There were no wedding planners when I was enmeshed in planning my wedding. My mother fulfilled that role, and like any mother it was her primordial desire to ensure my happiness as a bride. The memory of her lavish ceremony became the template for my betrothal and ultimate wedding day. She lived at home until the day of her wedding. Twenty when she married my father.

Happy Together, my mom and dad

Two aunts and a beloved grandmother had been her roommates. As a young girl she shared a room with these three loving women. Nurtured by them all, and tenderly spoiled by my great-grandmother, she never lived alone. Her family was giving their cherished daughter to my father as his bride, his wife. And she entered married life perfectly packaged as a young beautiful woman about to be married in the 1950’s.

1975

The bathroom of my shared college suite was the perfect rehearsal studio for one of my suitemates. Ignoring our many pleas to “get out”, Gail spent hours vocalizing, insisting the bathroom acoustics elevated the essence of her singing talent. We thought she sounded as if she had been wounded. My actual bedroom was shared with a girl from New Jersey whose father was a minister. Never having relied on her own judgment, violated curfew, or been on a date, she was giddy with independence and her new-found sense of freedom. When this beautiful girl with legs up to her neck got to college there wasn’t a single night when she wasn’t turning on the light at two o’clock in the morning as she fumbled her way into bed.

What Randy ate

My Westside midtown New York loft was shared with a gentle guy whose mother would visit from Akron Ohio twice a year with a suitcase full of bologna. They always purchased a case of beer and sat at the table in what would be the kitchen area, not talking much. Rather eating and drinking until it was time for her to leave. He had red hair pushed to one side of his forehead, probably much the same as it was when he was twelve. She smoked. On the morning when I returned from picking up breakfast to find my boyfriend (who had spent the night) sitting shirtless on my bed wearing eyeliner, and looking more beautiful than any woman I had ever known, Randy let me stay in his room until he was able to usher Kevin out. He was my perfect roommate. When the one year lease ended we both left.

Just a piece of me

Different cities, different countries, different sexes. There were many roommates. I was no blushing bride. But I was a bride, twenty-eight. My parent’s house hadn’t been my home for more than ten years. The tide of adulthood had washed over me and seemingly I felt ready to be married. I didn’t feel as if I was drowning in my life, or that marriage was a lifeboat. I didn’t need to be rescued or taken care of. I felt just as my mother had thirty years earlier, I felt happy.

Waiting for guests to take their seats

My mother and I held court at Kleinfelds, and I stood wearing Vera Wang in front of a mirror in the bridal shop at Bergdorf’s. But ultimately I walked down the aisle in a wedding dress borrowed from my brother’s girlfriend’s mother. That bride’s marriage was fraught with sorrow. After the walk down the aisle I changed into a tailored white suit.

Beautiful but no scent

Weeks turned into months of Saturdays and were spent haunting lofts, restaurants, temples and art galleries in search of the quintessential hipster perfect place to marry. Too small, too big, too expensive, not enough room to dance, no catering kitchen. Something made each one not the perfect venue. Endless disagreements, arguments, decisions. A cocktail hour, a champagne toast, a choice of entrees, a honeymoon suite, bridesmaids dresses, groomsman’s gifts, wedding bands, flowers, a veil, the makeup, a manicure. A cake. Lemon, chocolate, ganache, vanilla, butter cream, French butter cream, fruit, wedding topper, tiered, sheet. It was just a cake, but it seemed like a grand decision. Tasting samples displayed on small paper plates hoping we could all agree on a flavor combination. Cake tasting became a significant part of every weekend plan. I weighed about 100 pounds, lived on love, and didn’t really care at all about how it would taste. From one end of Manhattan to the other, from the revered iconic creations of Sylvia Weinstock, to the actual thought of me baking our own wedding cake, we quested to create our perfect, never before seen edible symbol of love and commitment.

A white piece of cake

In the end, a three-tiered vanilla cake filled with chocolate ganache covered in a plethora of shaved white chocolate curls, topped by the bride and groom which sat atop my parent’s traditional wedding cake decades earlier was displayed as the embodiment of our love. One year later we unwrapped the foil from the piece we saved in the freezer, in hopes that it was still edible, and not petrified from freezer burn. To honor the custom of eating a piece from the top-tier to celebrate ones anniversary, we nibbled at it with expensive champagne to recall the “happy day.”

A couple by default

The song. A song. Our song. Our lifelong song. Our theme song. Weeks, months of listening to music. His favorite song, my favorite song, how would we decide on our favorite song. The song we would pause to listen to for the rest of our lives every time it played on the radio, an elevator, or wafting out of someone else’s car window. How would we choose that song? It was 1984. Classical? Tony Bennett? Frank? It was 1984 the music we were listening to was not what we would, should dance our first dance to. My soon to be husband’s desire to dance with me at our wedding was as unwanted at our nuptials as the requisite dance with his mother at his bar mitzvah in 1963. Stand By Me. That became our song. Our anthem as it was.

Nothing left to give

Like a withered sun bleached balloon love had long since disappeared from my marriage long before it ended. I had in the past been reduced to lifelessness by breakups. Left pleading to go backward, desperate to change the outcome, but the dissolution of my marriage was more about betrayal than love lost or romance ending. After he moved out I didn’t long for my husband, or wish that the marriage was still in tact.

There is a pattern here

We scarcely held together at the seams as a couple even as we planned our wedding. Ice-fire, black-white, yin-yang, it didn’t matter. We essentially had disparate viewpoints, but despite our critical differences, and the unrelenting gnawing at my heart which empirically told me we were doomed, I married him anyway. And he married me.

Dinner time

And then at a seemingly innocuous dinner on a weekday evening with a friend, and a friend of hers who she was sure I needed to meet the sadness of my failed marriage unraveled, still lurking in my soul fifteen years after divorce. The interesting but ordinary conversation was about music, musicians, and a song. And then a particular artist, and then a particular song, and then it was that song, and then it was “our song” that dropped on me like a piano being hoisted into a window when the rope breaks unexpectedly.

Sadly the Wedding Was Perfect

I was listening, he was talking, extrapolating on the details of the musical project that crashed me into myself and flooded my eyes with tears. Not soft girly movie tears, tears. Burning, stinging, salty anguished tears, broken-hearted tears, stain your foundation, streaky make-up tears. They were those tears. The memory of the song assaulted my composure and changed the complexion of the meal in an instant. The new acquaintance rocketed directly into my life. His topic of conversation unpacked something I hardly wanted to know about myself. I still remembered my marriage, my husband.

Waiting to be married

In the instant that my mother saw my father for the first time she unequivocally knew they would be married. I knew that the first time I saw my husband. And while that is the history, I turned out not to be his beloved, I did not come first before all others. And I was not happy as his wife. After slightly more than a year of marriage we vacationed, still under the pretence of happy newlyweds. The island time service left us with no choice but to muse our way through the interminable wait for our food. It was then that I told him I knew we would eventually divorce. With certainty he refuted my declaration, but I signed divorce papers on August 18th, our wedding anniversary.

Under the same roof. Ceramic house by Asser Saint-Val

I would have remained his wife until death do us part, as promised in our vows. I would have stayed locked into being wed because we had three children together. Separate lives would have been lived under the same roof, but it didn’t work out that way. Despite the invention of a life and the intention to live it as a couple we were not well suited to each other.

Linked together

There are no pictures from my wedding, I took off my rings immediately and then sold them. I didn’t keep any mementos. No dried flowers in boxes or brown edged love letters squirreled away in boxes pushed deep under my bed. I thought I had excavated the memories and kept nothing. But there will never be nothing for him and me. I will never unhear that song. Stand by Me was the song we chose to represent our life together.

Unclear pieces floating

I pounced on the radio dial to change the station whenever the song would play. Regardless of how many years had passed I couldn’t listen to the words, for fear that the memory of what couldn’t happen and what didn’t happen would intrude on my immediate life.

1+3

For days after the dinner that hurled me back into fossilized memories I intermittently thought about the song. It was never meant to be a song for a bride and groom. Not in my case. For me the our of the “our song” is my daughters and me. My children. I will stand by them always and forever, till death do us part. My daughter J.Lucy. My daughter M. Dixie. My daughter Zazu. She legally changed her name to Zazu at age sixteen, (her nickname), leaving behind her given name which included the preceding initial.

It’s All in the Eyes

I could not be his wife. And after a bitter divorce, and ensuing custody battle that tore us asunder I know he too stands to love and protect the incalculably loved lives, hearts and souls of our children. We do not stand as a united family but we do stand united.

It would not be sufficient to merely thank Myra and Carl, who during a simple social moment unknowingly, but tenderly became the catalysts for me to let go of a pain so grievous that it imprisoned me for more than a decade.

“Free At Last! Free At Last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.

Just That

In her own image – Digital portrait created by J.Lucy

Prom Day for Dixie

Everything Comes to Light

The Happy Couple

Paintings and Dolls – Jill Slaughter

Asser Saint-Val