Wedding Cake for Breakfast (14 page)

The Marry Boy

JOSHILYN JACKSON

My marriage can drive. That's what I said to Scott on our last anniversary. Sixteen years since we stood up in the chapel at Fort Something on a date neither of us can ever remember and made all kinds of promises. I don't specifically remember those either. Obey wasn't one of them, I know that.

The rest is washed away in a whirling vortex of taffeta and organ music, a buffet with a shrimp tree and way too much champagne.

I was going to grad school, living in the middle of downtown Chicago, and Scott was living an hour away, having just finished his MFA. We wanted to be married in our southern hometown, so my mother, the Once and Future Belle, planned the wedding for us. I told her she could do whatever she wanted as long as (1) it wasn't pink, and (2) at the end of the day, I was married to Scott. I came home between semesters to find my happy mommy planning the swirliest pink wedding in the history of time. When I reminded her of my terms, she gave me the Belle-eye and said, with zero irony, “It isn't pink. It's ‘seashell.'”

By the time the day ended, I was married to Scott, so I decided to call it a win. We honeymooned in New Orleans and moved to Oak Park, and he got a job and I got a master's degree. We had an excellent boy child and Scott found a weird career niche and flourished and moved me back to the South, where I belong. I wrote a novel, and we had another baby, and then I wrote more novels and he got some promotions and we gathered up hordes of feckless pets to chew up and ruin all our furniture, days piling on days, until now our marriage can drive. In another year and change, it will be able to vote, and soon after that, we can legally take our marriage out drinking. I'm looking forward to that. Twenty-one, the Vodka Anniversary.

Yesterday, I asked Scott, “Tell me about the first year we were married.”

He was quiet for a moment, brows together, and then he said, “Oh! Our apartment had that god-awful galley kitchen.”

“What else?” I said.

After another silent minute, he shrugged. “I got nothin'.”

That would have been plenty damning, if I hadn't been asking him because I'd drawn a complete blank, too. I hadn't even been able to conjure up the galley kitchen.

I was asking because one of the two babies we had, the girl one, the youngest, came out of the womb a full-on Belle. It must skip a generation, because I was born a barn rat. Now in my forties, I still don't know how to blow-dry my hair and I can never remember to apply accessories. But the day we finally brought Maisy Jane home from the hospital? She peered about with her bleary baby eyes, seeking a bracelet that would complement her receiving blanket without being too matchy-matchy.

Because she is a Belle, one of the mystifying-to-me topics that consumes Maisy Jane is her wedding. More than that—her marriage. It began when she was barely three. That's when she started asking me who her “Marry Boy” would be. At first she thought the Marry Boy should be her daddy. I agreed that he was excellent husband material, but alas, he was already taken. Next she picked my father, but he is righteously preclaimed by the Once and Future Belle. After I ruled out Uncle Bobby and Daniel, her tallest, most handsome cousin, she deigned to settle for her brother, Sam. He, a lordly third grader, had zero interest in marrying little sisters and turned her down flat.

I told her she hadn't yet met her Marry Boy (probably). When she did, he would not (Lord willing) be any kind of a relation, but a new fellow, and that was how our family would grow. I was relieved to see she stopped trying to get into a contractual engagement with a close blood relative, but she immediately started casting about for her Marry Boy in the world around her.

She met her first potential Marry Boy in preschool. She came home all dreamy, talking about this three-year-old lothario who went by the overly virile name of Colby. I had to forcibly restrain my husband from going out and shooting a toddler, assuring him that Colby was oblivious to Maisy Jane's ambitions for him. Colby was more interested in
Blue's Clues
, quite frankly.

Maisy Jane is eight now, and she has remained vigilant, always on the lookout. Currently, she isn't sure if her Marry Boy will be Justin at school or Kyle at church. She likes to lie on my bed on her stomach and swing her feet back and forth in the air and muse about their relative merits. Terrifying, how rigorous my girl child is in her Marry Boy investigations.

She has asked me endless questions about when I met her dad (I was nineteen, he was twenty), how I knew he was the one (I didn't. He knew, right away, but I was clueless for seven years), and what our wedding was like (I dragged out the photo album and let her look at a young me swathed in a pouf of satin with multiple petticoats and a cathedral train, surrounded by seven swirly, be-pinked bridesmaids).

We recently went to a young friend's wedding, and now Maisy Jane is fascinated by what will happen to the bride next. She wants to know what it's like to be a “Newlyweed,” as she calls it.

I am drawing a terrifying blank. I think it was probably fun. It must have been an adventure. But it's not all that clear or distinct from the other fifteen. The year that stands out to me is the bad year, somewhere in the middle, when Maisy Jane was born too early, and we weren't sure if we would get to keep her. That year? Oh, hell yes, I remember that one. But the first is only a year, buried under and hard to distinguish from every other year I have spent with her father.

I told her we had a crappy galley kitchen, but that wasn't what she wanted.

So I've been trying to remember. We had a lot less of everything. Less children, certainly, and that means less responsibility. We had less security, but less need for it as well. Less money. A lot less, as I was in school and Scott had just hit the job market with seven years of higher education in theater.

The only thing we had more of back then was probably sex, which is not something I want to explain to my third grader. I have only recently told her, using a matter-of-fact tone and scientifically accurate terms, the process for making babies. She listened earnestly, then made a disapproving mouth and asked, “Do you have to actually touch the boy for it work?” When I told her that yes, the touch part was mandatory, she declared that she and Marry Boy would be adopting.

I also remember when Scott made the transition from friend to Marry Boy. I met him when we both had summer acting jobs at a regional repertory theater. He was a tall, dark-haired boy who reminded me of an adolescent German shepherd: innocent-eyed, with long skinny legs and feet way too big for his body. I was always in the middle of everything, usually instigating crime, and he stood on the edge of the action, observing and cataloging. He barely ever spoke. I liked that about him, as I never stopped speaking. I parked myself near him and gabbled at him for a couple of hours.

Instead of letting my endless flow of words wash over him and away, he seemed to be actually listening. I got addicted to it. After a few weeks, I got a bug up my butt about making him talk back. I felt that he knew everything about me, while he remained a silent cipher. I started questioning him relentlessly, trying for answers that were longer than five words, trying to learn him.

Back in those days, I never would have dated a boy like him. He was much too nice to me; I liked my romantic entanglements to be rife with intrigue and melodrama. And yet, no matter who I was dating, his opinion was always the one that mattered most in my head. He shaped the person I grew up to be, and I shaped him, too. I would meet his girlfriends, and I would be nice to them, because in some deep inside part, I understood that they weren't terribly relevant. None of them mattered to him the way I did.

It was only when he got serious about one particular girl that I realized I could lose him. We were both home at Christmas, and he told me he was ring-shopping and thinking about Valentine's Day.

“He's going to marry her! It's disgusting,” I raged to my mother. “Do you think that it will wreck our friendship?”

“Oh yes,” the Once and Future Belle said wisely. “Absolutely. Smart women don't let their husbands have girls for best friends.”

“Well, he can't marry her, then,” I said.

My mother wisely kept her counsel to herself. She didn't want to spook me off of him via maternal approval. Belles can smell a potential Marry Boy from miles off; Scott had long been her dark-horse pick for me.

All she said was, “Men like Scott get snapped up fast. He's going to marry someone.”

Then she left me to fume and stomp and relook at this boy I had known for years now. For the first time, I noticed that the German-shepherd puppy had grown into his big feet. Scott had become a hell of a man, but I'd been too close to him to notice him changing.

At that time Scott was living in Chicago, and I was living in Atlanta. After Christmas we both went home, and that might have ended it, had we both not been drawn back a couple of weeks later. I'd come to be a bridesmaid in a friend's wedding. He was home to bury his father.

After the reception, I went to check on him. It was late. His mother and sister had gone to bed, so I drove him to my parents' house. We sat in my backyard, in a teeny wooden structure surrounded by azalea and gardenia bushes. My mother called it “the gazebo, where you can entertain a beau.” I called it “the Hut,” and it was used exclusively as a place to sneak off to and smoke.

We talked all night. In the starless hour right before dawn, he said, “I want to order a Domino's pizza. I want the delivery guy to take more than thirty minutes, and then I want to punch him in the face. I need to be angry. I want to be angry with my dad for smoking, and for getting lung cancer. He's dead, though. I can't be angry with him, so I want to be furious with someone.”

I put out my cigarette, ashamed of it, and said, “I can make you angry.”

He laughed. “You've been my best friend for almost seven years now, Jackson, and you have yet to make me angry. Please. Bring it.”

I took a deep breath. “I don't want you to marry that girl. I lied when I said I liked her.” That was all I had planned to say, but my mouth kept talking. “In fact, you are not allowed to marry her. You are only allowed to marry me.”

He looked at me, calm and carefully observing, the way he always was, and then he shrugged. “I've been waiting for you to say that for seven years.”

And that was it. We sat there, both of us scared and dumbfounded, but with the brightest kind of happiness building unstoppably up behind that.

I said, “Well. We should probably kiss.”

So we did. It was a good kiss. A really good kiss. Maybe not worth seven years of waiting—and Lord knows it should have happened earlier—but it came pretty damn close. The air had that crisp apple edge it sometimes gets in mild, southern winters. To this day, when the seasons change and the air gets crisp, I find myself breathing deep, and that familiar bright happiness still rises in me.

Then we separated and stared at each other, and that was far as it went. We were both in relationships, and we didn't want to start with each other wrong, by cheating other people. I told him to call me in three days. If he was free, I said. If he had meant it. I told him I was pretty much in love with him and would be single come tomorrow, regardless.

Before we parted, I made it clear that I wasn't interested in “trying it out” or “seeing if this would work.” I wouldn't risk losing his friendship for the sake of some dumb experiment. Either he was all in, total commitment, heading toward marriage with a bullet, or we would simply go home, give it a few days to settle, chalk it up to 4 a.m. lunacy after the emotional tumult of a wedding and a funeral. We could, I said, return to our friendship relatively unscathed.

Three days later, the phone rang. He had picked to go all in.

I do remember, quite specifically, a few things that happened in the months after that. It is an odd transition, to see one's best friend's head perched atop of the lovely, naked male body one has just ridden to mad pleasure. But this is not information I particularly wish to share with my eight-year-old. Also, strictly speaking (and here we must ask the Once and Future Belle to delicately avert her eyes), that transition may have happened slightly before the first year of my marriage technically began.

So now Maisy Jane pesters for stories of Newlyweedhood, and I have nothing for her but an anecdotally barren sense of general happiness. She blinks her round blue eyes at me, dissatisfied, but this is all I have to say to her:

I hope you don't remember your first year of marriage either. I hope you marry your best friend and stay his best friend. You will have more fun with him than anyone. You will always be on his side, and he will always be on yours. Even when you are fighting with each other, you will always have each other's back. You'll be able to tell him anything, even though his opinion matters most, because you know he won't judge you. He will look at you like you invented pretty, and he will always, always be so nice to you. Pick a Marry Boy like that.

Because that is what being married to your father has been like. That's what you see us living together, every day, when he makes the perfect coffee, even though he doesn't drink it, and I leave Yes playing on the radio even though that squawky guitar noise gets on my last nerve.

When your own daughter comes to you to ask about Marry Boys, when she asks you how the first year of your marriage went, I hope that all you can say is that maybe you had a crappy galley kitchen, but otherwise, it was good. So good, you can't remember it as a separate thing. It will just be one of many years with him, blended into a long string of time that you think of as the best years of your life.

 

WE WILL CARVE OUT A FUTURE

The Devil's Playground

REBECCA RASMUSSEN

Brides scare me. So do cakes that are as tall as me and cost more than my first car. Don't get me started about billowy white dresses that make people weep into handkerchiefs one day and then end up hanging for time immemorial in the back of closets the next. There. I said it. I'm cynical about weddings when people in the world go daily without nourishing food, clean water, and sturdy roofs over their heads. How much does the average wedding cost? Five thousand? Ten thousand? Twenty? Any of those figures is an awfully high price to pay for ceremony, and yet I am a married woman and was, technically, a bride in 2006.

I didn't grow up dreaming of becoming a bride, as you may have guessed. I grew up sticking my feet in the muddy creek behind my father's farm in Wisconsin. I played with barn cats. I swam. I caught fish. I even read a few books in the hammock while my brother taunted me with branches from pricker bushes. I was a tomboy, and if you must know the truth, when I was three, I refused to be a flower girl in my father and stepmother's winter wedding because apparently, to me, the dress looked like curtains.

Though it seems I wasn't destined to be a winter bride, or a bride at all, for that matter, over the years I did dream plenty about falling in love with a smart and kind man who happened to wear a tweed sport coat. I dreamed about all of the books we would read together, all of the creeks we would tromp through, and all of the calamine lotion and cotton balls we would use up. I dreamed of the adventures we would have.

And it turns out that at the age of twenty, that's exactly what happened to me in Fort Collins, Colorado—sans the sport coat. I met my future husband, who was framing houses at the time, while I was finishing up an undergraduate degree in English. I loved to bring him lunch at the job site and watch two-by-fours turn into houses where dinners would be made, kids would grow up, and people would grow old. I loved the fine layer of sawdust on his skin. I loved that this fellow wore Carhartt by day and reading glasses by night.

I loved him.

After I graduated, my future husband and I moved to Pennsylvania so I could continue my studies in fiction writing. After that, we moved to Massachusetts so he could finish a degree in classics he'd started in Colorado. His knees and back had taken a beating over the years, framing lives for other people. And though it was a difficult job to let go of, my future husband decided it was time to frame his own life. At that point we had been together for five years, had lived together for three, and had been sharing our finances for one. We'd merged, so to speak. And we were trucking along just fine.

And then, four months after my twenty-seventh birthday, at spring's first touch, I found out I was pregnant. Even though we didn't know what we were going to do, we knew what we were going to do. Our combined fifty-four years of experience navigating this earth told us were going to have that baby. A girl, it would turn out. With tiny bubble-gum toes.

“And we have to get married,” my future husband said.

“Excuse me?” I said.

“You, me, married.”

I'm not going to lie to you: it took some convincing. It turns out that
bride
wasn't the only word that scared me. I grew up under the auspices of D-I-V-O-R-C-E and so did my future husband. Both of us shuttled back and forth between families when we were kids. Both of us endured parents who didn't get along. In my future husband's case: at all. So it was odd to me that tradition would take hold of him so firmly. That he thought it was not only something we should do, but also that we must do for each other and for our future child. M-A-R-R-I-A-G-E. Not only did he propose it, but he also proposed that we throw some wedding rings into the mix.

Dear Lord,
I thought.

“Really?” I said.

I know now that this is not a “normal” response to the offer of shiny (in my case vintage) jewelry. Most of my friends tell wonderful stories of their husbands kneeling down and professing their love, sometimes in private, sometimes in public, always in a completely endearing way. As much as I have connected with their stories, I didn't grow up wanting this to be mine. But I didn't grow up wanting to be a naysayer either.

“We're not our parents,” my future husband said.

So off we went to the beautiful hill town of Brattleboro, Vermont, to buy some rings. On that cool spring day, our exhaust system fell off twenty miles south of Brattleboro.

“Maybe it's a sign,” I said while we stood on the side of the highway.

“Maybe it's just an old car,” my future husband said.

But I saw a trace of doubt appear along with the lines in his forehead from working too many summers outside without wearing sunscreen, and it worried me. That day my future husband secured what he could with tethers and we ended up making it to Brattleboro and choosing a too-large titanium ring for him and an occlusion-filled half-carat recycled diamond for me. This marked the beginning of an ill-fated period my husband and I now call “What Else Can Go Wrong?” that included an ultrasound that scared us deeply, a dwindling savings account, a tuition bill we didn't know how we were going to pay, and a bout of all-day, sixteen-week morning sickness that nearly killed us both.

Which brings me to our June wedding that year. Since we decided to get married so quickly, unfortunately our families couldn't make the trip across the country for the event. By then I was about four months pregnant, just over the worst of the morning sickness and the stuffing-myself-with-feathery-white-bread phase, and I was starting to look the part of soon-to-be mother. Things were looking up, and out.

My soon-to-be husband asked if he could wear a pair of high-top Converse to the ceremony and I said yes, which made him smile my favorite of his smiles: his boyish one. I bought a simple little sundress at Target and a pair of sandals. That morning, we took pictures of each other on our leaning second-floor porch, me in front of a spider plant and him in front of an old attic table I'd made a craft project out of. Although we're not together in the photographs, we look sweet and young and happy. These photographs are even dearer to me than the ones the justice of the peace took of us in our backyard later that morning.

“I've never seen a bride wear black before,” the justice said when she arrived, and to be honest, it didn't occur to me that I was wearing black on my wedding day and that symbolically black was a little odd. I bought it because it had cute crisscrossing straps and was one of the few dresses that shielded my stomach from judgment and me from the time-immemorial-in-the-closet thing. And also because it was one we could afford.

“You look pretty,” my almost husband assured me.

“Do you have vows prepared?” the justice said.

“We were planning on saying ‘I do,'” I said, smiling at my Converse-clad darling.

“Absolutely not,” the justice said, and proceeded to pull out rumpled sheets of paper from her purse. “You can read these.”

Oh dear,
we thought, but did as we were told, even though the writer in me said
blech!
internally the whole time. I promise to love you when the lilies are in bloom. I promise to love you when the petals wilt and brown and fall to the ground . . .

Why? Why? Why? We were in Emily Dickinson country, for heaven's sake!

When we were finally alone again, my husband and I hugged each other in our backyard for a long time, laughing and smiling. We'd survived the blooming lilies and the browning ones, too. And we were married. And we loved each other. And we had a lovely little girl on the way.

My husband touched my stomach, and I touched it, too.

Our rings glinted in the sunlight.

After a while we threw our bags in the car, stopped for bagels at our favorite breakfast joint, and were off to a place we would come to think of as the Devil's Playground, although we thought of it as Connecticut then. Our very good friends Jack and Mara were getting married and my husband was supposed to play the banjo with a bluegrass band during the ceremony. Mara is a very traditional woman who had been dreaming of her wedding since she was a little girl, so we decided we weren't going to tell her and Jack about our bizarro-world version of a wedding. We weren't going to rain on her pretty white tent that would end up holding platters of lobster tails with drawn butter and over two hundred well-dressed people from all over the East Coast.

It turns out we would barely make it to that tent, and here's why: after two hours of driving, we pulled up to the World's Worst Motel.

There were only two motels in the area, according to Mara's wedding invitation, and we knew upon first glance why the other one was booked months in advance. This was either a motel where we would get sliced up à la
Psycho
or eaten up c/o les roaches. We weren't even thinking about bedbugs then. We were wondering (a) how we would stay there for two nights, and (b) how a place like this could cost $120 a night. A man whom I'll call Al for the duration of the essay came out of the office with a cigarette in one hand and a doorknob in the other to show us to our room.

“Is that our doorknob?” I said.

“Yes,” Al said.

In the future, if I ever walk up to a motel room without a doorknob, I'll know to walk back to my car straightaway and drive to the nearest campground, which means I'll also know to pack a few sleeping bags and a tent in the trunk just in case for situations like this.

We'd booked a nonsmoking room, but since Al walked into the room smoking and the walls were a greasy yellow, that distinction was not meant to be. Once Al put the doorknob in the door, he took our credit card and left us to explore our room.

“Is it as bad as I think it is?” I said.

“Worse,” my husband said.

Not only was everything a smoky yellow, the bedding was clearly soiled from someone else's bodily fluids, the half-torn, once-white carpet had what looked like bloodstains on it, and the fan in the corner was covered with dark gray dust several inches thick. Forget about the promise of air-conditioning or a window screen, this room was the filthiest my husband and I had ever been in. And the smell! My God, the smell. A cross between BBO (Beyond BO, from our favorite
Seinfeld
episode) and old meat.

Before we could either cry or revolt or run, our friends, who didn't know about our earlier vows, appeared in the doorway.

“Oh God, yours is completely horrific, too,” they said. “We thought we might be able to bunk up with you.”

“Maybe we should all just sleep in the car,” I said.

“Maybe it's one of those things that gets better the more you drink,” my husband said, and the other husband agreed.

The other wife—who was also pregnant—scowled. “What are we supposed to do?”

“There's a grocery store right down the street,” her husband said.

“You can get some licorice,” my husband added gently, and though I had been openly craving Twizzlers, I scowled, too. I might have even said, “Bite me.”

But I'll tell you this: anything was better than being stuck in that room, so we went to the grocery store, which was nearly as dirty as the motel, and the husbands bought a twelve-pack of local beer and the wives bought Twizzlers and chips. This wife even snuck in a small brick of yellow cheese, too.

A few hours later, we were off to Mara's parents' house to rehearse in the woods where the wedding would take place the next morning. My husband had just struck the last banjo string and I was just sinking my teeth into a water cracker with a hunk of Brie on it when he said three very fateful words to me: Where's the bathroom?

Thus began the worst four days of our lives, though we didn't know it yet.

“What's wrong?” I said.

Can't talk. Must run.

“What?”

Oh God, Rebecca.

After I stood outside the bathroom door for over half an hour, trying to look nonchalant while people passed by with plates of gourmet food and prettily colored cocktails, my husband emerged, his face pale as chalk, his hands shaking.

“I think I have food poisoning,” he said. “You have to take me home.”

“I'll get the keys,” I said, slightly more cheerily than was appropriate.

Home. What a wondrous word! I was already picturing our cozy and clean bed, the smell of fresh lilacs from the bouquet on the kitchen counter, the view of the magnolia tree from our living room window.

“Are you going to make it in the car?” I said, thinking of the winding country roads out of Connecticut and back to Massachusetts.

“It's only a few minutes to the motel. I'll stick my head out the window.”

Poof! Gone were my dreams of fresh flowers and clean linens.

“We have to hurry,” my husband said.

• • • • • • • •

I would like to be able to tell you that the fresh air did my husband good and that we were able to turn around and go back to the rehearsal party, that we sat all night beneath the stars with everyone else and played music and enjoyed the lovely summer evening.

But we didn't.

My husband spent our wedding night slung around the commode like a collar, with me sitting on the other side of the door with a decade-old phone book because he didn't want me and the baby to get sick if what he had wasn't food poisoning.

The nearest hospital was twenty miles away, and for several hours my husband was on the verge of letting me take him there.

The room now smelled more of vomit than meat.

Near midnight, when there was nothing left for my husband to expel, he crawled into the dirty old bed and fell asleep. I sat in the stained chair beside the bed for a while, eating Twizzlers and watching the one channel that came in on the dusty TV.

That night I learned about the history of soap and soap production, and I was glad for all the images of cleanliness and health the white bubbles conjured. I looked over at my husband, who was curled up like a child in the bed, the dirty blanket tucked under his chin.