I gather only what I need into a pearl clutch and am careful to close the hotel room door as quietly as Rose did even though I’m almost positive there’s no one left inside. Waiting for the elevator, I search the Internet for bride in space and time.
A scene from Fiddler on the Roof, backlit bride on a bare stage. Disaffected bride and groom at the back of a bus, the last shot of the movie The Graduate. Bride chained to a desk, urinating in her dress. Bride holding bouquet, floating downriver. Bride on wide lawn. Frowning bride in regalia. Dead Renaissance bride mourned by man wearing cassock. A 1950s bride winking, smoking. Bride holding gun, eyes caked in mascara. Bride wearing jockstrap. Pastel bride flying over town holding chicken. Bride with beard of bees.
“They all look sad,” someone says, and I realize I’m speaking aloud in the elevator that jolts to a halt. I’ve grown fond of the Inn’s idiosyncrasies. I assume this is a particular type of elevator that breaks on the way to every destination. Who can’t relate? I consult the lit panel and the doors, firmly shut. I call the front desk.
“Will only be a moment,” the concierge says.
A text comes in from the groom: I can’t wait to marry you. Pressure builds in my throat. “No rush,” I say.
“I’ll bet no rush.” She laughs as if I’ve made a joke. “You’ve got nowhere to be.”
In the mirrored walls, refractions of brides avoid my stare. I step in and out of my ecru heels. The dress’s hem rubs against my bare legs.
The hanging syrup-colored orb is a camera. I wave. The concierge must see me, alone in an elevator wearing a wedding dress and veil. The sulfurous scent of the stopped elevator deepens. I smell my pulse where a few moments before I’d swiped vetiver.
Her voice comes through the box: “Are you excited?”
The elevator depresses its brakes and brings me the rest of the way down.
“It’s fixed!” I step into the lobby, noting a distinct disappointment in my chest.
Rose and the party have been waiting long enough for their faces to rest into expressions of anguish. My mother searches a mirrored compact as if trying to locate a criminal. Our limo idles outside. Everyone turns their rouged, matted, highlighted complexions to me and applauds. Strangers sitting on an opposite couch follow the party’s gaze to where it meets me. I blanch under the attention.
“We’ve been waiting for the bride,” Aunt Henshaw says. “We’ve been eating those bagel things and talking.”
“Flagels,” Antonia says.
Someone has contoured my mother. “My god,” I say. “You’re commercial-pretty.”
“I’ve been blowing my nose all morning. I swear there’s a cat in here.” Her gaze scans me. “That’s the wrong dress.” Her tone is egg whites whipped to stiff peaks. “That’s not the one you bought.”
“It’s the other dress I bought.”
“What was wrong with the first dress?” she says.
“Too fussy.”
“I think this one’s perfect,” Rose says.
“What have you been doing all morning?” my mother says. “I called and called.”
“I was in the lobby, Mother. Telling everyone how excited I am.”
“How excited are you?” Antonia wants to know, and I tell her there is no mechanism on earth that can measure an amount that large.
“What about the scales that weigh an elephant?” the groom’s nephew Rodrigo says, sitting on the arm of a couch. I’ve never seen him sit in an actual seat. He is a quiet boy who only pipes in when he’s thought of a sarcastic comment. “What about the scales that weigh a jetliner?”
When I talk to Rodrigo I make every statement a question, reflecting the brattiness I divine in him. “What I’m talking about isn’t necessarily a solid?” I say. “So the examples you’re using don’t apply? An emotion isn’t a jetliner? It would be like weighing the sea?”
On the pocket-size screen of his video game, Rodrigo’s avatar sprints through an expanse of fog-lit mountains. In real life the kid is blond and scrawny. In the game he has chosen a dark boy with muscles. “He” rolls neatly under a barrage of gunfire, then completes an unlikely jump to tag a yellow disk triggering the mountains to part. He makes a dismissive sound and returns to his game where “he” levitates through a cavern of candelabras. I didn’t want to invite Rodrigo, or any children, but the groom insisted.
We file outside where the air is a crisp threat. I am seated in the limo when a thought launches me back out, jockeying everyone between me and the door, which is everyone, because as the bride I was allowed to enter first.
In the lobby, the concierge has retreated behind the desk and is tapping at her computer’s keyboard. She looks surprised to see me. “Can I help?”
Whatever reason I’ve returned has been torn clean out. Nothing in the room reminds me. The untidy fire. The smell of cheap cranberry candle. The twenty-dollar bill in my hand.
“Did you forget something?” she says.
I hold out the bill. “A tip!” I slide it over to her.
“Too much,” she says.
“For your daughter, then.”
“No.” She slides it back.
It is odd behavior to run back to tip when you’re a bride. Everyone seems to be thinking it: the strangers, the fire, her resumed rapping on the keyboard.
I return to the limo and the driver shifts us into movement. We ease down the driveway to the main road. There are only five stoplights until the church. I counted the day before.
The trees are furred with thick needles that insulate against what the lake can throw. It is midday on a regular Saturday for everyone else. A mother hurries her children along the sidewalk. A line at the bakery. A group of college-age students sit on a low wall, exchanging a mug of something hot. The limo passes through town like a cloud over the sun, reminding passersby of an opulent event, whether they want one or had one or hate the idea. Every time I see a limo, I think: tuxedoed teenagers.
We pull beside a man tapping his fingers against a steering wheel. A girl on the sidewalk insists to her mother, cheeks wet with tears.
After five stoplights, the limo reaches the church.
We’re early. The guests are still arriving. The bridesmaids call out the names of people they recognize as we hide in the car.
Finally, all the guests have climbed the steps and vanished behind the heavy doors.
Someone says, “It’s time.”
We disembark from the limo. An official countenance settles over the party, silencing the bridesmaids who let me pass like a specter from one world to the next.
The driver leans against the car, hands folded against her thigh. Even my mannerless mother recedes as I push through the oak door to the vestibule where my stepfather stands, staring at a collection of pamphlets shoved into wall cubbies. My mother insisted he’d walk me down the aisle. I fold my hand into his elbow’s crook. The bridesmaids file into the antechamber, ducking out of view from the open middle doors. Organ music pumps through the church.
My stepfather’s mahogany musk hangs in the air along with incense from an interior room beyond the vestibule. I clasp the unfriendly fabric of his rented tuxedo. Someone tucks my hair behind my ear. Someone gently wrenches my purse out from under my arm. Someone shows me where she keeps her mints in case I want one later. Someone says, “Any minute now.” The groomsmen line up like soldiers. Whispers of guests make angelic noise that chorus around the chancel, my mother asks the usher, What’s the holdup? A missalette rockets to the ground followed by nervous chuckling. Someone apologizes for the wait. The priest was in the bathroom. Every church wedding throughout history has begun late on account of a priest being in the bathroom.
Rose said it would be over before I knew it. Which is what I tell my clients about suffering. Time spent away from a lover, a plane ride. Everything in my battered life has led me to this vestibule, this hyphen of space that will join my life to another’s. The man tapping his fingers on the steering wheel. The girl insisting to her mother. I would have traded places with any of them. Is this correct? Maybe all brides feel this way but are sworn by oath not to tell.
Aunt Henshaw loses then finds her pashmina. “It’s like when you’re looking for something, you find it,” she tells Antonia.
“So true,” Antonia says.
Someone says, “It’s time.”
The organ music switches from meandering to focused, as if it will deliver us down the aisle with its certainty. My mother marches through the middle doors on the arm of a groomsman. One by one, each woman vanishes into that sacred slot until only my stepfather and I remain.
“Where are they going?” I ask him.
“Where are who going?”
I check his watch, two fifteen. “No one left but us chickens,” I say.
Someone says, “It’s time.”
Occasion steals my memory. I can’t remember what hairdo or which veil I chose.
“Am I wearing a tiara?” I ask my stepfather.
Confusion uglies his face. “Are you wearing a tiara?”
We pose in the center of the doorframe. Several empty pews away, the guests pivot to see us.
The music shifts into the furtive and holy song the groom and I chose the month before. It made sense then, but now I can’t remember why we wanted such a militaristic dirge as my stepfather and I glide through the standing guests. Here is Rose’s stepfather, festively belted. Here is a cousin, petrified in rouge. Here is Rodrigo, stiff with occasion. I thought I could count on him to stick out his gross tongue, but even he realizes that what I’m entering means no fun.
I do not remember my stepfather’s grip or having to recalibrate my steps to match his. One step, another. I dismiss the thought that no one has said I look beautiful. But as the groom’s sleeve comes into view, promising the rest of him on my advance, this bothers me. I’m not a woman who trades on beauty but you’re supposed to tell a bride she’s beautiful even when she’s not.
Granny, I miss you. There are all these people on earth who aren’t you.
The groom comes into full view. A cracked map of blood vessels reddens his nose and cheeks. He’s been drinking already. The girl insisting to her mother on the street was speaking to me. The groom sees me and grins. Beside him, four groomsmen are arranged by fondness. We reach the altar. My stepfather kisses me dryly on the cheek and takes his place in the pew, noticeably relieved. I face the groom.
The priest ahems and asks if we have come here of our own volition. Yes, we say, and this signals the guests to be seated.
The priest says some love is deep but unfulfilling, a durable towel on a rack. Some love is general, a sense of community, a garden that is watered from within. Love can be a hummingbird that lands on a jut of wood and, finding it undesirable, flutters off to try another.
A guest in the front pew moans erotically. The people around her titter.
“We are right to exult over these kinds of love,” the priest says. “But they are not the reason we stand in this room today.”
The love that gathers us is more reliable than some stupid bird, more durable than your pitiable towel, it doesn’t need your dumb-ass water, but contains the kinetic energy of dynamite or a car crash. The kind of love that is not like but is a bridge.
Bridge is bride with a g, I think. Then: Bride has a bird in it. Has anyone else noticed? The groom is not the type to think of things like bridge is bride with a g. He is no doubt thinking about love forming itself into pillars and counterbalanced pulleys, laying itself down over a choppy sea.
I want to lower myself onto my stomach and place my cheek on the thick carpet. I’d like to nap. I’ll address the congregation: If it’s copacetic, I’ll die until this is over and you’re gone. I don’t need a pillow or any attention at all. Don’t touch or speak to me. Please continue without me. To debride means to remove damaged tissue from a wound. If I take myself away from this ritual, everyone will heal.
Bridges are built to sway in bad weather. How did engineers figure that out? Left to myself, I’d build one with no flexibility and it would snap under the weight of the first car. And everyone would wonder how I could have made such a mistake. But I’d wonder why anyone trusted me to build a bridge in the first place.
Rose’s face makes it clear that mine is not performing correctly.
I should not be thinking of bridges but the priest doesn’t seem to be talking to me. I will have thousands upon thousands of days and this is merely one of them. This thought brings relief. My shoulders loosen. My breath deepens. I gaze at the giant colored windows and over the friends in the pews who will catch me in real and sanctifying hugs as soon as I am free.
The priest tells me he is going to list a bunch of obligations and I should notarize each one with my voice.
As he speaks my locket falls open. My grandmother stares unimpressed at the groom from her half heart nestled in my collarbone.
I am filled with longing so rich it has mass and cuts me. It is composed of the people who are not here. My prickly, unkind grandmother. Who only once pulled me into an approximation of a hug, so awkward we both laughed. My sister.
The best man pulls a ring from his breast pocket and hands it to the priest. He’s been married twice yet still his hand quivers. His new girlfriend sits in the second pew weeping, loving him. The priest holds the ring above his head. The attention of everyone in the church turns upward to a nine-hundred-dollar one-carat diamond. The priest says the ring is a symbol of our love.
“I don’t like diamonds,” I’d told the groom when we picked it out. He said, “Everyone likes diamonds.”
The groom slides it onto my finger.
The priest pronounces us married.
Everyone cheers. The bridesmaids press tissues against the corners of their eyes, any one of them willing to trade places with me. They’ve said as much, at the bachelorette party and the shower. Two of them immediately fantasize about other men when their husbands go down on them. Possibly they fantasize about the groom. I apply this to him and evaluate him anew. He takes my hand and holds it, shoulder-high. He pumps his other fist in a cheer. This is wild and unlike him. We flex and jerk through the hooting crowd to the back of the church where we pivot to re-greet the people we’ve just abandoned, ready to receive them. The organ celebrates as we verso recto, greet and re-greet.
What a service. What a day.
“Traumatic brain injury and PTSD,” I tell a guest who has asked about my job. “Normally during on-the-job accidents.”
“Sounds tough.”
“It is,” I assure them.
Three of the groom’s college friends stand at the side of the church, whispering while wearing smiles. “Is her brother going to be here I hear they’re not talking still they’re restaging that play of his the one that caused the damage but won him the pull him here Pulitzer? Her brother? Tron. Who? Tom. Does she have any? Family? What was it he had this weekend, a show? Pulitzer be here the play that won is causing all the pull him here.”
They assume their words are private yet I hear them because of the architectural voodoo of churches.
“Let them,” I say to the pink-sweatered cousin who has always bothered me because she is identical to my second-grade teacher.
“Sorry, dear?”
I say, “Traumatic brain injury.”
“Like football players,” she says. “How sad.”
My mother ushers the cousin toward the door. “No one wants to hear sad things today.”
The final person greeted, we join the rest outside. The limo driver chucks her cigarette into the street. The groom and I dance down the steps, through the people we’ve abandoned then received, and abandon them again, stepping into the limo with the rest of the groomsmen and bridesmaids. Rodrigo wants to ride in the limo again but the ride back to the Inn will involve drinking and adult talk. I like watching as he’s carried weeping to his mother’s car.
Someone says, “It’s time to celebrate.”
We drive back to the Inn. Five stoplights.
Combined for the first time, the bridal party reaches full power. The girls arrange their dresses and fix their makeup. The groomsmen avert their eyes. Their partners are waiting in parking lot traffic but that doesn’t mean they can’t flirt, does it? It is taking longer to get back to the Inn. Five stoplights. We’ve already passed this intersection, haven’t we? The window is obscured by a groomsman’s vest as he makes a point about America’s justice system. Trade winds, I think. Time difference. “How long have we been in this car?” I say. “It’s supposed to be easy to drive through this town.” A groomsman shrugs. “A couple minutes?” Someone lowers a window. “You got somewhere to be (waiting for this moment, a moth double-axles in, considers Rose’s hairdo then a display of purses, flirts across necks and shoulders, lands on Antonia’s bracelet before diving up between the women, a quick swab of the upholstery, the ceiling then the seat, the ceiling then the seat, Antonia’s shoulder then the seat, then, certain, question-marks bluntly to where I sit next to the opposite window that I lower so it can cartwheel into the air that dusk ((Dusk? It’s too early for dusk.)) has charmed. The moth’s trajectory from one side of the limo to the other takes seconds and no one notices except me), wifey?” the groom says. Champagne pours itself. An argument blooms at the front of the limo about a court case being tried in California. Two sides advance. The case is about a Hollywood producer who has been accused of rape. Why is anyone talking about anything other than the wedding or us or the idea of the wedding or us? Weddings are mirrors in which everyone sees themselves. People query it for anything that applies to them then return to their lives. An Internet search: Me. How their hair compares in the reflection of other people’s milestones. Does that mean this wedding is an Internet? Also, wifey? Dusk dips into the swells made from mountains and trees. Wifey? What other tendencies will be unlocked because of this serious paperwork?
Judging by the week’s events, the moth is my grandmother. Or, a future checking in on me. I am not misremembering that it takes a hundred times as long to return to the Inn and by the time we do the sky is pitch-gray.
The limo screeches to a halt.
“Why is it nighttime at four in the afternoon?” I say.
Everyone screams, “We’re here!”