Wake up, my grandmother says.
I regain consciousness in the Inn’s bathroom, a little girl I don’t recognize standing over me, tiny hands clamped on my shoulders. She asks if I’m all right.
I struggle to steady one leg under me then the next. I reassemble in front of the mirror as she gapes. My forehead bears a red welt where the floor slapped me. I riffle through the basket for makeup.
She asks where all the gum went. “The pack was full a minute ago,” she says.
“I ate it. I’m the bride.”
“There’s another bride here,” she says.
“I’m one of the brides. Are you the other bride’s flower girl?”
She nods.
“Are you having fun dancing?”
“I was,” she says. “But then they asked everyone to come onto the dance floor for a couples dance so my cousin and I were dancing and they said anyone who wasn’t married had to leave. And then anyone who was only married for a day. Then, anyone who was only married for a year. Until only my old aunt and uncle were dancing, and everyone cheered.”
“People who don’t stay married get shamed,” I say.
She nods. “You really like gum, huh?”
“Sure do.”
“Your dress is pretty,” she says, exhibiting an undetected sweetness that makes me regret eating all the gum. “Do you like it?”
“What a thoughtful question,” I say. We examine it in the mirror. “I like how it fits my waist.”
We wash and dry our hands. I follow her into the other banquet hall. As she walks, she reties the bow making a pleasant horizon on the back of her silk dress. Her arms are too short and can’t reach. The bow ends up sagging. I’d help but you don’t touch other people’s children.
The other bride sits on a chair in the center of the dance floor, howling with pleasure as the bridesmaids circle her. The deejay plays a popular song and the other groom beats time on his leg amid a crescent of observers.
The bridesmaids file away to make room for the men who’ve been called to the floor for the garter toss. One of them wags her finger at the groomsmen to say, Be good. The men stand with their hands folded, waiting for their part. The little girl stands to the side, shuffling in time to the music.
I’ve seen dozens of garter tosses and they always produce the same sensation of hollow ritual, cheap lace slid up a stranger’s thigh to tantalize. I return to the banquet hall that applies to me.
The bridesmaids and I used to make yearly excursions to Atlantic City. On this past trip, bachelorette themed, we stayed a few nights in a casino. Our rooms overlooked the poker tables. We spent three days hungover eating cheap eggs and breakfast meat. Outlet shopping and the beach. Periodic interruptions by husbands and children on the phone. Long after my friends fell asleep every night I watched the dealers dole out chips and cards. Give then clear. When to stick and when to fold. I watched them until I was so tired it looked like they were dealing pearlized eggs, clearing glitter-gates into shimmering decks.
The bridesmaids are girls from high school who were surprised when I asked them to fill important wedding roles. They don’t wear lip gloss anymore. More than half of them had ill-advised marriages in their early twenties out of which they quickly ejected.
On this last trip, everyone secured their belongings into their car trunks by noon on Sunday, apologizing out of the parking lot in reverse. After they left I dragged my suitcase onto the beach and ate a breakfast taco and watched the ocean throw itself around. Pigeon colored. Exhausted and flat, but honest. I thought about second marriages, what my friends call the real ones. They defend indefensible aspects of their slovenly, lucky husbands and stay in yearslong ruts because they cannot fathom two failed marriages. What’s wrong with divorce? Concluding that staying in the thing would be more illness than salve, snipping and cinching it, freeing one to pivot from what is not working and grow stronger in a different direction. If a plant insists on sending energy to its dead flowers, it dies, but it only takes itself down. Humans are not plants; they cannot keep rot to themselves. How dead marriages seep into the soil, dulling everything around them.
A marriage that furnished love and was relieved of its misery at the appropriate time so its participants could go on to love again, isn’t that more of a success?
I sat on that beach after all my friends had gone home and locked eyes with a scuttling seagull. Too intense to be mistaken, I was definitely its subject. We stared at each other until I knew it would be me and this seagull forever, and then do you know what that gorgeous, thrilling, winged heartbreaker, who I’d only just given my love to, had the gall to do?
The bridesmaids circle me, chanting my name while I do every dance move I can think of.
Across the room, sitting amid abandoned chairs, a man watches us. He wears formal trousers and a tuxedo shirt scissored down the middle. Blood leaks from a cut on his chest. Tom.