b y C i n t r a W i l s o n
Marriage: The Embalmment of Love
Photograph by Sibylla Herbrich / San Francisco
However, this fantasy escape route has been completely obliterated by her getting married. "Can you believe it?" she was saying to me, weeks before. "I'm buying a dress. I'm buying shoes. What's happening to me?" Indeed, a shock larger and perhaps more life-altering than puberty, even. The lashing of herself to the mainmast of another. The renouncing of sexless cackling. The renouncing of renouncing everything. A wedding is an unspeakable ordeal. I have been a bridesmaid before, and I know. It is one small disaster after the next. "Everything, everything cost two hundred dollars more than everybody said it would," lamented the groom, days before the ceremony. "I just had to squash all my rage and write checks. Just smile and write the checks. Checks, checks. Everybody took advantage of me because they knew I was over a barrel, and I couldn't just tell them to fuck off and punch their lights out, or I'd risk losing the space, the catering ..." Poor guy, I thought. People getting married, like people having children, have no idea what's about to happen to them. They suffer and shell out money, so they can suffer and shell out more money, and have no life and no freedom, etc. etc. forever and ever, Amen. Yet once they do it, they all seem to think it was all a great idea. I was thrust into the role of "Maid of Honor." This meant that I had to do things like Get My Hair Done With The Bride early in the morning, and wear a pink dress that I normally would have looked at with the evil alacrity of a group of Orinda skinheads discovering an unconscious drag queen lying in their parking lot. I mocked and taunted Chirt all morning. "Bridey! Bridey!" I hollered, to which she smiled and groaned, helpless in the undertow of impending events. I brought her a beer as she was sitting in the stylist's chair with her curlers. "Here, you'll need this," I said. She looked at me, puzzled and amused. "You brought me a beer?!" she asked. The obviousness of needing a beer at 9 a.m. on her wedding day had become a mystery to her. I realized that an enormous steel door was slamming shut on our lives, forever. "Well, YEAH!" I blurted out, somehow defensive. She ended up understanding the beer and drinking it, for which I was grateful. "I'm so nervous," she said, which I found surprising. "He won't back out now," I told the Bride-to-Be. "He's written too many checks." "Wedding is theatre," my mother said. "For most girls, this is the only time they're ever really onstage." It's true: Bride as Ingenue. Bride as the Embodiment of Beauty. Groom as Respectable Future Personified. Innocence and Beauty Weds Stolid and Secure Respectability in Mutual Bond of Legally Fortified Love. Ideally. Theatre, I guess. Ritual, really. The difference between Ritual and Theatre being that Ritual will cost you a whole lot more. We all managed to get through the short, utilitarian ceremony with a minimum of pain. About midway through the wedding day, the groom leaned over to me and said "Hey, somebody has to trash the car." I rushed out with holly fronds and doilies from the buffet table. Lumpy (his real name), the Best Man, had a bar of Zest from his shaving kit and we proceeded to write "Just Married" and "Suckers" all over the Groom's Honda. We festooned it with toilet paper, we tied soda cans off the back bumper. This societally condoned vandalism had a wholesome worthlessness about it, like a non-alcoholic beer. It's hard to get a true vandal's hard-on for an act steeped in Tradition — getting away with something that is a time-honored tradition that you're supposed to get away with doesn't pack the same creative emotional wallop as doing something that will truly dismay the victims. But oh, hee hee hee. We trashed the car, us wedding party adults. Boola Boola, won't the rival college be shocked we stole their goat. Titter titter. Wheee. The bride's oldest brother is one of these guys who never says a word and lurks around in the background and looks like he might be dangerously crazy, until you throw him up in front of a group of people and announce that he's going to make a speech. Then he becomes this fluid genius, like Dylan Thomas on a fresh drunk, rolling into lyrical free-prose. "Marital partners need to be worthy opponents," he said, wisely. "Your partner is somebody you're going to need to battle with for the cause of self-improvement for the rest of your lives. The bride and the groom in this case are pretty evenly matched. If either of them were marrying anybody else, I'd be terrified for the other person." Absolutely true, I thought. The worthiest opponent. Somebody with whom you can relentlessly wage a War on Truth and Love, a socko mate with whom to knock each other's blocks off, then pop them back on again. Someone who won't flee from the ring whining at the first taste of blood. A psychic animal of the same size and weight. 'Til death do you part. Weddings make one want to get married. But one thing has to be self-evident, before one can do it — the It Is Obvious That We Should Be Married thing. There shouldn't be a shadow of doubt about it, because marriage is an ordeal of mythological proportions. A Circus of Need. I wish I was needed by somebody. It brought a tear of self-pity to my eye later, driving home, thinking that the only person who ever said they needed me was dead. But life is funny and cool, and I have faith in its weird magnetic logic, and eventualities. When Chirt and I lived together, I got an emergency phone call one day at the theatre from her mother. "Do you know where Chirt is? I've got some news..." As it turned out, the younger of her 2 brothers had just fallen through some thin ice in Sweden with his girlfriend, and both of them had died. I watched Chirt go through this terrible grief for around a year and a half — she was torn through with devastation. She and her brother were very close. They had language between them like twins — some long alphabet of non-sequiturs that could reduce them to red explosions of tearful laughter. He was one of the main anchors into the world for her. The other person most affected by Chirt's brother's death was the late brother's best friend. The best friend and Chirt became pals through coping with the loss together — they did a lot of crying and walking and talking and remembering. Then the other day they got married. Unreasonable pain turned itself inside out, and through it came astonishing joy. "He cried all the way to Calistoga," said Chirt of her groom, a few days after the honeymoon. "He said he'd never been that happy before; he'd never cried because he was happy. He didn't know he could be that happy." The whiplash agony and ecstacy of human life, exemplified. Up, down. Up, down. A little higher up, if you're lucky, every time. Cintra Wilson can be reached at cintra@well.com. |
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