The Magic Room: A Story About the Love We Wish for Our Daughters

by Jeffrey Zaslow

  There’s a lot of talk these days about the extended adolescence of single men; women complain that too many of them remain “pre-adults” into their thirties. There’s a whole genre of movies—Knocked Up, Swingers—that showcase these guys. And yet, in ratios equal to women their ages, about 65 percent of single men in their twenties, and 40 percent in their thirties, say they want to settle down and get married, according to a 2011 Rutgers University study. The assumption is that these men are commit-mentphobes who’d rather play video games than turn into responsible husbands and fathers. But from Meredith’s vantage point today, the issues are more nuanced.

  She has certainly seen plenty of boys inside the men she has dated, including Ron. “I prayed I wouldn’t have a husband who sits around playing video games,” she says. “But guess what? I’ve now got a forty-two-year-old husband who sits around playing Xbox with his friends. And you know what? Given all his other great attributes, I’m fine with that.”

  In essence, over the years, she was able to home in on what she needed from a man. Meredith is a chronic list-maker, and in her twenties, she’d list the qualities she wanted in a husband. She’d come upon her list and revise it, adding something, crossing something out. For a time, she thought she wanted a corporate executive, an accountant, or a lawyer. She thought she wanted an athlete. “I’ve always hated sports,” she says, “but I thought I wanted a guy’s guy with guy friends doing guy things. I didn’t think I’d end up with a nerd playing video games all night long, like Ron does. Or that he’d be a ‘foodie’ like I am, someone who loves cooking, and watching the Food Network with me. But that’s Ron. Who’d have thought?”

  That “man-of-my-dreams” list, written and rewritten when she was a young woman, is now just a curiosity.

  “I came to realize that, most of all, I wanted someone to support me emotionally—not necessarily financially,” she now says, “someone to share a bowl of popcorn with, to go to a movie with, to share the responsibilities of caring for a dog or a home—or kids. I wanted to do the dishes in the kitchen and look out the window to see him cutting the grass. I wanted someone who could make the good times better and the hard times not as hard. I know, it’s corny, but I wanted someone to grow old with me, and it’s fine if he’s playing Xbox some of the time. I feel so happy because I believe I’ve found that in Ron.”

  Three weeks before her wedding day, Meredith turned forty years old, and she and Ron were invited to her parents’ house to celebrate. Her family had wrapped yellow police tape around the house that read CAUTION! 40TH BIRTHDAY IN PROGRESS. Her mother also had bought suckers that said 40 SUCKS! Everyone had their little joke that she was old, and then they had dinner.

  “Overall, my fortieth birthday was pretty painless,” Meredith says. “I was too busy with the wedding plans and the bridal showers, and I was just overwhelmed by the generosity of spirit that people were showing me. They know how long I’ve waited to marry. They know how much I’ve wanted it. They’ve given me such warmth and love. It’s like I hardly noticed I was leaving my thirties.”

  Two days after Meredith’s birthday, her sister-in-law hosted a bachelorette party, and Meredith’s friends made gallons of sangria and played’80s music really loud. They also brought along a stripper pole, and though nobody stripped, everyone took a turn dancing with the pole. Her bridesmaids ranged in age from thirty-six to fifty-three, but that night, with those drinks and those songs and that metal pole, they felt young and uninhibited. Meredith did too.

  Later that week, her father told her he had been thinking about something, and wanted to tell her. “Ron is a great guy, a great partner,” he said.

  “I know that,” Meredith answered. “The most wonderful thing about him is that if I need his help, if I’m down, he’ll be there for me. I can count on him. That’s worth everything.”

  Her father smiled at her. “I just want you to know,” he said, “that you’ve made the right choice.”

  Meredith didn’t cry, but she felt her emotions rising. “I’m forty now,” she thought to herself. “I don’t always come to my parents with my problems. But it feels so wonderful to hear my father say that, to know that he approves.”

  Meredith also thought about how far she’d traveled—about how many wrong men she had dated, and how she had coped with the uncertainty of her life as a single woman.

  “You know what, Dad?” she said. “At the wedding, I think I’m going to walk down the aisle really slowly. I’ve waited a long time for this. A really long time. So when I’m on your arm, in my dress, on my wedding day, well, please walk slowly with me. Let’s make it last.”

  Chapter Twenty

  A New Generation

  Maybe Grandma Eva’s ghost is here at Becker’s, hovering and second-guessing the renovations. If not, and she somehow returned to the store after all these years, the place (and the brides) would feel pretty foreign to her.

  One bride takes out her laptop, so she can use Skype to model her dress for her mother, vacationing in Portugal.

  Another never-married bride stops by with her maid of honor and her fiancé’s best-man: They’re her daughter and son from a previous relationship, ages six and eight.

  A third bride has come with an ice-filled cooler, sparkling wine, five bridesmaids, and her mother. This is the bride’s sixth visit, and after nineteen total hours in the shop, unable to make up her mind, she has finally settled on a dress. “OK, I’ll take it,” she announces, and her mother and attendants start whooping so loudly that Shelley can hear them in the back office.

  “That Cooler Queen finally picked a dress,” says Shelley’s daughter, Alyssa, who has just stepped into the office to deliver paperwork. Shelley and Alyssa peer out of the one-way mirror that looks over the sales floor. While the celebration continues, the saleswomen try desperately to resist rolling their eyes. It probably didn’t take her this long to commit to her fiancé! In Grandma Eva’s day, no bride would dare take nineteen hours to pick a dress. It would be the height of arrogance and indulgence, the talk of the town, a signal of near insanity.

  There are other trends that would leave Grandma Eva mystified.

  Since Eva’s time, brides and their mothers seem to have developed superhuman abilities to notice even the tiniest stain on a dress; for some, a smudge can be a cause of great consternation and outrage. (In times of plenty, people find plenty of little things to get them down.) And it doesn’t matter that, at their wedding receptions, some of these same brides will actually get on the floor and do the Worm. “You can just imagine what a dress looks like after a bride does the Worm,” says Shelley.

  Four brides trashing their wedding dresses

  And here’s where things have taken an even stranger turn.

  Brides used to return from their honeymoons, dry-clean their gowns, and try to preserve them for eternity. But lately, Shelley and Alyssa have become accustomed to indulging a new tradition among brides, dubbed “Trashing the Dress.”

  In the weeks after their weddings, more and more Becker’s brides have been getting back into their white gowns and ruining them by posing for photos in rivers, junkyards, Dumpsters, and pig pens. The resulting images are arresting reminders that marriages need humor, a sense of adventure, and a willingness to take risks and get dirty. (The concept was started by a Las Vegas wedding photographer whose dress-trashing photos went viral on photography websites in 2006. Other wedding photographers, especially those outside urban areas, saw the idea as a potential new revenue stream.)

  Kelly Lynne Burke, a local photographer and a friend of Shelley’s, often shoots weddings of Becker’s brides. She says 30 percent of them now pay the extra $300 for the “Trash the Dress” option on their photography package. “It’s a way for them to say ‘I’m married, I’m done, I never need to get into that dress again,’” says Kelly. “These post-wedding glamour sessions are crazy and fun because the brides are so much more relaxed.” Brides who felt stressed or repressed at their weddings—or who want to sy
mbolically shake off traditions or push boundaries set by their mothers and mothers-in-law—feel liberated when trashing their dresses.

  One recent twenty-two-year-old bride, Meggan Nielsen, decided to trash her bridal gown under a waterfall, to the dismay of her mother and grandmother. “They had an emotional attachment to my dress,” she says. “They were with me when we picked it out. I had to help them understand the reasons why I wanted to trash it.”

  She told them that trashing her dress was an appealing ritual because it made a statement to her husband that she’d never again be a bride: She’d be married to him forever. “I have the wonderful memories of our wedding. I don’t need the physical dress,” she told her mom and grandmother. The trashing ritual wouldn’t be mocking her wedding, she explained, “it’ll be celebrating the finalization of it. It’s a way of saying, ‘The dress served its purpose well, but I don’t need it anymore.’ I don’t need something that large and bulky taking up space in my closet. The photographs are enough of a sentimental reminder for me.”

  There was one other thing. When Meggan got married, she already had two children, a son and a daughter. She doubts her daughter will someday want to wear her dress. But trashing it removed the possibility, which also appealed to Meggan. “I want the experience of shopping for a bridal gown someday with my daughter,” she says. “I want to again feel that bonding moment between a bride and a mother.”

  Her mother and grandmother didn’t exactly give their blessings before Meggan trashed the dress, but they told her they were better able to understand her motivations. On the day she stepped under that waterfall and ruined the dress with dirty river water, she says, “It was invigorating. It felt like the right thing to do.”

  At twenty-four years old, Alyssa watches all of these odd new wrinkles in the bridal world, and wonders what life at Becker’s will look like a couple decades up the road, if she ever takes over the business.

  Alyssa isn’t sure yet what path she’ll take. But she’s open to the idea of someday accepting the responsibilities of keeping the store in the family for a fourth generation.

  Unlike Shelley, who never went to college, Alyssa majored in apparel merchandising at Central Michigan University, and even spent a few weeks studying fashion design in Paris. Before graduation in 2009, she worked for a couture bridal designer in New York, helping with the production of gowns. “I wasn’t good at it,” she says. “I was doing a lot of pinning and beading, and I felt inadequate. Plus, the designer was always yelling at somebody. I realized I’m better suited for selling.”

  As part of her job description now, Alyssa has to tell brides that all sales are final. But unlike her tough great-grandmother, Eva, she tries to find friendly ways to give the news. “Well, here we are,” she’ll say, while taking a bride’s credit card at the front counter. “You’re buying the dress, so there’s no turning back now. You’re sure this is the right guy, right?” She says it all very lightly, but she’s making a point that brides need to understand: no exchanges, no returns.

  As Alyssa learns the business, she sees the need for the no-return policy. Still, her heart goes out to the victims of broken engagements. Often, they can’t bring themselves to pick up the dresses they own but won’t be using. They’re too embarrassed, or it would pain them to see a new batch of happy dress-shoppers. Some just abandon their gowns to Becker’s Dress Cemetery. Others send their mothers to retrieve them. “We’ll try to sell it on eBay,” a mother will say, as Alyssa gently puts an unwanted dress in a garment bag.

  Now that she’s working at Becker’s full-time, Alyssa finds herself sorting through her feelings about love, marriage, and this line of work. Alone at home one night, she finds herself going through what she calls her old “box of love.” It’s a collection of letters, photos, and keepsakes she saved over the years. She has diaries there, too, from what she calls “the crisis years.” Some entries detail her unhappiness over her parents’ broken relationship, especially Shelley’s decision to end the marriage. Other entries spell out her yearnings about love and her place in this world. “A girl’s mind is a strange place,” she thinks as she reads.

  On January 24, 2002, when she was sixteen, she wrote about “what I want in life—the perfect wedding, home, children, husband. I want the kind of husband who will take me to an empty movie theater on our anniversary, and when we get there, our wedding will be playing on the screen. I never want to settle for less than love. But first, I need to slow down the pace and find myself. I need to get through my teen years and early twenties.”

  Nine years after writing those words, she says she’s still has hopeless romantic tendencies, but her time in the store has given her perspective. She knows the statistics. Half the brides who buy dresses from her could end up divorced. Why will some make it and others won’t? “I see a lot of brides who are young and naïve, but I don’t assume that necessarily means their marriages won’t work,” she says. In the history of the store, she points out, thousands of brides arrived very young and naïve, including countless grandparents and great-grandparents of today’s brides. Many of them ended up having successful marriages.

  A greater issue, Alyssa decides, is an ability to communicate well, which she thinks her parents never fully achieved. Her father, especially, couldn’t get his feelings out in the open, and retreated into alcoholism. Alyssa doesn’t think that she and her boyfriend, Cory, are great communicators, but they’re getting better at it.

  Even though she grew up in a family focused on brides and weddings, or maybe because of that, Alyssa always has been somewhat conflicted about marriage. “My parents’ divorce made me less idealistic,” she says. “It’s not that I don’t think a happy marriage is possible. I’m just more cautious.”

  These days, spending long hours on the front lines of the wedding industry, Alyssa is often hyperfocused on business issues. How can she help her mother sell enough dresses to make the weekly and monthly sales numbers? And then, in the midst of that number crunching, existential thoughts will creep into her head. She’ll ask herself: How did we all get here? Why do human beings even get married? Who first came up with all this wedding stuff? A ceremony, a ring, a vow, a dress, all of it?

  And yet, seeing so many brides, it’s easy for a young woman to get caught up in that urge to marry. Alyssa is not invulnerable to those pressures. A large part of her would like Cory to propose already. They’ve been together on and off since high school, and now that he works at Becker’s in the back office, Alyssa has constant reminders that he’s husband material. He’s kind, hardworking, funny, romantic enough, and he’d be a caring, responsible father. He makes her life brighter. “I’m happiest when I’m with him,” she says.

  For his part, Cory says he loves Alyssa, but he wants to be careful and deliberate. He’s getting his career established so he’ll have enough money to buy a ring and start a life together. But more important, he wants to make sure that “everything feels right” before he takes any big steps. “I’m not prepared yet to get married,” he says, point-blank. “Even though Alyssa and I have been together a while, we’re still learning about each other.”

  Loved ones and friends are now pressuring him to “do right by Alyssa,” and he’s shaking off their advances. At his sister’s recent wedding, it felt as if every guest was asking him about his intentions. During the reception, Hershey’s Kisses were on all the tables, and one of his great-aunts used the foil from the candy wrapper to fashion a silver ring. “Go give this to Alyssa,” she said. Cory smiled at her weakly and resisted.

  Working at the store, he sees that steady parade of young brides, some in their teens, and he knows it’s almost impossible that “they have all their ducks in a row,” the way he’s trying to do it. He knows some view marriage as something you jump into, that love conquers all. Sometimes that works. But he’s not crossing any streets without looking both ways. This is sometimes hard on Alyssa, but he thinks patience will serve them well.

  Alyssa (front r
ow, on the left, in a black dress) used a cropped version of this photo as her Facebook profile picture.

  While Alyssa waits, she’s trying to keep herself in check. One profile picture she uses on her Facebook page addresses all of her emotions perfectly, and with a sense of humor. The photo shows her grabbing for a bouquet that had just been tossed at the wedding of one of her friend’s. The look on Alyssa’s face is this unforgettable, almost-possessed grimace. Is it a look of determination? Uncertainty? Terror? It takes a brave and self-aware young woman—especially when she’s the heir to a bridal shop—to make such an image her Facebook profile picture.

  Alyssa’s father, Gary, worries that she overanalyzes her life. “She over-thinks things, and that can make her nervous,” he says. She’s a lot like him in that regard.

  Since Gary and Shelley divorced in 2000, he thinks a lot about the love he wishes for his daughter, and how it’s different from what he wishes for his two sons. “With the boys, I want them to grow into men, to take care of themselves,” he says. “But with Alyssa, it’s like I want her to still be my little girl.”

  A large part of him wishes he could get a redo on some of the years when Alyssa was young. He still can’t shake his memory of the night Alyssa won that cake at the Girl Scouts dance, and he drunkenly dropped it and laughed. And so he finds himself daydreaming about how he can make amends for such incidents. “I often think about what I could do at Alyssa’s wedding to make up for some of the dumb things I’ve done,” he says. He has considered buying a beautiful wedding cake, which could be an unspoken way of acknowledging and apologizing for that dropped cake from long ago.