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This was in the era when many girls got cedar chests at their high school graduations. My parents didn’t know this. We didn’t get one, wouldn’t have known what to do with one if we had. We were innocents, oblivious to the right way to do things.
My sister Terry married first. Her future mother-in-law gave her bridal magazines to read. Terry read the fiction in them, ignored the rest of the articles and gave them back. That same mother-in-law gave Terry a bridal shower. That was the first shower either one of us attended.
My cousin, who’d come from Ireland several years after we did, got married the year I started college. She was five feet tall, in heels. Terry is five feet seven inches. Terry got married in the same dress. Altered? No. She looked great in it!
I became engaged to Sam soon after Terry got married. The second bridal shower I attended was my own, given by my future mother-in-law. Painfully shy, I didn’t want one. Sam negotiated with his mother. In deference to my wishes, she reluctantly invited only 75 people. This was not the best way for me to start off with my mother-in-law but I was at the time oblivious to the Italian version of an eye for an eye, namely a gift for a gift. “I went to three of her kids’ showers. She HAS to come to Eileen’s shower.
”I wore my cousin’s wedding dress. I’m five four. No alterations. Looked fine.
I had a jalopy I’d bought for $350 when I got my first job. I sold it to pay for the wedding reception. Since money was tight for my parents, my mother clipped Jack Frost coupons to exchange for tableware. She enlisted all her friends in the clipping effort and I started married life with twelve place settings of silver plate and six place settings of sterling, as my sister had done six months earlier.
Our wedding reception was held in a motel outside of town. “There’s plenty of room,” the owner assured us when we said there’d be 120 guests. Wrong. People were squished together. Sam’s family had rented a bus to avoid the hazards of winter driving and they were in a convivial mood. Squeezed into a small space, everyone mingled. Sam’s grandmother, who spoke broken English, came up to my parents afterwards and said, “Damn fine wedding!” Everyone had hit it off and it didn’t seem to matter that it was a bare-bones affair.
So Sam and I drove off into the sunset to live happily ever after. The first reality check came on our honeymoon when we had a fender-bender at an intersection in San Juan, Puerto Rico. I sat in the car in the broiling sun and watched as, out in the middle of the intersection, nose to nose, Sam shouted in English and the other driver shouted in Spanish.
Who was this maniac I’d married?
Reality check number 2: Dressed in wool suits, ready for frigid New York temperatures, we sweltered for hours at the San Juan airport. You see, we’d missed our flight. I’d insisted on having reading material for the flight back and everything I picked up at the airport stand was in Spanish. Ignoring Sam’s pleas to hurry, I refused to move until I found something in English. By the time I’d made my purchase, the plane was ready for takeoff. Despite Sam’s pleading, arguing and yelling, they refused to let us aboard.
As Sam sat beside me in the muggy heat, tapping his foot, I’m sure he was thinking, “Who is this idiot I married?”
Reality checks came fast and furious. Where were the roses, the moonlight? I’m supposed to cook and clean and do laundry? What do you mean I’m supposed to buy groceries on ten dollars a week? You forgot my birthday?
We’ve survived. Thirty-seven years later, as I watch young brides walk down the aisle, lit up with love and sure that they’re going to live happily ever after, I pray that their dreams will be fulfilled. I am awed at their courage, for whether they know it or not, this is one of the bravest things they will ever do in their lives. If they succeed at it, the cost will have been high, as they learn to live with a real person instead of a fantasy figure; their growth as human beings will be tremendous, and the prize won will be beyond measure.
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