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

by Jeffrey Zaslow

  Alyssa’s hypothetical wedding sometimes plays out in Gary’s mind—the ceremony, the reception, the words he might whisper in her ear or say publicly to the invited guests. “I don’t want to do anything to ruin her day,” he says. “I think about what I’ll do and say. When I give her away, will I kiss her on the cheek or on her forehead? Will it be awkward? What should I say in my toast?”

  Gary’s awareness of the symbolism attached to weddings isn’t surprising, since he spent fifteen years as a husband and son-in-law in the world of Becker’s Bridal. But, of course, countless fathers outside the bridal industry mull over these same questions. Fathers who don’t always know how to connect to their daughters often see the wedding day as a time to finally reach into their hearts and speak up.

  Gary doesn’t easily reveal his feelings to Alyssa, and he isn’t adept at drawing out hers. He’s stoic, and Alyssa is too. She’s reluctant to talk about her toughest memories of family life because she doesn’t want him to think she’s blaming or judging him. She’s impressed by the way he has pulled his life together, and prefers to focus on that. (Sober since 2002, Gary says he doesn’t intend to drink again. “By age forty, I had more than drunk my lifetime quota,” he says.)

  After the divorce, Gary worked for a while in a car-bumper factory. He’s now in charge of maintenance at an independent-living retirement facility in East Lansing. He lives in one of the units on the property.

  Gary says he hasn’t been on a date since Shelley left him. At age forty-eight, he’s still handsome, and women do approach him, but he turns them away. He’s aware that Alyssa and her two brothers have harbored fantasies over the years that he’ll reunite with Shelley. “I admit that I have that wish, too,” he says. “I do still love her.”

  He knows Shelley doesn’t want him back; she is proud of him for his sobriety and forgives his worst behavior, but her life has moved on. “This may sound callous,” she says. “I care about him, but my feelings are like those you’d feel for a brother who worked through his problems.”

  Given that she spends her workday with women and doesn’t go to bars, Shelley doesn’t always come in contact with available men. She has dated a half-dozen guys since the divorce, but doesn’t expect to remarry. Her friends notice that she seems to be attracted to men with issues (she has never shaken her caregiver personality) or men who won’t commit. “For some reason,” she admits, “it’s almost as if I don’t think I deserve true love. So many of the brides in the store, they think they deserve love. But me? I’m always finding people who need to be healed first, or people who need me to love them but aren’t great at giving love in return. What the heck is that all about? Why am I a magnet for these personalities?”

  She doesn’t expect some handsome, romantic, divorced fortysomething father-of-a-bride to walk into the store one day and sweep her off her feet. It certainly hasn’t happened yet. “People say I’m married to the Becker’s Bridal Building,” Shelley says. “Maybe that’s true.” She admits she’s lonely. And yet, returning to Gary wouldn’t be the answer for her.

  Gary hopes he’s now a good role model for Alyssa and her brothers. His work doing maintenance for senior citizens in their apartments is more than a job; he looks after them, offers them company, keeps them safe. It’s a high calling.

  Gary spends much of his free time with his three children, and as Alyssa gets older, she’s more conscious of how she interacts with him. When Gary is with the boys, they kid around a lot. They talk about sports. But with her, he’s different.

  Recently, just before Father’s Day, Gary took her arm and said to her, “This is how I think I’ll hold on to you when we walk down the aisle at your wedding.” She smiled at him, but he was serious. “Maybe we should start practicing,” he said.

  He asked how she’d like him to dance with her during the fatherdaughter dance. What song? What steps? “It’s OK, Dad,” Alyssa said. “I’m not even engaged, and who knows if I ever will be?”

  Actually, both Gary and Shelley seem to be making more efforts to show love to Alyssa, and she’s appreciative. When she was young, hiding in closets to seek attention, they were more oblivious to her needs. Now they have urges to address them.

  That includes, of course, her decisions about working at Becker’s Bridal. These are questions complicated by Shelley’s desires to have her remain in the business. Is Alyssa happy there? Should she make the store her career?

  “I have to figure out where my life is going—marriage, kids, Fowler, New York, whatever,” Alyssa says. “And so I find myself thinking: How will this work if I stay here forever? What will that look like?”

  Alyssa is thrilled that her mother has built Becker’s into a business selling $1.8 million worth of dresses a year. But the great majority of that isn’t profit. Alyssa sees the pressure Shelley is under from brides, mothers, suppliers—and her $450,000 annual payroll. “I kind of absorb all of my mother’s tensions,” Alyssa says.” I feel obliged to worry along with her. My mom’s burden is my burden. Her stress becomes my stress.”

  Sometimes two days will go by and Shelley has hardly eaten anything besides a few crackers. Alyssa wonders: If she ever takes over the store, will she be so stressed that she’ll forget to eat? Shelley understands this. She tells Alyssa, “I don’t want you to feel confined by the walls of the store, or the limits of Fowler.” But Alyssa knows her mother would love her to stay forever. Her father, too. He’d like her to be close.

  She has a sense of how her life will likely go. “I guess my heart is here,” she says. “This is my home. This is my legacy.”

  It’s almost five p.m. on a Friday, and as closing time approaches, Alyssa and Shelley start encouraging customers to get back into their street clothes. As always, some aren’t eager to take off their dresses. One has been walking around in hers for almost an hour. “Honey, we don’t want to fray the bottom of the gown,” Shelley tells her. “If you keep walking back and forth on this carpeting, that’s what will happen.”

  The brides reluctantly take to the fitting rooms, and eventually head out the front door. After the store has emptied out, Alyssa says to her fellow saleswoman, Mona, “I feel like trying something on.”

  She gets herself into one of the store’s priciest wedding dresses, and looks at herself in the old mirror by the front counter. Alyssa can be engagingly sarcastic. “Mona,” she says, “will you marry me? No one else will!”

  Mona just laughs and says she’s done getting married.

  Cory is in the back office doing the store’s payroll. He looks through the one-way mirror and sees her parading around in the wedding gown. He reminds himself: He loves her, but he’s not ready yet.

  Alyssa isn’t trying to subliminally suggest anything. Or maybe she is.

  In any case, as she studies herself in the mirror, the expression on her face isn’t the one from her Facebook profile photo—that crazy bouquet-catching grimace. On this day, she’s smiling, and in this dress, she looks gorgeous. Cory ought to take a closer look.

  If Alyssa ever does go dress-shopping for real, she thinks, she’ll keep things dignified. She won’t be one of those brides showing off her dress via Skype. She won’t bring along an entourage of pals and a cooler of Champagne to indulge her for hours as she plays princess. She certainly won’t make any plans to “trash the dress.” After all, she knows well the painstaking, detailed beading and sewing that goes into each gown.

  When and if she gets engaged, Alyssa assumes she’ll just tour the floor after hours and easily narrow down the possibilities. She knows the stock. She knows what she likes. She imagines she’ll try on a few dresses, make a decision, and then head up to the Magic Room with Shelley for a look. Maybe she’ll ask her dad to join her in the Magic Room too. He’d feel touched to be invited.

  A part of Alyssa, though, wonders if her time will ever come. After she gets out of the wedding gown, she plants herself in a comfortable chair on the sales floor, exhales, then tells Mona with mock exasperation: �
�Maybe my mom and I will be the last two spinsters in Fowler. We’ll just live our sad little lives, and keep selling wedding gowns to everyone else.”

  In the back office, Cory is busy going through time-sheets and doesn’t hear her. Neither does Shelley, over by the vapor iron.

  Alyssa looks at the dress she’d been wearing, now back on its hanger. “I ought to remember this one,” she says. “It could work. Someday.”

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Julie

  As Julie Wieber’s wedding approaches, she finds herself thinking about all the ways she can describe herself.

  She is a nurse.

  She is a widow, having lost her much-loved husband Jeff so suddenly. She is a forty-five-year-old bride-to-be, after falling in love unexpectedly with Dean, her brother’s friend.

  She is a mother with a son and four daughters, all of them grieving, and all of them concerned—or angry—about her decision to get engaged barely a year after their father’s death.

  But Julie is also a daughter who remains incredibly close to her mother, Helen. And through her grief, and her surprising romance with Dean, she has been blessed to have her mother at her side, showing her love and trying to ease her pain.

  Over at Becker’s, Shelley thinks she understands some things about her friend Julie, including her great attachment to her mother and her urge to remarry so soon. “Maybe it’s partly because you were born prematurely,” Shelley tells her. “You were born with an extra need for nourishment. Preemies are fighters and survivors, but they often carry that need for nourishment the rest of their lives.”

  Julie with her son and four daughters

  Julie’s mom subscribes to the same theory. “Julie was born two months early, and weighed just three pounds, six ounces,” says Helen. “Back in 1965, a lot of other babies born that small didn’t survive.” For the first thirty-one days of Julie’s life, Helen was not allowed to touch her. “They say mothers need to bond with their children right away, but I couldn’t do that. Julie was in an incubator.”

  In the first year of her life, Julie was sickly, and even after she began to thrive, she was a clingy toddler. “Maybe it was because she was the baby, my fifth child,” says Helen. “But I think it was also because she was a preemie. She needed me. And for her whole life, I’ve never cut the apron strings. When the phone rings, I figure it’s Julie. She raised her family in a home right down the street. She couldn’t be any closer.”

  Recent studies suggest that people born prematurely are more apt to be anxious and prone to depression as adults. But preemies also grow up to be more risk-averse and more likely to heed their parents’ advice and warnings. It’s unclear whether this is because worried parents hover over their preemie children all through their lives, or because preemies grow up needing strong bonds with their parents. In any case, Helen believes that her close relationship with Julie is rooted in the circumstances of her birth.

  Now seventy-seven years old, Helen has been in Fowler for almost six decades, ever since she married a local boy, Roy, who runs an excavation company in town. She has watched Becker’s Bridal pass from Grandma Eva to Sharon to Shelley, and because she has seen this small town fade over the years—losing businesses, the movie theater, the hotel—she’s grateful that Becker’s remains. “It’s a thrill when you drive down Main Street and see cars parked, and brides and bridesmaids walking around, smiling,” she says. “It makes the town look happy—like we’re busy.”

  Helen sees Fowler as a town with two faces. During store hours at Becker’s, with young women populating Main Street, the community can feel young. But in truth, it is a town full of widows. When Helen meets friends for breakfast, she’ll look around the table—seven or eight women, all senior citizens—and realize she’s always the only one with a husband to go home to. One day she returned from breakfast and talked to Roy about it. “That’s life,” he told her.

  “I know,” she said, “but what am I going to do without you?”

  On Friday, February 6, 2009, Helen had breakfast as usual with her friends. When she said good-bye to them after the meal, she casually added, “You know, when I’m in church, I always say a prayer for the widows.” They thanked her. Later that day, Julie’s husband, Jeff, the most loyal, fun-loving guy in Fowler, had his heart attack and died. “At the visitation, each of my friends reminded me of what I had said that morning,” Helen says. “I didn’t realize it, did I? Within hours, I’d be saying prayers for my own daughter.”

  On the first fitful night after Jeff’s death, Helen didn’t leave Julie’s side. “I slept with her in her bed, the same bed where Jeff had slept the night before,” Helen says. “I held her and I held her some more. And Julie just clung to me, the way she did when she was a baby. That’s how we got through the first night and the second night.”

  Helen lost her father in 1950, when she was seventeen. Her mother, then fifty years old, would live another thirty-three years, but never remarried. On Sundays in the 1960s and 1970s, Helen would bring her kids to visit her mother, and little Julie was especially concerned for her widowed grandmother. “I don’t like that we’re leaving her alone,” Julie would say as they drove away after dinner, her grandmother waving good-bye from her front porch. “Let’s drive around the block and come back. We need to make sure she got in the house OK.” (The empathetic urges that would make Julie an award-winning nurse were evident early.)

  Julie only saw her grandmother on weekends. “But I’d think about her all week long,” she says, “wondering how she was doing all by herself. How lonely was she? I felt so sorry for her.”

  Decades later, after Jeff died, Julie thought of her grandmother’s many years as a widow. “We were sitting together, her head on my shoulder,” says Helen, “and Julie said, ‘I never thought I’d end up like Grandma, but I have.’ I just held her and we cried.”

  Helen was glad that Julie and her kids found their way to counseling. They all needed it. For one thing, because Jeff died so suddenly, none of them were able to say good-bye. The pain of that cannot be underestimated.

  One day Julie’s therapist told her to get in her car and drive out of Fowler for a while. “Pretend Jeff is in the passenger seat,” he said. “Pour your heart out to him. Tell him why you loved him, what you’re sad about, what you’re angry about. Scream if you need to. And tell him good-bye.” Julie did that and found it helped, but just a little.

  Concerned about her daughter’s emotional and mental health, Helen was relieved when Julie became serious with Dean. She watched the relationship lift Julie from a very low and sad place. That’s why Helen became such an advocate for her daughter when people said Julie got engaged too quickly after Jeff’s death. And her advocacy was especially focused on Julie’s kids.

  As the wedding plans took shape, the kids remained ambivalent at best and, sometimes, openly hostile. Though Helen is very close to her grandchildren, now ages fifteen to twenty-three, she became fiercely protective of her daughter, just as she was when Julie was a three-and-a-half-pound preemie.

  For a while, Helen listened to all of her grandchildren’s complaints: “Mom betrayed us! She betrayed Dad!”

  “Dad would want what’s best for his kids, wouldn’t he? And this isn’t best for us. So Mom can’t say he’d want her to be happy, if her happiness is making us unhappy.”

  “Why would she want to hang out with some guy, when we all need her?”

  Over time, Julie’s son tended to be the most accepting. But her four daughters would gang up on her, texting about her even while she was in the room, and lashing out at her, sometimes in public. When they were angriest and most disrespectful, the girls told Julie they hated her, that she was a terrible mother, and that their dad would never approve of how she was behaving.

  “I’ve lost the ability to discipline,” Julie admitted to her mother. Her counselor told her that’s common in grieving families, because kids learn to manipulate a vulnerable parent. But that didn’t make the pain and dysfun
ction any easier to handle.

  Knowing that Helen’s own father died when she was seventeen, the grandchildren expected her to be supportive of them, because she could tap into her own feelings of loss. But as twenty-year-old Lauren later explained: “It was the weirdest thing. All our lives, our grandmother had been someone we could vent to. And when we needed her, she was always there to console us. But in this case, she just laid down the law. She said, ‘Your mother is my daughter and I’m standing by her! You can’t talk to my daughter like that.’ We’d never seen her act that way before. Never heard her raise her voice.”

  “In a way, I had to be almost cruel,” Helen says, “and it was hard for me to do that, given how heartbroken the kids were.” Still, she felt a need to encourage her grandchildren to reach outside of themselves—to help their mother, their siblings, and other people too. She talked to the kids about her own mother’s many years as a widow.

  “You know, my mother used to say that heartache isn’t the worst thing. Sometimes you can take your heartache, and reach in deep and learn from it, and then you can use it to help someone else. Someday, people who are experiencing first-time sadness will come to you. And you’ll see, you can be strong for them in a beautiful way because of what you went through losing your dad.”

  Helen explained that, starting when she was a young adult, she wished her mother had remarried. “She was alone a lot of years, and we worried about her, sitting silently in that empty house,” she said. “Someday, you’ll be very glad that your mom found Dean after your father died, that she has someone who cares about her. Life is for the living.”

  Helen didn’t tell her granddaughters that she has a special bond with Julie, her little preemie grown to adulthood. She didn’t talk about how her heart ached for Julie, maybe more than her heart ached for them. She just spoke to the kids with respect, and tough love, and hoped they absorbed some of what she said. Though they weren’t thrilled that her allegiance wasn’t with them, they assured her they’d gotten her message.