Authors: Jodi Picoult
Just as I am beginning to really rock out, Lucy snorts. “That is the lamest crap I’ve ever heard,” she murmurs.
“Maybe you want to take a stab at it,” I suggest, and I put the guitar down and reach for a pad and a pen instead. I write out the lyrics mad lib style, leaving gaps and spaces where Lucy can instead substitute her own thoughts and feelings.
Sometimes you make me feel like._____
Don’t you know that I_____?
I do a fill-in-the-blank pattern like this for the entire song, and then set it on the table between us. For a few minutes Lucy just ignores it, focusing instead on a tangled strand of her hair. And then, slowly, her hand reaches out and pulls the paper closer.
I try not to get too excited about the fact that she’s taken an active step toward participation. Instead, I pick up my guitar and pretend to tune it, even though I did this before Lucy arrived today.
When she writes, she hunches over the paper, as if she’s protecting a secret. She’s a lefty; I wonder why I haven’t noticed that before. Her hair falls over her face like a curtain. Each of her fingernails is painted a different color.
At one point, her sleeve inches up and I see the scars on her wrist.
Finally, she shoves the paper in my direction. “Great,” I say brightly. “Let’s take a look!”
In every blank, Lucy has written a string of expletives. She waits for me to look at her, and she raises her eyebrows and smirks.
“Well.” I pick up my guitar. “All right, then.” I put the paper on the table where I can see it, and I begin to sing, certain that if anyone would understand anger and anguish it would be Janis Joplin, and that she won’t be rolling over in her grave.
“Sometimes you make me feel like a motherfucking asshole,”
I sing, as loud as I can.
“Don’t you know that I . . . cocksucker
—” I break off, pointing to the page. “I can’t quite read that . . .”
Lucy blushes. “Uh . . . fucktard.”
“Don’t you know that I . . . cocksucker fucktard,”
I sing.
The door to the hallway is wide open. A teacher walks by and does a double take.
“Come on, come on, come on, come on and take it . . . Take a motherfucking shithole asswipe . . .”
I sing as if this is any song, as if the swear words mean nothing to me. I sing my heart out. And eventually, by the time I finish the chorus, Lucy is staring at me with the ghost of a smile playing over her lips.
Unfortunately, there is also a small crowd of students standing in the open doorway, caught on the tightrope between shocked and delighted. When I finish, they start clapping and hollering, and then the bell rings.
“Guess that’s all the time we have,” I say. Lucy slings her backpack over her shoulder and, like usual, makes a beeline to get as far away from me as possible. I reach for my guitar case, resigned.
But at the threshold of the door, she turns around. “See you next week,” Lucy says, the first time she’s acknowledged to me that she has any plan to return.
I know it’s supposed to be good luck if it rains on your wedding, but I’m not sure what it means when there’s a blizzard. It is the day of my wedding to Vanessa, and the freak April snowstorm the weathermen have predicted has taken a turn for the worse. The Department of Transportation has even closed patches of the highway.
We came to Fall River the night before, to get everything sorted out, but the majority of our guests were driving up today for the evening ceremony. After all, Massachusetts is less than an hour away. But today, even that seems too far.
And now, if a weather disaster isn’t enough, there’s a plumbing snafu, too. The pipes burst at the restaurant where we were planning to hold our reception. I watch Vanessa try to calm down her friend Joel—a wedding planner who took on our nuptials as his gift to us. “They’ve got three inches of standing water,” Joel wails, sinking his head into his hands. “I think I’m hyperventilating.”
“I’m sure there’s somewhere that can hold a party on short notice,” Vanessa says.
“Yeah. And maybe Ronald McDonald will even agree to officiate.” Joel looks up sharply at Vanessa. “I have a reputation, you know. I will not, I repeat,
not
have French fries as an hors d’oeuvre.”
“Maybe we should reschedule,” Vanessa says.
“Or,” I suggest, “we could just go to a justice of the peace and be done with it.”
“Honey,” Joel says. “You are not wasting that gorgeous peau de soie dress on a city hall wham-bam-stamp-you-ma’am wedding.”
Vanessa ignores him and walks toward me. “Go on.”
“Well,” I say. “The party’s the least important thing, isn’t it?”
Behind me, Joel gasps. “I did not hear that,” he says.
“I don’t want everyone to drive up here and risk their lives,” I say. “We’ve got Joel as a witness, and I’m sure we can drag in someone else off the street.”
Vanessa looks at me. “But don’t you want your mother here?”
“Sure I do. But more than that, I just want to get married. We’ve got the license. We’ve got each other. The rest, it’s just gravy.”
“Do me a favor,” Joel begs. “Call your guests and leave it up to them.”
“Should we tell them to bring their bathing suits for the reception?” Vanessa asks.
“Leave that part up to me,” he says. “If David Tutera can fix a wedding catastrophe, so can I.”
“Who the hell is David Tutera?” Vanessa asks.
He rolls his eyes. “Sometimes you are
such
a dyke.” He takes her cell phone off the table and presses it into her hand. “Start calling, sister.”
“The good news,” my mother says, as she closes the bathroom door behind her, “is that you’re still walking down an aisle.”
It took her five hours, but she managed to make it to Massachusetts in the storm of the century. Now, she is keeping me company until it’s showtime. It smells of popcorn in here. I look at myself in the wide industrial mirror. My dress looks perfect; my makeup seems too dramatic in this dim light. My hair, in this humidity, doesn’t have a prayer of holding a curl.
“The minister’s here,” my mother tells me.
I know, because she already popped in to say hello to me. Maggie MacMillan is a humanist minister we found in the yellow pages. She’s not gay, but she performs same-sex marriages all the time, and both Vanessa and I liked the fact that there wasn’t a religious component to her ceremony. Frankly, after Max’s visit, we’d both had about as much religion as we could stand. But she really sold us in her office by whooping with delight when we’d told her we’d be crossing the border to Massachusetts to get married. “I wish Rhode Island would get with the program,” she’d said with a smirk. “But I suppose the legislature thinks if they give gays and lesbians civil rights,
everyone
in the state is going to want them . . .”
Joel sticks his head inside the door. “You ready?” he asks.
I take a deep breath. “Guess so.”
“You know I tried to get you a gay magician for the reception, but it didn’t work out,” Joel says. “He vanished with a poof.” He waits for me to get the punch line and then grins. “Works every time with a nervous bride.”
“How’s Vanessa doing?” I ask.
“Gorgeous,” he says. “Almost as gorgeous as you.”
My mom gives me a kiss on the cheek. “See you out there.”
Vanessa and I made the decision to walk down the aisle together. Neither of us has a father around to escort the bride, and this time, I didn’t feel like I was being given away into someone’s safekeeping. I felt like we were there to balance each other. So I follow Joel out of the women’s room and wait while he gets Vanessa out of the men’s room. She is wearing her white suit, and her eyes are bright and focused. “Wow,” she says, staring at me. I see her throat working, as she tries to find words that are big enough for what we are feeling. Finally she reaches for my hands, and rests her forehead against mine. “I’m afraid that, any second now, I’m going to wake up,” she whispers.
“Okay, lovebirds,” Joel says, clapping his hands to interrupt us. “Save it for the guests.”
“All four of them?” I murmur, and Vanessa snorts.
“I thought of another one,” she says. “Rajasi.”
We have been trading, for the past four hours, the names of people we think will brave the elements to celebrate our wedding with us. Possibly Wanda, from the nursing home—she grew up in Montana and is used to blizzards. And Alexa, my office assistant—whose husband works for the DOT, and who could probably hijack a snow-plow to get her here. It stands to reason that Vanessa’s longtime hairdresser will probably be one of the guests waiting for us, too.
With my mom, that makes a whopping four people at our party.
Joel leads us through a tangle of gears and pulleys and equipment, past stacks of boxes and through a doorway. A short curtain has been set up, and Joel hisses a command: “Just follow the runner and be careful not to trip over the gutters . . . and, ladies, remember, you are
fabulous.”
He kisses us on our cheeks, and then Vanessa reaches for my hand.
A string quartet begins to play. Together, Vanessa and I step onto the white runner and make the hard right turn at the edge of the curtain—the place where we step onto the aisle of the bowling alley we will be walking down, the place where the guests can see us.
Except there aren’t four of them. There are nearly eighty. From what I can see, everyone we called earlier today—everyone we advised not to come in this treacherous weather—has made the trip to be here with us.
That’s the first thing I notice. The second is that this AMC Lanes & Games bowling alley—the only spot in town that Joel could rent out completely on such short notice—doesn’t even look like a bowling alley anymore. There are vines woven with lilies lining the gutters on either side of the aisle we’re walking down. There are fairy lights strung overhead and on the walls. The automatic ball return is draped with white silk, and on it are frames with the faces of my father and both of Vanessa’s parents. The pinball machines are draped in velvet and covered with appetizers and heaping bowls of fresh shrimp. The air hockey table sports a champagne fountain.
“What a quintessentially lesbian wedding,” Vanessa says to me. “Who else would tie the knot in a room full of balls?”
We are still laughing when we reach the end of the makeshift aisle. Maggie’s waiting, wearing a purple shawl edged with a rainbow of beading. “Welcome,” she says, “to the blizzard of 2011
and
the marriage of Vanessa and Zoe. I’m going to refrain from making any jokes about lucky strikes, and instead I’m going to tell you that they’ve come to honor their commitment to each other not only today but for all the tomorrows to come. We rejoice with them . . . and for them.”
Maggie’s words fade as I look at my mother’s face, my friends’ faces, and, yes, even the face of Vanessa’s hairdresser. Then Vanessa clears her throat and begins to recite a Rumi poem:
The moment I heard my first love story I began seeking
you, not realizing the search was useless.
Lovers don’t meet somewhere along the way.
They’re in one another’s souls from the beginning.
When she is through, I can hear my mother sniffling. I pull out of my mind the ribbon of words I’ve memorized for Vanessa, an E. E. Cummings poem with syllables full of music.
i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
i fear
no fate (for you are my fate, my sweet)i want
no world (for beautiful you are my world, my true)
and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you
There are rings, and we are both crying, and laughing.
“Vanessa and Zoe,” the minister says, “may you avoid splits and always play a perfect game. As you’ve pledged in this ceremony, in front of family and friends, to be partners for life, I can only say what’s been said thousands of times before, at thousands of weddings . . .”
Vanessa and I both grin. It took us a long time to figure out how to end our ceremony. You can’t very well say
I now pronounce you husband and wife.
By the same token,
I now pronounce you partners
sounds somehow lesser-than, not a true marriage.
Our minister smiles at us.
“Zoe? Vanessa?” she says. “You may kiss the bride.”
Just in case you aren’t sure that the Highlands Inn is lesbian-friendly after you call its phone number (877-LES-B-INN), there is a row of Adirondack chairs in all the colors of the rainbow set on a hilltop. It hasn’t escaped my sense of irony that this little corner of open-minded paradise is set in Bethlehem, New Hampshire, that maybe this sleepy namesake town at the edge of the White Mountains could be the birthplace of a new way of thinking.
After our wedding ceremony—which may have been the only ceremony in the world that has included both a chocolate–Grand Marnier ganache cake with real gold leaf
and
a midnight game of cosmic bowling in the dark—Vanessa and I wait out the storm to drive to our honeymoon destination. We have plans to cross-country ski, to go antiquing. But we spend nearly the first twenty-four hours of our honeymoon in our room—not fooling around, although there are lovely interludes of just that. Instead, we sit in front of the fireplace, drinking the champagne the inn owner has given us, and we talk. It seems impossible to me that we haven’t exhausted our stories, but each one unfolds into another. I tell Vanessa things I have never even told my mother: about what my father looked like the morning he died; how I’d stolen his deodorant from the bathroom and kept it hidden in my underwear drawer for the next few years so that, when I needed his smell for comfort, I’d have it. I tell her how, five years ago, I found a bottle of gin in the toilet tank and I threw it out but never told Max I’d stumbled across it, as if not speaking of it would mean it hadn’t really happened.