by Jen Doll
It’s taken me much of my adult life to feel confident enough to admit that whether it’s a marriage, a long-term relationship, or even a short-term one, I do want love, the kind that is practical and makes sense, as my dad describes, but at the same time, all corniness acknowledged, knocks me off my feet. And even now, confessing that feels dangerous. If I need someone else in order to be happy or fulfilled, am I the stereotype, or somehow a bad feminist? Can I be a strong, independent, self-assured woman and also say I’d like a boyfriend, and maybe even a husband, someone to care for who also cares for me, forever-and-ever-amen? But if I don’t say it, will it ever happen? Will that mysterious “right one at the right time” ever arise?
For women, marriage has traditionally meant greater limitations than it has for the men we choose, particularly with regard to life options beyond the family unit. Of course, throughout history, women have faced an array of greater external limitations compared to men. Getting married, as it was in my mom’s day, was one of the few ways to start life away from one’s parents. That’s no longer true, but even now women face gender-based marital challenges ranging from finding work-life balance to determining how to share household responsibilities and child care, responsibilities that still frequently fall squarely on female shoulders. I am proud of my parents for their marriage, but the model that worked for them, in which my mom was the homemaker while my dad surged forward in his work, would not be sustainable for me. I want my own career, and I want my partner to have his, too, whatever that may be, and I want each of us to respect and value and relate to the other’s choices, professionally and personally. It is for reasons of the past, present, and future that I am wary of the marital institution in principle and reality, to the extent that I would never, past the age of eight, blithely plan a double wedding on a trampoline.
Being single can also seem like the ultimate act of self-reliance, and a not entirely dishonorable one, considering the divorce rate. Conversely, the choice to pair up with someone else for an entire life can look a wee bit terrifying. Yet of all the reasons to marry, the honest desire to take that leap of faith and extend beyond the self and into a state of two—to ask someone to be there always and be answered with a yes; I’ll take a chance on you, if you’ll take a chance on me—is the most compelling to me. The active selection of that mutual compact (with or without an accompanying wedding) is an impressive one, which doesn’t mean it’s not scary, or risky, or that it doesn’t have the potential to end badly. A proposal made without an awareness of the risks, though, is only the most shallow sort of proposal. A leap of faith requires leaping with faith, not blindness or blissful ignorance.
In fairness, it can be hard to tell the difference.
• • •
When Hurricane Sandy hit the East Coast, a man I was dating was visiting me in New York City, and afterward, my mom told me, “I was so glad he was there, so you weren’t alone.” That may be the closest she’s ever come to telling me she wishes I’d get married. Had I not been seeing anyone, she never would have said this, and I would have been fine, if a bit lonely, on my own, or I would have gone to stay with my brother, or with friends. And in truth, I was glad he was there, too. The flip side of that alone coin, though, is how utterly dreadful, how one hundred and ten times worse it would be to find yourself trapped in a tiny apartment with someone you can’t stand for the duration of a massive storm. Weathering out the hurricane of life means you have to find, and choose, the right companion. I feel glad my parents get that. They’ve never tried to guilt me into being with someone I’d never share beef jerky or my last bottle of hurricane water with, much less my life.
One of the questions I asked them was, “Do you think people today lose anything by not getting married?” I was probing to see if they thought I’d miss anything if I remained single forever. I wanted to know if they were worried about me, if they thought I was doing something wrong, and if they felt there was something wrong with me. I also wanted to know what they felt they’d gained over the years, and what they might have lost if they hadn’t followed in the course they had.
“It doesn’t worry me that you’re single,” said my dad (thanks, Dad). “People don’t marry today, in some cases, because they don’t have to. They do what they do because they can. In my day, living together without being married was something only showbiz people might do.” He was concerned, though, about missing out on the benefits of and the ability to compromise, “the rough-and-tumble of fitting in together,” as he put it, if people don’t marry. “You have to bend and fit in and adjust as you go through it. I guess at this point I’m full of bumps and Mom’s full of bumps, but we’re full of bumps together. If you did get married,” he said, “it would be a learning experience.”
I am sure he is right.
My mom had a slightly different take, about collective memory and the importance of keeping people around to remind you of who you once were. “Your dad and I can sit down and talk about things we did twenty or thirty years ago, things we still have jokes about. You don’t get to have that history or connection or the memories if you’re just meeting and dating and meeting and dating,” she told me. “And the memories of the good times can help you get through the rough spots.”
• • •
The day of my mom’s brain surgery I sat with my phone next to me, ringer on, waiting and trying to work but unable to complete a single task. I spoke to my brother, and we consoled each other. “You know how she is,” he said, “she’ll be astounding the doctors with her superhuman recovery in no time.”
“Yes,” I agreed. “Of course she will.” We hoped, we hoped.
Finally, Dad called to tell us she was out of surgery, but she wasn’t awake yet, and wouldn’t be for a while. They were keeping her in a medically induced coma as her brain healed to prevent any further damage to it.
That did not ease my mind much. “Do they think she’ll be okay, though?” I ventured, not sure if I wanted to know the truth. “Her brain is . . . fine?”
“Apparently the bleeding was from old wounds,” he explained, which wasn’t really an answer but was a kind of reassurance, if we chose to see it that way. The previous autumn, they’d gone on a bike tour of New Zealand, and she’d taken a hard fall that cracked her helmet. While bruised, she thought she was fine. She wasn’t. She’d been walking around with the hematomas for months, and they’d healed, and then they’d opened up again, the results of which had sent her to the emergency room. But she’d been walking around with bleeding in her brain for months, and during all that, her only complaints had been that she felt more tired than usual and her head hurt now and then. “So, you know your mom,” he said with a raspy laugh. “She’s not going to let this stop her.”
Brad and I flew down. Daily, the three of us would visit Mom in the hospital. We’d stand by her bedside and look at all the tubes going into her body, her chapped lips, the bruises on her arms from blood taken, the cap on her head to prevent her stitches from becoming infected. We’d look at her and my dad would hold her hand and say, “We need you back, Marilou. We need you back.” I’d try to will her eyes to open through the force of my own, and Brad and I would both talk to her. We’d tell her things that were happening outside in the world, though we barely knew what those things were because our world had shrunk to this hospital, this bed in this hospital, the person in this bed and the people who needed her to come back as soon as possible. She had always been the conversationalist of the family. We’d go home and sit in her too-quiet kitchen trying to eat some of the casserole dishes that kind neighbors and friends had brought over. We’d talk about what was happening or, more often, fall into an emotionally exhausted silence. The next day we’d wake up and do it again.
There was a wonderful nurse at this hospital who would sit with my dad and tell him it was going to be okay, that she knew my mom was a fighter, and that she would wake up and be herself again, she knew it. “Your
dad is trying so hard to be strong for everyone,” she said to me once, when it was just the two of us in the room. “It’s good you kids are here. You can help him get through this. You’ll get through this together.”
Finally, the call came. My dad emerged from his office at the house grinning. “Mom is awake!” he announced. “She’s talking! She’s out of it, but she’s awake!” We started to breathe, then. Our world had not collapsed in on itself permanently, though our fingers would remain tightly crossed in the weeks that followed. When we arrived at her room, we were privy to a disturbing sight: My mom was indeed awake, her paper gown in disarray, the hair they’d left her after shaving her head for surgery stringy around her neck. She was awake, and she was shouting at a hospital employee who was proffering a tub of fruit-on-the-bottom Dannon yogurt. She only liked Greek yogurt. “I’m not going to eat that!” she was saying. “It tastes like crap! Take it away. Blech!”
“Um, the medicine will make her a little . . . loopy for a while,” a nurse cautioned.
“We’ll bring you some good stuff from home,” Brad assured Mom. “The kind you like.”
“You better!” she warned. “Who are you!?”
“It’s Brad,” he said.
“Oh. Oh, hi, Brad.”
“Mom’s back!” he said, and we all stood around her, smiling so hard our faces hurt. It was the best thing we’d seen in days.
Later, my dad told me that what had gotten him through the surgery and recovery was “grim determination.” He had no other choice, he just had to do it.
And so had she when, years earlier, he’d had heart surgery to combat what turned out to be significant blockages. After his operation, the doctor came out and motioned to my mother. “I want you to come with me,” he told her.
“I thought, that’s not good,” she remembered. “We went into this room with all these monitors, and he showed me what he’d done, and said, ‘He has to come back again. I couldn’t do it all in one procedure.’ I was leaving the hospital, and that’s when it hit me. Shit, I’m not ready to be a widow.” They got through that, too, with grim determination and some dark comedy. In sick sense of humor and in health.
On the phone recently with my mom—who, as predicted, recovered with flying colors from her brain surgery, astounding the doctors, impressing friends and family—I asked, “Do you have a favorite memory from your marriage?” She had one at the ready, though it wasn’t what I expected.
“It was my ten-year high school reunion,” she told me. “All these people were there who knew I had been married and divorced, and that I had this new husband. I say to your dad, ‘I want you to really be nice, not that you wouldn’t, but please watch what you say.’ We get there and are having a drink, and he starts to say something, I can’t even remember what, some joke. I turn to him and say, ‘You told me you’d behave,’ and he goes, ‘What are you telling me? I haven’t said fuck once.’ The whole table cracked up, and we all had a great time . . . until my girlfriend threw up all over the table.”
I laughed, and she got quiet for a minute. “There’s another one, too.”
“What?”
“I was thinking about the time we went to Rome. It was our anniversary, and I had always wanted to go to Italy,” she said. “One night we went out for dinner at one of those places where people come around and sing at the table. I’m a little bit uncomfortable with that, but it was pretty. They asked, what did we want to hear? And your dad tells them ‘Al Di La.’”
“From Rome Adventure! Your favorite.”
“They start singing, and I just start crying, and these guys are all looking at each other, thinking, Do we sing so badly that she’s crying? Your dad waves them off, and I say, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t know what happened. Did I embarrass you?’ and your dad, I could have strangled him, says, ‘After all these years, it’s nice to know you have a heart.’
“I hate to say it, because everyone says it,” she added, “but you’ve got to have a sense of humor. If you were married to someone with no sense of humor, Jesus.” There’s a muffled yelling in the background. “Oh, hang on for a minute, you’re so impatient,” I hear her say, and then my dad’s voice: “I put up with a lot!” to which my mom retorts, “You just wait for the next ten years!”
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“I better go,” she said. “It’s cocktail hour, and your dad’s made me a martini, and he thinks I should be drinking it.”
7.
Greetings from Love Camp, Wish You Were Here
The flight was bumpy, and I was nervous. All those years of air travel to the increasingly far-flung parts of the world where my parents had moved for my dad’s job—London, Singapore, Indonesia—had resulted in an unexpected effect. As the hours I spent on planes accrued into triple digits, my level of nervousness on each flight ratcheted up as well. This wasn’t rational, but that didn’t change the facts: Any bump or lift or sway of the plane beyond the regular course, any hint of turbulence or shift in the way things felt or sounded, and I’d be clutching the armrests and gritting my teeth, engaging in some clandestine praying (regardless of how I felt about religion when my feet were planted on the ground), and generally promising to be a better person no matter what, just keep this plane in the air, please, please, please.
This particular flight was to a wedding in the Dominican Republic, two hours and change from Miami, kid stuff. I had this. Or so I thought. Then came another bump, followed by a sharp jerk to the right. I clutched my armrest tighter, accidentally also grasping the hand of my seatmate, a blond girl who’d grown up with Caitlin, the bride, in Florida. Her name was Leigh. I’d met her at the bachelorette party, and even before that, when a bunch of us had stayed with Caitlin at her parent’s house in Boca Raton for a couple of days before heading down to Key West for spring break sophomore year. Elsewhere on the plane, which was filled with wedding guests per the bride and groom’s instructions, people stood up, out of their seats, in the aisles, chatting as if they had nary a care in the world. They were making me even more nervous. We were in a metal capsule hurtling through the air some thirty thousand feet above ground. Oh, God, I don’t want to look.
“Pretend it’s a bumpy road,” said Leigh, who had inconspicuously moved her hand away from my sweaty grasp.
“Huh?”
“Someone told me that once. Turbulence on a plane is basically just like being in a car on a bumpy road,” she said.
“Is it really?” I asked.
She shrugged. “I don’t know. But it’s made me feel better about flying ever since. Just imagine you’re driving on a gravel road. It’s no big deal; you’ve done that tons of times.”
The plane jolted in the air again, and I loosened my fingers around the armrest slightly, but I kept my seat belt buckled low and tight across the waist, the way we’d been instructed by the flight attendant, for the remainder of the flight. No need to tempt fate.
• • •
A destination wedding! We’re having a destination wedding, and we want you to be there!” It was a pronouncement as close to a gift that a post-grad with an entry-level salary and underdeveloped budgeting skills can receive. This would be a built-in vacation I’d have to take, to a destination I wouldn’t otherwise think to visit or even be able to afford. As for affording, that was a stretch, but as luck would have it, Caitlin’s dad would be discreetly subsidizing our stay in an elegant beachside resort known for its golf course and fine amenities. Sure, I had to buy a plane ticket, a dress, and another dress, and there would be eating and drinking and the price tags attached, but I justified those in my mind easily. You had to eat wherever you were, and wasn’t the rest what credit cards were for? (Wedding Tip: Not exactly.) Anyway, this wasn’t just any wedding. It was a destination.
At this point in my midtwenties, I was enamored with the concept. Why wouldn’t you sequester all of your closest friends and your
family members away to a place free from the stresses and obligations and distractions of day-to-day life, to a location where everyone could focus on the bride and groom and their love and promising future for days on end? A destination wedding seemed the best way, the only way, to do this marriage thing. I’d seen the movies. There would surely be some cute boys, whether they were wedding guests or not.
• • •
Caitlin and I had been next-door neighbors in our assigned dorm freshman year. I liked her immediately. She was tall and blond and from Florida—not the so-called Redneck Riviera where I’d vacationed in high school, but high-end, sophisticated Florida. Boca. She had a worldly air that I admired. She knew things, about dating and guys and how the world worked, about fashion and drinking and social situations. She’d come to college with at least one suitable fake ID, and well-placed connections for backups. I, on the other hand, had to doctor my actual driver’s license with a pen. The bouncer at the off-campus bar known for its liberal carding policy took one look at my questionable artistry, said, “You can do better than this,” and let me in anyway. “We’ve got to get you a real fake,” Caitlin whispered to me once we were safely inside, and within several weeks we had.
Everyone loved her, and I felt lucky she loved me back.
When we graduated, she was offered a grown-up professional job with a grown-up professional sort of company, the kind at which a person wore smart suits and shiny, pointy, business-lady shoes. She moved to Boston and started her life there. I moved to New York. While Boston was close enough for visits, I mourned the separation and wished she’d change her mind and join the rest of us new Manhattanites. Oh, the adventures we would have! But it was not to be, because it was in Boston that Caitlin met Cash, the man who would become her husband.
