Save the Date: The Occasional Mortifications of a Serial Wedding Guest (8 page)

“Oh,” I said.

“It’s Decatur, you know,” he continued. “Same old, same old. Claire getting married, though, wow. I guess we’re old, huh?” He seemed slightly dazed as he turned back to his meatballs. It appeared I wasn’t the only one confronting strange feelings about growing up.

Moments later, Marjorie and Brian were at my side, ushering me to a table, sharing gossip. Weddings and babies, but also rehab stints, failing parents, even a divorce or two. Houses had been bought, companies founded. Jobs had been won and jobs had been lost. I didn’t see anyone who was suddenly bald and fat and driving a station wagon, just lives being lived, here like everywhere. “There they are!” someone shouted, and we all turned to applaud the bride and groom, headed out among their guests following their post-wedding photography session. “He seems nice,” said Marjorie. “She looks gorgeous. Oh, they’re so happy!”

I caught sight of Jesse, another high school friend. He was the one who’d kept me most reliably informed about my ex over the years. He waved and walked over. “Well, hello there, stranger,”
he said. When I’d broken up with Nathaniel, Jesse had not been happy with me, but he hadn’t stopped talking to me or even, like my brother, yelled at me for being a jerk. He wasn’t judgmental. He had stayed in our hometown after graduating. His family was here, and I suspected he had never planned to leave, not permanently.

“Hi, Jesse,” I said, getting up to give him a hug.

“Mind if I sit?” he asked, gesturing to the place next to mine.

This wasn’t a mere hello. He had news. I moved my bag to make room.

“So, I have to tell you something about Nathaniel,” he began.

“I just saw Buddy,” I said. I stopped eating and took a sip of wine. Everyone else at the table appeared deep in their own conversations. I swallowed. “He hadn’t seen him, though. What is it? Is he okay?”

“Nathaniel is
married
,” said Jesse. “To a redhead! Get this: They eloped to Hawaii.”

“Hawaii? Eloped?” This information did not compute. The Nathaniel I had expected, if not here, would be at home, watching TV from the couch of his little room at the back of the house, his Golf parked in the carport, its tape deck cued up to his favorite Hüsker Dü song. My Nathaniel, a lei around his neck, hula-ing into the sunset, cavorting in impossibly blue waves with
a redhead
?

“As you can imagine, his mother was not happy with the elopement,” he said. “Anyway, his wife sort of looks like Little Debbie!” As Jesse began to laugh, I tried to conjure the all-American cartoon girl on the box of snack cakes, an image I hadn’t thought of since high school. I couldn’t picture her, and I
couldn’t picture her as Nathaniel’s wife. But more than that, despite myself, what I felt was a strange kind of pride. Eloping to Hawaii has oomph. That’s the kind of thing I’d hope a future husband of mine would have the nerve to do, too.
He must really love her
, I thought.

“I think he’s really happy,” said Jesse.

We were interrupted by another friend from high school, a girl who’d been a cheerleader, who’d had the sort of popularity I’d once fruitlessly dreamed of attaining considering my lack of coordination and mud-brown hair. “How are you?” she said, grabbing my arm and squeezing. “Oh, my God, you look great. What are you up to now? Are you still living in New York?”

“
You
look great,” I said. “You look exactly the same! Um, I moved to Boston for a while, but I’m in the process of moving back to New York. I miss it, you know?”

“Totally.” She might not have known what I was talking about, but I got the distinct impression that she really did want to hear about my life and how it might compare and contrast with her own.

Later that night, I found myself sitting at the country club bar next to Buddy. I’d had many drinks and, despite my best intentions, not enough Swedish meatballs. Things were winding down, but there was still that particular sort of tingly wedding electricity in the air. It’s a neutral energy that can so easily veer one way or the other. You can end the night in joyful tears over the shared beauty and love in this place, among these people in this moving marital moment. Or you can see fit to annihilate everything in your path. You will regret the latter, and you may
even know that to be true as you persist in doing what you’re doing, but sometimes you can’t help yourself. As much as you try to stay with the light, there are certain weddings that take you into the dark.

Buddy and I were talking or, more accurately, flirting. He’d always dated another of our friends, the artistic one with the great clothes, and I’d been with Nathaniel. Of course, Nathaniel was married now, I reminded myself. It seemed like the friendship between the two men had lapsed as well. All bets were off. I poured on the charm, talking Buddy’s ear off, bragging about how much fun grown-up life was in the big city. He seemed impressed, so I went a step further, wanting to rehash and resolve old wounds. “You know,” I said, “you really shouldn’t have talked about my lack of a sex life to everyone in high school.”

“
You never talked
in high school,” he answered. “You never said a word. We were all just wondering who you were.”

“That’s funny,” I said. “’Cause I was wondering that, too.”

“Well, shit, girl. We were in high school. Who wasn’t?” He motioned to the bartender for another drink.

Marjorie, suddenly at my side, interrupted. “Claire’s dad is cutting everyone off,” she said. “We should go.”

At this wedding, I listened, and we did.

•   •   •

O
n the way home, they told me later, I slid from side to side in the backseat of the car. I might as well have been on a roller coaster, involuntarily tilting back and forth, my whole
body enjoying the ride. I sang along loudly to “Drift Away” and “Take It to the Limit,” alternating lyrics, as Marjorie and Brian laughed at my tuneless renditions. But it was a wedding, I thought, too deep in my own mind to explain; this was exactly what you were supposed to do at a wedding.
Take it to the limit. Drift away.

I woke up from a dream that I was in a dark cave permeated with a strange red light, and when I was able to pry one eye open realized I was facedown on one of the twin beds in Marjorie’s childhood bedroom. The pulsating numbers of a clock positioned next to me made for the crimson glow seeping into my subconscious. It was later than I’d intended to sleep. I touched my face. I hadn’t washed off my eye makeup or even taken off the dress I’d worn the night before. My shoes and bag were strewn across the room. Phone, check, next to my bag. What about my friends? Where were Brian and Marjorie? Had I lost them, through misplacement or, worse, offense? I heard laughter from the next room, her brother’s bedroom, which he’d vacated for college and where they were staying for this visit home. I pulled myself up into a sitting position, my hair a tangled mess around my face. My makeup, I was sure, was smeared down my cheeks. But I was here, and they were there, and nothing had happened. Nothing had happened. I was both relieved and disappointed. I shifted to the edge of the bed, and the clock fell to the floor with a loud thud.

They heard. “Jennifer! Are you awake?”

“Glahhhhhrrr,” I responded, seriously considering putting my head right back down on the pillow.

“We need to get going if you want to see your old house!” shouted an altogether too chipper Marjorie. “Mom’s made breakfast. Some food will do you good!” I heard the clomping of their footsteps as they headed down the stairs, the clanking of silverware, bustling morning kitchen sounds. It sounded like home. It smelled like home, too, a home I remembered.

For special events and holidays while we were in high school, Marjorie’s mom had made an egg, sausage, and cheese casserole, the sort of Southern food hospitable Southern ladies like to cook and serve. My mom would never make or consume such a thing, and surely it’s because of that that I loved it. It reminded me of growing up in this town, of the friends I’d made and their families, of who I was when I got here and who I was when I left. It made me think about the person I still had left to become. If family was the home you took with you, hometowns could also be families, no matter how distant they grew or whether you returned to them or not. Marjorie was right. This place was as much a part of me as Nathaniel was, as much as any of the shared history among all of us was. That didn’t mean it was the only part. But the next time I was asked
Where are you from?
, I might just answer
Alabama
and leave it at that.

“Jen!” yelled Marjorie again. “C’mon, it’s getting cold!”

•   •   •

M
y old house looked almost exactly as it had when my family had lived in it: same gray paint, same trees, same Gothic columns, same three-car garage I’d parked in once I got
my driver’s license, and even the same mailbox with its perky little flag. Across the street, there was the same sidewalk I’d taken every morning to get to the elementary school. It was all so familiar, like looking at an old photograph, and yet, as we slowed to a crawl and I stared long and hard at my former home from the window of Marjorie’s car, I could feel it wasn’t the same at all.

It’s the Journey, Not the Destination

O
ne weekday morning in the winter of 2010, I emerged from the subway to find I had a voice mail from my parents. Calls from them at odd times would always send a current of fear through me. We usually talked on weekends and in the afternoon or early evening. Why would they be calling me now? As I listened to the message, my anxiety level spun skyward. It was my dad, saying words no one ever wants to hear: something about Mom, a “brain bleed,” and the emergency room. I called him back immediately.

“Hello, Jennifer,” he said, maintaining his trademark fatherly calm even in the face of inconceivable news. “I’m at the hospital. Mom woke up in the middle of the night and couldn’t move. I called 911 for an ambulance, and we rushed her to the ER.”

I was stunned into silence. The last time I’d spoken to them, a week before, they’d regaled me with tales of upcoming biking
and kayak trips and dinner plans with friends. There had been no clue of anything wrong. My dad had been making his famed beer-can chicken; my mother had been relaxing outside on the patio with her martini, enjoying the balmy Florida night. “Oh my God,” I whispered, trying not to cry.

“She’s with the doctors now. They say she has dual hematomas, with bleeding on both sides of her brain. She’s going in for surgery within the hour.”

A flood of questions began as I tried to find some way to make sense of this news. Information. Information always helps. “Does Brad know?” I asked. “Should we fly down? What’s going to happen? I don’t understand,
how
did this happen?”

“I’m calling Bradley next,” he said. “I’ll know more in a few hours. Stay by your phone, and I’ll call you as soon as she’s out of surgery.”

“But do they think she’s going to be okay? She’s not—”

“Oh—the surgeon needs to talk to me,” he said. “I’ll call you back.”

•   •   •

T
he kitchen is the comma in the middle of my parents’ house, itself punctuated in the center with an island, a sturdy block of granite-topped wood. It’s here that my mother chops, cuts, mixes, tells my dad he’s not chopping or cutting or mixing properly, and instructs the family in the art of candle-lighting, wine-opening, table-setting, vinaigrette-making, pasta-shell-stuffing, relationship-maintaining, and, most of all, in the dark magic of keeping up one’s own side of a conversation even if no one
else
has anything interesting to say. The kitchen itself is airy Florida architecture: tall ceilings, gold-yellow walls, polished cabinetry, countertops with black-and-gray marbling, and numerous windows to let in the sun, which almost always shines. The room is form as well as function, and the objects within it adhere to that mantra. My mother adheres to that mantra. My mother is a benevolent dictator, usually, and her throne is the kitchen.

She would not consider this in any way sexist. This is just the way it is. She’s chosen it, and if you do wrong in her domain—where there is no KitchenAid, but recipes are filed neatly in a brown wooden box I’ve known since childhood and shelves are stacked with spices arranged to her particular needs and tastes,
labels facing front!
—you will be exiled. She moves easily from thing to thing, stirring a pot, tasting the soup and pronouncing it delicious, moving leftovers to a smaller container and fitting the old one neatly into the dishwasher. All of it is under her control, and she smiles as she shares again how Brad, as a child, told her she looked like a “microwave mom” but she sure didn’t cook like one. She is secure in this, in her cooking ability, her mom ability, her wifehood, herself, just as she is in the martini my father mixes each night at six p.m. and she drinks, with a glassful of ice next to it to add as needed. “Cocktail hour,” my dad will say, though when Brad and I are home it goes on for much of the night. My dad makes my mom her drink, and then he pours his own, and if we are there, too, he asks what we’d like and serves it. He always makes my mom her drink first, but that day in the winter of 2010 we were not there, and it was the first of many in which no drinks were made at all.

•   •   •

T
here’s one wedding that most of us never get to attend, and yet it’s one that impacts us in the most fundamental of ways. That, of course, is the wedding of our own parents. Yes, I’d seen the photos and heard the stories of that day, but I wanted to delve deeper into the fabric of my mom and dad’s relationship. Beyond how they met or wed, why did they choose each other? What were the parameters of marriage for the time in which they met? How did they view their own union as well as the overall institution, and how do they see those things now? What did they think about the relationships of their own parents, or even their grandparents?

I talked to them individually about these and other questions, and the conversations that ensued were some of the most revealing discussions we’d ever had. Just as we all have wedding stories, each family has its own intricately woven marital anthropology. There are amazing discoveries to be found with some digging. My dad told me of one of his first memories of his grandparents, who, when he was a little boy in the 1940s, drove him in their Ford V-8 out to a plot of land they owned in the country for a picnic. “I remember pasture land and trees and country,” he said. “They were walking hand in hand. It was a very nice day, and a nice, loving type of relationship they seemed to have.”

My parents were married in 1969, at a time when having a wedding by a certain age came as pretty much a given. My dad explains it frankly: “That was just what people did.” There was no question in his mind as to whether he should marry or not. He
went to college, he got a job, he had a car and an apartment. At twenty-eight, he’d accrued all the right things for the next stages in life—marriage and then starting a family. This was how it worked. As for choosing whom he’d marry, “it was a searching-out process,” he said. “You look around and see who might be a good match. You don’t want to get stuck with baggage, an anchor, someone with beliefs you don’t share. You want to know what their families are like.” That’s not all that different from how people approach finding a partner today, though of course the hows, whens, and even ifs as related to the searching-out process have changed.

So, why my mom in particular? “We had fun together,” he said. “We liked going out, having dinner, having a few drinks. We would get together with our other friends and do things . . .”

Compare that to the tale of my mother’s grandparents’ road to marriage. Great-Grandpa had lived in a boarding house, and the woman who ran it had a niece back in the old country. “Whoever would pay her passage from Italy could have her as a bride,” my mom recounted. He did, and they married and had four children, though it was said they never got along. “They must have gotten along sometimes!” said my mom.

Marriages today are expected to be about far more than getting along. We want more than the marriage certificate. We want that other thing, too, the thing we can’t put a finger on, though we know it’s passionate, romantic, soulful, cosmic, fulfilling, and individualized to our own couplehood, so somehow utterly unique. As for how we obtain it, the messages are confusing and often contradictory: We’ll know it when we see it; we can’t force it; we
have to put ourselves out there and go after it; timing is crucial; it never comes when we’re looking for it; we just haven’t found the right person yet; if we don’t know what it is, we’ll never find it.

“Wait, what about love?” I asked my dad about his courtship of my mom.

“Oh, of course there was love,” he said, as if surprised by the question. “Love and romance and all that. I guess you’d say that clinched it.”

When she was a young girl, my mother was introduced to the boy who would become her first husband. As they grew up, they started to date. He was a marine, and they wrote letters to each other while he was away. When he came back, she’d graduated from high school, and he proposed. She got married at nineteen, at a time when most of her girlfriends were married and some of them were already having kids. My mom’s desire to wed had been practical, too, not only because it was what was expected, but also because her parents fought “like cats and dogs,” and she wanted to get out of the house. “It was 1964. I didn’t go to college,” she told me. “If there was money for anyone to go to college after high school, it would be for my brother. As a woman, you were meant to be a housewife. At times, I thought, it would have been great if I had a couple girlfriends to live with—like you did after college—and work. But girls typically got married, or they ended up spinsters, or they lived at home with their parents and took care of them.”

My mom’s first marriage lasted five years. They had not been able to have children, and when her husband brought up the topic of divorce, that had been part of his reason for why: “Well, we
don’t have kids.” Divorce had
not
been in her plan. Though it was becoming more common, it wasn’t “what people did.” My mom did want children, and she also wanted to understand why her husband no longer thought their marriage was worth having. “Things were not the greatest, but I didn’t think they were bad,” she explained to me. He refused to go to counseling, and the relationship continued to dissolve. “I got to the point where I told him, ‘If this is what you want, do it, but I’m not going anywhere,’” she said. She stayed in the house, and he left, taking the car. Soon afterward, he served her with divorce papers.

As a newly single woman, suddenly her whole life was different. She had a job and, with the help of an attorney, got the car back. She sold the house and rented an apartment, where she lived on her own—though her mother was worried enough about that to insist she put “M.” on the mailbox instead of “Ms.” A few weeks after her divorce was final, she met my dad. They started dating, but given what had happened with her first marriage, she wasn’t eager to jump right back into another. She took a trip to Hawaii with her sister, and they met men and partied and flirted and had what sounds like an utterly fabulous time. When she got back, my dad, who thought the vacation would help her get singlehood out of her system, kept doggedly returning to the topic of marriage. This was to her dismay. “I said, ‘I’m really not ready for this. We get along, why should we ruin things?’” she recalled.

Of course, she did eventually say yes. Flash forward to that pivotal scene at the top of the revolving restaurant in Chicago and his repeat query, “Why won’t you marry me?” When I asked her what had made her change her mind, she quipped, “Because he
bought me a diamond wedding band, and I couldn’t get out of it!” In truth it was more romantic and also more pragmatic than that. She might not have wanted to marry again immediately, but she had the keen sense that she shouldn’t give him up. “I thought he was the right one,” she said. “He seemed to be a steady person who had a lot of good values, and we spent some time talking about what we wanted out of life.” Considering her fertility history, she thought it was only fair to tell my dad that she might not be able to have kids. He was not concerned that she’d been married previously, and he wasn’t concerned about this, either. “Oh,
we’ll
have kids,” he assured her. Her agreement to marry him came approximately six months after their first meeting. The wedding followed shortly thereafter. Seven years later, so did I.

The marital takeaway could be seen as such: Just find a decent person with good values, someone with whom you get along, can communicate, and most of all, want essentially the same things out of life. (Prior to this discussion, of course, you must be able to express what those things are.) He asks and you say yes, even if at first you balk, or laugh, or request a diamond wedding band. Or maybe
you
ask, and he agrees. The years go by. You manage through the inevitable trials and enjoy the anticipated happinesses, and you emerge to find yourself still together, going on your forty-fifth wedding anniversary.

It sounds blissful, and maybe a little bit basic, but in reality it’s never quite so easy. That kind of perseverance, and the initial leaping-off point, too, can seem even more difficult when getting married is not the only path we might take, or “just what people do.” A lot of what we think we want, and are allowed to want, has
changed. The marriage question is so complex for many of us today precisely because of the increasingly open-minded world in which we have been lucky enough to be brought up. In many cases, we have as many options as our parents dreamed of giving us. But as what we want becomes less codified and the paths we might take divide and multiply, the risk of choosing wrong can grow scarier than the risk of not choosing at all—especially when we don’t
have
to choose.

The common-sense searching for a partner my father described doesn’t seem like quite enough. We can have so much more, or so much less. We all know of healthy, supportive marriages, and we know of bad ones, too. If we knew,
really
knew, how to make sure we’d have the former and not the latter, maybe the decision to marry would be easy.
But
how do you know you know? What if you think you know, and then you’re wrong?
It’s never easy.

My parents divided their roles in their marriage pretty traditionally. Though my mother worked when she met my dad and for several years after they married, when she had children she transitioned to being a full-time mom, staying at home and taking care of my brother and me. As long as I can remember, she went to the gym regularly, played racquetball, and volunteered for charity organizations, as well as maintaining a close group of friends and a most un-momlike sense of humor. I recall a day in what must have been a series of many that my brother and I were home from school, perhaps due to snow. Mom went to the garage, ostensibly to get something, but more important, to get a short respite from us. Brad followed her to the garage and knocked on the door. “Mom!” he yelled. “MomMomMommmmmmm!”

She opened the door. “I’m not your mother,” she said to her dumbfounded son. “I look like her. I talk like her. But I’m not her. She’ll be back in a little bit.” She shut the door and, I’d guess, laughed hysterically while Brad circled back to me, his eyes wide, to share the story.