Altared Page 8
Stress manifests itself in the body in lots of ways. Some people lose tons of weight. I wasn't so lucky: Instead, my right eye started twitching and I broke out in eczema. Oddly, even though stress triggered the big patches of red, itchy bumps on my arms, wrists, knees, calves, neck, and— in the final weeks before the wedding—my eyelids, scratching at them was my greatest comfort. It bears mentioning: I'm sufficiently low-maintenance that I really wasn't worried that my eczema would “ruin” my wedding day look. (It's a tad difficult for someone wearing a white tank top and white jean skirt to get all princessy over a splotchy red rash.)
Besides, I actively did not want it to get better, since then I wouldn't know how to channel my anxiety. When I got called into my boss's office, I'd sit in the chair on the other side of her desk and, to quell my nerves, automatically reach for my knee and start scratching. I would stand in front of the open refrigerator, wondering what we'd have for dinner, and scratch at my inner elbows. Jamie would holler from across the room, “Stop scratching!” If I were sitting next to him on the sofa and mindlessly scratching, he would forcibly remove my hand from my rash. At night, in bed, when I was watching Law & Order and thought he was asleep, I'd reach for my elbows and wrists and dig right in. Invariably, in half sleep, he'd grit his teeth and whisper, “Stop it.” One weekend, about three weeks before the wedding, Jamie went to Buffalo to go sailing with his friend Scott so I could work full tilt, uninterrupted, on the last few projects I had due. Yes, I was happy to have the privacy so I could just focus (no chewing noises!) and work. But more than anything, I remember being so thrilled that I could go lie down in our cool, dark bedroom and scratch with impunity.
I know none of this stuff—the itching, the hit-by-bus fantasies—sounds glamorous or bridal or even very mature. It couldn't be just me, right? As I flipped through the bridal magazines at the newsstand (I had a wedding to pay for and wasn't about to shell out five bucks for a stack of advertisements), I saw that the overarching theme is “getting ready for your wedding is the time of your life! It doesn't get more thrilling or creative than this!” But I found it hard to understand that any overextended bride was buying any of it. I sometimes look back and think I crammed a marriage-worth of strife and worry into just a few prenuptial months. I like to think I know myself better than to say that maybe I was testing Jamie right down to his marrow: You think you want to be with me? Even when I have too much work? Even when I'm a foul beast? Even after I tell you you're breathing too loud ? I also like to think I know myself better than to say that maybe I was so miserable because, after I'd gotten what I'd thought I'd always wanted—someone cute, kind, and funny to love and love me back—I wasn't so sure I really wanted the responsibility of caring for it all the time. I've watched some of those Bridezilla wedding shows on the lady-cable channels and been utterly gobsmacked at how upset and apoplectic some of the brides get about the botching of small details—the wrong color Jordan almonds, a veil length that's off by an eighth of an inch. But then I think maybe there's a conservation of matter—that every bride has to worry and pick and be miserable a certain amount; it's just up to her what the fuss is. And that the fuss, no matter what shape it's in—be it a missing fake pearl from a tacky thigh garter or slamming a door when you have too much work—is just a displacement or expression of the fear of being with someone else for the rest of your life.
Eight days before my wedding, I handed in the last of my assignments. Miraculously, I'd finished all my stressful work (and had the blooms of eczema to prove it!). Now I just needed to make four hundred self-portrait clothespin cake toppers. On a Friday morning, I went to the art store to buy supplies. By that point in the summer, Jamie had started a job as a cabinetmaker, so he joked that both of us would be spending our day working with wood. When he got home at six o'clock, I'd been painting, gluing, and assembling for almost eight hours straight, with about forty self-portraits to show for it. For the Rorys, I painted on a little white tank top, wrapped and glued a white piece of eyelet for the skirt, Magic Markered hair, eyes, and mouth, glued a piece of tulle on top, then glued and snipped on coffee-stirrer arms. For the Jamies, I painted blue shorts and a pink polo shirt, brushed the head with glue then dunked it into “dirty blond” yarn fuzz, markered the eyes and mouth, glued on arms that had been painted with pink sleeves, and then—in what our (gay) friend David approvingly refers to as “the height of faggot nonsense”—used a green fine-point Sharpie to draw the world's tiniest alligator onto the shirt.
Jamie surveyed my progress. Then he sat right down to help me. He decided that in a sea of four hundred, some of them had to look a little different, so he made one guy have a red thong and a crazy curly thatch of chest hair. On another, he drew a painstakingly detailed pair of tighty whities. By the end of the night, we had close to one hundred, packed them up, and got ready to drive to my parents' in Massachusetts the next day. We spent the rest of that rainy weekend with my mom, at her dining room table, putting together the rest of our cake toppers. Jamie went into my mom's cellar workshop and sawed the head of one of the pins in half, and then glued the resultant half-sphere onto the “stomach” of another pin, making a pregnant bride with a shamrock tattoo on her forearm and a white tank top that didn't cover her bump. In a feat of fine art unlike anything I'll ever see again, he individually glued one-inch strands of satiny embroidered floss onto the back of one pin's “head” to make a mullet for a hillbilly groom (with pink wife beater and fringy, shorty-short denim cutoffs).
He, my mom, and I were in a creative fugue state unlike anything hinted at by the bridal magazines. My mom's table was covered with self-portraits-in-progress as well as tissue-paper-lined boxes of the finished products. At one point, my dad traipsed through the room, sort of shook his head, and said to my mom, “Alice, you and your projects”— not quite derisively but not quite affectionately either.
I flashed my eyes over to Jamie, in fear that he'd take my dad's comment as some sort of dismissal or insult or emasculating insinuation. Jamie, I was happy to see, was too caught up in the faggot nonsense of faithfully re-creating a comb-over to notice. Of course, at that moment, I had to appreciate his indulgence, his readiness to offer his time, keen motor skills, and even keener sense of humor to what I knew in my heart to be a rather inane endeavor. If being married meant more of this, then I was finally and completely ready.
A week later, we got married in outfits that matched the clothespins. The big reveal of the entire event came when people entered the lodge's large, screened-in porch for dinner and saw the tower of cupcakes with their self-portrait clothespin cake toppers—audible gasps and hearty ooohs and aahs. There followed the supremely satisfying exchange (several times) of “Where did you get them?” and “We made them together!” In the weeks following the wedding, our friends e-mailed digital pictures of the cake toppers in various locales. Our friend Heidi planted hers in the soil of her hanging fern, over her kitchen sink. Scott, who got the mullet-head, had his presiding over the living room from the mantel. My friend Curtis wrote to say that she had soaked them together in a teacup to get the frosting off their legs, and that it was the sexiest thing that had ever happened in her kitchen.
Our own set we store in a glass spice jar, with their (our?) feet bound with the thin green satin ribbon I wore that day as a belt. Every time I look at it, I feel irrationally happy. It's the same feeling I get most of the time when I'm in bed watching Law & Order and look to my left and watch Jamie when he's asleep. Even in wakefulness, I usually feel like this—a certain, hazy kind of happiness. Even if I'm still getting used to the noises Jamie makes when he's chewing.
the best-laid wedding plans
How I Called Off My Wedding
jennifer armstrong
I stood on a pedestal, thick white satin hugging every curve of my butt without scrunching, falling precisely to the tops of my silver-sandaled feet without bunching. The top seam of my strapless gown skimmed the top of my breasts, and my bare skin peeked seducti
vely through the lace-up back to my exact specifications. I don't mind saying it, because I'd picked this dress myself, I'd had the seamstress rework it until it was basically couture, and I'd endured five fittings to get here: I was a vision of perfection.
The gal on the pedestal next to mine, drowning in pouf and lace, caught my eye in the mirror and sparkled like we shared a delicious secret. “What's your date?” she asked, all aglow. My first reaction: Should she really be asking me about dating? I'm engaged, after all.
And then I caught my reflection in the mirror again, remembered why I was here. Panic set in. Let's see, it was late July. What would make sense? Not August. That was too soon. “September.”
“OhmyGod, me too! When?”
“Uh, the second weekend.” Total gaffe: Any bride has memorized not only her own date, but the exact date of every Saturday within at least four weeks of hers.
“Oh, mine's the eighteenth, so a week later.”
An embarrassed flush spread from the top of my dress, up my neck, to my cheeks. I'd put my wedding on September 11. Not impossible, but… unlikely, a mere three years after the terrorist attacks. The shop fell silent then, save for the occasional tussling of tulle. Who knows if she was onto me, but that was beside the point. When I stood there lying to a total stranger, it seemed all too obvious, the symbolism cinching my lungs like the seamstress yanking the strings of that lace-up back: I wasn't being honest with myself or my fiancé. We'd had a date, nearly a year before, and we'd been postponing ever since. Actually, I 'd been postponing. And I wasn't sure I'd ever stop.
The truth about my feelings showed up in the wedding planning—whether I was barreling forward with the goal-orientation of an Olympic athlete, oblivious to anything except getting to the finish line; dreaming of a destination wedding that would take us far away from our everyday reality; or convincing myself that a cool New York wedding would make us into the happy urban couple I wanted us to be. But the fact is that I got so caught up in the planning itself that I couldn't see that every one of those phases was telling me something very important about my relationship.
Facing my indecision proved the biggest struggle of my life. When doubts first began whispering through my head, they didn't make sense to me. I'd spent so long loving my fiancé—more than a decade, since we met in college. I had found a man who shared my love of Shakespeare and Elton John, who was taller than me but not too tall for me to kiss, who was smart (a nonnegotiable requirement) and funny in the exact right way (puns and sarcasm are both essential). He balanced my remedial financial skills with budgetary obsession and was so organized he made me feel wonderfully free-spirited (though anyone can see from my meticulous day planner that I am not). I was so sure we belonged together that I followed him from Northwestern University in my hometown of Chicago to Southern California (where he was stationed as a navy officer), back to Chicago (so he could go to grad school at Northwestern), and finally to a New Jersey suburb of New York—where he got a job at Mercedes-Benz, and I could finally chase my national-magazine dreams after years of local newspaper reporting. And I did just that, landing a gig at Entertainment Weekly—which required that I start as an assistant, but my diligent spirit was prepared to do what it took. We bought a condo in Jersey. Dan proposed. Everything seemed on track.
So how could I feel like it didn't quite fit? I had methodically plotted a perfect wedding that I didn't want, the same way I'd carefully constructed a perfect life I was beginning to realize I didn't want. The evidence was there in the preliminary wedding preparations when a strangely errant desire immediately surfaced: It seemed I wanted a small, casual affair, with just our closest friends and family—not the princess-bride wedding I'd always imagined having. Instead, I envisioned an evening party, essentially, kicked off with some vows followed by a yummy dinner and maybe a little dancing.
Then I even found the dress. My mom and I were walking through a mall in suburban Chicago when I was home for Christmas. This gorgeous little thing shimmered at me from a shop window: silvery white, with a halter top, plunging back, and swishy skirt that fell just below the knee. Sort of a Marilyn Monroe number, with less plunge in front and more dip in back (perfect, since my curves are more modest than Marilyn's and my back is one of my better features).
I stopped in the middle of the mall when I saw it, and I gasped enough that my mom reacted as if I were suffering a grave illness. “I'm fine, Mom,” I assured her. “It's just… that's the dress.”
“It's pretty. Are you guys doing something for New Year's?”
“No, that's my wedding dress.”
I never expected what came next. Not from my mom. My mom is cool, laid-back, and, more than anything, all about letting her kids make their own decisions (e.g., mistakes). The woman let me move to Southern California right after college into an apartment that I'd never seen, with a job at a far-flung newspaper that was paying me $320 a week, and never issued one word of doubt or warning. But weddings, I learned, do funny things to people beyond the bride. “You would wear that to your wedding?” she said. “How would you wear a veil with that?”
“Um, I'm not wearing a veil.”
“You have to wear a veil. You need a wedding gown and a veil.”
She looked so indignant, was so emphatic, that, at the time, I thought maybe I did need a gown and a veil. The only person I liked to please more than my boss or my fiancé was my mom, after all.
I never saw that dress again. But later that week, on a proper search for a proper dress in proper bridal stores, I found the one I'd tailor to perfection: a strapless, pure white column dress with a reasonable little train and silvery beading along the top. I got a veil trimmed with a little sparkle to match the beading. The silver bits reminded me of the shiny Marilyn dress I'd passed by—my (tiny, imperceptible) nod to the bride I'd wanted to be.
I'd fancied myself a modern woman who knew what she wanted and wasn't afraid to get it. But I was slowly starting to see that the only thing I wasn't afraid to get was a wedding dress that everyone else would think was gorgeous and, thank God, appropriate. And as for what I wanted, that was nothing more than a sparkle along my bustline. The wedding planning consumed me. So much, in fact, that when I look back at that time, even Dan hardly enters my memories. I was on autopilot, preparing for something I had been waiting for all my life. Whether I wanted it wasn't up for discussion.
In my mind, I was doing it for him. For us. I had dreamed of this day for so long, but I refuse to use the excuse that I was brainwashed, like all other girls, since childhood. I wasn't dumb—I had the wherewithal to figure out I didn't need a wedding to be a modern successful girl. But I was a searing romantic. Always had been, for as long as I'd liked boys. And it was because I liked boys so damn much. I'd always believed in true love, because I was always in love, period. This one had simply outlasted the others and made it to the finish line. This was it, and I was so ready. We'd been through a lot together, from all the time spent apart during his navy years' interminable deployments to several rounds of breakups and reconciliations during our mid-twenties. But we'd been through a lot together mostly by being apart. And being apart, especially when one of you is on a navy ship in a uniform, gives a relationship the feel of something for the ages. Destiny skulks around a lot. Meant to be sounds like a phrase coined just for you.
This was why I was really psyched about this wedding. It would serve as the climax to an epic romantic saga. What had I been thinking, looking at that cocktail dress, staking out mere restaurants for the occasion? Thank God I'd gotten the gown, the marbled Chicago Historical Society with the sweeping spiral staircase for me to walk down, the cake with the raspberry ganache. A day to celebrate the miracle that was us—the triumph of true love over adversity! I couldn't wait to say our vows before our family and friends—the ones who'd questioned our many reconciliations, who'd wondered if we were too young when we'd met, who'd raised skeptical eyebrows when I passed over perfectly good other men to remain fixated on Dan.
It crossed my mind, briefly, that one of the reasons I wanted this ceremony was to prove to all of them not that love conquered all, but that Dan loved me, that I conquered love. But, no. I loved him, too. Of course I did. Why else would I have kept this going for so many years if I didn't?
Wedding magazines stacked up on our coffee table, the useful pages (about invitations and favors and place cards, areas I hadn't yet tackled) dog-eared, later to be torn out and fastened into a binder with colored tabs and a personalized checklist I'd typed out myself by combining the pointers in several leading bridal publications.
It is amazing how wrapped up in minutiae one can get when one is avoiding bigger issues, like the fact that one's fiancé has started talking about kids right at the time that one has realized one might avoid them forever. Or the fact that one's fiancé wants to move farther into New Jersey just as one has been overcome with the desire to move into Manhattan at any cost. Or the fact that one has just gotten promoted at one's dream job, so one is actually writing feature stories for a national entertainment magazine, and one is thinking about writing a book and pursuing new dreams, not settling down with a dog and kids and a yard. Because one spends more time in the city with one's new group of invigorating, creative, writerly friends than one does at home in Jersey with one's fiancé.
And I defy you to find anything that manufactures obsession with minutiae more efficiently than the bridal industry. The wedding biz is an insidious ally to the bride who's determined to ignore her feelings, doing the same job the institution of marriage does for couples who are afraid to think too much: It structures gut feelings out of the picture, gives us steps to follow so that we feel like we're moving forward with a momentous decision when all we're doing is obsessing to the point of near mental illness over invitation fonts and frosting flavors.