The women of Condon gave three showers in the months before I graduated high school. One for a girl in my class who was marrying the boy she’d dated since she was a freshman. One for Pat’s wife, expecting their first child. And one for Leanne, who was marrying her cowboy boyfriend.
Leanne’s shower took place in the Demonstration Hall at the fairgrounds. The hostesses decorated the room with Leanne’s wedding colors in blue crepe paper and silver bells. Bowls of pastel mints and mixed nuts were set out on long folding tables.
Leanne sat at the head table. As her maid of honor, I had the place of honor next to her. Mom and Cris, Nana, and the mother of Leanne’s future husband also shared the table.
Women brought gifts wrapped in thick paper with shiny bows of silver and blue. Leanne unwrapped present after present after present. She was careful with the bows because each one that broke meant a child would be born of the marriage. Cris collected and gathered the bows into a fake bouquet for Leanne to carry at the wedding rehearsal. I made a list of gift and giver: Stoneware place setting. Set of blue towels. Crystal pickle bowl.
Leanne’s new layered hair cut framed her face. She was beautiful. She admired each item: candlesticks, a vase, a hand mixer, measuring cups and spoons, and thanked each woman.
She would have a husband. She would have a home. She was nineteen years old.
We were different, my sister and I. Not just her blond hair and blue eyes against my dark hair and brown eyes. She had a future she was sure of, and a purity next to my secrets and longings.
The hangover still hung on me from the night before, mixed with the memory of the boy I’d been with. My desire to leave this town had grown strong even though I had no idea about the kind of life I wanted.
The women talked and sipped coffee, tea, punch. The mints disappeared and the mixed nuts trickled down to a few peanuts in each bowl. Many of these women had already been married by the time they were nineteen; some already had babies by that age. This celebration brought back their own memories and drew an approving line under their own choices.
The opened gifts were passed for each woman to look at, to touch, to talk with one another about.
“Oh, how pretty.”
“I’d like one of these.”
“Isn’t her china pattern lovely?”
The hostesses stacked the gifts in the corner. Cake was cut and served, more tea and coffee poured. Leanne stood up and thanked the hostesses and the women of town. She introduced me, her maid of honor, and Cris, her bridesmaid, even though everyone already knew us.
She told about where she and Larry would live after they married. Mom looked at her and smiled, Nana’s chin lifted with a grandmother’s pride. Aunt Lena sat at a table with all the other women, not at the table of honor. Her thick glasses reflected the faces of the women in the room, smiling and nodding and welcoming Leanne into the world of woman things.
Leanne’s wedding was on a Saturday afternoon at the Church of Christ. Before the ceremony, in the Sunday school room, Cris and I stood nearby and watched Mom help Leanne with her dress and arrange her veil.
Leanne and Mom moved quietly together, womanly and calm, like they were continuing a conversation they’d started when I wasn’t paying attention. A wife and a soon-to-be wife.
Nana sat nearby, holding Pat’s first child, a daughter. Tawna had been born the month before. Nana looked even prouder than she’d been at Leanne’s wedding shower. Her first great-grandchild.
Being an aunt for the first time was cool. But my interest in the baby had a short duration. I was seventeen! I was about to graduate high school! There was a wedding and I was in it!
When the music started, Cris went down the aisle in the hesitation steps we’d practiced the night before. Then I went down the aisle. The music lifted, and Leanne and Dad came. Her hand on his arm. Him looking proud in his fine suit, his blond-haired girl next to him.
Leanne’s almost-husband in his powder-blue suit waited for her at the altar, hands folded in front of him. She’d wanted him all through her high school years, and now chose him for the rest of her life. Years later she would tell me she knew the minute she met Larry that he would be a good father.
I’d never thought that far ahead when it came to boys. I never thought how this boy or that might fit into my future, or considered what he could do beyond make me fall for him for a while.
There were no shiny bows or cake for my graduation a week after Leanne’s wedding. But gifts came anyway, from relatives and the people of Condon. Gifts for a girl going away to college: laundry bags and towels, stationery with postage stamps, envelopes of money. Notes saying congratulations and good luck with my future.
College was the thing for me. “You’ve got the smarts,” Mom had been saying for the past three years. “You’re going.”
I’d chosen a social work program in Eugene, a five-hour drive away from home, in a town Mom said was full of hippies and druggies. She worried about how that would combine with my lack of common sense. But she didn’t try to change my mind.
Even if the big celebrations were about babies and weddings, I thought would make Mom proud. I would be the first child of hers to get a four-year degree.