Wedding Cake for Breakfast (13 page)

I hope that coyote choked to death.

We haven't been petless since the day Lion came to live with us, and over the years we've branched out into other many other species. At the height of our lunacy, we had two dogs, a cat, two turtles, three mice, a frog, and three fish. (We also had four kids at that stage in our lives—I am not exaggerating when I use the word
lunacy
.) We've also had millipedes and snakes and spiders and mantids and hamsters.

And, yes, my parents have hated every single one of our pets. To this day, my father scowls at our gentle yellow Lab and tells him to “go away” if he dares to greet him at the door.

Well, what do you expect from someone who's not an animal person?

But over two decades and dozens of pets later, I still miss Lion. And when our current lazy hairball of a Persian cat (who makes my sisters sneeze their heads off) crawls on top of me and kneads my chest and purrs, I love him as much because he evokes the memory of Lion as for himself.

And I love Lion's memory not just because he was a great cat—although he was—but because of everything he meant to me in that first year of marriage.

When Rob and I adopted him together, it brought home like nothing had before that we were forging our own path together. My parents and siblings might not have been animal people, but I was part of a new family now, and that new family could be whatever Rob and I wanted it to be. It was an exhilarating realization.

And one more thing.

I had married a man who had shown me during our years of dating that he was kind and supportive. I knew I wanted to have kids with him, but I had to take on faith that he would be a good father. It's not something you can test ahead of time.

And then we got our first cat.

When Rob spoke to Lion, his voice would lower to a soft, reassuring rumble. He always had room on his lap for the cat, was always willing to give an ear scritch or endure a good, long knead—even if the claws hadn't been trimmed recently and the knead had its painful moments. If the cat was sleeping on the bed, Rob would arrange his own limbs carefully around the supine fluffy body. He never kicked or hit Lion in anger, never touched him except with affection, always was willing to clean up the occasional rat carcass or bird-bone vomit without complaint. The cat wasn't just mine; he was ours, and Rob shared the work as well as the pleasures.

Sometimes I'd look at them curled up in bed together, a man and his cat, and I knew I had linked my life with someone who would not only be a good husband but the best kind of father. Because if he could love a stupid little pet that much, if his heart was that tender and open toward an animal who had come into our lives as an adult with an unknown past, if he was willing to give up his free time to care for and protect something small and vulnerable and dependent—wasn't that evidence right there that when we actually had kids together, he would be the kindest, best father there ever was?

Yeah. It was and he is.

The First Year

CLAIRE BIDWELL SMITH

Greg and I got married on a hot July day on Cape Cod. Two months later I walked into the bathroom of our Chicago apartment and took a pregnancy test.

You're not pregnant, Greg called through the door.

When I came out of the bathroom, I handed the test to him, watching his face as he stared down at the miniature plus sign. He looked back up at me and I offered him a wobbly smile, and he returned one of his own. I was indeed pregnant.

Greg wasn't entirely convinced, though. I think this was mostly because my being pregnant didn't quite fit into his idea of what our first year of marriage was supposed to be like. It didn't exactly fit into mine either, but then again, nothing did.

Marriage and pregnancy are two things I've always felt ambivalent about. I even told Greg on our very first date that I didn't know if I ever wanted to have children. We were walking across a bridge in Chicago's Millennium Park and it suddenly seemed like one of those things he should know about me right away.

The words trickled out of my mouth before I'd even had a chance to consider the impact they might have on my future with this man, but I needn't have worried. Greg simply smiled at me mysteriously. Either he didn't care, or he knew something I didn't.

Although that was our first official date, we'd actually known each other for a few months, having corresponded by e-mail after “meeting” when we both became writers for the same literary site. On a whim, I changed a flight, stopping in Chicago for sixteen hours so that we might finally meet in person.

I'd always scoffed a bit at the idea of love at first sight, but the moment I met Greg in baggage claim at O'Hare Airport, I knew that he was going to be my husband. I moved to Chicago three months later, and hardly a year passed before we found ourselves standing before an altar, reciting carefully written vows.

Greg is a husky-voiced and handsome writer, the son of Ohio farmers, one of six kids. When we met he'd never lived outside of the Midwest. Compared with the lengthy list of big cities I'd inhabited, coupled with my penchant for world travel and my lack of an immediate family, we were an unlikely match.

I lost both of my parents to cancer by the time I was twenty-five, and as a result, my twenties were tumultuous, and my sense of independence had become a force to be reckoned with. For me to go from living alone in Los Angeles to being married and pregnant in the space of a year was enough to make anyone dizzy.

The Monday after I took the test, Greg met me at the doctor's office to confirm the pregnancy. She gave me another test, we all peered down at another little plus sign, and then she gave us a date: June 6.

Satisfied, and also a little stunned, Greg kept his hand on my knee during the drive back to our apartment. We spent that night in a daze of wonderment. Someone was growing inside of me, part him, and part me.

That wondrous feeling never quite dissipated, although I spent most of that fall battling a morning sickness that was most prevalent in the afternoon. I would come home early from work and lie on the couch in the living room watching old TV shows. The way I felt was more akin to seasickness, and the sofa became my gently rocking boat. I thought a lot about my life during those afternoons. What I'd imagined for it, compared to what it had become.

I spent most of my twenties terribly sad and lonely, and although I knew that I didn't want to feel that way for the rest of my life, I couldn't deny that pregnancy and marriage were heavy anchors in an ocean I was used to navigating freely.

Greg was sweet those months, bringing me saltines and massaging my legs when they grew restless. His family was excited, too, although with six kids, ours would be just another number in a handful of growing grandchildren.

I missed my own mother a lot during the months that my gently swelling belly grew. There were a hundred questions I wanted to ask her, but couldn't. I listened to Greg on the phone with his own mom, happily reporting the latest update with the pregnancy, and I was envious. I could have talked to her myself, and sometimes I did, but it was never the same as I knew it would have been with my own mother. We'd had a connection that would be impossible for me to replicate with any other woman.

Perhaps this was the reason I longed for a daughter. I knew that having a girl might be my only chance to replace my long-lost mother-daughter bond. I knew that having a girl meant that in some small way I would get my mother back, if only because I would become her.

Greg and I decided not to find out the sex. Me for the already stated reasons, and Greg because he is sweet and sensitive, and would be equally at home playing with mermaids as he would with trucks. As the months wore on, we speculated constantly. Everyone around us had an opinion, too. Coworkers, checkout clerks, strangers on the street—all stopped what they were doing in order to declare their prediction. It was unanimous: I was going to have a boy.

Greg felt the baby move for the first time one cold January morning. It was early and we were lying in bed in the dark. I took his hand, pressing it to my lower abdomen at the exact moment that our unborn child gave a swift kick. Greg's eyes flew open in the dimly lit room, barreling into mine. It was one of the most intimate moments of my life.

It's one thing to commit yourself to spending the rest of your life with someone. It's another thing to create a physical manifestation of that commitment, one that's going to grow up and go to school and need new shoes and kiss someone for the first time.

As the months drew themselves out, we both grew a little wistful. Pregnancy didn't suit me. I was huge and listless, prone to hormone-induced anxiety and tearful days. I could tell that Greg missed the vibrant and happy young woman he had married only months earlier. Sometimes we whispered secrets to each other in bed, in the dark.

I wish we'd had more time to just have fun, he said into his pillow one night.

Me, too, I admitted, lying on my side to accommodate my protruding belly.

I'm afraid that I won't be a good mom, I told him. That I won't love the baby.

I'm afraid that I won't be able to support all of us. I want our baby to have a good life, he whispered back.

There was nothing either of us could say that would reassure the other. Because the truth was that we didn't have the answers. While our secrets stayed safe, hidden in the hushed gloom of our bedroom, I caught glints of them now and then in Greg's eyes or in mine, reflected back in the mirror as I observed myself.

When spring came we took a weekend and turned the guest room into a nursery. We painted the walls a pale yellow, assembled the crib, and hung a pair of soft, pretty curtains. I washed and folded dozens of little onesies and carefully folded them into the dresser.

I took a bath almost every night, and as I lay still in the clear, warm water, I tried to imagine the person growing inside me. I thought about how even though Greg and I chose each other, the baby wouldn't have the same experience—we would simply always be its parents. Greg and I—once two strangers, who are still getting to know each other—would never be anything but the two people who most understand this little person we would soon meet.

This thought gave me a sense of peace. Almost just as suddenly as I'd lost the threesome I'd always been a part of, I'd re-created it.

I went into labor on an unseasonably cool June night, four days past my due date. I'd worked hard throughout pregnancy to prepare for a natural birth and I wanted to labor without pain medications, aiming for as raw an experience as I could have. Greg had been a good sport, going along to HypnoBirthing workshops and interviewing doulas, even though the whole concept was a new one for him.

His willingness to participate in these trainings, to help me prepare for something he would mostly just witness, only served to further emphasize that I had married the right person. So far, everything about me, from my scattered past, to a grief that he could never quite relate to, had never fazed him. He embraced each facet of my personality with an interest and an openness that I myself couldn't even match.

When the time came, Greg drove us to the hospital in an old car he bought just after he graduated high school. Things went as planned and I was admitted to the alternative birthing suite. So there we were, not even married a year, huddled into each other on a queen-size bed, working to bring into the world a small version of the two of us. I gritted my teeth and screamed, squeezing Greg's hand as hard as I could.

A few hours went by before it was finally time to push, officially the hardest thing I have ever done. I sat with my back up against the headboard of the bed, Greg on my left, the doula on our right. The midwife knelt before me and a team of nurses assembled in the back of the room.

Greg told me later how each time the midwife instructed to me to push through a contraction, the nurses in the back of the room would all rise, expecting to receive the baby. I don't remember this because I had my eyes closed, straining with every muscle in my body to expel the creature everyone was so eager to meet. Greg explained that halfway through my pushing, the nurses would be able to tell that it wasn't going to happen during this particular contraction, and they would all sit down again while I not so blissfully pushed on. The sympathy in his eyes each time he told this story became tiny windows into his first experience of fatherhood, for that unrelenting ability to feel someone else's pain.

When I finally did reach the final push, I felt my hip bones spread apart, and the baby burst forth into being. Before I could really understand what had happened, Greg was placing her on my chest.

It's a girl, he said.

We both cried then, overcome by the enormity of it all. By the swift disappearance of our quiet union. By the way we had produced something so much bigger than either of us. And by the way that we would forever move through life, inextricably linked by a living extension of the first moment we met.

He Chose Me

SOPHIE LITTLEFIELD

Many years ago, when I met my future husband, I was barely twenty-four. Does that seem young to you? It does, now, to me—an age of impossible innocence, an age imbued with the sweet wrongheadedness of youth.

I seized upon him and he upon me. We were instantly inseparable. That part of the story you can imagine for yourself, if you've ever fallen hard and fast. It was intoxicating and invigorating and exhausting all at once, and I will never, until the moment I die, forget the feeling of his gloved hand holding mine as we ice-skated beneath the frozen sparkle of the Chicago skyline at night.

It lasted a long, long time. Not forever. But this is not a story about the undoing. It is the story of what came first. If love is a lucky pebble tossed into a pond, spinning concentric circles out across the still waters, this is the story of the innermost circles, when it seems that the magic can radiate out forever and change everything. I was as foolish as any lover, and I forgive my former self without hesitation—with affection, warmly. How could I have known? The world is far more complicated than any of us imagine, and each passing year reveals a little more of the truth, glimpses of the game maker's odds. But in the beginning—and if you are lucky, as I was, it will be a long and splendid beginning—there is the shiny patina, the sleight-of-hand magic of Cupid and Eros, and if you are truly blessed, you will drink deeply.

• • • • • • • •

I came from a childhood marred by chaos and abrupt changes, rarely good; my adolescent years were marked by loss and anger and loneliness. I was the apple of no one's eye. I was often a burden, but on the worst days I was just . . . extraneous. Unneeded. Unnoticed. Unremarked.

Maybe that was why I loved the drama of fairy tales. Not just the Disney variety either; in our home were volumes of Grimm and equally frightening Polish and Russian anthologies, which I supplemented with folk and fairy tales from every culture represented in the public library of our small town. These stories were often violent and vengeful and passionate; people were constantly being starved and beaten and imprisoned. It was not enough merely to love; suitors had to prove themselves and earn their beloved's troth, and their trials were deliciously appalling if incomprehensible. I remember a tale in which seven handsome brothers were turned into swans by an angry witch. To regain human form, they had to convince seven beautiful maidens, sisters, to spin seven shirts of rough flax, which pierced their fingers while they spun. They bled extravagantly—and somehow, in the process, fell deeply in love with the brothers.

The fact that this seemed like a suitable allegory for a contemporary love affair should tell you how flawed was my understanding of human relationships. I longed for love but believed it was reserved for the beautiful; I did not delude myself that I had any potential in that regard. I noted bitterly that in folklore, the youngest sisters were always the most beautiful, clever, and faithful; I was an older sister. It did not escape me that gracefulness was required, though I knew that grace was and always would be beyond me. I was homely, too tall, awkward, clumsy, and while I expected to marry someday, I assumed it would be to some dull, equally forgettable lout, someone who would be every bit as disappointed with me as I would be with him.

• • • • • • • •

By the time I went off to college, I'd put aside fairy tales in favor of highbrow literature, the sort in which the everyday lives of unexceptional people are elevated by their fleeting rejection of the banal. I'd also grown tired of wallflowerism, and—dizzy with the possibilities presented by living where no one knew me—I managed a handy self-renovation. Those were the eighties, so it involved a lot of blue eyeliner and voluminous hair. By all external accounts it was successful; I ended up with more than enough male attention. But no matter how ardent my admirers, they never were able to assuage my essential loneliness: if they really knew me, I reasoned—the me beneath the lip gloss and the Hang Ten short shorts—they'd realize how truly unlovely I still was.

And then—only a few months into my first real job—I met him. He wasn't like the others. (Join me now, you who had your own brave passion; this is a chorus you know the words to.) My friends were surprised: we were so unsuited for each other. He didn't care what they thought, and soon I didn't care what they thought.

He was staid, dependable; he was a keeper of promises; I was all passionate longing and scattershot affection. We reached for each other with something like desperation and certainly with relief; we sensed in each other salve for what was broken in ourselves. We seized and held on tight, from the start. After our first evening together, we were never apart unless circumstances forced a separation. Mondays meant that one of us was always awake hours before dawn to get to an airport, and Fridays were sweet with the promise of being together again. That it wouldn't be forever was inconceivable. We got engaged. We got married.

As a love story, ours was nothing unusual. You probably have your own, if you chose your partner with any care at all. Early love is about seeing yourself in the other's eyes, and seeing reflected back a version of yourself that fixes your hurt places or completes what's missing. Perhaps you were an obedient child, but your lover cherishes your occasional stubbornness, your minor rebellions. Or the clumsy one can't believe her luck when her lover identifies a kind of grace no one ever noticed before, the way she ties her shoe, perhaps, or the way her bracelets jingle. “We don't love anyone,” someone once told me. “We only love the self we see reflected back.” This seems too cynical, even for me, even now: it is the us that is intoxicating. He gets me. She understands me. Together, we can handle anything. Together, we are more than the sum of our selves.

The twenties seem a gentle decade when viewed from middle age. Everything is rife with possibility—it hardly matters if you're broke if you use your last few dollars to buy an orchid for a lover, a length of riotous Marimekko fabric, a bittersweet confection. Later you will learn detachment and accustom yourself to the taste of disappointment. Love may crumple and fade, but you'll have things, lots of lovely things, and people will envy you, and that will be a kind of recompense.

• • • • • • • •

But for now, let's return to the home of the newly wed.

I was well suited for traditional wifery. My proudest early accomplishments were sewing a straight seam, baking a flaky biscuit, coaxing paperwhites to bloom in winter. My repertoire included unwavering topstitching, uniformly chopped carrots and potatoes, neatly braided hair, boiled icing, ruby radishes pulled from well-turned earth. The women of my family cleaved to a precise ideal of femininity: a rosary, an A-line coat, a single tube of lipstick, a bottle of perfume that would last five years of special occasions, neat unpolished nails, folded hands at church, and one ankle turned just so in front of the other when posing for photographs—these were the hallmarks of womanhood that I observed and absorbed.

I brought these notions into my marriage with far, far more conviction than I would have ever admitted to—but I also longed to be elegant. Our friends were sophisticated; they had nice taste, expensive things, and I coveted not just their clothes and sunglasses and silver frames and good dishes, but their entire pasts. Debutante balls, boarding schools, inherited jewelry—it was the fashion then, and probably still is, to affect a mild contempt for all of these if you possessed them, indifference if you did not. After all, the hard work of inventing oneself involves a certain amount of casting off, no matter what you bring from your past.

Still, my life seemed so humble by comparison. Our friends—my husband's friends, whom I claimed for my own, hungrily, longing for acceptance—called me “FMA.” That acronym stands for Fucking Miss America, and I know they coined it with affection—I was the one among us that made every dish from scratch, sewed my own black-tie gowns, filled our balcony with pots of flowers. But I was ashamed of my nickname, too. I wanted to be like them, not different. I wanted a long-standing manicure appointment and a stack of take-out menus and a horrendous dry-cleaning bill.

There was one place, however, where being FMA felt right, and that was in my marriage. I wanted to be a good wife. I wanted to be a helpmate. That term—outdated even then—was irresistible to me, because it suggested I would be needed. That I would complete my husband as he would complete me. I wanted my husband to shine, and I would be content to stand in his shadow. I wanted to be the wind beneath his wings, and even as I cringe at how hackneyed that phrase has become, I remember how I turned it in my mind over two decades ago and thought,
Yes, yes, that's right.
I would hang his shirts in the closet. (That image is so powerful, in fact, that it made its way into a short story I wrote a while back, and is perhaps the perfect still shot of marriage for me—a wife, alone during the day, hanging her husband's shirts with care, with affection. Their fabric is fragrant from the laundry and she smoothes the fabric with her hand, straightening the shoulders on the hanger, imagines her husband dressing for work, finding the perfectly pressed shirt pleasing.)

Other couples brought store cakes to potlucks; I baked. I made curtains for our apartment. Together, my husband and I planted the flower beds behind our building with impatiens; the smell of the turned earth on that long-ago May morning may be the sweetest memory of that year. The sun was warm on our backs and we laughed at the dirt ground into our knees; later I would shower off the grime and sweat and change into a summer-sheer dress, and we would drink wine on our balcony, and we were so blessed, so blessed. I was smug, and I know now that conceit is a sin that fate punishes with glee; fate waits with the patience of the inevitable. Still, I pitied those other wives, the ones who didn't know how to sew a hem and had to send their husband's pants out, the ones who would correct their husbands in conversation or laugh too loud . . . who did not understand the blessing they'd been given, even though it was right in front of their faces.

Threaded throughout all of this first year of marriage was the stunning amazement that I had been chosen. “I am a wife,” I whispered to myself the day after our wedding, folding the dress I had made, mindful of the thousands of tiny pearls and sequins I sewed on by hand. I could imagine no greater honor.

Cards and invitations arrived, addressed to Mr. and Mrs. Robert Littlefield. I didn't mind the disappearance of my former self. That self had not served me well, I thought. When I had to check a box on a subscription form, choosing “Ms.” or “Mrs.,” I chose the latter with great satisfaction.

I took my place at my husband's side and I cherished it. I remember moments with great clarity. My ex-husband remembers every phone number, every address we ever had; he can tell you where we went each summer and whom we saw. These details don't last for me, but I remember how he looked in the Brooks Brothers shirt I picked to bring out the color of his eyes. I remember the brass dish where he used to leave his keys when he came to the door—and the smell of the polish I used on it. I remember the gifts he gave me, and I still have them, wrapped with care and tucked into the bottoms of boxes, underneath out-of-season coats and the children's sports trophies. There was a picture frame, the green of malachite. An earring, a gold-tone crystal-studded hoop, its mate lost long ago.

I wanted children right away. I would have been happy to start trying on our honeymoon. There would be four, all girls; when their father came home from work, their hair would be combed neatly and they would have made things for him, leaves pressed between waxed paper and cookies decorated with colored sugar, and they would be pretty like me and he would call us “his girls.”

On our first anniversary we thawed the frozen bit of wedding cake and took it outside on the sunny porch. It was dry, almost inedible. We laughed and drank champagne instead. He opened the bottle with a flourish; I did the dishes when we were finished. We had our roles and we relished them. I thought they would see us through.

• • • • • • • •

Lying to myself lost its appeal somewhere north of forty. The denial that served me so well as a layer of protection—like the cartilage around a knuckle or the WD-40 on a hinge—sloughed away, and I was left with an acuity that proved impossible to cast off.

Here was the long-evaded truth: cherished ideals and best intentions were not, in the end, enough. And so, with great sadness and regret, we parted.

When I look back at my young marriage, I was so full of hopes, so eager to quit the loneliness of my past and become not just someone new, but part of something even further removed from who I was before: part of a couple. But I think that even then I knew the old self would not stay buried forever. Was it a mistake to keep it in the box, sealed and shoved back on the shelf, left to simmer and churn until the day it would come back to claim its place?

I'm not sure I think it was. There was joy in that year, genuine can't-believe-my-luck glory at finding myself by his side.

He chose me,
I think still. That, at least, will always be true.