I didn’t want soda. I wanted to see the dress, come up with an adjective, hit the road, and be good & gone by the time Melrose Place was on. But she seemed desperate, and I was thirsty, so I sat down at her kitchen table under the stitched sampler that read “Bless This Home,” with my notebook at my side.
Sandy took a gulp of her drink, burped gently against the back of her hand, closed her eyes, and shook her head. “Excuse me, please.”
“Are you nervous about the wedding?” I asked.
“Nervous,” she repeated, and laughed a little. “Honey, I’m terri-fied!”
“Is it…” I wanted to tread carefully here, “have you done the whole wedding thing before?”
Sandy shook her head. “Not like this. My first time I eloped. That was when I found out I was pregnant with Trevor. Justice of the peace over in Bald Eagle,” she said. “I wore my prom dress to that one.”
“Oh,” said I.
“Second time,” she continued, “there never was a wedding at all. That was Dylan’s daddy, who I guess you could call my common-law husband. We were together seven years.”
“Dylan, that’s me!” piped up a little voice from underneath the table. A small, sleek blond head peeked out. “My daddy’s in the army.”
“That’s right, honey,” said Sandy, absently tousling Dylan’s hair with one hand. She raised her eyebrows significantly toward me, shook her head, and whispered, “J-a-i-l.”
“Oh,” I said again.
“For stealing cars,” she whispered. “Not anything, you know, too bad. I actually met Bryan, my fiancé, when I went visiting Dylan’s dad,” she said.
“So Bryan’s…” I was just starting to learn how the long pause could sometimes be a reporter’s best friend.
“Going to be paroled tomorrow,” Sandy said. “He was in for fraud.”
Which, I guessed from the pride in her voice, was a step up even from grand theft auto.
“So you met him in prison?”
“We were actually corresponding for some time before then,” Sandy said. “He put an ad in the classified section… here, I saved it!” She hopped up, causing our soda glasses to rattle, and came up with a laminated piece of paper no bigger than a postage stamp. “Christian gentleman, tall, athletic build, Leo, seeks sensitive pen-pal for letters and maybe more,” it read.
“He got twelve responses,” Sandy said, beaming. “He said he liked my letter the best.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I was real honest,” she said. “I explained my situation. How I was a single mother. How I wanted a role model for my boys.”
“And you think…”
“He’ll be a good daddy,” she said. She sat down again, staring into her glass like it contained the mysteries of the ages instead of flat generic cola. “I believe in love,” she said, her voice strong and clear.
“Did your parents…” I began. She waved one hand in the air, as if to shoo away the very idea.
“My father left when I was four, I think,” she said. “Then it was just my mom and one boyfriend after another. Daddy Rick, Daddy Sam, Daddy Aaron. I swore it wasn’t gonna go that way for me. And it’s not,” she said. “I think… I know… that this time I got it right.”
“Mom?” Dylan was back, his lips dyed Kool-Aid red, holding his brother’s hand. Where Dylan was small and fine-boned and blond, this boy— Trevor, I guessed— was darker and sturdier, with a thoughtful look on his face.
Sandy stood up and shot me a tentative smile. “You wait right here,” she said. “Boys, you come with me. Let’s show the reporter lady momma’s pretty dress!”
After all of that— the prison, the husbands, the Christian classified ad— I was prepared for something dreadful, some off-the-rack horror show of a dress. The Bridal Barn specialized in those.
But Sandy’s dress was beautiful. Tightly fitted on top, a fairytale princess boned bodice spangled with snowflake-sized crystals that caught the light, a deeply scooped neckline that showed off the creamy skin of her chest, swelling into a wave of tulle that swished around her feet. Her cheeks were flushed, her blue eyes sparkled. She looked like Cinderella’s fairy godmother, like Glinda the good witch. Trevor held her hand solemnly as she made her way into the kitchen, humming “Here Comes the Bride.” Dylan had appropriated her veil and popped it on his own head.
Sandy stood under the kitchen light and twirled. The edge of her skirt whispered along the floor. Dylan laughed and clapped his hands, and Trevor stared up at his mother, how her bare arms and shoulders rose out of the dress, how her hair fell against her skin. She twirled and twirled and her sons stared at her as if they were under a spell, until finally she stopped. “What do you think?” she asked. Her cheeks were flushed, and she was breathing hard. I could see each breath make her bosom swell against the tight-fitted scalloped edges of the bodice. She turned once more, and I could see tiny cloth rosebuds stitched all down the back, tight as a baby’s pursed lips. “Is it blue? Green?”
I looked at her for a long moment, her pink cheeks and milky skin, and her sons’ delighted eyes.
“I’m actually not sure,” I said. “But I’ll figure something out.”
I missed the deadline, of course. The city editor was long gone by the time I made it back to the newsroom, after Sandy had shown me her pictures of Bryan, and told me all about their honeymoon plans, after I’d watched her read her sons Where the Wild Things Are, and kiss their foreheads and their cheeks, and add a finger’s worth of bourbon to her soda, and half as much to mine. “He’s a good man,” she’d said dreamily. Her lit cigarette moved through the room like a firefly.
I had three inches to fill, and I had to write to fit, write only enough to fill the allotted space beneath the blurry picture of Sandy’s smiling face. I sat at my computer, my head spinning a little, and keyed up my fill-in-the-blank marriage form, the one with spaces: bride’s name, groom’s name, attendants’ names, description of dress. Then I pressed the “escape” key, cleared the screen, took a deep breath, and wrote:
Tomorrow Sandra Louise Garry will marry Bryan Perreault in Our Lady of Mercy Church on Old College Road. She will walk down the aisle with antique rhinestone combs in her hair and will promise to love and to honor and cherish Bryan, whose letters she keeps folded beneath her pillow, each one read so many times it’s worn thin as a butterfly’s wing.
“I believe in love,” she says, even though a cynic might say there’s every indication that she shouldn’t. Her first husband left her, her second is in jail— the same jail where she met Bryan, whose parole begins two days before the wedding. In his letters, he calls her his little dove, his perfect angel. In her kitchen, the last of the three cigarettes she allows herself each night burning between her fingers, she says he is a prince.
Her sons, Dylan and Trevor, will attend the bride. Her dress is a color called seafoam, a color perfectly balanced between the palest blue and the palest green. It isn’t white, a color for a virgin, a teenager with her head full of sugar-spun romances, or ivory, which is white tinged with resignation. Her dress is the color of dreams.
Well. A little florid, a little overwritten and overwrought. A dress the color of dreams? The whole thing had “Recent Graduate of College Creative Writing Workshop” stamped on every syllable. The next morning I came to work and there was a copy of the page splayed over my keyboard, the offending passage circled in red copy-editor’s grease-paint pencil. “SEE ME,” said the two-word message scrawled in the margin, in the unmistakable hand of Chris, the executive editor, an easily distractible Southerner who’d been lured to Pennsylvania with the promise of moving on to a bigger, better paper in the chain (that, plus unparalleled trout fishing). I knocked timidly at his office door. He beckoned me inside. A second copy of my story was opened on his desk.
“This,” he said, pointing with one spindly finger. “What was this, exactly?”
I shrugged. “It was just… well, I met this woman. I was typing her announcement and there was a word I couldn’t read, so I called her, then I met her, and then…” My voice trailed off. “I guess I thought it sounded like a story.”
He looked up at me. “You were right,” he said. “Want to do it again?”
And a star was born… well, sort of. Every other week I’d find a bride and write a short column about her— who she was, her dress, the church and the music and the party afterward. But most of all, I wrote about how: how my brides decided to get married, to stand up in front of a minister or rabbi or justice of the peace and promise forever.
I saw young brides and old brides, blind and deaf brides, teenage brides pledging themselves to their first loves and cynical twentysome-things taking vows with the men they called their baby’s fathers. I attended first, second, third, fourth, and a single fifth wedding. I saw eight-hundred-guest extravangazas (an Orthodox wedding, where the men and women danced in separate ballrooms and there were a total of eight rabbis in attendance, all wearing Tina Turner–style glitter wigs by the end of the night). I saw a couple get married in adjoining hospital beds after a car accident that had left her a quadriplegic. I saw a bride left at the altar, watched her face crumple when the best man, his face pale and grave, made his way down the aisle and whispered, first into her mother’s ear, and then into hers.
It was ironic, I knew, even then. While my peers were writing hip, sarcastic first-person columns for nascent online magazines about being single in the nation’s big cities, I was toiling at a little local newspaper— a dinosaur, quivering on the tar pit of extinction in the evolutionary scale of the media— investigating marriage, of all things. How quaint! How charming!
But I couldn’t have written about myself the way my classmates did, even if I’d wanted to. The truth was, I didn’t have the brio to chronicle my own sex life. Nor did I have the kind of body I’d be comfortable exposing, even in print. And sex didn’t interest me the way marriage did. I wanted to understand how to be part of a couple, how to get brave enough to take someone’s hand and leap across the chasm. I would take each bride’s story, each halting narrative of how they met and where they went and when they knew, and turn them over and over in my mind, looking for the loose thread, the invisible seam, the crack I could pry open so I could turn the story inside out and figure out the truth.
If you read that little paper in the early 1990s, you could probably see me at the edges of a hundred different wedding pictures, in the blue linen dress that I wore— plain, so as not to call attention to myself, but dressy, in deference to the solemnity of the occasion. See me in the aisle seats, my notebook tucked into my pocket, staring at a hundred different brides— old, young, black, white, thin, not thin— looking for answers. How do you know when a guy is the right guy? How can you be sure enough to promise someone forever and mean it? How can you believe in love?
After two-and-a-half years of the wedding beat, my clips happened to cross the right editor’s desk at the precise moment that my home-town’s big daily paper, the Philadelphia Examiner, had, as an institution, decided that attracting Generation X readers was of utmost importance, and that a young reporter would, by her very existence, draw those readers in. So they invited me to move back to the city of my birth and be their eyes and ears on twentysomething Philadelphia.
Two weeks later, the Examiner decided as an institution that attracting Generation X readers mattered not a whit, and went back to desperately trying to shore up circulation among soccer moms in the suburbs. But the damage had been done. I’d been hired. Life was good. Well, mostly.
From the start, the single biggest drawback to my job was Gabby Gardiner. Gabby is a massive, ancient woman, with a cap of bluish-tinged white curls and smeary, thick glasses. If I’m big, she’s super-size. You’d think we would enjoy some solidarity because of our shared oppression, our common struggle to survive in a world that deems any woman above a size twelve grotesque and laughable. You would think wrong.
Gabby is the entertainment columnist for the Philadelphia Examiner and has filled that post, as she’s fond of reminding me and anyone else within earshot, “for longer than you’ve been alive.” This is both her strength and her weakness. She’s got a network of contacts that spans both coasts and two decades. Unfortunately, those decades were the 1960s and 1970s. She stopped paying attention somewhere between Reagan’s election and the advent of cable, so there’s a whole universe of stuff, from MTV on down, that simply doesn’t register on her radar the way, say, Elizabeth Taylor does.
Gabby’s age could be anywhere from sixty on up. She has no children, no husband, no discernible hint of sexuality or hint of any life at all outside of the office. Her lifeblood is Hollywood gossip, and her attitude toward her subjects is rarely anything less than reverential. She talks about the stars she covers, mostly thirdhand, in reprinted bits of regurgitated gossip from the New York City tabloids and Variety, as if they are her intimates, her friends. Which would be pathetic if Gabby Gardiner were the least little bit likable. And she’s not.
She is, however, lucky. Lucky that most of the Examiner’s readers are over forty and not interested in learning anything new, so her “Gabbing with Gabby” column remains one of the most popular parts of our section— another fact that she frequently remarks upon, at top volume (allegedly she shouts because she’s deaf, but I’m convinced that she does it because it’s more annoying than simply talking).
For my first few years at the Examiner we left each other alone. Unfortunately, things escalated last summer, when Gabby took a two-month leave to address some nasty-sounding medical problem (“polyps” was the only word I caught, before Gabby and her friends shot me laser-beam hate looks, and I scurried out of the mailroom without even having retrieved my copy of Teen People). In her absence, I got to write her daily column. She lost the war, but won the battle: They kept calling the damn thing “Gabbing with Gabby,” appending a short note in an embarrassingly small font about how Gabby was “on assignment” and that “Examiner staff writer Candace Shapiro is filling in.”
“Good luck, kid,” Gabby had said grandly, waddling over to my desk for her farewell, beaming as if she hadn’t spent the past two weeks lobbying for the editors to run wire copy instead of giving me a chance while she was off, presumably being de-polyped. “Now, I told all my best sources to call you.”