by Michelle Tea
My mom sat in the front row of folding chairs, already crying. When she rose to recite an Irish poem in her shaking, emotional voice, I almost cried, too. But panic dried up my tears when my sister, realizing she had forgotten her vows in the hotel room, turned to me. Because I was the maid of honor. And I should have been carrying a copy of the vows for this exact moment. But I wasn’t. I was carrying only flowers. I looked back at Madeline, my face slowly shifting into a bug-eyed expression of oh shit. It was the moment of maid-of-honor truth, and I was failing her.
Before getting into casting, my sister had been a dancer. And dancing is showbiz, and in showbiz the number one rule is the show must go on. Madeline, lovely and lighthearted, seized the spirit of the moment and free-styled her vows to her husband, who free-styled them back, the both of them conjuring up heartfelt promises before our teary eyes. I didn’t want to let myself off the hook for being a bumbling maid of honor, but perhaps this was one of those moments when a mistake really leads to something more special than the original plan.
I hadn’t been to any weddings as an adult, but I couldn’t imagine one any more festive and romantic than my sister’s. As the sun set, platters of antipasto were brought out, the first in what was an onslaught of food. The wedding cake was topped with sparklers that hissed spouts of glittery fire into the night. I was so enchanted, so happy for Madeline and her new husband, I did not think at all about how my own fake wedding measured up. Well, hardly.
I couldn’t help but reflect on it. How after my fake wedding, when I returned to my punk house, my living room was filled with revelers, none of whom actually lived there. Apparently I’d forgotten to lock the door, and when some friends came by looking to party they just let themselves in. A Kenneth Anger movie was playing on the VCR. The partiers thought it was cool that my ex and I had gotten fake-married by Candy the Sexy Witch, and offered us some celebratory cocaine. I stood in the kitchen and flung my bouquet backward into the living room. It was caught by an androgynous individual named Captain, who has not since married. Know why? Because it was a bouquet from a fake wedding.
In spite of wearing a ring on that finger for a string of years, I tend to forget that I was ever “married.” I never called my ex my husband, and he never called me his wife. Perhaps the adult formality of the terms really illuminated how not husband-and-wife we were. That is how Dashiell got a surprise while looking at an old photo of me on Facebook. “Honey, what’s that ring you’re wearing in that picture? It looks like a wedding ring.” Oh yeah, I got fake-married to someone back before I met you—sorry, did I forget to mention that?
Dashiell was jarred but recovered quickly. Having met each other in our thirties and forties, we each knew the other had a history—periods of long, committed relationships; periods of shameless slutting around. We actually like it about each other. We come together having experienced a variety of romantic connections, and we know exactly what we want. We want each other, and that’s it.
Still, I felt haunted by my crappy first marriage. I feared that I could not adequately convince Dashiell of what a drug-addled, shabby pretend wedding it had been. I didn’t want that to be my first marriage and ours to be my second; everything about Dashiell felt like the first time—the first healthy relationship, the first time I was treated so gently, the first time I could love from a wide-open heart because I wasn’t taking pains to protect myself. I wanted my and Dashiell’s wedding to be my one and only. Was I being like a born-again schoolgirl trying to reclaim a lost virginity?
Everyone gets to create the wedding that best suits them, but I do believe the betrothed should not be nursing ecstasy hangovers, have miniature heroin habits, and snort a rail after tossing the bouquet. I believe in a community gathered to witness and celebrate, helping to hold the couple accountable to their vows when times get rough. Perhaps my phony first wedding provided me with an anti-template as I set forth to plan my marriage to Dashiell: I didn’t want it to be anything like that. But how could it be? I wasn’t that person anymore, and hadn’t been her for more than a decade.
Knowing very little about how anyone gets married, Dashiell and I started planning our wedding, seven years after my sister’s Roman affair. It seemed the first order of business was to pick the venue. As someone who has been throwing events all over San Francisco for the past twenty years, I know a lot of cool spaces, but I really didn’t want to get married on a stage where I’d once read my poetry. I wanted a place I didn’t already have a history with, so I could always be nostalgic about the place we got married. And so I started booking walk-throughs at a bunch of locations, some very traditional and some unusual.
I decided if I’d only performed in a venue once or twice, and not for a very long time, we could consider it. I remembered a large, nonprofit building that had a handsome brick-walled room with a wooden balcony, and scheduled a visit.
“You’re thinking of getting married there?” Tali chuckled when I told her. “Good for you. I hear they give you the space for free if you include a needle exchange as part of your ceremony.”
“It’s not that bad!” I cried, but it didn’t take too long after we arrived to realize that it had been a while since I’d been in there, and perhaps I remembered it differently. The entryway was papered with fliers for harm-reduction studies and psychotherapists and roommates wanted. The trash, recycling, and compost bins sat dumpily along the wall. The place did kind of feel like a free clinic, someplace you’d go for an HIV test, not a wedding. I walked up to the entry to the brick-walled room, and found it occupied by a free Zumba class. Dashiell and I peered in the window at the scowling dancers. “I don’t know,” Dashiell said uneasily. Fair enough. I decided I would not consider places that hosted AA meetings and Zumba classes as wedding venues.
Our next stop was the Polish-American hall. I sort of love ethnic halls. They remind me of the old-worldy-ness of New England, and inspire rare twinges of homesickness. Like the nonprofit building, the Polish joint was cheap, and that was important. Weddings are expensive! Expensive enough to make my breath catch when I heard what other people spent on theirs—twenty thousand was considered cheap. A married couple told me to expect to spend thousands on invitations, thousands more on photography, and another thou for a DJ. My whole body surged no at these predictions. We had to find a way to be crafty and still make it classy. I wanted a grown-up wedding, one that was elegant and memorable. I wanted to wear white, my slutty past be damned. Even though many traditions didn’t work with Dashiell and me—for instance, neither of us had fathers in our lives to escort us down the aisle, so we decided to walk to the altar together, hand in hand—I wanted to hold on to as many that did. I wanted to experience this classic expression of love and commitment.
I showed Dashiell pictures of the Polish hall on the Internet. She scrunched her face at the images of children in Eastern European folk costume dancing across the wall.
“What about all that?” she asked. Plastic tubs of toys were jumbled beneath the skipping peasant children.
“They run a daycare,” I explained. “And I bet those decorations can come down.”
We arrived at the space after dark, as arranged, waiting for a woman who never showed up. As we waited we observed the trash piled up against the building—plump dirty diapers, fast-food wrappers. Eventually a car pulled into the driveway, letting out a Polish-speaking guy who showed up to take out the trash. My surge of Polish pride—the last name I was born with was Swankowski, y’all—came about rather recently, and I actually know very little about my heritage, let alone a single Polish word aside from kielbasa. I mimed and pantomimed and gesticulated with the Polish man, begging him to let us in.
“Let’s just go,” Dashiell hissed behind me. Unlike me, Dashiell cares about making scenes and begging strangers. The man grew tired of our strained communications and went into the building. I paused for a moment, then followed him in.
“Don’t!” Da
shiell cried. “He didn’t say you could go in there!” Unlike me, Dashiell cares about trespassing and breaking laws.
“It’s fine,” I said dismissively. “We’re just going to peek.”
A swing of the door brought us face-to-face with those garish frolicking Polish folk dancers. They were painted onto the wall of this room that was scattered with toys and smelled vaguely of baby poop. The door to the room was open and I could see into the rest of the hall, smaller and dingier than it looked online.
“No,” Dashiell said over my shoulder. “Hard no.”
As someone who likes to say yes to lots of things, especially odd clothing and home decor sourced from dusty thrift shops, I have been blessed to be with someone like Dashiell, whose dial is set to no. Dashiell is a Virgo, a sign excellent at editing. I am an Aquarius, a sign that likes to live in a sure, why not, let’s try it out state of mind. Dashiell’s hard nos have actually assisted in my quest to grow up, as she has prevented me from bringing things into our home that would make it resemble a dorm room, or the bedroom of a little girl circa 1965. I respect Dashiell’s elegant, streamlined, adult aesthetic, and I always respect her hard nos. I shut the door to the Polish hall.
We decided to hit an open house at a pricier venue that looked like a log cabin and was located in a beautiful public park in San Francisco. I didn’t think it was affordable, but in the warped world of wedding expenses, it was touted as a cheaper alternative. The drive to the building took us through rows of willowy eucalyptus trees, the clean, sharp fragrance coming right into the car.
“Oh my God,” I breathed dreamily. “This would be such a magical way for people to arrive at our wedding!”
Inside, the place was lined in lumber and stone. “I think this is probably amazing,” I whispered to Dashiell. “But I also can’t tell if it’s a little Flinstone-y.” Around us walked a thin blond bride-to-be, flanked by her take-charge parents. The mother and father grilled the venue’s representative on caterers, tables, insurance—all things that had to be additionally rented. Soon another woman walked in with her parents, and another. I realized that people’s parents often pay for their weddings. Right? Wild. I knew we couldn’t compete with couples with these extra resources. The log cabin was beyond our means. We slipped out the door as a couple of natty gay men slid inside, oohing and ahing.
I had planned a second viewing for us that day. “It’s a long shot,” I said, prepping Dashiell. “It probably won’t work. But it’s free.”
The space was an alleyway in the Tenderloin that the city had leased to an art gallery for one dollar, and that the art gallery had transformed from a site of urination and dirty needles to a forest, complete with towering redwood trees and stands of bamboo, ferns and flowers, Japanese maples, and scrambling vines of jasmine. Artists had painted murals on the walls, laid down mosaic walkways, and built a koi pond. There was even a working kiln, and the place was strung with romantic lights. But again, it was small, and awkwardly laid out. And it was in the Tenderloin.
The Tenderloin, for those not familiar with San Francisco neighborhoods, is the city’s skid row. The prevalence of cheaper housing and single-room-occupancy hotels makes it a great starting-out spot for immigrants and a great ending-up spot for drug addicts with advanced downward spirals. You saw everything in the Tenderloin—people yanking down their pants to take a poop on the curb, people sticking a needle into their skin, people vomiting down their shirts, talking to themselves, talking to you. Driving into the neighborhood was the exact opposite of driving into the eucalyptus-lined parkland we had just visited. I imagined our moms dodging grabby drunks on the way to our wedding; my sister nervously guiding her kids around splashes of puking pukers.
We entered the alley through the back door of a small art gallery, and stood before the tall gates that separated the forest from the wildness of the streets. A festivity like a wedding would attract all the neighborhood lingerers to the fence. I could imagine the schizophrenic barrage of emotions I would feel—annoyance at drugged-out drunkards heckling my wedding; a desire to protect my guests from them; an awareness that this was their neighborhood I was interloping on; anger at the poverty and racism that impacted these lives so miserably; despairing hopelessness at how the problem is so much bigger than I am; self-loathing at my privilege. Ugh. This seemed like a bad idea. Thankfully, the space just didn’t work logistically, so addressing any deeper social questions was moot. We asked to be let back out through the gallery, and the gallerist pushed the glass door against the jumble of people who had congregated in the entryway, politely asking them to move. A woman turned toward us as she shuffled, a cloud of smoke escaping her lips. I held my breath as we walked through the small crowd, but Dashiell didn’t.
“That was crack smoke,” I hissed as we approached the car. “That fog we just walked through? Crack smoke.”
“Oh my God.” Dashiell felt her neck, her throat, her face. She looked nervous. “I think I can feel it!”
I cracked up. “You cannot feel it! Get in the car. Let’s get out of here.” I slid into my seat and shut the door as a gentleman unfurled his penis from the fly of his pants and began urinating on the building before us. Dashiell clambered in after me, looking distraught.
“It just would not have even occurred to me that that was crack smoke!” she said with a dazed, earnest innocence.
“We cannot risk our mothers inhaling secondhand crack smoke at our wedding. That was a sign from the Universe,” I said.
In the end, we found the perfect place, a Swedish-American club on the affordable side, with ye olde wooden walls and beams and thrones, and a low stage for us to say our vows. It felt special and elevated and, most important, on the cheap side.
“You don’t have to use our catering,” said the venue’s manager, who wore a long trench coat and panama hat and looked like he had escaped from a noir film. “Some people just like to bring in barbecue or something.”
BBQ? How genius! On one of our first dates, Dashiell and I went dancing at an outdoor soul music party, sweating and swooning as we fell into each other on the dance floor. With her shoulder-shaking, finger-snapping moves, Dashiell looked like she had just jitterbugged from a 1950s dance-off right into contemporary San Francisco. When the party got too crowded and its revelers too drunk, we dashed to the BBQ joint across the street and ate burgers and mac ’n’ cheese and banana pudding. I checked to see if the spot catered, and it did. And it was cheap. We’d have BBQ at our wedding, with pies and banana pudding taking the place of a tall white wedding cake, one of the traditions we felt we could live without.
I was haunted by the predictions some married friends had made on what our various wedding expenses would cost us, those thousand-dollar DJs and photographers. Luckily, the arts community I’d been a part of for the past two decades was filled with talented people who wanted to work our wedding, and at a reduced rate. I couldn’t believe our wild luck! The DJ from the soul party where Dashiell and I had fallen in love offered to spin Motown at our bash, for a kindly rate. A photographer I’d modeled for offered to shoot the event, also for less than average. One of our guests worked for the lighting design company that had just lit up the redwood forest where a boorish tech tycoon had a decadent wedding involving cocaine, environmental crimes, and computers flung into rivers; he offered to light our wedding for free. We opted out of letterpress invites, as pretty as they are, for a cheaper design so classy no one noticed the difference. I got my gown at J.Crew. For a dress, it was expensive, but for a wedding dress it was a steal! My hairdresser surprised me the day of by refusing to take payment for the amazing fishtail side braid she’d magicked my hair into. My bestie Rhonda, a landscape designer, filled the hall with dramatic vases of branches and leaves, lush aubergine flowers on the tables, the most gigantic air plants I’d ever seen accenting corners, fat bouquets of hydrangea and lilies, boutonnieres and corsages wound with exotic ribbon.
; To top off this embarrassment of riches, I was pregnant. Our second go-round with IVF had resulted in a positive pregnancy, and by the day of our wedding I would be ten weeks along. Although I lived with the constant fear that my wedding dress wouldn’t actually fit by the time our big day rolled around (those IVF hormones make you bloated), we were both so thrilled, so tickled that our future son or daughter would be, in this funny way, present at our wedding. We had an appointment with our obstetrician the morning of the rehearsal dinner, and we brought along our moms for a peek at their grandkid-to-be.
It hadn’t occurred to us that we might get bad news.
The day before our wedding, Dashiell and I learned that the little blob of life we’d seen on an ultrasound just two weeks ago had shortly thereafter ceased to grow. The obstetrician’s wand slid over my stomach, revealing the same amorphous bit of matter we’d seen weeks ago, no larger, and now with no flickering heartbeat.
There is no good time for a miscarriage, but surely the day before your wedding counts among the very worst. I was in shock as I sent out a volley of text messages to all who’d known I was expecting. There were a lot of them. I knew that there was a tradition of waiting until you were out of the first trimester danger zone before sharing the news, but I’d found that hard, if not ridiculous, to adhere to. I am a wildly public person, and all sorts of people knew my business. I’d been blogging about our attempts to get pregnant for two years, and anyone who knew we’d recently had an egg transfer was inquiring about how it went. Plus, there was my body. Although I shouldn’t have been showing at all, those IVF hormones had pumped up my belly till the elderly were offering me their seats on the bus. I looked pregnant. I was pregnant. So I had shared the good news, and now I would share the bad.