“That's why he was late,” my mother said, giggling. “He had a feeling this is what you were going to tell us so he went out to get wine, but he had to go to Chinatown since all the liquor stores were closed.”
He brought out a bottle of rice wine with Chinese writing on the label and poured us a couple glasses. We clinked and I swallowed. It was awful. The price was on the bottle: $4.99.
“So have you thought about dates yet?” my mother said. Her cheeks were flushed and she was exuberant. I could see her imagining herself dancing at the wedding, and being a gracious hostess. I had always wanted a closer relationship with her, and I had a feeling my wedding was going to do it. We had always been so different, but now we would be the same in one way: We'd both be married women.
“We want to do it this fall,” I said. “Grandmom and Grandpop are so old, and we want to be sure they can be there.”
“Where do you want to do it?” she said.
“We'd like to get married in the Berkshires,” I said. I knew that in Massachusetts you could be married by anyone, and Jack and I had an older, patrician friend we wanted to enlist so we could avoid the whole drama of trying to find a rabbi who performed interfaith weddings.
We started talking about possible locations and different weekends. My dad asked how many people we were thinking of having and I rattled off some names of friends. Jack mentioned a few of his, and since his friends were older and married with kids, his number was a little higher.
Before we left Jack took a picture of the four of us, using his long arm to hold the camera. My mom, Jack, and I were all grinning ear to ear, but my dad looked like he was constipated.
When we got home that night my mom had written to congratulate me. She said it was obvious Jack and I brought out the best in each other and would make each other very happy. There wasn't any note from my dad. I wrote back to my mom: “I'm so glad you're happy,” I said. “I hope Dad is too.”
“My mom sent me the sweetest note,” I told Jack as we got into bed.
“Yeah?” he said. “Did your dad write?” I leaned over and turned out the light. “He didn't. I can't believe he didn't congratulate you.”
“He probably read her e-mail before she sent it,” I said. “To him everything that comes from her is from both of them.”
The next morning I checked my e-mail as soon as I woke up. “Mom felt I should reply to the implied question. I really, truly, totally feel as she does. If I tell you that running through my mind was: ‘But does she know how hard it is to live with someone for better or worse?’ you have got to believe that that's how any eyes-open person would feel at a time like this.”
That was his attempt to be nice? Each step he took to try to be gracious made him come off as more hostile and weird. I wished he had some ability to lie, to suck in his feelings when it was for the greater good. Didn't he know how important his support was to me, even if he wasn't totally comfortable with Jack? We hadn't known each other that long, but my parents had known each other only a year when they got married. Besides, they knew from reading my column that I'd dated around long enough to know what I wanted.
On Fourth of July weekend Jack and I drove to the Berkshires with my parents to go location scouting. Every place we saw was too stuffy or too WASPy, until my parents suggested a funky restaurant they'd eaten at, the Dreamaway Lodge. It was a former bordello in Becket that Bob Dylan had once visited. The furniture was falling apart and all the tables were mismatched, but as soon as I walked in I knew this was it.
“What do you think?” I whispered to Jack.
“It's definitely funk factor five,” said Jack. “But I like it.”
The owner, an affected former actor named Daniel, had hosted a few weddings before, and when I told him I wrote a column for New York magazine he seemed impressed. He gave us a tour, showed us some sample menus, and took us to a spot in the woods where we could do the ceremony.
“So assuming we have one hundred people,” my dad said to Daniel, “do you think you could ballpark it for us?”
“Well, with three appetizers, it would be about fifty dollars a head.” There was a stunned silence. My father broke into a smile. Even including the tent, the floral, and the band, he was going to get in and out for under ten thousand dollars. My lowbrow taste would wind up saving the day.
Over the next few weeks, as I made the other wedding preparations, my mother said she'd like a running tally. I took this to mean my parents were okay with paying for the bulk of the wedding as long as the costs didn't balloon out of control. And I liked this arrangement, partly because I didn't want to tap into my retirement savings to pay for my wedding, and partly because it seemed like they could afford it. Jack and I were paying for our own suits and dresses (at least $2,000 altogether), a photographer we liked ($2,000), and the liquor ($1,000). With all that money coming from us (which meant me) it didn't seem ludicrous to ask them to pay for the rest.
But when I found a klezmer band and the guy wanted $2,500, I decided to run it by my mother. My father answered. “Is Mom there?” I said.
“She's out folk dancing,” he said.
“Oh,” I said. “I just interviewed this band we want to hire.”
“You can talk to me about it.”
This was the point where I should have said no and hung up. She was out folk dancing, which meant he was watching crime shows and messing around on the computer. Nights like this he didn't eat dinner and got hypoglycemic. This was no time to talk money. Even though I knew all of this I got nervous, and because I was nervous I kept talking.
“Well, we listened to a few of their tapes and they're really incredible,” I said. I told him how most of the band had been in the episode of Sex and the City where Charlotte has a Jewish wedding. “They cost two thousand five hundred dollars, and I was thinking we'd pay for half.” He was quiet.
“I'm so glad you brought this up,” he said. “I think you've gotten the impression Mom and I want to pay for the whole wedding when that's not the case. I don't believe in the tradition of the bride's family paying. I think it's outdated and unfair.”
“Who paid for your wedding?” My mother's parents had paid for the entire thing, a swank affair for two hundred people back in 1969.
“That was a different era!” he shouted. “I've thought this over and we're willing to pay up to a certain amount or a certain percentage, whichever is lower.”
“Whichever is lower?”
“I envision this as a shared expense, some combination of you, us, and Jack's family.”
“But they're already doing the rehearsal dinner and it's going to be like five thousand dollars. It's not like they're not helping already. And Jack and I are paying for the photos and the liquor!”
“I undehstand that,” my dad said. He didn't have a Brooklyn accent except when he said “undehstand” and “intehview.” “But there's no reason the burden should fall on Mom and me when Jack's inviting so many more people than you.”
“What are you talking about?” I said. We'd come up with a working list, and because I had a huge Jewish family I was inviting three times the number of people Jack was.
“When you were saying who you were going to invite, there were many more people on his side than yours.” He had clung to this like a fact when it was just an initial conversation. He did this kind of thing all the time: believed an incorrect bit of information and then built up a month's-long resentment, without even knowing it was all predicated on a fallacy.
“Dad!” I screamed. “I was just going off the top of my head! I'd just gotten engaged. My head wasn't working right. We're inviting eighty-five people and sixty are on my side.”
“Oh,” he said. “Well, let me think this over and e-mail you some breakdowns.”
I began to hyperventilate. I could do the whole thing if I really wanted to, but I would bust most of my retirement savings. And I didn't want to ask Jack's mother and stepfather to kick in any more because they'd already indicated they'
d be giving us a substantial wedding gift.
What was my father's problem? Did he think Jack's father and stepmother were richer than they really were? They summered in Wellfleet, and my dad always raised his eyebrows when they talked about it, like they rented some huge cottage even though it was really a shack. Or was it all about Jack? I was convinced my dad wouldn't be fighting like this if I had married Jesse Peretz. (Then again, if I married Jesse Peretz, his video-directing money would have funded the entire wedding.)
Did my father know I made more money than Jack? Was he worried I was going to support Jack for the rest of my life and afraid to be complicit in that, even symbolically, by paying for most of the wedding? If he knew I made most of the money then he had to know that any contribution from us was really a contribution from me. Why would he want to do that to me? Maybe he felt that getting Jack's family to pay was the only way to even things out, a kind of reverse dowry.
I went into my office and checked my in-box. There was an e-mail that looked like an algebraic equation, outlining three different ways of dividing the total budget between them, us, and Jack's family. It contained phrases like “where Y =60% of total.”
When Jack came home I was totally distraught. “It's OK,” he said. “Obviously your father has issues with me, so let's do it all ourselves. I can't pay you anything now, but I will pay you back, I promise. We'll cancel Dreamaway and do it here, at City Hall, just a small dinner, immediate family. I'd prefer a small wedding anyway.”
“I'm an exhibitionist!” I said. “I'm not going to do my wedding vows for an audience of fifteen. That's fewer people than I had at my Barnes and Noble reading!”
The phone rang. It was my mother. “What is it?” I said, my voice high and frenzied.
“You know that conversation you had with Dad?” she said.
“Yeah?”
“Forget it. We'll do the whole thing.”
“I don't understand. What happened?”
My father was on the line. “Mom came home and brought me to my senses. I said to her, ‘How did you manage to defuse such a tense situation so easily?’ She said, ‘The same way I've been doing it for thirty-three years. It's called husband management.’ ” He got all choked up when he said, “husband management,” like he'd realized how lucky he was to be married to someone who knew what to do with him.
The rest of the planning went by relatively smoothly, although there were arguments over how many people could be invited to the rehearsal dinner. (Jack and I wanted fewer, my parents wanted more.) The day of the wedding my father put on a suit and a carnation and, with his slicked-back hair and gray beard, looked like a real father of the bride. Even when the band went into overtime and the photographer turned out not to have the right equipment, my father didn't get upset. We danced together even though he doesn't like to dance and we made quiet small talk while everyone watched us.
At the toasts, Jack's friends stood up and said what a wonderful guy he was and my friends stood up and made jokes about how much I used to drink when I was single. My parents got up and my mother said, “We were going to read a poem but we decided it was too corny, so instead we'd like to give Amy and Jack a few words of advice about marriage.” Then, in unison, they said, “When you're wrong, admit it. When you're right, shut up.” It wasn't sentimental but it got a huge laugh. I wished they had said something nicer about me, or even about Jack, but I figured they decided less was more.
Two days after the wedding, after Jack and I were back in Brooklyn, I got an e-mail from my father. I was nervous to open it because the subject heading was “Misc.”
It opened with a long and somewhat corny poem, the one they were going to read, about the joys of marriage with metaphors like “mountains and valleys.” I wasn't sure who wrote it, but it looked like something he'd found on the Internet.
Underneath it, he wrote, “I'd have to say that one of the greatest ‘values’ of the wedding day (toasts plus conversations) was how much I learned about Jack…to his enormous credit! Maybe I wasn't observant enough, or other things got in the way of my realizing sooner and with greater certainty what a truly wonderful match you are for each other. Anyhow, you certainly ‘have our blessing,’ by which I mean that we think that your making a life together is a wonderful thing and we're glad we can learn from both of you over the coming years. Now, about this ‘baby thing’…” After that, he put the sign for a wink. It's the only time an emoticon ever made me cry.
my perfect wedding
samina ali
When I was twelve years old, I got my first period while my parents, two brothers, and I were spending Fourth of July weekend in the Wisconsin Dells, a gaudy tourist trap smack in the middle of the Midwest, which can best be described as a miniature and humble version of Disney World. There were bumper cars, twisting roller coasters, towering water slides, and, of course, the main attraction: the waterskiing show, where a troupe of expert water-skiers showed off their talents of impressive high jumps and twirls to a large, mostly white audience. All the hotels in the area were booked, and my immigrant Indian family had rented a room in one of the many crowded and nearly identical two-story hotels that featured a view of the main highway and a swimming pool adjacent to the asphalt parking lot. My dad liked to go to Wisconsin because, unlike where we lived in Minneapolis, fireworks were legal. In Wisconsin, he could load us up with firecrackers that my brothers and I would excitedly shoot into the wide gray skies at dusk.
My menses secretly crept up on me in the middle of the night. My mother woke me early in the morning, and when she saw the stains on the white hotel sheets, she led me to the bathroom and had me clean up before the others woke up. I still remember the confusion and horror I felt, this deeply private maturation process happening smack in the middle of a tourist trap in some cheap hotel room, where my father and brothers were steps away from my mother's commanding whispers and my quick and embarrassed movements. For the rest of the vacation, I felt strangely different but did everything I could to keep my sudden change hidden from the men, grateful it had been my mother who found me. Yet only a month later, my family flew back to Hyderabad and within days of our arrival, my father threw a party to publicly announce the onset of my menstruation. Rather than invite a handful of close relatives, as some families do to mark this occasion, my father, who is known for his dramatic gestures and his deep pleasure in entertaining, invited close to two hundred guests, most of whom I didn't know, hired three chefs from the best local restaurants, and lit off fireworks over the house.
For the occasion, I was dressed in the wedding outfit in which an older cousin had recently gotten married. The ensemble consisted of rich layers of red silk and a six-foot brocade veil that was wrapped around my developing breasts and over my head. My hands were intricately patterned with henna. My face was washed with turmeric, and kohl was deeply applied to my eyes. Gold bangles gently clinked on my wrists. Around my neck and ankles, dangling from my ears, down the center part of my hair, and cinched around each finger, were fifteen pounds of gold. I was seated on a center stage in the huge living area of the old house, and my mother and aunts, the women of the house, fed me sweetmeats and draped me in fragrant ropes of jasmine and marigold. After the ceremony was completed, my mother took the crook of my arm and led me across the wide, open room to greet the guests. As a traditional Indian bride would, I kept my head bowed low, not out of obligation, but because I was deeply ashamed over the public production. My two brothers, whom my parents had firmly admonished not to tease me, kept to the background, providing my only relief. That night, when all the guests were gone and the house was quiet again, my parents sat drinking chai on the verandah underneath the clear dark sky. I overheard my father telling my mother he had received fourteen marriage proposals. This, of course, was the real reason the celebration had taken place, to announce that I was of marriageable age.
When my mother asked what he was planning to do, he said, “Nothing, she's far too young. Tonight we were just
having fun.”
The traditional Hyderabadi Muslim wedding ceremony lasts five days, each ceremony bearing its own ritual along with its own color. The first three days are gold, promising fortune and fertility; the wedding is the bloodred of union; and the groom's dinner that is thrown the day following the wedding is the green of Islam, the color of submission. The bride and groom are both expected to be virgins. Though the wedding has been arranged and the two meet for the first time on the wedding night, a successful consummation is expected, which is what, traditionally, the groom's dinner publicly announces.
I was nineteen when my marriage was arranged to a Muslim Indian man in Hyderabad. I was born in India, and though my parents immigrated to Minneapolis when I was six months old, I was raised to know that it was to India that I would return to get an arranged marriage. When I attended school in the United States, I wasn't allowed to date or even have male friends. I couldn't even accept their phone calls at the house. Each summer, to remind me of who I really was, my father sent me back to India, where I was also enrolled in school. I grew up in both places, fluent both in Urdu and English as well as in American and Hyderabadi Muslim culture. It never occurred to me that I might not participate in an arranged marriage when everything in my life was preparing me to be a proper Indian bride. The man my parents chose was exactly the type of man they had prepared me for: Indian, Muslim, educated, and from a similar social and economic background. Marriages are arranged around such commonalities to ensure that the daughter, who has grown accustomed to certain types of comforts in her father's house, continues to enjoy those privileges in her husband's. There was no surprise. I was relieved, however, to find that my future husband was handsome, even by my standards, and young, just four years older than me. In this roulette wheel of fate, anything is possible: My parents could have agreed to a match with the man who recently had one lung removed or with the widower who was fifteen years older and had three school-age children about my age. Of course, there were also the handful of suitors whose attributes were indistinguishable from the one they ended up choosing, and it was only after my parents completed thorough background checks and careful character assessments that they made their final decision. Which is to say that by any standards, my parents chose wisely.
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