TAKE YOUR SHOES OFF.
I smile big. I know what I’m about to see. I kick off my sneakers and open the door.
Rose petals, shiny and red as apple skins, are sprinkled all over the shitty gray carpet. They meander through a village of votive candles and lead into my bedroom. Ray Lamontagne is playing from my little stereo speakers at the end of the bed. He’s singing about the woman who redeemed him.
I take it in, walking slow, squishing my feet into the petals and making pink streaks that won’t ever come out of the carpet, passing mounds of melted wax that won’t ever come out either, and moving with the music. Step by step by step, the shame starts to lift from me.
He is there on his knee in the almost-dark, a cluster of faraway candles on the nightstand are lighting his face just enough to let me see his perfect, quivering lips. The room is covered in new dresses from my favorite boutique; I’ll get to pick one to wear out for our celebration. I smile at him and I keep walking. He doesn’t know anything about dresses and I assume he must have had help. As I get closer, his great-grandmother’s diamond makes glimmering stars on the wall and I notice him turning it nervously in his hands. It could be anything, really, a rubber band, a Ring Pop, I don’t care, I just want to wear it. He tells me that he loves me again and his eyes fill with tears.
“Ruthie, will you marry me?”
I can hardly speak but I say enough of a yes. We hold each other and my cheek settles in its favorite place against him. We let Ray sing us another song and we rock back and forth, not really dancing, just hanging on while the music carries us for three minutes.
We barely know each other, we barely know ourselves, but we make new promises to erase the ones that we broke. After we make them, we feel a wonderful relief that we don’t talk about and pretend isn’t there. I call my parents, who have been waiting by the phone, and Jack calls his. I pick out a new dress and we go to a restaurant that serves cheese plates and champagne, and as we spread buttery slabs of Brie onto hunks of bread, faces bathed in candlelight, we build a life together with our words. I dream up the little house we will buy and the dog that will teach us how to be parents; Jack talks about seeing the world together and we commit to only buying real Christmas trees. We play a little game of house.
That night, I fall asleep in Caroline’s bed and he sleeps in mine. We’re pretending to be virgins again, we’re course correcting even though we’re engaged. I look up at the ceiling and think about picket fences and Christmas trees and babies and wonder if marrying someone is just playing a game of house that lasts forever. The heaviness that Jack knows finds me. I’m scared and lonely, even though I’ll never be alone again. Maybe it’s always trying to do the right thing, or growing up. Maybe it’s the hormones left over from the Plan B. I don’t think it has anything to do with the weather.
7 Southern Baptist Romance
There is a church down the road from my family’s farm. Only about two handfuls of people can fit inside, and once a month, they have a Sunday service at 6:30 a.m. that my mom loves. This quiet, humble, gunmetal-gray building tucked up in the trees off Old Laurel Hill Road is where I become Jack’s wife. This is where we begin.
When I was a little girl, I wanted to invite a thousand people to my wedding; I wanted two thousand eyeballs glued to me all day long and a horse and a carriage and a sheet cake from Baskin-Robbins as big as a dog bed. I wanted to hear a thousand gasps at the same time when I walked into the church and my special song started to play. During Communion, I practiced what it would be like, plucking up the edges of my church dress and walking slowly between the pews toward my cracker and wine. Right, stop. Left, stop. Right, stop. Left, stop. The pastor smiled at me and I smiled back. He was my handsome husband in this game, even though he looked a bit like a tree frog. When I got back home, I changed into my shiniest leotard for the big party that came after the procession and I slow danced by myself, arms straight out, resting on a pair of invisible shoulders. The spotted dogs watched me sway and I serenaded them with Madonna’s “Crazy for You.” It reverberated through the forest and made the birds fly away. To be watched is to be wanted and to be wanted is to be loved. I closed my eyes and daydreamed it, the dress, the dancing, the desire, as hard as I possibly could.
When I actually do get married, there are no horses or ice-cream cakes. There is no Madonna. Only a couple of dozen people are invited to behold me when I walk down the aisle, and the only set of eyeballs I care about belongs to the shivery, nervous man who waits for me at the end of it. Little Ruthie would be bored; she would wrinkle her nose at the smell of the great-granddaddy chapel, the old songbooks, and the soft, rotten wood. She wouldn’t understand the quiet sacredness of it all, but she doesn’t have a say. Little Ruthie doesn’t cross this threshold with me.
* * *
The morning of the wedding is like a coffee commercial, misty and thoughtful and just cold enough for a sweater—though in Louisiana, sweater weather never lasts past 9 a.m. My mom kisses my head and drives to the church early to supervise the positioning of fat white roses and stalks of leather-leaf fern. This is as much her day as it is mine; it’s the gift she’s been waiting to give me my whole life. The wait has not been easy for her. Lile says that when I was in college and not dating anybody, she convinced herself I was a lesbian and openly mourned the loss of planning a perfectly picturesque, abundantly heterosexual ceremony for me. Today, she finally gets to play her opus. I don’t really care about the tiny wedding, the details, the buttercream or ganache, the huge reception, or the plantation with the good picture-taking tree, so I give all of it to her and watch her devour it.
The dress hangs in a bag on a puffy pink hanger. It sits there all morning just staring at me from the back of my parents’ bedroom door. It’s jawbone white and cost only $250; Katie took me to the Nicole Miller store at the mall and we found it in the bridesmaid’s section next to a big stack of marked-down platform shoes. It’s perfect, unembellished, stark, and simple. The bottom swings with me when I dance, and the bodice droops all the way down in the back, allowing the space just above my butt to peek out through a tiny window of scalloped lace.
I smile when I take it down and step into it, when it’s almost time for us to go to the church. It grasps my torso just enough to make me feel like a woman. I pat powder on my cheeks, draw a perfect line around my lips, and stare at myself in the mirrored cove of the vanity. I’m ready. I know I should savor the motions of this day but I just want to be married, I just want to be with Jack, made whole in him the way God thinks a woman should be. I don’t want to feel shame for the body inside the white dress anymore, and after today, our sinfulness, our lust, will become sacredness.
My daddy is too giddy to speak when I walk onto the porch and he sees me in my white not-wedding dress and bare toes. I’m half grown-up, half baby girl, and it makes him squeal. He fans his fingers out like sunbeams, steps back, and just stares at me. He’s wanted today for me as long as my mom has; wanted me to be loved the way that Jack loves me, wanted me to have babies, wanted me to know the joy that he knows, the endless unbroken love of family. A part of him is made whole today, too, three children, all married, all sworn to the right partner, to godliness, and to righteousness. My happiness is his total absolution, for the war, for recovering from the war, for hard work in the hot sun, for raising his children right. This is what he has prayed for and he knew it would come. While my mom worried about the declining population of single white men with good jobs, my daddy just shook his head and laughed, and when Jack asked for his blessing, he knew exactly what to say: “If Ruthie chooses you, you must be very special.”