Strangers Tend to Tell Me Things Page 11

  I made my entrance by walking down Main Street from my house, dressed in a mint-green cocktail dress I’d found at a church rummage sale and hastily hemmed that morning. I joined my future husband and his and my many siblings, our children and our nieces, nephews, aunts and uncles, and our close and distant friends. There on Main Street, we ate Methodist chicken and fresh sweet corn and potato salad. The moon rose. It was the first time I had seen it all summer. It was giant, white, and full.

  Chapter Twelve

  We Did

  My people are marrying people but not wedding people. Our divorces seem to be more dramatic, drawn out, and impactful than any weddings we could possibly host. Of my siblings and cousins, I am the rare family member to have a public wedding. My parents were married in my grandparents’ living room; Rachel and Tim were married on my mother’s porch. Anne has had two private weddings and has only told people after the fact. My father, Buck, has been married and divorced many times, but he seems to marry (and divorce) women more or less on the fly.

  Given this marital legacy, one might conclude that I take marriage lightly. But I do not—not at all. For most of my adult life, I have been alone and without any romantic partner. I have researched and observed marriage, personally and professionally. I make my living trying to help people unravel what went wrong with their relationships. I am intimately familiar with issues that can undermine a marriage, as well as the approximately one in two odds of an American marriage failing. I know all this, but I also understand the pull toward marriage, because I have felt it.

  Standing on that snowy New York City sidewalk with Bruno, I experienced an instant realization that we must marry. After many decades of thoughtfully trying to anticipate and then second-guess every romantic choice I’ve ever made, my decision to marry Bruno was, quite literally, a no-brainer. It happened somewhere on a cellular level, and from the day of our proposal to the day of our wedding I experienced not one moment of the slightest doubt.

  What will always be something of a mystery to me is why I (and so many others) are drawn to being married in a public way. I can only explain it as a very human pull toward powerful witnessing. A community that witnesses an important ritual makes it more real and resonant. This same community may then draw close again to be supportive during tough times. I think a joyful moment is amplified when it is shared.

  My mother, who did not seem to like weddings, accompanied me once to a beautiful, large, and elegant wedding, which featured a dozen identically gowned bridesmaids, groomsmen in tuxedos, a couple hundred guests, a delicious meal, and dancing and champagne. “Queen for a day,” she sniffed. In addition to considering large displays wasteful, Jane couldn’t imagine a person being willing to experience any private emotion in public.

  Years ago, I covered a story for National Public Radio about a mass wedding held by the Unification Church. For several years in the ’80s and ’90s, these mass weddings—featuring up to 1,000 couples matched by the church—were a sort of annual curiosity. The “Moonie weddings” would be held in arenas or soccer stadiums, and the photos that emerged from these events were of row upon row of identically dressed brides and grooms, none of whom had even met before the church assigned them to one another on their wedding day.

  This particular ceremony was held in RFK stadium in Washington. Up close and not viewed through a photo filter, the whole thing looked surreal, cruddy, and profoundly depressing. To me, it played like some sort of unintentional meta-exposure of the underlying absurdity of wedding ceremonies. Hundreds of couples sat on folding chairs set up on the stadium’s field. The grooms wore dark suits and the brides wore identical white dresses (which I assume the church had supplied). But what I noticed on that day, and which I had never seen reported before, was the undeniable surplus of brides. The whole back section of the stadium’s field was filled only with brides—a couple hundred extra brides seated side by side, like identical wedding-cake toppers. Each bride held an 8 x 10 framed photo of the groom with whom she had allegedly been matched. My understanding was that these brides were simply told their grooms were unable to attend the ceremony. Talk about a leap of faith! It’s one thing to marry someone you just happen to be seated next to at a mass wedding; it’s another to pledge your troth to a photo, which—who knows?—could actually be the photo that came with the frame.

  After the very short and not at all sweet wedding “ceremony,” which dispatched the hundreds of brides and grooms toward the exits, I did what I always do whenever I’m at a stadium: I had a hot dog and a beer and then joined the line for the ladies’ room. There was no line at all for the men’s room, of course, but the line for the ladies’ room was lousy with leftover brides, standing there in their pinned-on rayon gowns, holding their photo-husbands, and shifting from foot to foot as they waited to pee. These brides, many of them quite young, had received their public wedding and witnessing, and yet in their case I worried about who would stand with them later, after they had finally met their husbands.

  On my own wedding day, I realized that, because of my stage in life, I had been experiencing a wedding drought lasting for well over a decade. My most recent wedding attendance had been at the long-ago Moonie wedding. I often wonder what had ever become of the leftover brides and their two-dimensional husbands, but I hope they had escaped the confines of an organization that would draw them in on such a flimsy promise.

  The first thing I did on my own wedding day was to quickly part the vintage tablecloth I use for a curtain in my bedroom, look outside, and rejoice that the weather was holding. This particular Saturday was dawning into sunshine; there would be no bridal snits over weather on this fine wedding day.

  There was a lot of distance to travel between that early morning moment and eventually saying “I do,” but instead of obsessing over details, I realized I mainly wanted to get this thing done and start a new life living with Bruno. I definitely wanted the ritual of the church service, and I absolutely wanted to celebrate, but I had already enjoyed my rehearsal dinner of Methodist chicken and corn on the cob, and now I wanted to move it along. I had found the person I wanted to spend the rest of my life with, and I was itchy for the rest of my life to begin.

  My first stop was to bring Dunkin’ to the household at Maryhill Farm. Bruno’s siblings and their families had been gathering there over the previous several days. Bruno had already been to the farm that morning, spraying pesticide around the seams of the tent to try to keep out the chiggers and no-see-ums and mayflies that would swarm with that day’s moist warmth. I hadn’t seen Bruno since we’d kissed good night standing on the sidewalk in Freeville the night before, and I didn’t expect to see him again until we met at the chapel for our three o’clock ceremony.

  I walked into the Schickel family’s old farmhouse and saw that it had been scrubbed and polished by Bruno’s visiting sisters. The tents and tables were set, the gardens were gorgeous, the lawn trimmed tight, and someone had repainted a door and trim. I hadn’t asked anyone to do it; I wasn’t even aware of this monumental labor happening. It dawned on me for the first time since exiting our secret engagement snow globe: A lot of people were working very hard to get us hitched.

  Next I stopped at my mother’s house on Mill Street. She had missed the rehearsal dinner at my sister’s house. Jane had been waffling back and forth about attending the ceremony; it seemed that she was unsure if she could physically manage it. But I had found an outfit for her to wear, Aunt Jean had altered it to fit her, her caregiver was helping her to get dressed, and Elsie, her eighty-year-old friend from high school, was going to transport and assist her in the chapel and at the reception. Although I was desperate to have my mother witness my marriage to Bruno, I was at peace over whatever last-minute choice she might make. I did not want to feel disappointed over anything today.

  I met all of my bridesmaids for their salon date in Ithaca. Declining any services for myself, I nervously leafed through a magazine while the girls were all made beautiful. The reason I
didn’t submit to any professional fluffing is this: I always look the same. With the exception of the few times I’ve been a guest on Fox News—when I have been made by their makeup department to look like a man in drag—I always look like myself. I’m not vainly declaring that I don’t need any improvement, but in my experience, when the beauty professionals get ahold of me, I emerge from the process looking worse, sometimes dramatically so, than when I went in. This is never the case with other people, and I have never heard another woman complain of this phenomenon. Because of this, my beauty philosophy consists of: Leave well enough alone.

  When my five bridesmaids emerged at 11:00 a.m., polished and pretty, I realized there was a yawning gap of a few hours where we were basically unprogrammed. There aren’t many amusements for underage bridesmaids with upswept, bobby-pinned hair. We decided to go to the Queen Diner for lunch and call it our bachelorette party.

  It was over patty melts at the Queen that the enormity of the afternoon started to bear down on me with real force. Many years ago I had read a quote that when First Lady Nancy Reagan wanted to hurry Ronnie along, she said, “Zip zip, let’s go!” Now, for some reason, that phrase was running through my head like a ticker tape. I was jumpy and excited. I declared to our waitress Lorraine, “I’m getting married today!” and she said, “I know!” Lorraine had watched my courtship with Bruno progress over countless bowls of chili as I sat crushed up next to him in our regular booth. She knew everything.

  By one o’clock, my five bridesmaids and I had landed back at my house on Main Street, where we would all get dressed. I helped them steam out their dress wrinkles, and they pulled out makeup bags loaded with eyelash curlers and eyeliners (liquid and solid), jumbo folding palettes of eye shadow, lip glosses and lipsticks and deodorants and perfumes. They stood on the porch and displayed their newly painted fingernails and toenails, comparing colors and wiggling their digits to catch the afternoon sunshine. They either did or did not like their hairstyles and took turns in front of the full-length mirror as they critiqued and propped up one another and fussed with their tresses and dresses.

  If I could get away with it, I would doll myself up at every opportunity. I’d wear hats and opera-length gloves and flowing scarves and boots with buttons. But I have a small stature and a largish head. I can take a cool-looking, “fun” or artistic garment into a dressing room and emerge wearing Garanimals. The only accessory I seem to get away with is a strand of pearls. One additional thing—even a hair clip or a handkerchief—is too much.

  My wedding dress was a simple champagne-colored sleeveless dress with a fitted bodice and full, twirly skirt. I know that brides commonly refer to their layered, tucked, seed-pearled, lace-festooned gowns as “simple”—but this one actually was. The dress had no buttons, no pattern or adornment, no internal wiring to keep it up, and no dragging train. I slipped it over my head and zipped it up the back. Zip, zip, let’s go.

  I was so eager to get married that I insisted Emily leave the house a half hour early to go to the chapel—a drive that takes three minutes. She started to protest, then took one look at my face and got the keys.

  We parked behind the chapel. I didn’t see Bruno’s truck there. I walked around toward the front entrance, which was flanked by two fat sheaves of cornstalks. I later heard that Bruno’s sister Ruth had snuck into a neighboring cornfield in the middle of the night to gather the eight-foot stalks and lash them together. Inside, the simple chapel bloomed with brightly colored zinnias in white pots of different sizes and shapes. Jacques had solicited zinnia contributions from neighboring gardens throughout town. The bagpiper I’d asked to play pulled up in his car. I’d forgotten all about him.

  What I felt in that moment was the simple joy of something coming together. This was not the manic satisfaction of ticking boxes off a long list and of having my best-laid plans realized. This was the absolute absence of anxiety. I realized that I was surrounded by people who were pulling for me and happy for me—and who also were reliable.

  The bagpiper stood off to the side, playing to the soft hills and cornfields as our guests found their way into the small chapel. I hustled the girls into position for the procession. Bruno pointed out to me that we were starting five minutes early. I told him that I simply could not wait one more minute to be married. I signaled to the pianist to start, and as he started to play, I pinwheeled my arms toward the bridesmaids in the universal symbol for “Hustle!” Avila started up the aisle, and then Bruno grabbed my hand and motioned me off to the side. His ninety-year-old uncle Bud wasn’t in the church yet. And so we stopped the pianist, midnote. Avila returned to her place, our congregation shared a knowing chuckle, and Bruno got his uncle seated.

  We started again. Cue the piano, cue the beautiful bridesmaids. Lined up at the front of the chapel, our daughters looked like individual brightly colored flowers. Bruno and I held hands and walked up the aisle together. On the way I saw Jane, seated just behind the Gene Pool Choir at the front of the church. We stopped just short of our destination to greet and kiss our mothers. I whispered my thanks.

  The ceremony was not a blur. It was beautiful. I told myself to stay in the moment because this would be my last wedding. Reverend Roger started by asking, “Who presents this woman and this man to be married, one to the other?”

  Our daughters/bridesmaids responded as one: “We do.”

  Together with our guests, we read:

  O Divine Master,

  grant that I may not so much seek

  to be consoled as to console;

  to be understood, as to understand;

  to be loved, as to love;

  for it is in giving that we receive,

  it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,

  and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

  And then the Beatitudes:

  Blessed are the poor in spirit…

  Bruno and I sat on chairs to the side of the altar during the sermon and the music portions of the service. I looked out at the crowded little chapel. Somehow we had managed to squeeze almost 200 people into the old wooden pews. In addition to our family members, there were friends and colleagues through every stage of my life. And, just as importantly, neighbors from Freeville who knew my grandparents and my parents, people who had gathered with me to mourn my aunt Lena’s death and who were helping my mother when she needed help now; people who quietly pitched in and built things and sowed gardens and left casseroles or seedlings or jars of preserves on the porch. I sought out my sisters, cousins, and aunties, sprinkled throughout the congregation. I was so moved by their presence and their willingness to increase my happiness by adding their own joy on this day. My bridesmaids were all smiling, and that made me even happier.

  Rachel wrangled the choir together and they sang for us: “The King of Love My Shepherd Is.”

  And then a surprise—the wonderful, schmaltzy old song “I Love You Truly,” which is most familiar to some from its brief appearance in the movie It’s a Wonderful Life, when Bert and Ernie sing it beneath George and Mary Bailey’s window on their wedding night.

  I love you truly, truly dear,

  Life with its sorrow, life with its tear

  Fades into dreams when I feel you are near

  For I love you truly, truly dear.

  I was so happy, I thought I would inflate and float, balloon-like, over the crowd, out of the chapel, and fly and drift over the village and the hills, fields, streams, and lakes of this challenging and beautiful countryside that is my home.

  After the ceremony, we streamed out of the chapel and into the August sunshine. Each of our guests was holding a zinnia, daisy, or black-eyed Susan. We were all part of a glorious bouquet.

  Because I field so many wedding questions for my advice column, I’m exposed mainly to the ugly, tacky, problematic side to this tricky celebration. Bridesmaids complain about the expense and effort required to participate. Siblings stop speaking. Divorced parents won’t sit next to each other. Bachelor
parties in Vegas get out of hand. Wedding cakes previously agreed upon are the wrong flavor or the band is too loud. Everybody is sick of shelling out money for elaborate showers, destination weddings, and gifts. Marrying couples expect guests to fill “money trees” or pay for their honeymoons. Many of these problems are generated by the marrying couples, by planning too many events and expecting too much of their guests. Bruno and I circumvented all of these issues by throwing one party, telling people to skip the gifts, and asking our guests to simply show up and celebrate with us.

  After we had greeted our guests, Bruno scooped me into his arms and carried me to his truck. We joined our guests at Maryhill Farm, and we gloried to the food, drink, and music under our big white tent. Massive round hay bales stood sentry in the pasture as we toasted one another and our guests. The huge, full, milky white harvest moon rose over our party, and we danced with our children until the band put away their instruments. Our bridesmaids stayed elsewhere that night, and Bruno and I returned to Pemberley to start our married life together.