Wedding Cake for Breakfast (18 page)

When a door slams shut on a divorce, it's different from the one that closes quietly after a death. Divorce's ending is noisy and jarring—an intrusion into life's rhythm with painful repercussions that can last indefinitely, dissipating when both parties move on to new relationships.

The aftermath of Mort's death was daunting—relinquishing its hold unimaginable. I had burrowed into a place where apathy seemed not only familiar but oddly comforting. Mort's presence had become an invisible fixture: photos, his art, a medicine chest filled with his prescriptions, drawers spilling over with miscellaneous paraphernalia, after-shave cologne whose scent still lingered, and closets that still housed his suits and ties I hadn't been willing to discard—relics of a life still in progress that ended all too soon.

Added to these were Mark's possessions—items divided between him and his former wife. Our home became a warehouse that bulged with accessories and merged furniture, Mark's baby grand piano and bass, his art collection that demanded wall space on which hung Mort's illustrations and portraits. What was his and mine now became ours as we tiptoed around each other like two intimate strangers taking up space in the same house.

And then there was the matter of the cat—my beloved Annabelle—adopted sixteen years earlier by Mort and me from a litter of felines at the Humane Society. Mark, I soon discovered, was allergic to cat dander, necessitating Annabelle's move to a new home and compounding my already existing feelings of loss.

There was a tug of despair when one day Mark announced in a moment of impulsive rancor that too much of Mort was lingering in corners. It seemed wrong, unnatural. It was time to discard the tangible evidence that another person once dwelled in spaces into which my new husband was trying to fit. Like a well-mannered hostess wanting to please her permanent houseguest, I rearranged furniture, put in a new kitchen, and relegated boxes of memorabilia to the basement to be buried among the old discarded mementos, erasing all traces of my former marriage.

I viewed Mark as a “substitute husband,” replacing the real one, whose absence seemed a glaring omission. And so began our first year, where we juggled between past and present, trying to blend into each other's life like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that didn't quite fit together.

In order for any marriage to spread it swings and fly, it needs a blank canvas on which to paint a new picture. Not, as Lillian Hellman described in
Pentimento,
one where old transparencies of former images peek through the cracked paint.

We entered our version of “couple's boot camp”—a period of adjustment—where we settled into domesticity, and transitioned from whirlwind dating into a less frenetic routine. I secretly missed my bimonthly flights to Florida, a place I had come to view as a mini–vacation retreat. Accustomed as I was to dining out or ordering takeout, suddenly Mark expected me to cook. I preferred grabbing a bite when the mood struck. Where I had dabbled at golf on my Florida visits, I had no intention of doing eighteen holes in Connecticut. Mark's interest in bridge soon became an obsession, starting with Monday and Thursday nights and moving on to Wednesday afternoons. I pored over
Bridge for Dummies
—a study in futility. For me, card games were what I imagined people did to fill up their time, serving no real purpose other than to satisfy a hedonistic urge.

Mark, an engineer and software developer, had become a computer nerd, spending hours locked away doing spreadsheets and making deals with printing companies interested in his estimating program. He required little sleep, often rising before dawn and on the phone with customers by eight o'clock. I could hear him in the next room—his makeshift office—and unaccustomed to having a man lurking underfoot, I grew to resent the lack of privacy that now invaded my once-quiet sanctuary.

Conversely, Mort, a commercial illustrator, had a studio in town where he went each morning, returning at night, with a break when we met for lunch. Now my writing routine was stifled, and the silence on which I had come to rely was being sporadically interrupted. I left the house to find solace at a favorite restaurant where I retreated daily to write or meet friends for lunch, and where I, eventually, completed and later sold two novels.

The idiosyncratic habits of everyday life—traits we once found endearing—morphed into annoying: Mark devoured Oreos in bed, leaving crumbs embedded in the sheets. I ate oranges, discarding the rinds with wild abandon. I left threads of dental floss on the night table. He clipped his toenails on the toilet and cut his own hair, leaving strands of it in the bathroom sink. He had a postnasal drip and snored. I took to rolling my eyes. I stole the blankets. He wouldn't share pillows. He talked during movies. I secretly detested the argyle socks that he wore for all occasions. His saddle shoes (his trademark) seemed pretentious. I slept with a stuffed animal. He preferred the windows closed in summer with the air conditioner blasting. His ex-wife designed quilts. I couldn't sew on a button. He loved cruises. I got seasick. He told bad jokes, and worse, he awakened each morning with a cheery demeanor, while I didn't come alive until after breakfast . . . The list, along with our resentments, grew longer with every passing month until our first year seemed more of a struggle than a loving partnership built on commonality.

My friends were cordially obliging, graciously welcoming Mark as the new man in my life with some minor alterations. No longer could I purge my grief over dinners; nor did they console. Trips down Memory Lane that we once had rehashed with great pleasure—couples vacations, moments shared, inside jokes—were no longer possible in Mark's presence. We were guarded now, choosing topics that were politically correct and couple-friendly.

During our courtship, Mark and I had found our diverse interests to be opportunities to widen our scope. Now these became deterrents, serving only to accentuate the gap between us. It was no longer cute to think that “opposites attract.” I craved the duality I had with Mort: easy, relaxed, accepting. Mark's view of being a couple and mine were vastly different. He was a type A personality, who seemed more controlling than compliant; I, a free spirit, who took oversensitivity to the level of an art form. He was linear and cautious; I, more spontaneous and open. I saw us as two mismatched bookends holding up a rickety marriage, whose expectations might never be met.

And suddenly the honeymoon was over.

Ideally, I had hoped our first year would be steeped in wedded bliss—the blending of two souls blessed to have found each other. Instead, I was haunted by old ghosts—the emotional tentacles of my past. I was married to Mark, and had brought Mort along for the ride. Old memories latched on, infiltrating my life with unrelenting force, keeping me a prisoner as I gnawed on the carcass of my previous marriage, refusing to breathe new life into my new one and validate its existence.

Time has a way of either diluting or exaggerating the truth. The reality was that Mort hadn't been perfect; neither was I, nor was our marriage. Our first year was a time of extensive marital housecleaning and adjustments. Although we did evolve into something that was as close to compatible as I had ever known, it was through the trail of years that we had blossomed and endured. We also had one basic ingredient that Mark and I had yet to experience: a shared history—a marriage's greatest gift.

If life is kind, it often gives us second chances; third chances rarely. One day, toward the end of our first year, we became weary of it all—worn down—and for the first time the baggage we had been lugging around seemed excessively cumbersome. The repetitive dance that we had so skillfully choreographed came to a screeching halt. Both of us needed to take stock before we could move ahead. I was tired of being angry: angry at Mort for dying; at Mark for not being Mort; mostly angry at myself for idealizing Mort to my advantage by punishing my new husband for not measuring up to a phantom husband.

It was time to stop living in a past masquerading as my future.

If, in fact, “past is prologue,” then we are the sum total of all our experiences, and the players who have impacted our lives carry us along on this incredible journey. The two men I had married brought me to where I was now, giving me that third chance to reinvent my life and get on with the business of marriage.

What Mark and I needed most was a springboard from which to take off, unencumbered by past demons, and create a history of our own. But before that was possible, I needed to say good-bye to Mort—an opportunity I never had—even more, to put closure on us as a couple. Similarly, it was time for Mark to accept what once was, namely Mort's and my marriage, not as a competition, but as a testimonial blueprint to all marriages past and future.

The week before our first-year anniversary nine years ago, Mark and I drove to Compo Beach. Summer had just arrived after a rainy spring. It was early evening and the sun was still high in the sky. Placing a blanket on the sand, we sat watching the waves break against the shore. Sailboats punctuated the horizon; children skipped along the water's edge ahead of their parents, delighting in the first taste of warm weather.

For me, summer was always a season of renewal when the days slowed, each one blending into the other like a giant, lazy yawn. Mark and I sat close until dusk settled in, enveloping us in a slate-blue backdrop, merging sky, sand, and water as though there were no dividing line between them, making it hard to tell where one left off and the other began.

Soon the early evening breezes kicked up and the beach emptied. It was just the two of us now, save for the seagulls that swooped down alongside our picnic basket, hoping to get lucky. Deciding to take a walk before supper, we sauntered along the water's edge—husband and wife in one shadow. I reached over and took Mark's hand as his closed over mine. The days were longer now. Our first year of marriage was nearly behind us, the old ghosts gently laid to rest. We had made it through.

As I pulled my sweater tightly against me, Mark wrapped his arm around my shoulder. It was a time of beginnings—of history in the making—as we continued down the long expanse of beach toward our hard-earned future so dearly won.

“There's Always Divorce” and Other Parental Advice

SALLY KOSLOW

My sons have put a ring on it. They are getting married. For months, the conversational axis in our households has tilted on diamond versus sapphire, tuxedo versus dark suit, and Costa Rica versus Jackson Hole, since the venue of Venus is booked. Not that my boys hold my opinions in especially high regard. As the mother of grooms, my primary function has been to stifle myself, ruminate on the true meaning of mother-in-law-hood, and write checks. After the Jurassic Bar Mitzvah era, my husband and I thought our major fiduciary responsibility for bash throwing was over, but—who knew?—today the groom's family goes halfsies on many expenses, and there are many.

From what I can tell, Jed and Rory have chosen their life partners well. I have grown attached to these almost-daughters, and after playing house, I'm glad they're going legal. Living together is fine—I did it myself—but one nasty fight and a call to Moishe's Movers later, both Anne and Kim could be out of my life.

For wedding number one, I bought a strapless column of Dolce & Gabbana satin so sleek and corseted I don't plan to eat as much as a scoop of ice cream between now and July. For wedding number two, which is next December, I hope to wear a dreamy velvet frock I pounced on at my one and only Chanel sample sale, justifying the purchase with that eternal salvo, “I'll wear it someday.” Someday is around the corner, a son taking a wife. This brings me back—to that time before both boys sprouted wit and whiskers, before they arrived at all, to those starter years when my husband and I were twenty-three, younger than my kids are now, just married, and calling a bagel dinner so we could nap, then leave at eleven for Studio 54.

At twenty-three, some people are old oaks. They've fought wars, supported families, become parents, faced disasters, or at the very least skipped high school because they were too smart for their own good. At that age, Rob and I were not quite smart enough to get out of our own way. Our vision of married life was fuzzy. We were an unlikely couple: East Coast boy/Midwest girl, Hellmann's mayo/Miracle Whip, outgoing/shy, athletic/not. We bickered. We competed. We were young.

Rob and I were standard-issue, early-1970s types, though cut of different cloth. He was charming yet caustic, a suburban hippie with eyes the color of grass, the kind you mow, not the sort we smoked at college, where we'd dated for two years. Rob majored in French, a romantic yet useless choice unless you hoped to teach the language or work where it is spoken. He planned to do neither. He hadn't planned at all. After graduation, Rob returned to his parents' home near New York City and drove a cab. Every Sunday he made deliveries for a bakery, so the pint-size freezer in the kitchenette through which you squeezed into my similar-size apartment was always stuffed with jaw-breaking rugelach he received as a tip.

I was conventional yet career-oriented, a girl who'd moved from Fargo to Manhattan with a degree in English and her earnestness so intact that when Rob once suggested lunch at McDonald's because it was my “kind of place,” I wept at the insult. He liked golf tournaments. I,
Masterpiece Theatre.
I couldn't understand what was funny about Woody Allen and he felt the same way about the news from Lake Wobegone.

Soon after I arrived in New York, an Alberta Clipper blew in from my mother, trumpeting the message “get the guy to marry you or move on.” I'm not a lot of things, but I am determined, and took this direction to heart. Moving on, I decided, was unthinkable. Rob was more than my love. He'd become my roommate, my only close friend within fifteen hundred miles, and my Seeing Eye dog in a city of blinding confusion. I'd landed an editing job—back at college in Madison, Wisconsin, when not ducking the national guard as they teargassed Vietnam War protesters, I, with shame for my bourgeois ambition, had mailed résumés—but the fancy-pants atmosphere of the magazine where I worked scared the confidence right off me. Every night, Rob restored it, and even though both of us were embryonic, something told me he was the one. I'm not sure, however, why he stuck with me; we weren't caught in a maelstrom of nuptials. I suspect Rob believed that one day I would simply disappear, not turn to him every morning and ask, as I did, “Is this the day we're getting engaged?”

Had a woman ever tried this on one of my sons, she would have found me stalking her, assault weapon in hand. Forget The Rules. My approach was the kind of niggling, tone-deaf assault that ultimately can wear a man down. One August evening, as Rob and I drove to his parents' home, we pulled to the side of the road and he popped open a small velvet box that contained a sparkling rock. I don't recall if he actually asked me to marry him, but the next stop involved toasting with champagne at his parents' home. I later learned that the family had anticipated an epic engagement during which, I imagine, they hoped their son might, say, graduate from law school. But all of these people—and I add my name to the list—had underestimated my mother, a woman who knew how to seal a deal.

Nowadays a bride and groom become their own ecosystem. But decades ago, it was the mother of the bride's Woodstock. The bride chose her dress, a color scheme, and with her fiancé's input—assuming he was interested, which Rob was not—china and silver patterns. The groom showed up with a ring, hangover optional. My mother selected our wedding date and virtually everything else. Not once did Rob and I meet with a florist, a stationer, a caterer, a bandleader. This gave us ample time to wonder,
What have we gotten into?
Three months after the wedding train had left the station, I bared my cold feet to my father. Never one to confront my mother, his response was, “There's always divorce.”

Rob and I were married on December 26 in North Dakota. The temperature never broke zero. Rob's family tells tales about how tears formed icicles on their eyelashes, how the hearty locals plugged cars into warming contraptions before they drove, and how while the New York guests bundled in full-length mink, bikini-clad Canadian tourists cavorted around the Holiday Inn pool as if they were catching rays in Barbados.

On Christmas, we got a special gift from the rabbi, whose wife had just dumped him. At a command-performance counseling session, he ranted about how most marriages crash over sex or money. Or both! At the rehearsal an hour later, my future mother-in-law became incensed when the same rabbi forbid the exclamation point that had ended every other Jewish wedding for 5,732 years: the groom breaking a glass. I never fully understood the rabbi's beef, because I stopped listening after “hymen” and the shade that word turned my father's face. Rob developed a fever that spiked during the wedding ceremony. At the reception, a drunken couple danced to our song before we did. We did have a high old time on the trip back east, however, when a blizzard grounded our plane and a Minneapolis hotel put us up in their honeymoon suite. The detour didn't delay our real honeymoon because we hadn't planned one. We simply returned to our messy little dive and matching life.

None of this was an auspicious start to marriage, and it didn't get better when a few weeks later we were robbed in our brownstone's vestibule. My new husband handed over his wallet. I had just cashed my dainty fashion-magazine paycheck and peeled off two tens. “Give the guy all your fucking money!” Robert yelled. “He's pointing a knife at my back.” Reluctantly, I complied.

After this, without discussing it, I decided that we needed a doorman. Back in the day, apartments were easy to come by in our neighborhood, where sensible people wouldn't park their cars, much less themselves. After looking for an hour with a broker, I announced to Rob that we were moving. The same day we signed a lease for a one-bedroom in a grand dowager building. Our apartment, which you entered through a genuine foyer, had a vast living room and cozy dining room, enormous closets, high ceilings, herringbone parquetry, bookshelves, arches, a bike room with a vending machine that sold milk, a laundry in the basement instead of blocks away, and a leafy view of Riverside Park. Recently, this apartment was listed for sale at $1.3 million, but when we were newlyweds, it cost $285 a month to rent.

We were excited about our new home, but when we changed addresses, we not only brought along our bad habits; we also seemed to adopt the other person's most odious traits. Rob learned to be relentless and I to be sarcastic. I also threw things. One evening, in response to a flying phone book, he tossed all my clothes in the hall and locked me out in my underwear. Good times.

And then he got mugged. Rob had segued from taxi hack to construction worker to real estate manager in the dodgiest part of the Bronx, where he was cornered in a boiler room, beaten by a junkie with a pipe, shot, and left for dead. His boss called my office and told me to go home and wait for further information. Why I didn't rush straight to the ER I can explain only by saying I was so stunned I felt as if I, too, had been conked on the head. I was also twenty-three going on thirteen, still doing whatever real adults instructed. A few hours later, to my immense relief, a bandage-swaddled Rob staggered into our apartment, his thrift-shop army jacket splattered with blood. The next night we threw a party for all our friends, where Rob held court and repeated his war story on a continuous loop

Perhaps the beating was divine intervention, mugging some sense into us. We rarely discussed it, but the incident was an elephant of a testimonial that whispered “grow up.” Incrementally, we did. The process began by making a home. We stapled pink plaid sheets to our bedroom walls, had draperies sewn by an elf in a yarmulke on the Lower East Side, and ordered pinkalicious shag carpeting. The room looked very Pepto-Bismol meets Cinderella. Unaware that a product existed that stripped finish in minutes, Rob and I spent night after sweaty night sanding our cupboard doors, which we repainted egg-yolk yellow. We hung calico curtains—our kit had a win—unpacked wedding presents, and began to host dinner parties on our twelve place settings of Wedgwood Florentine and Gorham Buttercup sterling flatware. Our signature dish was Craig Claiborne's stuffed flank steak, though one night we threw an earsplitting disco party and served fried chicken in straw baskets lined with red bandanas. We were a colorful couple, doing what happy couples did. When our first anniversary rolled around, we celebrated at La Bibliothèque, a restaurant tricked out like a library. Seeing Rob through the candlelight, I realized I no longer felt spooked or tempted by my dad's term of endearment, “There's always divorce.” We'd made it through the first year. Life could only get better, and it did.

Over the years, we have befriended many couples. Half of them have divorced, many of our friends are on round two or three of marriage, and several of my best buddies are single. Meanwhile, Rob and I are chugging along, the little engine that never surrendered. My husband doesn't look much different to me than he did in college, but inexplicably, soon we will celebrate our fortieth anniversary, on which I believe you're expected to exchange gift certificates to orthopedists and cosmetic surgeons. We are happy, very happy. In no way, however, do we define the charmed life.

During the decades, we've faced down the standard grab bag of health problems, deaths of parents, work setbacks, and—damn you, Rabbi—intermittent financial frustration. If you ask Rob, he'll say I still don't know how much milk to pour in his cereal, and yes, once I voted for Rudolph Giuliani. We aren't one of those couples who have hammered out a mission statement that ensures that we present ourselves like matched draft animals. We're nobody's role model, but I'm skeptical of public role models. Whenever I see couples behaving on cultlike autopilot, always in character—“You tell the story, Pooh bear!” “No, baby, you!”—what I think they reveal is their measure of devotion to self-control and branding, not necessarily each other. We are a different kind of team, still making it up as we go along, pissing each other off and sometimes acting bossy, critical, and small. But lubricating every childish act is laughter, which, at least 65 percent of the time, is not at the other's expense.

After this lifetime together, we share a common history, which is not small at all. Our story is filled with anecdotes, digressions, and footnotes that are goofy, tender, terrifying, and ours. How when we roasted our first turkey we chose a recipe that called for a crab-apple jelly glaze and had to use a hammer to crack the bird's shellac. (Never again have we served poultry as moist or as purple.) How numerous cigar-puffing uncles and fifty other near and dear ones crowded into our apartment and made seven pounds of Zabar's finest Nova Scotia salmon disappear in five minutes at the bacchanalia that was our oldest son Jed's bris. How after we drove my mother to the airport the next day we sang “Happy Days Are Here Again.” They were. We had become a family. (Correction: a family and a nurse. In today's dollars, she would probably also cost $1.3 million.)

Some of our chapters are dull; others painful. We are awash in memories we can lip-synch, including some Rob and I could and would never explain to anyone. But this archive welds us, friends and lovers who've grown up together. Whenever I look at Rob, I see the boy in the man. Dammit, I love the guy.

That Jed and Rory are getting married is, for their generation, almost quaint; statistics point to cohabitation, not marriage. Recently, when one of their new friends discovered that both Rob and I were the parents, still married to each other, the shock on this kid's face made me feel as if we had just stumbled out of a diorama at the Museum of National History. Has our endurance made our boys more willing than many of their friends to go over the cliff to marriage? All I know is that we haven't scared them off.

Jed and Rory strike me as infinitely more prepared for matrimony than Rob and I were, though in fairness, they're far older: thirty-four and twenty-eight. They treat their fiancées with enormous consideration and respect, as they are treated in return. Teasing is gentle and infrequent. They make plans, many plans. Perhaps we should take lessons from them, not offer advice. But to a mother, advice giving is part of the job description, and so: