Save the Date: The Occasional Mortifications of a Serial Wedding Guest by Jen Doll Read Free Book Online Page B

only partial attention to this complicated relationship, noting that the woman getting married was Susan; the man she was marrying was Carl. These sounded to me like old-fashioned names. Susan and Carl must have been in their twenties or thirties, pretty much
ancient
. But there was another problem here, a bigger one, to tackle: Married grown-ups didn’t always stay together, I interjected, citing my mom’s own divorce, before she married my father, and also my uncle’s. “By all counts,” I said, quoting some stat I’d heard on TV or in school that indicated that remarried couples were more likely to split, “you andDad should be divorced by now, too.” My mom sighed. “My nose isn’t in a book,” I said.
    To divert us from such incendiary topics, my dad piped up. “Weddings are an excuse to have a big party and celebrate and bring all your friends and family together, kind of like a reunion,” he offered. “They’re what people do. It’s what people do, especially before they have kids.” He and my mom gave each other a look that I was not sure how to interpret, because, the thing was, my parents did not have a big party for their wedding. They’d wanted to get married on Thanksgiving, but the small brick chapel where they had the ceremony was holding church services then, so they did it on the following Saturday. My mom wore a lacy, lingerie-esque minidress with a V-neck and sheer, flowing bell sleeves, her legs clad in the nearly opaque flesh-colored panty hose of the sixties and tucked into thick-heeled, shiny shoes with square toes. It was November in Chicago, and in one photo she is jacketless and probably shivering. Her hair is long, jet-black, and curling in ringlets that flow down her back. In a sepia-toned photo shot inside the church, my bespectacled dad is wearing a black suit and dark tie, looking serious but pleased, even smug, a large white flower in his lapel. My mom smiles with her lips parted, all big eyes and glowing skin. In another photo, they face each other in front of church candles, holding hands. You can see the impressive scope of my mother’s hairdo and how the transparent sleeves of her dress draped just so. And in a picture taken from such a long way away you can’t see any expression at all on their faces, they stand in the chapel doorway, underneath a bell, poised to walk into their new life as a married couple. Both of my grandmothers stand over tothe side, leaning against the church in fur-trimmed coats, seemingly oblivious to their picture being taken.
    After the ceremony, they all went to a restaurant, its name and type of cuisine and, most likely, the establishment itself lost to time, and then back to my grandmother’s house, my mom had told me. There, they opened a few gifts—“I know you’ll ask what they were, but I have no idea,” she’d said. “The usual stuff a young couple gets.” There’s a picture of this part of the wedding, too, a wrapped gift topped with a bow on my mom’s lap, my dad next to her on my grandmother’s couch with his hands on his knees. In front of them is an array of other packages, and while she’s smiling outright, he’s got something of the expectant look I have in my photo from Susan and Carl’s wedding, his eyebrows raised over the rims of his glasses and his lips curled up as if to smile.
    It’s a nice picture, but I was dismayed with this wedding story. It was all so terribly practical. There was no beading on an ornate, expensive, long white gown. There was no tux, no huge bouquet, no crowd of beaming guests, no rice-throwing like I’d seen in weddings on TV and in magazines. No adorable old car with tin cans tied to the back and “Just Married” written on the window. No giant pile of fancily wrapped gifts. Was my mom even carried over a threshold? It seemed unlikely, given the length of her dress and my parents’ overall casual attitude toward this wedding. Her previous marriage had been to someone named Troy who