Save the Date: The Occasional Mortifications of a Serial Wedding Guest (5 page)

An hour or so later, as I was preparing to jump into the pool, fully clothed, with the remaining, still-standing guests, Boyd grabbed my arm and pulled me toward a quieter area, away from everyone else. “Let’s go,” he said, glancing back at the now-defunct tequila bar, and then beyond, where I’d made my clandestine trip earlier that night. “Let’s go get your
toothbrush
, and then we’ll go to my villa.”

There are times when you’re nearly struck by a collapsing ice swan but escape unharmed. There are times when you drink one
too many tequila shots, but you fight back, and you win (or maybe you lose, but press on just the same). There are times when your wedding hookup has been predetermined since long before the wedding itself. And there are times when you’ll do anything so you can later say you did, because when all is said and done, the party favor you’ll take home with you is the story.

What can I say? I wanted to see what those premium villas were like inside.

I brushed my teeth and put on shorts and a T-shirt, then walked with him to his room, where we spent the night making out as I would have in high school on his fancy four-poster bed. Early the next morning, I crept back to my room and packed up my things, and without the need for a proper good-bye, we all flew back to our respective cities and homes. For the rest of that summer, I blogged and freelanced. Boyd and I Gchatted a few times, but soon stopped. The wedding, its characters, my tan, and eventually my layoff, too, faded, and I found myself with a boyfriend and another job. Even when we’re not going to weddings, the stories of our lives continue to unfold.

I still don’t know why the swans chose to collapse on me, or if the fact that they did has any importance or a greater cosmic intent. Ice in the tropics is a risky endeavor. It could have happened to anyone. Perhaps my timing was wrong or, better, just right. We all have things we want to experience, if only so we can share them later, and we bring these nascent yarns and hoped-for renderings with us wherever we go—most especially to weddings—in pursuit of an ending that suits our beginning, and if we’re lucky, the middle, too.

First Comes Love, Then Comes Marriage

T
he first wedding I remember attending was when I was eight years old. There had been weddings before, but they were events at which I was a tiny, monosyllabic figure, barely even a person, held by the hand or carried by a relative when I was included at all. I’d stumble upon pictures of these moments in my occasional perusals of the big family photo album, and my mom would notice and come over to point me out, reminding me of a me I didn’t remember—
Oh, weren’t you adorable in that bonnet and ruffled diaper; it matched the place settings! Here’s a photo of you at three months old, sleeping through a wedding in Vegas!

Sometimes I’d hear about weddings by keeping a sharp ear to the adult conversations percolating around the dinner table. These frequently had to do with couples my parents and their friends had helped usher off into “for better or worse,” who were heading now, in later years, toward worse—and often divorce. But all
stories, from the silly to the dramatic and even tragic, seemed to garner new import when linked to the main events of life, and one of the
main
main events of life, it became clear, was a wedding. A ruined cake was one thing; a ruined wedding cake was something very different. Weddings were just a bigger deal, inherently or because they helped us remember the important moments better, or both. Whose children were at which weddings was a time stamp of sorts: My cousin Vince, for instance, had been at my parents’ ceremony as a little boy, which made him privy to something I’d never be able to experience. I was somewhat envious of that, and in awe of its strange permanence. Even after he grew up, to my family he would always exist as the adorable, suit-wearing toddler present at the church that day.

The most interesting bits of the wedding stories, though, had to do with me. Yes, it’s narcissistic, but isn’t it true? Information related to ourselves is almost
always
fascinating, no matter how mundane (my diapered presence at my uncle’s wedding was hardly the showstopper of the day), especially when that information pertains to a previous version of the self that one must rely on others to define:
You wailed during the vows and Dad had to take you outside! You were left behind at a hotel with a babysitter, and when we got home you demanded to know why you’d never gotten to have your own wedding!
Or the anecdote my mom loved to tell, particularly when I got older and began to imbibe myself, of a teenaged me chastising, “You’re drunk, Mom!” after she’d had a few too many glasses of Champagne at one celebration. Her response, which she delivered with a proud flourish in retellings, had been, “No shit.” These details felt real, but the weddings of my childhood did not: They had to do
with people I hadn’t known; people who, in most cases, I would never know aside from the stories and the pictures. I wasn’t all that concerned with how those people were getting along in their post-wedding lives, or that they weren’t, and I was equally irrelevant to them, having not been old enough to truly count as a guest at their wedding. It’s not like a two-year-old was going to eat surf and turf, or gift anyone a soup tureen. Even if I’d been there, as the photographic evidence indicated, it wasn’t like I’d
really
been there.

By third and fourth grades, though, shifts were occurring, superficially and otherwise. I’d seen the magazines, watched the movies, become enthralled with the white dress and that formalized walk down the aisle, the dad-and-daughter dance, the special party everyone got to have at least once. We had a tape deck in the car, and sometimes, while riding shotgun, I used it to blast Pachelbel’s Canon, a piece of music I enjoyed so much I was learning to play it on the piano. My dad, confused by my new penchant for high-decibel classical music, would ask me to please turn it down. I started to listen on my Walkman, where I could hear it as loud as I wanted, and on repeat,
so totally rockin’
. This was around the time that I planned my own double wedding with my best friend, our vows to be delivered on a trampoline, with refreshments of ice cream cake and lemonade. That we had no grooms (we were considering an array of rockers and boy celebs from our
Tiger Beat
and
Bop
magazines; I’d narrowed it down to a lucky two) didn’t matter any more than the fact that a trampoline ceremony for four might present some problems—was there a trampoline that large to be found? How do you kiss without breaking each other’s teeth, or noses?

When a distant relative’s wedding was announced in the fall of third grade, I was ready. Attending a wedding when you’re eight, when double digits are lurking around the corner, when you’ve started at least tentatively to look at boys and they’ve begun to look back at you, is hardly the same thing as attending a wedding when you’re a baby clad in a ruffled diaper, being carried by an uncle. I’d remember this one. Maybe I’d even pick up some tips. This would be the beginning of
everything
.

•   •   •

I
wore the outfit I’d later wear in my fourth-grade school picture. It was a department store dress version of a wedding cake, layers of lavender ruffles covered in a faux fondant of tiny white dots, with fabric tiers encircling my body from midcalf to waist, and then again at the sleeves. In a photo from this day, my hair, which hung past my collarbone, is brown and has a wave to it without the aid of styling products or a curling iron. My bangs, cut with the assistance of a piece of Scotch tape, are jagged across my forehead. My eyes are open wide, my eyebrows raised in an expression of expectant surprise. There is the early beginning of a smile on my face. I’m waiting for something exciting to happen, holding on to the table in front of me for balance. Next to me, my mother, slim with her dark hair cut in a bob and her striped dress paired with a long necklace, smiles prettily, and my five-year-old brother, to her right, gives a purposely dour stare to the camera from underneath his bowl-cut head of hair, his tie amusingly askew.

I assume my dad is on the other side of this photo.

Whose wedding was it? A family member, a far-flung cousin
or uncle or niece or aunt of my father, or a direct relation of my grandmother; it really didn’t matter. What mattered most immediately was the ride to the wedding, a journey in the back of the navy-colored four-door Buick sedan with the velveteen seats we called “the Blue Buick.” Then, of course, the wedding itself, but first the ride: This was a trip long enough that a grubby old car towel that usually resided on the floor had been placed on the backseat between me and my brother, Bradley, as a dividing line across which we were not allowed to tickle or pinch or pull hair. It would be several hours to our destination in Michigan, and I had a stack of books on my side of the towel. In those days, my mother’s most frequent complaint was that my nose was always in a book (this complaint would continue for much of my car-riding life with my family), and she took this drive as an occasion to reiterate that I should really look out of the window, have a conversation, do something,
anything
, other than stare at printed words on pages. “Doesn’t reading in the car make you nauseated?” she’d ask. For some reason, after that question, it always would.

I was in a nickname phase. I had taken to calling Bradley “Zook,” short for “Bradzooka,” the name I’d used previously until I’d bored of it. Hopelessly and hilariously a step behind us, Dad was still calling Brad “Bradzooka.” I’d have to move on from Zook when he finally caught up, so I was keeping a list of options, “Bubsy Orlando,” for some reason, at the top. Zook’s wedding outfit was a dark gray suit, one tailored to his five-year-old proportions. The look was completed with a fresh haircut and a maroon tie—real, not a clip-on—atop a relatively crisp white button-down shirt. He might have been commuting from the Chicago suburb
in which we lived to his office in the big city, a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, dapper young businessman, minus the fact that he was a kid and he was toting around a stuffed monkey. We called this monkey Bobo. He was small enough to hide in a lady’s purse, but since neither of us carried such a thing, my brother held him in his arms and sometimes transported him on his shoulder. It was of vital importance that we not lose track of Bobo. He was a willing subject for the photos we planned to take upon the first opportunity we had to sneak the camera away from our parents at the wedding. Plotting our camera takeover may have, in fact, been some of the reasoning behind our ceasefire across the Great Dividing Towel. Also, we’d learned that in crowds of grown-ups there was safety in kid numbers. Alliances were key.

Along with quiet plans sprung up in the backseat, on the ride to Michigan there was much talk of weddings. Getting married was something grown-ups did when they decided they wanted to be together forever, said my mom, who clarified that this was the wedding of the daughter of cousins of my father, of the niece of my grandmother. I paid only partial attention to this complicated relationship, noting that the woman getting married was Susan; the man she was marrying was Carl. These sounded to me like old-fashioned names. Susan and Carl must have been in their twenties or thirties, pretty much
ancient
. But there was another problem here, a bigger one, to tackle: Married grown-ups didn’t always stay together, I interjected, citing my mom’s own divorce, before she married my father, and also my uncle’s. “By all counts,” I said, quoting some stat I’d heard on TV or in school that indicated that remarried couples were more likely to split, “you and
Dad should be divorced by now, too.” My mom sighed. “My nose isn’t in a book,” I said.

To divert us from such incendiary topics, my dad piped up. “Weddings are an excuse to have a big party and celebrate and bring all your friends and family together, kind of like a reunion,” he offered. “They’re what people do. It’s what people do, especially before they have kids.” He and my mom gave each other a look that I was not sure how to interpret, because, the thing was, my parents did not have a big party for their wedding. They’d wanted to get married on Thanksgiving, but the small brick chapel where they had the ceremony was holding church services then, so they did it on the following Saturday. My mom wore a lacy, lingerie-esque minidress with a V-neck and sheer, flowing bell sleeves, her legs clad in the nearly opaque flesh-colored panty hose of the sixties and tucked into thick-heeled, shiny shoes with square toes. It was November in Chicago, and in one photo she is jacketless and probably shivering. Her hair is long, jet-black, and curling in ringlets that flow down her back. In a sepia-toned photo shot inside the church, my bespectacled dad is wearing a black suit and dark tie, looking serious but pleased, even smug, a large white flower in his lapel. My mom smiles with her lips parted, all big eyes and glowing skin. In another photo, they face each other in front of church candles, holding hands. You can see the impressive scope of my mother’s hairdo and how the transparent sleeves of her dress draped just so. And in a picture taken from such a long way away you can’t see any expression at all on their faces, they stand in the chapel doorway, underneath a bell, poised to walk into their new life as a married couple. Both of my grandmothers stand over to
the side, leaning against the church in fur-trimmed coats, seemingly oblivious to their picture being taken.

After the ceremony, they all went to a restaurant, its name and type of cuisine and, most likely, the establishment itself lost to time, and then back to my grandmother’s house, my mom had told me. There, they opened a few gifts—“I know you’ll ask what they were, but I have no idea,” she’d said. “The usual stuff a young couple gets.” There’s a picture of this part of the wedding, too, a wrapped gift topped with a bow on my mom’s lap, my dad next to her on my grandmother’s couch with his hands on his knees. In front of them is an array of other packages, and while she’s smiling outright, he’s got something of the expectant look I have in my photo from Susan and Carl’s wedding, his eyebrows raised over the rims of his glasses and his lips curled up as if to smile.

It’s a nice picture, but I was dismayed with this wedding story. It was all so terribly practical. There was no beading on an ornate, expensive, long white gown. There was no tux, no huge bouquet, no crowd of beaming guests, no rice-throwing like I’d seen in weddings on TV and in magazines. No adorable old car with tin cans tied to the back and “Just Married” written on the window. No giant pile of fancily wrapped gifts. Was my mom even carried over a threshold? It seemed unlikely, given the length of her dress and my parents’ overall casual attitude toward this wedding. Her previous marriage had been to someone named Troy who was a cop and blond, two types of men I decided at a young age I disliked immensely. That this was her second time down the aisle is why, she said, the wedding was especially simple. True, it was my dad’s first, but there was no sense in carrying on. There
was
a
short notice in my grandparents’ paper, featuring my mom’s face and her maiden name, along with the salient details of the day. The headline: “Will Be Bride Saturday.” It states that my uncle, my dad’s brother, was the best man, and my aunt, my mother’s youngest sister, was the maid of honor, but they are not pictured in any of the photos I’ve seen.

Far more interesting than their wedding and more frequently discussed in my family were two other tales: how my parents met, and how my dad proposed. The meeting story is especially great, because it is scandalous and occurred in a bar. My mom was meeting a man who had not yet arrived for a date, and my dad showed up and offered to buy her a drink. In my imagination this bar is one long, narrow tunnel, customers packed in side by side, with barely any standing room. The lights are dim and bathe the room in a faint reddish hue. There are candles situated about, and cigarettes, smoked throughout the place, allow for further pinpricks of light. My mom, twenty-four and very pretty, long-haired and olive-complexioned and thin, tells my future dad, who is a few years older and a bit of an engineering nerd in glasses and a short-sleeved button-down shirt, that unfortunately she’s waiting for someone. It would be rude to accept a drink from him in these circumstances. My dad says, “Have a drink with me, anyway, while you wait,” and so, not being the sort of person to pass up a free drink from a nice man, she does. I picture them sipping from glasses decorated with parasols and maraschino cherries, offering lights for each other’s Lucky Strikes, their arms nearly touching at the bar. I imagine them laughing. My dad can be very funny.