The Magic Room: A Story About the Love We Wish for Our Daughters

by Jeffrey Zaslow

  Her parents’ strained relationship made things confusing when Alyssa went to Becker’s to hang out with her mom and grandmother. It was hard for her to reconcile the images of smiling brides, heading into marriage, with her understanding of the marriage she observed in her own house. “To me, a marriage was a mom, a dad, and kids,” she now says. “Marriage was a family. I didn’t see it as a special love between two people. I have no memories of my parents in love, so I didn’t know what love looked like.”

  Once, when Alyssa was eight, Shelley and Gary had been fighting, and afterward, Alyssa followed her mother into her bedroom and asked, “Did you ever love Dad?”

  Shelley didn’t fully answer. She acknowledged the struggles caused by Gary’s drinking, and said she hoped he would get himself help. She reminded Alyssa that he was a good man in a lot of ways. But she couldn’t bring herself to say that she had ever loved him. “My parents might have tried to teach me about love when I was young,” Alyssa says. “But it wasn’t by showing me the love between them.”

  By the time Alyssa was eleven, Shelley was sleeping with her on many nights. Shelley couldn’t bring herself to share a bed with Gary. And yet each day, she’d dress herself up, head down to Becker’s, and sell the idea of love to brides and their parents.

  For his part, Gary knew that his drinking was creating a distance between him and Shelley that was becoming too wide to breach. “You’re going to have to slow down or she’s going to leave you,” Shelley’s brother told him one day.

  “I know that,” Gary responded. “I know I’m losing her.”

  Several times, Gary found the strength to quit, and he’d remain sober for a few months at a time. He always relapsed. As he sees it now: “Alcoholism is a disease that tells you that you don’t have a disease.”

  He had been drinking a great deal of beer, hiding the bottles, and as he got older, he turned to hard liquor. He ended up in rehab five times, and several stays were required by law because of drunk-driving convictions. At one point, he spent sixty days in jail.

  There were times when Shelley found herself trying to talk Gary out of suicide. She didn’t think he’d actually do it. But she eventually stopped coddling him and got tough. “Who the hell do you think you are?” she said at one point. “If you want to knock yourself out of this world, that’s one thing. But you’re leaving behind three kids who love you. And that’s just a selfish thing to do.”

  In 1999, when Alyssa was thirteen years old, Shelley told Gary she wanted a divorce, and they separated.

  By that point, she felt she had no choice. Gary’s alcoholism was a threat to the kids’ safety. She had to take action. She tried to reason with Gary. “If there isn’t an openly expressed love in the house, how unhealthy is that for the kids?” she asked.

  Gary couldn’t argue with her. He was upset, but he knew he couldn’t blame her. “For a long time,” he now says, “she was a caregiver and I was a care taker. At first she was very willing to help. But by the end, she was just disgusted. She was only looking out for the welfare of the kids. If I was watching the kids and drinking, would I be able to take care of them?” They both knew the answer to that question.

  For the four years that followed, a good part of Alyssa resented Shelley for breaking up the family. She kept a journal, but couldn’t always bring herself to write about her parents. But she wrote observations about Becker’s Bridal, about what it took for her grandmother and her mother to run the place. When she was fifteen she wrote, “I suppose one day I’ll be the one running the store. I’ll be the boss. And when that happens, I’m going to have to be a bitch.”

  Shelley understood her children’s sense of loss that Gary was out of the house. And so she always invited him over for holidays, always made sure he knew about the kids’ school activities. He’d be there Christmas morning when presents were opened, and remained a constant presence in their lives. That wasn’t enough for Alyssa, who felt her mother had taken her father away from her.

  But Gary now looks back at the divorce with appreciation. The divorce likely saved him from dying in a car accident, or from cirrhosis of the liver. “Shelley gave me the tough love I needed,” he says. “She helped me hit rock bottom, which started the whole process toward recovery. She did what she had to do.

  “There’s a good chance that I wouldn’t have quit if she didn’t leave me, that I’d have drunk myself to death. She helped save my life.”

  Shortly after Shelley told Gary she was leaving him, he was in court-ordered rehab and, as part of his therapy, wrote letters to Shelley and their kids. “I’ve never really told anyone my feelings,” he wrote to Alyssa. “That’s how I was brought up. I’m learning to express how I feel, and to tell you the truth, it’s very hard.” He wrote of his sorrow because he missed a school parade that Alyssa was in, “Everyone said how beautiful you looked and I thought to myself, ‘She looks like that every day.’”

  Gary missed Alyssa when she was on her school’s homecoming court, but wrote her to say he heard she’d looked beautiful.

  He wrote that he was praying for her to understand how his life had ended up in that rehab center. “The best I can do is to change myself for the better. I’ve been looking for a place like this ever since I admitted to myself that I am an alcoholic . . . This place has taught me that I am human and I’m allowed to make mistakes. I thank God for giving me an other chance so I may correct my mistakes and the harm I inflicted on everyone.

  “Alyssa, I can’t explain how very proud I am to have you as my daughter. I just hope you know it. I miss you with an unconditional love forever.”

  He knew that Alyssa was angry with her mother about the divorce, and he knew Shelley had done what she needed to do. He ended his letter: “Give mom a hug for me. Tell her you love her on Christmas. Just do it, Alyssa. Thanks!”

  As Gary worked to find his way to sobriety, as months and then years passed, he discovered something about love. “If you really love somebody, if it’s really true love,” he told Alyssa, “then sometimes you have to let it go. I knew your mother couldn’t be happy with me, not the way I was. I knew that. And so I had to love her enough to want her to be happy without me. I say this without resentment, without any grudges. I still love her, and I want her to be happy without me. That’s what I wish for her.”

  After a childhood of not really seeing or understanding the bonds between her mother and her father, Alyssa finally had a sense of things. Her father was describing a kind of love most of the brides at Becker’s couldn’t yet fathom.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Ashley

  Here on her first visit to Becker’s, Ashley Brandenburg feels both at home and out of place. She grew up in rural Laingsburg, Michigan, a half hour southeast of Fowler, and her mother and most of her aunts were Becker’s brides. When she was a girl, she had pulled herself into her mother’s tiny, long-sleeved lacy dress, wondering when her time would come. And so being here at Becker’s, picking out her dress, is the continuation of a family tradition.

  And yet, Ashley also feels unlike everyone else in the store today, almost as if she’s visiting a culture to which she no longer belongs. Now a PhD candidate in French literature at Cornell University, she is likely the only bride here who speaks four languages (English, French, Italian, and Spanish) and the only woman marrying a fellow Ivy Leaguer also studying for his doctorate. At twenty-seven, she also appears to be the oldest bride-to-be here today.

  Some of the other brides are still in their late teens. “They’re like babies!” she thinks. “How much of life could they have experienced? Why rush into marriage? Shouldn’t they wait and explore the world at least a little bit?”

  She keeps her thoughts to herself, though, as her mom and aunt help her narrow down her dress choices. She doesn’t want to come off as an elitist—a highbrow academic looking down at the naïve, small-town girls she left behind. And who knows? Maybe these other brides’ lives—even if they never leave Michigan—will be as fulfill
ing as the life Ashley and her fiancé are planning for themselves.

  Ashley doesn’t realize that the saleswoman helping a bride on the other side of the store—the owner’s daughter, Alyssa—empathizes with her conflicted feelings. When Alyssa sees customers such as Ashley, former local girls who’ve moved away to find big jobs or get advanced degrees, she finds herself thinking about the days she studied fashion in Paris and New York. “I miss that part of my life,” she later explains, “and I’m torn about it.” After discovering just the basics of Ashley’s story, she’s a bit envious. “A major struggle in my life is asking myself questions: Is this what I’m supposed to be doing with my life, working at Becker’s here in Fowler, focused on the idea of getting married one of these days and having children? Or am I supposed to be doing something else, somewhere else, something bigger, in some big city?”

  Ashley is cognizant, of course, of her own observations and feelings as she shops alongside other brides at Becker’s. But she doesn’t know how the brides and their attending saleswomen are taking note of her—how she carries herself and the small talk she makes with her mom. Is she coming off as some academic outsider, or does she seem like she’s just another local small-town bride?

  “This looks a little like the dress you wore to your own wedding,” Ashley says to her mother, Sue, as she holds up the gown she will eventually wear into the Magic Room. “It’s sort of the same overlay of lace.”

  Sue tells a saleswoman that she got her dress in 1971 at Becker’s, when the dressing rooms were separated by curtains. “I still have it,” she says. “It was a sample dress, and was very tight on me. I realized I’d have to really go on a diet before the wedding to fit into it.”

  Ashley knows well the story of how her mother ended up being able to fit into that dress. But neither she nor her mom offers details about that here in the store. Instead, they head up the stairs to the Magic Room, past all the young brides, to see what Ashley looks like in the dress that echoes that too-tight gown from 1971.

  Ashley’s mom was twenty-two years old when she came to Becker’s. And Sue turned out to be one of those brides who saw firsthand how tenuous the hold can be on happy bridal moments, given the randomness of life.

  In early June 1971, a few weeks after Sue bought her bridal gown, her sister was driving her to the post office to mail out her wedding invitations, and they came to a rise in the road. In a car coming the other way, a dog had just vomited in the backseat, and the driver had turned to comfort the sick animal. In that instant, the driver veered into the oncoming lane of traffic and slammed into the car driven by Sue’s sister.

  Unlike her sister, Sue wasn’t wearing her seat belt, and her head slammed through the windshield. She blacked out and woke up to see the whole scene in a yellow hue, since her eyes were so full of blood. Her face required 1,000 stitches and extensive plastic surgery. Though her jaw wasn’t broken, the stitches were so tight on her face that she could barely open her mouth. For three weeks, unable to eat any solid foods, she subsisted on milk, milkshakes, and soup run through a blender and consumed through a straw.

  “I won’t look at myself,” she told her family in the early days of her recovery. “I just can’t do it.” When she finally found the courage to hold up a mirror, fifteen days after the accident, she cried. “Two black eyes and a face stitched like a baseball” was how she described herself. Her wedding was two weeks away.

  There are moments of that experience that would become meaningful memories for Sue, and that served as inspiration to Ashley growing up.

  At the time of the accident, Sue’s future husband, Rick, hadn’t yet given her an engagement ring. He brought it to the hospital and presented it to her there, telling her he loved her before the 1,000 stitches and he loved her just as much afterward.

  “If I can look somewhat normal, I’ll go through with the wedding,” she said. Ten days before the big day, her stitches were removed. By then, given how little she could eat through those straws, she’d lost fifteen pounds. And so she fit perfectly into that once-tight dress from Becker’s. “I knew you’d get into that dress somehow,” her mother joked.

  Wearing a great deal of pancake makeup, Sue made it down the aisle smiling. “I always thought she looked great in her wedding photos, despite the makeup,” Ashley says. “She was just beautiful, in this early seventies way, with her long, platinum blond hair.”

  Sue recovered well from the accident, but it helped make her a woman who would one day want her two children to experience everything—literature, art, music, travel—because they’d never know what might await them over thenext rise in the road.

  Ashley’s parents, Sue and Rick, on their wedding day in 1971

  At first, Sue and Rick weren’t sure they wanted to have children, and they waited seven years before they did. She was a social worker, and he was a rising professor in the School of Packaging at Michigan State. Over time, he became an expert in “shock and vibration” issues concerning packages that are shipped by air, rail, or truck.

  Their son J.P. was born in 1979 and Ashley arrived in 1983.

  Like many children of a professor, they grew up in a house that celebrated the cerebral. Ashley, especially, embraced every opportunity to think. “You’d be great at doing scholarly things,” her father told her. “You have that in you.”

  Ashley always described him to people as “an all-around science guy” whose scholarship and education covered several disciplines. He even taught about astrophysics and astronomy. She’d brag to people about his work on rocket engines, and liked when he spoke exuberantly about subjects he’d researched, such as the basic physics of packaging. He had written a textbook on vibration issues that was widely used by those in the field. When a package is dropped, the contents undergo a rapid deceleration. Appropriate packaging can control the deceleration and protect what’s inside.

  Her dad offered fascinating explanations of how vibration, especially by rail, can destroy products. The circuit boards in early computers were often damaged by the time they got to their destinations. Packaging was eventually developed to limit vibrations before they reached inside the computers. Few people have any sense that advances in box-making helped fuel the computer revolution.

  Rick was able to offer Ashley other real-life examples to contemplate. “Let me tell you about ketchup,” he’d say, and then he did. Over the years, a lot of ketchup would be shipped by rail in large containers. But by the time the ketchup containers got to their destination, vibrating rail cars had turned them into vats of unpleasant liquid, with a yellow sap on top and a tomato stew on the bottom. By limiting vibrations, package engineers were heroes of the fast-food revolution. “Think of that,” her dad would say, “when you put ketchup on your french fries.”

  Ashley admired her father’s academic life, and early on, thought she might want the same for herself. She’s an example of how daughters today, when compared to women who came of age in previous generations, are far more likely to work in the same fields as their fathers, according to a North Carolina State University study. That’s partially because of the increase of women in the workforce and partially because fathers and daughters are closer today than in the past.

  Ashley was a focused, hard-charging student, which made her stand out in a small town like Laingsburg, where many students were the children of farmers or blue-collar workers. Because her mother wanted her children to embrace every moment and every opportunity to learn, Ashley took lessons in piano, violin, trumpet, and trombone. She studied dance for twelve years. Her mother enrolled her each summer in academic programs and art classes. And Ashley was constantly reading books.

  Other kids called her a “brainiac,” and she had a tough time socially during middle school. “I was tall, eccentric, with braces—twice—and I embraced my inner nerd too much,” is how she explains it now, “and so I got picked on by ignorant kids.” She and her best friend at the time both wore big glasses and strange clothes. They couldn’t resist te
lling kids when they got a wrong answer. Ashley even found herself correcting her teachers.

  One day when Ashley was in middle school, the principal called Sue. “Ashley is in my office, and she’s in tears. You need to come get her.”

  “What happened?” Sue asked, but the principal gave few details.

  “She’s OK,” he said. “Just come pick her up and I’ll explain.”

  What happened, it turned out, was the collapse of the Soviet Union.

  It was 1997, and Ashley’s teacher had told the class that “Russia is a communist country.” By then, of course, given the Soviet breakup, that was no longer the case. Ashley argued it. The teacher insisted. Ashley burst into tears. The teacher remained insistent. Her mother came and continued the discussion, helping the teacher improve his understanding of the issue.

  Throughout her school years, Ashley couldn’t help but assert herself. She was an unabashed academic show-off, winning sixth-grade student of the year and turning in the fanciest science and social studies projects. She was in a program for gifted students and spent a year putting together a presentation about physicians. “You ought to be a pediatrician,” her mother said. Later, given her ability to argue a case, her mother thought she’d make a great lawyer. But Ashley waved her off. She was good at a lot of things. And she wasn’t afraid to articulate her confidence. “In high school,” she says, “I was the only person raising my hand and saying anything worthwhile. In college, there were a lot of people with a lot to say, and I loved that. Part of me just needed to get out of Laingsburg.”

  After he made his name in packaging dynamics, Ashley’s dad went on to even greater acclaim as associate dean of Michigan State’s School of Agriculture and Natural Resources. But as busy as he was on campus, he remained very involved in the kids’ lives, as did Sue. They were willing to do whatever it took to help Ashley succeed and stand out. One year they helped her mold this incredible diorama of Ellis Island for a school project. “The other kids’ dioramas were just a bunch of sticks,” she came home and told them. Another year, for a project on ancient Egypt, her dad used his fanciest engineering rulers to help her build an ultra-precise, exactly-to-scale model of a pyramid.