by Jen Doll
“Are you sure you should be doing that?” I said, my voice coming out quavery and meek. “It seems kind of, er . . . dangerous.”
“It’s fine,” he said.
“I . . . I just think no one should break his neck here today,” I said, louder, and then even louder, “That would make for a terrible wedding!”
He rolled his eyes and muttered as he kept climbing, and the people holding the feet of the ladder steady atop the table gritted their teeth and held tighter. I had a vision that this would end horribly, so I took that moment to hide in the bathroom. Oh, God, I’ve become a mom, I thought. I had been totally lame, a nagging worrywart, and in front of all of Will’s friends. Still, I really didn’t think a person should climb onto a ladder that sat on top of a table. Feeling sure I’d seen warnings about such things somewhere, say, in seventh-grade shop class, or perhaps on ladders themselves, I held fast to that resolve.
When I emerged a few minutes later, everything was fine. There had been no disaster, the ladder was no longer on top of the table, and people were singing and talking and diligently hanging up lanterns. Progress was being made. I can do this, I told myself.
Will walked over to me. “Hi.”
“Hey,” I said. “I just got kind of weirded out about the table . . . I’m good now.”
“Let’s go,” he said definitively. “We’ve done enough. We need to eat.”
I was not inclined to argue with that. We left and went to a tiny cafe in town where we sat outside in the now-warm sun and ate egg dishes and drank coffee after coffee. Suddenly, life was wonderful again. We meandered through a little street fair that was also an organic market, featuring brightly colored fruits and vegetables and hemp soaps and fresh-baked breads, and we tasted local cheeses and bought one to take back with us. All of the stress of the earlier morning gone, we returned to our apartment to get ready for the evening. Two of Will’s friends were in the kitchen making pies and cakes to be served at the wedding. They’d appropriated the kitchen next door for this purpose, too, and for the past hour or more had been going from one oven to the next checking on their baked goods. All seemed well, so they decided to go ahead and take their showers. This is often precisely when all hell breaks loose.
We were standing in the kitchen next door talking with some other guests when it became clear that something had gone wrong in the oven. There was smoke pouring out of the top burner, and having little knowledge of what one should do in case of an oven fire (Wedding Tip: Don’t open the oven!), we opened the oven. Flames danced inside, red and gold tendrils reaching out at us. Oh, that was not good. We slammed the oven door shut and ran around the apartment opening windows. Though we’d turned off the stove, smoke kept pouring out of it, abating briefly and then billowing up again. In the distance, smoke alarms were going off. We feared the arrival of a cadre of firefighters, or worse, management, who might kick us out and would probably, definitely, charge us for a new oven and any other damage incurred. “Where are Heidi and Natasha? Get Heidi and Natasha!” someone said, but the girls in charge of the pies and cakes remained blissfully ignorant as they showered. This was our problem to handle; you can’t wait for someone else to handle fire.
You can, however, delegate. Having done all we knew to do, Will and I returned to our parlor area, away from the smoke, leaving the people who were staying in the apartment with the compromised oven to Google “What to do in case of oven fire.” Yep, should have kept the oven door closed in the first place. Oops. The fire died down, and soon after, Heidi and Natasha appeared, their hair damp and in towels, and pronounced the burned cakes inedible. “I don’t know what she put in that cake!” said Natasha, blaming Heidi’s laissez-faire recipe interpretation for the inferno. Fortunately, the baked goods in the other oven were fine, and very nearly but not quite burning down your lodgings at a wedding is the kind of story the bride loves to hear about after the fact.
We never were charged for any damage, either.
• • •
I didn’t know much about Max and Ava, the groom and bride, but I knew from Will that Max had asked Ava to marry him previously, and she’d said no the first time. She hadn’t been ready, but after some time had passed, he asked again and she was. I liked the idea that love could grow even from a form of rejection (that wasn’t, in the end, a rejection at all), and I liked that this couple seemed so thoughtful about marriage. They wanted to be sure. They were both tall and slim, attractive and creative. They seemed, simply enough, a good match, people who looked right together and people who had decided they were right together, too.
Getting ready that evening, I put on a silky red dress, wrapping myself in a black belt that tapered the waist and made the skirt flare. I had brought the patent leather stiletto Mary Janes with four-inch heels that I’d worn to Annabel’s wedding. They were gorgeous and made my feet hurt so badly that one night out in Brooklyn I’d had to take them off and walk home barefoot. I also had with me a pair of brown and gold suede heels that I loved but that a friend of mine had once dubbed “sensible.” Fuck it, I wanted to be able to stand. I wore the sensible shoes, went without tights, and applied red-coral lipstick. I emerged from our room, and Will saw me and smiled. “You look great,” he said. He did, too, all dressed up in a jacket and tie, formal clothes I hadn’t yet had the occasion to see him in. He’d made himself a drink of ginger ale and some shady bourbon that had been hanging out in the backseat of his cluttered car for the past few months, sopping up the occasional Seattle sun and more frequent cloudy skies. I took a sip of it. Not bad. It was wedding time.
Like us, the hall we’d spent the morning in had been transformed. Lights were hanging from the ceiling’s beams in a flattering way that would not block the bride’s head. Candles flickered throughout the room, which was filled with color and prettiness and interesting things: art installations from friends who’d crafted them as gifts, photographs of the couple displayed about, and fresh-scrubbed, happy people in their party clothes. Everyone was milling around in front of the bar, and there was that special about-to-get-started energy in the room, all of us in our best, and in the best moods, too. I saw the wedding planner and approached her. “Everything looks so good,” I said, motioning around the room. “Thanks so much for helping,” she responded. Not a hint of sarcasm passed between us. It was a wedding miracle.
The bride and groom appeared. She had on a sparkling, pale gold gown with long, flowing sleeves and a low back; it looked like a long column from top to bottom and was cinched with a jeweled belt. The effect was very old Hollywood in Washington State, her hair coiffed and a jeweled brooch tucked above her ear, her lips crimson. The groom wore a gray-blue pinstriped suit over a pale yellow shirt that brought out the gold in the bride’s dress, and a blue and gold tie. Beyond their collaborative styling everything seemed to just go, and the whole room appeared itself alight with jewels. I could feel proud of my candle placement, if not my fearlessness around ladders.
At this wedding, especially once my initial nervousness dissipated, I took a more anthropological view than I ever had before. It was fascinating to sit back and watch as the event transpired, to see how things played out among these friends—many of whom had known one another since college—and how this couple had envisioned their wedding. There were five or six long tables lined up across the room, and a buffet set up in the front, those wedding-omnipresent Sterno burners blazing underneath to keep things hot. There were vegetarian options, grains and beans, stuff that was filling and earthy and also tasted good, and plenty of pans along the buffet line to choose from. Instead of a separate ceremony and reception, everything seemed to happen at once, almost like dinner theater. People got drinks and found places at the tables, and the speeches and toasts began from friends and family.
The bride and groom were married onstage by one of their close friends, another graduate of their college and member of the theater company. She stood between the couple, w
ho held hands in front of her, and addressed the room. “I asked my mom, who has been married to my dad for more than thirty years, what the biggest surprise of their marriage had been, what she knew now that she could not possibly have known then,” she said. “Her response: ‘I didn’t know how long it would be.’” There was a pause for laughter, and we heartily obliged. After a moment, she continued with her mom’s words: “‘I didn’t know there would be so many trials we’d have to go through together. I also didn’t know how much Dad and I would grow together, how much our values would stay the same, how important it was that our values were the same.’” There was another pause, this one for some wiping of tears.
Then it was vows time. We watched, rapt, as the bride and groom delivered the marital promises they’d written to each other. “I will always listen,” “I will have your back,” “I will accept you as you change,” and so on, back and forth, words that weren’t about obeying one’s husband or looking after one’s wife, but which signified a more modern promise to always try to care and communicate in equal measure, because without that, where are you? Blind, enforced obedience is so very yesteryear. “I will eat your young,” said the bride, or it may have been the groom. At least that’s what I thought I heard, and across the table one of Will’s friends caught my eye. He was suppressing his own outburst of laughter. I tried to keep from spitting out my wine, and I mostly succeeded. “I will be your home,” that’s what had been said, a lovely sentiment, I thought, feeling involuntary giggles rise up in me again and semi-successfully quashing them.
The vows over, we ate, drank, and mingled. “There’s someone I want you to meet,” said Will, pulling me aside so he could introduce me to one of his former professors. She and I sat and talked. “Isn’t he wonderful?” she said. “He is so wonderful,” I agreed, getting a little misty over how wonderful he, and all of it, was.
Later we climbed onto the stage where the bride and groom had been married, the same spot that earlier that day had been a staging ground for lantern assembly and hanging. In its latest iteration it was a room for shadow dancing, sheets hung across the stage and pulsing pink and green and blue lights everywhere. If you stood on the other side of the curtain and looked up from the floor where guests had been seated for dinner, you’d have seen dark moving forms on the sheet. This was where we now danced and jumped up and down, pretending to talk on an old plastic rotary phone that had been part of an art installation decorating the room. It was making its way across the dance floor, passed from friend to friend, a live, literal version of telephone. “Hello!” we shouted into it. “Hello?” someone would respond. “How are you?” “I’m great—I’m at a wedding!” Riiiiinnngggg. “Oh, hi!” And so on, until the reception was over.
The apartment where the cakes had burned to a crisp had been designated as the official after-party location. We arrived and others began to show up, too, more and more of them, everyone wedding-weary and sweaty and sufficiently boozed, but not tired enough for bed. Hours of fun remained to be had. In the room adjacent to the kitchen, which still bore a greasy, palpable sheen from the oven fire, a large table was being set up for beer pong. Will stationed himself at the head of that table, his tie flung over his shoulder rakishly, and began to play, surrounded by his former college buddies. I found a spot on a couch next to a few women, each of us clutching a plastic cup of wine in hand, and we kicked off our shoes and traded stories and laughed, oh, how we laughed. As the dawn broke, we stumbled, sleepy but satisfied, back to our rooms with our dates, and we fell asleep in their arms, the perfect ending to a perfect wedding.
• • •
Well, not exactly. Because it just doesn’t happen that way, no matter how we try.
• • •
What really happened was this: Everything was fine and dandy, until it wasn’t. Suddenly I was drunk, tired, and most of all, tired of being a good sport. I’d tried, I’d really tried! And now he was playing this dumb college game with his college friends, and just expecting me to be okay with that. He was clueless that something might be brewing dangerously on the couch, in his wedding date, and that was because he was not paying attention to me at all. I felt ignored and neglected. I felt . . . the need to make my feelings known.
Here is where it all goes wrong at a wedding. In a moment, something that is really quite small and maybe not an issue at all, if you were being reasonable, blows up in your mind, and all at once it’s so big, you can’t stand it. It’s encroaching on the sides of your cranium. It’s struggling for release. It’s making your body and heart and soul and most of all your mouth want to scream, and you have to let it out. This is the Wedding Tantrum, a buildup of everything sustained throughout the day—the excitement and anxiety, the happiness and sadness, the expectation and disappointment, and whatever else might have seeped into your deepest, darkest emotional caverns. It is inherently unreasonable. These feelings desperately want to go somewhere, and because you’re a little bit (or a lot) drunk, and a little bit (or a lot) tired, they will frequently be laid upon whatever person in the immediate vicinity cares about you the most: whoever is there and will not stop loving you because you’re about to have a shit fit. Whoever will take it. It’s a dangerous game, however, because you never know if this person might not take it at all and will instead say screw it, you’re not worth all this trouble, and walk away. Sometimes that happens.
That’s not what I was thinking about right then, though. I wasn’t really thinking, or if I was thinking, it was in Neanderthalic utterances rather than in rational human sentences—far more Tarzan beating chest than, say, even Andie MacDowell delivering stilted but at least cogent lines in Four Weddings and a Funeral. My mind was full of impulse-driven thoughts: Me Feel Bad. Me Mad. Me Want Attention. Me Gonna Get It.
I paused in my conversation, stood up, and walked over to Will. He didn’t stop playing his game, and this burned me up further. Me Want ATTENTION. “Wanna try?” he asked, one eye still on the competition. I made a halfhearted attempt to get the ball in the cup and missed by a mile. I hate games, I thought, and I especially hate games I lose. HE KNOWS I HATE GAMES I LOSE. And I am about to lose it entirely. All of the weddings, all of the relationships, all of the times I felt I’d tried and hadn’t gotten what I wanted, whether I knew what that was or not, were right back with me again. I thought I’d matured. I thought I was finally an adult. But the truth was, inside, I was just a little girl in a party dress with jaggedy, badly cut bangs, who was about to yell and kick and scream and cry to try to make herself feel better, because the wedding had stopped being fun. “That’s okay,” he said, handing me another ball. “Go again.”
I am not entirely sure I did not throw the ball across the table, across the room, away, in any case, from me. I am sure that something terrible came out of my mouth, something that might have been along the lines of “I HATE BEER PONG, AND I HATE YOU!” And I’m definitely sure that, like an eighties antiheroine in a movie about prom, I turned on my sensible heels and ran out of there, down the hall until I reached our bedroom, where I threw myself across the bed and started to cry. Well, I’d gotten attention. Everyone had seen that. It just hadn’t gone quite as planned. Yelling at someone else to make yourself feel better almost never works, unless you’re on the phone with your cell service provider.
As I began to calm down, I was struck with a horrifying thought: Is this how every date I’ve ever taken to a wedding felt? Alone, as if I wasn’t paying them enough attention, as if I wasn’t doing enough to take care of them? Alone, and maybe even taken for granted? I felt for Jason, for Christoph, for the men I’d brought with me who knew no one, and who had struggled, gamely or less so, to be a part of my event. These were the guys I’d criticized for not being better, and yet here I was. It wasn’t always easy to be a date at a wedding, even in the best of circumstances.
A few minutes later, Will was in the room with me. “What just happened?” he asked. “You can’t do that. Y
ou can’t just get mad and freak out and storm off like that.” He was right, of course. Or I could, but if I did, it didn’t bode well for us or for me and anyone I ever wanted to be with. Still, he’d followed me to tell me that. He’d cared enough to choose me. I apologized, and inwardly I vowed to be better, to listen, to have his back, to try to communicate without resorting to toddler tactics, and to never eat anyone’s young. If this relationship was going to go anywhere—and where it might go, I didn’t know, but I wanted the option to see what might unfold—I would need to do all of that, and I’d need to work on it every day. And we weren’t even married.
The next morning, I woke with the ache of regret. It had all felt like it was going so right, and then out of the blue, it had taken a turn I hadn’t predicted. In hindsight in these situations, you know you should have done your best to shore up the course for just such a thing, because it wasn’t out of the blue at all. Then you beat yourself up doubly, because you didn’t. It wasn’t a mistake that I’d felt neglected or even that I’d gotten angry. It was a mistake that I hadn’t been mature enough to talk about it in a reasonable way. It was a mistake that I’d been such a baby. Growing up is hard. Being a grown-up at a wedding can be even harder.
Weddings. They are fraught with emotion. They can be powder kegs. They are full of love, but they also can be tinged with anger, resentment, insecurity, doubt, and all the baggage we come with as adult humans. At a wedding, the habits we’ve adopted to cope with and get by in daily life confront these weighty traditions we may or may not even believe in, and that is a recipe that may lead to oven fires. That’s why it’s important at a wedding to check the cakes, to breathe and think twice before you storm out of a room or head down a path you don’t actually want to go. It’s important to be patient and kind and attentive to your dates, whomever they may be. And, if you’re me, it’s important to try to stop somewhere around the sixth glass of wine. Or, fine, the seventh. Hey, it’s a wedding.
