Autobiography of a Fat Bride (7 page)

Dead Bride Walking

I
was getting married in eleven days.

I had spent the last year planning, scouting, gluing, and stressing for our wedding. Yesterday I had five months to finish getting my shit together, but this morning it transformed into a matter of hours.

I thought that I might even need to speak to a chaplain.

When it comes time to do it, I wanted to ask him, will it be painless? Will I feel anything? Will it be peaceful or will I suffer?

Will I still be worrying that the ex-boyfriend and ex-girlfriend, respectively at tables six and fifteen, will end up slugging it out? Will anyone take a piss in public at the reception? Will anyone have sex at my wedding? Will my mother throw anyone out for having a potty mouth? Will my missing-in-action bridesmaid actually show up? How many guests are going to bring people who weren’t invited and where do I seat them? How big is the chance that I will burst into a molten lava menstrual flow as I walk down the aisle?

Is he actually going to marry me?

What happens if he dies within the next eleven days—do I have to send back all the gifts? Will any one of the waiters be somebody I’ve slept with in a past life? Will I remember to wear underwear that day? Will my mother and I be speaking by then? Have I gained too much weight to fit into my dress? Is it going to rain?

Will I have a big pimple on my neck, or a whitehead on the side of my nose that no one will tell me about? If I end up crying like a ninny, can I do it in a way that people will think I’m choking on a chunk of cheese or some chocolate? Will our three-year-old ring bearer pick his nose and then put the treasure back, a favorite habit of his, when he’s standing at the altar?

Will the known kleptomaniac of the family try to steal the gifts, particularly the money bag? Will people I hate try to crash the reception, just to piss me off? Will the suspected retarded family member eat with his hands or use utensils? Is the chicken going to be fatty? Do I really need to shave or can I wear tights instead of hose? How much am I allowed to eat? Do I need to wear a girdle? How can I kiss my boyfriend without turning him into a transvestite? Can I light the candles without spilling wax on myself or setting my hair on fire? Is it too late to have liposuction on my chin? Have I turned into one of those beasts that have nothing to talk about but their wedding? What if I have to take the Big Poo?

Have all of the bridesmaids gotten their dresses altered? Will people who didn’t RSVP show up anyway? Does anyone know how to complete a bow tie? Do I need a dowry? Will he marry me without one? What the hell is a dowry? Does it involve livestock? My family knows nothing about livestock or animal husbandry. How about my dog? Can she take the place of livestock in the dowry? Can I use my bra for the “something old” bit? Why did I allow my mother to buy the garter? It has
feathers
on it and a bell. Do I really have a mustache or is it just my bathroom light? Do I look like a sausage in my dress? If anyone throws rice, I know it’s going to hit me in the eye and I’ll have to keep that eye closed for the rest of the wedding, or make sure I bring an eye patch. Have I remembered
Modern Bride
’s three
C
’s: Consideration, Communication, and Compromise?

Am I still mad at her or should I snub her at the reception? I wonder if he is bringing that awful girl? What if I fall down? Is anyone going to do the “I object!” thing or will they hold their peace? Will the groomsmen tape the words “Help Me!” on the bottom of the groom’s shoes? I’ll have nothing to talk about when this whole thing is over. Did I need to ask the Pope for permission? I forgot to ask the Pope for permission. Is it my religion that steps on the glass? What kind of glass? Does it have to be holy glass? Where do you get holy glass? Can I just use a lowball? I hope no one plays “My Love Does It Good.” Do I have to admit to any felonies now?

After the reception, will my mother have to kick an unconscious person, found lying under one of the tables, repeatedly, screaming, “Young man, it is time to go home!
Where are your friends?
” What happens when he finally sees me naked with the lights on? God, I’ll have to unscrew every lightbulb from now until he gets Alzheimer’s and forgets what women are supposed to look like. Did I give the Reverend the right directions and is she bringing a date? Please don’t let it be the guy swathed in army green swatting at imaginary flies or the junkie with the eye patch. If it is the junkie, though, maybe I can borrow the patch temporarily if I am maimed by the unexpected rice. What if I fart by accident? What if I fart in front of everyone? Did I invite that person? I think I forgot to invite that person. Oh God. I forgot to invite that person. What if someone gets high in the parking lot and my mother sees him? Will she call the police? Of course she’d call the police. She’s my mother.

Oh my God.

Oh my God.

Eleven days.

I’m a Dead Bride Walking.

“If You Get Divorced Within a Year, You Owe Your Father $35.78 a Dinner Times Two Hundred”: Words of Wisdom on My Wedding Day

T
he morning of her wedding, there are some things that a bride is better off not knowing.

Really, it’s true. You can exhaust yourself becoming prepared, tending to every minute detail, taking the proactive stance against any little, tiny thing that may possibly go wrong. But it’s useless.

Because there is no precaution against fate.

And it’s better when a bride doesn’t know that. When she doesn’t know that, at any second, forces she cannot understand, much less control, will swoop down from the heavens and kick her off-white, Italian-satin ass six ways from Sunday while the photographer is taking her picture at the same time.

I woke up on the morning of my wedding and embarked on my Preventative Measures Plan. If there was anything that scared me on my wedding day, it was the possibility that once I was up there in front of two hundred people and I became actively involved in vow-taking, I would be sucker-punched by an intestinal cramp that would demand an immediate escape to the ladies’ room with a commemorative book of matches in hand. In other situations, sure, you can sneak away when a doody gremlin is tugging at your colon, but good luck when you have a leading role and your part is up next, although I was somewhat prepared to muddle through. I’ve been onstage before. When I was nine, my dance school put on a recital for an old folks home, and right smack in the middle of our tap-dancing salute to the theme song from
The Sting,
an old man pushed his wheelchair to the front row, unzipped his fly, pulled what I understood to be an uncooked sausage out of his pants, and then peed all over the floor. At that age, I was completely unaware that men could even do that, and as I stared at the puddle in front of me, my little feet kept shuffling off to Buffalo as Judy Garland’s voice shouted in my head, “Go ON with the show! Go ON with the show!” while the rest of my dance class burst into tears, walked off stage, or just plain sat down.

So to cut the digestive train off at the pass, I flipped open the box of Immodium AD, my best means of protection against The Big Poo. I popped two out of their foil bubble-pack tombs and chewed them mercilessly, then chowed down another one for good measure.

Step Two involved looking in the mirror, and what I saw amazed me. My face was clear. Absolutely clear. Although I had a Band-Aid in hand and had painstakingly constructed a far-fetched yet almost believable story about how members of a nearby killer-bee colony had expressed an attraction for my new honey-milk hand lotion (in case I had more than one zit, I could attribute the breakout to a swarm attack by the hive), I did not have a strawberry-size boil on my nose, neck, or chest that required makeup, bandaging, or immediate cosmetic lancing. My mother owed me five whole bucks.

Step Three in my Preventative Measures Plan consisted of using a flashlight and a mirror with magnifying properties only a surgeon would need to scan my chinny-chin-chin in a quest for devious little piggy hairs. I used to think that I had a very kind, sympathetic mirror, but I now lean toward the theory that I bought a defective one, because in my bathroom, I have a regular female jaw. Push me into the power of direct sunlight, however, and I have chin scrub fuller than Grizzly Adams’s. Since I was getting married outside, my mandible foliage had the potential to be a deal breaker, so I had to reap the forest carefully with my trusted tweezers. I relied on my tweezers solely after my encounter with wax strips, which do not disclose in the instructions that repeated usage in the same area after about fifteen applications will indeed rip all remnants of testosterone and most of the skin cells right off your face, leaving exposed bone. I learned that lesson the hard way the night of our engagement party as I and my perfectly proportioned, square-shaped chin scab tried to act cute and engaged, while behind me, my invited guests were exchanging scenarios about how I may have acquired a rug burn in such a precarious and delightful spot.

In Step Four, I layered myself with so much padding that if I had been knifed in the gut by any of my boyfriend’s ex-girlfriends or his mom, not so much as a drop would have seeped through to the other side. There was no way I was going to have to borrow a sweatshirt or cardigan to tie around my bustle on my day of all days.

This bride was prepared. She was all set.

Or so she thought.

It wasn’t until I was watching the bridesmaids walk down the aisle to the music of the string quartet that I realized I was at my wedding. My betrothed was already up at the turned-off waterfall with Ellen, watching the procession.

I wasn’t shaking, I hadn’t cried, I wasn’t stuttering or hissing, all of which were good signs, or at least symptomatic of the eight Midols I had recently swallowed. And here we were, I thought, four minutes into the wedding and everything was running smoothly. I smiled and took a deep breath. What was I worried about?

In forty seconds, I was walking down the aisle myself on the arm of my father, who had been either a very wise man and remained absolutely silent for the past year or had sold his tongue to pay for the ice sculpture. I don’t believe he had talked to anybody, including his reflection, since we announced our engagement.

Suddenly, from overhead, an all-enveloping, powerful roar—the kind of roar that urges you to duck and seek cover—was being born above us, and as all two hundred heads looked up, they saw the nose, the windshield, and the pilots—one of whom looked like a guy I went to high school with who sold really bad pot in the darkroom of the yearbook office—of a 747 preparing to land.

It suddenly dawned on me that we were three miles from the airport, and it would have been impossible to be more directly in line with the north runway of the fifth busiest airport in the country and fifteenth busiest airport
in the world.

Even
I
couldn’t hear what Ellen was saying. The noise fell over us like a blanket, smothering everything: the courtyard, the guests, the turned-off waterfall, which would have been a whisper compared to the jet engines that were thundering above us in a deafening, rumbling roar. And no sooner had the jetliner taken its time to blast above us and then retreat than another one popped up, riding on the first one’s heels.

Then a third plane arrived, and a fourth and a fifth, the aggregate roar lasting longer than the complete running time of the ceremony, including the scheduled musical performances, the photographic slide montage, grand finale, and encore.

Our beautiful wedding location was loaded with more airspace activity than Afghanistan. It couldn’t have been louder if we had chosen to get married on an aircraft carrier.

Poor Reverend Ellen. Not even a lifetime of living in a compound with habitual offenders and felons or paying back her own debt to society could have prepared her for this situation. She may have had a spiritual solution to addictions, but her pockets of God were empty when it came to the noise level of a sonic boom. She tried to solve our dilemma by talking as fast as she could when we recognized the threat of approach, and squeezing in as much as possible, until she began to sound like an auctioneer.

“Stand fast in that hope and confidence having faith in your shared destiny just as strongly as you have faith in yourselves and in one another-today,” Ellen said with a stretched smile just before she took a deep, scuba-dive breath and went back in. “Only with this spirit can you forge a union that will strengthen and endure all the days of your lives Jesus I could use a drink right now!”

Even I wasn’t sure which point in the wedding we were at—was I still single, was I loving, was I obeying, was I married, was it time for the fire baton twirlers to swing in on the trapezes?—I had absolutely no idea. I tried to utilize my therapist’s advice and focus in on the positive, as in, “I HAVE NO CHIN HAIR, I HAVE A COTTON FIELD BETWEEN MY LEGS, AND I WON’T HAVE TO SHIT FOR A MONTH,” but I was absolutely positive when I turned around for our march back up the aisle that I would see my now bald mother on a stretcher while a paramedic performed CPR. With every passing plane, she’d have pulled out another fistful of hair and another and another until there wasn’t anything left for her to do but throw a hissy fit in such massive proportions that she would just plain knock herself out.

That’s when I swore I heard an evil chuckle from the back row. If I did, I knew exactly where it came from. It was the same man who an hour before had yelled at Meg when she politely pulled the hand of the three-year-old ring bearer away from his nose, his finger buried deep inside.

“That’s one of the best shots I had all day!” growled the videographer when Meg interrupted the booger taffy pull, although now he was making up for lost footage with his camera pointed directly toward the sky. It wasn’t the first nasty thing he had done that day. I watched as he rolled his eyes when Meg hid bra straps and informed a groomsman that his fly was open as we were taking our wedding pictures, stuff that, no doubt, would be pure gold to the videographer after he sold our wedding video and cashed the check from the funniest-home-video show.

After the ceremony, he followed us around like a loser friend we couldn’t shake. It took him forty minutes to set up the shot of us signing our marriage certificate when we should have been in the receiving line, and amazingly, the only part he clearly got on tape was when I was digging a morsel of a cocktail meatball out of my teeth with my tongue, which required so much concentration that I forgot to keep my engorged cutlet stomach sucked in. He told us when to eat. When to make the toast. When my new husband could kiss me. When we should cut the cake. When we could dance with each other and our parents. I looked up during dinner, and somehow, he had seated himself at my mother-in-law’s table and was sitting next to her, with his camera turned off. He wasn’t filming anything. He was stuffing his fat, nasty face with chicken Parmesan and au gratin potatoes.

His appearance was entirely misleading, and it took me a while to understand that, because although, yes, this man carried around a video camera and had something stuck in his ear, he was no videographer. No, no, no. What he really revealed himself to be was a professional Wedding Ruiner.

During dinner, I had to wrestle a hard roll out of the maid of honor’s hand that was positioned and ready to be fired at his head.

“A roll can’t hurt,” Jamie argued as the bread turned to crumbs in between our fingers.

“I know, but the butter knife you had rammed through it
might,
” I reminded her. “C’mon, I promised my parents that no one would sue them today!”

Craig, the best man, was behind her, ready to fling a steaming piece of roast beef, spiked on a fork, at the chewing target.

Maybe other newlywed couples had higher tolerance levels than we did, maybe they wanted someone else to take control of their wedding. But I didn’t. I had spent a year planning details, and both my new husband and I knew what we wanted and when we wanted it. I didn’t need the video man to poke me in the back with his finger and pronounce, “Hey. You’re losing your crowd. You’d better throw your bouquet now or you can forget the whole thing.”

I had known this man less than twenty-four hours, and in that time, he disrupted our wedding more effectively than the unexpected appearance of an ex-girlfriend with a newborn baby. He was so busy pushing us around, insulting the members of the wedding party, and setting up shots of fake events to film a wedding that didn’t exist that I never got to greet a majority of our guests, let alone take stock of who was shoving centerpieces and the remainder of the meatball pyramid into their purses.

The only time he truly left me alone was when I was with my eighty-four-year-old grandfather, Pop Pop. Pop had come to the wedding in a wheelchair because the medication for his cancer left him a little dizzy, and a wheelchair seemed the best way to make him mobile. I figured, hell, if I could have someone push me around while I went from the meatball pyramid to the cheese tower to the fondue station and it wasn’t an expense my mother made me pay for myself, I’d go for it. After all, isn’t that how Liza Minelli attended every milestone event in her life?

The DJ began playing one of his favorite Frank Sinatra songs, and before Old Blue Eyes even belted out the second line, Pop had thrown his lap blanket to the ground, wiggled out of his wheelchair, grabbed me from the head table, and spun me out to the dance floor.

As he led me in the fox-trot, Pop tossed me around like a rag doll to “Fly Me to the Moon,” and while they looked on, most of my husband’s extended family were stunned. For them, it could have only been a genuine act of God, even without the snakes or an evangelist’s palm-smack to the forehead. Minutes before, some of them whispered to each other, the man who had been confined to a wheelchair had not only freed himself from the chains of his rolling prison and
walked
but now was
dancing.
There wasn’t a dry eye in the house. “It’s a miracle, it’s like Joseph Smith and the seagulls,” some of them said among themselves, but I didn’t want to ruin it for anybody by informing them, “The old man’s on
morphine.
You could ram a spear through his foot and he’d still keep going. He’s as numb as Robert Downey, Jr.”