by Michelle Tea
It wasn’t until I spoke to Madeline that I broke down. “I feel like our wedding is going to be a sad thing now,” I cried into my first cup of coffee in three months. “Everyone will be feeling so bad for us, or they’ll be uncomfortable, that way people get uncomfortable around tragedy. It will be tragic, and awkward. It’s going to feel horrible.”
“Everyone loves you,” my sister consoled me. “Everyone is so happy that you and Dashiell found each other, and they are coming to celebrate that. You’ll see. It is so awful that this happened, but you’re going to have a beautiful wedding.”
As I noted before, weddings are showbiz, and the show must go on. There was no time to mourn, to collapse under covers and eat takeout and wallow in sadness. For starters, I needed a mani-pedi. It’s true I almost lost it all over again when the woman painting my nails pointed to my protruding stomach and asked, “You have a baby in there?”
“No,” I said quickly, and turned my face away, down to the People magazine I wasn’t reading, my cheeks burning. Even though this is the question you are never, ever supposed to ask any woman ever, I didn’t blame her. I looked pregnant. Only hours ago I would have replied to her question with a yes and a smile. I placed my hand under the UV lights that baked the gel polish onto my nails, and the woman slid away quietly.
After the mani-pedi it was home for my progesterone treatment. Part of the IVF procedure is dosing yourself with progesterone from right before the egg transfer deep into your first trimester, first with nightly intramuscular shots that leave your butt both sore and numb, a grotesque combination, and later with little oval suppositories. Normally, when a fetus is found to have stopped developing, a woman would stop her progesterone. But stopping the progesterone increases the possibility of having a natural miscarriage, which can be an epic, painful, blood-soaked experience. I had a D and C—an abortion, basically—scheduled for two days after our wedding. In the meantime, I did not want a natural miscarriage to kick in. And I certainly didn’t want it to happen at my wedding, as I glided around in a long white gown. The Carrie-esque, pitch-black humor of this did not escape me; the evil, nagging voice inside me, the one that insists that all my efforts to have a nice, normal adult life are bound to dramatically, flamboyantly fail due to some deep internal flaw, cackled wildly. You would! it hooted. You totally would have a miscarriage all over your wedding dress. That is so you.
The night before our wedding, Dashiell and I lay in bed, too exhausted to cry. In the morning I woke up and inserted my progesterone, this time too excited to cry. Partly I worried about being so distracted from emotions I was bound to feel sooner or later, but I was also grateful for it. There was no time for grief. My hairdresser was on her way to our house, and the photographer would follow, and it was time for me to finally slide into the dress I’d been hiding in my closet, time to step into the satin Lanvin pumps that were possibly the most expensive part of the wedding. It was time for Dashiell and me to marry one another.
With the help of our friends, the venue, beautiful to start, had become otherworldly in its romance. The flowers were exotic, and the space wasn’t simply well lit; it was decorated with shadows in the shape of trees, so that it seemed we were gathering in a dark, majestic garden. I had grown deeply fond of our caterer, a French woman who had brought in a team of French-speaking ladies, all of them rushing around, prepping the dessert table with the most decadent lime pies, apple pies, pineapple cakes, and of course the banana pudding. An entire salmon, its scales replaced with rounds of cucumber, had pride of place on the savory table. It looked positively royal. After taking a barrage of photographs with every possible combination of family, it was time for Dashiell and me to hide. The guests were soon to arrive, and to our delight, the little room we’d selected to hide out in had a window that peeked out onto the street. We held hands in excitement, looking out at the parade of friends, all dressed up for our wedding. There was Tali, in a bow tie, ready to be our officiant (she’d clicked a box on a Web site and been instantly ordained a minister!); there was Annie, climbing out of the cab from the airport, her blond curls a wild halo around her head. A limousine pulled up and two cousins from Chelsea poured out, all long legs and wild hair. There was that person and that person, in their sequined jackets and cocktail dresses, their suits and their acid-washed jeans, their ascots and thrifted maxi dresses.
Dashiell had planned with our DJ when the music to cue the procession would begin, and when the melody would change to cue our own walk down the aisle. Ducking behind a wall, we caught little glimpses of my nephew, the ring bearer, stumbling down the aisle clutching a bird’s nest I’d carefully tied our rings to. My nephew had only just learned to walk, so it was a little touch-and-go, but he took to his duty so loyally he refused to relinquish the nest, and it had to be pried from his hand. Next came our flower girl, my five-year-old niece. Worried that she would fling all the flower petals onto the floor in one fat handful, I had told her to do it slowly.
“One at a time?” she’d asked.
“Yeah, totally,” I’d said. I’m not used to talking to children. I’m used to talking to my sarcastic friends who are always joking and joshing. It did not occur to me that my niece would actually walk down the aisle with the slow concentration of a butoh dancer, meticulously placing one petal at a time onto the floor.
“Oh my God,” I whispered to Dashiell from our peeking place. “It’s like . . . Yoko Ono. It’s performance art.” Eventually, Madeline leapt from the stage and helped her daughter along. As the audience was mostly filled with performance artists, it was a highlight of the event.
My highlight of the event was when Dashiell in her custom-made three-piece suit and I in my trailing gown clasped hands and set off together down the aisle. At the sight of us the entire audience rose from their chairs and let loose a thundering cry of joy. They hooted and yelled and screamed and whistled. They cheered and clapped and stamped their feet. Dashiell and I looked at one another in utter shock, before cracking up. My smile was so big I thought it would break my face. I didn’t think, then, of my sister’s promise that our wedding would be filled with love and joy; I wasn’t thinking of anything, so totally in the moment I was. But I would think of it later, how her promise was so true. Our wedding was filled with love, and we were at the gorgeous, beating heart of it.
Tali started crying before she even opened her mouth to speak, delivering a speech about the history of queer love we were a part of, referencing this new ability we have to actually, legally marry one another. Her crying was contagious; soon bunches in the audience were dabbing their faces. Our friends were largely ignorant of weddings, being mostly queer people whose friends hadn’t been permitted to wed; many of them had grown to dread weddings as those awkward obligations that force you to hang out with family members you can’t stand. It felt magical to be in the midst of this controversial tradition, doing it our way, making it meaningful not only for us but for a community of friends alienated from the rites of love and commitment.
I pulled my vows out of my bouquet of hydrangea and lilies and spoke my promises to Dashiell: I promised to snug and be snugged. I promised to respect her autonomy. She pulled her vows from the pocket of her suit and promised me the same. Unsure of who we would now be to one another—husband? But Dashiell’s a girl! Wife? Fine for me, but Dashiell is way too much of a boy to be anyone’s wife!—I didn’t know what to tell Tali to “pronounce” us. “Each other’s person?” I suggested weakly, knowing how awkward it sounded. But she figured it out herself.
“I now pronounce you married,” she crowed, once our rings were safely jammed onto our fingers. We kissed, and bounded from the stage, Dashiell instinctively raising her hand in a fist pump. It’s just how she expresses joy. We dashed back to the little room that had been our hideout, to catch our breath while the guests filed into a cocktail room.
“We did it,” Dashiell said, wrapping herself around me. “We did it.”
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“Did you hear everyone cheer? Did you hear that?” I asked, as if she could have missed the entire room rising to their feet and thundering their love at us. We kissed and kissed and kissed some more, and then went out to join our party.
By the end of the night I had heard from many people that our wedding was the first they’d ever felt an actual emotion at. They talked about how Tali had made them cry, how my niece’s flower petal placement had been the best piece of durational performance they’d seen in a long time. I hoped that at least some of the couples left feeling inspired—after a year of wedding planning, I now wanted to go to someone else’s wedding! So far, none have made any announcements. My bridal bouquet was caught by a particularly slutty fag, but then again, even slutty girls settle down sometimes.
11.
You Can’t Fire Me; I Quit
At fourteen years old I was eager to join the workforce. I went to city hall and fetched a card for my mother to sign, granting the government permission to override the final years of protection offered by child labor laws.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” My mother scrunched her face. “Once you start workin’ you’ll be workin’ till you’re dead, you know.” It was sweet of her to try to stave off lifelong wage slavery for another year or two, but I was desperate to become a career woman. And I knew where to start. My run-down hometown had recently gotten a mall!
Our new local hot spot, the Mystic Mall, was built on the weed- and trash-encrusted empty lots where the city had notoriously burned down in the seventies. The humor of its name was lost on me. It wasn’t a galleria of new age shops selling cut-rate crystals and swoopy Stevie Nicks shawls; it was simply named after the nearby Mystic River. Still, it’s not incorrect to say that the mall became my temple, a place filled with objects of worship that elicited many urgent prayers. Marianne’s sold clothes so cool, I’d never seen anything like them—shirts that looked just like leather, slashed with zippers! Neon button-up shirts with neon-splattered neckties! Deb sold fingerless gloves, the kind worn by Madonna and Sheila E. and Adam Ant in the music videos I’d studied on TV. The Gap of yesteryear was nothing like The Gap of today; it hawked heart-covered T-shirts with spaghetti straps that tied into bows. Record Man offered Billy Idol and Van Halen records, some of them collector’s-item picture discs, with Billy’s bleachy spikes and luscious sneer gazing out at you from the grooved vinyl. At Mr. Tops you could pick out a T-shirt and flip through the gigantic three-ring binders stuffed with glittery decals, and the worker would sear your selection onto the shirt with a giant steaming iron, even laying out your name on the back in fuzzy letters, or sticking a velveteen lightning bolt on the shoulder. It was the eighties, and the opening of the Mystic Mall corresponded almost exactly with the introduction of MTV, which corresponded almost exactly with my puberty. Suddenly, I knew what cool was, and I wanted to be it. Amazingly, this brand-new mall, right here in my uncool hometown, could help me.
To score any of these things—a U2 pin from the revolving pin case at Mr. Tops, a fringed skirt from Marianne’s, purple eye shadow from the drugstore—I would need money. Coolness was a luxury in my family; there was very little extra for such frivolity. But I was beginning to understand that this idea of coolness might, in fact, save my life—get me out of my hometown and into the larger world. The need for a J-O-B was serious. My mother signed the card, and I was hired at DeMoulas Market Basket, the gargantuan new supermarket built alongside the mall. There were still some laws governing how many hours I could work, but I worked as much as I could—after school at St. Rose, buttoning my smock on over my Catholic school uniform, and on weekends.
At first it was exciting—picking up my tray, the cash neatly organized in the little slots, and proudly walking it over to my cash register. I loved the clickety-click of punching the prices into the machine, loved counting back the change. Girls who’d worked there longer taught me how to steal packs of bubble gum and where to stash them in your drawer, how to space out the bathroom breaks you spent smoking in the ladies’ room. And as the novelty of employment wore off and the monotony of the work wore on, these little tips were what the job became about—not so much how to work as how to un-work. How to steal little bits of time for yourself, shave something extra off the top. I learned to daydream, especially while bagging groceries. I wrote stories in my head, the story of my life thus far, and realized that with twists of tone and vocabulary I could make my story sound glamorous or triumphant, funny or tragic. Maybe I’ll do this one day, I thought, sliding cans of baked beans and plastic packages of hot dogs into paper sacks with Tetris-like efficiency. Maybe I’ll write about my life, and make it glamorous and triumphant and funny and tragic.
I quit DeMoulas right before I got weird, dyeing my hair and drawing upside-down crosses on my uniform. It had begun to feel like too much to do both school and the job, and to have time left over for important bonding with new friends, finding secret places to chain-smoke cigarettes and compare notes on boys and music videos. But after my weirdness was firmly established I realized that I actually needed a job more than ever—for bus fare to sneak into Boston, for pins declaring my favorite bands, and for packs and packs of cigarettes—and tried to get hired back. But DeMoulas would no longer have me. “You’ve got to wash that pink streak out of your hair,” my old boss said, shaking his head at me.
“It doesn’t just wash out,” I said, offended. “It’s permanent.” I’d recently learned what a poseur was—a person whose commitment to rock ’n’ roll was not legitimate, someone who was only pretending to be hard-core, who was going through a phase. Rock ’n’ roll, I had come to know, was my life. From here on, everything about my appearance was calibrated to broadcast this allegiance to the world around me, in hopes that, beacon-like, it would attract to me others whose devotion to the underground was obsessive and true. Thus far, it hadn’t. Thus far, it was simply getting in the way of me having a job so that I could continue to afford my rock ’n’ roll lifestyle. Manic Panic doesn’t grow on trees! Oh, the irony!
There was only a single store in my hometown that would hire a girl with a pink streak in her hair in 1986—Mr. Tops, that make-your-own T-shirt shop with its books of glittery decals and trays of velvety letters. One woman who worked there looked just like Martha Quinn, the MTV VJ with the pixie cut. I shyly commented on her look-alike-ness while browsing through the book of rock decals, and she said she knew that. I told her that Martha Quinn was one of the women dancing in lingerie in the J. Geils Band “Centerfold” video, and she told me she knew that, too. I told her that the J. Geils Band was from Boston, right across the bridge from us. She was aware of that. Fake Martha Quinn seemed to know as much rock trivia as real Martha Quinn! When I asked if Mr. Tops was hiring, she gave me an application, and a week later I had a new job. One where the boss didn’t mind if I came to work wearing white greasepaint meant for actual clowns as foundation makeup. One that didn’t mind if I played the Cure’s doomy-est album, Pornography, over the store’s sound system—even if the customers did. It had all the makings of an awesome after-school job, except for one thing: I couldn’t do it.
First of all, I couldn’t fold the shirts. Folding things in general—shirts, wrapping paper, towels—is something I bumble at to this day. My creases are weak. Bits are sticking out where it should be streamlined. After learning that my best efforts resulted in stubborn imperfection, my frustration overwhelmed me and I stopped trying. I sort of rolled the T-shirts into soft lumps and hoped nobody noticed.
Then there was the giant iron that melted the decals onto the poorly folded (and thus wrinkled) shirts. Customers would choose a simple, sparkly decal that I’d have to iron on smack in the middle of a shirt. I’M A BEAUTICIAN—NOT A MAGICIAN! A TOUCH OF CLASS. MAKIN’ BACON! (That one had a cartoon of two pigs having sex. Gross.) There was the little puffy green guy always sticking up his middle finger, sometimes proclaiming, DISCO SUCKS. There was DISCO SUCKS BUT ROCK IS
ROLLING. PAYBACK’S A BITCH had a deer holding a rifle. It took me a while to realize it was a hunting reference. People didn’t hunt in my hometown. There wasn’t any wilderness, or animals.
The real stress came when somebody wanted their name on the back of their shirt. Or even worse, a proclamation of their love—DONNA LOVES SULLY; DOM’S GIRL 4-EVA.These jobs required exact spacing not only between the letters but then between the words, all of it placed perfectly in the center of the garment—low but not too low, high but not too high. And you had to be sure to depress the iron slowly, lest a slight breeze ruffle your painstaking work and produce a wonky result. My results were often wonky. Sometimes an entire baseball or football or hockey or cheerleading team would place an order and I would be in tears, salty mascara trails cutting through not just my white greasepaint but the dusting of baby power I sprinkled over my face to kill the greasepaint’s intense, clowny shine, creating a grayish mud on my face. I looked crazy; I felt crazy.
I liked my bosses, a couple of doctors who lived in a little castle by a beach somewhere and had ties to the Boston music scene. I hated showing them my mistakes, seeing how anxious it made them. So I began hiding my fuckups, balling them up in my army bag and then throwing them away in the dumpster behind the mall. Instead of thinking their new employee was totally inept, they now thought that someone was stealing their T-shirts. They never suspected me of thievery—with my uniform of vintage black dresses purchased from the Salvation Army, they knew I had no interest in baseball tees and sweatshirts. But after coming into the store and finding me so engrossed in a paperback that it took me ten or fifteen minutes to realize they were there, they decided I was unintentionally abetting shoplifters by reading Portnoy’s Complaint rather than keeping my eye on the goods. I was fired.