A mile farther on, nearly to the church, I brushed the bumper of a farmer in front of me who was turning with irresponsible slowness. I laid into the horn. “GO, you fucker!” I hollered. He gave me the finger and crept through the intersection with all the haste of a slug.
“She's the bride, you a-hole,” my sister said inside the car. We laughed. Meghan looked at her watch. “Kath, you've got plenty of time. Really.”
I nodded but accelerated quickly anyway. Adrenaline still floored me. I wanted this to go well. My wedding. Our wedding.
In the balcony at the church, flowers were waiting and the brass quintet was warming up. This was good. My brother arrived with a cold can of beer for me (at my sister's wintertime wedding, he'd brought a flask of bourbon). I left the cotton dress in a pile at my feet as I stepped into Mom's wedding dress, and as Meghan and my sisters-in-law worked on the many buttons, I took a gentle, careful swig of Coors Light, thinking I probably hadn't had one since high school. I peeked over the balcony to see Tim striding up to the front of the church, talking to the groomsmen, looking a little anxious. I wanted to be down there with him already, but I was eased just to look at him.
The previous summer, we had gathered around my dad's hospital bed in Indianapolis, where I grew up, playing his favorite music and saying whatever we could think to say— “last words,” in theory, though I found the concept ludicrous. (He couldn't hear us, not with all those drugs, and what would I say anyway, with everyone gathered?) He had lost a medical lotto of sorts, improbably spawning a septic infection after relatively minor brain surgery, related to a small, benign tumor. The jackpot was four weeks on a respirator in intensive care, with a second infection and sepsis as the final bonus prize. That morning, fatally low blood pressure meant his veins resembled a deflated pool raft, and synthetic adrenaline was keeping him alive until his sister arrived on a plane from Washington, D.C., and my brother on a plane from New York.
At some point, Mom said to him, “I guess you won't be able to walk Kathleen down the aisle.” She resumed crying, and I moved my face in an expression of disgust that got us off the topic of my wedding, which didn't even exist at that point. I was exhausted, nauseous, and the events around me were ungraspable. Everything was distorted, a bad cliché. The only way I knew that my father's impending death was real was that I couldn't say it out loud. I'd made several phone calls that morning. “Please come,” I'd said to my mother's brother, trying to pull out the ugly warbles in my voice. “As soon as possible.”
“Come today,” I said to Tim, when I called his office in Rhode Island. “Pack your suit. Call me when you have your flight. OK?” Then I hung up.
I hated what my mother said about Dad not walking me down the aisle because it contributed to the melodrama, the TV version, the, in fact, silliness of it all. What about his missing the publication of my first novel, which he carefully edited? What about the fact that my children would have no idea what he was like? I also hated the wedding reference because it was so exclusively about me, and although I'd done a fair amount of feeling sorry for myself that month, most self-absorption evaporated the moment I realized he was, in fact, going to die. I would assimilate to his death. Most everything I wanted from life I could still have. But he would be gone and he would leave a thready, unmendable hole in the world for many people. He had so many talents, so many pleasures, so many ways of living. It would be easier, I thought, never to speak to him again than it would be to get used to the idea of his not being in the world. And this, above all, is why I scoffed at my mother's comment. Who gives a shit, I wanted to say, about one currently nonexistent big expensive party where I wear a white dress. Dad won't be anywhere.
Perhaps I would've been more concerned about my father missing my wedding if he hadn't known Tim, if it hadn't already seemed likely that we'd marry. Tim had known my father for two years before his death. On their introductory dinner, my dad described a shaggy dog of a dream that had us all scratching our heads, but then the punch line involved white mules, the mascot of Tim's alma mater, and the compliment inherent in Dad's scheme—he paid attention to how I sounded about Tim on the phone; he was going out of his way to flatter Tim—flushed me with pleasure.
There were a few Christmases and Easters and one Indy 500 spent together. Then, during the first week of Dad's hospitalization, Tim joined me in Indiana and took a couple two to six a.m. bedside shifts, doing crosswords and holding Dad's hand and making gentle jokes about it, since Dad was still somewhat lucid, and he wasn't someone who usually wanted his hand held by his youngest daughter's boyfriend. We had one hotel room across the street, since the nine-mile drive to my parents' house was too far the first week, and Tim and I rotated through naps in one of the beds, while my mother, my sister, my brother, and/or my brother- or sister-in-law slept in the other bed. Tim's truest induction into my family came that weekend, and although my father was in and out of sedation, I know he knew Tim was there.
I picked Tim up myself at the airport an hour after Dad died. Memories of that time exist in still frames, and I remember Tim rising off the escalator, and I see myself not wanting to meet his eyes. I'm surprised I can see at all, I feel so swollen, so disoriented, plus the usual, excruciating embarrassment of crying in public, and then he's dropped his bags and his arms are around me.
When we were all together for a September 11 funeral about eight weeks after Dad's death, Tim asked my mother about proposing marriage to me. He asked my sister and brother next, and he finally asked me to marry him in late October at the bottom of a bluff on Block Island. Though I was a little surprised at the timing, or afraid that others would be troubled by it, I also felt stronger for it, and brave and honest—we wanted to get married and we didn't expect anyone, including me, to put aside sadness. What, I asked myself, did I consider “better” timing—when exactly would my family and I be less sad? I thought back to sitting around in the living room the night Dad died. There was an extra car at my parents' house, and there had been a several-months'-long discussion of who should have it. Tim's car had recently been stolen and so I'd asked for the extra car for us a few times. The extra car was Dad's Mazda Rx-7, retired but beloved. That night, we talked about many logistical things: the calling, the funeral, who would do what the next day. I have no memory of the prompt for what came next, and very possibly there was none, but with Tim sitting at her feet, Mom blurted out, “Tim can have the Mazda when Kathleen gets a ring.” She wasn't thinking and never meant to say such a thing in front of Tim. But we all laughed long and hard, even on that night—even then. The memory of it made me think that our wedding could similarly be a single, happy spot in a long, tight spell of sadness.
We planned a small Midwest wedding away from Indianapolis—away from where we'd have to avoid the funeral church and reception country club, and where the list could easily grow past one hundred, which I felt I couldn't handle. Pentwater is the rural Michigan beach town where I'd spent many summers, always romantic in my life, and romantic in a way that Tim and I shared: good food and long beach days and books and sports and family and music. Pentwater was also Tim's kind of place more than any city or country club would be, in part because he had grown up in a small Rhode Island beach town. To boot, he wouldn't wear a tux in Pentwater, and the dance floor would invariably be dusted with white sand. Though Pent-water was rife with memories of my father, I believed a wedding there could be both more intimate and more appropriate to Tim and me.
I asked my brother over the phone to walk me down the aisle. He wanted to know if he could wear seersucker and I said yes, absolutely. I wondered after hanging up if I hadn't squandered a nice moment by asking this over the phone, but my instinct was to ask casually, so I did. As for the rest of the planning, I had visions of it being a true, portentous Tim-Kathleen partnership. Yet the reality of tiny Pentwater being eight hundred miles away and unfamiliar to Tim meant I planned much of the three-day event myself with a notebook full of scribbles and phone numbers, while he too
k on the “mystery” Canadian honeymoon. In my file cabinet, the wedding file rotated ahead and behind, in between “Dad Memorial Contribution thank-you” and “Dad medical bills,” which were my other consuming activities at the time.
Perhaps I missed my father the most during the planning stages. He would have given the process grace, confidence, and a simplicity that I could never feel. Instead of my disintegrating notebook, he would have had a three-ring binder, divided by days and by food, lodging, guests, maps, music, and he would have had definitive opinions and gut takes on people, like the band agent and the caterers, who baffled me. My dad was also a map guy, so when that task fell to me one miserable half-rainy-half-snowy day in March, it was excruciating. I couldn't get a map of the area right—and given that the wedding was literally in the middle of nowhere for the many guests flying in or driving numerous hours, we needed a good map. Tim will point to that day and say I kind of lost it then, holing myself up with the computer and then at Kinko's for too many hours, speaking few words until it was complete, then crashing into bed and not being able to sleep.
I thus discovered that I'm a doer of a griever. I become slightly manic to distract myself from grief, then wonder why I don't feel much (besides exhaustion). Finally, something like map day happens, and I simply drop, out, down, away. It was funny, therefore, to be occasionally pigeonholed as a manic bride, because I rarely felt, during the engagement, that (manic) bride and (grieving) daughter were distinct from each other. And this feeling, perhaps, above all, meant I was determined not to be either one on the actual day of my wedding.
I arrived in Michigan with only my mother and our dogs two full weeks before the wedding. I communed with my father and exercised my body and spirit in the best way I knew how. I used a putty knife to clean accumulated dirt, crud, and maple wings from between the deck boards, all one thousand square feet of them. I located the origin of a potent stench—a rotting raccoon in the woods—and asked my year-rounder neighbor to bury it. I washed all the outdoor furniture and realphabetized the spice drawer while listening to show tunes. I walked the dogs on the beach in the morning and at night. During long runs, I wrote a hundred eloquent, subtle toasts to my “husband.” And though I continued to hope that I'd be awakened one morning by Dad firing up a power tool downstairs, I knew how much he, too, would love the coming weekend, and that made me happy, not sad.
Tim arrived on Tuesday before the wedding, and we ditched family to go out to dinner alone. After eating, we walked out onto the long cement channel that provided boat access from Lake Michigan to the Pentwater Harbor. I remember only the revelation of being together again, after a few weeks' separation, of being together in that place, with a notion of what we were about to do, of having stolen time away from our families and the numerous “to dos” to enjoy each other. I think my calmness that weekend, the sense of sailing across an almost unnaturally calm surface, began with our date that night, standing on the channel at sunset.
As most wedding days do, mine flew by. After nearly rear-ending that car and flipping the bird right back at the driver, the afternoon and evening were a blur. My young nieces and nephew were shy and serious and perfect in their roles. I breezed down the aisle. My brother Jimmy kissed Tim at the altar, awkward if it hadn't been on purpose, and then I immediately set to calming Tim down. I mixed up right from left during the ring exchange. We had tin cans tied to the back of our car, and we laughed through our whole foxtrot. Dinner was delicious, the wine was perfect, and my toast was bumbling. And I felt like I exhaled one breath for a solid five minutes as Tim and I drove out of town the next morning with our dogs barking in the back of the Volkswagen. It seemed about four hours since the whole weekend started.
A half year later, at Christmastime, I had a late-morning dream that we were having another wedding, except this one was in Indianapolis, at the church where I grew up, and Dad was organizing it all. Wedding guests were everywhere. Dad met me in the parking lot. His suit was perfect and his shirt seemed starched, though starch irritated his skin, and he wore a yellow pocket square and a yellow striped tie. I was pleased because he looked so good, like himself, not like he had in the hospital. We had the predictable father-daughter moment, and I said it was time to go into the church and he nodded: “Yes, and it will all be fine. But I have to go now. I can't stay.” Even in my dream, I was thinking, This is such a stupid dream, this is so “ABC After School Special,” but I was gasping hard, sucking in, wheezing with shock, and I couldn't speak; Tim, awake and spooning me on the real-world side of things, asked me if I was okay, what was wrong, why was I breathing like that, while in my dream, I crumpled to the asphalt: Dad had left.
Every so often I'll wake up knowing I've dreamed of Dad, knowing I'll spend the day once again getting used to the idea of his not being at his desk in Indianapolis, his voice not greeting me on the phone. Surely I missed having my father at my wedding; surely it was “easy” not having him there because I wanted it to be “easy.” But I also know Dad would have wanted it that way. Though he loved good traditions, such as walking his daughter down the aisle, he was also one of the most considerate, self-deferential people I'll ever know. He would not have considered the walk down the aisle or the father-daughter dance at the reception the primary aspects of my wedding. He would have emphasized that he was essentially a bystander to Tim's and my joining, and this must be why, in my dream, he sent me in alone.
getting hitched
first, reader, i made him up, and then i married him
jacquelyn mitchard
I used to buy wedding dresses. Ivory lace jackets. Delicate beige suits. Costumes for second weddings. It was a kind of hobby because I never really expected, after more than four years as a widow, to marry again. I would sometimes, though, take out my picture hats and fingerless lace mitts and try them on, to imagine how I might look on the day I confounded the odds.
But every day, the odds seemed stacked more firmly against me. And I was so bored and discouraged by dating that I'd given it up.
How is it possible, you may ask, that a widow aged forty years old with four children under the age of twelve (including a toddler and a rebellious boy) could get sick of dating? Isn't the better question to ask, how does such a woman, who does not resemble Demi Moore or Susan Sarandon or even their fatter sisters, even have the option to give up dating at all? I was a woman living in a populated area, at the end of the twentieth century—not the kind of nineteenth-century widder woman a cowboy might marry for love of her barn—in other words, for security and three square meals a day. I had assets, but not necessarily the kind that modern men considered value-added.
And yet, I am not lying.
People did come a'courting and I, alas, did tire of them.
They were all nice enough fellows.
There were sweethearts from the past with busted marriages, orthodontists I approached with fervent hopes for free braces in the future, a hotelier and former English soccer pro young enough to be my, uh…younger cousin. But all of them failed the critical test. They weren't father material. If I were to marry, the man would be the only father my children would ever know, the only father whom the young ones would truly remember. Either these men blanched when they heard about the size and variability of my brood or visibly glazed over when I regaled them with tales of my posse. For me it was a case of this: Love me; love my crew. And that wasn't happening.
And so, as I have done so often, trudging grimly across an arid expanse, I cried into my pillow and turned to my pages.
In my second novel, I created the man I wouldst marry, no Tim, Dick, or Harry, but Charley Wilder, a sexy younger guy with a ripped T-shirt and ripped biceps beneath it, who had a degree and a tie, liked classical music, and considered the idea of having a big family deeply erotic. “Too bad Charley Wilder doesn't exist in nature,” my friends wrote as I sent them chapters to read. A free spirit, Charley slept in a woven hammock from the Yucatán he'd strung across his living room. He had a tool be
lt with three pockets instead of the usual two. He knew all about botany; he could dance, and (most urgently, as I am shallow) he looked like David Duchovny. (And yes, that last part really made my friends snort.) But I could dream—the law against it had not yet been passed in 1998—and Charley on paper was more fun than Joe or Mike or Eric or Ted in real life. In my book, he courted the stiff and edgy lawyer Annie Singer until, against all reason, she gave in. He came to do carpentry on her house and ended by covering her bridal bed with orchids. They had a baby, although she was too old, because he just couldn't wait to have a family.
No wonder reviewers found the story line unrealistic.
My author's copies of The Most Wanted were sitting unopened in the hall on the morning the doorbell rang, and my daughter Francie, wearing her floor-length summer nightgown, her long dark hair in a tangle, opened it. I heard a voice ask her, “Are you a Mayan princess?”
Francie answered insouciantly, “Yes, I am.” She was two at the time and didn't know not to talk to strangers. So I unrolled myself from the couch where I'd been catching a postworkout nap, resplendent in my ripped biking shorts and Texas Rangers ball cap, and looked into the clear-water-blue eyes of one of the cutest guys I'd ever seen. My assistant would later tell me I had that look people get after a near-death experience.
“Hi, sport,” said the guy, who looked to be about twenty-one. (He was, in fact, thirty-two.) I felt myself assume the demeanor of a puddle of warm pudding; and the fact that I could neither speak nor look at him did not augur a relationship. I pointed the way upstairs to where he would be doing…carpentry, and though I was too young for a hot flash, I flushed when he strapped on his tool belt (three pockets, not two). He was obsessed with measuring, he later told me in passing, because he liked a tight fit. I remained conscious.
Altared Page 18