by Jen Doll
After the ceremony, they all went to a restaurant, its name and type of cuisine and, most likely, the establishment itself lost to time, and then back to my grandmother’s house, my mom had told me. There, they opened a few gifts—“I know you’ll ask what they were, but I have no idea,” she’d said. “The usual stuff a young couple gets.” There’s a picture of this part of the wedding, too, a wrapped gift topped with a bow on my mom’s lap, my dad next to her on my grandmother’s couch with his hands on his knees. In front of them is an array of other packages, and while she’s smiling outright, he’s got something of the expectant look I have in my photo from Susan and Carl’s wedding, his eyebrows raised over the rims of his glasses and his lips curled up as if to smile.
It’s a nice picture, but I was dismayed with this wedding story. It was all so terribly practical. There was no beading on an ornate, expensive, long white gown. There was no tux, no huge bouquet, no crowd of beaming guests, no rice-throwing like I’d seen in weddings on TV and in magazines. No adorable old car with tin cans tied to the back and “Just Married” written on the window. No giant pile of fancily wrapped gifts. Was my mom even carried over a threshold? It seemed unlikely, given the length of her dress and my parents’ overall casual attitude toward this wedding. Her previous marriage had been to someone named Troy who was a cop and blond, two types of men I decided at a young age I disliked immensely. That this was her second time down the aisle is why, she said, the wedding was especially simple. True, it was my dad’s first, but there was no sense in carrying on. There was a short notice in my grandparents’ paper, featuring my mom’s face and her maiden name, along with the salient details of the day. The headline: “Will Be Bride Saturday.” It states that my uncle, my dad’s brother, was the best man, and my aunt, my mother’s youngest sister, was the maid of honor, but they are not pictured in any of the photos I’ve seen.
Far more interesting than their wedding and more frequently discussed in my family were two other tales: how my parents met, and how my dad proposed. The meeting story is especially great, because it is scandalous and occurred in a bar. My mom was meeting a man who had not yet arrived for a date, and my dad showed up and offered to buy her a drink. In my imagination this bar is one long, narrow tunnel, customers packed in side by side, with barely any standing room. The lights are dim and bathe the room in a faint reddish hue. There are candles situated about, and cigarettes, smoked throughout the place, allow for further pinpricks of light. My mom, twenty-four and very pretty, long-haired and olive-complexioned and thin, tells my future dad, who is a few years older and a bit of an engineering nerd in glasses and a short-sleeved button-down shirt, that unfortunately she’s waiting for someone. It would be rude to accept a drink from him in these circumstances. My dad says, “Have a drink with me, anyway, while you wait,” and so, not being the sort of person to pass up a free drink from a nice man, she does. I picture them sipping from glasses decorated with parasols and maraschino cherries, offering lights for each other’s Lucky Strikes, their arms nearly touching at the bar. I imagine them laughing. My dad can be very funny.
When her date finally does show up some entirely unacceptable amount of time later, my parents-to-be have found themselves in deep conversation. They have more in common than was expected. There’s chemistry. My dad has pulled out all the stops in the charm department, or the drinks are that good. My mom’s erstwhile date stumbles up behind her, taps her on the shoulder rudely, and gestures toward a room at the back of the bar, ignoring my father. This other man says—and I imagine this in gutturals or a series of grunts, so Neanderthal-like is the depiction my parents have given me of him—“I be in da back.” My mom nods politely; my dad looks at my mom; she stays put. He asks, “Do you need to go?” and she says, “I’m fine right where I am.” I do not know this for a fact, but I am certain they ordered another round.
This story has a certain mythology to it, more so than the wedding tale. It’s been repeated often in my family, as has the story of my dad’s sort-of proposal at the top of a revolving restaurant in Chicago. He’d been broaching the topic of marriage, but my mother, freshly divorced, was not eager to give up her new single life and rush right back into the chapel. As they enjoyed the view and their drinks, my dad decided to take a new tact: brute interrogation. “Why won’t you marry me?” he asked.
She brushed it off with a laugh, saying, “Oh, come on, not this again,” which made him angry.
“Why are you laughing?” he said. “Why won’t you marry me? Why won’t you marry me?” My dad is not someone who gets angry and yells very often, but the result this time ended up being his desired one, even if the engagement story was not.
She stopped laughing and offered her own counterproposal, not thinking he’d agree: “If you buy me a diamond wedding band, I’ll marry you.”
“Okay, let’s go shopping,” he said.
“Okay,” she responded. This to me is the mysterious power of an engagement. Getting someone to stop laughing at you and say okay, diamond wedding band or not.
• • •
Susan and Carl’s ceremony was unexpectedly boring. In my pieced-together recollections, I was next to my brother in a church pew, with Bobo between us. We alternately stood up and sat down along with the other people in the room—some hundred of them, mostly grown-ups, but a few kids here and there—when it appeared that we were supposed to stand up and sit down. There was a lot of talking, but it was all up at the front of the church, and it was difficult to keep up. If we tried really hard we could pick out every couple of words, and we could follow along, sort of, as the minister gestured one way or another, as the rings were exchanged, as each party played his or her role. My mom kept hushing us, even though we weren’t talking, and craning her neck farther toward the front in an effort to hear. I wished I’d brought a book. Then and now, it’s annoying to be at a wedding when you can’t understand what’s happening.
There were, however, two good parts: first, when the wedding party began to stream down the aisle, the ladies smiling and wearing matching dresses and carrying flowers, clutching the arms of the men, who wore tuxes and more serious expressions. They filed carefully into place at the front of the church to impressively swelling organ music, and then there was an expectant hush. Everyone stood, and out came the bride from behind the two big doors. She was wearing a big, white, poufy dress with a long white veil, the kind of dress that, unlike my mom’s in her wedding photo, did look like what I’d seen on TV and in movies and magazines. There was a communal intake of breath followed by a responsive utterance from the crowd: The bride! Isn’t she beautiful! It was as if someone sainted or magical had fallen into our midst, and so we stopped and stared, reacting almost involuntarily. We couldn’t tear ourselves away from the sight. Some women in the crowd dabbed at their eyes with Kleenex.
Susan took the arm of the older man standing next to her—her dad, my mom whispered—and they walked slowly, grandly down the aisle, which had moments before been strewn with white petals by a little girl I was jealous had gotten to play such an important role in this performance, essentially by making a mess. After the bride got to the front things became dull again, nobody really enunciating properly and lots of shuffling and rustling in the pews, until another key moment when it appeared we were nearing the end. The minister cleared his throat and everyone leaned in with renewed vigor to catch the last bit. “I now pronounce you man and wife,” he said, and nodded his head with a certain grave definitiveness. “You may kiss the bride.” This was the second good part of the wedding. Carl lifted Susan’s veil, and she looked at him intently, and he laid a smooch on her that had my brother and me nearly falling out of our pew in hysterical laughter. “Shhhhhhh,” my mom reprimanded, frowning at us. My dad suppressed a smile. Buoyed by the renewed fun, my brother and I made increasingly grotesque kissy faces at each other, and at Bobo, until we’d exited the church.
It was when we walked into
the hall where the reception was being held that I realized this was the meat and potatoes of the event. This was what we were here for. Round tables draped in white, flower arrangements centered in the middle of each, were stationed around a large, temporary dance floor made of collapsible parquet flooring. It was as I envisioned an Academy Awards dinner, famous people clustered about at tables, supping on chicken and lobster as they politely congratulated one another on their successes. In this case, though, there was no gold statuette, no clapping for a win other than the win of the bride in snagging her husband, or the husband in landing his bride. In the years to follow, this marriage would end, but that hardly mattered at the moment, and though it might have been predicted given the divorce rate I’d mentioned to my parents earlier, no one at my table appeared to have such thoughts on his or her mind. If they did, they didn’t speak them.
Certainly, my attention was on far more basic things. We ate. Like most wedding food, it was nothing to write home about, but it served its purpose. We frolicked around the room. We met other kids, journeying in packs, friending easily and discarding those friends as they were rounded up in stages to go home. Zook ran around blowing out candles placed on tables until my mother, who’d surreptitiously removed the film from the camera, passed it to us. We continued to do laps around the room, around the dance floor, snapping pictures of everyone we could find, plus some with Bobo for good measure. We got our fifteen minutes of fame, being videotaped by a man with a camcorder who asked us to “Say a few words” for the bride and groom. Zook, budding comedian, looked back at the camera and without a hitch said, “A few words,” not even cracking a smile. I danced, with my dad, with my mom, with my brother, with my grandmother, who was there with her boyfriend, Henry, and even with strangers, a whirling, swirling vision in my tiered-ruffle dress. Shyly, I danced with the tall, handsome groom.
I also watched the adults, seemingly at ease in this habitat, the women in fancy dresses, the men in suits and ties. They sipped from glasses and shook hands with one another and kissed one another on the cheeks, and sometimes a man would clap the groom on the back and offer congratulations, or a woman would hold the bride in an embrace and whisper in her ear. On the dance floor, the adults paired off in twos and clutched each other, moving slowly, back and forth, forth and back, to the sway-worthy stylings of the wedding band. At tables they’d sit and clang silverware against their wineglasses, then pick up the wineglasses to drain them and instantly receive refills from the waiters always hovering nearby. We dashed our forks against our own glasses, which held juice, not wine, and watched the bride and groom kiss. Mad with power, we did it again and again, until my mother took the forks away from us and set them out of reach.
Somewhere in the midst of all of this, I paused and had my photo taken next to the couple’s three-tiered, ornately frosted white wedding cake, both of us positioned in front of a brick wall. The cake does resemble my dress. Its tiers reach up in the distance, over my head, defying gravity. The very top of it is cut off in the image, but it appears to be decorated with branches or foliage of some sort. I have that half smile again. I’m sleepy, on the down side of a sugar rush, and altogether self-satisfied. I am owning this wedding. My looks may read eight-year-old girl with a party dress and a mullet, but there’s something deep in my lightly dazed expression that says, “Hell, yeah.” It’s a wedding.
It got late, and we grew tired, nodding off to sleep in our chairs. We were gathered by my parents and my grandmother and returned to the little motel where we were staying for the night, the boys—Dad, Zook, and Henry—in one room; my mom, grandma, and me in the other, right next door. We all clustered into one room at first, though, to rehash the gossip of the wedding and to talk about plans for the next day. That’s when Henry announced that he wanted to marry our grandma, and Zook and I, suddenly awake again, began to jump up and down on the bed, shouting, “Hooray! Another wedding!” Weddings were fun.
Henry and my grandma would never actually marry, and the next wedding I would attend as a bona fide guest wouldn’t be until I was in my twenties. My grandmother, though she was proposed to several times throughout her life and engaged more than once, would only be a wife to one man, my dad’s dad, my grandfather, who died before I was born. Following his death, a man with the wonderful, austere name of Hamilton Booth had proposed to her, and she’d accepted, but he’d died of a heart attack before they could marry. She took the engagement ring he’d given her and used its diamond, along with diamonds from other rings she owned, to create a new “cocktail ring,” as my mom called it. At one point, I thought it might be my own engagement ring. It has been mistaken for such, even though I wear it on the fourth finger of my right hand. Usually it’s my only jewelry.
As for Henry, he may have been swept away in his own wedding euphoria, but I’m sure he did love and want to marry my grandmother. It was, after all, simply what was done among a certain generation. If there was love, or something that looked like it, why wouldn’t there be a wedding? But there were younger generations to contend with. That night, after my brother and I had stopped jumping on the bed and been tucked in and fallen asleep, my grandmother told my mother that she didn’t know why he’d brought that up again. He’d asked her before, and the reason they couldn’t marry was because Henry’s son’s wife was in a stew about who would inherit what if the two were to wed. It was too much to contend with, and though everyone else in the family loved my grandmother, she refused to be brought into that drama in order to become a Mrs. again. That wasn’t something she needed. Though it was never made legal, their relationship continued until Henry died, a handful of years later. My grandmother outlived him and died, well loved but single, at the age of ninety.
While my mother and grandmother spoke, I was adrift on thoughts of weddings, that big party all of us would eventually get to have, dancing forever in ruffles, the power of a fork to a glass to make grown-ups kiss, adults who hugged you and told you they couldn’t believe how big you’d gotten, cake and more cake, and getting lifted into the air by the most famous man at the party, the one in the tuxedo, on the dance floor. I couldn’t wait for the next one. Someday, I’d meet a boy, too.
5.
Homecoming
It was November in Alabama, and while it was not yet cold, not Northern cold, it was solidly sweater weather, a fall crispness and hint of oncoming winter in the air. The leaves remaining on the trees surrounding the Burning Tree Country Club, where the wedding reception would be held, were, I presumed, the colors the club had been named for. Orange and gold and crimson and yellow and burnt sienna, they were as reminiscent of college football and high school homecomings as they were of nature. They dripped onto driveways and draped across the crusty yellow-brown winter yards of nearby houses in a languid fashion that belied the inherent drama of seasonal change. A fall wedding holds a different sort of beauty than the June standard.
Leaves were all over the yard at Marjorie’s house as well, where we were staying for the wedding of our high school friend Claire. This was the reason we had traveled from our respective towns back to the place where Marjorie and I had grown up, and the reason Brian, Marjorie’s boyfriend, was there, too, making me something of a third wheel. Earlier that day her mother had taken a photo of the three of us—daughter, daughter’s boyfriend, daughter’s best friend—with the glorious fall color behind us. In that picture, I’m wearing a long-sleeved gray T-shirt with an orange star in the middle, very nearly the costume of a Dr. Seuss character, and smiling with the sun in my eyes. I was twenty-five, and it was the first time I’d been back in years.
The night before the wedding, Marjorie’s parents had long since gone to bed, but she and Brian and I remained in the kitchen, drinking and talking. I reached into the ice maker, the one I knew so well from high school—it still looked and worked exactly the same, I marveled, as if we’d never left—cupped a few fresh cubes, and replenished what had melted into my Jack and Diet Cok
e.
“I wonder if Nathaniel’s in town,” I said. Nathaniel had been my high school boyfriend. Before I’d left for college, I’d broken up with him, and he’d eventually moved farther south to a slightly bigger city. I had no idea where he was now, if he was single, if he lived here. If he would be at the wedding.
“Probably,” said Marjorie. “No one ever leaves.”
“You guys left,” pointed out Brian, taking a swig of bourbon.
“Well, my parents moved,” I said. “And it’s not like I’m really from here. I was bound to leave.” Marjorie shook her head. It bugged her when I acted as if I were free from what it meant to have lived here for the formative years of my life. I backtracked. “I mean, in fairness, we’ve been talking about getting out of here since ninth grade.”
“And we did,” said Marjorie. “But that doesn’t mean it’s not a part of us.”
I changed the subject. “Last I heard, Nathaniel was in Birmingham. He’s probably married. Maybe he’s got kids.” I found myself hoping that was not the case. “Can you imagine getting married here?”
“Don’t let my parents hear you,” said Marjorie. “Once that idea gets into their heads, it’s over.” She checked the clock and smoothly poured the watery remains of her drink into the sink. “We should probably go to bed. It’s late, and tomorrow’s going to be later.”