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Racing
toward love Strapped! Mommy
Diarist The
Guilty Bride Introducing
… IndieEtiquette Bride,
Unhinged When
Wedding Dresses Attack! Book
Review: The Artful Bride The
B-word My
Best Friends' Weddings When
Bachelors Go Bad O
Brother Wed Art Thou The
Mythology of Marriage A
Marriage of My Own Why
I Popped the Question My
Wedding, My Way Happily
Ever After Am
I Really That Single? -----------
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The Mythology of Marriage Our wedding stories end with 'Happily Ever After'. Then comes real life.
Winter 2001 | I am a child. I am at the dinner table and my father is cutting fruit for the family. He slices a pear into roundels from the stem to the calyx, paying them out between my brother and me. He tells us what foreign coins we hold: erish, piasters, riba'a, lira. When the fruit is gone, and my mother stands to clear the table, he grabs her tastooz and says, "C'est bon ca, eh?" He turns to us and says, "She was like Marilyn, your mother, blonde hair and big--" "Salim!" She hits him on the back of the head with the flat of her hand, but we can tell by her smile she is happy. This is how the story starts. We have seen this performance a hundred times, but we want it again, the story of how they met, fell in love, got married. They divide the tale between them, interrupting each other in the same places with the same comments, the same corrections, like a well-rehearsed comedy team, a Lebanese/German Burns and Allen. They met as students in Paris: "I was in love with your father's best friend." "But he said to me, can you take her off my hands?" My father wore a horrible lime green suit and showed her his etchings, she thought he looked a bit like Omar Sharif. At some point there was a chaperone to dispose of, and then came the moonlit walks along the Seine, the lingering talks in cafes. Just as they were falling in love, my mother had to return to New York, and my father to Beirut. They wrote, or rather my mother wrote and my father occasionally dropped her a postcard. When they were to rendezvous a year later in Paris, my father couldn't get a visa to leave Lebanon. So my mother flew there to find him. She wandered the streets of Beirut, asking passersby for "Chalfoun?" She knew no Arabic. (Later she would learn enough to swear, cook, and say "Drop me off at the corner please.") Somehow she found my father's house and his mother let her in. He was upstairs in the shower. My grandmother called up to him, in French, "The American is here", and my father called back down, "Which one?" Still, there was a reunion, they dated for a few weeks, then my mother caught a cold. She bought some cough syrup, couldn't read the Arabic label, and drank the whole thing. Horribly drunk, she wandered alone into a bad section of Beirut. My father found her wrapped around a lamppost and right then and there, he proposed. "I said, 'Some one needs to take care of you.'" My father's mother didn't approve of the marriage, called my mother a blonde American slut and forbade the wedding. My mother's parents didn't even know their daughter was in Beirut. So my parents did the only rational thing: they eloped. They have few pictures of the wedding. My mother wore a handmade dress, white, but casual and short. She had no engagement ring. The ceremony was brief, with few guests (friends of my father, no one from his family), and no reception followed. No one was present from my mother's side. Soon after, her visa ran out and she was sent back to New York sans husband. My father followed months later. To this day he forgets their wedding anniversary, then claims it doesn't count because their real anniversary was the day they reunited in Idlewild airport. Then he forgets that anniversary also. Fast forward. I am a thirty-one year old woman living in a gentrifying Boston neighborhood with my boyfriend . Aaren and I have discussed marriage rationally on many occasions. We've been together for over three years, and we're not getting any younger. If we want children, we'd better start soon. One bright summer day, the day before I am to leave for a job as a cook on a schooner, we go for a last walk. We can't stand another separation, but we need the money: Aaren is in graduate school, and I don't earn enough with my writing. Teary-eyed, I walk straight into a lamppost. I turn to Aaren, stunned, my hands cupping my nose. He leads me to a stoop and kneels before me, peering anxiously up into my face. I cautiously part my hands to reveal my throbbing schnoz. "Do you think it's broken?" I ask. "Will you marry me?" he answers. Later he will tell how he'd be planning to propose for a while, and that it just seemed to be the right moment. "She looked so vulnerable," he'll say. We enlist the help of my mother. She contacts Preservation Trust sites (my parents have retired to Martha's Vineyard) and collects menus from caterers. She sends me manila envelopes with demo cassettes and band profiles. Over the phone and on my few days off ship, Aaren and I try to plan a wedding. The cost of a cake is equal to my weekly salary. The money for hors d'oeuvres could buy two airplane tickets to New Zealand. We can't imagine spending so much money (even if it isn't ours) for a one-night celebration. My father is feeling the same anxieties. He takes Aaren aside and offers $5,000 cash if we elope. Of course this is a good deal for him compared to the $50, 0000 a traditional wedding on the Vineyard would cost. Then, Aaren's father finds five years of love letters that his mother wrote to a lesbian lover. Divorce proceedings are underway. The family divides on the issue of the lesbian affair. We question the wisdom of spending tons of dough on a wedding party where many of the guests are no longer speaking. We don't care, we tell each other, about one day of fairy-tale nonsense. With five thousand dollars we could go to New Zealand and Tahiti. Besides, I've just taken another shipboard cooking job. We will discuss wedding plans when I return, after things have cooled down. After I've been sailing for about two months, Aaren calls and says, "I've been checking out fares to New Zealand." "Yeah?" "Well, the deal is I get a student rate, but you don't. Unless we're married." "Yeah?" "The thing is, I need to buy the tickets next week." There's a pause. "So I was thinking I could come to New York this weekend and maybe we could get married?" The boat is docked at the Chelsea Piers in New York. Aaren comes down by train from Boston and I take Friday off so we can file the papers at City Hall. We plan to do the ceremony first thing Monday morning--the boat sails Monday night. When the crew hears, they are delighted. We had no time to shop for rings, so the first mate weaves us two tiny turks' heads out of seine twine and shellacs them rigid. The captain springs for pizza and cake so I don't have to cook, and we have a mock wedding on Friday evening's sail, to the delight of the tourists. Instead of a dress, I wear a blue sarong and a white undershirt. My veil is a black and white kerchief, and I carry a bouquet of paper and mousing-wire flowers. The captain says a few words from the helm, and the second mate plays guitar while we dance. The official ceremony at City Hall is far smaller. I wear a dress borrowed from another crewmember, carry no flowers, and we still have only our string rings. I laugh through the whole one-minute affair. No friends or family are invited, and so our union is attended by a Chinese man who is there for his sister's wedding. His English is rudimentary, but he manages to tell us that in his country attending many weddings is good luck, so he'd be happy to attend ours. But he doesn't understand the concept of "last name" so our certificate says, "Anthony from Taipei" under witness. Outside, an itinerant photographer snaps a blurry Polaroid and puts it in a cardboard frame for ten bucks. We go for a pupu platter at the Starlight Lounge, and then Aaren gets on a train back to Boston. We won't see each other for another two months, when we will meet in the LA airport, on our way to Tahiti and New Zealand. Later, people ask us to tell our story. We have a certain way of telling it, interrupting each other, highlighting the humor of Aaren's mother's "outing"; and we laugh about "Anthony from Taipei", and play up the romance of sailboats and travel and separation and reunion. I think of the parallels between our wedding and my parents'. They had Paris, we had New York.. They had the Seine, we had the Hudson. They had their lamppost proposal, we had our lamppost proposal. They were cast apart, an ocean between them, we had a continent between us. Recently, a married friend of mine said she felt as if she were now living "beyond the plot." She said her story had ended with the wedding and now she existed in the gray area after the dramatic arc. I understood. I tell (have just told) a "story" of my courtship with all the fictionalizations that the word implies. The story ends with the wedding; the denouement is summed up with "happily-ever-after." We stop talking before we get to our regrets, the daily mundane details of marriage, the small and larger griefs that pile up and threaten to overshadow everything that came before. I don't tell how, each spring when I visit my parents on Martha's Vineyard, I see other people's weddings, and I feel wistful. I don't say how sometimes I am jealous of couples with matching plates and silver, and photo albums filled with wedding shots. I don't tell how we've lost that blurry Polaroid taken outside the courthouse, how our rings still aren't engraved, how I envy other women's diamonds. I don't go on to say how having children hasn't worked out; how, after one year of marriage we had a miscarriage, and then were told by doctors that, short of a miracle, we would never have a child genetically related to the both of us. How this has tested our young marriage, how we have, so far, survived the grief, but just barely. How sex has become a sad thing, how we suddenly feel old. How we still love each other, despite it. I know a woman who got married to the same man three times. Her story, when she tells it, is hilarious: the first ceremony was a civil ceremony in a Brooklyn loft, because he needed health insurance and she had it; the second wedding was a small Catholic ceremony to please his mother; the third was a gigantic catered bash, to please her mother. She doesn't mention the stress, the expense, the family infighting. She doesn't say how her husband has since had a nervous breakdown, how she supports the family whenever he is incapable of work, how they are in tremendous debt. I know another woman who knew her husband was the man for her because on their first date, when her Diet Coke came to the table without a straw, and he got up to get her one. She says he had written in his daily planner under the five year goals: "Get Married, Buy House, Have Children," and she thought that was sweet. She doesn't tell how she has nearly died three times having his children, how he works eighty-hour weeks and is rarely home. I have met women who say they don't even remember their wedding, it was all a blur, that they didn't get to eat the food they'd so carefully chosen, they were so busy greeting guests. I know of a woman who sits on her couch all day, every day, watching the video of her wedding. She says it was the happiest day of her life. We all have our stories. My parents have stayed together through the years. There were times when things got so bad (my mother's mother got Alzheimer's and stood on our front lawn hurling aluminum packages of frozen dinners at our windows, screaming "You're trying to poison me!"; my father's father caught shrapnel from a terrorist's home-made bomb, and had to be smuggled from Lebanon to the US for medical treatment), that my brother and I hid in our closets. My father always said, "You don't marry the person, you marry the family." They married each others' families: the drunks, the crazies, the suicides. They took them all in: the brushes with bankruptcy, the relations who immigrated. The nieces and nephews fresh out of rehab, jail, abusive homes. My father ripped the phone from the wall, my mother drove off in the car and didn't come home to make dinner. They threw plates, broke the Steuben ashtray on the floor, threatened divorce. But they are still together. He still pats her tastooz, still insists on pumping the gas because my mother "is a lady", still speaks dirty to her in French. He has had three strokes, he is not the man he used to be, and my mother tears up at the thought of losing him. They have stayed together simply by staying together. So far, it has been enough. That is their secret, that is their story. Their romance, their happily-ever-after, I have swallowed it whole. I swallowed it whole, as my father paid out the sweet juicy coins, as my mother painted a funny, rosy picture. ----------- Michelle Chalfoun is the author of two novels, "Roustabout" and "The Width of the Sea." ----------- |
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