Altared Page 7

  Naturally, my then-boyfriend responded by going on the offensive. That's how it was with us—we fought in the round. We were lobbing recriminations back and forth at high volume, when, out of nowhere, he popped a corker:

  “I was planning a surprise wedding for you in December, but now you can just forget it. You blew it.”

  For a moment, I was speechless.

  “A surprise wedding?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And you were going to surprise—me?”

  “Yup.”

  Pause.

  “What was I going to wear?”

  It wasn't a rhetorical question. I honestly wanted to know. In a way, the idea of being driven to a mystery location, having a veil slapped on my head, and being led down the aisle in a daze as my family yelled, “Surprise!” seemed as viable an idea as any. Because when I thought about my wedding, I drew a complete blank. That's not to say the idea of getting married didn't appeal to me. In theory, it did. What I couldn't bring myself to do was imagine myself as a bride. Occasionally, with some effort, I'd muster a hazy, mysterious image—like, there I'd be, standing in a field somewhere, wearing a white sundress and holding a small bouquet of wilted daisies. Then I'd realize that I'd mentally scrambled an old boyfriend's Southern upbringing with an Estée Lauder ad and inserted myself in the picture. Obviously, I felt like a moron.

  The truth is that, even in my early twenties, I felt too old for the optimism that the part seemed to require, too self-conscious for the self-involvement, too broke for the expense, too jaded, in general, to put myself at the center of a tradition so thoroughly hijacked by commercial interests it made the contemporary consumerist Christmas look like a ritual of self-abnegation. Part of me wished I could project myself into the part of the blissfully self-obsessed, confidently demanding, insanely overspent-but-it's-my-wedding sort of bride (I guess I've always believed there must be bliss in this kind of entitled unself-awareness), but it was the same part of me that wished, with doomed and plaintive futility, that I was still a kid, worried about how I'd avoid it all, but feeling like time was on my side.

  Even though I grew up on three different continents, the view was always essentially the same. We lived in a succession of nice, quiet, leafy neighborhoods filled with executive husbands, nonworking wives, and ample domestic help. Some of the wives golfed, some played tennis, some volunteered at hospitals or charities, some, like my mom, took to managing the household with military precision. Although—or, possibly, because—she had help, she was able to expand the parameters of a well-run, well-organized household to accommodate activities such as periodically removing the silver from its chamois bags, polishing it, and putting it back into the cupboards, where it remained until the next cleaning. Doorknobs were divested of fingerprints on a weekly basis. The leaves of the ficus tree plants were dusted individually. Sofa cushions were to be fluffed the moment your butt left the seat under penalty of nagging. Sometimes, we'd have Sunday lunch in the dining room, my mom would lift the lid from a porcelain soup tureen, the steam would curl up, and I would have trouble breathing.

  As I got older, I attributed the failure of my bridal imagination to factors that I knew to be neither novel nor particularly interesting, but that in the aggregate comprised quite a ball of wax: late-divorcing, incredibly acrimonious parents; the midlife bankruptcy of said parents; the concurrent, unrelated yet not unremarked ascension of a younger brother to disconcerting wealth; and an undergraduate education specifically designed to make it impossible to navigate the real world without first deconstructing it to pieces. Plus, my postcollegiate career had not only proved nonremunerative, but also afforded few opportunities to socialize with the sort of people who don't split the check with you at dinner and then try to charge you a dollar extra for the Diet Coke you ordered because they just had water.

  I wasn't the kind of girl who grew up dreaming about her wedding. I grew up dreaming about my divorce. Not that I thought of it that way, exactly, but the future life I imagined for myself as a kid looked nothing like the lives of the wives that I saw around me. What it resembled— though this didn't dawn on me until I was twenty-seven, my mom had just left my dad, and I picked up my first Elle Décor at the airport on my way to visit her at Christmas— was one of those glossy photo paeans to the sophisticated Paris/London apartments of middle-aged art dealers and fragrance company executives who, having emerged from the other end of marriage, were finally free to paint the walls lilac and relax.

  Three years after the Barcelona incident, I met my soon-to-be-husband, and a couple of years after that, we got engaged. The engagement came as a surprise, as did our fast and almost discussion-free commitment to throwing a wedding. We set the date right away, and suddenly I was staring down an eight-month time frame within which to plan a destination wedding for one hundred guests. I was happy and excited, but I still dreaded the thought of the wedding.

  For women of my generation, women in their mid-to late-thirties, the big, white wedding had somehow (but when exactly?) come to represent a sort of over-the-top, hair-trigger reaction to all the ambivalence, cynicism, and doubt that came before it. If you spend, as I and most of my friends have, the entirety of your twenties and a good part of your thirties in frustrating relationships, then the wedding, when it comes, presents a unique problem. Do you go quietly (and discreetly) after all that bitching? Or do you swallow a decade and a half 's worth of words and throw down?

  Every aspect of celebrating a marriage seemed to me to be distorted by consumerism and status anxiety, divorced from its original meaning. What did it mean to wear white and be given away? Didn't the falseness of both of those gestures, given that the overwhelming majority of married couples I know lived together before marriage, tip the performance into irony? The solution, of course, was to depart from convention and tradition—but somehow, I was never able to get behind the bride-wore-hot-pink scenarios, either. It takes a certain kind of person to resist the pressures and seductions of a wedding industry estimated to be worth somewhere in the vicinity of $40 billion. And as I would find out, I'm not that sort of person.

  The first move I made toward “tradition” came as I was standing at the Sav-On Drugstore on Franklin and Western—the kind of place that makes you feel like you've just shuffled in off the street in a dirty bathrobe, muttering, no matter what you're actually wearing. I was waiting in line to pay for batteries and Advil, when it occurred to me that it might be a good idea to buy a bridal magazine or two. At first, it was hard even to choose a magazine. A Martha Stewart Weddings cover was devoted to huge diamond rings. Several others were dedicated almost exclusively to wedding gowns, and I'd already decided I wouldn't be wearing one. All I wanted—or all I thought I wanted—was some basic instruction on exactly how many pieces of paper an invitation should contain, and what those pieces of paper should say. Maybe a couple tips on decorating. That was it.

  Not long afterward, I went shopping for “something to wear to my wedding” with a similar bride-phobic friend whose wedding would coincide with the fourth month of her pregnancy. Having soldiered through something like ten relationships between us in our thirteen years as friends, we were happy but disoriented, as though we'd suddenly emerged from ten years in the jungle into a very shiny mall. We bought party dresses, a hot pink chiffon frock for her and a bubble-skirted champagne-colored one for me. My friend even refused to try on anything in white, intent on staying as far away as possible from what we had come to think of as the “bride costume.”

  When I tried my bubble dress on again at home, however, I started to lose my nerve. As divorced from reality and cobbled-together from no longer extant traditions as the whole white wedding thing seemed, the idea of going completely nontraditional seemed rife with pitfalls, too. What if instead of original and stylish I just looked like I'd thrown something on as an afterthought? Did I want to commit to being the disappointing bride? I exchanged the bubble dress for a slightly “bridier” tea-length dress in ivory. T
hen, two days before her wedding, my friend called me in despair. “I look like a fat girl in a nightgown!” she wailed. Twenty minutes later, I met her at a nearby bridal salon, and she walked out of there in possession of a long, white strapless gown with a full, floor-length skirt. I returned the tea-length dress and ordered a long linen one from J. Crew. It looked like a wedding dress, without any of the flattering rib-crushing properties. So a month later, I sent that back and bought a long, strapless silk dress with a mermaid skirt and a sweetheart neckline. I told another friend about the whole saga. She said, “Honey, you're a hair away from Vera Wang.”

  Soon, and without my knowing exactly what had happened or how, the dress obsession had metastasized to all aspects of the wedding planning. I pored over magazines, trying to find images that I could recognize as somehow belonging to us. As much as part of me dreaded the idea of staging an elaborate, possibly alienating spectacle, I was secretly thrilled at all the aesthetic possibilities. Here, finally, was an excuse to spend money like I'd never spent money before! And it was guilt-free spending, too. Like it or not (and usually I don't), the last decade or so has been a banner one for the systematic replacement of life with “lifestyle,” and the fact is that the cheesy, corny wedding is—at least as far as the media is concerned—a thing of the past. Before I knew it, I was spending all of my free time thinking about wedding favors and invitations, centerpieces and bridal registries, cakes and photographers. One by one my inhibitions fell away. And slowly but surely, our wedding took on all the characteristics of a Martha Stewart photo spread. In my head. The more excited I got (about the signature cocktails, the mariachis, the postceremony parade—yes, the parade), the more frequently I was beset by sudden panic attacks. What, in God's name, was I doing and why? I'd imagine myself walking down the aisle in my pretty, but let's face it, completely absurd gown, and be suddenly filled with overwhelming shame. I'd fallen for all of it, like a sucker.

  One weekend, when I was flu-ridden and flying on a 102-degree fever, I spent a weekend watching a show on the Style channel called Whose Wedding Is It Anyway? It's a show about brides and wedding planners rushing around and conquering jitters as they approach their special day— a day that to an alien observer would look more like a coronation than a public declaration of commitment between two people. More than anything, the bride-and-planner dynamic recalled the dynamic between a princess and a lady-in-waiting whose job it is to make sure that protocol is complied with. In one episode, the planner and bride kept a mopey groom locked up in the best man's hotel room, biding their time away from the postceremony cocktail, so that they could make the all-important grand entrance at the reception. Over the course of two days, I must have heard the word “princess” a thousand times. But the word could not have been farther away from its meaning. The average American woman couldn't pick an actual princess, with the exception of everyone's favorite celebrity princess, Diana, out of a lineup at gunpoint. They were not dreaming of the special day when they could mock-assume the responsibilities of the figurehead of parliamentary monarchy and visit AIDS hospices, in other words. What they wanted was to enact the “fairy-tale princess” role of Walt Disney's imagination, to fulfill a childhood fantasy that may or may not have been actually theirs. It certainly wasn't mine.

  One afternoon, my fiancé and I sat down to “figure out” our ceremony. Neither one of us is religious, so we knew we wouldn't be getting married in a church. For a while we thought we'd have a civil ceremony, but in Mexico, the process would have required blood tests, chest X-rays, professional translations, notaries, and reams of paperwork. In the end, we decided that we would have a friend marry us by the power vested in him by the Internet. Since Mexico doesn't recognize the Universal Life Church, we'll actually be getting married at City Hall in Los Angeles shortly before we go. In other words, our wedding will take place before our “wedding.”

  Our “wedding,” then, will be a reenactment of a sort, and we look forward to it every day. It will also be the biggest, nicest, most fun party we ever throw. Or maybe it won't be, exactly. Because we're not in Mexico to obsess about the flowers and the lanterns and the tablecloths—all the fretting is being conducted now via phone and e-mail— we won't have as much control over the event as we might have had if we'd planned it at home. It might rain, as it has on that date for the past three years running. (We forgot to look into the weather before booking the date.) I might, as I get ready to walk down the aisle on my mom's arm, be overcome with embarrassment. I might capitulate to the small-town makeup artist and wind up looking more like Baby Jane than like myself. If it were possible for me to return the silk gown, which it's not, I might do it and start all over again at Level 1, the cocktail dress. Maybe I'd then cycle through five more dresses and wind up with a ten-foot-long train and a veil.

  The truth is that, two months before the event, I'm still alternating among excitement, horror, and genuine surprise at how it was exactly that we wound up here instead of eloping and taking off for Thailand for a month. But what has changed is that the idea of the wedding itself has, for me, taken the place that marriage once occupied in my imagination. What I mean is, I now see the wedding, and not the marriage, as the possibly great, possibly regrettable transitional stage in my life. But when it's over, we'll be married, a condition that now looks to me a lot like those pretty rooms that seemed like such a happy reflection of their inhabitants—a warm, enveloping place where I'll finally get to feel like myself again.

  my bridal meltdown

  rory evans

  Having spent the bulk of my twenties and early thirties alone in my apartment, I had no idea what it would be like to live with someone. Especially someone I was about to marry.

  Jamie and I started dating when he was living in western Pennsylvania, a very cushy 475 miles away from me. After a two-year teaching post ended, he, his cat, and his hockey equipment moved in with me. And it was soon thereafter that I realized I was always in a toxic mood. We had gotten engaged before he moved in. I assumed our new living situation would be like our relationship: a seamless and happy fit. But I had never accounted for how hard it was going to be to get used to the sound of him whistling or slurping coffee or chewing food. It was the first time I'd lived with a boyfriend, much less a fiancé, and how I missed all the privacy I'd taken for granted—the evenings of sitting in the middle of the living room floor, trimming my toenails and talking to my friend Rachel about absolutely nothing for an hour an a half, the mornings of waking up, showering, and falling back asleep on the sofa. We live in a duplex apartment—the living room directly over the bed-room—and I remember sitting in bed, eyes bugged out, aghast at the sound of Jamie's stocking-feet footfalls as he walked between the sofa and the bathroom. “Stop pounding!” I snapped, as if I expected him to grow dainty little gossamer wings and flutter to the toilet, as if I expected him to disappear.

  Adding to my unhappiness was his underemployment. In a summer of irrational fears and anger, this amplified my lifelong Yankee dread of someday waking up flat broke. At the time, mine was the only paycheck, and Jamie spent his days on the fool's errand known as looking for a tenure-track position in the humanities. And doing lots of fix-it-build-it projects around the apartment. (And, of course, desperately seeking shelter when caught in the sudden squalls of my bad moods.)

  I wrongly thought that since there were two of us, I would have to work doubly hard and make twice as much money. I also had the large bill of our wedding to reckon with. Honestly, the wedding planning itself sparked very little grief, because the event would be so casual, and the venue was more or less a one-stop shop. I just didn't have it in me to chew and gnash over small decisions like which wine would be best with dinner (beer goes with cheeseburgers, right?). I trusted my mom to do whatever she thought best.

  It was the paying for it that I was so stressed out about and kept me busy with an insane amount of overtime assignments, which, of course, just bred further resentment of this sweet, unsuspecting man w
ho had thought he was moving in with someone loving and friendly and fun. I am ashamed to think of how many times I slammed doors that summer with the conversation-ending “One of us has to work!” As I stretched myself ever thinner, taking on various freelance assignments on top of my part-time editing job, I would mentally offset some aspect of the wedding—like, this 600-word Q&A with Yoko Ono would pay for the open bar. (Kampai, Yoko, BTW.) Every night before falling asleep and every morning before getting up—when I should have been looking to my left at a man who is the kind of handsome I still don't think I deserve—I'd lie in bed and do a mental inventory of all the things I had to get done before the wedding: story for X, story for Y, story for Z, revise story for X. Write memo for Tom. Send ideas to Linda. Oh, and find the time and supplies to make four hundred clothespin self-portrait cake toppers.

  Let me explain: The idea came to me very early on in our engagement, and was inspired by a streetwalker-looking doll my little sister made when she was in first grade. She rolled a peg clothespin in lime green satin, wrapped a cotton ball around its shoulders, glued some orange yarn on its head, and drew a floozy, pretty-lady face on it. (It is, to this day, the coolest thing I think my sister has ever made, in her lifetime of making cool things.) I decided to make bride and groom self-portraits out of clothespins, in arts-and-crafts replicas of the very clothes we planned on wearing, and I would then place one on top of each of the two hundred cupcakes we'd overordered for the one hundred guests at our cookout wedding.

  Almost every night as I walked home from the subway, I would stand at the very edge of the sidewalk on the corner of Lafayette and Astor Place and think: “If I could just get hit by a bus, I wouldn't have to deal with any of this.” I didn't want to die, but I did want a valid excuse for blowing off all the work that was making me so miserable (and so miserable for Jamie to be around). I fantasized about lounging in a hospital bed and watching gobs of vapid daytime television. Then an actual bus would come whooshing past, snap me out of my reverie, and I'd head home to have dinner, then do a few hours of work.