~This essay was first
published in Fourth Genre (2013).
old.
Once upon a time, there was a girl who was not an
orphan tended by a woman who was not a nanny in a red brick house that could
never be, by any calisthenics of imagination, a castle—
though
there was a view of the sea.
That girl sitting at the table was me. That woman standing by the stove was my
mother.
We lived then in the late splendor of
catalogues. Everything we ever wanted
could be found on a glossy page. Locate
the little white letter in the upper right corner, then call and place your
order.
I liked to linger in lingerie, with my scissors and my paste and my tablet of red
construction paper. These were old
catalogues, mine to cut and alter. My
mother stirred a pot of something frothy and said, “Pack a suitcase.” This was only pretend. She wanted me to choose the clothes I would
take on the trip that comes after the wedding.
If the man was there, the man who was every day
less my savior and more my father, he would fill a glass with water and lean
beside the sink. “Did someone order a
honeymoon salad?” I never got it. I shook my head. Then, he’d chuckle—“Lettuce alone!”
I noticed over time the faces of women in the
catalogues. There were not many of them,
so the same woman wore garment after garment, sometimes with her hair let down
or her lipstick lightly blotted. One
face I loved—the dark curls, the pert nose, the creamy complexion. She posed in nightgowns, pajamas, matching bras
and panties. Once, I found her in a
black lace body suit. Though it seemed
transparent, nothing was visible beneath it.
I expected a glimpse of her real body, but she had none. She was like a doll arranged on a low chaise
lounge: her elbow bent by someone else, a smile painted across her lips, her
bright eyes unblinking.
“Have you found what you’ll wear on your wedding
night?” My mother leaned across the
counter as I tore the page free and trimmed its edges.
“This,”
I said, triumphant.
“That’s a little racy,” she murmured. “Why don’t you try again?”
blue.
One of
my earliest memories is of a wedding. It
is blurry in that way of memories before they contain narratives. Summer, I think, because my skin is
warm. I wear a white eyelet dress with a
blue sash that matches the blue ribbon tied around my white Easter bonnet. This bonnet keeps the sun from blinding my
eyes.
My parents are there—my mother in a long skirt,
my father in suit and tie. We sit in
chairs on the lawn, and someone rolls a carpet down the makeshift aisle. A woman with hair like a silver curtain
strums the strings of a harp.
I cannot recall precisely the bride or groom, the
minister’s deep voice and lavish robes, the boy who bears the ring. Two girls, not much older than I, scatter
petals from small woven baskets. My
mother squeezes my hand. I study
everyone’s shoes. In the distance, a
little dog paces behind a fence, waits for the dancing to begin.
I think in the way of thoughts before they are tied
into words, parcels made tidy with knowing.
The gist of it, folded into a bow—this
is the most important thing I could ever do.
old.
I have cut three wedding gowns from the catalogue
and smoothed them onto thick sheets of paper.
My mother reviews them, remarks on the gown she likes best.
“And when will this wedding take place?”
“Christmastime,” I say. “There should be snow. We may have to go to the mountains.”
“The best time for a wedding is spring or
summer. Your father and I were married
in August.”
“But my bridesmaids will wear velvet,” I
explain. “Red velvet dresses with furry
white pouches to keep their hands warm.”
I have seen this before in a film.
“How will they carry their flowers?” She is testing me now.
“White
roses,” I say, “pinned to their pretty lapels.”
I thought the wedding was a fashion show, a
commercial for the marriage.
But what
was a marriage? I did not
know.
borrowed.
It was a treasure hunt, but we
always meant to put everything back. A
distant cousin was getting married at a distant house. I fell asleep on the car ride there. When I saw my closer cousin, she was
ready. She had her mother’s old valise—leather,
with a satisfying clasp. We wandered the
rooms and lifted trinkets from the tables.
In the bathroom, I took so many soaps my own small purse came to exude a
dreamy lilac and honeysuckle smell.
Then, we were on the landing. Suddenly, everything was still. I crouched down and peered through the
window, the square kind at the top of the stairs. They were kissing, my distant cousin and his
distant bride, and the crowd assembled on the patio leapt to their feet and clapped
and cheered.
“We missed it,” my cousin sighed. “Now they’re different forever.”
What
was it about the kiss that did this?
Thinking of my mother’s lip print on the envelope, her cursive
annotation—SWAK!
“I
always close letters to your father like that.”
She pointed to the row of capitals.
“It’s an acronym. It means sealed with a kiss.”
“How are they different?” I wanted
to know. “They look just the same as
before.”
My cousin lifted a votive candle
from the window ledge, slipped it into her pocket. “Haven’t you read your storybooks? The right kiss at the right time is the only
way to make or break a spell.”
old.
Jump
rope chant: First comes love, then comes
marriage, then comes the baby in the baby carriage.
I could
see there was a proper sequence to things.
It was like math, the way you had to add before you could multiply, then
multiply before you could divide.
These were the words, three words
like the peaks of three snowy mountains—Love,
Marriage, Baby. You had to hike a
long way to reach them, but the mountain-climbers had a word for this, too. They might plant a flag or drink a thermos of
cocoa when they reached the summit. But what did you call the space between
those summits?
“Do you mean the lowland?” my father
asked. “The opposite of a mountain is a
valley.”
I could picture the valleys,
too—snowy-deep, untrodden. It seemed
every mountain had one. The valley
beside Love was Lonely. The valley beside Marriage was Single.
The valley beside Baby was Childless. How I wanted to find the crocus heads
pushing up through that cold, cup them with my woolly mittens. How I wanted to lay myself down and make
angels, one after the next, until a path could be forged across the angels’
bodies. Maybe then—it required a deep
breath—maybe then those angels would bless the valleys where only the very sad
or very brave would dare to tread.
borrowed.
I had
some confusion, though, about “happily ever after.” Did Prince Charming ever actually marry
anyone? Could the Ash Girl or the Sleeping
Beauty live happily ever after without a ring and a dress and a softly
whispered “I do”? Or a suite at the
Marriott, for that matter? Or a baby
that came the next year?
“Someday,” my mother wept, “your father will give
you away.”
Newly skeptical, I heard myself say it: “I think
I would rather stay.”
You see, I was beginning to understand about
stories—how you could read them for the sounds they made, the pictures they
painted in your mind. But then, when you
went back to them, you could read again for something different. You could wriggle on your belly and sift through
the soil until you found their meanings, which were hard little stones in your
hands.
Everything Cinderella wore was borrowed,
including the glass shoe. I felt uneasy
about it—all that false pretense surrounding her one late night at the
ball.
My father read to me for the last time from the
big book of Disney favorites, read to me until I stopped him.
“But she was lying to the Prince,” I say. “Everyone says you’re supposed to be
yourself, but Cinderella came as someone else.”
He shakes his head. “No.
She just wanted to put her best foot forward. She just wanted to look her best.”
I rub one pebble around and around in my palm
until it forms a tiny blister. “And what
about that shoe? Why didn’t it vanish
with the rest of her things? By rights,
he should have never been able to find her.”
My father removes his glasses and wipes them with
his handkerchief. “The way you’re talking—it
sounds like you wish he hadn’t.”
What of
that? What if he hadn’t? Could I change the story? Did I have that power? The Prince seemed like a dubious
man. He claimed to love her, but he didn’t
recognize her face? He needed the shoe
to prove she was the one he had pledged his heart to?
“He even says it himself in the film. ‘Do I love you because you’re beautiful, or
are you beautiful because I love you?’ I
think she’s too good for him. I think
the Prince is a little bit shallow.”
Now my father wrinkles his brow. His hands are clean and soft with no dirt
beneath the nails. “I think you’re
reading too much into this,” he says.
blue.
In the church pew, we find our offering
envelopes, the little wood pencils to fill in the lines.
Before
she can stop me, I take my mother’s blue ballpoint; I tithe my dime. Then, I check the box beside Ms. and print “Wade.”
“This one,” my mother corrects,
pointing to Miss. “It lets people know you’re not married.”
“I’m ten years old. I think they know.”
“Still,” she says, crossing it out. “You want to get into the habit.”
old.
I study my parents’ wedding
album. Everything is white, even the
cover, though it is stenciled with silver bells. Even the edges of the photographs are white,
so you could write something if you wanted to, but no one has.
“The train of your dress is so
long,” I say. “Didn’t you worry you
would trip?”
“No.
It’s easier to walk than you would think, and I had my sister, the maid
of honor, to smooth out the wrinkles and set everything straight.”
“Did you like having so many people
staring at you? I think I would blush or
faint or something.”
“When it happens, everything will be
perfect, and you won’t mind them looking.
You’ll be glad. You’ll be giving
hope to every young girl and single woman in the audience. Yours will be, for all those assembled, the
face of love.”
For some reason, at twelve, I turn
easily queasy. I can’t take comfort in
the old truths anymore. Watching The Sound of Music with my mother, I walk
out during Liesl’s dance in the gazebo.
This seems the best time to blow my nose, to forage for something to
make a sandwich. When I return, she has
paused it for me—Liesl in mid-air as Rolfe spins her around,
Cinderella-style. Her shoes, too, seem
impractical.
“He’s going to be a Nazi,” I say.
“We don’t know that yet,” she
replies.
But the scene where Fraulein Maria
gets married—it is hard not to watch. It
is hard to feign indifference to that grandeur.
The music swells, the people rise, and my nose burns with tears I refuse
to cry.
“This film came out two years before I married
your father.” My mother turns
sentimental now, clipping her coupons and sipping her tea. “I kept going back to the theater for
this—one scene in nearly three hours of screen time. I wanted to copy everything, right down to
her crown of roses.”
Fraulein Maria, who is also Julie
Andrews, who is also my namesake and a woman whose beauty doesn’t end with her
face, fills me with inexplicable dread.
From nun and nanny to wife and mother, I know I cannot walk in her
shoes. I haven’t the patience for it, or
the stamina. What’s more: her shoes come
second-hand from a man who must reject another woman, and before that, whose
first wife had to die.
“You can’t marry someone when you’re
in love with someone else,” Captain von Trapp tells Baroness Schrader on the
terrace. He has the power to change the
future, for not one but two women’s lives.
blue.
We begin watching Dr. Quinn: Medicine Woman on Saturday
nights as a family. It is “wholesome,”
my father lauds.
“And Sully’s so handsome,” my mother beams.
Jane Seymour has one blue eye and
one green, which is enough for me. My
biology teacher calls this condition heterochromia
iridis, which can be genetic or acquired. My history teacher reports that Jane
Seymour was the third wife of Henry VIII, possibly his one true love. She is remembered for birthing Henry his only
male heir, even as she died from complications after.
Dr. Quinn, who comes to the valley
at the base of a mountain called Pikes Peak, is without love, marriage, or children. We learn her first name is Michaela, mistaken
on a telegram for “Michael A.” No one
expects a woman doctor. We learn she is
thirty-five and has never been married, which requires an explanation. Her one true love—her betrothed—died in the Civil War.
Now we can feel pity for her and not suspicion. She was trying to be a wife but was
prevented, by circumstances beyond her control.
We also learn that Dr. Quinn is a
virgin, which is not the same as unmarried, but “should be,” my father says. “It’s nice to see a show with good
old-fashioned values for a change.”
Even though I have studied the
mechanics of sex in school, I find the prospect as remote as an island, as
mythical as Atlantis. I am a virgin with
two blue eyes and a little green of envy in my heart.
When Dr. Quinn marries Sully, who I
understand is beautiful but for whom I must force a swoon, the crucial scene is
the one that happens next. Will it be
“happily,” this surrender of her virginity, this sequel to the wedding vow of
wife? She has been alone in her body so
long—twenty years longer than I. She has
made a home in that valley, pitched her own tent and learned how to tend her
own fire. Must Love lead to Marriage? Is this the only chair lift passing through
the heart?
I take the VHS tape to my room in
secret. I sit at the edge of the bed, my
face close to the screen, scanning for shadows of uncertainty, resistance. Sully has made their marriage bed in a train
compartment. Her dress swaddles her into
something half-child, half-swan. They
seal again with a kiss, then draw the shades together. When he lays her down on the bed, she cups
the back of his head, consenting. He
contains the music, I understand then; she waits for the dancing to begin.
borrowed.
“I’m a
little concerned,” the teacher says. “I
asked you write about a ritual in your faith.
I don’t see how what transpires here is a ritual.”
“It’s a wedding,” I tell her. “Aren’t weddings a ritual in any faith?”
“Yes, but—” I have been summoned to her office. This is not the first time. She thinks I am troubled but also
promising. Ambivalence hangs between us
in the air. “You realize that this isn’t
really about the wedding.”
“Is it ever?”
I have been practicing my enigmatic face, shortening my sentences for
effect.
“I think perhaps you’ve misunderstood the purpose
of the assignment. In describing the
ritual, I wanted you to consider its significance.”
“I have.
The wedding exists to prove a marriage has taken place, and the marriage
exists so the man can take the woman.”
The teacher is married, which means that she has
been taken, but I notice also she has not taken her husband’s name. Ms. A married woman who is not a Mrs.
“I need to confirm—” she uncaps her pen as if she
is going to make a mark of some kind—“I need to confirm this didn’t really
happen to you.”
“I’ve never been married,” I shrug.
“Not the marriage—the rape.” The word is so hot it
burns the roof of her mouth to say it.
“What rape?
This is a story about a girl who marries her high school sweetheart.”
“No.
This is a story about a young woman who marries the only man she has
ever known, and then he takes her to her childhood home and ties her hands to
the wicker headboard and—has his way with
her.” Thank goodness for
euphemisms. She would never have made it
through that sentence without them.
“It’s a metaphor,” I say calmly. “It’s about a loss of innocence. That’s why I put baby’s breath on her
windowsill and dolls on the bed that he has to sweep aside.”
“But it’s not true?” she makes me promise,
holding my gaze a long time.
“Not literally,
no”—though I do have a wicker headboard.
“So, why did you write it?” She lets her pen trace the length of my
margin.
“I wanted to look at a different ritual besides
the wedding itself—the one no one talks about but everyone implies.”
“Consummation,”
she nods.
“To me, even though I’ve never been
consummated”—I feel the need to reassure her now—“it seems like the place where
borrowed meets appropriation.”
“Can you say a little more about that?” Her brows have come together in a dark line;
her lips, which are thin and pale, pucker deeply with concern.
“No.
I really don’t think I can.”
new.
In the
Sharon Olds’ poems I begin to read in college, sex is a new, rare, coveted
thing. The way she writes sex makes me
want to want it, makes me wonder if I ever will. Then, I remember—like a dream that returns
all day, bit by bit, in fragments—that I do
want it, that I have. Only where was sex in the old
sequence? Could it come before Love?
Must it come after Marriage? (It was only clear that it must precede Baby in the baby carriage.)
At the central desk in the Mormon
genealogy room in Salt Lake City: “Are you married yet?” the woman’s sweet
voice inquires.
“Me?”
She nods and smiles.
“I’m—I’m only nineteen,” I stammer.
“It’s never too early to start your
family planning.”
A pamphlet with a husband and wife and many rosy
children—everyone white and clad in khaki—appears beside me on the counter. I never see her hand. She seems to move the pamphlet with her mind.
“That’s OK,” I say. “I already have a plan.”
In my dorm closet again, I assess
the stash. One jug of Carlo Rossi wine,
the only kind I could find in the pantry at home. This will help to put us in the mood, to
soothe our nerves—should there ever be an us
and a reason to be nervous. Also,
many condoms from Campus Health, pilfered from a small woven basket when the
receptionist stepped out to heat her lunch.
I don’t know how many I will need, so I take all of them. I only know there must not be a baby in a
baby carriage.
Finally, a pack of cigarettes—Marlboro
Reds—because I once heard a tattooed barista tell a suave-seeming man that they
were sexy. People seem to want these
after. I’ve seen all the movies, some of
them several times. At least in bed
then, after the sweat and the swoon, when the words have become insufficient, I
won’t have to wonder what comes next. I’ll
have something to do with my mouth and my hands.
borrowed.
It
is my last time in my parents’ church, and I am restless. The weddings and baptisms have all been
announced. The preacher has read from
the big book of laws and parables. I
slip five dollars into the envelope, which feels less like a gift than a
bribe.
My mother watches as my hand hovers above Ms. “What did I tell you
about that designation?”
Recently, I have become irate about double standards. Everything is grounds for comparison. “Look,” I whisper. “Men are always Mr. their whole lives. They never have to change their prefix,
and no one expects them to change their names.
I won’t do it either. It isn’t
fair.”
“So, you’re going to be that kind of woman then? You’ve made up your mind?” She signs her check in flourished script—the
first name hers, the last name borrowed.
Anger is opening inside me like a rose.
I take her pen and check the box beside Mr.
What was a marriage then? I wrote it in a poem. Marriage, for women, was a big pink eraser. They tried to make it sound nice, but it
wasn’t. I was onto them, whoever they
were.
Another euphemism: this Pink Pearl.
blue.
In a poem
she wrote to her daughter, Sharon Olds makes the following prediction: “That
night will come. Somewhere someone will
be entering you, his body riding under your white body, dividing your blood
from your skin…”
Only for you, it is day, and the sky
is rippling blue in that soft September way; only faint wisps of cloud annotate
its margins. It is also your birthday, and
what you want most is a gift you cannot return—pure experience, nothing with a
string or a tag.
Later that day, you will arrive at
your parents’ house to play the good daughter again, the one who saves herself
for marriage, the one who faithfully abstains.
But the sequence and the startled
opening and that feeling like the flutter of trapped birds and then the glimpse
of something as through a skylight returns to you in dream-haze for days.
You are not ashamed the way your
mother promised you would be. This is
the first surprise. But it is not like
the poems promised either. You do not
feel a great cathedral inside. Instead,
like someone opened an umbrella indoors, and you are the indoors, and he is the
umbrella with the sharp points and the too-wide smile.
Perhaps—an unsettling thought—perhaps you are not a Modern Woman after
all. Your mother passes the piping hot rolls. Your father mentions the weather: how mild it
has been, how serene. But wasn’t he the
same person who always said, “It’s calmest before the storm”?
It might be in fact—an intriguing thought—that you are a Post-Modern Woman, the one who
comes after and other, who does not play by her mother’s rules, but neither
does she play by their converse. Less
chart and graph, less dotted line. More
dark mosaic and white noise.
new.
It was long in coming, but we knew it,
the way we always know. My best friend’s
wedding like the arrival of a train, and the people on the platform remarked,
“Why, lookie here. Right on time.”
“Will you stand with me at the altar?”
she asked. “Will you read a sonnet for
us in blessing?”
Would
she be erased by him, her gentle husband?
Would he be erased by her? I
did not know.
So I stood, and I read, and I played
the part of witness—the part I knew well, the part I knew best of all. It was important not to seem jealous. (Was I?) It was important not to begrudge. (Did I?)
There were calla lilies on my dress, the dress I
had chosen. Later, a woman told me they
were the flower of death. “Don’t worry,
dear. You didn’t know.”
A furtive look on my face, a blush
cresting my cheeks. Ambivalence hangs in
the air between us.
new.
This is
the last time my parents will dance together, or the last time I will see them
dance, so it is final for me: the way a photograph preserves its subject
exactly as she was and cannot account for changes that follow.
There they are, my parents, as vivid in memory as
they were that day in the chilly church basement: gliding across the checkered
floor, swaying in time to the Big Band tunes.
Perhaps I felt a little wistful then, watching them from the folding
chair with the Styrofoam cup in my hand—wistful that perhaps I would never be a
blushing bride, a Mrs. So-and-So—that emulation they had
always longed for.
“Do you feel sad?” my mother asks when she pauses
for a cookie and some punch.
“Sad?
No. Why should I be sad?”
“Well, it’s hard, I know, being surrounded by so
many couples. But your time will come,
and all of us will dance on your wedding day.”
“Mom—”
“Yes?” She
is powdering her shiny skin into a plain matte finish.
“Why are we here again?”
“Well, Nancy’s my friend, and she and her husband
wanted to renew their vows.”
“But they’re vows. Aren’t they supposed to last forever?”
“Of course they are, but it’s just that her
family’s been through so much, and they’ve weathered it all—every last
storm. Now don’t stare, but—” She makes
a subtle gesture toward a young woman in a tight black dress. I had noticed her earlier: the freckled arms
and cropped red hair, the body that seemed afraid to ever stop moving. “That’s Nancy’s daughter, and in the last two
years, she has dropped over a hundred pounds.”
“Oh.” I am
not sure what to say. (Was there a right thing to say?)
“On the road to spinsterhood,” my mother gleams,
“someone just made a U-turn!” Then, she swivels
her gaze toward a young man, dark and stalwart, standing beside the
pass-through window. “And Nancy’s
son—see him there? He used to be gay,
and now he’s not anymore. I hear he’s
even found himself a girlfriend.”
Many thoughts still require images to explain
them, especially in the absence of certain words. No one will tell you that there is a place apart
from the mountain and the valley, separate from the summit and the
lowland. Sometimes it is concealed by a
waterfall, which everyone recognizes as a symbol for passion. For example, many lovers stood at Snoqualmie
Falls and kissed each other fervently; some even recited their vows and
exchanged their rings against the roar of water cresting over the rocks.
This was the dangerous side of Love. They liked it, even though they were afraid.
But below and behind that glistening spume, I could
picture it now—what Thomas Wolfe had called “an unseen door.” If you opened it, you could step through the
mountain and change your trajectory entirely.
No longer ascending or descending, you could traverse the landscape of
the underside, the unspoken. I had approached that keyhole many times in my
mind, but it too was dangerous, and I was still afraid to peer inside.
My father extends his hand to me, and I
startle. “Sweetheart,” he says, “may I
have this dance?”
borrowed.
The new millennium makes me want to
do something extraordinary and daring—maybe even mountain-climb. I work with a man who makes me laugh sometimes,
who shows me the way the shoes lay flat in their box: “Like opening a quote,
then adding an apostrophe.” He smiles
his best, syntactic smile.
We work on commission, the way everyone does,
whether they know it or not. Once, in an
elevator with him, I pressed the STOP button.
I meant the opposite. I meant
READY, SET, GO. I wanted so much to be
like those women in the movies, leaning in and leaning back, playing coy and
enjoying it. Beneath my starched white
collar and my pinstriped skirt, I could feel myself tremble, tipping: a barrel
poised on a waterfall.
It would have been fitting if the musak had
played, “No one knows what goes on behind closed doors,” Charlie Rich soulfully
crooning. I did, in fact, let my hair
hang down, and he was glad then to be a certain kind of man.
When the doors opened, though, I should have been
a certain kind of woman, her palms slick with concupiscence, her heart in her
throat like a wild bird. Instead, I
smoothed my skirt and walked on toward the break room calmly. I can still hear my heels clicking on the
newly shined floor.
blue.
For our
wedding, we agree to meet in the orchard.
It is our long ago and far away, our fairy tale landscape after all. His brother is a priest, and I have two
friends to act as witnesses. What I want
is small and simple and private: a dress without a train and a blue car waiting
in the underbrush.
“I’ll rent a convertible,” he
promises. “We’ll drive all day to the
beach.”
One friend is married; she
encourages me. “This is where it leads,”
she says. “Not an end at all—a new
beginning.” I can tell from an hour in
their home that she loves her husband as I have never loved my fiancé.
My other friend is single and silent
on matters such as these. As I stand
before the three-way mirror, I ask her to fasten the clasp, secure the
zipper. “I never wear dresses anymore,”
I blush. The hot lights of the fitting
room; her hand on my back like a flame.
I am marked now, in a way I cannot erase.
“What about the bouquet? Will you have one?”
“Iris,” I say. “A bundle of them, almost in disarray. So blue they are almost purple.”
Something—it is not
ambivalence—hangs in the air between us.
new.
Instead. This is the word on the little gold
plaque on the large wood door under the waterfall. You can knock as long as you want, but no one
will answer. Your voice will ricochet
and return to you in that cavern, and you may feel, for a moment, more alone
than you ever have.
It is worth noting that your parents
also have receded into the past. They
are smaller now, in retrospect, like the wax figures atop a wedding cake,
joined at the arm but gazing away from each other, not toward. The deep spell of their long governance has
been broken.
Instead. In lieu
of. Otherwise.
Look for the key in your pocket. If you don’t have a pocket, you might need to
change your clothes.
borrowed.
Carole Maso writes, “We’re a little
lost. In the semiotics. And not a graduate student in sight.”
We were the graduate students. We were a little lost. Not even the semiotics could save us.
The woman and I passed our days in
communal space and spent our nights in rented rooms, and we were furtive and
foolish and unable to stop what we had started.
We hawked the man’s wedding band and went for Thai food. We traveled around, my wedding dress in the
trunk, a library book long overdue. (Think of the stories it couldn’t tell.) Paper
airplanes were made from the marriage license.
Then, one morning, many years in the
future, I woke, and my pockets had sprouted flowers. There they were, fresh as clover in the
neighbor’s lawn. I lay still a long time,
struggling to believe they were mine.
blue.
Then, it
was time. Another friend had summited
the mountain and strolled the scenic bridge—from Love to its adjacent peak. (Was
Wedding the signifier? Was Marriage the signified?)
She asked me to read for her, to
walk ahead of her in a satin dress and stand at the altar in her honor. (In her
shadow?) My beloved sat alone in the
crowd; someone rolled a carpet down the makeshift aisle. Years had passed. We were happy after everything. Her eyes,
cerulean, squinting in sudden sun. Years
had passed. We were happy for everything
to come. Her skirt and blouse, the real body I had glimpsed beneath them. Peaceful in our paradox—not Single, not Married either. What were
we? What was this—our Something Else?
I stood at the altar, she sat in her chair, and all
at once the old rose of anger bloomed in my throat, choked me as I tried to
recite—“How shall we speak of love except in the splurge of roses, and the long
body of the river shining in its silk froth”?
Of course we tell the story of rose and river. These belong to everyone, to all lovers
everywhere, united in romantic fancy. But we are not only speaking of Love! My nostrils flair as I consider it at last:
the blue body paragraph, the red margin line, that vast topography of
difference. It is not the rose and river
only, but the wedding rite, the honeymoon, the married life that follows. That familiar algorithm (part math, part
witchcraft): Love converts to Marriage after a spell. SWAK! But it didn’t—it wouldn’t—not for us.
Later, my beloved would say, “Yes, you have lost
something. It was not something you were
sure you wanted, but you have lost it nonetheless.”
It
wasn’t the ring! It wasn’t the
dress!
Instead: “It was the choice—to choose or not to choose.
What you lost was the possibility
of.”
For the moment, then: too much champagne like a drum in my head; the
catapult of the loose bouquet.
“I’m next!” a triumphant voice exclaims.
The tears on
my cheeks, slowly singeing: I’m not!
Not once. Not ever again.
new.
“I’m suspicious of therapy,” I tell
the therapist, folding my arms. “I’m
suspicious of marriage, too.”
He meets my eyes, holds my gaze
until I look away—back to his hand, back to his ring--
the
thing that divides us. (Or does it?)
“Maybe it isn’t even marriage
exactly,” I sigh. (Was Marriage only the subject?
Was Something Else the theme?) “It’s just—it’s about entitlement, you know.
That’s the theme. That’s my
objection to marriage.”
“So if everyone could freely choose
marriage—if it were an equal right—you’d be married? You and your partner would walk down to the
courthouse and sign the contract today?”
I want to say it is so. I wait for the word—true, indeed, affirmative—like a bell set to ring at a certain time.
Then, Yes is melting on my tongue;
then, No is melting on my
tongue. They are the snow, and I am the
warm ground, the warm sound of Maybe.
Instead, it was Maybe I said.
“Can you say a little more about that?” His face is calm and kind; his pen traces a
dotted line across the page.
I study his ring and shake my
head. “No. I really don’t think I can.”
old.
There are
two women we know, friends we are lucky to call them. They have been “together forever,” they
say. A decade at least—which sounds like
forever to us.
By all accounts, they have a good life. Since Pennsylvania is not a marriage state,
they have what many would call domestic partnership.
(Some
romance is lost in that phrase, but
marriage still implies a husband and wife.
The one is business-like; the
other rife with hints of old dominion.)
The invitation comes in the mail. A cardstock square of plain black script:
“Please join us for our wedding celebration.”
It is Pittsburgh.
It is August in the park. It is forsythia
and forget-me-nots and the purple haze of summer that hangs between us in the
air. They grin and wave, the bride and
bride in slacks and shirts and bright Hawaiian leis. They say, “We figured, why not bring the
beach to us?”
There are these familiar things—the speaking of
vows, the giving of rings—but no frazzled family, no store-bought bouquets. No minister officiates, no photographer
directs. Neither woman’s father walks
her down the aisle. Their names,
paratactic on the page, remain unchanged.
We stand and smile among the witnesses, our
glasses clinking through the singing, the dancing, and the stories told. We toast to their long love, to their
enduring happiness. Several times, I
find the warm water seeping out of my eyes.
“So, what
about the laws?” I ask my friend.
The new platinum band swivels on her pale
finger. “What about them?”
If a wedding doesn’t mark a marriage…I’m a little lost in the semiotics…what
is it a marker for?
blue.
I’m sad, and I don’t know how to
express it. I resent them all—every
married person I have ever known—but I envy them, too, and I also—if I am
honest—feel a little bit smug, a little bit…superior.
Every day my Love walks a tightrope without a
net. Every day they have the whole
circus to support them. Think how brave
my Love must be, by comparison.
“So, let me understand,” he
says. “You don’t want to marry your
partner, but you believe you should have the right to marry her if you choose?”
“The first part is sometimes true; the second
part is always true.”
“But you also wish that no one else would
marry? That there would be a moratorium
on marriage?”
“Just until the laws change. Just until everyone is equal.”
“Do you really believe,” he asks, “that
legislation results in equality?” His
gray eyes narrow and focus on mine. “Has
it been your experience that laws change people’s minds?”
old.
A
poem on my pillow:
I think I grow tensions
like flowers
in a wood where
nobody goes.
Each wound is perfect,
encloses itself in a tiny
imperceptible blossom,
making pain.
Pain is a flower like that one,
like this one,
like that one,
blue.
In the dream, I return to the
orchard where I once loved a man—my best attempt of those long years of Almost,
of Not Quite. I stand in the high grass
under the apple tree and remember the picnics, remember our clothes cast off
after the picnics, our bodies becoming Something Else.
Then, I stand at the turn of the road and
remember my absence, that old elopement I managed to elope from. How had
I come to say that I would come? How had
I made this promise to him—
as if our lives were only a
catalogue page, mine to cut and alter?
In the dream, I do not wear the
white dress. I do not carry the velvet
box with the man’s thick band inside. My
beloved holds long-stemmed iris in her lovely hands, blue as twilight and so
many she can barely grasp them. We wear
blue jeans and canvas shoes. We are not
expecting a special occasion.
“Look into my eyes,” she says. They are blue also, like the sea or the
sky. “Not these irises,” shaking the flowers as she shakes her head. They make a gentle, rustling sound. “These.”
I glimpse the ticker at the dark corner of the
dream: Your life with her—that is the
special occasion.
old.
I had always wanted to belong
without being claimed. To be a wife
meant I was wanted, but it did not confirm, and in fact might obscure, the
truth of what I wanted. Often I felt I couldn’t bear it—this cultural
imperative—yet it was hard to look away from the Chosen Ones, to surrender my
envy and even my admiration.
(Did I
spurn marriage first because I feared I would never be chosen?)
I lost my best friend in the
aftermath, the way numbers in a problem are sometimes left over and will not
resolve. I had become her vexing
remainder.
“I’m really surprised by your casualness.” The words singed as she spoke them. “You say you love this woman, but you won’t even have a commitment ceremony?”
“Our love is between us!”
“But your commitment should be made before God
and everyone.”
(Did I
spurn marriage next to make a point, to defy her judgment and win the
argument?)
new.
A
sign on my professor’s door:
The real question is not whether
the state should marry queers, but whether the state should marry anyone.
old.
“Do you have any family I should
call?” the surgeon asks before the anesthesia takes hold.
“I have family. She’s sitting the waiting room.” Now my heart thumps harder beneath my ribs—earnestly,
defensively.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” he replies, his
wedding band visible beneath his latex gloves.
(I can’t help but look, can’t help
but wonder…) “My nurse mentioned you
were unmarried.”
On the
medical form: (check one) Single
Married Separated Divorced Widowed
When I wake, still groggy in the
hospital bed: “I know what I would
say—my vow.”
“Do you?”
“I’m not saying we should have a
wedding. I’m not saying we need a
wedding. But—” She looks so beautiful in
the morning light, with her glasses on and a book in her hand.
Fading out again, I whisper. “It’s Eliot.
He knew. We are the music while the music lasts.”
.
old.
It has been ten years now. Do we qualify as “together forever”?
In our decade of undocumented love, six states
and one district have legalized same-sex marriage. In our decade of unnotarized affection,
twelve states have prohibited same-sex marriage via statute, another twenty-nine
via state constitution. On paper, it
looks like we are losing. On paper,
there is a push toward our erasure.
How can
marriage be both the Pink Pearl of erasure and the Pink Pearl that prevents our
erasure?
“Wild idea,” I propose over
breakfast. “Since we’ve always had a
Boston marriage, why don’t we go ahead and have a Boston marriage?”
“Maybe, if we lived in Boston, it would
make sense. I don’t see how that serves
us here in the Bluegrass State.”
“That depends,” I say. “It doesn’t make sense if we think of the
marriage as purely practical—a legal document.
But it does make sense if we think of the marriage as Something Else—as
something symbolic.”
“I don’t think of marriage that
way,” she replies.
“Oh.”
Softening: “Do you?”
The snow and the warm ground again: “Maybe.”
She
kisses me then, and a new spell is made and broken.
blue.
In the dream,
we stand on the seashore, our pant legs cuffed and our fingers laced. As we walk together toward the gathering fog,
the cool waves lap at our feet.
This is
the perfect setting for a wedding, I realize.
When I turn to her, she points to a piece of
driftwood further up the beach. Tied to
the log is the largest bouquet of balloons I have ever seen. Each one is a different shade of blue.
“What are these for?” I ask. “Is this some kind of celebration?”
She doesn’t answer. Instead, she kneels down in the brown sand
and begins to untie them. The many white
strings are knotted, tethered to the log but also tangled with each other. I watch as she works diligently to release
each balloon from the bunch.
They are Love,
they are Marriage, they are Children.
They are also their concomitants, the explicit and the implied: Sex, Wedding, Fertility. The blue balloons are a collection of
certainties, of wishes and fears and secret anticipations.
One by one, we let these balloons go, separate
from us and separate from each other. We were a little lost in the semiotics…and
now in what we have no words for. That
is, are we wistful? Are we joyful? Are we somber in our task? Then, we stand a long time in the morning
light, watching and forgetting to watch.
*****
THE STORY BEHIND THE ESSAY
Every
three years I write a meditation. I
started doing so in 2005, but the idea had been brewing ever since I
encountered Lyn Hejinian’s innovative, autobiographical, hybrid-genre
masterpiece, My Life, as a graduate
student in 2002. I wasn’t sure I could
commit to writing a meditation every year, but I wanted the essays I wrote to
serve as a kind of lyric inventory of what was happening in my life at the time
and, in particular, what preoccupied me most at particular moments. At 26, the awareness of my own mortality
emerged as the dominant theme. No sooner
had I really begun to believe in my own adulthood than I found myself reckoning
with the realities of aging and eventual decline. At 29, a fall down the steps of the rural
Ohio boarding school where I had been teaching the year before gave rise to an
unlikely triptych on favorite coats, all of them lost to time or accident. And at 32, ten years’ deep in a love
relationship, I found myself reflecting relentlessly on marriage. This was early 2012 in Kentucky. Momentum was growing for marriage equality
nationwide, but nowhere Angie and I had lived to date permitted same-sex
couples to participate legally in the institution, including the Bluegrass
State, our then-home. I began to realize
that my feelings about marriage were more conflicted, fraught, and deeply
contradictory than my feelings about almost anything else in my life—and this,
as I tell my students, is how you know you have an essay on your hands.
I decided to structure “Meditation
32” according to the adage that brides need “something old, new, borrowed, and
blue” to bring good luck on their wedding day.
I grew up hearing this adage often, but as I came to understand myself
as a gay person, I found my sense of belonging to the world I came from
slipping ever further away. The adage
was a way of reaching back in time to the “old” messages but also leaning
forward in time to the “new” ones, the alternative possibilities that were
emerging for my life. These four small
words—“old,” “new,” “borrowed,” and “blue”—are multi-valent and pushed me to
recollect and inspect my history in a free-form but somewhat guided way. I came to think of them as linguistic
inkblots.
Of course I didn’t know at the time
of writing this meditation that legal marriage, at the state and national
level, would be possible for Angie and me in our life together. I wanted to believe we would have the choice
to make—whether to marry or not to marry—but I couldn’t trust that we would in our
lifetime. By the end of 2012, however, Washington
State—where we first met—had legalized same-sex marriage, and by the middle of
2013, same-sex couples like us could marry there and be recognized as spouses
for federal purposes, though not yet in our new Florida residence. Florida state recognition wouldn’t come about
until 2015, six months before the Supreme Court decision that brought about
marriage equality for all.
This meditation is especially
important to me now as a record of that reckoning from the interstice—before I
knew marriage would become a genuine possibility for us, a right for everyone
and not just a privilege for some. I
don’t want to ever forget the struggles, both internal and external, that
accompanied that uncertain time in my private life and in the public history of
our country. It is my hope that this
essay will serve as a small strike against our inevitable collective forgetting,
a reminder of that time in U.S. history—not so very long ago at all—before one
person could marry another person, regardless of gender, and have that
commitment honored by the law.
NOTE: Another link that might be of
interest is this one, to the Fourth Genre
“Off the Page” podcast series. I was
interviewed by Kathleen Livingston in February 2014—three days after I married
my partner in a legal ceremony in Washington State—about the writing of the
essay and some of its themes: http://fourthgenre.msu.edu/?p=927
*****
ABOUT JULIE MARIE WADE
Julie
Marie Wade is the author of four collections of poetry and four collections of
prose, including the forthcoming Catechism:
A Love Story (Noctuary Press, 2016) and SIX:
Poems (Red Hen Press, 2016), selected by C.D. Wright as the winner of the
AROHO/ To the Lighthouse Poetry Prize. A
recipient of an Al Smith Individual Artist Fellowship, a grant from the Barbara
Deming Memorial Fund, and the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir, Wade
teaches in the creative writing program at Florida International University in
Miami. She is married to Angie Griffin
and lives on Hollywood Beach. Find her
at www.juliemariewade.net.
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