Autobiography of a Fat Bride (6 page)

The Suck of Bridal G-Force

I
will admit there was a moment that I really did get sucked into a bridal black hole. In a way, you can hardly help it. After spending months of leafing through ten pounds of wedding magazines every single time you come back from the grocery store, your mind becomes a little soft and very open to suggestion. After you’ve flipped through the newest issues of
Modern Bride, Bridal Guide, Bride’s, Martha Stewart Weddings, InStyle Weddings, Bride Again,
and
Encore Bride,
you will honestly believe that you will look exquisite walking down the aisle dressed as a lemon meringue pie, or even more tragic, a coconut macaroon.

Bridal magazines propagate faster than mosquitoes. Every time I went to pick up a stick of margarine or a box of tampons, there on the shelf was a brand-new issue of the same magazine I bought yesterday. In hindsight, I am fully convinced that it’s actually the same, exact magazine, but that the publishers supply retailers with thirty different covers each month, and when the one on the shelves is sold, the quickest bag boy on staff runs to the supply room immediately to fetch the next version of the magazine with the new cover. It wouldn’t be a difficult scam at all; every magazine has the same awful dresses that make you believe that the Civil War era really is back in fashion and that if you want a gaggle of bridesmaids that could double for Suellen O’Hara, Melanie Hamilton, and Aunt Pittypat on Halloween, that is your God-given right as a bride, and anyone who tries to talk you out of it is nothing less than the devil. All sport the same, limp stories with headlines like “Flatware: An Investigative Report,” “Is Your Coffeemaker Meeting Your Needs?” and “The Truth Behind 200-Thread-Count Sheets.” Bridal magazines are kind of like OxyContin for the ivory satin/tulle crowd, and when you get down to it, I believe they are the number-one cause of why it is easier to reason with a crack addict than it is an engaged woman.

Because of bridal magazines and an emphatic endorsement from my mother, I became convinced that not creating a bridal registry was nothing short of bestial.

“If you don’t go and register this very minute,” my mother warned, “I’ll tell you right now that every present you open will be candlesticks and salt and pepper shakers. And you can’t build a home on that! If you don’t believe me, there was a very good article in one of your magazines called ‘Flatware: An Investigative Report’ that you should read. You ever try eating stroganoff with a candlestick? Have you? Yeah, that’s what I thought. Then
register.
”

Haunted by the vision of trying to cut into a filet mignon with a salt shaker for the rest of eternity, I grabbed my boyfriend and we embarked on picking out stemware, washcloths, casual dinnerware, and lots of things we didn’t want but could return for cash or credit, since there was a great pair of cowboy boots I had my eye on in the shoe department. In effect, the entire ordeal was nothing short of an engagement hazing/endurance test. It took us two days, rotating in shifts, to pick out all of the essential things we were going to need or risk our marriage eroding into a miserable and dismal failure. Every choice was laced with trepidation and chance. Who knew if the double old-fashioned juice glasses could be the unraveling of our love or if the villain was really the etched goblets? You never knew.
You never knew.
I didn’t even know the truth behind two-hundred-thread-count sheets and if three hundred was better or worse, and there I was, picking out things that were supposed to last a lifetime.

I realized I had crossed a line when I was standing in the towel department and found myself shouting across the aisle to my boyfriend—who was seeking well-deserved slumber on a bed the size of a hot dog meticulously vignetted in Ralph Lauren’s Avery Cafe bed linens—“Why are we even going through the motions of this wedding if we aren’t getting the full-size bath sheets? What
is
the point?”

Bridal black hole. Sucked right in. Fortunately, I was able to pull out of it after I received an invitation to a bridal fair at the same department store a week after we registered. The lure was free gifts. I figured if I wasn’t going to be a beautiful bride, I might as well get some free stuff by just being a bride in the first place, and I talked my unfortunate maid of honor and best friend since third grade, Jamie, into going with me.

As the loot was handed out, we saw one girl tackle another for a free Wedgwood gravy boat. I saw a bride-to-be and her maid of honor work an unsuspecting lone bride like grifters, trying to make her trade her Lenox crystal ring-holder gift for their package of thank-you cards. I saw a girl erupt into tears when she opened what looked like a jewelry box that really held a pen with an attachment for a big, nasty feather. And I watched all of them circle around me like raptors when I won the shower cake as Jamie held them at bay with lit aromatherapy candles she grabbed from a nearby display.

It was enough to make me go home, grab the closest wheelbarrow, gather up approximately fourteen hundred pounds of bridal magazines, and dump them straight into the gaping black hole of our recycling bin.

Don’t Drink the Kool-Aid

W
e had run into a snag.

Neither my boyfriend nor I had been to a church in years and had no one to marry us. Although one of our friends swore he was an ordained minister and would perform the ceremony, we changed our minds when we found out what kind of medication he was on.

After some searching, I found a minister in the phone book and made the call. Assuring me of what a great ceremony he performed (including a portion in which the bride and groom high-five each other), he then informed me that he was busy on our date and that he would refer me to one of his colleagues.

That’s how we found Ellen.

Ellen called, and told us that she ran a church on the west side of town. She suggested that we come down to the service the following Sunday to see if we liked each other. I agreed. There couldn’t be any harm in that.

On Sunday, we got up early, took showers, and made sure we were both wearing clean underwear, even if both pairs were my boyfriend’s. We ironed his shirt and got ready for church.

With the address in hand, we set off for Ellen’s place. We were both pretty hungry, though, and stopped for some McEgg thing on the way there, ordering as much as we could with the five dollars we had on us. We had finished gobbling everything just about the time we reached the street the church was on. We made the turn.

There, behind a wall of blooming oleander bushes, was a parking lot, and as we pulled into it, we noticed that the layout of the place was kind of odd. Scattered about the edge of the lot were numerous little houses, perhaps seven or eight in all, and then what was obviously a main hall. Our car was one of three in the lot.

“This doesn’t look like a church,” I said quietly.

“But it sure does look like a compound,” my boyfriend replied.

“It’s a cult,” I said adamantly. “It’s a cult, they’re trying to recruit us. It’s like Little Guyana or a Branch Davidians franchise. Great. Cult people. Our minister is a Jim Jones.
’Come, children, come, don’t be afraid.’
“

“Well, what do you want to do?” he asked me.

“I want to leave,” I answered, looking over both shoulders. “Unless they’ve already surrounded us.”

“You made an appointment with her,” he argued. “I think we should go in. You said she sounded nice.”

“Honey, you capture more cult people with honey than you do with vinegar. What do you think she should have said, ‘Hey, did you ever feel the urge to become the sixth child bride of a balding, overweight man with a perspiration problem and big pores, because I can hook you up by sundown’! You know that cult people always make the new recruits drink their own pee!” I reminded him, but he was already out of the car.

“It can’t hurt to see,” he insisted.

“Okay, okay.” I gave in. “Your choice. But if anyone hands you Kool-Aid or a loaded rifle, just back away slowly and say nicely, ‘No, thank you,’ and if you see any children dressed in fatigues, don’t say a word, just run to the car.”

We walked through the doors of the main hall, into a room about as big as a classroom. Several rows of metal folding chairs were set up, occupied by a variety of about fifteen people. In the air hung the undeniable fragrance of old coffee and nicotine residue, a sure signal that cleanliness wasn’t as next to godliness as you’d like to think around these parts. As I looked around, I had the undeniable feeling that I was the Mary Poppins of this group.

Yep. Mixed-up, brainwashed cult people. Suddenly, the high-fives seemed perfectly acceptable, even downright
cool,
as did the Wave or even the Jerry Springer chant, “Go Jerry! Go Jerry! Go Jerry!” My mother could handle that after we said our vows, I convinced myself, especially if we let her
start
the Wave.

As soon as we each took a seat, the piano player attacked the keys with the chords of “We Shall Overcome,” and instructed the congregation to come to the front of the room, hold hands in a circle, and sing. In what was clearly an invasion of my personal space, I joined hands with perfect strangers and sang what little I knew of the song, swaying involuntarily with my hands above my head, my right in the clutch of a man wearing an eye patch and my left grasped tightly by a woman missing both her eyeteeth. For all I knew, in an hour I could be married to Bluebeard and forced to follow the orders of his first wife, The Whistler.

When we very gladly and happily returned to our seats, a basket was passed around (a part of church I had completely forgotten about), and before it got to us, I was able to scavenge the thirteen cents that was left over from our McBrunch and tossed it into the collection. I didn’t feel so bad after I took a peek in the basket and realized that we were apparently the high rollers in this “church,” being that the parishioners donated what they could afford to sacrifice. Along with the bounty of our thirteen cents, the basket boasted a half-smoked GPC cigarette, an origami bird created from a gum wrapper, several Canadian pennies, and what looked suspiciously like a rewrapped cough drop.

The lady I assumed was Ellen stood up and began delivering her sermon. Short and squat with eyes that said she had done some hard living, she began talking in a soft voice about how people should accept other people for who they were, just like Jesus did, and, as a matter of fact, if He were to come back to Earth right now, He’d feel much more comfortable at this church with the drug addicts and over-the-limit offenders than he would in Scottsdale with the hoity-toity people eating raw fish at a sushi bar.

“A-
men,
Sister Ellen, the Lord is
every
man!
Every
man!” one particularly invigorated churchie stood up and proclaimed. “
Every
man fights his own demons, like my own enemy, cocaine!”

“And the temptation of drink!” another man yelled.

“And the crack pipe!” The Whistler barely rattled.

It was then that I understood. We weren’t in a compound, and we weren’t about to be brainwashed. No one was going to give me a gun and start calling me Tonya. I wasn’t going to drink my own pee. We were simply at a rehabilitation center. A nonvoluntary, court-appointed rehab center. For these folks, it was singing and dancing and praising the Lord or wrestling the last scrap of shit wipe from their cellmates in the Big House while using their metal feeding tray as a shield. It turns out that we didn’t need to wear clean underwear, after all. We were sitting in a meeting of Junkies for Jesus.

We met Ellen afterward, and I decided that I liked her just as long as she didn’t bring her commonwealth to our wedding for a free meal, despite the entertainment value of an honest-to-God freak show, and the fact that if Jesus chose to return to Earth, He might show up at my wedding, looking for His “every man” peeps. Then she gave me her card, which I have never, to this day, shown my mother.

It read, neatly in black and white: “Reverend Ellen, A Spiritual Solution To Addictions.”