Autobiography of a Fat Bride

by Laurie Notaro

  “No,” I answered honestly. “But I wasn’t ready to be the boob-flashing rodeo witch that I apparently am, so let’s just go.”

  The present-opening began, and with the paper tearing and the kids squealing, for a moment, everything seemed okay as I sat back with crossed arms and watched.

  “Wow, thanks, Mom,” my boyfriend said as he held up his gift. “A Snow White video!”

  “Thanks, Mom!” his sister said excitedly, holding up a pair of pearl earrings. “They’re beautiful!”

  “Aren’t . . . those the earrings I asked for?” his other sister stuttered.

  “I didn’t have this on my list, but I guess we could use it,” her husband said as he poked at what looked like a nursing bra. “I know I’ve gained a couple of pounds, but do I really need it? Tell me honestly.”

  “If anyone unwraps a gun, I’m calling first dibs,” my boyfriend’s brother asserted.

  Everyone looked very confused except for my future mother-in-law and me. I already knew what had happened, and against all odds, no matter how impossible it seemed, I had completely destroyed the family’s holiday even further than I had when they thought I was a pregnant, homeless stripper with knotted hair.

  In my haste, in my stress, in my panic, I had apparently stuck the wrong tags on the wrong gifts, damaging the gift exchange, and as a result, a three-year-old was handling a Leatherman tool with about eight different knives on it, two sisters were about to rumble under the Christmas tree, a gun was possibly in our midst, and it was suspected that a coveted Diaper Genie was hiding somewhere under a tag with the phantom Gloria’s name on it.

  “I’m so sorry,” I professed over and over again. “I am so sorry. I don’t know how this happened. I am really, really sorry.”

  It was then that my boyfriend’s nephew, a frisky, one-year-old toddler, waddled up to me and immediately went straight to second base, making a far quicker move than his uncle ever did. I didn’t know exactly what to do, so I just sat there, trying to smile as he grappled at my right boob and trying to pretend I didn’t have a baby feeling me up.

  “Oh, he must be hungry,” his mother said as she laughed and pulled him off me.

  “Wow,” I said lightly. “I’ve never been mistaken for a snack bar before.”

  “Here,” my boyfriend’s brother-in-law said as he laughed and tossed me his nursing bra. “I think this is probably for you.”

  They all laughed, and I laughed, too. When I looked at my boyfriend’s mother, I saw that she was chuckling as well, and when she finally looked at me, she winked.

  Dreading the Wedding

  My friend Aaron has always been brutally honest with me. One night at Long Wong’s, he looked at me and shook his head.

  “You know,” he started, “if anyone had ever said to me last year, ‘Hey, Aaron, in twelve months, Laurie Notaro is going to quit smoking and get married,’ I would’ve punched them right in the mouth and yelled, ‘Hey, buddy, that’s my friend you’re talking about!’”

  I quit smoking on purpose, when I thought I had cancer, but it just turned out to be a puffy Cheeto stuck in my throat. I didn’t, however, set out to get married. I wasn’t one of those girls who dreamed of her wedding day every time she closed her eyes, or who got a subscription to Modern Bride on her sixteenth birthday, or that could, at any given point in her life, recite the names of the girls who had made the final cut for her bridesmaids’ squad.

  So my boyfriend and I really had no idea what to expect. We were babies in the world of bridal registries and fairs, of caterers and florists, of boutiques and videographers; we were innocents. All I knew was what I had seen my sister go through the year before as she prepared for her wedding, and it wasn’t pretty. My mother had only recently begun to sleep more than an hour a night and had just stopped walking around with the palm of her hand attached to her forehead, saying to no one in particular, “If you stop speaking to so-and-so and his wife, it will save your father and me thirty-five dollars and seventy-eight cents a head, which is what it’s costing us to feed your rotten friends, who probably won’t give you anything more for a wedding gift than movie tickets.”

  We set the date for our wedding for the following March, giving us more than a year to prepare for it. And, on a brave day a week after the “You’re Fat Although Your Puffy Private Parts Appear to Be Disease-Free” incident, I went to my parents’ house to break the news. I felt it was best if I went alone. Although I was twenty-nine, had graduated from college, and had a job, I felt like I was a promiscuous thirteen-year-old who had to tell her parents that her science teacher had knocked her up during a classroom experiment. With twins.

  I don’t know why I felt this way; the only conclusion I could come to was that I was raised as a Roman Catholic, a religion in which guilt plays a larger role than God. The only comfort I had in telling Mr. and Mrs. Notaro that their daughter was getting married was that my mother would be relieved that I would be in the presence of some sort of religious official, and, against all odds, it wasn’t for a exorcism.

  “I have something to tell you,” I said to them after I had taken a deep breath and sat them both down.

  “Oh my God, you’re gay. She’s gay. I told you she was gay,” my mother immediately spit out. “You watched that goddamned Ellen show one too many goddamned times!”

  “Nope, I’m not gay,” I proclaimed. “And that’s the good news! Isn’t that good news? And here’s more! I’m getting married next year.”

  “Hello, insomnia, my old friend,” she said, her hand immediately flying up to her head. “Another wedding. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, where’s the Tylenol? If you were gay, you’d have to pay for this yourself, you know. If new neighbors move in next door to you, don’t talk to them. If someone new starts at your work, you’d better ignore them. I’m not paying thirty-five dollars and seventy-eight cents a head for people we don’t even know!”

  The following weekend, the four of us, my boyfriend and I and my parents, attended five weddings we weren’t invited to, to scout for possible wedding sites. I’ve never seen so many fat, permed bridesmaids stuffed into peach taffeta in all my life. I watched in horror as one groom lifted his new bride’s dress over her head and took her garter off with his tongue and teeth; as another groom smashed the wedding cake into his bride’s face so hard she had to blow her nose to get the frosting and little bits of strawberry out; and as another newly married couple blatantly shoved their tongues down each other’s throat when anyone so much as knicked a glass with a spoon. The true horror came, however, at the last wedding when my father returned from the buffet and he was chewing.

  Weddings, I began to understand, were vile, filthy things when they ran amuck.

  That was the day I started to comprehend the phenomenon known as Dreading the Wedding. You see, when a girl becomes engaged, a transformation takes place and she becomes a prenuptial monster, crying at insurance commercials, picking out Las Vegas showgirl costumes for her bridesmaids and any five-year-old girl who happens to wander into her field of vision. If her mother lives in the same city, she has the potential and the actual, physical need to injure people. She torments everyone around her self-absorption bubble, sucking any passersby into her lair of white tulle as soon as they innocently ask, “So, how are the wedding plans going?” The victims, if they survive, escape the lair without a large percentage of their souls, then immediately adopt fifteen cats from the pound, buy several polyester/nylon-blend cardigans, and never leave their apartments again. If you always wondered how those people ended up like that, now you know. Once you’ve been exposed to that kind of fright, the world is forever a changed place, full of nothing but danger and brides.

  The last wedding venue we looked at that day seemed to be perfect as long as we could turn off the noisy waterfall that tumbled at one end of the garden; it was a great location, with plenty of parking, we could bring our own booze, and we had the option of outdoor and indoor spaces.

  “Oh, you’re going to ne
ed that,” my mother said. “It’s going to rain that day, I’ll tell you right now.”

  Because we wanted to have the wedding outside, she was convinced that not only was it going to rain that day, it was going to hail, and a typhoon, perhaps even a tsunami, would jump inland four hundred miles and the whole thing would be ruined. Just washed out. People would be swept away in violent waves and then drowned horribly. Almost everyone would die. The cake would be soggy. It would be a bad party.

  So, in several days, when the date of our wedding was exactly a year away, I watched the sky, I felt the wind. It was a beautiful day, with a big yellow sun, the bluest sky available with the same white, puffed-up clouds you see only on toilet paper commercials. Perfect weather. And, when I was confident enough that afternoon, I called my mother.

  “See?” I said, slightly proud of myself but far more pleased to have proved her wrong. “There’s no storm today. There won’t be a storm next year. Everything will be fine.”

  “The day isn’t over yet,” she said, taking a drag off her cigarette.

  She was right, it wasn’t. By the time the sun was starting to set, blue and black stormed the sky like bruises, the wind began to blow so hard that it hurt, and the temperature dropped twenty degrees in the same number of minutes.

  I pushed the wedding back a week.

  “You can’t hide from the weather. It will hunt you down and find you,” my mother responded. “There’s no weather inside of a Catholic church, you know!”

  Honestly, it wasn’t the rain that scared me, but the fact that if I had seen an insurance commercial featuring an ill child or a house full of family memories burning right down to the ground at any point that day, I probably would have cried.

  Naked with a Stranger

  I already knew that no matter what transpired during that afternoon, it was going to end up in a fight.

  A big fight, too, not a little fight where people just quit talking to each other, but a big fight that lands one or both participants either in the Madison Street jail or on an afternoon talk show.

  I wondered if I still had a strong right hook; it had been years since I had needed to use it. It used to be good enough to leave a hell of a mark. This time, however, I had the feeling that it was gonna have to be pungent enough to knock out a couple of teeth.

  My opponent had approximately twenty-two years more experience in man-to-man, hand-to-hand combat than I did, putting me at a definite disadvantage. She was an expert in pinching, open-hand slapping, hair-pulling, and Indian burns, and had also won the National Mark of Excellence Award by transforming a hairbrush into a lethal weapon. I knew all about that award. She received it after she beat the crap out of me on my eleventh birthday because I spit on my sister and then hit her in the leg with a dried-up dog turd.

  The only advantage I could possibly have would be to try and stay calm. That was it, that was the only thing I could do. I knew damn well that my competitor could whip herself up into a whirling dervish in a matter of seconds, and if I kept my ability to reason, the advantage would be mine.

  Then she called me on the phone.

  “I’ll be there in twenty minutes to pick you up,” she said.

  “Okay,” I agreed, “I’ll be ready.”

  “What condition are your armpits in?” she queried.

  “Oh no,” I protested. “I refuse. I am not shaving.”

  “Yes, you are.”

  “I don’t have any razors,” I reasoned. Stay calm, I told myself, keep the edge.

  “I’ll bring you one,” she informed me. “The way you keep parts of your body is disgusting. Where did you learn these things? I raised you to shave. You can’t let other people see you like that!”

  “What do you mean?” I asked. “No one’s coming in with me!”

  “Oh yes,” she said, and I could sense her smile widen on the other end of the phone. “Yes, they certainly do. They have to dress you.”

  “You didn’t tell me that strangers were going to see me naked,” I protested. “I don’t want strangers to see me naked! I’m going to have to put on some underwear, and I don’t even know if I have any.”

  I’m sure she believed that she was teaching me a lesson, but she wasn’t. She was only proving that she could enforce her vetoing power only as a mother who was paying for her daughter’s wedding could.

  Today was going to be an important battle in the war of my wedding, the struggle over the bridal gown. Up until now, my mother had exercised her veto power in pretty much every area known to Bride’s magazine and we barely agreed on anything.

  You see, in other places in the world, where weddings haven’t become big business, getting married is easy. In Kenya, the father of the bride spits on the bride’s head and on her breasts to demonstrate his good wishes, and as the bride departs, she does not look back for fear that she will turn to stone. All you need is some drool and an allegorical threat that a fair maiden will turn into a monolith and the wedding is a rampant success. The mother doesn’t have time to figure out how to ruin the experience for her daughter.

  But here, things are different. You need a ceremony, reception, a band, a DJ, invitations, favors, a caterer, a photographer, a florist, a baker, a videographer—the list doesn’t end, ever. I believe my family is the current world-record holder for attending more weddings that we weren’t invited to. As a result, I’ve crashed more receptions in one day than I did parties during my entire time as an undergraduate.

  My mom, still fresh from planning my sister’s wedding, had a pretty good idea of the way she wanted things to be and who she wanted to hire in this off-Broadway production. I thought that I might have some bargaining power since it was my wedding, but I was obviously using it incorrectly. The whole thought of the event would make my stomach burst into boiling ulcers, so I did the only thing I could do: I asked my shrink for $120’s worth of advice.

  “It’s your wedding, Laurie,” she stressed. “You’re going to have to fight for what you want.”

  “I know, I know,” I answered. “But it’s beyond that. You don’t understand.”

  “It can’t be that bad,” my therapist said. “Pick out certain things that are especially important to you, and focus on those. Something like your invitations, your dress, the place where the wedding will be.”

  “Yeah,” I nodded, “except that I found out that my mom’s been looking at places without me.”

  My therapist stopped for a moment, crinkled her brow, then sat back in her chair.

  “In that case, you have only one option,” she said slowly. “Give up. Surrender. You’re fighting a losing battle. Try and concentrate on your honeymoon, then.”

  “You think I should give up? Just like that?” I stuttered. “Well, can you ask someone else, like one of your therapist friends? Can you ask them for advice?”

  She just shook her head. It was obviously useless.

  I was remembering that conversation when my mom pulled into the driveway. I could tell she was excited. She just kept honking the horn, over and over again. I locked the side door of the house and started walking toward the car. In less than half an hour, I thought to myself, I will be standing in front of a mirror in some bridal store, looking at my reflection and realizing that I look remarkably like a Judd or one of the Gabor sisters, dead or alive.

  We got to the bridal shop.

  My mother picked out the dresses she liked.

  I got naked in a dressing room with a stranger.

  But it was way worse than that. I had no hope of capturing any of the glamour of Eva, Ava, or Ova when all of that white satin came tumbling over my head. I didn’t even have the charm of one of their poodles.

  When I came face-to-face with the real-life image of Laurie in a wedding dress, the first thing I thought was, “Realistically, what are my chances of dying in a Dust Devil–related home-liposuction attempt?”

  The second thing I thought was “Can I hire a stand-in?”

  And the third thing I though
t was “I’m already that monolith.”

  My mother, on the other hand, saw something different. She most likely had the wrong glasses on, but in that mirror she didn’t see Agnes Gooch or a girl crammed into a wedding dress so tight she looked like a Price Club–size white satin sausage. My mother saw a bride.

  I saw razor burn.

  “You’ll look beautiful,” my mother said. “Once you brush your hair.”

  “You look good,” the saleslady added. “It makes your boobs perky.”

  “Oh, thanks,” I answered. “I thought only a crane or five thousand dollars could do that.”

  “You look so pretty,” my mother reiterated. She smiled.

  She knew what she was doing.

  I couldn’t fight with someone who was telling me that I was fetching, perky, or relatively attractive.

  She won the battle, that day.

  I never even got to form a fist.

  The Suck of Bridal G-Force

  I will admit there was a moment that I really did get sucked into a bridal black hole. In a way, you can hardly help it. After spending months of leafing through ten pounds of wedding magazines every single time you come back from the grocery store, your mind becomes a little soft and very open to suggestion. After you’ve flipped through the newest issues of Modern Bride, Bridal Guide, Bride’s, Martha Stewart Weddings, InStyle Weddings, Bride Again, and Encore Bride, you will honestly believe that you will look exquisite walking down the aisle dressed as a lemon meringue pie, or even more tragic, a coconut macaroon.

  Bridal magazines propagate faster than mosquitoes. Every time I went to pick up a stick of margarine or a box of tampons, there on the shelf was a brand-new issue of the same magazine I bought yesterday. In hindsight, I am fully convinced that it’s actually the same, exact magazine, but that the publishers supply retailers with thirty different covers each month, and when the one on the shelves is sold, the quickest bag boy on staff runs to the supply room immediately to fetch the next version of the magazine with the new cover. It wouldn’t be a difficult scam at all; every magazine has the same awful dresses that make you believe that the Civil War era really is back in fashion and that if you want a gaggle of bridesmaids that could double for Suellen O’Hara, Melanie Hamilton, and Aunt Pittypat on Halloween, that is your God-given right as a bride, and anyone who tries to talk you out of it is nothing less than the devil. All sport the same, limp stories with headlines like “Flatware: An Investigative Report,” “Is Your Coffeemaker Meeting Your Needs?” and “The Truth Behind 200-Thread-Count Sheets.” Bridal magazines are kind of like OxyContin for the ivory satin/tulle crowd, and when you get down to it, I believe they are the number-one cause of why it is easier to reason with a crack addict than it is an engaged woman.