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

by Jeffrey Zaslow

  Ashley knew she was different from her classmates, and that her mom and dad were likely the most academically focused parents in their small conservative town. But she didn’t always think of the socioeconomic issues at play. Her family was able to go on trips across the United States every summer. They found their way to Maine, Alabama, Alaska, and Colorado, usually to visit land-grant universities where her dad met with other academic deans. They once did a stint in France so her father could collaborate with educators at a French university. Many of her classmates, meanwhile, spent summers working the family farms and had never been out of the state of Michigan. Their parents didn’t have the time or the inclination to build showy dioramas that far exceeded the teachers’ expectations.

  Ashley’s parents weren’t the most tactile in town when it came to showing her affection. They were quiet about their emotions and didn’t say “I love you” much. But as Ashley saw it, they showed their love by the way they encouraged her academic pursuits, and by giving her every opportunity they could.

  In high school, Ashley took French for two years—not from a live teacher, but from a video feed, which is all her school could afford. The school offered no upper-level French courses, so she enrolled in a Michigan State program for high-achieving high-schoolers. There, she took college-level French, driving twenty-eight miles each day round-trip from Laingsburg.

  At the end of her high school career, she graduated first out of a class of eighty-four students. She didn’t consider it an especially great accomplishment. She said it wasn’t hard to get all A’s at her high school. “To do any less would have been to do nothing,” she says.

  She spent her undergraduate years at the honors college at Michigan State—as the daughter of a professor, tuition was half price—and graduated early, in December 2004. She ended up spending a year in France, teaching English, before beginning a five-year French literature program at Cornell. Her dream was to teach French literature at the college level.

  Around this time, her mother, Sue, had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s, a degenerative disease that can be caused by a blow to the head. Though her doctors couldn’t say for sure, the onset of her illness could have been related to her crash through the windshield in that 1971 car accident before her wedding.

  For Ashley, this was yet another reminder of her father’s sense of science: He often spoke of the repercussions of one unanticipated act.

  In those early years, her mother had very few physical symptoms, but emotionally, she took the news very hard. She was diagnosed with depression and anxiety issues, which led to hospitalization for a nervous breakdown. She helped herself recover by re-embracing the message driven home by her 1971 accident; that life is tenuous, and you need to appreciate every moment of it. Sue didn’t know when and how Parkinson’s would take pieces of her life away from her. While she was able, she promised Ashley she’d savor all she could.

  During college, Ashley had met a man from France who was two years older and had come to Michigan State for a master’s in marketing. Manu was charming and handsome, with an accent that made him sound like the quintessential romantic Frenchman. Ashley, so often a serious young woman, and not especially sentimental, found herself very drawn to him—or perhaps the idea of him. He was certainly more exotic than any boy or man she’d come across in Laingsburg.

  When she graduated from college, the school’s Department of French Classics and Italian awarded Ashley a $4,000 scholarship and told her she could use the money for any pursuit she’d like. She decided to visit France for two months—Manu had already returned there—and so her relationship with him deepened. The next year, 2005, she got that job as an elementary school English teacher in Challans, France, a rural community near Nantes.

  In some ways, this was the adventure Ashley had always dreamed about during her childhood in Laingsburg. But it was more difficult than she expected. For one thing, especially given her mother’s health issues, it was hard for her to be away from home.

  Manu lived in Paris, four hours away, and she saw him every weekend. She felt very lonely in Challans—the town was isolated, her mother was far away, and she was the only American working at the school—and so her time with Manu felt like a lifeline for her. At least at first.

  In his own way, he was supportive and engaging, but Ashley began to notice something. “I realized I was still lonely when I was with him,” she says.

  Manu just wasn’t as mature as Ashley, and he was very much a mama’s boy. In European countries, that’s not uncommon. Young people rely on their parents longer, and live at home far longer than Americans do. In Italy, for instance, the percentage of men ages thirty to thirty-four living with their parents now tops 36 percent, up from 14 percent in 1990. (For women in that age group, 18 percent live at home.) High unemployment and rising living costs are a factor. But the declining marriage rate may be the biggest cause. Adult children in Europe don’t usually leave home unless they’re married, and fewer and fewer feel any rush to marry. The number of marriages in Italy has fallen from 500,000 a year in the early 1970s to about 260,000 today. Meanwhile, the average Frenchman today doesn’t marry until age thirty-one, a jump from an average age of twenty-three in 1980.

  There’s almost no stigma in Europe for a man living with his mother well into adulthood. In fact, when surveyed, more than half of Europeans approve of the idea. A guy can live with mom and date the field. Many see that as the good life.

  By contrast, the percentage of Americans ages thirty to thirty-four living with parents is now 5 percent for women and 9 percent for men. More than their European contemporaries, young adults in the United States are more apt to move away for college, to move in together with friends before marriage, to cohabitate with lovers—and to wonder about why an adult man would want to still be living with his mother.

  Given all of these differences, Ashley struggled with culture shock. She prided herself on being from the Midwest, where people tend to be more self-reliant and self-determined. And here was Manu telling her that if they ever got married, he’d never join her in Michigan for Christmas because he needed to spend every Christmas with his mother. She had to have her appendix out while she was in France, and Manu was not as attentive as she would have liked, which was a signal to her about how attentive he was likely to be as a husband. The two words in her head: “not very.”

  Also, monogamy is not as important in France as it is in the United States. “If you’re not used to that,” Ashley says, “it can be shocking.” Manu’s mother never divorced her husband and had a very open relationship with another man who was also married. Ashley had a difficult time with that. “Maybe she considered herself a feminist, but to me she was an adulterer,” Ashley says.

  Manu saw no problem with his mother’s choices, and that naturally gave Ashley pause. If she married him, how would he view his vows to her up the road? She knew his culture. She knew his mind-set about his mother. Deep down, she knew the sort of husband he’d end up being.

  Ashley and Manu remained together after she enrolled in the PhD program at Cornell. They visited each other and talked of marriage, but Ashley recognized that part of the reason he wanted to marry her was because it would be more convenient for them; he could live in the United States without restrictions. “I don’t want to get married just because it will simplify things,” she told her mother.

  So much about the relationship began to feel forced to her. “The truth was, we just weren’t that compatible,” she now says. “I wanted him to be someone he really wasn’t—someone who would put me first. And he wanted me to be someone different from who I was. Maybe he needed somebody more independent. I was more in love with the fact that he was a French person than I was in love with him. It took me a while to realize that.”

  When she told Manu she wanted to break up, he thought she was giving up too easily. He talked of their chemistry, the future they could have in both countries. But she knew. The relationship was taking way too much energy
. And so she came to a conclusion. “I realized I didn’t want him in my life at all. We needed to break things off completely.”

  She was alone again, and she was comfortable with that. But eventually, she made a decision. At Cornell, students tend to hang out with others in their immediate fields, and so there’s not a great deal of socializing between disciplines. Her fellow students in the foreign language PhD programs were all gay or taken, and she just wasn’t meeting anyone else.

  She thought about her parents, who had met on a blind date. Her brother, who went on to become a geophysicist, met his wife via an Internet dating service. She figured online dating is the twenty-first century version of blind-dating. And so she signed up for a one-month subscription to eHarmony.com.

  That’s how she met Drew, a curly haired, bearded graduate student in materials engineering at Cornell, who grew up in the academic community of Princeton, New Jersey. He was science-minded and practical, like her father, and that attracted her to him. He was serious about his studies, like Ashley was. He came from a family that valued education; his father was a dentist and his mom worked in higher education. “I’ve always been attracted to intelligent women,” he told her early on, which of course appealed to her too.

  To Ashley, Drew was awfully cute. “You have such a beautiful face and smile,” she told him early on. Her mother later told Drew that he looked just like a cherub. Ashley was embarrassed by that observation, but Drew decided to take it as a compliment.

  Ashley was born Catholic but raised without much religion—her scientist father is an atheist—so the fact that Drew was Jewish was not a deal-breaker for her. He said he wanted his children raised Jewish; Ashley thought about this possibility, and decided she’d be OK with that.

  Ashley and Drew

  Drew was more romantic than Ashley, sending her flowers on the monthly anniversaries of their first date. Not fully shaking her inner nerd, Ashley found the flowers annoying after a while. “There’s only one anniversary,” she told him, “and that’s a wedding anniversary.”

  She fell for him gradually. “I don’t believe in love at first sight,” she said. “I’m too pragmatic.” But eventually, she just knew.

  When Drew decided to propose to her in October 2009, he plotted to make it very special. “I want to take her out to dinner, and then to a place that has some meaning,” Drew told his friends. He decided they’d go to the site of their first kiss, at Cascadilla Gorge near the Cornell campus. It’s a gorgeous spot with breathtaking waterfalls.

  By the time they got there, however, it was after sunset, a drug deal was taking place, and the part of the park where they first kissed was closed. He and Ashley stopped far short of their special spot, but she already knew what was about to happen.

  Drew began to get down on one knee, and Ashley stopped him. “Oh no, don’t do that, not here,” she said. There were a few people around, and she’d always been averse to public displays of affection. She appreciated his chivalry, but she also thought this was silly and a bit embarrassing. “Come on, Drew, get up!”

  For Drew, this was problematic. As he later told the story: “I was halfway down—stuck in this funny position, with one leg forward and bent, but my knee not yet fully down. And because she told me to stop, that’s where I was when I handed her the ring and asked her to marry me—not yet down on one knee, not yet fully standing. It was awkward.”

  “Of course I’ll marry you,” Ashley had told him. “Now stand up, OK?”

  They hugged and kissed, but there were no tears.

  It was a few weeks later that Ashley’s mom told her she looked forward to visiting Becker’s with her. “It’s a store that has a special place in a lot of people’s hearts,” Sue said.

  Since she was a little girl, Ashley was always determined to be more cosmopolitan. But as her mother spoke about Becker’s, Ashley didn’t think of saying that she’d rather find a gown in Paris or even New York. She realized that she was very pleased to honor her mother’s roots.

  Her road to marriage had taken her from small-town Michigan all the way through France, to the edge of a gorge in Ithaca, New York, and now back to Michigan, where the Magic Room awaited her.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Danielle

  Danielle DeVoe has returned to Becker’s for a second fitting, and Shelley remembers the twenty-five-year-old social worker because she was pretty and vivacious, but also because she was there without her mother. When a bride doesn’t make at least one visit with her mom, it always means there’s a story—whether there was an argument the morning of the dress search or a long-term estrangement . . . or something. Some mothers live far away but still make it in to look at the dress at least once. Or the brides are taking a lot of photos, so they can e-mail them to their out-of-town moms for feedback.

  In Danielle’s case, she has again brought her grandmother, Cynda.

  The relationship between Danielle and her grandmother has come to resemble a mother-daughter relationship, with the deepest loving feelings intermixed with all the attendant demands and annoyances.

  Though Cynda and Danielle are in agreement about the wedding gown, which Cynda is buying, there are other nagging issues—with “nagging” being the operative word.

  Danielle would like her four bridesmaids to wear long satin dresses and pearls. “I’m a huge fan of Jackie Kennedy,” she says. “If it was up to me, I’d wear pearls and sunglasses every day.” Cynda wants the bridesmaids to wear diamonds.

  And Danielle and her grandmother have been at odds over the wedding cake. Cynda has been arguing that a special wedding needs a special cake, and she’s willing to pay $700 of her own money for a three-tiered showpiece. Danielle appreciates her grandmother’s generosity—the wedding dress alone is costing Cynda $1,000—but Danielle thinks it’s frivolous to overspend on a cake. She’s perfectly happy buying a less-extravagant cake for $180. And since she’s the bride, shouldn’t her opinions win out?

  Why is Cynda pushing for this cake? In the days before arriving at Becker’s, Danielle had been talking through this question with her fiancé, Brian. “My grandmother is nitpicking,” Danielle said. “She wishes my mom could help with the wedding, and so she ends up focusing on the little things. That’s the way it has always been between me and her. Always. We nitpick on the stupid stuff instead of dealing with the main issue.”

  In the Magic Room, however, any differences melt away, at least for the moment. It’s always this way between brides and their loved ones. That’s part of the magic of the space. It’s a bit of an echo chamber, so people find themselves lowering their voices. But more than that, when a bride steps onto that pedestal, she loses the inclination to argue, or to dwell on past differences. And those who love her, well, they just love her more.

  Shelley arrives in the Magic Room with her usual smile and gets down on her knees, working on Danielle’s hem. The off-white satin dress is strapless with a crystal bodice, and Danielle looks breathtaking in it. Cynda leans against the mirror in the corner, holding back a swell of complex emotions, including, again, her memories of that home-from-the-hospital dress she bought Danielle twenty-five years earlier.

  “I really love this wedding dress,” Danielle says, “Thanks again, Grandma, for buying it.”

  “I love you,” Cynda tells her.

  Cynda gives Danielle a lot of credit. Her granddaughter has turned into a poised young woman, overcoming the toughest of circumstances. Cynda often thinks back to how close Danielle was to her mother, Kris, and how they buoyed and entertained each other. Cynda marvels at her daughter, Kris, too: Kris and her husband had met as teens, and their relationship was marked by both great passion and a troubling volatility. Kris was pregnant at her small, subdued wedding in 1985, and she was just nineteen when Danielle was born. Given that Danielle’s father, an iron-worker, turned out to be regularly irresponsible and absent, with substance-abuse issues, Kris had no choice but to find the courage to divorce him after two years, and to raise Danie
lle by herself.

  After Kris got a degree in early childhood education, it was Cynda who gave her the seed money to open her preschool, and Kris turned her mother’s monetary investment into an investment in children’s lives. It was lovely to see.

  This was the perfect occupation for Kris. When she was young, she had been crazy about dolls long after her friends outgrew them. Even when she was ten years old, she still kept a baby crib in her bedroom and took turns giving her two dozen dolls a chance to sleep in it. “I’m going to have eleven or twelve children when I grow up,” she’d tell her cousin Holly.

  “I believed her,” Holly now says. “She was a fanatic about those dolls of hers. Every one of them had a name and a story. When she started running the day-care center, and I watched how great she was with kids, I remembered those dolls of hers, and all the children she wanted to have. It all made sense.”

  After spending full days with the twenty-five preschoolers under her charge, Kris came home each night and tried hard to make Danielle’s life feel as special as possible. This was partly because Kris had this pure connection with children, and partly because it saddened her to see how much Danielle longed for her father’s attention. Kris felt a responsibility to compensate for that.

  Kris also seemed to have an awareness that she’d never have another child. The childhood dream of raising a dozen children of her own had passed when her marriage collapsed. “I’ve got one beautiful, wonderful girl,” she’d say. “I’m happy and I just want Danielle to be happy.”