Altared

by Colleen Curran

  They smiled when they said this and nodded their heads. But I was obscurely disappointed. Where were the ecstatic protestations of joy? Where was the oohing and aahing? This was the unique culinary evocation of me, remember?

  I met my husband, at last, under the verandah. Our eyes met over the trays of Emeril Shrimp and Roasted Diced Vegetables with Fiery Vinaigrette. Cajun polka music drifted among the Spanish moss. “I'm famished,” I con fessed.

  “Me, too!” sighed my husband.

  So we piled our plates high and sat on a stone wall beside the dance floor. I spread a napkin across my lap to avoid the heartbreak of Creole Mayonnaise on silk organza. I speared a shrimp on my fork and bit into it.

  Crap.

  Rubber chicken.

  The trouble with rubber chicken isn't that it's bad; it's that it's not much good. It is also, alas, inevitable, I see now. The memory of my rubber chicken is a continuing heartbreak for me, but I have finally stopped trying to assign blame, either to the catering company, which really is quite an excellent one, or to some personal failure of nerve or imagination.

  Rubber chicken is just what happens when you want the impossible. When you want to make a meal for hundreds into an expression of who you are.

  The only way to deal with rubber chicken is to embrace it for what it is: an excuse to bring these people you love together, a way to mark time while everyone you know does the thing they really came here to do; to celebrate this wonderful day, the day that you married the sweetest, kindest man in the world. Honestly? Nobody gives a crap about the food.

  So in retrospect, I think if I were to marry again at the age of twenty-four, I'd keep the poofy white dress and the tulips and the paper lanterns in the live oak trees. I'd even keep the rubber chicken. But for real this time.

  My theory on the ideal perfect chicken is this: It should be cheap, it should be at least a little tasty, and it should be inoffensive. Roasted chicken breasts with fennel fits the bill nicely.

  ROASTED CHICKEN BREASTS WITH FENNEL

  Smear some olive oil on a cookie sheet, toss the chicken breasts on there, and broil until the juices, when pricked, barely run clear. Set aside and throw some sliced fennel on the same sheet. Brush them on both sides with more olive oil, season them with salt and pepper, and squeeze some lime juice over them. Broil about five minutes, until the edges are slightly blackened. Turn them over, sprinkle with a generous dusting of Parmesan, and broil again, until the cheese begins to brown. You can serve this warm or at room temperature, and the fennel adds just a bit of interest. Spoon the fennel over the chicken breasts before serving, sprinkle with a bit more lime juice, and serve to as many hundreds of people as you like. Or let the catering company do it, rather. And relax, remembering that your rubber chicken is fine, but your rubber chicken is not the point.

  The point is you. And your husband. And your family and friends.

  Oh, and booze, of course.

  MINT MARTINI

  This is the drink I wish I'd served at my wedding: Put a few mint leaves in the bottom of a highball glass. Add a tablespoon of simple syrup and some crushed ice, and mash it up with the handle of a wooden spoon, to bruise the mint leaves. Pour in the vodka—Belvedere is good—and shake until thoroughly chilled. Strain into a martini glass and garnish with a sprig of mint. This is delightfully refreshing, slightly sweet, and packs a serious wallop. One or two of these and all impatience with rubber chicken will melt away.

  But in case you're now thirty-three? The number for Peter Luger is (718) 387-7400. The steak is to die for, and the bartender makes an excellent martini, though not girly mint ones. It's probably the way to go.

  Really.

  to have or have not

  Sex on the Wedding Night

  jill eisenstadt

  Four a.m., one hour till dawn, and our four-star suite was still full of revelers. One hour in which to get out of our wedding clothes, tally the gift checks, have sex. It was our wedding night. Of course we'd do it. This I truly believed despite the hour. Blame it on bridal magazines, Hollywood, or my own naïveté, but when I agreed to take part in the marriage rites I assumed that meant all of them. Why else would I have worn the (new) white gown, the (old) tiara, and the (borrowed) garter that gave me prickly heat? Why would I have held up the ceremony to shove something blue (a Canada Dry label) into my cleavage? And allowed my parents to give me away? Maybe it was unrealistic to expect all-night bubble-bath erotica. But surely our vows would be consummated. For all I knew, our license wasn't even valid otherwise: Unravished come sunrise, I'd turn into a pumpkin, or worse—a single girl again.

  That I hadn't technically been a girl in a while only heightened my anticipation. What could be more intense than a second chance to lose your innocence? This time without pain or hair-trigger conclusion. What more fitting way to mark the commitment to exclusive lovemaking till death (or divorce) did us part than with la petite mort, as the French like to call orgasm, preferably followed by rebirth and fireworks. After years of “sin,” what could be more thrilling than the inaugural bedding of a legally married woman?

  Unfortunately, I had to wait for the answers to these questions. It appears that a great many of us have had to wait. “Did you or didn't you?” I began asking friends and acquaintances over the months, then years that followed my wedding. Not the most scientific method, yet the responses were revealing. Many laughed nervously, evaded the question, changed the subject. But the overwhelming majority finally gave an excuse:

  “Bladder infection. I cried.”

  “I spent the whole night on a plane.”

  “… in a car.”

  “… sitting in traffic.”

  “… mile after mile of no vacancy signs.”

  “We fought about what he said to my high school friends.”

  “…fought about my ex-husband.”

  “Pillow fight.”

  “Morning sickness…Yes, at night.”

  Of the few who did claim victory, only one ever described the act as being anything out of the ordinary. And, I quote: “…a little like date rape.” The others just thought they “had to” or “should.” They just “did it” to “do it.” Laugh we might, but somehow, we still feel we're just supposed to have sex on our wedding nights. When we don't we think of it as a bad omen. Or as one friend, Tara, put it: “I felt like we'd flunked some kind of test.”

  After years of living together, she and her fiancé, Bill, had spent a chaste prenuptial week in separate (but equal) apartments. He wasn't allowed a preview of her “virginal” gown. She wasn't allowed a review of his “worldly” bachelor party. From the proposal on bended knee to the send-off under a shower of politically incorrect white rice, they'd performed their traditional bride and groom roles flawlessly.

  “We had the honeymoon suite with a king-size water bed, the complimentary champagne, the works….” But then something—or rather, nothing—happened. “We conked out.”

  “Blacked out.”

  “Crashed. The whole wedding party in a big pile.”

  Barring the religious, most people nowadays wouldn't dream of marrying somebody with whom they hadn't slept. Common sense says that ignorance is dangerous. Better to know the body to which you're pledging monogamy. Rule out incompatible fetishes and irreparable conditions. Decide you like the bed you're getting into. A lot. Marrying later, we're hardly naive. So what's all this hullabaloo over a one-shot screw? Why is everyone still playing the old game, pretending that the bride is still a virgin?

  In earlier times, that kind of false advertising would have gotten a girl stoned to death. Those bloody sheets had to be hung out as proof. If the marriage was deemed void, she might be sent into a life of prostitution or—perhaps worse—back to her father's house, shamed.

  If nothing else, the number of sexually experienced brides today makes punishing all of them impractical. It was with the invention of latex and dependable condoms that women in the Western world began taking the risk. The Kinsey reports
from 1920 show only 50 percent of brides in this country at that time were virgins. The difference was they didn't sleep with the men they were marrying. Makes you wonder over their wedding-night scenarios. Maybe they fooled their new husbands too. But more likely they were just like us.

  “Too exhausted…” for intercourse. Planning a wedding is said to rate in the top five for stress, along with air-traffic controlling and death of a spouse.

  “Too hungry…” Only those who elope get to eat at their weddings. And brides typically don't eat for weeks before either.

  “Too preoccupied…” partying.

  “Too drunk…” if too preoccupied.

  “Too hungover…” if the wedding was over before nightfall.

  “Too many buttons. Forty or more buttons. I swear, I gave up.”

  “He couldn't get it up. All of a sudden.”

  I heard all these reasons and most of them thrice. But all I really heard was that no one is having sex on their wedding nights anymore. It's the best-kept undirty secret around. So why is it secret? It's not rational. It's ritual.

  And when you examine it (which is exactly what is not done with rituals), the whole subtext of the celebration is sex. Once that veil goes up and you may now kiss the bride, you must keep kissing her whenever a spoon hits crystal. You must dance the first dance to your song. You must cut the first slice of cake and take turns smooshing it into each other's waiting mouths. There's the high jinks with the garter and the getaway in the vandalized, shoe-festooned vehicle.

  It's a performance—flirting for an audience. It's pretense and foreplay. It's one outdated formality after another, leading to the ultimate climax—sex. Even my ride over the threshold (a vestige of marriage-by-capture) had cheerleaders, though their presence ruled out the very act for which they rooted. Regardless of what the customs or trappings suggested, I'm sure not a single one of them believed I was a virgin. And why should anyone, most of all myself, care? Marriage is a public declaration of love. Sex is a private declaration of marriage. Or should be.

  Maybe newlyweds would be better off leaving the sex to their guests. Weddings are, after all, notoriously romantic for the invited. Maybe once the pressure was off, fresh rituals would evolve. Modern newlyweds would, say, share a banana split, exchange foot massages… talk.

  But when I found myself fully dressed the next morning, I wasn't thinking so clearly. Was the marriage off to a bad start? I fretted. Would our plane crash, our passions wane, our eyes wander? Were we doomed to a future of pecklike kisses? Fluorescent-lit dinners? Twin beds? What if we'd married our fathers, our mothers, our childhood pets? What if we'd projected or settled? What if we never had sex again?

  “Don't be ridiculous,” my new husband said as I repacked the unused peignoir set—peach thong and bra with push-up features—I'd so carefully selected. Ridiculous, exactly. If only I'd known that the lingerie bridal shower would turn out to be a practical joke, I'd have asked for appliances. I'd have never paraded around wearing that paper-plate hat stapled high with bows. If only I'd known that the rites were expendable, I'd have skipped the embarrassment of the first dance and kept my bouquet. If only I'd known not to believe the age-old wedding-night hype that this would be my fantasy night.

  “But how could you have known?” my new husband said. “It's not the kind of thing you read in magazines or books. Anyway, we have the honeymoon to make up for it, not to mention the rest of our lives.”

  And so we did. And so we do.

  for better or for worse?

  survivor honeymoon

  amanda eyre ward

  I have no memories of a happy marriage. My parents were badly matched from the start, but it took them sixteen years to bitterly divorce. “I didn't know what I was doing,” my mother told me. “I chose the wrong one.”

  I headed into marriage with a list of what didn't work: being naive, having lots of expensive things, quitting your job to stay home with kids, being bored in the suburbs, hoping for the best. From this knowledge, I constructed a weird group of goals: be aware of every possible thing that could go wrong, live cheaply, always have a job and a way to walk out on your own, settle as far as possible from suburban New York, and be ready for the worst.

  My husband and I met at a keg party in Missoula, Montana. We were both graduate students—Tip was studying geology, and I was moving toward an MFA in fiction writing. I had dated every creep in my graduate program and was branching out.

  The party was thrown by three geology students who called their home The Fun House. The geologists drank beer instead of wine, had beards instead of sideburns, and none of them quoted Raymond Carver. After two years of New Yorker cartoon analysis and deep pronouncements about trout streams, The Fun House was refreshing.

  I was telling someone about my dream of having children and traveling with them around Africa. Tip barged right in and said he thought dragging children around Africa was unfair. We talked about this for some time.

  Later, I told Tip that there were tunnels underneath my apartment building, tunnels that had once, I'd heard, been used to smuggle opium. Also, I mentioned beer in my fridge. That was that: beer and tunnels. Tip was mine.

  On our first official date, we drank whiskey and talked about what had brought us to Montana. Both of us had felt out of place in our previous lives and wanted to make a new sort of life, one filled with adventure, travel, and books.

  Our courtship progressed. We argued when Tip went fishing for days without calling me; we made up and went to a George Winston concert. Tip had a bathtub and a bottle of very good Scotch. I spent evenings soaking in his tub and gazing at the picture he had of himself skiing naked in the Colorado mountains. In the mornings, he made breakfast with actual ingredients that he kept in his refrigerator. While I ate SpaghettiOs and Popsicles, Tip had a spice rack. I bought an eggplant to impress him, but I had no idea what to do with it. When Tip pointed out that it was growing moldy, I threw it away.

  I worked as a librarian and could order obscure nature films like Migration of the Wildebeest. We watched them on his bed, inside his sleeping bag. (Tip had a spice rack, yes, but no sheets.) We fought when Tip made me dinner for my birthday but didn't buy me an actual present. The dinner was the present, he explained. I'm from suburban New York, I told him: a present is supposed to be wrapped.

  We broke up for about twelve hours and then met again in a bar called the Rhino. A long night of shouted threats and whispered promises followed. We moved in together. After all the confusion, all the nights I hoped I would meet my love, all the years I had spent trying to make Mr. Right Now into Mr. Right, it was so easy. Tip, there he was, that tall blond boy with the goofy smile and bright eyes. The one made just for me.

  Our engagement was complicated. Tip wanted to ask me to marry him in a canoe, rafting the Gooseneck section of the San Juan River in Utah. We packed a canoe with steaks, wine, books, and vegetables. We arranged with a man named Ralph to drive our car to the end of the float in five days. “River's running high,” warned Ralph. We ignored him. As we put in, a ranger ambled down to the river to tell us that he'd just rescued a family whose canoe had been wrapped around a rock “like a taco.” The water was way too high, and he advised us not to head out.

  But we were adventurers. Like John Wesley Powell before us, we wanted to see what was around the bend. We launched our canoe triumphantly, and the water swept us under a bridge, past onlookers who cheered. About ten minutes later, the waves almost swamped the canoe. Tip pulled the canoe over, looked at what was ahead, and said, dejectedly, “We can't do it.”

  It took about three hours to haul our canoe full of foodstuffs back upriver. When we passed the onlookers, they did not cheer. Ralph gave us our money back.

  “Oh, well,” I said.

  “Oh, well nothing,” said Tip. “Tomorrow, we're going to climb a mountain!”

  We drove our truck with the canoe strapped on top over rutted roads, and camped in the rain. In the morning, we climbed a damn mount
ain. At the top, Tip said, “I really, really love you.”

  “Thanks,” I said, and then lightning struck a nearby peak. We ran down the trail to safety.

  “Okay then,” I said, “time to head on back home.”

  “Head on back nothing,” said Tip, who was beginning to act a bit strange. “We're climbing another mountain tomorrow.”

  “Fabulous,” I said. It rained again that night. At dawn, I poked my head out of the tent to see Tip, wild-eyed, frying eggs.

  “Come on! Coffee's ready!” he said. He was shaking, muttering about “early start,” and “view from the top.”

  Now, we call the mountain Proposal Peak. I don't know what it's really called. But we never made it to the top. About halfway, I sat down heavily. “Forget it,” I said. “I'm tired. I'm wet. This is it.”

  “Oh please,” said Tip, pushing the sweat from his forehead.

  “I can't,” I said. “I'm exhausted.”

  “There's something really great at the top,” said Tip.

  “A cheeseburger?”

  “No,” said Tip.

  “Then I'm staying right here.”

  Tip sighed and dropped to one knee. He asked me to marry him halfway up the mountain, and when I accepted, he tied a flower around my finger. We hiked to our campsite, packed up, and headed into town to celebrate. At the True Grit Café, a weary waitress asked if I'd like French fries or onion rings with my burger.

  “I'll have both!” I exclaimed. “We just got engaged!”

  She shrugged and wrote our order down. She returned with the best onion rings I've ever eaten in my life.

  It's hard for me to remember how I felt on my wedding day. Yes, I had the long dress, my mother's lace veil, pearl earrings from a Tiffany's box. Tip and I exchanged vows on the top of another Colorado mountain, and I truly have no recollection about what I was thinking. I certainly look happy in the pictures. (But I stared at my mother's wedding pictures for years, and she looked happy, too.) I do remember, as we fell asleep next to each other that night after a midnight picnic of wedding leftovers, feeling a sense of safety and relief. I had found him, and he was the kind of person who would always take care of me. I cherished Tip—I was amazed and awed by him—and I was his wife. It was a simple happiness, and yet I had never known anything like it before. I feel it still, underneath everything I do: my love is next to me.