outside! You were left behind at a hotel with a babysitter, and when we got home you demanded to know why you’d never gotten to have your own wedding! Or the anecdote my mom loved to tell, particularly when I got older and began to imbibe myself, of a teenaged me chastising, “You’re drunk, Mom!” after she’d had a few too many glasses of Champagne at one celebration. Her response, which she delivered with a proud flourish in retellings, had been, “No shit.” These details felt real, but the weddings of my childhood did not: They had to do with people I hadn’t known; people who, in most cases, I would never know aside from the stories and the pictures. I wasn’t all that concerned with how those people were getting along in their post-wedding lives, or that they weren’t, and I was equally irrelevant to them, having not been old enough to truly count as a guest at their wedding. It’s not like a two-year-old was going to eat surf and turf, or gift anyone a soup tureen. Even if I’d been there, as the photographic evidence indicated, it wasn’t like I’d really been there.
By third and fourth grades, though, shifts were occurring, superficially and otherwise. I’d seen the magazines, watched the movies, become enthralled with the white dress and that formalized walk down the aisle, the dad-and-daughter dance, the special party everyone got to have at least once. We had a tape deck in the car, and sometimes, while riding shotgun, I used it to blast Pachelbel’s Canon, a piece of music I enjoyed so much I was learning to play it on the piano. My dad, confused by my new penchant for high-decibel classical music, would ask me to please turn it down. I started to listen on my Walkman, where I could hear it as loud as I wanted, and on repeat, so totally rockin’. This was around the time that I planned my own double wedding with my best friend, our vows to be delivered on a trampoline, with refreshments of ice cream cake and lemonade. That we had no grooms (we were considering an array of rockers and boy celebs from our Tiger Beat and Bop magazines; I’d narrowed it down to a lucky two) didn’t matter any more than the fact that a trampoline ceremony for four might present some problems—was there a trampoline that large to be found? How do you kiss without breaking each other’s teeth, or noses?
When a distant relative’s wedding was announced in the fall of third grade, I was ready. Attending a wedding when you’re eight, when double digits are lurking around the corner, when you’ve started at least tentatively to look at boys and they’ve begun to look back at you, is hardly the same thing as attending a wedding when you’re a baby clad in a ruffled diaper, being carried by an uncle. I’d remember this one. Maybe I’d even pick up some tips. This would be the beginning of everything.
• • •
I wore the outfit I’d later wear in my fourth-grade school picture. It was a department store dress version of a wedding cake, layers of lavender ruffles covered in a faux fondant of tiny white dots, with fabric tiers encircling my body from midcalf to waist, and then again at the sleeves. In a photo from this day, my hair, which hung past my collarbone, is brown and has a wave to it without the aid of styling products or a curling iron. My bangs, cut with the assistance of a piece of Scotch tape, are jagged across my forehead. My eyes are open wide, my eyebrows raised in an expression of expectant surprise. There is the early beginning of a smile on my face. I’m waiting for something exciting to happen, holding on to the table in front of me for balance. Next to me, my mother, slim with her dark hair cut in a bob and her striped dress paired with a long necklace, smiles prettily, and my five-year-old brother, to her right, gives a purposely dour stare to the camera from underneath his bowl-cut head of hair, his tie amusingly askew.
I assume my dad is on the other side of this photo.
Whose wedding was it? A family member, a far-flung cousin or uncle or niece or aunt of my father, or a direct relation of my grandmother; it really didn’t matter. What mattered most immediately was the ride to the wedding, a journey in the back of the navy-colored four-door Buick sedan with the velveteen seats we called “the Blue Buick.” Then, of course, the wedding itself, but first the ride: This was a trip long enough that a grubby old car towel that usually resided on the floor had been placed on the backseat between me and my brother, Bradley, as a dividing line across which we were not allowed to tickle or pinch or pull hair. It would be several hours to our destination in Michigan, and I had a stack of books on my side of the towel. In those days, my mother’s most frequent complaint was that my nose was always in a book (this complaint would continue for much of my car-riding life with my family), and she took this drive as an occasion to reiterate that I should really look out of the window, have a conversation, do something, anything, other than stare at printed words on pages. “Doesn’t reading in the car make you nauseated?” she’d ask. For some reason, after that question, it always would.
I was in a nickname phase. I had taken to calling Bradley “Zook,” short for “Bradzooka,” the name I’d used previously until I’d bored of it. Hopelessly and hilariously a step behind us, Dad was still calling Brad “Bradzooka.” I’d have to move on from Zook when he finally caught up, so I was keeping a list of options, “Bubsy Orlando,” for some reason, at the top. Zook’s wedding outfit was a dark gray suit, one tailored to his five-year-old proportions. The look was completed with a fresh haircut and a maroon tie—real, not a clip-on—atop a relatively crisp white button-down shirt. He might have been commuting from the Chicago suburb in which we lived to his office in the big city, a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, dapper young businessman, minus the fact that he was a kid and he was toting around a stuffed monkey. We called this monkey Bobo. He was small enough to hide in a lady’s purse, but since neither of us carried such a thing, my brother held him in his arms and sometimes transported him on his shoulder. It was of vital importance that we not lose track of Bobo. He was a willing subject for the photos we planned to take upon the first opportunity we had to sneak the camera away from our parents at the wedding. Plotting our camera takeover may have, in fact, been some of the reasoning behind our ceasefire across the Great Dividing Towel. Also, we’d learned that in crowds of grown-ups there was safety in kid numbers. Alliances were key.
Along with quiet plans sprung up in the backseat, on the ride to Michigan there was much talk of weddings. Getting married was something grown-ups did when they decided they wanted to be together forever, said my mom, who clarified that this was the wedding of the daughter of cousins of my father, of the niece of my grandmother. I paid only partial attention to this complicated relationship, noting that the woman getting marr
ied was Susan; the man she was marrying was Carl. These sounded to me like old-fashioned names. Susan and Carl must have been in their twenties or thirties, pretty much ancient. But there was another problem here, a bigger one, to tackle: Married grown-ups didn’t always stay together, I interjected, citing my mom’s own divorce, before she married my father, and also my uncle’s. “By all counts,” I said, quoting some stat I’d heard on TV or in school that indicated that remarried couples were more likely to split, “you and Dad should be divorced by now, too.” My mom sighed. “My nose isn’t in a book,” I said.
To divert us from such incendiary topics, my dad piped up. “Weddings are an excuse to have a big party and celebrate and bring all your friends and family together, kind of like a reunion,” he offered. “They’re what people do. It’s what people do, especially before they have kids.” He and my mom gave each other a look that I was not sure how to interpret, because, the thing was, my parents did not have a big party for their wedding. They’d wanted to get married on Thanksgiving, but the small brick chapel where they had the ceremony was holding church services then, so they did it on the following Saturday. My mom wore a lacy, lingerie-esque minidress with a V-neck and sheer, flowing bell sleeves, her legs clad in the nearly opaque flesh-colored panty hose of the sixties and tucked into thick-heeled, shiny shoes with square toes. It was November in Chicago, and in one photo she is jacketless and probably shivering. Her hair is long, jet-black, and curling in ringlets that flow down her back. In a sepia-toned photo shot inside the church, my bespectacled dad is wearing a black suit and dark tie, looking serious but pleased, even smug, a large white flower in his lapel. My mom smiles with her lips parted, all big eyes and glowing skin. In another photo, they face each other in front of church candles, holding hands. You can see the impressive scope of my mother’s hairdo and how the transparent sleeves of her dress draped just so. And in a picture taken from such a long way away you can’t see any expression at all on their faces, they stand in the chapel doorway, underneath a bell, poised to walk into their new life as a married couple. Both of my grandmothers stand over to the side, leaning against the church in fur-trimmed coats, seemingly oblivious to their picture being taken.