Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress (43 page)

“Was he kidding?” Bob said as we walked, shell-shocked, to the parking lot. “What’s a ‘Jewish sort of bunny hop’?”

The next photographer, Mildred, was everything Blaine was not. Unkempt, gentle, and obese, she arrived at my apartment dressed in a paisley muumuu with a portfolio tucked under one armpit and an enormous pastrami sandwich beneath the other. No sooner was she seated at my kitchen table than she unwrapped the sandwich and offered us sections.

“I hope you don’t mind if I eat while we talk, but I have this strange blood disorder,” she laughed. “If I don’t eat protein every one or two hours, I tend to pass out. I mean, like,
boom.
Right down on the floor like a redwood. Craziest thing. You’ve never seen anything like it.”

Determined to resist the orgiastic consumerism that passed itself off as a premarital requirement, Bob and I refused to register for gifts. It struck us as greedy and presumptuous somehow:
Hi. We’re getting married. Now here’s the blender we’d like you to buy for us.
But then, Bob happened to mention this at a dinner party at our friend Lucy’s.

“I have only two words to describe what happens to couples who don’t register,” Lucy said flatly. “String art.”

“I have only four words,” said Andrea, also a newlywed. “Orange plastic salad bowl.”

“You can’t think of it as being greedy,” Brian advised, as he got up to refill our wineglasses—beautiful glasses which, Lucy pointed out, they’d registered for. “You have to think of it as insurance against bad taste. It’s something you do preemptively to make sure you don’t wind up with cartons full of shit.”

“Look,” said Andrea. “If you really have the masochistic urge to let your guests select their own gifts, I’ll be happy to give you the salt shakers shaped like lawn trolls that Peter and I received.”

“It’s like the Borg on
Star Trek,
” Bob observed in the car ride home afterward. “Resistance is futile. You will assimilate.”

“So that’s our choice?” I said. “Register—or receive sixteen salt shakers shaped like lawn trolls?”

A week later, when we arrived at a bridal registry office, we were greeted by Mrs. Marscapone, an older, well-coiffed woman with the officious air of a headmistress. As our “personal registry consultant,” Mrs. Marscapone came around to my side of the desk, put her arm protectively around my shoulder, and presented me with a clipboard.

“Here you go,” she said proudly, as if it was something I’d earned. “This lists every item we have on this floor, as well as in Bedding, Linens, and the Electronics Department.” With an expert flourish, she flipped through the sheets attached to the clipboard. “These are just checklists, guidelines to help couples register. You see?” she pointed to a list that read
Serving bowl, creamer, gravy boat.

Gravy boat?
I thought.
Now that I’m getting married, I’m supposed to register for a gravy boat?
Just the thought of it made me feel eligible for Social Security. I looked down the list.
Butter dish,
it said.
Chafing dish. Punch bowl.
Who actually used these things? The only place I’d ever seen them was at my grandparents’. Was I supposed to buy all this stuff and save it for when I was reincarnated as a society wife or a Republican?

Casual china,
the list read, followed by
formal china.
I considered asking if “casual china” was called that because it slept around a lot, then looked at Mrs. Marscapone and decided against it. When two lesbian friends of mine had a commitment ceremony in New York City, they’d registered for sex toys at an erotic boutique called Eve’s Garden. Their registry had been remarkably different.
Two-headed dildo,
it had read.
Hitachi Magic Wand vibrator. Ribbed latex strap-on. Size: medium. Color: magenta (but lilac OK too).
I wondered if it was too late to change stores.

“Don’t be afraid to dream a little,” Mrs. Marscapone told me grandly. “Remember,
you’re
the bride. This is
your
day. People want to buy you expensive, high-quality presents. So if you’ve always dreamed of owning a bread maker, now’s the time! Register for a bread maker! You want a hand blender? Register for a hand blender! You want a Krups food processor with mini-bowl attachment? Register for a Krups food processor with mini-bowl attachment!”

Before I could even think of asking, “What if I want a two-headed dildo?” Mrs. Marscapone turned to Bob. “Here,” she said perfunctorily. “You get the gun.”

The “gun” turned out to be a bar code scanner, thoughtfully designed to make the holder believe they were carrying not a price-checker, but a piece of high-tech weaponry.

Once we were properly armed in accordance with our sex role stereotypes, Mrs. Marscapone steered us out of the office toward a sign reading “Dishware.”

“Happy registering,” she called after us as we staggered toward a forest of dinner plates.

The selection was overwhelming, and the lists on the clipboard somehow made it worse.
Serving forks, fondue pots, toaster ovens.
What were we supposed to do with all of this stuff? And where were we supposed to put it? Bob and I each lived in compact, one bedroom apartments that, on a good day, could double as “before” pictures in an IKEA catalogue. We were living apart not because we were old-fashioned, but simply because we’d gotten too busy planning our goddamn wedding to find the time to move in together. Between the two of us, we had roughly enough storage space for a colander and a pair of salad tongs.

“You know,” I said to Bob, as we eyed the enormous stacks of gourmet kitchen appliances, “for the price of a bread machine, a convection oven, and a Cuisinart, we could probably hire a maid to do these things for us instead.”

In the aisles of flatware, the sample place settings gleamed seductively beneath the halogen spotlights, and each one had a name conjured up by someone to suggest grandeur or exoticism:
Cobalt. Chantilly. Artemis.
We did need flatware. Bob’s stuff had been purchased at a garage sale—no two pieces of it matched—and mine had had an unfortunate run-in with a garbage disposal. Scanning the displays, I picked up a curvaceous dinner fork from the Ganges design collection. “Hey, Bob,” I called out. “You like this fork?”

Bob came over and examined the fork. Unlike me, he seemed unconcerned with what it looked like but rather with how much food the tines could hold.

“Yeah, it’s okay,” he said finally. “Sure. I could live with these forks.”

“For the rest of your life?”

Bob dropped the fork.

“Yeah, I pretty much had the same reaction when I thought about it that way,” I said as he crawled under the display case to retrieve it.

For the next forty-five minutes, we walked around Housewares in a state of paralysis, virtually unable to register for anything. We found enough stuff that we liked—some blue, ceramic dishes, a geometric sushi set—but we just weren’t sure we liked them enough to commit to looking at them for the rest of our lives.

We did come across some wine goblets we loved, but at $30 apiece, they seemed slightly ridiculous.

“That’s good,” said Bob. “We’ll use the world’s finest crystal to drink the cheap shit we buy at Sam’s Club.”

Still, Mrs. Marscapone’s “Venus/Mars” strategy began to pay off, because soon Bob became itchy to try out the scanning gun. “Then again,” he suggested, “maybe I should just scan a few of them in, you know, just to see how it works.”

After three hours at the department store, we registered for exactly one set of wineglasses and a pizza cutter.

Choosing each other as spouses had been fairly easy. The dinnerware, however, was proving a bitch.

I must say that during the whole planning process, our families were amazing. The bridal magazines had prepared me for the worst, running articles with titles like “Managing Your Mother” and “Sisters Who Sabotage.” Yet after the initial flurry of advice, both families respectfully backed off. No one called to quiz us about expenses or emotionally blackmail us into adding people to our minuscule guest list.

We attributed our parents’ restraint to their unique maturity and wisdom. But truth was, they were simply too stunned to say anything. The only detail we’d bothered to share with anyone was that we’d arranged to have our wedding ceremony performed by one of our nearest and dearest friends, Carolyn. Carolyn just happened to be a Wiccan priestess from Berkeley, California. She was a lesbian Wiccan priestess, to be exact, seeing as we’d met her through her lover, Cecilie, a friend of mine from college, and all four of us had become extremely close.

“A lesbian Wiccan priestess?” my churchgoing, Catholic future in-laws said when we told them. “You don’t say.”

“A lesbian Wiccan priestess?” my father said. “What’s she going to wear for the ceremony? Leather?”

“A lesbian Wiccan priestess?” said my mother. “Hmm. Anyone I know?”

Yet since Carolyn lived in Berkeley, she wasn’t licensed to perform marriages in D.C. We had to scramble to find some phenomenally open-minded clergy to co-officiate. Blessedly, we came across a rabbi named David.

“Let me get this straight,” he said. “You’re a non-practicing Jew and a ‘recovering’ Catholic and you’d like me to perform an inter-faith wedding ceremony with a lesbian Wiccan priestess?” He sat back for a moment and stroked his beard pensively. “Well, Jewish law does not list ‘sheer curiosity’ as a reason to do so, but it’s as good as any I can come up with.”

Both Carolyn and Cecilie loved the idea.

“It’s like the basis for a sitcom,” Cecilie exclaimed. “
The Rabbi and the Witch.
Can you just picture it? OhmyGod. I’m hearing a theme song.
The Rabbi and the Witch!” she
sang. “
The Rabbi and the Witch! He keeps Shabbas, she worships the goddess. They’ll have you in a stitch! The Rabbi and the Witch!
”

Although Bob and I worried that this unique, possibly-Saturday-morning-cartoon-series wedding ceremony might alienate our families, it actually united them in utter confusion. It also seemed to compel them not to ask any more questions. Apparently, they agreed it was simply best not to know.

Back when my friend Lucy had been planning her nuptials, she and her fiancÉ had instituted a policy they called “Wedding-Free Wednesdays,” which meant that for one night a week they were forbidden to discuss anything wedding-related. At the time, Bob and I snickered over this. Now, it was starting to look like a stroke of genius.

All our free time was soon consumed writing checks, making elaborate lists, faxing, e-mailing, and bickering over liquor, parking arrangements, and even the song we’d walk down the aisle to. (I wanted the Rolling Stones’ “[I Can’t Get No] Satisfaction,” while Bob opted for “Should I Stay or Should I Go” by the Clash.) No detail, we discovered, was too stupid to obsess over. Soon, like the zillion other engaged couples we’d vowed never to be like, we began to think that once our wedding was over, we’d be ready to spend our honeymoon in a mental institution.

“Guess what I got to help calm us both down?” Bob said one night when he came home. “I’ll give you a hint. It begins with a ‘P.’”

“Prozac?”

“No. Porn!” he exclaimed gleefully, unveiling an unmarked videotape.

“You just can’t wait until your bachelor party, can you?” I said, shaking my head.

“It’s ‘couples porn,’ see?” he said, pointing to the Day-Glo sticker on the spine reading “His ‘n’ Hers.” “It’s made to appeal to both sensibilities.”

“You mean horny
and
sleepy?”

After sending out for pizza and cutting it with the pizza cutter we’d already received from our registry, we loaded the videotape into the VCR and settled back for an evening of fine adult entertainment. As soon as the requisite 1970s synthesizer music kicked in, the title of the movie flashed onscreen across a pair of enormous breasts.
To Have and to Hold,
it read.

“Ha ha,” said Bob.

“Ha ha, indeed,” I said.

But a few minutes after the opening scene began, we realized why this movie was labeled “for couples.” Its premise was that—I am not making this up—an engaged couple, Traci and Brad, have a huge series of fights over their upcoming wedding. This compels both of them, of course, to storm out of the house and have sex with other people.

Yet for a good ten minutes before any sex occurs, Traci and Brad argue in elaborate detail about their wedding band, the seating plan, the menu, and her mother.

“Okay,” said Bob. “Why am I not finding this relaxing?”

“I know,” I said, while before us, Traci finally began having sex with one of the bridesmaids at her wedding shower. “All I can think about while I’m watching this is ‘Where did she register? Is that serving platter they’re on top of from Villeroy and Boch?’”

Yet the biggest issue, by far, was The Dress. Quite simply, I refused to wear one—at least not a traditional white one. My plan was to be “the Anti-Bride” and walk down the aisle in scarlet or black.

More than anything else, big frothy wedding dresses struck me as silly and infantilizing, as leftovers from the Eisenhower administration, the couture of future homemakers and Cinderella wannabes. They were the epitome of every value I rejected and of everything I did not want to be. To join Bob in matrimony, it struck me as foolhardy, even dangerous, to present myself to him as a fantasy, to walk down the aisle with any pretenses to living in a fairy tale.

“Let’s face it. I’m neither royalty nor a virgin. Who would I be kidding?” I told Lucy. “In a traditional wedding gown, I’d just be a hypocrite in a pouffy white dress.”

Truth be told, I also rejected the idea of a traditional wedding gown because I couldn’t stand to shop for one. I couldn’t bear spending weeks, if not months, trying on dresses that were supposed to make every woman look beautiful but that would undoubtedly confirm that I was fundamentally, chromosomally
yech.

Clothes shopping, for me, has always been an act of masochism. As every woman knows, the garment industry will routinely cut some size 8s that are more like 6s, and others that are more like 10s. With my hourglass figure, I’m invariably two different sizes on the top and the bottom, thereby quadrupling the equation. After fifteen minutes in a dressing room, all my humor and perspective invariably fly out the window. Buttons don’t close. Fabric pulls across my upper back. Waistbands hula-hoop around my hips, and I’m reduced to a jelly of self-hatred and despair. Never mind that children are starving to death in Africa:
I am an un-dressable freak!