Altared Page 6

  My wedding dress was light and translucent, like a wispy cloud, covered with delicate embroidery, sprinkled with tiny mother-of-pearl flowers, with a modest yet exquisite headdress made as if out of a bouquet of lilies of the valley and forget-me-nots. I looked quietly radiant as I stood by the tall gilded doors waiting for the cue to enter. Nothing of the sort appears in my wedding photographs. In the photographs, there is a skinny, tense-looking, very young girl. Her dark hair is messy; long strands are falling all over her face and neck. Her headdress is made out of paper and wired tulle. Her dress is shapeless and stiff and bunched up on the bottom so that the tips of her lavender pumps show. The roses in her hands have ridiculously long stems, three straight green lines stretching across her body, and the pale pink buds are about to fall apart.

  None of it matters. The girl is ready to take a leap.

  back in black

  lisa carver

  For me, getting married has always been like throwing up. I do it as alone as possible, feeling sick, drastic, and doomed. My first one was before a justice of the peace in Philadelphia. I was nineteen years old, marrying a thirty-five-year-old Frenchman so nervous his fingers had swollen up and the ring didn't fit (earlier, he'd passed out at the blood test). I wore my work apron from Kelly & Cohen's Diner. We did it between shifts. We did it not for the green card, but for our twin, tremulous hearts that somehow reached through age, country, and political differences to touch each other.

  We moved to Paris. He was a composer and a real, live communist. I decided I was a capitalist. I felt that because I loved him so much, and knew myself so little, I would have to make myself his enemy, his opposite, or else be swallowed whole. For the next two years, my obsession with him grew, and my need to see myself as separate from him grew with it, until finally all there was to do was leave—not only him, but his country as well, and the music and theater and the whole way of life we had created together.

  When I first met Robbie, I was mesmerized by what he was not. He did not hate and fight God and state and the patriarch. He was neither dirty nor ugly nor paranoid nor brave. Attractive, reliable, upper-middle-class, Robbie was inexplicable to me. When he asked me to marry him, I felt like a Mayan girl at the lip of a volcano, about to be sacrificed to appease the gods and protect the village. I knew I would marry this man for what I thought he could give my son, who was four years old—stability, faithfulness, normalcy. Things that I and his natural father could not give. I would have said yes to Robbie anyway, even without my son, because I believe in the Butthole Surfers song, the one that goes, “It's better to regret what you have done than what you haven't.” To know better, to avoid a mistake, is not high on my list of qualities to aspire to. The chances are that any path I take—to marry or not—is going to turn out to be the wrong one, and in the end I'd rather be a kamikaze of love and marriage than merely AWOL.

  Robbie and I got married on a tiny, rocky island in upstate New York in a storm at dusk. My best friend, a thousand miles away, was pissed off at me for yet again not inviting her to my wedding. I shivered in the pelting rain and felt pissed off at the groom for looking solemn and right. Nothing else was right: no white dress, no guests, no flowers, no doves, no butterflies set free out of season in the wrong location just to look good and die. I find something rude about appropriateness. Having been raised with chaos and abandonment, that's the only life that looks real to me. Order of any kind—tradition, a planned life, even a neat room—strikes me as suspicious. Somebody has imposed their will on the natural state. I am of the Edward Gorey school of thought. He let things be as they truly were so much so that he didn't even mow his lawn or trim his hedges. I made no arrangements. While the red-faced minister droned on at our wedding, the poor birdie-looking professional witness in patterned fake silk (the minister's neighbor) slid slowly down the muddy side of the hill until finally she disappeared from view.

  I guess I thought (though I didn't really think) that by being all haphazard and isolated and gloomy, by doing the wedding ceremony all wrong, I was unjinxing the marriage, or at least freeing it up to be what it wanted, and freeing myself from becoming “a married woman.” And it worked. Both of my marriages were open. I felt like a rebel, but I still liked that I was a legitimately loved rebel. When I fooled around with someone else, I didn't take off my wedding ring. I was vaguely dissatisfied with the arrangement, but I expected to be.

  And then my son's nanny got married.

  Her name is Karen. She is a lovely person. She looks like Britney Spears (pre–Kevin Federline). She's so nice she doesn't even have anything bad to say about President Bush. She still sends thank-you cards. She was marrying a fireman, and she prepared for the ceremony for over a year. She registered with Linens n Things. She meticulously went through her Kenny Rogers albums to find just the right song. She showed up for work hungover the day after her bridal party. (I never had a bridal party. I never registered. I picked no songs, apparently preferring uncomfortable silence.) In a complete philosophical turnaround, I felt amazed and touched by someone's respect for the rules. This was not sentimentality or conformity; Karen used traditions to guide her in being considerate. Like when she let her little sister coordinate the bridesmaids' dresses instead of her mom, even though her mom would have done a better job, because her sister wanted to feel like a grown-up woman capable of ordering and dying shoes lilac in time for the wedding. On the day Karen found out the cranberries that were to be sprinkled on the autumn-themed centerpieces had not ripened due to a freak cold spell, she broke down and cried. And having gone through the whole process with her, that didn't seem a stupid reaction to me at all. I was about ready to cry myself.

  Karen did everything a thousand degrees different from me. When she heard through the grapevine that a stripper had been at her fiancé's bachelor party, she was horrified. She fumed and felt jealous, yet said nothing, giving her fireman his sleazy last-days-of-freedom space. Me, I'd taken Robbie to a strip joint myself. Partly because I'm, uh, liberated, but partly because I didn't know how to let him be, to do something like that apart from me. I had no sense of community and would have felt threatened if he'd had one. My favorite book as a child was Lamont, The Lonely Monster. When I compared myself to Karen, I realized how terribly lonely I really was. While partly it was biological and inescapable, partly it was a choice I'd made and kept making. To be alone on my wedding days and in all my days. To withstand any and all expectations. To be proud and scared until the day I die. After thirty-five years of being sure about the superiority of my position, suddenly I wasn't.

  Even though I knew beforehand what her dress looked like, I was stunned when I saw Karen walk through the church doors in it. With her twelve-hour-attended-to hair and French-manicured nails, she was a real bride. She was really leaving us. Her life would now be with this Malibu Ken fireman standing up at the altar, too wooden-jawed to be real. But he was real, because when the priest told him to, he kissed our Karen and took her for his own. And she took him, in front of everybody, with dramatic language and surrounded by the sweet-smelling flowers flown in from Hawaii, and they actually looked happy about it.

  At the reception, the mood turned merry, and Karen's twelve months of attention to detail became even more apparent: the careful seating arrangement; the tearful and sincere little sister's speech; the ribald and masculine best man's speech (which I think also produced a tear or two); the jocular disc jockey who kept things rolling. And then there were the classic mess ups that happen whenever you corral 140 people into one room, no matter how meticulous your pre-thinking: the little kid (mine, actually) who stuck her finger in the wedding cake; the confusion of the old people about drink tickets; and navigating the thin line between strangers about what is funny and what is gauche.

  “Everyone who has been married less than one day, exit the dance floor,” said the DJ. The bride and her groom blushingly went to their seats.

  “Okay,” he said. “Now everyone who has been married less than o
ne year.”

  Other, also blushing, couples left.

  “Five years!”

  As this group exited, no one was blushing. In fact they seemed a little cranky. I was so proud of my husband and me, in our finery, for still standing. At that moment, I was in love with marriage and weddings and habits and beliefs worn soft with use.

  Finally only the two oldest people in the world were left, a couple of shrunken apples who had been married fifty-five years. The DJ called the newlyweds back up to dance with the oldieweds, and their youth made a nice contrast with the other couple's age, just like life. Tradition buoyed the bride and groom. You could see flickers of doubt—or I thought I did—in their faces; they were lost, and then found again, falling into the motions made by thousands or millions who had gone before them.

  When I kissed Karen good-bye, I felt not good enough for her. I felt like a dark, slinky shadow of doing-everything-wrong. I'd always been proud of that about myself, but now dark just looked…well, dark, next to her shining rightness.

  Robbie and I talked about it on the couch that night. “I'm glad that I am outside culture,” I claimed, “and I make a good living observing it. I wouldn't want to be inside. It's just that they all looked so toasty in there today. Inside history.”

  He said he felt the same. “I know they must have problems too, but…”

  “But they won't be problems of their own design. They'll be shared problems, just like today was a shared victory: hope over cynicism. I think I may be cynical! I never thought that before. I think I considered myself a revolutionary, but I'm… I'm lonely!”

  “You have me,” he said.

  It was the first conversation we'd had in a very long time. I think we were able to converse instead of argue because we both knew, without exactly knowing we knew, that this was the end. There was nothing to struggle against or toward anymore. Struggle was the only way we knew how to be with each other. I always wanted to dig closer and closer to him, to get a good foot- and handhold on him, on the problem. I wanted to win. Sex was a physical manifestation of the struggle: hips pushing and grinding to get closer to this person who remained a mystery and an aggravation, feeling constantly, for seven years, like I was just about to solve the problem. But the solution, like our witness on the storm-muddied island hill on which we were married, kept slipping further and further out of range. Somewhere in the soft glow of Karen's unoriginal but joyful wedding, it became clear how miserably we two loners were failing in our attempts to imitate the healthy people. That's what we argued about all the time. Not about money or sex, fixable problems if you just go on Dr. Phil. We argued because we were mad that we were arguing. What we argued about was what we were arguing about, and you can never bring that to any conclusion because there's no beginning or middle. All you can do, when you see it, is to disengage your hooks from each other's bones, turn away, and start walking.

  Both times, I'd married to escape loneliness. Both times, I ended the marriage to escape a different kind of loneliness.

  Eventually, I lost the house. I lost my in-laws, whom I'd adored. I lost my multiline discount on car insurance. My children felt lost. My divorce dismantled every structure that getting married had put up over our heads to protect us.

  Before all that happened, while still married, I was talking on the computer (yes, I know, I'm totally sleazy) with a fellow across the country in even worse straits than I was about to fall into. He was already divorced, his instruments were in hock, one guy wanted to kill him, he'd been in jail five days for gun possession…which he'd possessed due to the guy who wanted to kill him. He no longer possessed the gun, or anything really. He left it behind in the town that was home to the guy who wanted to kill him, along with his ex-wife, who, for unrelated reasons, also wanted to kill him, and the pawnshop with his stuff in it. Now he lived in an empty apartment in the desert with only a mattress, a computer, some ramen, and one half-eaten can of strangely stinky nuts. He got a job in a club but was fired for reasons too complicated for me to understand, but which I imagine must have had something to do with whatever made the other guy and the ex-wife want to kill him. The same thing that made me, Lamont, the Lonely Monster, want to join my life to his ragged, wide-open one. He was the antithesis of everything I'd tried so hard to turn myself and my life into with my marriage to Robbie. It felt like coming home.

  When we got together, there was nothing for me to hide or change or try defensively to explain. We were happy and the kids were happy. I didn't ask him to get a job and behave; he just did. He didn't ask me to not ask things of him; I just didn't. It was nice. I know it looks bad. But I also know my six years that looked good held so much secret tension that my son ended up spending some time in a mental hospital; my husband, who had never been to jail or fired from a job or even come close to putting anything in hock, tried once or twice to punch holes in our walls; and I spent some months I'll never get back on Zoloft.

  That sick, drastic, and doomed mood in which I got married the first two times was also the way I felt about marriage itself. Why? All the usual reasons: My father left me; there are double standards for women in this world; in some places wives are even burned alive for cheating or disobedience. And then there was my own tendency to make the man my everything, which I fought by making him in some ways nothing. The feminist in me cringed at the words to the Kenny Rogers song playing at Karen's wedding: “Like a rhyme with no reason in an unfinished song/There was no harmony; life meant nothin' to me, till you came along.” And yet that was my dream, wasn't it? That's what I secretly wanted from marriage.

  I was terrified of being married, but being scared of something makes me run to it, not from it. I have a recurring nightmare where a tidal wave hovers over my head and instead of trying to reach the shore, I dive under it. As if I would ever come out on the other side of something so overwhelming. But it's the only hope I have.

  I don't know how it is that with this grizzled ex-con divorcé from the desert, it's just easy. I recall that Al Green lyric, which I previously thought of as inane: “Being in love means feeling good about someone.” The more you like someone, the nicer you treat them, and then the nicer they treat you, and then the more you like them. It sounds pretty dumb, but it's true. Everything is just easy when it's easy. Not that he doesn't irritate me, but you know, I irritate myself, and I don't hold it against me. I just forget how infuriating he is as soon as my mood passes, instead of remembering and counting and measuring what this person has done to me and what he owes me, and always looking for new ways to explain his deficit to him in a way he'll understand. Food tastes better when you haven't fought or silently seethed about who cooks more often. My intestinal health has surely improved with this guy. The kids like me being happy because they get yelled at less, and because they like me and wish good things for me.

  I don't want to have sex with other people anymore.

  He never asked me to marry him; it was just assumed. I think the kids brought it up: “When are you going to marry our mom?” I don't remember how we decided there would be a ton of people at this wedding or that we would just put the bill to feed them on the credit card because what the hell. I know that one day he said he missed his crowd in San Diego and that's how we figured out we'd do the ceremony in San Diego. We decided to have lots of daisies because that's my favorite flower. Then I decided I didn't want any daisies at my wedding. I'd rather happen upon them, not hire someone to grow them just to cut them down for me. I'm not an entirely different person. My third wedding will still have some elements (or anti-elements, really) from my first two. But I'll mean them differently. This time, my wedding ring is black; my wedding dress is, too. Not like Bauhaus, but like my hero Laura Ingalls Wilder, who wrote Little House on the Prairie. Her mother told her not to. She said, “Marry in black, you'll be back.” And maybe I will be, again. I'm different, but I'm still me.

  I don't feel bad at all that this will be my third marriage. Sometimes you have to try out both coasts
before you decide Ohio is the place for you. Nothing against the previous neighborhoods, or against moving in general.

  Life is hard. But sometimes it isn't at all, not at all. Even an anxiety-ridden, lonely monster won't spend her entire life under a rock, all curled up and hissing. Sometimes she'll uncurl and bask in a spot of sun.

  plans & preparations

  there went the bride

  carina chocano

  When I was thirty-three, my younger brother got married in a little town outside Madrid. A few days later, my then-boyfriend of three years and I retired to our Barcelona hotel room to fight. Like most things that would have been fun if we hadn't tried to do them together, the trip had completely curdled. It was obvious that we were over, so I did the only logical thing. I brought up the subject of our relationship. Why was it so difficult? Why was it so bad? And why, seriously, why weren't we getting married?

  Embarrassing as it was to admit even to myself, I was feeling besieged by the 360-degree turn the popular culture had taken in matters wedding-and marriage-related. In the ten years since I'd graduated from college, it seemed a cottage industry had sprung up around freaking single women out. One minute, it was 1993 and my generation was going to collectively boycott marriage; the next it was 1997 and Bridget Jones was in the middle of a full-blown panic attack. A year later, the Sex and the City girls started freaking out in quadruple, and then nobody was safe.