The Less Than Perfect Wedding (4 page)

"Not to worry, my dear Danielle," Alex told me, pulling me in close and planting a kiss on my cheek as I pretended to struggle. "Whatever they throw at us, I can handle."

Despite my futile struggles, Alex planted another kiss on me. With a slight cry of pleasure, I gave in, and turned around to let his arms slide around me.

The Divorce

*

The next couple of weeks alternated between feeling like a dream and a nightmare. At work, and out with my friends, I was in heaven. I got to show off my new ring at every opportunity, watching my friends drool over it and excitedly squeal about how lucky I was to have met such a perfect man. My best friend, Claire, didn't hesitate to drag me up to anyone that I even remotely knew, making sure that they learned that I was off the market. I shared my engagement story over and over, quickly adapting a rhythm and flow from the repeated tellings, although I was careful to not include the little irritating detail of my parents' divorce.

Many of my coworkers were brimming with congratulations, but none more so than my cubicle mate, Judy. Judy was an older woman who sat across from me. Her style of decor that accumulated around her computer provided an instant view of the type of woman she was - one with a love of snow globes, as well as a determined but ultimately futile effort to knit. Mostly, she knit tea cozies, even if that wasn't her original intent upon starting. In Judy's hands, everything turned to tea cozies.

Judy was unmarried, but never complained about men in the slightest, and I somehow got the vague impression that she was juggling several suitors. But she oohed and aahed over my ring, giving me random hugs in the middle of the day and sending a nearly constant stream of wedding-related links my way in dozens of emails. With her around, life at work was bearable.

When I wasn't out celebrating, however, I was constantly being plagued by the details coming from my parents and their friends, however. Among my circle of friends, only Claire knew about what was happening with my parents, and she did her best to keep me distracted and focused on my own life. At work each morning, however, I would open up my email and find that one of my parents' friends had sent me new and horrifying details of their divorce as it unfolded. I would get to work, feeling somewhat happy and awake thanks to my warm, fresh cup of coffee, and then my head would sink as I read each new email until my forehead was pressed against the cool wood of my desk. And some of the details were staggering.

Once my parents had announced the initial decision to get a divorce, things had snowballed, rolling faster and faster. Both my mother and my father had hired lawyers, and the two were now in a bitter court battle over everything from their wedding rings to the old clothes and Halloween costumes in the back of their closets. (No joke - one of my friends from my hometown worked at one of the law firms, and he forwarded me some of the submitted claims. They were ridiculous.) My mother had apparently gotten the drop on my mother with the divorce filings, and had managed to retain control of their house, while my father moved out.

A few days later, however, I was rocked by a new revelation. My father, now homeless, had moved in with a younger woman who was described to me breathlessly on the phone by one of my friends as "the flower child from Woodstock, twenty years later and with a high school dropout of a son." This friend insisted that the woman was known only as Blossom, even on her driver's license. One of my old high school acquaintances lived in the same apartment building as Blossom, and told me the next day that he had seen my dad coming and going from Blossom's apartment fairly regularly, even before the divorce. I had now discovered where my father had disappeared off to every night, and why he would come back so late that he would end up sleeping in the guest bedroom. He had apparently been engaged in this affair for several months before that Christmas Eve.

When my mother, already blaming my father for the collapse of their marriage, learned about this affair, she was incensed. I knew that she had found out when, one afternoon, I had received a phone call from her that turned into an hour-long blistering tirade against all men and how they "were nothing more than shallow pigs, blindly following their dicks and not even good for bacon at the slaughterhouse." Since my mother chose to call me at work, I ended up plugging headphones into my phone jack, muting my microphone, and continuing to try to work while her voice screamed at the lowest volume setting in one of my ears. Every ten minutes or so, I would un-mute the microphone to make a few soothing noises, hoping that sooner or later she would run out of steam. She gave no sign of slowing, however, and I ended up hanging up on her when I had to drive home. I still don't know how much longer she ranted into the phone before she realized that I had disconnected.

Upon her discovery of my dad's affair, my mom decided that her new mission in life was to destroy my dad at every opportunity in this divorce. In one spectacularly disturbing tale, relayed to me by phone in hushed tones by one of my parents' next door neighbors, she dragged my father's favorite armchair from the living room out onto the front lawn, doused it in gasoline, and set the entire thing ablaze. It burned for nearly half an hour before the fire department arrived, put the sorry sight out with a hose, and then gave my mother a stern talking to. She, of course, immediately forgot about their visit and set my father's dresser on fire on the lawn the next night. I still don't know how she managed to avoid being arrested.

When he learned about the systematic destruction by fire of his belongings, my father, instead of backing down, decided that for once, he was going to up the stakes. The next day, he was at the courthouse, Blossom's arm looped through his, requesting a marriage license. Of course, since the current divorce proceedings hadn't even been finalized yet, he was denied, but this still served its purpose of sending my mother's rage to new, stratospheric heights.

I received so many phone calls from my mother, often late in the evening after she had finished off a bottle of wine, that I began intentionally letting them go to voicemail. My mother had settled into a permanently angry mindset, and she didn't seem to grow any more or less upset if I answered the phone or ignored it. I would fast-forward through her messages, only listening to snippets here and there to see if anything she said concerned me. Almost invariably, nothing really did.

My father, on the other hand, had become much tougher to contact. My mother had removed him from the family's phone plan almost immediately, and had somehow convinced the poor employee at the phone store to remotely wipe and disable his phone. Blossom apparently had neither a cell phone nor a land line, and so the only time I was able to talk to my father was when my high school acquaintance who lived next to Blossom managed to catch him entering her apartment and pass him the phone so that I could talk to him. In that brief conversation, my father assured me that "everything was fine," that this divorce "was just a small hiccup," and that "nothing would get in the way of my special day." I truly wanted to believe him, but I wasn't sure that he still had much of a grip on reality left. He also told me that I should be happy that "our family has grown; Blossom's son may not be a blood relation, but we should welcome dear Bryan into our family as if he was one of us. And once Janice and I are divorced, he will become your new brother, so you should try and make friends right away." This same Bryan, I learned from my high school acquaintance, had left high school at age sixteen and currently worked part-time in various menial jobs, including brief stints as a supermarket bagger, a busboy at a restaurant, slinging luggage at an airport, garbageman, and telemarketer. He would lose his job fairly regularly due to showing up stoned, intoxicated, or not showing up at all, but would manage to find something else that paid minimum wage with just enough time to cover his share of the rent on the apartment he shared with Blossom - and now with Rick, my father.

*

After the new year, Alex announced that, now that we were officially engaged, we would have to sit down with his parents as well. I was never quite clear on why we had to do this - were they going to finally determine whether I was worthy of their son? Did they have presents already prepared for us? Wasn't it a little too late for them to get involved in the screening process?

Despite my confusion, however, we made plans to join my dear fiance's family the next weekend for a lunch at their house. Alex's folks lived closer than mine, fortunately, so the drive was only about a half hour. Unsure of whether I should be looking classy, like a girlfriend meeting her boyfriend's parents, or relaxed, like I usually dressed on Sunday mornings, I ended up with some strange combination of casual sweatpants and a rather nice, well-fitting blouse that I liked. I sat in the passenger seat of the car as Alex drove, staring down at myself, aghast, trying to figure out how I had managed to dress myself this way.

When we pulled up at Alex's parents' house, however, he reached over and patted me on the shoulder. "Relax, honey," Alex consoled. "They already love you - you'll be fine!"

I nodded, and tried to force down the nervousness in the pit of my stomach. We climbed out of the car, and headed up to the front door. I tried to smooth down my sweatpants to make them look slightly more presentable as Alex rang the bell.

A minute later, Alex's parents, Jeff and Mary, opened the door and smiled out at us, Jeff's arm on Mary's shoulder while her arm was wrapped around his waist. "Hello!" they both enthused, looking radiant and perfectly composed.

"Hi Mom! Hi Dad!" Alex greeted them back, immediately moving forward into the house to embrace them. I followed behind, pulling the door shut behind me.

Inside the house, after Alex had finished with his enthusiastic greeting, his parents turned on me. "Danielle, we were so happy to hear that you said yes to our son!" Mary enthused, grabbing me and pulling me in for a hug as well. Her embrace was surprisingly strong, and by the time she finally released me, I barely had the opportunity to suck in a breath before Jeff had also engulfed me with his arms.

Not stopping in their compliments of me and loud comments on how happy they were that I had agreed to marry their son, Jeff and Mary led the two of us into their dining room, where plates, cups, and silverware was already set on the table. Also at the table was Danny, who I vaguely remembered as Alex's younger brother. He was three or four years younger, I remembered, just finishing up college, but I had only met him a couple times - and both times had been when we were out at bars. This would be my first time sitting down with him when either he - or I - was sober.

Jeff and Mary took their seats at either end of the table, smiling happily at us and waiting for us to find our seats. "So, once again, congratulations!" Jeff began, as we began passing around the plates of food. "Have you begun planning the wedding yet, Danielle?"

Totally unprepared for this direct question, I nearly choked on the bite of egg that I had just inserted into my mouth. "No, not yet," I wheezed, as Alex reached over and patted me on the back. "To be honest, I haven't even gotten used to referring to your son as my fiance yet!" I tried to make the comment into an offhanded joke, but Mary merely looked back at me.

"Way to go, Alex!" Danny spoke up, from the other side of the table. "You totally managed to land a babe, here!" Alex smiled back at him, but I shrugged a little, uncomfortable from how the compliment was phrased.

"Danielle, are you thinking of an outdoor wedding? I happen to know of a lovely park that would make a wonderful place for a wedding!" Mary commented. "I walk past it every day, and could totally see you two kids getting married there!"

The rest of the meal passed in a similar fashion, with the parents constantly making wedding suggestions, which I did my best to fend off, while Danny stared at me from across the table and occasionally commented on how his brother was a "lucky guy." By the end of the meal, I felt exhausted from dodging wedding ideas and slightly dirty from Alex's younger brother's gaze.

"You know," I told Alex, as we finally walked out of the house and headed back to our car to make our escape, "I may always talk about how my parents are crazy, but yours aren't too sane either."

"What are you talking about? Mine love you!" Alex insisted, holding up the remote to unlock our vehicle.

"Mine don't care about our wedding, because they're too wrapped up in themselves," I pointed out. "Yours, on the other hand, seem even more excited about our wedding than we are."

Alex shook his head. "They're just being enthusiastic, trying to help," he said.