Altared

by Colleen Curran

  The next morning, I prepared to greet him—having employed mascara and a curling iron. He didn't show up. By ten, I was furious. By eleven, I had decided not to put my faith in tool belts. I had changed back into a sweatshirt from a sweater by the time he showed up in his absurd yellow van. He apologized. He had remained up far too late, reading my novel, a copy of which my assistant had thoughtfully given him, and he wondered if we might later take a few minutes to discuss it.

  Discuss my novel? A guy who looked like this wanted to discuss my novel ? In my experiences, deltoids like his did not usually coincide with bookishness. But my first novel, he mentioned, had been one of his mother's top ten all-time favorites. He had himself not read it, but hoped to.

  And so, we began to spend half our workdays gabbing in my garage, sitting on overturned plaster buckets. I was fixing up my house to sell and working on my third novel. Chris had a degree in studio arts but was proud of being a carpenter. He had made beautiful environments, gazebos, multitiered and unusually shaped, and loved the botanical aspect of his work. He hoped within the year to move to New Mexico. I caught myself hoping against his hopes.

  It didn't take a psychic to recognize that I had conjured up Charley Wilder…from longing and imagination, and somehow, the universe had listened and sent my vision to me. He had the look, the demeanor, and the, ah, equipment of the man I'd created in the novel, the one who convinced Annie Singer (who, like me, had been around the block before the block had sidewalks) to give up her misgivings about men in general and be swept away—into his hammock and his love.

  Still, I wasn't sure for some weeks.

  What I had, I realized in days to come, was a giggly teenage crush. So did Chris. We rode around in his van and sat on the hood looking at the stars. We lost a combined total of about twenty pounds. And we never did a single thing but hold hands. Chris didn't want to kiss me, he told me, because he didn't like things that ended, and if this was to be a thing that ended, he wanted it to end with a friendship instead of a premature and truncated love affair. Still, late at night, he called me, and while my children banged furiously on the bathroom door, we talked absurdity and gush for hours. We sang to Tom Petty on the radio. We talked obliquely about how some men liked marrying women with children, and how some older women needed a younger man to keep up.

  The first time I visited his sparse apartment, I noticed the eighteen-foot hammock from the Yucatán strung across the living room.

  The second time I visited, he proposed. The way he put it was this: “I've been wondering. I think you're remarkable. And you seem to think I am. And so, I thought I'd ask if you would do me the honor of marrying me?”

  I reminded him about my children, with whom he'd been playing basketball in our yard after work, the closest I'd ever allowed any man I had dated to come to them.

  “I'd like ten children,” he announced.

  I asked when he hoped this nuptial event might take place. He said, “Well, let's see, what's today? Saturday? Do they do weddings on Monday?”

  I gulped. But the universe had indeed handed me my fantasy on a plate. I gulped again and nodded. Mad with excitement, unable to sleep, we went for breakfast at one of those horrible pancake places where everyone is up too early or too late. In what I would learn was a statement characteristic of him, Chris said, “Tonight, I'm only grateful that I'm not anyone else on earth.” He paused, glancing at the behemoth farmers and scrawny Goth children around us. “Especially anyone in this restaurant.”

  At six a.m., we went to the house of my best friend, who'd been a rabbi, and asked her if she would marry us on Wednesday. She had been invited that coming Wednesday night to a dinner in Ohio to sit with President Clinton. She declined in order to perform our marriage instead. Finally, we headed to my house.

  When I told my sons I was going to be married, after nearly five years of widowhood, my eldest wondered, “May I ask, to whom?”

  And my youngest son pulled me aside and asked, “Does this mean he'll live here?”

  I'd phoned the people whose country house I was in the process of buying to ask whether I might bring by a few friends to see the place on a night just a few days hence. How we pulled this together is still a mystery. Of course, I had the dress—I had a closet of selections. But I needed a bouquet with violet orchids (an obliging neighbor and bridesmaid went to work on that). We made phone calls to extra-close friends and relatives, many of whom had the same reaction as my ever-tolerant brother: “Married. To the Zen carpenter. Wednesday. Right. Well, game on!” My father was so confused he thought I was asking him to someone else's wedding. One friend surreptitiously surprised me with a gift of two white limos that showed up later in the afternoon, drawing the attention of the neighborhood. My assistant hired out a room at my favorite Italian restaurant, and a baker buddy whipped up a multitiered carrot cake for the chocolate-allergic bride. A photographer who'd often taken book publicity shots for me agreed to shoot the wedding all in black and white, and on two days' notice. When Chris's dad asked what the rush was, we were able to reply that it wasn't us; it was everything around us. We weren't afraid we'd back out; we were afraid that so many people would give us so much adverse advice that we wanted to put their words back into their mouths before they came out.

  Though all the bustle, I was curiously calm, and “calm” is not a word often used in connection with me. In fact, a friend once told me of the Zen philosophy “Be like snow,” in other words, fall softly on the earth but still nurture it, as does the rain. She said, “In your case, I'd suggest, be like hail.” I had chosen the loveliest and laciest of my wedding dresses: an ivory ballet-length skirt and a fitted bodice with a high neck in front that dropped away in the rear view to nothing at my waist. It was May thirteenth; I got twenty-one mosquito bites on my beautiful back in the twenty-minute ceremony, in which we promised to honor each other with all that we were and all that we had, in a variation of the words from the Book of Common Prayer.

  The previous owners of the house I was buying, who were still in residence, promised to vanish but later heard about the limousines in the neighborhood, and we heard they got a giggle out of it. Chris's mother, who looked to be the same age as her son, pulled him aside and said, “All I asked you to do was get her to sign my book!” My brother hugged Chris and asked, “Have you ever seen my sister… get mad? Think the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland. I admire you.”

  Each of my three boys had chosen a passage to read. The eldest read from Robert Frost's famous poem, “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.”

  My middle son read from A River Runs Through It, “Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it…on some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words.”

  And my youngest son, just seven, read from Charlotte's Web, “It is not often someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both.”

  At the reception, friends made side bets on how long this marriage, a culmination of a five-week courtship, would endure. The long shot was a year.

  But it has been eight years, three more children, whales of laughter and oceans of tears since that day. We married in haste and wondered at leisure just what we had done. But I am stubborn and so is he. And we were both committed, in part, to prove the doubters wrong. The children quickly let it be known that even if we occasionally yell at each other like people in an opera—and, at first, we did—no one was going anywhere. And no one has.

  Writing has its own way of making things manifest. I don't have a spiritual bone in my body, but putting things down somehow seems to nudge at least some of them into being, perhaps because, as we write them, we bring them forth so utterly from the core of ourselves. Silly as it sounds, I'm convinced, this one time, that I fictionalized not my own past, but my own future.

  And by the way, we got four hammocks as wedding gifts.

  the second trimester

/>   ruth davis konigsberg

  Our engagement came as a surprise to no one, especially me. Eric and I were both thirty-five. We had met at a dog run where we took our canine companions, Camby and Rennie, a scenario so marvelously clichéd it recently found its way into a mediocre John Cusack movie. Two weeks into our relationship, we were already talking about spending the rest of our lives together. Eric was everything I wanted: caring, highly literate, in therapy. When you're in your mid-thirties and finally fall in love, things can happen awfully fast.

  Five short months later, Eric proposed. Once engaged, we had no problem with the wedding planning being as whirlwind as the courtship, and it seemed as if no hurdles could get in our way.

  We began the premarital merging of two lives; we each sold our apartments, with no regrets plus great nontaxable capital gain, and moved into a cozy two-bedroom apartment in Greenwich Village. Even before Eric popped the question, we'd scouted out our ideal wedding location—an old hot springs resort in southwestern Montana—and immediately reserved a date. Eric's parents, who were throwing the rehearsal dinner at their house near the resort, announced that they'd be giving us an exotic honeymoon on safari in South Africa as a wedding present, the trip of a lifetime.

  Even buying a dress was swift and painless—I chose one off the rack at RK Bridal, an unglamorous warehouse in midtown Manhattan, for $800. It was off-white with blue embroidered floral trim, perfect for a ceremony taking place in a field of alfalfa with the northern Rockies as a backdrop. The A-line cut accentuated my best feature, my waist, but the sleeveless bodice accentuated my worst, my upper arms. (When did all wedding dresses start looking like ball gowns anyway?) Undeterred, I ordered a bolero jacket to throw over my shoulders during the ceremony and take off as the evening progressed indoors.

  Since I'd recently left my editing job to become a freelance writer, I decided that I finally had time to hire a personal trainer and get in shape. But not just any personal trainer. I called the author of an exercise book entitled Buff Brides and arranged to begin sessions with her right away. That gave me at least five months before our wedding date in late June.

  At some point during this flurry of activity, I started having the following thought: I'll be thirty-five this year. If we want to have kids, it can take anywhere from six months to a year to conceive. And then this thought: Why not “start trying”? I did some quick math: If I got pregnant now, I'd be in my second trimester for the wedding, late enough so that I wouldn't be puking and early enough so that I wouldn't be enormous. I broached it with Eric. He was on deadline with his first book; it had been five years in the making. “Okay, cool,” he said. “Maybe they'll come out at the same time.” Unfortunately, I didn't pose this question to anyone else, or I might have been told what I would say to anyone who asked me today, which is, “Be careful what you wish for.”

  I was afraid of waiting too long and discovering I was infertile, but I gave little thought to what it would be like to be pregnant so early in our relationship, and even less to what it would be like to actually have a baby. Now that I had every other aspect of my life perfectly lined up, or so it seemed, I couldn't handle the procreative uncertainty of a woman who had finally found a partner but was no longer in her prime childbearing years.

  The obvious flaw to my thinking, of course, was that the only way that I could know for sure if I could conceive and bear children would be to actually conceive and bear a child.

  In this regard, I have to admit that I wasn't simply going to “start trying”—that left too much to chance. Getting pregnant became a full-scale project that I embraced on every level, from taking folic acid to painstakingly reading the book Taking Charge of Your Fertility, by Toni Wechsler. Per Toni's instructions, I began to chart my basal temperatures every morning. Not content with this time-honored but low-tech method, I also threw into my arsenal an ovulation monitor with a computer chip that could read my hormone levels and “memorize” my cycle. Wake up, take my temperature, pee on a stick, and repeat. When, two weeks later, I realized that I had, in fact, gotten pregnant right out of the gate, I was stunned by my own success. I shouldn't have been—I had engineered the whole thing, down to having sex on the day all the signs were saying that one of my eggs was already making its way down my fallopian tube.

  All of a sudden, things were going so fast that two of my life's biggest milestones were getting compressed into one, and it was my own damn fault. I wasn't worried about any kind of social stigma attached to my “condition” at the wedding, especially since we were already having a civil and not a religious ceremony. In fact, both my family and Eric's were quite happy about the events being packed together, as my eldest brother and his wife had done the exact same thing two years earlier. But there was no denying that both our wedding and the birth of our child would be irrevocably changed by their proximity to one another. I had been trying to make up for lost time, but now there was no turning back. The train had left the station.

  First, I focused on the logistical adjustments, such as the dress, which had already been ordered and paid for. I called RK Bridal and explained the situation. “Well, all we can do is wait for the dress to come in and see what we can do,” said the clerk.

  “But this must happen all the time, right?” I asked nervously.

  “If we can let the dress out, we'll let the dress out,” she said, sounding as if my situation hardly qualified as a bridal emergency. “If not, we can try sewing in some kind of panel over the stomach.”

  So much for my nice waistline. At least my personal trainer had a retailoring plan ready to go. It turned out that she was at work on a follow-up to Buff Brides called Buff Moms-to-Be. But I only made it through a couple of sessions with her until nausea and fatigue hit. I had so little energy, I couldn't see the point of expending it in the gym, and so I stopped going altogether. I would have to put vanity aside and make do with having a swollen, ungainly figure at my own wedding. By this point it was almost March, and already my pants were getting very tight around the waist and my bras felt like torture instruments. By the time late June rolled around, I would be almost six months pregnant. My best hope was that my jacket and some creative pashmina placement could diminish the bulge.

  The next disappointment: our honeymoon plans. As I was now in the habit of sleeping ten hours at night, my dream of waking at five a.m. to search for rhinos in the savanna no longer seemed wise, or even feasible.

  “I still want to go,” I told Eric and anyone else who asked, and I did, desperately. I've always loved animals, and I'm a sucker for nature shows on public television. Since I would never feel comfortable splurging on a safari for myself, getting one as a wedding present seemed like my only chance. But was it safe for me to travel to South Africa? I checked the Centers for Disease Control Web site:

  Travel to a Malaria Risk-Area During Pregnancy is NOT Recommended. During your pregnancy, you should not travel to an area with malaria unless travel cannot be postponed. If you get malaria, you may become more ill than a woman who is not pregnant would become.

  The CDC's warning didn't leave much to interpretation. But I was still torn, and I made an appointment with an infectious disease specialist, who informed me that if I really wanted to, I could take the antimalarial drug mefloquine, also known as Lariam.

  “Excellent,” I said. “That's a relief.”

  But the doctor wasn't finished. “The thing is, there haven't been any studies of what effects the drug might have on unborn fetuses,” he said. “Why don't you find a nice beach in the Bahamas?”

  Back at home and on the Web, I discovered that studies had shown that Lariam can cause depression and psychotic episodes and was even suggested to be the cause behind the high number of soldier suicides in Iraq. That decided it for me: I called Eric's father and apologetically told him to cancel the safari. Then I went into our bedroom and cried. Eric couldn't understand why I was so upset. “Are all the hormones from pregnancy making you emotional?” he asked. I just
shook my head and kept crying.

  My reaction seemed out of proportion because it wasn't just the loss of the honeymoon that I was mourning; it was the loss of control. When you're planning a wedding, every step along the way is an opportunity to broadcast your preferences, to make a personal statement by picking a country-and-western band over a string quartet, or blue hydrangeas in buckets over white lilies in glass vases. For that matter, our relationship also seemed to be a clear articulation of choice: making the decision to be together, and feeling, in that decision, that we were finally getting what we wanted. I had been riding high on this notion for months and was only now crashing back to earth. Now that I was pregnant, many of my choices were being made for me, down to which wines we would be serving, since I wasn't allowed to taste any of them. What was more, all the time I was supposed to spend writing that spring—one of the other “perfect” changes I had managed to make in the year of having everything go my way—was getting sucked up by morning sickness and doctor's appointments. Even my body was no longer mine; it had been taken over by that baby growing inside of me, and it didn't seem fair. Planning a wedding may be an exercise in exerting control, but getting married, and certainly starting a family, seemed to be all about losing it.

  A month before our wedding date, when the manufacturer delivered my dress to RK Bridal, I went in for a fitting. Luckily, I had ordered one size up before I got pregnant; the plan had been to take it in around the chest and waist. And even though, of course, the dress was now tight and unflattering, there seemed to be an inch or so of inseam that could be let out. The jacket, however, was a different story, and there was nothing to be done about it: When I put it on, it hit at exactly the wrong place, my widening and protruding belly. At four months, I was definitely showing, but I tried to find comfort in the knowledge that at least I wouldn't have to buy an entirely new outfit.