First Comes Marriage

by Huda Al-Marashi

  CRISIS C: WHAT THE HELL IS GOING TO BECOME OF US?

  By the end of spring, it was apparent that Hadi would not be going to medical school in the fall. He would be graduating in a few weeks, and he had no admission, no job, and, for the moment, none of my respect. The invitations had been sent out, and the thought of calling off the wedding at this point was anathema to me. The Ridhas were equally loath to accept Hadi's pursuing a different path, and so after discussing several options, our families decided that come September I'd overload on units so that I could graduate at the end of my third year. Meanwhile, Hadi and I would live together close to campus. Under my supervision, he would work, take more classes, and reapply. The following fall, we'd go off to graduate school together.

  Even though I'd been the one to suggest the plan, I made sure to let Hadi know how much I hated it. Where would he even find a job? How would I know which graduate school to apply to if I didn't know where he was going to get into medical school?

  I never told Hadi that I was so overly critical of his academic history, because I was terribly insecure about my own achievements. Although I could make As by studying around the clock, I could not bring in anything more than average scores on standardized tests. To me, this proved that I was an academic imposter who had duped her teachers through hard work. I wanted to marry someone who'd help me keep up the charade, a genius on whose intellectual coattails I could ride. Together we'd talk about smart things, keep smart company, and no one would ever know that I'd been raised on sitcoms. But now Hadi's situation had pegged us as an average couple, the kind of people who went to no-name schools.

  Since I blamed Hadi for crisis C, I decided that this made him ineligible to participate in the negotiations of crisis A or B. Whenever we argued, I paraphrased this finger-pointing tirade: “You didn't do your part so you have no right to make any demands on our wedding plans. Because of you, I have to go into my wedding with a black cloud of doubt hanging over my head. The least you can do is give me the party I've always wanted.”

  As long as I had my dream wedding, I believed there was still hope for Hadi and me. Then I could cast off our engagement memories, plot down our ceremony and reception as the opening to our love story, and wait for our newlywed years to redeem us. First Valentine's Day, first birthdays, first anniversary—these moments would be the chapters of an even better story.

  In the weeks leading up to our wedding, the shopping alone was enough to make me think my strategy was working. Of course, I wanted to get married. Hadn't I picked the floral arrangements on gold stands; the tiered fondant cake; the flower girls’ ribbon-and-pearl dresses; the bridesmaids’ entire ensemble, from their blush dresses to their rhinestone tiaras and white gloves?

  The only thing left to covet now was the family reunion I had hoped my wedding would inspire. The last time Mama and her six siblings had been in the same place was her 1971 wedding, but I also knew just how unlikely this possibility was. With the exception of one sister who lived in the United States, Mama's siblings were spread between the United Kingdom and Lebanon. One of the sisters in Lebanon still had her Iraqi passport, and coordinating summer bookings and visas to the United States was always a tricky and fickle business.

  But then it started to happen. My aunts and uncles each called to say that they were coming. This, in itself, shone like an omen that Hadi and I were meant to be together. Our union was so blessed that a veritable miracle was taking shape in its honor. The concerns I had about marrying Hadi were irrelevant when I compared them to the sweet anticipation of Jidu's face that first moment when all his children were in the same room again. First, we'd cry. Then we'd stay up late, laughing, chatting, and reminiscing. At my wedding, my aunts, uncles, and cousins would dance and clap and make me feel as if I was the most important person in the world to have ever gotten married. Picturing all of this made me giddily happy. I could fix my relationship with Hadi later, but there was no way to go back in time to change a wedding. And right now, these visitors, flowers, favors, and dresses all made me feel as if a sorcerer's hand had gone to work, rendering my girlhood dreams into reality.

  Then one morning, when Mama and I were lingering at the table after breakfast, discussing how to coordinate trips to the airport, how many vans to rent to haul us down to Los Angeles for the wedding, she said, “I'm going to tell you something Jidu told me before I got married. You leave your house in your wedding dress and you come back in your kiffin.”

  I felt a faded memory come into focus. I'd heard this from Mama before, during her marriage talk. Out the door in a big, puffy dress, only allowed back in a papery funeral shroud. I shook my head. Did she really think she needed to tell me this now?

  She sensed my annoyance. “It's only a way of saying that this family doesn't believe in divorce.”

  “I grew up in this family. You think I don't know that?”

  I had crossed a line with my tone, but Mama didn't call me on it.

  “There's no need to get angry. If you know it, you know it,” she said and moved on to asking me where I thought we should take everybody, Disneyland or Universal Studios.

  I gave an opinion while trying to name the rock of tension sitting in my gut. This was more than annoyance. This was umbrage that my mother felt the need to warn me of the finality of marriage. For the past year and a half, she had watched me accept and swallow a list of troubles. She, of all people, should have known just how much I understood the irreversibility of my commitment to Hadi. Leaving Hadi hadn't been an option when we were engaged, and it was no more of an option now.

  A week before my wedding, my family pulled up in two rented vans to Hadi's family's three-bedroom San Diego beach house and unloaded our cargo: twenty-six people, their luggage, and extra bedding. The beach house would serve as Bride's Family Headquarters until we relocated to the hotel where our reception was being held.

  As we went about the house, carrying in bags and boxes, we continued the happy noisemaking we'd begun in the car, the clapping, the tambourine banging, and the ululating whistle, because this too was a part of the wedding celebrations. The groom was being brought his bride.

  Mama assigned all women and children to the master bedroom. The men would sleep in the living room (Hadi among them until he left for his parents’ full-time residence). And two couples would get the remaining two bedrooms: my grandfather and his wife, out of respect for their age, and my uncle and his English wife. It wouldn't be fair to expect an English woman to rough it Arab-style.

  Jidu was the last to get down from the van; he was at his heaviest and needed time to clear the gap between the step and the ground. Standing in the doorway, I held out a hand for him, smiling at an image of him during the drive. He'd encouraged us to play the cassette tapes my cousins had brought along even though he was too observant to listen to music on any other occasion. “A bride is with us,” he'd said as if that was reason enough for merriment and music. From our seats, we'd shimmied our shoulders and sang along, and Jidu had clapped, his hands meeting together and separating in jaunty little bursts.

  I led Jidu through the door. Hadi stood in the foyer and greeted Jidu with a salaam that Jidu returned along with a warm, “Hello, Baba,” and a kiss on the forehead.

  “I'll tell you something,” he said to Hadi in a conspiratorial whisper. “We're giving you the best girl. This is Hadeytallah.”

  Gift from God. That was Jidu's nickname for me. He took both our hands and said he wished us all the happiness in this life and the next; he wished for us to see our grandchildren and our grandchildren's children. And then letting go of Hadi's hand, he said to me, “I carried your mother and every one of my daughters on their wedding day, and inshallah, inshallah, if God gives me the strength, I will carry you.”

  I kissed Jidu's hand and led him up the stairs, my heart warm with anticipation. Jidu would carry me, and I would join the ranks of his daughters, my mother and my aunts, women I admired.

  That night, after dinner, we played t
he same cassette tapes, this time from the living room tape deck. We danced. We jumped. We made conga lines around the couch and squeezed in for group pictures that had to be snapped at least a dozen times with different cameras because of closed eyes, missing photographers, and wiggly children.

  We did this night after night. Hadi never danced. He had to be coaxed into the pictures. Most evenings, he sat on the stairs and watched us, neither smiling nor unsmiling. Everything about my family being together was exactly how I'd pictured it except for him. I wanted Hadi to charm my aunts and uncles, to smile and laugh so heartily that my family would congratulate me on finding such a great guy. I hoped my family's approval could cure me of whatever conflict still lingered in my heart. Their arrival had already brought me such peace with getting married. It was precisely because of my wedding that these people, who had not been under the same roof at the same time for over twenty years, had come together, and I adored being a part of this huge, noisy clan. I just wished Hadi blended in with us better, too.

  On the third night of our stay, I approached Hadi on the last step, a castigatory hand on my hip. “Why are you just sitting here?”

  “This isn't my kind of thing.”

  “What do you mean by ‘this’? This is a celebration for your wedding, and you're the groom, and you're not even acting like you're happy.”

  “I'm not a happy groom just because I'm not dancing and clapping?”

  I scoffed as if Hadi was being ridiculous. “Pretty much. That's how most people show they're happy.”

  “Well, that's not how I show that I'm happy, and if I am not happy enough for you, I can go back to my parents’ house early. I don't have to stay.”

  Hadi's suggestion intrigued me. If Hadi wasn't going to impress my family, at least he could leave them with fewer reasons not to like him. And I would enjoy everyone's company more if he wasn't here looking so disinterested, trying to pull me away every chance he got to talk or kiss or sneak a hug, and it would be so much easier to show up to my wedding, convinced I was making the right decision, if I didn't have all this proof day after day of how much our personalities differed.

  “I don't want you to leave,” I said with feigned reluctance, “but maybe you'd enjoy spending more time with your family before the wedding, too.”

  Hadi knew exactly what I was implying without my saying it. Although he had planned on going home over the weekend, he left the next day. I knew he was hurt. After months of bickering, months of me worrying about school and telling Hadi he should have tried harder, now there was this proof that what I wanted most from our wedding was not him but the party, these people. But instead of sympathizing with my soon-to-be-husband, I blamed Hadi for being too available. He'd created no scarcity with his love, no sense that it was a precious commodity. I was doing Hadi a favor by hinting for him to leave. I was strengthening our love's economy by giving it room to grow.

  The day before my wedding, my entire clan and I filed out of our rental vans in front of the Regal Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. At the hair salon, I got a blowout from a stylist who gave me a piece of advice for my rehearsal dinner: “Drink as much as you want tonight. Just take two Tylenols before you go to bed. You won't even feel hungover the next day.”

  I looked at the girl in the mirror—brunette, fair-skinned, hazel eyes. I could have been any girl, Italian, maybe Greek. I knew the hairdresser didn't see me—the twenty-year-old Muslim girl who'd never had a drink in her life. I smiled and nodded at his drinking tip. I would play the part of the Western bride as long as I sat in his chair. Today, the day before my wedding, I did not have the energy to convince anyone that Hadi and I were childhood sweethearts, nor did I want to answer any questions about our marriage being arranged or if I loved my future husband.

  When my hair was done, I took my smooth, curl-free locks upstairs to the suite all my aunts and girl cousins were sharing. There, I played a different part, the Arab girl bride who let her aunts tell her she needed bigger, flashier earrings and brighter lipstick to go with her long, black sequined gown, who used one of their fancy headscarves as a shawl to cover her exposed shoulders. Then I headed downstairs, eager to see the preparations in the ballroom.

  As I opened the hall's towering double doors, I squealed with true delight. The tables had been set with white and gold linens, and tall gold bases awaited their floral centerpieces. Diana, Nadia, and Aysar were already there, rushing toward me with arms open wide. I hadn't even finished hugging them when Hadi showed up in a pinstripe suit, his hair freshly trimmed, carrying a dozen long-stemmed red roses in a gold box. Listening to my friends’ collective “Aww,” I felt a surge of certainty. I wanted this boy in a suit giving me beautiful things. My friends seeing it. This hall filling up with our out-of-town guests, a mix of family and friends. I crumpled up our old story and threw it away. This wedding would set our love story free.

  With a comb in one hand and cigarette in the other, Dariush, proprietor and Beverly Hills stylist extraordinaire, transformed the giant ball of back-combed fuzz on my head into a sleek updo.

  “You're a very pretty girl,” he said in a thick Persian accent. He stubbed out his cigarette and added, “You should have a nose job. Such a shame a nose like that on such a pretty face.”

  I should've resented having my flaws pointed out to me on my wedding day, but I didn't. Dariush was a genius, and there was no sense in distracting him over something as small as my pride. Dariush secured my rhinestone headpiece and then got to work on my face, gluing on individual false eyelashes, painting a thick line of black eyeliner over the evidence, trimming my eyebrows, and filling in my lips with a shimmery neutral. When I looked into the mirror, I felt triumphant, transformed. This was not the subtle, natural beauty extolled in American bridal magazines. This was a look straight from satellite television, the dramatic-eyed Arab bride.

  Back at the hotel, in a staging room that had been set aside for us, Mama helped me slip into my dress. Then she stood, taking me in, tears in her eyes. “Such a princess,” she said before leaving to get Hadi. I'd given up on my see-me-at-the-altar dream after I realized he was going to see me for the pictures anyway.

  When Hadi first laid eyes on me, it was nothing like the moment I imagined. He made no gasp, no jump for joy, or other cinematic gesture. He merely took my hands, his lips spreading in a wide smile, and said how he couldn't wait to spend the rest of his life with me.

  “Me, too,” I said, and I meant it. I loved Hadi in a tuxedo, the way the coat jacket filled out his shoulders and the way his bronze skin stood out against the bright white of his dress shirt. Standing there, taking in my groom while embraced by sheets upon sheets of tulle, I felt as if I were wearing the brand-new pages of our story together.

  Still holding my hand, Hadi led me to the ballroom so we could pose for photographs. All the tables had been set; small gold boxes filled with chocolates sat at the top of every plate; and floral arrangements full of fragrant gardenias, white roses, and sweet peas were perched on every stand. Our multitiered cake stood in a corner balcony. And the family and friends who made up my eight bridesmaids, among them Jamila, Lina, Diana, Nadia, and Aysar, had lined up in front of the photographer, a vision of pink, sparkly tiaras and little white gloves. Everything was exactly as I'd imagined if not better.

  After their group picture, my bridesmaids stepped away from the photographer and circled me. They told me I looked beautiful, and I told them the same. I marveled at Lina's curly locks secured in a French twist, a rhinestone bracelet pinned into the curve. It was such a careful detail, something so small but so lovely that I felt myself expanding into the beauty that surrounded me, into this moment and place where everything was right. There was no room for nervousness. No space for regret. No time for doubt. Today was perfect, and the memory of all this wonderfulness would be the balm for my and Hadi's uncertain future.

  We took pictures for an hour, and then we lined up outside the closed doors of the adjoining hall where we'd b
e holding our ceremony. When the sound of the DJ playing an airy, jazzy tune drifted toward us, the flower girls entered, followed by my eight bridesmaids, then our grandparents, my mother and brother, and Hadi and his mother. For my grand moment, the doors closed and then reopened to the sound of the wedding march—not because any of this was customary in any way. It was just iconic, something I coveted for no other reason than that I wanted to feel as if I was living out a scene from the movie Father of the Bride.

  With Baba at my side, I walked down the aisle slowly, pausing for photographs, pressing down on Baba's arm when his pace quickened. I felt rooted by the attention of our family and friends, alive and centered. I wished the aisle was longer. I wished I could walk with the weight of a bouquet in my hands, my legs pushing along a petticoat and a dozen layers of tulle, for hours.

  Hadi met me at the end of the aisle and gave my father a kiss on each cheek before taking my arm. Before us was a raised platform holding our wedding sufra, a decorative spread of various symbols: a mirror for our bright future, colorful spices to guard against the evil eye, painted eggs for fertility, a piece of flatbread for prosperity, and a bowl of honey and two large cones of hardened sugar for our life to be sweet.

  Now Hadi and I walked around the sufra and sat on the velvet loveseat his mother had shipped from Egypt. The Seyyid who was marrying us stood by the microphone to our side, wearing a black turban and a freshly pressed black robe that opened to reveal a long, white gown underneath.

  I could not concentrate on the marital advice the Seyyid offered our guests; the anticipation roaring through me was too loud, too distracting. But as soon as I heard him calling me by name, asking me to accept the terms upon which our families had agreed, my mind became focused. I kept quiet as I'd been trained, waiting until he'd asked me five times in honor of the Prophet Muhammad, his two grandsons, and their parents. The fifth time, Mama gave me a nod, and with words I'd been rehearsing since I was twelve, I told the Seyyid that he was my representative, “Na'am, inta wakili.” The women brought their tongues up to the roofs of their mouths. Their ululating ring made it official.