Top
| Welcome to Wedding Land | p. 1 |
| The Princess Diaries | p. 20 |
| The Great Wall of China | p. 40 |
| Who's Afraid of Martha Stewart? | p. 60 |
| Waiting for Cha Cha | p. 85 |
| Tradition! | p. 106 |
| These Colors Don't Run | p. 133 |
| A Ribbon Runs Through It | p. 152 |
| The Happiest Day of My Life | p. 174 |
| Afterword | p. 209 |
| References | p. 216 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 218 |
| Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved. |
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1 Welcome to Wedding Land
Marry your son when you will and
your daughter when you can.
--French proverb
Here is the difference between a twenty-eight-year-old man telling his parents he has just become engaged and a thirty-year-old woman doing the same: When Steven called his parents, they said something along the lines of "Really? Well, okay. Whatever makes you happy." When I called my father, he said, "Well what do you know. It's about fucking time."
"Yes, thank God I'm off your hands," I said. Daughter successfully married off. Check.
He then told me that I sounded like one of those girls I'd been making fun of for the past few months, giddy and excited that someone would actually want to marry her.
"I do not," I insisted. "It's just cool that I'm, like, getting married and stuff. It's weird."
"You do," he said. "Maybe you don't want to admit it, but you do."
From my mother, a woman whose general level of seriousness would make a two-year-old depressed, I got squeals of delight. So I did the only thing that seemed reasonable. I squealed back.
I'd never really pictured myself married. My childhood fantasies had always involved either sharing a funky SoHo loft with my fabulous (undiscovered) artist boyfriend, or heroically struggling to raise my kids on my own while pursuing a high-powered career that required owning lots of designer suits. Wearing a big white dress and twirling across the floor to "A Groovy Kind of Love" had never entered into my imagination. So it had been a long and involved process to get to this point, to go from being someone who wore two worthless rings on her right hand (one bought at a flea market to commemorate a long-overdue breakup with an ex-boyfriend, the other purchased on a business trip in a moment of boredom) to one of those women I always saw on the subway lugging around glaciers on their fingers. There had been two years of friendship, two years of dating, and one year of living together before either Steven or I even uttered the word "marriage." But once spoken aloud, it was soon followed by other related words like "engagement ring," "proposal," and finally, "wedding."
And then before I knew it, I was flashing my own little chunk of ice at my friends. With the ring on, my hand no longer looked like mine. It looked like it belonged to someone older, someone who lived in a sprawling Upper East Side apartment, someone who referred to herself as Mrs. So-and-so and had a nanny and a closet full of Manolo Blahniks organized by color. I found that I couldn't stop staring at this foreign entity that had taken up residence on my hand. I snuck peeks at it as I walked down the street, watching it flash in the sun, wondering how it looked in the rain, when it was overcast, when there was wind. My friends seemed a little obsessed too.
"How do you feel?" asked my friend Jami, the resident rocker chick in my life, over sushi in the East Village a few days after I had officially become engaged.
"Ridiculous," I told her.
She grabbed my ring finger and pulled it towards her. "Let me see it one more time. I may never get this close to one of these things again."
I stared at her. Jami is a woman who maintains a website detailing her sexual exploits. We used to stay out at clubs till all hours, spend Sundays lazing around Tompkins Square Park, eating bagels and peanut butter frozen yogurt, and complaining about work and men. My understanding had been that we didn't care about getting married or owning diamond engagement rings. When people we knew got married, we rolled our eyes.
"You'll find the right guy," I said, suddenly the authority on how to properly trap a man into marriage.
She picked up a spicy tuna roll with her chopsticks and inspected it. "You know, when I turned thirty it was fine. Thirty and single is cute, you're part of a trend, single thirty-year-olds loose in Manhattan, blah, blah, blah."
I nodded.
"But thirty-one and single," said Jami, "that's not so cute."
The engagement ring, it seemed, shone as bright and loud as the lights of Las Vegas, and everyone noticed it. It wasn't a huge ring, but to me it felt like I was carrying around the Rosetta stone on my finger. I was getting my hair cut when the hairdresser asked me if I was planning on wearing my hair up or down at the wedding. I was getting my eyebrows waxed when the waxing lady asked to see my ring. ("Oh," she said, hot wax in hand. "Your fiancé is so...thoughtful." I took this to mean she thought the diamonds were small.) I was at an interview in a large midtown office building when the twenty-something guy conducting the interview asked when the wedding was.
"What wedding?" I said.
"I saw your ring."
"Oh," I laughed."Mywedding. Um, we're thinking next fall. Labor Day weekend. Probably something small."
I was surprised at how easily these facts rolled off my tongue. In just a few weeks they had become my new vital statistics. What I did for a living, what neighborhood I lived in, what I hoped to accomplish in life -- all these facts had now become secondary to the single, all-encompassing fact that soon I would be someone's wife.
When I stopped by my friend Ellen's store I got the feeling she was staring at my ring, so I put my hands in my pockets. Ellen and I used to work together years ago in the Internet division of a fancy ad agency. Back then she had bleached blond hair and wore patent leather stiletto boots because that was what one wore in advertising. But these days she owns a home furnishings store just east of SoHo, has grown her hair back to its natural brown, and is usually in some flavor of trendy sneakers and jeans.
"I'm thinking," said Ellen, "that you're not letting yourself be happy about this."
"What do you mean?" I asked. "I'm happy."
"But you should be really happy. It's okay. You're getting married."
I shrugged. "I'm happy. I cried when he asked me -- I don't know why."
"Because you were happy," she said.
The door opened and two Japanese tourists walked into the store.
"Let me know if you have any questions!" Ellen called out to them.
"How's the store?" I asked, lowering my voice.
Ellen sighed. "Oh, it's fine."
"That one's nice," I said, nodding towards a curvy green glass vase. "You just get it in?"
"Yeah." Ellen reached out and moved it two centimeters to the left. "I just need to find a husband, is what it comes down to. I'm sick of worrying about money."
I stared at her blankly, not sure if she was serious or not.
"Thank you! Come again!" Ellen called out to the two tourists, who were silently making their way out the door. "Anyway," she continued. "Be happy."
"I am happy," I said. "I just don't want to get divorced."
Ellen rolled her eyes. "Oh Lord. You're not going to get divorced."
"Over half of marriages end in divorce."
"I'm not having this conversation. Be happy. You're getting married."
I shrugged, and looked down at the cement floor.
"Plus," she said. "We've got wedding planning to do."
Yes, there was wedding planning to be done. Now that I had a ring and a fiancé, it seemed that the only reasonable thing to do was to figure out what kind of wedding Steven and I were going to have, which sounded simple enough. It wasn't until I wandered over to the wedding planning section of my local bookstore that it began to dawn on me that I had done more than simply decide to commit myself to the man I loved: I had entered Wedding Land.
"You've died and gone to heaven" read the introduction toPlanning a Wedding to Remember."He, you know -- the one -- finally popped the question and you said (no surprise here) YES! Your feet haven't touched the ground since."
I stood in the bookstore, frilly pink book in hand, not knowing whether to laugh, cry, or throw up. Thinking that perhaps I had selected a particularly obnoxious wedding planner, I put the book back and picked up a second one.
"Congratulations on your engagement!" cried theEasy Wedding Planner, Organizer and Keepsake."You must be looking forward to what will be the happiest day of your life -- your wedding!"
I didn't realize, of course, that this was the sort of language and the kind of mentality that would engulf my life for the next year, that from the moment Steven placed a ring on my finger until the last wedding guest left I would inhabit a world filled with ribbons and menu choices and useless facts, like the difference between engraving and thermography. I figured that over time people would stop noticing my ring (it would get duller, right?), stop asking me wedding questions, move on with their lives. But this was foolish, and I believed it because I had not yet opened a wedding magazine.
The engagement up until that point had been an oddity, a funny little thing that I'd gone and done. A slice of American kitsch that Steven and I had enacted in our living room. But one day, killing time at the airport before a flight, I crossed into flagrant wedding planning mode: I boughtMartha Stewart Weddings.All my life I had passed by racks of wedding magazines, and now, finally, I had undergone the rite of passage required for me to actually open one. I had to find out what secrets of womanhood were revealed in those pages. What was it that made the white-clad women on the pastel magazine covers look so serene and pleased with themselves? Did they say if the ring got duller? Did they explain why no one mentioned divorce?
It turns out that the world of wedding magazines is one in which every bride has waited her whole life for her wedding day, where women have favorite flowers and signature mixed drinks, and every marriage ends in happily ever after. Advertisements for vacuum cleaners and silverware abound, sandwiched between articles instructing the bride on how to carve her own chocolate bride and groom figurines, or extolling the virtues of ruffles. The magazines are like an alternate universe in which the years between 1953 and now never happened. One article in my issue ofMartha Stewart Weddingsentitled "Figuring Out Your Taxes" showed a black-and-white photo of a 1940s-looking couple, the woman sitting on her husband's lap, smiling as he writes a check, because, of course, he is so wise and in charge of all their finances, and she is in charge of looking cute and sitting on his lap. This, despite the fact that most wedding magazines come with a wedding budget planner. Apparently women are capable of managing a wedding budget that involves signing potentially dozens of vendor contracts, but paying the cable bill is beyond them.
It seems hard to believe that anyone can take this stuff seriously. And yet women buy more bridal magazines every year. I had noticed the ever-expanding rack of wedding magazines on the newsstand, and wondering if it was just my imagination or if there really were more of them than I'd ever seen before, I did some investigating. I discovered that bridal magazines took a hit in the sixties, when the idea of a perfect wedding for most brides involved exchanging Native American vows while standing naked under a waterfall rather than walking down a church aisle to "Here Comes the Bride." The then-editor ofBRIDE'Smagazine has said that back in the sixties, "people would laugh at me at parties."
No one would be laughing today. In recent years, while ad pages for the magazine industry have been falling, bridal magazines have seen their ad pages rise. In 1999,BRIDE'Sbroke the Guinness World Record for magazine size, weighing in at 4 pounds 9 ounces, a total of 1,242 pages -- and you can bet it wasn't because they'd added so many more articles. And in the past five years, a bevy of new magazines have begun to line the magazine racks:InStyle Weddings, The Knot, Elegant Bride, Wedding Bells,just to name a few. Which is not surprising, when you consider that the wedding industry on the whole is expanding -- at last count it raked in approximately $70 billion annually, making it the same size as the entire U.S. food processing industry. But then, of course the industry brings in that much money, given that the average wedding today costs $22,000. Let me repeat: that is theaverage.To put that number in perspective, consider that the average household income in the U.S. in 2002 was $42,000. But how can you put a price tag on the Happiest Day of Your Life?
As I read through the magazines and books, and as I talked to my friends, I began to wonder if I was the one who was out of step with the rest of the planet; perhaps I was the one living in an alternate universe. They were all so obviously in agreement, and they all shared the same mantra: your wedding is the happiest day of your life. It is your day to shine, your shot at the spotlight, says everyone. Don't fuck it up.
"This is your moment," said one Estée Lauder ad I flipped past.
"It's your day," cooed an ad for the bridal salon at Saks Fifth Avenue.
Leafing through these magazines, engulfed in a world of women who vacuumed and men who went to work and paid the bills, I was utterly lost. Since when was my wedding supposed to be the happiest day of my life? What about the day I graduated from college? Landed a great promotion? What if I won the Nobel Peace Prize? Would that day still come second to my wedding? And how did all my friends seem to know this already, this Happiest Day thing, and how had I missed it? All this time I'd thought that we were focused on our careers, on our lives as fulfilled single women. If a man came along, great; if not, that would be okay too. Had it all been a charade? Had I just been puttering along while everyone around me waited to be swept off their feet by Prince Charming?
The Happiest Day mythology is so deeply imprinted on people's brains that it crops up in the strangest of places. Recently I was watching a reality TV show where a bunch of wannabe fashion designers were challenged with the task of designing wedding gowns for a group of fashion models, none of whom were actually getting married. The designers all immediately freaked out at the prospect of creating garments for what they endlessly referred to as "the most important day" in the lives of their fashion models, despite the fact that the day was hypothetical. Some of the models were all of sixteen years old, and yet they too promptly began acting as though they were really about to be married, referring to their "big day" as though it were just around the corner.
The notion of the wedding as the most important thing that could ever possibly happen in a woman's life has been around since the days when it actually used to be true, and it goes hand in hand with the concept of the princess bride, who is allowed to throw temper tantrums because her bridesmaids' nail polish is the wrong shade. After all, if this were guaranteed to be the most important day in your life, wouldn't you want everything to be perfect? I wondered if I could find out when the bride-as-princess concept first originated, and turned up a reference inThe New York Timesfrom 1905.
"On her wedding day," the article explains, "if never before or afterward, she [the bride] is permitted to do as she pleases, so long as she does not upset the established conventionalities."
My friend Cameron had gotten engaged a few weeks before I did, and I called her to discuss.
"I'm thinking about taking a year off to plan my wedding," she said before I could ask about the Happiest Day.
"Seriously?" I asked. Cameron was a senior-level brand strategist at an advertising agency and was, until that moment, one of the most career-oriented people I knew.
"Totally," she said. "It'll be fun. I'm already designing my save-the-date cards, and I love it. It's so creative."
"What about your job?" I asked.
"My job sucks," she said. "I want to make save-the-date cards."
"I loved planning my wedding," my friend Kimberly told me on the phone. "Of course, I took off a year to do it. Not everyone has to do that."
"Hmm," I said.
Kimberly was one of my oldest friends, and that she felt this way should have come as no surprise. Within moments of our meeting in college, Kimberly had informed me that all she really wanted to do in life was what her mother did: play bridge and get manicures. This was not the kind of goal one owned up to at our fairly competitive university, so she said it with a laugh, and at the time I thought she was joking. We had been discussing her major, and I pointed out that she probably couldn't major in bridge, so instead she picked political science, the default major for people who didn't know what else to study. (This was a process I was intimately familiar with since I, too, was a political science major.) Kimberly, it turned out, was great at political science, went on to win prestigious Capitol Hill internships and ultimately landed a spot at a top law school. I pretty much forgot about her homemaker dream until a few years later when, after a short stint as a lawyer, Kimberly got engaged and promptly quit her job. Now she lives in Connecticut and is married to a dermatologist.
"Actually," she said, drawing me back to our conversation. I've been thinking lately that I might become a wedding planner." The economy was in a slump and since she was through with law, Kimberly was always coming up with new career plans for herself. One day she was going to go to cooking school, the next she was deciding between starting a gift basket business or studying medicine.
I guess it should have come as no surprise that lots of women love weddings because as a nation we love weddings. The filmFour Weddings and a Funeralwas an unexpected success in 1994, and almost every year since, Hollywood has turned out a blockbuster in which a wedding is central to the plot. In four of those years, a wedding film ranked in the top ten at the box office. And two of the most recent wedding movies,My Big Fat Greek WeddingandMeet the Fockers,rank among the top fifty of all time highest-grossing U.S. films.
Based on the nation's movie-watching habits, it seems that people like fantasy weddings as much as real weddings, which helps explain the existence of fantasy wedding planners -- women who have started selecting locations, dresses, and flowers, even though there is no one in their life at the moment that they plan on marrying.
"Editors of wedding magazines and websites say many of the letters and e-mails they receive are from single women who are not currently engaged but enjoy planning their future weddings as a form of entertainment," reported one article I came across.
"Men aren't a part of planning the real wedding," said a woman quoted in the article, "so why should they be a part of the virtual one?"
And then there are the women of the wedding website The Knot who inhabit a world so consumed by the wedding life that they even have their own language: FI for "fiancé," FMIL for "future mother-in-law"; and after the wedding (for these women continue to participate in wedding discussions long after the bouquet has been tossed), there is DH for "dear husband." I'd known about this site for a long time because I had a friend who worked for them during the dot-com boom. But had I not already known about The Knot, I'm sure somehow it would have entered my consciousness one way or another, because it is the epicenter of Wedding Land. So, soon after my engagement was official, I logged on to check it out.
The women who post messages on The Knot call themselves Knotties, and each creates an online bio for herself detailing the basic information about her wedding. Or at least, that is the ostensible purpose of the bio. In practice, many of the women turn these bios into virtual scrapbooks of obsession, pasting in images of their engagement rings, shoes, flower arrangements, flower girls, endless bouquet options, hair-style choices, invitations, and, of course, wedding gowns. And then, when they are done, they invite other Knotties to "critique" their bios.
No topic on The Knot is too small to obsess over, no detail too stupid or mundane.
"I'm planning on having Victorian Lilac dresses for my bridesmaids," wrote one Knottie. "I've been looking for ribbon and other accessories to match, but cannot find the right shade! Help!!!"
Ribbon for what? I wondered. Was there some reason I needed to be amassing a collection of Victorian Lilac ribbon?
"I just ordered a fabric aisle runner," wrote another. "Anyone else worried about tripping? Would paper or vinyl be better? I thought fabric would be nicer now I'm second-guessing as it is softer and might be harder to walk on. Any opinions?"
Some women posted their wedding nightmares: one dreamed she missed her entire reception looking for her lipstick, another that her maid of honor stopped on her way down the aisle to sell raffle tickets. There were dreams of blizzards in May, ruined pictures, ruined hair, smeared invitations. The stress level of these women oozed right out of the computer screen, and I found myself stressing for them. And yet, the amount of effort they were spending on their weddings -- some seemed to be planning three years in advance of the date -- left me in awe. How could it possibly be that these women were so utterly focused on wedding planning? Did they really buy into the Happiest Day mythology? Did they think it was 1950? Did they wish it was?
Perhaps women have so little control over their lives that we feel this, our wedding, our "big day," is at last something we can control down to the last insanely small detail. Perhaps we are so rarely the center of attention in the real world that we find ourselves enthralled with the one event at which we will be, for a brief moment, the star. Whatever the answers, I knew that my wedding would be different, and I smiled with the knowledge that I would not become an obsessive-compulsive bride. I would have some sort of wedding, I would be married, and that would be that.
"So where do you want to have this shindig?" I asked Steven one night as we were cooking dinner. Or rather, he was cooking and I was standing in the hall observing because at the time we had a one-person kitchen. Our division of labor in the kitchen usually went like this: I was in charge of all oven-related dishes, like roast meats and baked potatoes, and Steven was in charge of all stove-top cooking, which meant mostly pasta sauces and stir-fry. Since we both liked to cook, it was a division that worked out pretty well, although we'd discovered that none of our parents believed us. ("So you cooked?" Steven's father was always asking him. "Or really Hana cooked and you're taking credit?")
"I don't know," Steven said. "What do you think?"
"Well, the magazines say that a good way to start planning a wedding is to pick a theme, and everything else follows."
"Oh man," he said, chopping up an onion. "What kind of theme?"
"They suggest things like 'Hearts and Flowers,' or, you know, 'The Wild West,' that kind of thing."
"Like, 'Romance Under the Sea'?"
"Yeah," I said. "I'm thinking maybe we should go with 'Man's Inhumanity to Man.' "
"What about, 'Anti-Semitism Through the Ages'?" asked Steven. "I mean, it is going to be a Jewish wedding."
"Ooh, good one. We could do a Czarist Russia table, a Spanish Inquisition table, a Nazi Germany table."
"The possibilities are endless, really. That's what makes it a good theme."
Steven tossed the chopped onion into a frying pan and adjusted the burner heat.
"Seriously," I said, leaning against the wall. "What do you think of when you think about our wedding?"
"When I think of our wedding," he said, "I think: casual."
"Casual, like twenty people in a restaurant, or casual, like, in a field?"
"I don't think we can do twenty people in a restaurant. I'm sure my parents want to invite more than twenty people."
"Yeah."
"What do you think of when you think of our wedding?" Steven asked.
I sighed. "I think, oh my God, my parents are going to be in the same room."
"Oh, babe," he said. "They'll behave."
My parents really wanted me to elope. Or more accurately, my father really wanted me to elope. Even though they had been divorced for six years by that point and he was now remarried, he was horrified by the thought of being in the same state as my mother, let alone the same room. The best thing you could say about their divorce was that it was speedy. One day I was out for a weekend drive in the country with my parents, a week later my mother had moved across town. A few months after that my father sold their apartment and moved out of the state. Silly little scraps of my childhood that had been carefully tucked away for years suddenly vanished. Poems I'd written, papers with gold stars on them, the one or two awards I'd managed to win over the course of fifteen years of schooling, and my birth certificate all disappeared in the tornado of lawyers, mediators, and divorce papers. So when my father recommended elopement, I understood what he meant. My mother, on the other hand, said she had no opinions. But my guess was that, secretly, she was rooting for an elopement too.
Steven's parents, on the opposite end of the spectrum, subscribed to the "whatever makes you happy, honey" school of parenting. We'd had them over for dinner once when they were in town, and when Steven asked them what they wanted us to cook, they both said, "Oh, whatever, it doesn't matter." "Fine," Steven replied. "We'll make you a pork roast." "Oh no, don't make pork," they said in unison. "Then what do you want?" he asked. "You know," they said. "Whatever you want to make."
This was the policy they employed when it came to the wedding too. Whatever we wanted. Whatever made us happy. But not at City Hall. Not too small, either. They had a lot of friends with whom they wanted to share their joy. But whatever we wanted was just fine.
To be fair, if we'd insisted on getting married at City Hall, they would have gone along with it, and my parents would have probably breathed huge sighs of relief. I thought a lot about City Hall, about what it would be like to get on the subway in a little white dress, or maybe we could spring for a taxi. We'd get down there, we'd wait on line, we'd sign something, and we'd be married and that would be it. I talked to an acquaintance who'd done just that, who described the waiting area as looking like a subway car had just emptied out into it -- all the people you see on the subway, she said, they're all in there with you, waiting to get married. As much as I didn't want to move to Happiest Day Land, I also wanted something more special than signing a piece of paper at City Hall. Something that at least paid a tiny homage to the fact that what Steven and I were doing was Big and Important.
Because, even though I had not been dreaming about my wedding since I could walk, it had been there, in the back of my mind -- how could it have not? At my bat mitzvah, when I complained to my parents that there was no band, just a stupid string quartet, and how come I didn't get to pick out stuff -- I didn't know what stuff, but surely there was stuff to be picked out -- my father said, "This isn't your party. This is for your mother and me. Your wedding will be your party." And back when my parents were married, my mother used to like to pick out pretend locations for my nuptials. She would call me and say, "Today we saw the most beautiful garden, it would be perfect for your wedding." Even though I had not been thinking about flower arrangements and wedding colors and ribbons, I had imagined the general feeling of my wedding. My family would be there, everyone would be happy, and I would be happy.
And I wonder if this is what the whole 1950s-era Happiest Day of My Life thing is about. The generation of women getting married today grew up in the era of divorce. We were children in the seventies and eighties, when the divorce rate reached its peak, and even though we know there is no such thing as happily ever after, we want it stubbornly, irrationally. We believe that our marriages will be different, and we start by proving it with our weddings, which harken back to a Disneyfied view of the 1950s, when the men went to work and the women took Valium and people got married and stayed married and everyone was happy.
No matter that the world was not the way people like to imagine it, that divorce is as much a part of American life as getting drunk and blowing things up with fireworks on the Fourth of July. No matter that American divorce actually predates America, with the first recorded divorce issued in 1639 in Massachusetts. American culture is rife with rose-colored views of the past. Politicians like to talk about getting back to family values, as though we had only recently left Eden and with the enforcement of a few little laws could quickly find our way back. Fashions repeat endlessly on themselves -- when I was a teenager the little white socks of the fifties were in; in college it was sixties-era tie-dyes and ratty jeans, giving way to a brief attempt circa my early twenties to reintroduce the bellbottoms of the seventies; and just the other day on the street I saw two women wearing leg warmers, the fashion statement of the eighties. Each generation tries to recapture the feeling of the previous generation, of the eras we lived through but barely remember or never lived through at all, but surely they were better than they are today, because today sucks. Generations X and Y are seemingly obsessed with their childhoods: the other day on the subway I heard two people my age discussing the collection of Star Wars figurines they owned twenty years ago ("Dude, you had the Millennium Falcon? Can you imagine what that would be worth on eBay?"). So why should weddings be any different? Why not take a nostalgic trip back to the era when we pretended that everything was okay?
The first location we looked at was the Boathouse in Central Park. We wandered in one sunny afternoon in T-shirts and cargo pants, looked at all the well-dressed ladies lunching, picking at their salads as they admired the lush landscape of the park. It was a quiet, elegant little corner of Manhattan, and we felt completely out of place.
"Don't you think it's a little weird that we're looking at booking a place for our wedding that we can't afford to eat in?" I whispered to Steven.
"I was just thinking the same thing," he whispered back.
Someone came by and brought us fresh iced tea, and we sat for a while in two enormous high-backed leather chairs, our feet dangling above the floor as though we were children. When the wedding coordinator arrived, we went through the motions of looking at the space and reviewing the menu options, both of us knowing that never in a million years would we get married here. It was a lovely spot, but it was everything I didn't want in a wedding: a large hall, those big round tables where everyone has to yell to be heard, a band leader forcing everyone to get up and Hava Nagila themselves around the room (and there was always that moment, at those weddings, where some uncle or other would squat down on the floor and try to do some sort of Russian kicking thing while everyone else worried that he might have a coronary and eventually his wife or daughter would plead with him to get back to the table). I had no idea what I wanted from a wedding, but it wasn't that.
The wedding magazines clearly thought they were full of all different kinds of weddings -- weddings for every taste and budget, some claimed -- but to me they all looked like the same general idea. There was a bride in a white dress, a groom with a silly boutonniere, a marriage ceremony, and then everyone ate. Usually there was dancing. The weddings I'd been to tended to blend together in my head. There were nice hotels and ugly hotels, there were weddings with sushi and weddings with jalapeño poppers, but in the end they were all just a bunch of pomp and circumstance, a scene meant to duplicate every TV or movie wedding because no one knew what else to do.
But, truth be told, there had always been a voice in my head at these weddings that said, "Well, atmywedding..." At my wedding there won't be a band, at my wedding we'll rent out Shea Stadium and there will be a big softball game and I'll get married at home plate, at my wedding the toasts will be witty and articulate, at my wedding it won't rain. Because that was the fun in going to other people's weddings, right? Finding things to criticize, determining the overall cost of the wedding, and placing bets on how long the marriage would last -- these were, as far as I could tell, the main activities people indulged in at weddings.
None of this would help us pick a location, so I went out and bought Locations magazine, which listed hundreds of places in New York where one could get married. There were a vast assortment of hotels and catering halls, echoing industrial spaces in SoHo, something billed as a "photographer's studio," Park Avenue mansions where you could pretend to be Edith Wharton, churches and synagogues, private clubs, and endless restaurants. None of them spoke to me. Or rather, they did speak. They said: this isn't for you.
Part of the problem was that neither Steven nor I are really from anywhere. Had things been different, I would have been perfectly happy to get married in the house where I grew up. Unfortunately, I was no longer related to anyone who lived in it. I grew up in Connecticut, but my mother now lived in Chicago in an apartment I'd never seen, and my father lived in a house in Florida that had been slowly transformed into a still-life menagerie by his new wife's passion for decorating with ceramic animals. Steven's parents had only recently moved to Atlanta; and while they generously offered up their home for the wedding, given that we didn't know a single person in Atlanta, it would have been an odd choice.
So that's how we ended up with Vermont. We spent a few nights flipping throughLocations,making gagging noises. I called a few Manhattan caterers and, upon hearing their price ranges, promptly hung up. And then, one rainy evening, I tookLocationsand threw it across the living room.
"There is nowhere in here to get married," I said, "So, I guess the wedding is off."
Steven was sitting across the room in our blue overstuffed chair-and-a-half, readingWar and Peace,which he had recently begun in preparation for his impending entry into a graduate program in Russian Literature. Steven and I had met at work, back when we were both writing for a news website. Since then I'd stayed on in the Internet world, becoming a freelance web designer, but Steven had ventured on a long and occasionally treacherous career path that had found him at various points making bagels at midnight in Seattle, writing reviews of Tex-Mex restaurants or Carpathian Mountain ski resorts in Ukraine, and most recently, editing the most boring academic journals ever published. Ever since I'd met Steven he had been fighting the impulse to go to graduate school and study something arcane and inconsequential to humanity. He maintained that he wanted to beinthe world, not just locked in an office reading about it. "I would give anything," he sometimes said, "to be interested in something practical." But, after two months of editingHuman Factors and Ergonomics in Manufacturing,he decided arcane and inconsequential sounded pretty darn good, and applied to graduate school. He would begin school three days after our wedding.
Steven book-markedWar and Peaceand looked over at me.
"Don't say things like that," he said.
I glared at the carpet. "I'm sorry," I said. "I didn't mean that. I just...I just don't know what the hell we're going to do and I'm sick of looking at all these pictures of stupid industrial spaces. And I thought we were going to do this together."
"We are doing it together. We looked at the Boathouse. We looked at that magazine. What do you want me to be doing?"
"I want you to pick a location."
"Fine."
Pause.
"Have we figured out how many people we're inviting?" Steven asked.
"I dunno. Well, your parents probably want to invite some people, and then there are our friends, and I guess some of my family. Do you think we could do, like forty people?"
"That sounds nice. Forty people sounds good."
"Okay."
"Okay."
Steven looked up at the ceiling, as though our location might be up there somewhere. I walked across the room and picked up theLocationsmagazine, which had landed on the floor with its pages splayed out.
"What about that place in Vermont?" Steven said.
"Which place?"
"You know, that inn we went to a few summers ago."
I smiled at the memory, thinking of the tangy local cheese we'd stuffed ourselves on, the spider-filled shuffleboard court where we'd whiled away the better part of an afternoon, the charmingly freezing swimming hole. We'd been together for about a year at that point, and it was our first real vacation as a couple. When you've been dating for a while and you go on vacation, it's a little like experimenting with living together. All your stuff is in the same room for the first time, and you learn things like who takes up more space on the bathroom counter. It's the first time you don't have the option of saying, "Well, I guess I'll go home now." And that trip was, I think, the first time I knew that this could really be it. This could be my life.
"That place was nice," I said.
"And that way we could keep it small."
"Right, because who would want to drive all the way up to Vermont?"
"Yeah, it's hard to get to."
"Omigod," I said. "It's perfect. We'll have a little country wedding and no one will come and it'll be great."
"See," said Steven. "That wasn't so hard. Anything else you want me to do?"
"Yeah," I said. "Call Vermont and tell them we're coming."
And with that, I imagined that the hard part was done. I would plan a lovely Vermont wedding. It would be small. There would be a wedding coordinator at the inn who would take care of most of whatever needed taking care of. I would not have a theme, no one would play "Hava Nagila," and I would not become obsessive about Victorian Lilac aisle runners. And then we would be married and that would be all there was to it.
Copyright © 2006 by Hana Schank
Excerpted from A More Perfect Union: How I Survived the Happiest Day of My Life by Hana Schank
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
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