Save the Date: The Occasional Mortifications of a Serial Wedding Guest (10 page)

There was a wonderful nurse at this hospital who would sit with my dad and tell him it was going to be okay, that she knew my mom was a fighter, and that she would wake up and be herself again, she knew it. “Your dad is trying so hard to be strong for everyone,” she said to me once, when it was just the two of us in the room. “It’s good you kids are here. You can help him get through this. You’ll get through this together.”

Finally, the call came. My dad emerged from his office at the house grinning. “Mom is awake!” he announced. “She’s talking! She’s out of it, but she’s awake!” We started to breathe, then. Our world had not collapsed in on itself permanently, though our fingers would remain tightly crossed in the weeks that followed. When we arrived at her room, we were privy to a disturbing sight: My mom was indeed awake, her paper gown in disarray, the hair they’d left her after shaving her head for surgery stringy around her neck. She was awake, and she was shouting at a hospital employee who was proffering a tub of fruit-on-the-bottom Dannon yogurt. She only liked Greek yogurt. “I’m not going to eat that!” she was saying. “It tastes like crap! Take it away.
Blech!
”

“Um, the medicine will make her a little . . . loopy for a while,” a nurse cautioned.

“We’ll bring you some good stuff from home,” Brad assured Mom. “The kind you like.”

“You better!” she warned. “Who are you!?”

“It’s Brad,” he said.

“Oh. Oh, hi, Brad.”

“Mom’s back!” he said, and we all stood around her, smiling so hard our faces hurt. It was the best thing we’d seen in days.

Later, my dad told me that what had gotten him through the surgery and recovery was “grim determination.” He had no other choice, he just had to do it.

And so had she when, years earlier, he’d had heart surgery to combat what turned out to be significant blockages. After his operation, the doctor came out and motioned to my mother. “I want you to come with me,” he told her.

“I thought, that’s not good,” she remembered. “We went into this room with all these monitors, and he showed me what he’d done, and said, ‘He has to come back again. I couldn’t do it all in one procedure.’ I was leaving the hospital, and that’s when it hit me.
Shit, I’m not ready to be a widow.
” They got through that, too, with grim determination and some dark comedy. In sick sense of humor and in health.

On the phone recently with my mom—who, as predicted, recovered with flying colors from her brain surgery, astounding the doctors, impressing friends and family—I asked, “Do you have a favorite memory from your marriage?” She had one at the ready, though it wasn’t what I expected.

“It was my ten-year high school reunion,” she told me. “All these people were there who knew I had been married and divorced, and that I had this new husband. I say to your dad, ‘I want you to really be nice, not that you wouldn’t, but please watch what you say.’ We get there and are having a drink, and he starts to say something, I can’t even remember what, some joke. I turn to him and say, ‘You told me you’d behave,’ and he goes, ‘What
are you telling me? I haven’t said
fuck
once.’ The whole table cracked up, and we all had a great time . . . until my girlfriend threw up all over the table.”

I laughed, and she got quiet for a minute. “There’s another one, too.”

“What?”

“I was thinking about the time we went to Rome. It was our anniversary, and I had always wanted to go to Italy,” she said. “One night we went out for dinner at one of those places where people come around and sing at the table. I’m a little bit uncomfortable with that, but it was pretty. They asked, what did we want to hear? And your dad tells them ‘Al Di La.’”

“From
Rome Adventure
! Your favorite.”

“They start singing, and I just start crying, and these guys are all looking at each other, thinking,
Do we sing so badly that she’s crying?
Your dad waves them off, and I say, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t know what happened. Did I embarrass you?’ and your dad, I could have strangled him, says, ‘After all these years, it’s nice to know you have a heart.’

“I hate to say it, because everyone says it,” she added, “but you’ve got to have a sense of humor. If you were married to someone with no sense of humor, Jesus.” There’s a muffled yelling in the background. “Oh, hang on for a minute, you’re so impatient,” I hear her say, and then my dad’s voice: “I put up with a lot!” to which my mom retorts, “You just wait for the next ten years!”

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“I better go,” she said. “It’s cocktail hour, and your dad’s made me a martini, and he thinks I should be drinking it.”

Greetings from Love Camp, Wish You Were Here

T
he flight was bumpy, and I was nervous. All those years of air travel to the increasingly far-flung parts of the world where my parents had moved for my dad’s job—London, Singapore, Indonesia—had resulted in an unexpected effect. As the hours I spent on planes accrued into triple digits, my level of nervousness on each flight ratcheted up as well. This wasn’t rational, but that didn’t change the facts: Any bump or lift or sway of the plane beyond the regular course, any hint of turbulence or shift in the way things felt or sounded, and I’d be clutching the armrests and gritting my teeth, engaging in some clandestine praying (regardless of how I felt about religion when my feet were planted on the ground), and generally promising to be a better person no matter what, just keep this plane in the air, please, please, please.

This particular flight was to a wedding in the Dominican
Republic, two hours and change from Miami, kid stuff. I had this. Or so I thought. Then came another bump, followed by a sharp jerk to the right. I clutched my armrest tighter, accidentally also grasping the hand of my seatmate, a blond girl who’d grown up with Caitlin, the bride, in Florida. Her name was Leigh. I’d met her at the bachelorette party, and even before that, when a bunch of us had stayed with Caitlin at her parent’s house in Boca Raton for a couple of days before heading down to Key West for spring break sophomore year. Elsewhere on the plane, which was filled with wedding guests per the bride and groom’s instructions, people stood up, out of their seats, in the aisles, chatting as if they had nary a care in the world. They were making me even more nervous. We were in a metal capsule hurtling through the air some thirty thousand feet above ground.
Oh, God, I don’t want to look.

“Pretend it’s a bumpy road,” said Leigh, who had inconspicuously moved her hand away from my sweaty grasp.

“Huh?”

“Someone told me that once. Turbulence on a plane is basically just like being in a car on a bumpy road,” she said.

“Is it really?” I asked.

She shrugged. “I don’t know. But it’s made me feel better about flying ever since. Just imagine you’re driving on a gravel road. It’s no big deal; you’ve done
that
tons of times.”

The plane jolted in the air again, and I loosened my fingers around the armrest slightly, but I kept my seat belt buckled low and tight across the waist, the way we’d been instructed by
the flight attendant, for the remainder of the flight. No need to tempt fate.

•   •   •

A
destination wedding! We’re having a destination wedding, and we want you to be there!” It was a pronouncement as close to a gift that a post-grad with an entry-level salary and underdeveloped budgeting skills can receive. This would be a built-in vacation I’d
have
to take, to a destination I wouldn’t otherwise think to visit or even be able to afford. As for affording, that was a stretch, but as luck would have it, Caitlin’s dad would be discreetly subsidizing our stay in an elegant beachside resort known for its golf course and fine amenities. Sure, I had to buy a plane ticket, a dress, and another dress, and there would be eating and drinking and the price tags attached, but I justified those in my mind easily. You had to eat wherever you were, and wasn’t the rest what credit cards were for? (Wedding Tip: Not exactly.) Anyway, this wasn’t just any wedding. It was a
destination
.

At this point in my midtwenties, I was enamored with the concept. Why
wouldn’t
you sequester all of your closest friends and your family members away to a place free from the stresses and obligations and distractions of day-to-day life, to a location where everyone could focus on the bride and groom and their love and promising future for days on end? A destination wedding seemed the best way, the only way, to do this marriage thing. I’d seen the movies. There would surely be some cute boys, whether they were wedding guests or not.

•   •   •

C
aitlin and I had been next-door neighbors in our assigned dorm freshman year. I liked her immediately. She was tall and blond and from Florida—not the so-called Redneck Riviera where I’d vacationed in high school, but high-end, sophisticated Florida. Boca. She had a worldly air that I admired. She
knew
things, about dating and guys and how the world worked, about fashion and drinking and social situations. She’d come to college with at least one suitable fake ID, and well-placed connections for backups. I, on the other hand, had to doctor my actual driver’s license with a pen. The bouncer at the off-campus bar known for its liberal carding policy took one look at my questionable artistry, said, “You can do better than this,” and let me in anyway. “We’ve got to get you a
real
fake,” Caitlin whispered to me once we were safely inside, and within several weeks we had.

Everyone loved her, and I felt lucky she loved me back.

When we graduated, she was offered a grown-up professional job with a grown-up professional sort of company, the kind at which a person wore smart suits and shiny, pointy, business-lady shoes. She moved to Boston and started her life there. I moved to New York. While Boston was close enough for visits, I mourned the separation and wished she’d change her mind and join the rest of us new Manhattanites. Oh, the adventures we would have! But it was not to be, because it was in Boston that Caitlin met Cash, the man who would become her husband.

They’d gone on a date to a Rolling Stones concert. Cash, who was several years older, was a die-hard fan. He was from New
Hampshire, and in the times I’d hung out with him, he appeared to want to get every last drop of enjoyment from life that he could. Despite his small-town roots, he was not staid or boring or conventional, and what Caitlin offered in sophistication and social graces, he put forth in optimistic energy, entrepreneurialism, and a boisterous sense of humor. The two of them wanted to travel, to see things, to have adventures, and to live a good and most of all interesting life. It made sense that this effort would be better with a teammate. The engagement seemed fast; she was just twenty-five. But both sets of their parents had married young, too. When it was right it was right, was what they said. No reason to hold off on starting your life with that person, once you found him.

I still had not even an inkling of the sort of person I’d want to marry, nor of the sort of person who’d want to marry me, much less how to find him. Moreover, I had no concept of what
being
married might feel like and when I might be ready to do it. I was just learning to pay bills on time and that my credit card limit was not “extra savings” in the bank. My relationships, insomuch as they could be called that, usually involved men who liked me but for whom I felt nothing, or at least not enough—or the opposite, me the awkward girl with a crush on someone who wasn’t interested beyond a couple of dates or casual makeout sessions. I didn’t feel jealous of Caitlin; I was more proud, and a little bit in awe. She had always been a step ahead of the rest of us, a girl who liked to get things done. She had direction, and for her, this marriage was an obvious next step in an adult life.

In that way the marriage was traditional, but that didn’t mean
there was anything wrong with it. In fact, this was one of those weddings at which no one had doubts, at least not doubts that I heard or saw expressed in any way. No one was afraid the couple wouldn’t make it, that they were faking it, or that they were doing it for the wrong reasons. It may have been one of the most emotionally pure weddings I’ve ever been to, possibly due to the relative youth of the bride and groom. The thing about marrying older is that the so-called baggage can’t help starting to pile on, our relationship experiences accruing like so many beads on a vintage bridal gown. This is not to say that people should get married early in life to avoid complications—we are all ready, if we’re ready, at different times, and many factors go into that readiness—but simply that this particular union seemed remarkably complication-free for very organic reasons. No one would have protested, save a few guys from college who were still carrying torches for Caitlin, and they hadn’t been invited. Everyone, from the parents of the bride and groom on down, just seemed so darn happy. It was infectious.

Cash had a close-knit crew of guy friends he’d grown up with in New Hampshire. They had funny nicknames, like Pickles and Rowdy, Scarface and Cobra. Caitlin had her own group, Leigh and other girls with whom she’d attended her private Florida high school. (They had very normal, decent, ladylike names.) These were the women she was closest to, along with her freshman year roommate, Emily, and me, the three of us having gone on from our initial meeting to live together until we graduated. We’d all come to celebrate their union, as had her dad’s golf
buddies, old family friends, and extended family. It was a small number of people, fewer than fifty in all. Many were friends to begin with, and any who didn’t know one another already would by the end of the trip.

Destination weddings are like camp, love camp, in that way. Guests are brought together for a reason that ties everyone there. In this safe place you find yourself more open to new friendships than you ever are in regular life, and you make them quickly, in whatever time frame has been allotted. Bound by all this happiness and goodwill, particularly when it stretches over several days and nights, you can’t help wanting to snatch some of it for yourself. A mini-society built on love and togetherness is born, with collaborative activities and even shared morals and a certain kind of politics and government. You promise foreverness when you leave. You cry, you hug, you exchange contact information. And then, oddly, because the promises were sincere, only sometimes do you ever actually talk to any of these new friends again. Out of sight, out of mind, and anyway, outside of a wedding atmosphere, can you really reclaim the joy brought by an impromptu limbo tournament in the discoteca, the mother of the bride lifting her skirt to compete, or the sheer euphoria of driving around in a golf cart stolen from the resort, a wild and reckless rampage as hotel security closes in?

As with Las Vegas’s famous refrain, sometimes those pristine wedding memories are better left where they’ve been formed, untouched and unchanged. Leave them alone and leave them precious, like the moment captured in the keepsake photo right
before everyone jumped in the pool and ruined their silk dresses and tuxedos with all that chlorine. What you felt then, in that second, was real. What happens at love camp stays at love camp.

•   •   •

T
he plane landed safely. Everyone clapped.

•   •   •

T
he bride and groom had arranged a bus to the resort, and we departed from the airport in a big, convivial cluster, talking faster and louder as we passed scenic spots and photograph-ready vistas. Emily and I had been separated on the flight, but we reunited on the bus and began to make plans for our impending arrival at the resort: room, pool, room, bar, room, dinner. We were here. We were here! When we disembarked, members of the hotel staff placed tropical cocktails festooned with colorful straws and tiny drink umbrellas in our hands and greeted us warmly. “Welcome to your vacation home,” they said, shaking our hands and smiling. “Much happiness for the wedding!” The sun was a glowing, unblemished orb. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky.

Emily and I were sharing a room, to which we were delivered via golf carts. It was better appointed than anywhere I’d resided in my adult life. After testing the mattresses of each of the two giant beds and gazing at all the luxury we’d been bestowed, we hung up our dresses and opened the bamboo shades to allow a view of the patio outside our room and the pink and red and yellow flowers beyond. We were in a kind of heaven, one that we
weren’t sure how we’d gotten so lucky as to arrive at. Just by being friends with our friend? It seemed such an easy thing, and the rewards were so great.

Later, I wrote in my diary: “The wedding was amazing, more amazing, almost like a soap opera, but a positive one where everyone gets along and loves each other, with no evil person or babies born out of wedlock. It is a beautiful piece of unreality.” That’s the thing about a destination wedding, though any wedding has this aspect to some extent. They are unrealities, even if what they are meant to showcase and support is something that’s very real. No one can live his or her life like it’s a destination wedding, though while we are there, it’s everyone’s prerogative to try. Of course, it’s not like you even have to try when it’s eighty degrees and sunny and there’s a swim-up pool bar within walking distance. It just happens.

That’s where we went first. We put on our swimsuits and lathered up with the appropriate numbers of SPF and headed to the pool. Already an array of pasty wedding guests in freshly purchased bikinis and swim trunks surrounded the horizontal sliver of blue water. That’s another thing about destination weddings. The group of guests can often by sheer numbers pretty much take over whatever location they’ve been bequeathed, and usually they do. We did. We swam, we talked, we drank, we hung out en masse. We commandeered the golf carts the resort employees used for delivering room service, clean towels, and delicately scented hibiscus soaps, and we drove them around late at night, drunk from gaiety as much as from booze.

The days blurred marvelously with unchanging weather as
we repeated the same basic non-duties over the course of our stay. Wake to the sun, breakfast on the restaurant deck overlooking the lush golf course. The grueling choice between fruit and pancakes or sausage and eggs. (Wedding Tip: Have it all!) The pool, or sometimes the beach, a snack or lunch, time to read or take a nap in the sun. Later, dinner and drinks and hanging out, at the discoteca or elsewhere. If we were lucky, Caitlin and Cash would join us for drinks or to eat or to lounge at the pool and would be treated like celebrities by their worshipful fans. But the bulk of our time was spent with other guests, because the couple was kept busy with family and the final arrangements for the ceremony, which would happen on the beach the day before we would all depart the resort. We’d heard the bride and groom would be delivered to their sandy, ocean-adjacent nuptial spot via horse and carriage like a princess and her prince, their kingdom awaiting, its citizens watching with bated breath. With the wedding our stay would come to an end. It was all happening too fast. We wanted the fairy tale to go on forever.