White Dresses

by Mary Pflum Peterson

  “Will you come?” I asked her more than once. I wanted her with me in New York, needed her with me on my doctor’s visits.

  She paused. I could hear the hesitation. “Honey, I want to be with you. But my job . . .”

  Her voice trailed off.

  “If I take time off now, I might not be able to get the time off if—­well, if the results aren’t good and you—­”

  “And I need more help,” I said, finishing her sentence. At this, we both began to cry.

  Strangely—­surprisingly—­it was my father who came to my rescue in my hour of need. Dale Pflum had retired to a gay-­friendly retirement community in Boynton Beach, Florida, in 2000 and seldom let anything, he liked to brag, get between him and his happy-­hour socials in nearby Fort Lauderdale. New York, and the North in general, he said, was too cold and too expensive, and we saw each other less and less after his move—­sometimes little more than once a year. And when we did see each other, the visits were often riddled by fights in which I reminded him how badly he’d hurt my mother.

  But when they found those spots on my lungs, it was Dale Pflum who miraculously dropped everything and showed up on my New York City doorstep. He’d moved out of my childhood home and left our family more than two decades before. Now he’d come to assist me in my hour of need. I’m not sure who was more surprised by the turn of events—­me or him.

  “Now just be calm,” he said when he arrived at my apartment, a suitcase in hand and a canary-­yellow windbreaker on his back. “We’re going to get this all straightened out. Just you wait and see.”

  His demeanor was calm. He was focused. He seemed to recognize that I needed to be taken care of—­and he was there to do it, even if his approach struck some as odd.

  Our trips to the various doctors’ offices as a father-daughter team were especially comical. Here I was, the patient: pale, thin, scared, and suffering from debilitating coughs that sometimes lasted for minutes at a time. There he was, the father. At six foot six, he was larger than life and, fresh from the beaches of Florida, he also sported a leathery tan that stood in stark contrast to my pasty white skin. My friends liked to joke that he was the eternal bull in a china shop, commanding attention everywhere he went. He raised more than a few eyebrows with his standard bright pink polo shirt, his extremely loud voice, and his inability to put his cigarettes down for more than ten minutes.

  “Mr. Pflum,” lectured Dr. Lawrence Scharer, the renowned pulmonary specialist Dr. Tim had helped me find, “you do realize why we’re treating your daughter, don’t you?”

  Dr. Scharer stood in a crisp white lab coat in front of Roo­sevelt Hospital, where we had gone to find my father after one of my appointments. The decorated doctor, a short man with closely cropped white hair, had wanted to share his latest theories about my lungs with my father and, not finding him in the waiting room where we’d left him during my exam, had joined me in looking for him in front of the hospital.

  My father took a long, deep drag on his cigarette as he nodded down at the considerably shorter Dr. Scharer—­not realizing for a moment the error of his ways.

  “We’re concerned she could have lung cancer,” Dr. Scharer said, peering up at my father. “Lung cancer!”

  My father nodded once more, still unwilling—­or unable—­to put that damned cigarette down.

  I stood between the two of them, not sure whether to laugh, cry, or referee.

  But in spite of some of his clueless ways—­or perhaps because of them—­my father was just what the doctor ordered when it came to handling my illness. He placed calls to ABC to help me straighten out my insurance plan and medical leave. He went to the pharmacy to pick up my medication. He prepared meals for me and encouraged me to meet up with friends in an effort to keep my mind off my deathbed.

  And on a near-­daily basis, he said something so ridiculous that I had no choice other than to burst out laughing.

  Arguably the most outrageous comment came one morning over breakfast at my favorite neighborhood diner. Between bites of bagel, I noticed that my father looked particularly preoccupied. “What are you thinking about?” I asked him.

  “I was just thinking we don’t have a place for you to be buried.”

  “What?” I asked, spitting out my bagel. Surely I had misheard!

  “I bought a plot for me years ago, one for your mother, too. But we don’t have one for you. I wonder if I should make some calls.”

  The comment was insane—­something that no father should say to his still-­alive daughter when the results of her biopsy were still unknown. If anything, it was something to be thought, not uttered.

  But there it was. And I had no other choice than to laugh, shake my head, and reach for my phone so that I could regale a pair of girlfriends with the tale, beginning with, “You will not believe what the fuck my father just said to me!!”

  A week after the procedure, my father took me to Florida with him for a ­couple of weeks to rest and wait for my results. A little-­known fact is that results for lung biopsies don’t take days. Full results take weeks, while cultures grow. It was an agonizing wait. To pass the time, I went to the beach, looked at seagulls, and largely felt sorry for myself. I also agreed during that time to start organizing a small birthday party for myself to be held back in New York at the end of October when I returned to the city.

  I didn’t feel like celebrating. My future felt less certain than ever. In just two years, I’d moved countries, lost love, changed jobs—­and now this. But my father, who never let personal problems stand between him and a potential party—­was among those who believed I should.

  “Have a party,” my father told me between rounds of Bourbon and Seven at Tropics, his gay bar of choice. “It’ll be good for you.”

  His circle of gay friends, the vast majority of whom wore a uniform similar to that of my father—­dark tans, bright polo shirts, and gold necklaces that covered their tufts of graying chest hair—­nodded good-­naturedly as they polished off their own drinks. “A party is always the way to go,” they agreed.

  So I suppose I have my father’s love of social gatherings to thank for meeting the love of my life.

  Dean Peterson was a man I had heard great things about prior to our meeting. He was a member of Manhattan’s Michigan State University Alumni Association. A male friend of mine—­an MSU alum—­had befriended Dean at a city alumni event and suggested Dean stop by the party at New York’s Bowery Bar, a restaurant and watering hole in Lower Manhattan.

  When Dean entered the bar the Saturday night after I returned from Florida, it was one of those moments I thought existed only in my beloved soap operas. The noise around me—­the music playing overhead, the loud din of bar conversation—­faded away and it was just the two of us. Our eyes locked, and as he made his way toward me, I, the usually confident journalist, felt my face burn unexpectedly red and my always-­dry palms grow sweaty. This was my West Side Story Tony-­meets-­Maria moment. Forever­more, there would be two halves of my life: Before Dean and After Dean. I think a part of me somehow knew even then—­a split second before we were formally introduced—­that life on the After side was one I’d been waiting for all of my life. When I met Dean, I came home.

  “Hi, I’m Dean,” he said, taking my hand in his. “What kind of drink can I buy the birthday girl?”

  My pulse went from a trot to a sprint. Stammering, I spit out a request for my favorite concoction at the time—­a pretty pink watermelon martini. And that was it. With drink in hand, I took a seat beside my future husband.

  Dean was everything I’d been looking for, everything I’d been waiting for. He was tall, dark, and handsome. He was smart and kind. And without question, he was the funniest man I had ever met—­prompting me to burst into schoolgirl giggles at every turn. He regaled me with stories of the two cats he’d rescued and was happily raising in his one-­bedroom apartme
nt, told me about his work as an international tax attorney, his upbringing in southwestern Michigan with his close-­knit family. Then, pointing to his head, he made fun of his recent bad haircut, which had resulted in the unfortunate decimation of his trademark head of thick dark curls. “I fear that barber irrevocably altered my personality,” he said, noting that next time he’d fare better if he went to his cats’ groomer.

  But smitten though I was, the last thing I was looking for the night I met Dean was a new relationship. I had lungs to worry about.

  So within a week of our meeting, I tried to set him up with two different girlfriends. If I couldn’t have this great guy, then some deserving single woman certainly should.

  Dean wasn’t into the setups.

  “I don’t want to date those other girls,” he said, his eyes locking with mine as we shared our second round of drinks in a week. “I want to date you.”

  “I don’t have time for dates,” I told him. And I meant it. “I only have time for doctor’s appointments.”

  “That’s fine,” Dean said, his eyes still locked with mine. “Then let me come with you to those appointments. I’m good company in waiting rooms.”

  “You want to come and hang out in a doctor’s office?” I asked disbelievingly. In New York, men acted put-­upon if a girl so much as wanted them to pick her up for a date at her apartment—­and he wanted to spend his lunch hours taking a girl who wouldn’t kiss him to the doctor?

  “Why not?” Dean countered. “You’ll be there, right?”

  And so, within two weeks of our first meeting, Dean Peterson started tagging along when I went in for CT scans, kept me company as I waited for PET scans.

  “Are you the husband?” he was asked by nosy receptionists on more than one occasion.

  “No,” he said. “Not yet.”

  I would later learn from some of Dean’s old law school friends that he was so smitten, in part, because I was his “type.”

  “Dean likes tall, skinny, brainy women,” his friend Eddie would later tell me. “Always has. Always will.”

  Then Eddie laughed and winked. “You are smart, aren’t you?”

  Not only was I Dean’s type, but I was also from the place that he loved most in the world: his native Midwest. Dean had been in New York for six years before meeting me. He’d dated plenty of women from California, from New York, even from Scotland. But he missed his Michigan roots. And he longed for a woman who appreciated the beauty and simplicity of a small town, knew how to handle herself in a snowstorm, and understood the significance of Sunday-afternoon football, particularly if it involved his Detroit Lions or my Green Bay Packers.

  After dating so many serious, career-­driven women, some of whom didn’t know if they’d ever want children, he also was looking for a woman who appreciated his sense of humor. I was most definitely that woman.

  During one appointment, when I was waiting to go in for a scan in a doctor’s office that had unexpectedly lost heat, I sat shivering in my winter coat and mittens. Wrapping his arm around my shoulders, Dean cracked joke after joke about the cold. “If this is what this doctor calls a warm-­up act when it comes to courting new patients, he’d better rethink his business plan,” he deadpanned before chivalrously wrapping his wool dress coat around me.

  The joking worked. I burst into laughter.

  On a later date, he made light of the story I’d told him about my father’s tasteless ruminations about where to bury me. “Tell your dad I saw a sale on pine boxes,” he said with a wink, as we strode hand in hand through the East Village. “On second thought, I bet your dad’s already all over that one.”

  On New Year’s Eve that year, he arrived at my apartment with a split of champagne, a pair of flutes, and a VHS copy of The Bionic Woman pilot episode.

  “I thought it fitting to ring in the new year with an incredible woman watching the tales of another incredible woman,” he said, remembering my adoration of vintage TV.

  I was in love. And, as luck would have it, the feeling was mutual. We said the L word to each other within a matter of weeks. It wasn’t planned. Like the rest of our relationship, it just happened with the greatest of ease. Every step felt natural, unforced, drama-­free, and, in his words, blissfully “meant to be.” There were no issues about conflicting nationalities, religion, and politics. Instead, there was passion and partnership, love and understanding.

  In the words of one of my girlfriends, “With Dean, there are no buts.” No “He’s a great guy BUT he’s not sure if he wants to have kids.” No “He’s a great guy BUT he only wants to marry a Jewish girl.” No “He’s a great guy BUT he’s married.” He was a great guy. One who got me. And one who, from the start, set out to prove he loved me for better, for worse, in sickness and in health.

  So when the news finally came that the sputum collected during my lung biopsy and related tests had grown in some dish in some lab—­and that whatever had grown was inconsistent with the kind of tuberculosis found in the United States, but consistent instead with strains of the disease native to Pakistan and Afghanistan—­Dean was my first phone call and the first one there to celebrate with me, another bottle of champagne in hand. I didn’t have cancer after all. Mesut had been right from the very beginning. My trip to that refugee camp—­my interaction with all of those beautiful, sickly children in Afghanistan—­had been ill-­advised. They had left me with scarred lungs, a permanent souvenir from the region.

  My body had fought a yucky disease that had left me, Dr. Scharer said, with lungs no stronger than those of a seventy-­year-­old woman. My lung capacity was nil. I might have recurring fevers for years to come, he warned. But I would live. And with Dean at my side I had a bright future to look forward to.

  By Valentine’s Day, I had met Dean’s parents. By April, we were talking marriage.

  Dean knew about my previous boyfriends, the earlier proposals, the paths I’d almost gone down. He didn’t care. He had the quiet confidence to know that just as I was the one for him, he was the one for me. There was never any doubt. “I’m not only going to marry you, Mary Pflum,” he told me over a late-­night dinner. “I’m going to marry the hell out of you.”

  When he got down on bended knee in front of the Jackson Pollock statue on Central Park’s famous Poet’s Way on Labor Day 2004, the world that had once seemed so cold and bleak now radiated with a sunshine I had never known before. Where there had once been doubt and sadness, now I saw nothing but endless possibility.

  I pinched myself nightly at my great stroke of luck: a relationship that made me feel both safe and drunk with excitement. I’d found a man whose kisses sent electric shockwaves through my nether regions and whose intellect not only matched mine but also kept me guessing.

  My mother watched the unfolding of our love story with decidedly mixed feelings. She liked Dean. But beneath her smile lingered an air of hesitation.

  “Are you sure you’re ready?” my mother asked when I called to tell her of our marriage plans.

  “Mom, I’m in love!”

  “But you’ve had so many boyfriends.”

  “Not like this,” I said, shaking my head. “Mom, he’s the one.”

  My mother pressed on. “I love Dean,” she said when I called her to discuss the wording of the wedding invitations. “But please understand—­no one’s pressuring you to do this.”

  “Lots of wonderful ­people—­famous ­people—­remain single and are perfectly content,” she said when I delightedly told her of the New York Times’s intention to not only run an announcement of our wedding, but also to include a longer article about our courtship.

  “Mom, what are you trying to say?” I asked, exasperated.

  “I’m trying to tell you what I wish someone had told me before I got married—­that you have options.”

  “Mom,” I said at last. “Dean’s not Dad. And I’m not you.”
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br />   In a bid to get my mother excited about the wedding, Dean and I ultimately decided to get married in Milwaukee. We had it all planned: guests would stay at the Pfister Hotel, which my mother adored; we would marry at the nearby cathedral; and we would have a reception to end all receptions at the world-­renowned Milwaukee Art Museum, a stunning Santiago Calatrava display of architectural wonder that had been completed only two years before. Mammoth and white, the museum boasted a pair of humongous wings that opened and closed and fanned out over the blue of Lake Michigan. The Wisconsin wedding plan would enable Dean to get married on his beloved Lake Michigan, on whose eastern beaches he had grown up. And it would allow my mother to invite all of her teacher friends—­and her friends from Beaver Dam—­to the weekend festivities. Surely that would make her feel more involved, more included. Surely that would win her over to the pro-­wedding team, I reasoned. Wouldn’t it?

  I also thought that maybe, just maybe, having the wedding in Wisconsin would prove a source of inspiration to my mother to at last get her house in order. From the time when I was a boyfriend-­less high school student, my mother had talked about the possibility of having a big family gathering at the house—­a post-­wedding brunch or pre-­wedding party—­when the time eventually came for me to marry. For years, she’d talk about what trees we’d gather beneath, how nice it would be to have all of her siblings and nieces and nephews assembled alongside me and my brother and my future groom.

  But when the possibility of an engagement became a reality, my mother panicked. Instead of encouraging me to come to Beaver Dam for a wedding-­related activity—­or even for a pre-­wedding visit—­she did the opposite.

  “I don’t think any of you will have time to come to Beaver Dam. It’s too far from Milwaukee.”

  “But, Anne,” Dean told her one night over drinks in New York, after my mother and I had completed a particularly disastrous day of nightgown/wedding gown shopping, “I love Mary and I’d love to see her hometown. Why don’t we visit you in Beaver Dam during our next trip home?”