by Kim Perel
The fact that this seemed like a suitable allegory for a contemporary love affair should tell you how flawed was my understanding of human relationships. I longed for love but believed it was reserved for the beautiful; I did not delude myself that I had any potential in that regard. I noted bitterly that in folklore, the youngest sisters were always the most beautiful, clever, and faithful; I was an older sister. It did not escape me that gracefulness was required, though I knew that grace was and always would be beyond me. I was homely, too tall, awkward, clumsy, and while I expected to marry someday, I assumed it would be to some dull, equally forgettable lout, someone who would be every bit as disappointed with me as I would be with him.
• • • • • • • •
By the time I went off to college, I’d put aside fairy tales in favor of highbrow literature, the sort in which the everyday lives of unexceptional people are elevated by their fleeting rejection of the banal. I’d also grown tired of wallflowerism, and—dizzy with the possibilities presented by living where no one knew me—I managed a handy self-renovation. Those were the eighties, so it involved a lot of blue eyeliner and voluminous hair. By all external accounts it was successful; I ended up with more than enough male attention. But no matter how ardent my admirers, they never were able to assuage my essential loneliness: if they really knew me, I reasoned—the me beneath the lip gloss and the Hang Ten short shorts—they’d realize how truly unlovely I still was.
And then—only a few months into my first real job—I met him. He wasn’t like the others. (Join me now, you who had your own brave passion; this is a chorus you know the words to.) My friends were surprised: we were so unsuited for each other. He didn’t care what they thought, and soon I didn’t care what they thought.
He was staid, dependable; he was a keeper of promises; I was all passionate longing and scattershot affection. We reached for each other with something like desperation and certainly with relief; we sensed in each other salve for what was broken in ourselves. We seized and held on tight, from the start. After our first evening together, we were never apart unless circumstances forced a separation. Mondays meant that one of us was always awake hours before dawn to get to an airport, and Fridays were sweet with the promise of being together again. That it wouldn’t be forever was inconceivable. We got engaged. We got married.
As a love story, ours was nothing unusual. You probably have your own, if you chose your partner with any care at all. Early love is about seeing yourself in the other’s eyes, and seeing reflected back a version of yourself that fixes your hurt places or completes what’s missing. Perhaps you were an obedient child, but your lover cherishes your occasional stubbornness, your minor rebellions. Or the clumsy one can’t believe her luck when her lover identifies a kind of grace no one ever noticed before, the way she ties her shoe, perhaps, or the way her bracelets jingle. “We don’t love anyone,” someone once told me. “We only love the self we see reflected back.” This seems too cynical, even for me, even now: it is the us that is intoxicating. He gets me. She understands me. Together, we can handle anything. Together, we are more than the sum of our selves.
The twenties seem a gentle decade when viewed from middle age. Everything is rife with possibility—it hardly matters if you’re broke if you use your last few dollars to buy an orchid for a lover, a length of riotous Marimekko fabric, a bittersweet confection. Later you will learn detachment and accustom yourself to the taste of disappointment. Love may crumple and fade, but you’ll have things, lots of lovely things, and people will envy you, and that will be a kind of recompense.
• • • • • • • •
But for now, let’s return to the home of the newly wed.
I was well suited for traditional wifery. My proudest early accomplishments were sewing a straight seam, baking a flaky biscuit, coaxing paperwhites to bloom in winter. My repertoire included unwavering topstitching, uniformly chopped carrots and potatoes, neatly braided hair, boiled icing, ruby radishes pulled from well-turned earth. The women of my family cleaved to a precise ideal of femininity: a rosary, an A-line coat, a single tube of lipstick, a bottle of perfume that would last five years of special occasions, neat unpolished nails, folded hands at church, and one ankle turned just so in front of the other when posing for photographs—these were the hallmarks of womanhood that I observed and absorbed.
I brought these notions into my marriage with far, far more conviction than I would have ever admitted to—but I also longed to be elegant. Our friends were sophisticated; they had nice taste, expensive things, and I coveted not just their clothes and sunglasses and silver frames and good dishes, but their entire pasts. Debutante balls, boarding schools, inherited jewelry—it was the fashion then, and probably still is, to affect a mild contempt for all of these if you possessed them, indifference if you did not. After all, the hard work of inventing oneself involves a certain amount of casting off, no matter what you bring from your past.
Still, my life seemed so humble by comparison. Our friends—my husband’s friends, whom I claimed for my own, hungrily, longing for acceptance—called me “FMA.” That acronym stands for Fucking Miss America, and I know they coined it with affection—I was the one among us that made every dish from scratch, sewed my own black-tie gowns, filled our balcony with pots of flowers. But I was ashamed of my nickname, too. I wanted to be like them, not different. I wanted a long-standing manicure appointment and a stack of take-out menus and a horrendous dry-cleaning bill.
There was one place, however, where being FMA felt right, and that was in my marriage. I wanted to be a good wife. I wanted to be a helpmate. That term—outdated even then—was irresistible to me, because it suggested I would be needed. That I would complete my husband as he would complete me. I wanted my husband to shine, and I would be content to stand in his shadow. I wanted to be the wind beneath his wings, and even as I cringe at how hackneyed that phrase has become, I remember how I turned it in my mind over two decades ago and thought, Yes, yes, that’s right. I would hang his shirts in the closet. (That image is so powerful, in fact, that it made its way into a short story I wrote a while back, and is perhaps the perfect still shot of marriage for me—a wife, alone during the day, hanging her husband’s shirts with care, with affection. Their fabric is fragrant from the laundry and she smoothes the fabric with her hand, straightening the shoulders on the hanger, imagines her husband dressing for work, finding the perfectly pressed shirt pleasing.)
Other couples brought store cakes to potlucks; I baked. I made curtains for our apartment. Together, my husband and I planted the flower beds behind our building with impatiens; the smell of the turned earth on that long-ago May morning may be the sweetest memory of that year. The sun was warm on our backs and we laughed at the dirt ground into our knees; later I would shower off the grime and sweat and change into a summer-sheer dress, and we would drink wine on our balcony, and we were so blessed, so blessed. I was smug, and I know now that conceit is a sin that fate punishes with glee; fate waits with the patience of the inevitable. Still, I pitied those other wives, the ones who didn’t know how to sew a hem and had to send their husband’s pants out, the ones who would correct their husbands in conversation or laugh too loud . . . who did not understand the blessing they’d been given, even though it was right in front of their faces.
Threaded throughout all of this first year of marriage was the stunning amazement that I had been chosen. “I am a wife,” I whispered to myself the day after our wedding, folding the dress I had made, mindful of the thousands of tiny pearls and sequins I sewed on by hand. I could imagine no greater honor.
Cards and invitations arrived, addressed to Mr. and Mrs. Robert Littlefield. I didn’t mind the disappearance of my former self. That self had not served me well, I thought. When I had to check a box on a subscription form, choosing “Ms.” or “Mrs.,” I chose the latter with great satisfaction.
I took my place at my husban
d’s side and I cherished it. I remember moments with great clarity. My ex-husband remembers every phone number, every address we ever had; he can tell you where we went each summer and whom we saw. These details don’t last for me, but I remember how he looked in the Brooks Brothers shirt I picked to bring out the color of his eyes. I remember the brass dish where he used to leave his keys when he came to the door—and the smell of the polish I used on it. I remember the gifts he gave me, and I still have them, wrapped with care and tucked into the bottoms of boxes, underneath out-of-season coats and the children’s sports trophies. There was a picture frame, the green of malachite. An earring, a gold-tone crystal-studded hoop, its mate lost long ago.
I wanted children right away. I would have been happy to start trying on our honeymoon. There would be four, all girls; when their father came home from work, their hair would be combed neatly and they would have made things for him, leaves pressed between waxed paper and cookies decorated with colored sugar, and they would be pretty like me and he would call us “his girls.”
On our first anniversary we thawed the frozen bit of wedding cake and took it outside on the sunny porch. It was dry, almost inedible. We laughed and drank champagne instead. He opened the bottle with a flourish; I did the dishes when we were finished. We had our roles and we relished them. I thought they would see us through.
• • • • • • • •
Lying to myself lost its appeal somewhere north of forty. The denial that served me so well as a layer of protection—like the cartilage around a knuckle or the WD-40 on a hinge—sloughed away, and I was left with an acuity that proved impossible to cast off.
Here was the long-evaded truth: cherished ideals and best intentions were not, in the end, enough. And so, with great sadness and regret, we parted.
When I look back at my young marriage, I was so full of hopes, so eager to quit the loneliness of my past and become not just someone new, but part of something even further removed from who I was before: part of a couple. But I think that even then I knew the old self would not stay buried forever. Was it a mistake to keep it in the box, sealed and shoved back on the shelf, left to simmer and churn until the day it would come back to claim its place?
I’m not sure I think it was. There was joy in that year, genuine can’t-believe-my-luck glory at finding myself by his side.
He chose me, I think still. That, at least, will always be true.
The Marry Boy
JOSHILYN JACKSON
My marriage can drive. That’s what I said to Scott on our last anniversary. Sixteen years since we stood up in the chapel at Fort Something on a date neither of us can ever remember and made all kinds of promises. I don’t specifically remember those either. Obey wasn’t one of them, I know that.
The rest is washed away in a whirling vortex of taffeta and organ music, a buffet with a shrimp tree and way too much champagne.
I was going to grad school, living in the middle of downtown Chicago, and Scott was living an hour away, having just finished his MFA. We wanted to be married in our southern hometown, so my mother, the Once and Future Belle, planned the wedding for us. I told her she could do whatever she wanted as long as (1) it wasn’t pink, and (2) at the end of the day, I was married to Scott. I came home between semesters to find my happy mommy planning the swirliest pink wedding in the history of time. When I reminded her of my terms, she gave me the Belle-eye and said, with zero irony, “It isn’t pink. It’s ‘seashell.’”
By the time the day ended, I was married to Scott, so I decided to call it a win. We honeymooned in New Orleans and moved to Oak Park, and he got a job and I got a master’s degree. We had an excellent boy child and Scott found a weird career niche and flourished and moved me back to the South, where I belong. I wrote a novel, and we had another baby, and then I wrote more novels and he got some promotions and we gathered up hordes of feckless pets to chew up and ruin all our furniture, days piling on days, until now our marriage can drive. In another year and change, it will be able to vote, and soon after that, we can legally take our marriage out drinking. I’m looking forward to that. Twenty-one, the Vodka Anniversary.
Yesterday, I asked Scott, “Tell me about the first year we were married.”
He was quiet for a moment, brows together, and then he said, “Oh! Our apartment had that god-awful galley kitchen.”
“What else?” I said.
After another silent minute, he shrugged. “I got nothin’.”
That would have been plenty damning, if I hadn’t been asking him because I’d drawn a complete blank, too. I hadn’t even been able to conjure up the galley kitchen.
I was asking because one of the two babies we had, the girl one, the youngest, came out of the womb a full-on Belle. It must skip a generation, because I was born a barn rat. Now in my forties, I still don’t know how to blow-dry my hair and I can never remember to apply accessories. But the day we finally brought Maisy Jane home from the hospital? She peered about with her bleary baby eyes, seeking a bracelet that would complement her receiving blanket without being too matchy-matchy.
Because she is a Belle, one of the mystifying-to-me topics that consumes Maisy Jane is her wedding. More than that—her marriage. It began when she was barely three. That’s when she started asking me who her “Marry Boy” would be. At first she thought the Marry Boy should be her daddy. I agreed that he was excellent husband material, but alas, he was already taken. Next she picked my father, but he is righteously preclaimed by the Once and Future Belle. After I ruled out Uncle Bobby and Daniel, her tallest, most handsome cousin, she deigned to settle for her brother, Sam. He, a lordly third grader, had zero interest in marrying little sisters and turned her down flat.
I told her she hadn’t yet met her Marry Boy (probably). When she did, he would not (Lord willing) be any kind of a relation, but a new fellow, and that was how our family would grow. I was relieved to see she stopped trying to get into a contractual engagement with a close blood relative, but she immediately started casting about for her Marry Boy in the world around her.
She met her first potential Marry Boy in preschool. She came home all dreamy, talking about this three-year-old lothario who went by the overly virile name of Colby. I had to forcibly restrain my husband from going out and shooting a toddler, assuring him that Colby was oblivious to Maisy Jane’s ambitions for him. Colby was more interested in Blue’s Clues, quite frankly.
Maisy Jane is eight now, and she has remained vigilant, always on the lookout. Currently, she isn’t sure if her Marry Boy will be Justin at school or Kyle at church. She likes to lie on my bed on her stomach and swing her feet back and forth in the air and muse about their relative merits. Terrifying, how rigorous my girl child is in her Marry Boy investigations.
She has asked me endless questions about when I met her dad (I was nineteen, he was twenty), how I knew he was the one (I didn’t. He knew, right away, but I was clueless for seven years), and what our wedding was like (I dragged out the photo album and let her look at a young me swathed in a pouf of satin with multiple petticoats and a cathedral train, surrounded by seven swirly, be-pinked bridesmaids).
We recently went to a young friend’s wedding, and now Maisy Jane is fascinated by what will happen to the bride next. She wants to know what it’s like to be a “Newlyweed,” as she calls it.
I am drawing a terrifying blank. I think it was probably fun. It must have been an adventure. But it’s not all that clear or distinct from the other fifteen. The year that stands out to me is the bad year, somewhere in the middle, when Maisy Jane was born too early, and we weren’t sure if we would get to keep her. That year? Oh, hell yes, I remember that one. But the first is only a year, buried under and hard to distinguish from every other year I have spent with her father.
I told her we had a crappy galley kitchen, but that wasn’t what she wanted.
So I’
ve been trying to remember. We had a lot less of everything. Less children, certainly, and that means less responsibility. We had less security, but less need for it as well. Less money. A lot less, as I was in school and Scott had just hit the job market with seven years of higher education in theater.
The only thing we had more of back then was probably sex, which is not something I want to explain to my third grader. I have only recently told her, using a matter-of-fact tone and scientifically accurate terms, the process for making babies. She listened earnestly, then made a disapproving mouth and asked, “Do you have to actually touch the boy for it work?” When I told her that yes, the touch part was mandatory, she declared that she and Marry Boy would be adopting.
I also remember when Scott made the transition from friend to Marry Boy. I met him when we both had summer acting jobs at a regional repertory theater. He was a tall, dark-haired boy who reminded me of an adolescent German shepherd: innocent-eyed, with long skinny legs and feet way too big for his body. I was always in the middle of everything, usually instigating crime, and he stood on the edge of the action, observing and cataloging. He barely ever spoke. I liked that about him, as I never stopped speaking. I parked myself near him and gabbled at him for a couple of hours.