Wedding Cake for Breakfast (5 page)

That was that. Keith's goal of going to Ranger school was over. Now, with a little over a year left in the unit, they transferred him to the headquarters unit, as close to an office job as you could get in his unit. The Ranger school slot went to someone who had reenlisted. Keith went on fewer training missions; he rode his bike to work, came home early most days. Just as I'd gotten used to the crazy schedule, it turned into a normal one.

But though both our dreams and goals had changed that first year, sometimes disappointingly, we learned we could depend on each other, no matter what. And, in a strange twist, it was only by becoming an army dependent that I had finally become independent, someone who wasn't afraid of loneliness. In marriage, I discovered my own small brand of toughness.

525,600 Minutes

JENNA M
C
CARTHY

Many people believe that the first year of marriage is one of the hardest, a transitional period of extreme sacrifice, compromise, and adjustment. I am not one of these people. In fact, I am pretty sure that if you find the opening twelve months as newlyweds to be tough, you are in for a long and rocky road to side-by-side cemetery plots.

I say this based on the assumption that you married someone whom you knew for some length of time greater than a few hours or days. (Mail-order brides and Carmen Electra can skip to the next essay; there's really nothing for you here.) You asked him what he did for a living and what that job entailed, saw him eat, and negotiated your divergent tastes in movies and music. You probably rode in some type of vehicle simultaneously at least once. You met each other's family and decided to stay together anyway. Eventually he got on bended knee or rented a banner plane and gave you a ring that he (actually, now, the collective you) still will be making monthly installments on five years from now. You knew with an absolute confidence that allowed you to profess your everlasting love and devotion in front of God and family that he was your soul mate, the one and only. You planned the mother of all parties together—well, he watched you do it and maybe went to the cake-tasting thingy—and afterward spent a week attempting complicated new sexual positions on a balcony in Aruba. Then you came back to your lovely marital home, the one overflowing with fluffy matching towels and a fortune in All-Clad pots and pans and enough gift cards to tile your master bathroom, and discovered that the son of a bitch you just wed eats sunflower seeds in bed and couldn't close his underwear drawer that last half an inch if someone held a gun to his testicles.

What the fuck? Where are the romantic candlelit dinners and the sunset strolls wearing matching white outfits like they promised you in the marriage brochures? Where's the chocolate Lab puppy and the white picket fence and the doting, happy husband wearing his “My Grill's Hotter Than Yours” apron, flipping filets for you and your closest couple friends? Where are the roses, the spontaneous tokens of affection, the philosophical debates over the meaning of existence that you can only have with your life partner? And how could he forget that today is your five-and-a-half-month anniversary?

If you were expecting marriage to be a nonstop parade of rainbows and back rubs that don't double as foreplay, I guess I can understand the whole miserable-first-year bit. Otherwise, consider a few realities: in the lifetime of togetherness you just signed up for, these 525,600 minutes are pretty much your extended honeymoon. Odds are he's still occasionally opening your car door for you, grabbing your ass (in a flirty and not annoying way), and actually listening when you talk. You probably don't have thirteen kids to fight about, you haven't gained forty-five pounds apiece, and while his boisterous snoring may no longer fall into the “adorable” category, it also doesn't make you want to smother him yet. You have time and energy for things like date nights and sex. It will be years before one of you will storm into the bathroom uninvited and attempt to have a conversation without actually noticing or caring that the other is on the toilet. Peer, if you will, into my imaginary crystal ball:

Future Him [throwing open the bathroom door with a startling flourish]: “Honey, do you know where I left my tape measure?”

Future You [not even bothering to put down your
People
magazine]: “I'm a little busy at the moment.”

Future Him [exasperated]: “I'm not asking you to
get
it; I just want to know if you know where it is.”

Future You [scrutinizing Demi Moore's impossibly line-free face and wondering exactly how much work she's had done]: “Would you mind giving me just a minute? I'm on the toilet here, in case you didn't notice.”

Future Him: “Who cares?”

Future You: “I do.”

Future Him: “You should light a match.”

Future You:
“GET OUT OF THIS BATHROOM, YOU FUCKING ASSHOLE!”

Relative to the rest of your married life, there will be few times in those initial fifty-two weeks of wedlock when you will call your husband a fucking asshole. For one thing, you'll still be comparatively high on the drugs known as hormones that propel two people in love to commit to a lifetime of togetherness in the first place and then temporarily blind them to the host of behaviors that will one day drive them both batshit crazy. Secondly, you will be extremely busy writing thank-you notes and finding ways to throw the words
my husband
into every third sentence. In your remaining slivers of free time, you will be folding his boxer briefs or marveling at the way the sunlight glints off the eternity band on your left hand or searching for new and exciting Crock-Pot recipes. (He'll be watching TV.) And in most cases, it takes more than a dozen months for the deep-seated anger and resentment born of proximity to fester to “fucking asshole” levels.

I'm not saying you won't experience a few newlywed hiccups. After all, depending on whether or not you were among the 70 percent of couples who live together in sin prior to tying the knot, there may be some logistics to work out: Who will pay the bills? Will you have two separate bank accounts or one joint one? Who will do the grocery shopping, the laundry, the cooking, the yard work, the bill paying, the taxes? Who gets to decide where you go on your vacations or whether you buy the new couch that you want or the pool table that he wants? Whose family will you spend holidays with? Who gets to park in the single garage spot? Will you load the dishwasher using his random and haphazard method or your clearly superior painstaking approach? If you both want to watch different shows on TV at the same time, how do you choose? Which way should the toilet paper come off the roll? (This one's a no-brainer because most men are incapable of replacing an empty tube anyway.)

While this early period in your union might involve some degree of compromise and negotiation, your disputes should be reasonably minor in both scope and importance. If your marriage were a dog, all of the first-year “adjustment issues” combined would be a single, tiny fleabite compared to the crippling arthritis, festering scabies, and rotting teeth typical of older marriages. Hopefully neither of you is considering having—or actually
is
having—an affair. You're not yet arguing about whether his public school education is good enough for your children or if they deserve the same swanky private experience you had, or which of your crazy relatives would assume custody of your spawn should God forbid something happen to you both. You're not freaking out because you haven't saved enough money for a new toaster, no less retirement. Your health is damn near as good as it's going to get. In other words, you're not thinking about all of those hypothetical extremes—illness, poverty, abject misery—you vowed wouldn't put the slightest damper on your eternal devotion.

Think back to your very first real job. I don't care if you're flipping burgers or flying jumbo jets; every field has entry-level underlings with entry-level responsibilities. My first gig was as an assistant in the traffic department of a large advertising agency, which essentially meant that I carried stacks of papers around all day and waited for important people to sign them. The task was simple (get the papers signed), the expectations clear (they must have signatures), and I possessed the necessary skills to complete it (legs to carry me from one important person to the next and eyes that could detect signatures). Plus, unlike many of my recently graduated friends, I had a job. Who cares if it was mindlessly, miserably boring? I got to wear cute clothes and use the park-and-ride shuttle, so I felt like a grown-up. Other than having my wallet stolen out of my office once and suffering an unseemly crush on one of my coworkers, it was pretty drama-free.

Somehow I managed to pick up a few skills at this job, and assumed some greater responsibilities; once I got to sign some papers
myself
. I started climbing the ladder. With each rung my title became more impressive, my office a little swankier, my salary a smidge bigger. I began writing my own ads for smaller clients, then the larger ones. Eventually I was creating entire campaigns from concept through completion. There was much more stress, of course—now I had not just my boss and her boss breathing down my neck, but clients of my own depending on me not to screw up. Yet even with the added pressure, I wouldn't have traded places with my lowly, bored replacement traffic assistant for all of the stirrup pants in the world. (What? This was the early 1990s.) I won a few awards and had confidence and the respect of my coworkers. I wasn't the boss yet, but I also wasn't scared of her. Once I called her a fucking asshole to her face. She laughed, and I knew I had job security.

Honestly, being married is a lot like that. When your hunky new husband carries you over that threshold, you're not expected to know or do very much. (Mostly show up, shut up, and put out.) The responsibilities and their subsequent challenges are added slowly, layer by layer. You buy a house, then maybe a bigger one. Your jobs get more demanding, which seems like a fine time to pop out a few kids. One of you gets sick (hopefully nothing serious), you take a couple of vacations, maybe attempt a home-improvement project or thirty. Someone loses a job or a parent, or gets really depressed or buys a sports car or considers a face-lift. Your friends start having affairs and getting divorced and your retirement account is a few zeros short of the comfort zone. I hate to sound harsh, but if you're that daunted by the raging toilet-paper debate or his inability to launch his dirty socks all the way into the hamper instead of in the general vicinity of it, either your expectations were a tad lofty going in or maybe—just maybe—you married the wrong person. (It happens. Look at Renée Zellweger, Janet Jackson, and Drew Barrymore.)

Marriage as a whole isn't easy, to some extent because monogamy isn't our biological destiny and also because of the living-together-forever part. Happily ever after? A myth. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying or delusional. You'll disagree, bicker, and maybe even one day throw a shoe or a lamp or a plate of spaghetti at your husband. You will lie to him (“Botox? What Botox?”) or catch him lying to you (“Strip club? What strip club?”) on at least one occasion. When he storms away from you in the middle of a fight, you will give him the finger behind his back because you can't scream what you really want to with the kids right there listening. You'll complain about him to your friends so often and so loudly that even you will get sick of hearing it. When your sweet, innocent children are safely out of earshot, you will call him a
fucking asshole
and mean it with every fiber of your being. I'm not condoning or endorsing any of this, mind you; I'm just saying it will happen. Hopefully by the time it does, you will have built a life together on a foundation so rock solid that you'll both still be standing—together, and maybe even smiling—when the dust settles.

Some people exercise because they thoroughly enjoy the grueling pain of working out; the rest of us do it for the results. Marriage is no different. As challenging as it is to commit your life to another human being, the payoffs are profound: Folks who forsake all others are happier, healthier, live longer, and have more money and sex than our swinging single friends. We get to have someone by our side in sickness and in health, for better or for worse. We have a mostly unbiased adult in the house we can ask, “Do these pants make my butt look big?” and who will capture and kill the very large spider over our bed. If we are so inclined, we can combine our DNA to create brand-new people, practically from scratch, and then we have someone who will watch those people for free when we go to Palm Springs with our girlfriends. If we're extraordinarily lucky, we'll still be bitching and bickering when we are so old that we don't care which way the toilet paper rolls because we can't wipe our own asses anyway.

 

WE WILL SURVIVE

Shared Anniversary

DAPHNE UVILLER

With apologies to my children, I can confidently say that my wedding day was the happiest day of my life, a goal I mocked when wedding vendors used it to try to win our business.

“I know you want this to be the most special, the most perfect day—”

“No.” I would interrupt the well-meaning catering contestant. “If this is the most perfect day, does that mean it's all downhill after this?”

Before she began her confused apologies, I soothed her: “It doesn't have to be perfect. I just need to wind up married to Sacha.”

But in fact, it was a glorious, scorching day on the banks of the Hudson River (nine years before Chelsea Clinton had the same idea). Except for one friend, our cohort was still childless and thus full of energy, enthusiasm, spontaneity. My dad was alive and healthy. My mother, with authority vested in her by the state of New York, married us with unsurpassed art and wisdom. We danced our butts off. And, icing on the cake, a friend confided that her chronically ill mother was up for a heart transplant that could put an end to her troubles and give her another thirty years on this earth. We all still moved about in a bubble of innocence we became aware of only after it popped.

No one who was there forgets our anniversary. It turned out to be a good-bye party to the way the world was.

• • • • • • • •

Less than forty-eight hours later, we were atop a ridge in the Shawangunk Mountains when a pair of tourists told us two planes had hit the World Trade Center. I actually didn't believe them, took them for a pair of morons. A few hours later, when we finally got through to New York City, a remote reality began to dawn as my father reassured me that my mother was alive and walking uptown from her office. Another friend left a message that he'd begun a phone chain to account for our wedding guests, many of whom were scheduled to be on flights home to California or Boston that morning. That was day two of our marriage.

• • • • • • • •

On September 12, we were supposed to head home to start the rest of our lives, but all of Manhattan was in lockdown. Instead, we drove to my in-laws, who lived upstate, not far from our honeymoon hotel. During breaks from the news, we opened the wedding presents we'd had shipped there instead of to our small apartment. I've tried to understand how I was able to take some pleasure in excavating new wineglasses and linen place mats and even a melon baller from the folds of Crate & Barrel tissue paper. I'd glance up at the screen, watch my native city burn, then snip open another box. Denial? Shock? A desire for tangible evidence that our married life was beginning—gleaming, unchipped, unstained—regardless of what the world threw at us?

Two of Sacha's relatives were also staying at his parents' house, stranded after the wedding, unable to get flights home to points west. One of them was so anxious she could barely speak to us; she'd worked up the courage to leave an ailing husband in order to attend our celebration, only to be punished for her generosity. She spent most of her time on the phone making sure he had enough to eat, that he was warm enough, that he hadn't fallen. At one point she answered call waiting and handed the phone to Sacha. He listened to the new call, his face calm. It was only from the pauses that I sensed something—else—wrong.

He hung up and took me aside, his eyes bright. We'd been waiting for the other shoe to drop, to learn that someone we knew had been in the towers or unlucky enough to have been downtown.

“Alice died last night.”

Alice was not someone who was downtown. Alice was the mother of our friend, the friend who'd reported that we might be looking at a new chapter for her mother. It was a coda of a fuck-you from the universe: hey, what's one more life today?

We didn't open any more presents after that. Two planes into two buildings had been surreal enough to permit a kind of compartmentalization. This grief was a knee to the chest, utterly perceivable, and would have shaded our honeymoon in any context. We held each other and wept.

That was day three of our marriage.

• • • • • • • •

On day four, a national guardsman rested one hand on a police barricade and the other on his rifle and regarded the dried-up bouquet I shook at him. His face revealed nothing. He wasn't going anywhere. His job that day was to start with no, and then let people prove their cases, like a script reader in Hollywood. The line behind my husband-of-ninety-six hours and me was growing longer, literally by the second. I started to dig through our suitcase. I began to babble.

“I swear to you, he's been living here for months. But he was finishing grad school and moving in and planning the wedding, and also, we went to Hawaii before the wedding because he had this conference there, so he hasn't had time to change his license. That's why this was a short honeymoon. We were even supposed to be back yesterday, but we couldn't get home. We couldn't get home.”

With all the tragedy flaming around us after the planes hit the towers, this was the part that, selfishly, upset me the most at that moment. I count my blessings every day, and one of them is a variation on “I'm grateful I don't live in a country where tanks roll down Fifth Avenue.” For the first time in my privileged life, I was getting a taste of freedom curtailed: we were required to show identification to reach our West Thirteenth Street apartment, which was still cordoned off as part of the dead zone. I had lived in that building since I was eight years old, but Sacha didn't have a shred of evidence to prove that this was now his one and only home.

“Here!” I shouted. “Look.” I waved a newspaper clipping at him with the hand not clutching dead flowers. “Our wedding announcement. See?”

The phlegmatic officer either took pity on me or got tired of our holding up the line. He stepped back and let us squeeze through the splintery blue barricade. It wasn't the threshold I'd imagined crossing.

• • • • • • • •

In theory, the first year of a modern marriage between offspring of liberal-minded families shouldn't be much more than a ceremonial transition, an uneventful twelve months preceded by cohabitation and followed sometime later by births, illnesses, and deaths. Compared to those rocky events, why should the procurement of a piece of paper with a seal on it shift the ground beneath you? How could signing a license be as momentous as the day Sacha moved in, a day that a man untroubled by accumulation threw his lot in with a sworn purger? And certainly, uttering vows under a pretty white tent wasn't more upending than what has followed: children born, parents getting sick, parents dying, mortgages (both approved and denied), renovations, uprootedness, often all together at the same time.

Why, even, should the officialization have been more momentous than the engagement, the moment at which we truly committed to spending our lives together? The wedding was just the party celebrating the decision we'd already made.

And yet.

Think about marriages that end, or begin to end, before the first anniversary. There has to be something about the vow taking that sheds light on problems that couldn't be seen or articulated before the ceremony (not unlike hitting send on a sensitive e-mail; the action suddenly highlights every flaw you couldn't see before). Certainly, many of us have teetered on the edge of marrying the wrong person. Years ago, when a six-year relationship of mine ended, my mother, though comforting and sympathetic, expressed relief that we didn't have to get married to get divorced. I don't tend to give much blanket advice, but this I know is true: if you get to a point where you say, “We need to either marry or break up,” then please, please do everyone a favor and break up. A marriage should be a progression forward, not the result of a coin toss at a T-stop that led you left instead of right.

• • • • • • • •

Those who follow the coin-toss route probably suffer from a larger problem of false expectations: whatever's wrong with the relationship will be fixed by the Magic of Marriage, a sweet but misguided hope that there's a powerful tool available for purchase upon the tossing of the bouquet. These people must believe that getting married is like gaining entry to a secret club that will reveal heretofore unobtainable knowledge. They discover during the first year that this is not the case.

And under the harsh light of tragedy—death, illness, terrorist attack—perhaps that discovery is made during the first month. For better or worse, misfortune throws into sharp relief the contours of a nascent marriage. So if one member of the couple has to leave the country immediately following the wedding, it's a little tough to gauge how the marriage is doing in the face of said misfortune.

• • • • • • • •

Three weeks after our wedding, Sacha, a professional entomologist, began a two-month stint in the Bolivian jungle capturing dung beetles. As a grad student, he'd traveled to Bolivia many times during our courtship and I was familiar with the totality of his absence: no Internet access, no phone calls. He would land in Santa Cruz, load up on eight weeks' worth of rice for him and his fieldhands, find a working car, and take a perilous, bumpy, dusty two-day drive away from civilization, during which the car was sure to break down at least twice. (Doing science in developing countries requires an aptitude for auto mechanics.) To communicate with him, I e-mailed his coworker's wife, who then drove to a museum in Santa Cruz once a week to radio our husbands. She'd return home and e-mail me with Sacha's response.

• • • • • • • •

A week after Sacha left, the United States began bombing Afghanistan. If I'd found our meager communication wanting in the past, I was finding it downright unbearable this time around. Sirens continued to roar past our apartment day and night, smoke billowed up in a column from the bottom of Sixth Avenue like a giant, wavering tombstone, and the neighborhood was swimming in what would turn out to be utterly futile missing-person flyers.

• • • • • • • •

With hindsight, we can all sum up our experiences of that time succinctly, dinner-party style, but while it was going on, every day, sometimes every hour, seemed to bring a new perspective. Add to that constantly shifting outlook a brand-new identifying trait—married—and an absent brand-new husband who wasn't even a phone call away and you have a woman who went and stuck her head in the sand: I spent day after day in the café across the street from our apartment, a million miles away, writing my first screenplay. It was a romance set in pre-9/11 New York City that allowed me, for five or six hours a day, to escape. Better than reading, I had the power to create exactly, detail for detail, the world I longed to return to.

• • • • • • • •

When I reluctantly emerged from my fictional fog at the end of each day, all I had for comfort was the new ring on my finger. Had our marriage been anchored on flimsy foundations, I might have worried that this tumultuous time apart would drive a wedge between us. Instead, I imagined my ring as one end of a steel (okay, platinum) line connecting me to Sacha, a bond I could display to anyone in our quickly disintegrating world and say, “That man out there? Mine. Thousands of miles and languages and currencies and topographies away, but he's mine. I have official proof that is recognized on every inch of this planet.” I'd always been an advocate of same-sex marriage, but now I felt in my gut what it meant to have that piece of paper in hand, and how it would be nothing short of a nightmare to be denied one. There are times, especially in the uncharted waters of early marriage, when that paper is all you have.

• • • • • • • •

Sacha returned safely from that trip and we finally got started on married life under the same roof. He began working at his new job, I finished my screenplay, we stopped wearing contact lenses, because the grit that drifted up to us from Ground Zero meant constant eye irritation. We went out, we ordered in, we held up thank-you signs on the West Side Highway to flash at the endless caravan of construction vehicles. We read books, we went to movies, we wondered whether New York City had a future.

A bond that began to form during wedding planning strengthened during these months. To survive caterers, florists, and even our wonderful parents, Sacha and I had developed a mantra: Us Against The World. I know this sounds like an antagonistic way to go about the sugary business of nuptials and life in general, especially when you consider that our parents are among our favorite people in the world—a reasonable, lovely quartet who shared the same ethics and aesthetics with each other and us. But even reasonable, lovely people will sometimes focus on details you do not care about, like, say, the menu, or the color of the flowers, or the quality of the hotels in which they are going to house their relatives.

Letting us form a new bond, sometimes against them, was the greatest gift they gave us—graciously conceding their spots to the upstart newcomer marrying their precious child—and one that was indispensable during that first year as husband and wife, when our world was unnavigable. Part of early marriage is learning to put someone ahead of your parents, as painful and unsettling as that may be for those of us who come from tight, happy families. (It's anyone's guess whether I'll manage to be half as merciful to the people my children marry. I practice acceptance now, while they are three and six, to get a running start.) We began to see ourselves as one entity before the wedding; the tragedy that surrounded us during our first year cemented that perception.

• • • • • • • •

Seven months into marriage, Sacha traveled again, only this time it was to lecture on a cruise up the Orinoco and I got to go with him. Instead of bags of rice, there was a chef on board reported to have been snatched up from a three-star hotel in Paris and there were seven kinds of cake at dinner every night. Seven. I'm not exaggerating and my memory has not dimmed (someday scientists will discover a lobe of the brain charged entirely with remembering significant meals). We set sail on a large yacht with seventy passengers who had paid to see the wonders of South America during the day and be enlightened by my husband and his PowerPoint show at night.