Save the Date: The Occasional Mortifications of a Serial Wedding Guest (6 page)

When her date finally does show up some entirely unacceptable amount of time later, my parents-to-be have found themselves in deep conversation. They have more in common than was expected. There’s chemistry. My dad has pulled out all the stops in the charm department, or the drinks are that good. My mom’s erstwhile date stumbles up behind her, taps her on the shoulder rudely, and gestures toward a room at the back of the bar, ignoring my father. This other man says—and I imagine this in gutturals or a series of grunts, so Neanderthal-like is the depiction my parents have given me of him—“I be in da back.” My mom nods politely; my dad looks at my mom; she stays put. He asks, “Do you need to go?” and she says, “I’m fine right where I am.” I do not know this for a fact, but I am certain they ordered another round.

This story has a certain mythology to it, more so than the wedding tale. It’s been repeated often in my family, as has the story of my dad’s sort-of proposal at the top of a revolving restaurant in Chicago. He’d been broaching the topic of marriage, but my mother, freshly divorced, was not eager to give up her new single life and rush right back into the chapel. As they enjoyed the view and their drinks, my dad decided to take a new tact: brute interrogation. “Why won’t you marry me?” he asked.

She brushed it off with a laugh, saying, “Oh, come on, not this again,” which made him angry.

“Why are you laughing?” he said.
“Why won’t you marry me? Why won’t you marry me?”
My dad is not someone who gets angry and yells very often, but the result this time ended up being his desired one, even if the engagement story was not.

She stopped laughing and offered her own counterproposal, not thinking he’d agree: “If you buy me a diamond wedding band, I’ll marry you.”

“Okay, let’s go shopping,” he said.

“Okay,” she responded. This to me is the mysterious power of an engagement. Getting someone to stop laughing at you and say okay, diamond wedding band or not.

•   •   •

S
usan and Carl’s ceremony was unexpectedly boring. In my pieced-together recollections, I was next to my brother in a church pew, with Bobo between us. We alternately stood up and sat down along with the other people in the room—some hundred of them, mostly grown-ups, but a few kids here and there—when it appeared that we were supposed to stand up and sit down. There was a lot of talking, but it was all up at the front of the church, and it was difficult to keep up. If we tried really hard we could pick out every couple of words, and we could follow along, sort of, as the minister gestured one way or another, as the rings were exchanged, as each party played his or her role. My mom kept hushing us, even though we weren’t talking, and craning her neck farther toward the front in an effort to hear. I wished I’d brought a book. Then and now, it’s annoying to be at a wedding when you can’t understand what’s happening.

There were, however, two good parts: first, when the wedding party began to stream down the aisle, the ladies smiling and wearing matching dresses and carrying flowers, clutching the arms of the men, who wore tuxes and more serious expressions.
They filed carefully into place at the front of the church to impressively swelling organ music, and then there was an expectant hush. Everyone stood, and out came the bride from behind the two big doors. She was wearing a big, white, poufy dress with a long white veil, the kind of dress that, unlike my mom’s in her wedding photo,
did
look like what I’d seen on TV and in movies and magazines. There was a communal intake of breath followed by a responsive utterance from the crowd:
The bride! Isn’t she beautiful!
It was as if someone sainted or magical had fallen into our midst, and so we stopped and stared, reacting almost involuntarily. We couldn’t tear ourselves away from the sight. Some women in the crowd dabbed at their eyes with Kleenex.

Susan took the arm of the older man standing next to her—her dad, my mom whispered—and they walked slowly, grandly down the aisle, which had moments before been strewn with white petals by a little girl I was jealous had gotten to play such an important role in this performance, essentially by making a mess. After the bride got to the front things became dull again, nobody really enunciating properly and lots of shuffling and rustling in the pews, until another key moment when it appeared we were nearing the end. The minister cleared his throat and everyone leaned in with renewed vigor to catch the last bit. “I now pronounce you man and wife,” he said, and nodded his head with a certain grave definitiveness. “You may kiss the bride.” This was the second good part of the wedding. Carl lifted Susan’s veil, and she looked at him intently, and he laid a smooch on her that had my brother and me nearly falling out of our pew in hysterical laughter.
“Shhhhhhh,”
my mom reprimanded, frowning at us.
My dad suppressed a smile. Buoyed by the renewed fun, my brother and I made increasingly grotesque kissy faces at each other, and at Bobo, until we’d exited the church.

It was when we walked into the hall where the reception was being held that I realized
this
was the meat and potatoes of the event. This was what we were here for. Round tables draped in white, flower arrangements centered in the middle of each, were stationed around a large, temporary dance floor made of collapsible parquet flooring. It was as I envisioned an Academy Awards dinner, famous people clustered about at tables, supping on chicken and lobster as they politely congratulated one another on their successes. In this case, though, there was no gold statuette, no clapping for a win other than the win of the bride in snagging her husband, or the husband in landing his bride. In the years to follow, this marriage would end, but that hardly mattered at the moment, and though it might have been predicted given the divorce rate I’d mentioned to my parents earlier, no one at my table appeared to have such thoughts on his or her mind. If they did, they didn’t speak them.

Certainly, my attention was on far more basic things. We ate. Like most wedding food, it was nothing to write home about, but it served its purpose. We frolicked around the room. We met other kids, journeying in packs, friending easily and discarding those friends as they were rounded up in stages to go home. Zook ran around blowing out candles placed on tables until my mother, who’d surreptitiously removed the film from the camera, passed it to us. We continued to do laps around the room, around the dance floor, snapping pictures of everyone we could find, plus
some with Bobo for good measure. We got our fifteen minutes of fame, being videotaped by a man with a camcorder who asked us to “Say a few words” for the bride and groom. Zook, budding comedian, looked back at the camera and without a hitch said, “A few words,” not even cracking a smile. I danced, with my dad, with my mom, with my brother, with my grandmother, who was there with her boyfriend, Henry, and even with strangers, a whirling, swirling vision in my tiered-ruffle dress. Shyly, I danced with the tall, handsome groom.

I also watched the adults, seemingly at ease in this habitat, the women in fancy dresses, the men in suits and ties. They sipped from glasses and shook hands with one another and kissed one another on the cheeks, and sometimes a man would clap the groom on the back and offer congratulations, or a woman would hold the bride in an embrace and whisper in her ear. On the dance floor, the adults paired off in twos and clutched each other, moving slowly, back and forth, forth and back, to the sway-worthy stylings of the wedding band. At tables they’d sit and clang silverware against their wineglasses, then pick up the wineglasses to drain them and instantly receive refills from the waiters always hovering nearby. We dashed our forks against our own glasses, which held juice, not wine, and watched the bride and groom kiss. Mad with power, we did it again and again, until my mother took the forks away from us and set them out of reach.

Somewhere in the midst of all of this, I paused and had my photo taken next to the couple’s three-tiered, ornately frosted white wedding cake, both of us positioned in front of a brick wall. The cake does resemble my dress. Its tiers reach up in the
distance, over my head, defying gravity. The very top of it is cut off in the image, but it appears to be decorated with branches or foliage of some sort. I have that half smile again. I’m sleepy, on the down side of a sugar rush, and altogether self-satisfied. I am
owning
this wedding. My looks may read eight-year-old girl with a party dress and a mullet, but there’s something deep in my lightly dazed expression that says, “Hell, yeah.” It’s a wedding.

It got late, and we grew tired, nodding off to sleep in our chairs. We were gathered by my parents and my grandmother and returned to the little motel where we were staying for the night, the boys—Dad, Zook, and Henry—in one room; my mom, grandma, and me in the other, right next door. We all clustered into one room at first, though, to rehash the gossip of the wedding and to talk about plans for the next day. That’s when Henry announced that he wanted to marry our grandma, and Zook and I, suddenly awake again, began to jump up and down on the bed, shouting, “Hooray! Another wedding!” Weddings were
fun
.

Henry and my grandma would never actually marry, and the next wedding I would attend as a bona fide guest wouldn’t be until I was in my twenties. My grandmother, though she was proposed to several times throughout her life and engaged more than once, would only be a wife to one man, my dad’s dad, my grandfather, who died before I was born. Following his death, a man with the wonderful, austere name of Hamilton Booth had proposed to her, and she’d accepted, but he’d died of a heart attack before they could marry. She took the engagement ring he’d given her and used its diamond, along with diamonds from other rings she owned, to create a new “cocktail ring,” as my mom
called it. At one point, I thought it might be my own engagement ring. It has been mistaken for such, even though I wear it on the fourth finger of my right hand. Usually it’s my only jewelry.

As for Henry, he may have been swept away in his own wedding euphoria, but I’m sure he did love and want to marry my grandmother. It was, after all, simply what was done among a certain generation. If there was love, or something that looked like it, why wouldn’t there be a wedding? But there were younger generations to contend with. That night, after my brother and I had stopped jumping on the bed and been tucked in and fallen asleep, my grandmother told my mother that she didn’t know why he’d brought that up again. He’d asked her before, and the reason they couldn’t marry was because Henry’s son’s wife was in a stew about who would inherit what if the two were to wed. It was too much to contend with, and though everyone else in the family loved my grandmother, she refused to be brought into that drama in order to become a Mrs. again. That wasn’t something she needed. Though it was never made legal, their relationship continued until Henry died, a handful of years later. My grandmother outlived him and died, well loved but single, at the age of ninety.

While my mother and grandmother spoke, I was adrift on thoughts of weddings, that big party all of us would eventually get to have, dancing forever in ruffles, the power of a fork to a glass to make grown-ups kiss, adults who hugged you and told you they couldn’t believe how big you’d gotten, cake and more cake, and getting lifted into the air by the most famous man at the party, the one in the tuxedo, on the dance floor. I couldn’t wait for the next one. Someday, I’d meet a boy, too.

Homecoming

I
t was November in Alabama, and while it was not yet cold, not
Northern
cold, it was solidly sweater weather, a fall crispness and hint of oncoming winter in the air. The leaves remaining on the trees surrounding the Burning Tree Country Club, where the wedding reception would be held, were, I presumed, the colors the club had been named for. Orange and gold and crimson and yellow and burnt sienna, they were as reminiscent of college football and high school homecomings as they were of nature. They dripped onto driveways and draped across the crusty yellow-brown winter yards of nearby houses in a languid fashion that belied the inherent drama of seasonal change. A fall wedding holds a different sort of beauty than the June standard.

Leaves were all over the yard at Marjorie’s house as well, where we were staying for the wedding of our high school friend Claire. This was the reason we had traveled from our respective towns back to the place where Marjorie and I had grown up, and the reason Brian, Marjorie’s boyfriend, was there, too, making
me something of a third wheel. Earlier that day her mother had taken a photo of the three of us—daughter, daughter’s boyfriend, daughter’s best friend—with the glorious fall color behind us. In that picture, I’m wearing a long-sleeved gray T-shirt with an orange star in the middle, very nearly the costume of a Dr. Seuss character, and smiling with the sun in my eyes. I was twenty-five, and it was the first time I’d been back in years.

The night before the wedding, Marjorie’s parents had long since gone to bed, but she and Brian and I remained in the kitchen, drinking and talking. I reached into the ice maker, the one I knew so well from high school—it still looked and worked exactly the same, I marveled, as if we’d never left—cupped a few fresh cubes, and replenished what had melted into my Jack and Diet Coke.

“I wonder if Nathaniel’s in town,” I said. Nathaniel had been my high school boyfriend. Before I’d left for college, I’d broken up with him, and he’d eventually moved farther south to a slightly bigger city. I had no idea where he was now, if he was single, if he lived here. If he would be at the wedding.

“Probably,” said Marjorie. “No one ever leaves.”

“You guys left,” pointed out Brian, taking a swig of bourbon.

“Well, my parents moved,” I said. “And it’s not like I’m really from here. I was bound to leave.” Marjorie shook her head. It bugged her when I acted as if I were free from what it meant to have lived here for the formative years of my life. I backtracked. “I mean, in fairness, we’ve been talking about getting out of here since ninth grade.”

“And we did,” said Marjorie. “But that doesn’t mean it’s not a part of us.”

I changed the subject. “Last I heard, Nathaniel was in Birmingham. He’s probably married. Maybe he’s got kids.” I found myself hoping that was not the case. “Can you imagine getting married here?”

“Don’t let my parents hear you,” said Marjorie. “Once that idea gets into their heads, it’s over.” She checked the clock and smoothly poured the watery remains of her drink into the sink. “We should probably go to bed. It’s late, and tomorrow’s going to be later.”

•   •   •

M
y family moved around a lot: Texas, South Carolina, Illinois, South Carolina again, another place in South Carolina, another stint in Illinois. When I was in fifth grade, we moved to a midsize town in northern Alabama named Decatur. We’d stayed there for eight years, until I graduated from high school—the longest amount of time I’d lived in one place in my life up to that point—and then, as I headed to college in the Northeast, my parents would move yet again. With all that moving around it was hard to pinpoint what place I belonged to, exactly, and what I could claim in return, so I learned to choose intriguing vagueness rather than specificity. If you gave the place a name, you had to deal with the repercussions. Nowhere felt right enough to want as my own, not only for what it was but also for what it reflected of me, forever. I didn’t have an accent. My parents were Yankees. I could be from anywhere.

So “we moved around a lot” was what I would say when the inevitable question was asked. “Military brat?” would often be
the follow-up, and I’d shake my head and give a second routinized response: “My dad’s an engineer . . . not the kind that drives trains,” which for a number of years seemed a vital clarification. If the person asking actually cared, I might explain further, listing the various cities and the whens and hows and whys. Usually, though, “we moved around a lot” was enough to satisfy the fleeting interest of strangers who were just asking to be polite, the geographically based version of the “How are you?”/“Fine” exchange that could be broadly deciphered as, “We are both acknowledging that we are living humans on this earth; okay, carry on, thanks.”

Anyway, it was true, we moved around a lot. By the time I was six, my mom bragged to her friends, I’d lived in six different houses. And when I left for the first day of kindergarten in my new town in a suburb of Chicago, Illinois, I walked through the door not of a house but of our Winnebago motor home, which was parked in the driveway of the mustard-yellow two-story abode my parents had purchased but not yet had time to move us into. Something in this peripatetic existence appealed to my mom and dad, who’d, respectively, grown up in the same neighborhoods of Chicago and northern Michigan their entire lives. We were hardly roving vagabonds or wandering hippies, though. Dad was a chemical engineer who stayed with the same company for his entire career, responsibly putting in for promotions that might allow our family to venture to new soil. I think they liked the idea that however bourgeois we might be, we were attached to no place for so long we’d become stuck. We had packed up and left home before and could always leave again. Home was
where you made it; the home you could take with you wherever you went was your family.

As a kid, however, I didn’t want to make a place home. I wanted it to
be
home, an entity I could rely on and even start to take for granted. Instead, the excitement of every new house was tempered with the knowledge that we could move again in a matter of months, through no decision of my own. Perhaps it was because of this that I was shy around strangers, preferring to make my brother—a handy, built-in companion who didn’t mind being instructed and would talk to anyone—order our root beers at the mini-mart or ask the bowling alley attendant for change to play an arcade game.

My parents persisted in urging me to speak up and not be afraid to say what I wanted, and by the time I reached fifth grade in that same Illinois suburb where I’d gone to kindergarten, an epic stay for us, I was starting to come into my own. I had just won a fierce electoral battle for treasurer of my class against a male opponent who’d run his campaign on the assertion that girls should not be in charge of money. That I’d beaten him soundly was progress for women, but progress, especially, for me. And then it happened: Shortly after we celebrated that win, my dad came home and told us we’d be moving to a new town in an entirely new state. It’s rare that a bookish fifth-grade girl with glasses wants an adventure that doesn’t come in the pages of one of her beloved books, but that’s what it would be, I was told. An adventure. Second-grade Brad relished the idea, but I was not so thrilled. It hardly mattered what I thought. It was not my choice.

We packed up and moved to another two-story house, this
one gray with giant decorative columns and a large, willowy tree in the front, an attached three-car garage to the side, a deck in the back, and a big backyard with grass and trees and even an enclosed hot tub. It was located in a neighborhood within walking distance from my new school. By all appearances, it was a very nice place.

The disasters began nearly immediately.

The first problem was my new teacher. I’d never had a teacher who didn’t like me and whom I didn’t adore in return. After all, I played school for fun and kept lists of must-read biographies and wrote letters to the president in my spare time (to my great disappointment, he never answered). My fifth-grade teacher in Illinois had been young, with curly, golden hair and an infectious laugh. But in Alabama, Mrs. Pilcher had clawlike hands tipped by pointy coral nails, and a Southern accent so deep I had trouble understanding her. A pouf of colorless hair sat on top of her head, and her powdered, papery skin sagged around her eyes and chin and elbows. She frowned a lot, which made everything seem to sag further. I was not her dream at all; instead, I seemed a special affront to her sensibilities: an interloper in an already full class and, worse, a misfit who hailed from a place she didn’t much like. Before we moved I had never heard of the War of the Northern Aggression, but I learned quickly that the Civil War was called something different in this state where battle reenactments were held on weekends, and where, in those reenactments, the South won.

I muddled along. Then came the Ma’am Incident. Mrs. Pilcher was standing at the front of the room, a piece of chalk in her
crooked fingers, scrawling on the board. She asked a question. I raised my hand and answered. I do not know what that question was, nor what I responded, but I know what happened next.

“What did you say?” she asked.

I repeated my answer.

“What did you say?” she said again.

I turned red. Could she be hard of hearing, like my grandma? Was she confused? “Uh,” I stammered, and slowly repeated my answer again, louder. Her frown cut deeper into her face. I squirmed in my desk. The class laughed, uncomfortably.

“Jennifer,” she said, waving her hand with the chalk still in it, her fingers gnarled like those of witches. “In my classroom when you address the teacher, you say ‘ma’am.’ Yes, ma’am. No, ma’am. This is the answer, ma’am. Do you understand?”

The class stared at me. Some of them were still laughing; others looked plainly horrified. “Yes,” I said. It came out in a whisper, and she jabbed her chalk at me, accusingly.
“Ma’am.”

I hadn’t even known
ma’am
was a word, much less something I needed to say in school, and when I went home, I explained what had happened and cried. My mom called the teacher to tell her I was not intentionally rude; we were simply from another part of the country. I don’t know that that helped.

The next humiliation came at the hands of my own classmates. People were pantsing one another on the playground; it was a phase, and I was desperately afraid it would happen to me. I thought about it when I put on my clothes in the morning. If the underwear I picked for the day was going to be seen by twenty kids, it better not have something embarrassing on it, like car
toon characters or hearts and stars. Better stick with solids, preferably in dark colors, and definitely, definitely make sure there were no holes or raggedy spots. The pantsings were generally done by the popular girls, who probably picked the game up from the popular boys, who may have done it to one another congenially for a day before moving on to playing dodgeball. With the girls it was less game and more psychological torture, a form of bullying that escaped being called that because,
ha ha, wasn’t it hilarious?
No one got hurt; it was kids being kids! When the teacher sent us out for recess in the afternoon, the most awful part of the day (
she
got to stay inside), I clutched my hideously uncool pants, which had been fine, even hip, in Illinois—stone-washed jeans or Z. Cavariccis—tightly to my waist, wary of other girls, dressed in matching brightly colored outfits with brand names like Benetton and Esprit, getting too close. When it did happen, I was prepared. Oversized Coke-bottle lenses can come in handy. I saw my attackers reflected before they pounced and held tight enough that my high-waisted bottoms did not give. The other me, the Illinois me who had never struggled to keep her pants up on a playground, felt a long way away.

The adjustment to the South wasn’t so hard for the other members of my family. My dad, who’d received a raise and promotion in his move to this new town, had a whole set of coworkers who had to treat him well since he was the boss. As for Brad, from the moment we arrived he had a host of new friends, including some who lived just doors away. His afternoons were spent running through the streets, playing in the creek, and terrorizing the nearby cul-de-sac in the way of prepubescent boys,
more mischief than malevolence. There was a bunch of second-grade girls who wanted to marry him, he’d complain. My mom was more like me, ill at ease in this strange land of buffets and sweet tea and neighbors who said “Bless her heart” when they really meant “What an ass,” though she at least had the safety net of being the boss’s wife. No one would dare pull down her pants on a playground or make her say
ma’am
; she’d get all sugar and Southern hospitality, at least to her face. Meanwhile, behind her back, her use of multicolored Christmas lights instead of the neighborhood-approved white-only ones caused a stir for several seasons among certain ladies of the town. Those who were too young to know better were more upfront with their opinions. Mom volunteered for a field trip with Brad’s second-grade class, and one of the boys, hearing her thick Chicago accent, asked my brother what planet she was from. We might as well have been from Mars.

In a departure from historical precedent, we stayed put, and as always, I adjusted. By the end of elementary school, my report card would read “excellent” for my courteousness and respect for authority. The years kept passing, and it became home, if not the home I might have chosen. Along with when to say
ma’am
, I learned what to wear, how to say
y’all
, and who to be friends with. I met Marjorie in seventh grade. By eighth grade we were hanging out in the elementary school playground where I’d nearly gotten pantsed, experimenting with smoking cigarettes. By ninth we’d graduated to wine coolers and loitering in the parking lot of that school at night, in the cars of boys who could drive. Her family lived in a rambling, multi-winged brick-red house with neat
white shutters and matching trim, perched on the top of a hill near the edge of town. Its kitchen was warm and well lit and usually smelled of fresh-baked, delicious food homemade by her mom, who for a while had run a catering business. Marjorie and I shared crushes on senior boys whose girlfriends were the girls we dreamed of growing up to be. We joined the same clubs, running for different offices. We sat next to each other in our classes and passed notes in plain view of our teachers, our allegiance to each other, not them. We rushed for the same high school sorority—an association of girls intended to prep us for the real thing in college—and when those parties and formals started happening, we would ask boys who were inseparable twosomes like us to go as our dates.