Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress Page 33

  Best yet, my future boss wanted to have coffee with me. “But unfortunately, I can’t do it this afternoon,” she explained over the phone, “I’ve got a therapy appointment that I absolutely can’t miss.”

  I’ve relished few things more than giving Vicki and Edna my two weeks’ notice; as I told them how truly devastated I’d be not to work with them another year, it seemed as though bars from Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture were reverberating through the office, and I had to restrain myself from leaping up on the desk and doing the “Nah-nah-neh” butt-wiggling victory dance I’d perfected when I was four.

  Soon after, Vicki and Edna returned to the district for Christmas, leaving Lee, Kiran, Zachary, and me alone in Washington to close out the term. Now that she was no longer a first-term congresswoman, Minnie was literally moving up in the world. Having fared much better in the office lottery this time around, she had secured a large office on the top floor of Longworth. It opened up onto the roof, which provided a vast terrace of sorts from where you could see the Capitol Dome, the tip of the Washington Monument, and the gentle swale of the mall.

  It fell to us to oversee the move, and we spent the last few days before Christmas romping giddily around the piles of furniture and unopened boxes. A few offices on our new hall had draped garlands of tinsel over their door frames, but most everyone had gone home to their districts for the holidays. There was absolutely nothing for us to do. Kiran briefly went into a panic because, after a year of obsessing about his law school essay, he’d finally mailed it out, only to discover that he’d written about wanting to go into “pubic” service instead of “public.” We got a lot of mileage teasing him about that one, until an early acceptance letter arrived. Lee boasted about his latest girlfriend. Zachary invented a new game that involved a “welt scale.” Everyone congratulated me on getting a new job.

  My last day in the office, a package arrived. It was a five-pound box of chocolates sent to Minnie as a Christmas present from a supporter. Yet amid all the boxes and packing materials, Zachary somehow lost the return envelope. We had no idea who’d sent it.

  “Shit,” he cried. “Minnie is going to have a heart attack when she finds out we can’t return it. What the hell are we going to do?”

  We all looked at each other.

  As we tore into the trays of nougats and butter cremes, a young reporter for the Baltimore Sun knocked on our door.

  “I’m sorry to bother you,” she said. A photographer skulked behind her, fiddling with his Visitors Press badge. “But I was sent to interview Hill staffers about their experiences. The Maryland offices have closed already. Mind if I interview you guys instead?”

  We looked at the reporter, then at the half-eaten box of chocolates sitting on the couch next to us. It was even more forbidden to talk to reporters without Vicki’s approval than it was to accept gifts from constituents.

  “Well, you know,” Lee reasoned, “we’re already going to hell.”

  Zachary looked at the reporter, then at the photographer. “If we agree to be interviewed, can we get our picture in the paper, too?” he asked.

  “Sure,” she said.

  I held out the box. “Chocolates, anyone?”

  In between mouthfuls of candy, we answered her questions and posed on the couch. After she left, the three of us, heady with sugar and transgressiveness, climbed out onto the roof and looked out at the Capitol Dome, rising monumentally before us in the bracing December sunshine. It really was something to behold, still.

  For my last day, I’d brought a disposable camera and asked each of the guys to pose with me in front of the Dome as part of my last, official Capitol Hill memory. As I stood there with them, I thought of the first day when I’d arrived, how awed I’d been, how hopeful and excited I’d felt when Minnie and I had eaten donuts together in her office. It occurred to me then that I’d revered Minnie for her humanness, yet in the end, I’d faulted her for it, too. Like most Americans, I’d wanted a “Normal Everyperson” on Capitol Hill, then felt betrayed when the person I’d supported had actually behaved like one—when she’d wound up exercising the same flawed behavior and poor judgment that the rest of us always did.

  I stood before the Capitol—first with Zachary, then with Lee—and blinked into the sunlight as they each took turns with the camera.

  When we were done, Lee gave me a squeeze. “I’m going to miss you,” he said.

  “Aw, I’ll miss you guys, too,” I said.

  “No, I mean I’ll miss you,” Lee grinned. “When you were standing there next to me just now, I got a touch of your boob.”

  Chapter 14

  Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress

  AS I REACHED my thirties, a strange thing happened—a lot of my friends actually thought it was a good idea to start getting married. Orchestrating weddings similar in size and scope to the invasion of Normandy, they suddenly began obsessing about floral centerpieces and disposable cameras. Yet the amount of fun I had at their weddings never had anything to do with the monogrammed napkin rings they’d chosen or their “signature cocktails.” Rather, it always depended upon one thing only: whether or not I happened to be getting laid at the time. If I was single, it didn’t matter if they served lobster tails at a wedding, decorated the reception hall with ice swans spitting grain alcohol, or gave me a Tiffany silver picture frame as a party favor. If I felt lonely and pathetic, I watched the beautiful bride walk down the aisle amid clouds of rose petals and thought only one thing: I am going to die alone, surrounded by seventeen cats.

  And yet, even when the Amazing Bob and I got engaged, I remained supremely ambivalent about marriage myself. Never mind that the media constantly depicts women in their thirties as husband-hungry hysterics. As a child of divorce, I harbored no illusions that walking down the aisle led to happiness and fulfillment. If anything, marriage seemed to me like the one thing you could do to inevitably bring yourself closer to needing alimony. What’s more, I wasn’t convinced that marriage was all that good for women, period.

  When I was younger, I’d leave the war zone of my own household and wander through my friends’ living rooms, admiring the little framed pictures scattered around their pianos and end tables. “Wow. Who’s that?” I’d ask, pointing to photos of young women who looked like starlets in pedal pushers, taffeta cocktail dresses, shiny graduation robes.

  “Oh, that’s my mom,” my friends would say dismissively, “before she met my dad.”

  Invariably, the carefree, dazzling young women in the photographs looked nothing like the haggard, irritated, sexless mothers I saw forever unloading groceries in the kitchen, soaking their feet in Epsom salts, and snapping at my friends to “get that goddamn Yahtzee set off of the sofa.”

  Lying awake at night, staring at my clock radio, I worried that once I got married, I would become one of those exhausted, invisible women obliterated by the demands of her family. After I became first a Wife, then a Mother, my career would disintegrate like fireworks and I’d quickly be reduced to nothing but a pair of giant, lactating mammaries. Crying children would swing from my neck like albatrosses as I stumbled around the kitchen, bovine in a bathrobe, holding a frying pan and a breast pump. Soon I’d be wearing drugstore bifocals, Isotoner slippers, and sweaters decorated with knitted sheep, and even my husband would start calling me “Mom.” When he talked about me to other people, he’d behave as if he were addressing a grand jury: “My wife here,” he’d say, rolling his eyes, “thinks we should drive around with snow tires until April.”

  “Why can’t we be like Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir?” I often moaned to Bob. “You know, just remain two lovers who spend the rest of their lives together arguing at a cafÉ in Paris.”

  Yet eventually, both my overwhelming love for him and the desire for joint health insurance won out. “We’re going to have a beautiful life together,” Bob and I agreed the night we got engaged. “Our marriage will be ours to live in our own way, and we’ll plan our wedding exclusively on our o
wn terms, nobody else’s.”

  Okay. You can now put down this book and commence laughing.

  As a newspaper journalist, I’d had to maintain objectivity while interviewing all sorts of sexist, ideological yahoos. Working on Capitol Hill, I’d been forced to reevaluate my assumptions about sisterhood. But as a feminist, nothing was as daunting to me as getting engaged. Because as soon as Bob slipped the ring onto my finger, it was as if we were instantly catapulted back into 1957. Virtually overnight, people stopped treating us like individuals and began relating to us instead as a traditional Bride and Groom—sex roles as shallow and reductive as the symbols on public restrooms.

  “Ohmygod, you’re engaged,” my feminist girlfriends squealed, lunging for my hand. “Let’s see the ring!”

  “Hoo boy, welcome to the club,” said our guy friends, slapping Bob meatily on the back. “Kiss your freedom goodbye, bud.”

  Our friends were hardly what you’d call reactionaries. In fact, they were mostly a hodge-podge of tofu-eating political activists, artists, scientists, social workers, massage therapists, lawyers, and astrologers. Yet oddly, they kept referring to our wedding as my “Big Day” alone, in which Bob had little more significance than a door knob. What’s more, like the rest of the world, they seemed to assume that our wedding would be the one legitimate opportunity I’d ever have to dress up, boss people around, and act out all my narcissistic and exhibitionistic impulses, when—as far as I was concerned—that was precisely what my everyday life was for.

  The ring had barely been on my finger a week when the onslaught of bridal magazines began mysteriously arriving in my mailbox. They weren’t so much magazines as “wedding porn,” each one loaded with six hundred pages designed to get me hot and drooling over hand blenders, hair ornaments, and dresses that could easily double as slipcovers.

  “The flowers you choose for your wedding reception,” one article began, “will be the most important flowers of your life.”

  “Oh. Please,” I groaned to Bob. “Spare me the frou-frou bullshit.”

  Neither of us, we agreed, wanted a traditional wedding. The whole premise struck us as regressive, degrading: The groom was practically straight-jacketed in a tuxedo, then led around like a man on death row, while the bride was dressed up like an enormous doll and encouraged to live out every fantasy she’d ever had as a five-year-old in order to enter into the most adult commitment of her life. This hardly seemed to us like an intelligent way to kick off a marriage.

  “I don’t want any icky, Freudian, father-daughter waltzes,” I told Bob. “And no insipid bridesmaids’ dresses, either. I love my friends too much to make them dress up like giant eggplants. And no sadistic bouquet toss. I mean, why do that to people?”

  “Agreed,” said Bob. “Let’s just keep it small, simple, and funky.”

  “What do you say we just hire a deejay, an ice cream truck, a bartender, and be done with it?”

  “There you go,” said Bob. “You just planned our entire wedding in three minutes. See, that wasn’t hard at all.”

  “Really, I don’t know why couples get so bent out of shape over this,” I sniffed. “Some people are such drama queens.”

  Stunningly, of course, Bob and I had somehow managed to miss the fact that weddings are giant Rorschach tests onto which everyone around you projects their fears, fantasies, and expectations—many of which they’ve been cultivating since the day you were born. The moment we began planning our small, simple, funky wedding, the telephone started ringing.

  I heard you’re not having bridesmaids. How can you possibly have a wedding without bridesmaids?

  You know, you can never go wrong with prime rib.

  Polkas are always nice for the elderly generation.

  “Listen,” said my father, “do you really want to spend the equivalent of a down payment for a party that lasts only four hours? Why don’t you guys do something cheaper and laid-back and just get married at an old Southern roadhouse somewhere? I mean, D.C. is close to Virginia, isn’t it?”

  “An ‘old Southern roadhouse’?” I said. “Why, that’s a great idea, Dad. I’m sure the locals down in Killjew, Virginia, would just love to host a Yankee interfaith wedding ceremony.”

  “It’s just a suggestion,” said my father. “Bob could wear a Stetson. We could all dance the Texas Two-Step. Serving barbecue would certainly be a lot less expensive than a sit-down dinner in New York.”

  “And if we could arrange to have the Klan chase us out of town before dessert, I bet we could save a bundle on the wedding cake,” I said.

  After hanging up, I called my brother in a panic. “John,” I asked, “what drugs is Dad on? He actually suggested throwing our wedding at a Southern roadhouse and having Bob walk down the aisle in a cowboy hat. Does he have us confused with some other family he has?”

  “Suze,” my brother said after a minute. “I’ve got only one piece of advice for you: Elope.”

  Somehow, Bob and I had also overlooked the fact that even if all you wanted was an ice cream truck, a bartender, and a deejay, you still needed a place to put them. And if you decided it might be nice to have some photographs of the day—photographs that did not scalp anyone, or feature detailed close-ups of your uncle’s thumb—it was best to hire a photographer. And then, as my mother diplomatically pointed out, if relatives were going to travel across the country to witness your marriage, it was probably polite to feed them more than a Fudgsicle and a glass of champagne. And surely, you couldn’t expect older folks to balance a plate on their hand all night: they had to sit somewhere. And since you were going to have tables anyway, would it really kill you to put out a few flowers to brighten things up?

  By the end of the month, Bob and I had sixteen rotating appointments with photographers, florists, wedding halls, deejays, and caterers. The only upside to this was that most of the vendors we interviewed made any crazy and annoying relatives look reasonable by comparison.

  “Okay. This is how you’re going to do your wedding,” a photographer named Blaine—no first name, no last name, “just Blaine please”—informed us. Just Blaine Please, I noticed, wore a voluminous silk shirt tucked into a pair of tight Armani jeans, giving him the distinct look of a homosexual pirate.

  “You Jewish?” said Blaine, leading us through a hallway lined alternately with black-and-white wedding photos and stagy self-portraits of himself wearing chaps. “Yes? No? Partially? Well then, immediately after the ceremony, go into the hora. Don’t even have the guests walk into the reception area. Dance them in. Do you understand what I’m saying? Dance them in with that Jewish sort of bunny hop you guys always do. Then, do that hoist-the-bride-up-on-the-chair bit, and then, before anyone’s even sat down, immediately wheel out the wedding cake and start cutting it. Do you hear what I’m saying? Cut the cake right then and there, before they’ve even brought the salad out. That way, your makeup will still be fresh and all your guests will still look interested. And that way, if for some strange reason, God forbid, I have to go and photograph a second wedding that same night, you’ll still have plenty of Blaine originals of all the best moments.”

  “Was he kidding?” Bob said as we walked, shell-shocked, to the parking lot. “What’s a ‘Jewish sort of bunny hop’?”

  The next photographer, Mildred, was everything Blaine was not. Unkempt, gentle, and obese, she arrived at my apartment dressed in a paisley muumuu with a portfolio tucked under one armpit and an enormous pastrami sandwich beneath the other. No sooner was she seated at my kitchen table than she unwrapped the sandwich and offered us sections.

  “I hope you don’t mind if I eat while we talk, but I have this strange blood disorder,” she laughed. “If I don’t eat protein every one or two hours, I tend to pass out. I mean, like, boom. Right down on the floor like a redwood. Craziest thing. You’ve never seen anything like it.”

  Determined to resist the orgiastic consumerism that passed itself off as a premarital requirement, Bob and I refused to register for gifts.
It struck us as greedy and presumptuous somehow: Hi. We’re getting married. Now here’s the blender we’d like you to buy for us. But then, Bob happened to mention this at a dinner party at our friend Lucy’s.

  “I have only two words to describe what happens to couples who don’t register,” Lucy said flatly. “String art.”

  “I have only four words,” said Andrea, also a newlywed. “Orange plastic salad bowl.”

  “You can’t think of it as being greedy,” Brian advised, as he got up to refill our wineglasses—beautiful glasses which, Lucy pointed out, they’d registered for. “You have to think of it as insurance against bad taste. It’s something you do preemptively to make sure you don’t wind up with cartons full of shit.”

  “Look,” said Andrea. “If you really have the masochistic urge to let your guests select their own gifts, I’ll be happy to give you the salt shakers shaped like lawn trolls that Peter and I received.”

  “It’s like the Borg on Star Trek,” Bob observed in the car ride home afterward. “Resistance is futile. You will assimilate.”

  “So that’s our choice?” I said. “Register—or receive sixteen salt shakers shaped like lawn trolls?”

  A week later, when we arrived at a bridal registry office, we were greeted by Mrs. Marscapone, an older, well-coiffed woman with the officious air of a headmistress. As our “personal registry consultant,” Mrs. Marscapone came around to my side of the desk, put her arm protectively around my shoulder, and presented me with a clipboard.

  “Here you go,” she said proudly, as if it was something I’d earned. “This lists every item we have on this floor, as well as in Bedding, Linens, and the Electronics Department.” With an expert flourish, she flipped through the sheets attached to the clipboard. “These are just checklists, guidelines to help couples register. You see?” she pointed to a list that read Serving bowl, creamer, gravy boat.