Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress Read online

  Gravy boat? I thought. Now that I’m getting married, I’m supposed to register for a gravy boat? Just the thought of it made me feel eligible for Social Security. I looked down the list. Butter dish, it said. Chafing dish. Punch bowl. Who actually used these things? The only place I’d ever seen them was at my grandparents’. Was I supposed to buy all this stuff and save it for when I was reincarnated as a society wife or a Republican?

  Casual china, the list read, followed by formal china. I considered asking if “casual china” was called that because it slept around a lot, then looked at Mrs. Marscapone and decided against it. When two lesbian friends of mine had a commitment ceremony in New York City, they’d registered for sex toys at an erotic boutique called Eve’s Garden. Their registry had been remarkably different. Two-headed dildo, it had read. Hitachi Magic Wand vibrator. Ribbed latex strap-on. Size: medium. Color: magenta (but lilac OK too). I wondered if it was too late to change stores.

  “Don’t be afraid to dream a little,” Mrs. Marscapone told me grandly. “Remember, you’re the bride. This is your day. People want to buy you expensive, high-quality presents. So if you’ve always dreamed of owning a bread maker, now’s the time! Register for a bread maker! You want a hand blender? Register for a hand blender! You want a Krups food processor with mini-bowl attachment? Register for a Krups food processor with mini-bowl attachment!”

  Before I could even think of asking, “What if I want a two-headed dildo?” Mrs. Marscapone turned to Bob. “Here,” she said perfunctorily. “You get the gun.”

  The “gun” turned out to be a bar code scanner, thoughtfully designed to make the holder believe they were carrying not a price-checker, but a piece of high-tech weaponry.

  Once we were properly armed in accordance with our sex role stereotypes, Mrs. Marscapone steered us out of the office toward a sign reading “Dishware.”

  “Happy registering,” she called after us as we staggered toward a forest of dinner plates.

  The selection was overwhelming, and the lists on the clipboard somehow made it worse. Serving forks, fondue pots, toaster ovens. What were we supposed to do with all of this stuff? And where were we supposed to put it? Bob and I each lived in compact, one bedroom apartments that, on a good day, could double as “before” pictures in an IKEA catalogue. We were living apart not because we were old-fashioned, but simply because we’d gotten too busy planning our goddamn wedding to find the time to move in together. Between the two of us, we had roughly enough storage space for a colander and a pair of salad tongs.

  “You know,” I said to Bob, as we eyed the enormous stacks of gourmet kitchen appliances, “for the price of a bread machine, a convection oven, and a Cuisinart, we could probably hire a maid to do these things for us instead.”

  In the aisles of flatware, the sample place settings gleamed seductively beneath the halogen spotlights, and each one had a name conjured up by someone to suggest grandeur or exoticism: Cobalt. Chantilly. Artemis. We did need flatware. Bob’s stuff had been purchased at a garage sale—no two pieces of it matched—and mine had had an unfortunate run-in with a garbage disposal. Scanning the displays, I picked up a curvaceous dinner fork from the Ganges design collection. “Hey, Bob,” I called out. “You like this fork?”

  Bob came over and examined the fork. Unlike me, he seemed unconcerned with what it looked like but rather with how much food the tines could hold.

  “Yeah, it’s okay,” he said finally. “Sure. I could live with these forks.”

  “For the rest of your life?”

  Bob dropped the fork.

  “Yeah, I pretty much had the same reaction when I thought about it that way,” I said as he crawled under the display case to retrieve it.

  For the next forty-five minutes, we walked around Housewares in a state of paralysis, virtually unable to register for anything. We found enough stuff that we liked—some blue, ceramic dishes, a geometric sushi set—but we just weren’t sure we liked them enough to commit to looking at them for the rest of our lives.

  We did come across some wine goblets we loved, but at $30 apiece, they seemed slightly ridiculous.

  “That’s good,” said Bob. “We’ll use the world’s finest crystal to drink the cheap shit we buy at Sam’s Club.”

  Still, Mrs. Marscapone’s “Venus/Mars” strategy began to pay off, because soon Bob became itchy to try out the scanning gun. “Then again,” he suggested, “maybe I should just scan a few of them in, you know, just to see how it works.”

  After three hours at the department store, we registered for exactly one set of wineglasses and a pizza cutter.

  Choosing each other as spouses had been fairly easy. The dinnerware, however, was proving a bitch.

  I must say that during the whole planning process, our families were amazing. The bridal magazines had prepared me for the worst, running articles with titles like “Managing Your Mother” and “Sisters Who Sabotage.” Yet after the initial flurry of advice, both families respectfully backed off. No one called to quiz us about expenses or emotionally blackmail us into adding people to our minuscule guest list.

  We attributed our parents’ restraint to their unique maturity and wisdom. But truth was, they were simply too stunned to say anything. The only detail we’d bothered to share with anyone was that we’d arranged to have our wedding ceremony performed by one of our nearest and dearest friends, Carolyn. Carolyn just happened to be a Wiccan priestess from Berkeley, California. She was a lesbian Wiccan priestess, to be exact, seeing as we’d met her through her lover, Cecilie, a friend of mine from college, and all four of us had become extremely close.

  “A lesbian Wiccan priestess?” my churchgoing, Catholic future in-laws said when we told them. “You don’t say.”

  “A lesbian Wiccan priestess?” my father said. “What’s she going to wear for the ceremony? Leather?”

  “A lesbian Wiccan priestess?” said my mother. “Hmm. Anyone I know?”

  Yet since Carolyn lived in Berkeley, she wasn’t licensed to perform marriages in D.C. We had to scramble to find some phenomenally open-minded clergy to co-officiate. Blessedly, we came across a rabbi named David.

  “Let me get this straight,” he said. “You’re a non-practicing Jew and a ‘recovering’ Catholic and you’d like me to perform an inter-faith wedding ceremony with a lesbian Wiccan priestess?” He sat back for a moment and stroked his beard pensively. “Well, Jewish law does not list ‘sheer curiosity’ as a reason to do so, but it’s as good as any I can come up with.”

  Both Carolyn and Cecilie loved the idea.

  “It’s like the basis for a sitcom,” Cecilie exclaimed. “The Rabbi and the Witch. Can you just picture it? OhmyGod. I’m hearing a theme song. The Rabbi and the Witch!” she sang. “The Rabbi and the Witch! He keeps Shabbas, she worships the goddess. They’ll have you in a stitch! The Rabbi and the Witch!”

  Although Bob and I worried that this unique, possibly-Saturday-morning-cartoon-series wedding ceremony might alienate our families, it actually united them in utter confusion. It also seemed to compel them not to ask any more questions. Apparently, they agreed it was simply best not to know.

  Back when my friend Lucy had been planning her nuptials, she and her fiancÉ had instituted a policy they called “Wedding-Free Wednesdays,” which meant that for one night a week they were forbidden to discuss anything wedding-related. At the time, Bob and I snickered over this. Now, it was starting to look like a stroke of genius.

  All our free time was soon consumed writing checks, making elaborate lists, faxing, e-mailing, and bickering over liquor, parking arrangements, and even the song we’d walk down the aisle to. (I wanted the Rolling Stones’ “[I Can’t Get No] Satisfaction,” while Bob opted for “Should I Stay or Should I Go” by the Clash.) No detail, we discovered, was too stupid to obsess over. Soon, like the zillion other engaged couples we’d vowed never to be like, we began to think that once our wedding was over, we’d be ready to spend our honeymoon in a mental institution. />
  “Guess what I got to help calm us both down?” Bob said one night when he came home. “I’ll give you a hint. It begins with a ‘P.’”

  “Prozac?”

  “No. Porn!” he exclaimed gleefully, unveiling an unmarked videotape.

  “You just can’t wait until your bachelor party, can you?” I said, shaking my head.

  “It’s ‘couples porn,’ see?” he said, pointing to the Day-Glo sticker on the spine reading “His ‘n’ Hers.” “It’s made to appeal to both sensibilities.”

  “You mean horny and sleepy?”

  After sending out for pizza and cutting it with the pizza cutter we’d already received from our registry, we loaded the videotape into the VCR and settled back for an evening of fine adult entertainment. As soon as the requisite 1970s synthesizer music kicked in, the title of the movie flashed onscreen across a pair of enormous breasts. To Have and to Hold, it read.

  “Ha ha,” said Bob.

  “Ha ha, indeed,” I said.

  But a few minutes after the opening scene began, we realized why this movie was labeled “for couples.” Its premise was that—I am not making this up—an engaged couple, Traci and Brad, have a huge series of fights over their upcoming wedding. This compels both of them, of course, to storm out of the house and have sex with other people.

  Yet for a good ten minutes before any sex occurs, Traci and Brad argue in elaborate detail about their wedding band, the seating plan, the menu, and her mother.

  “Okay,” said Bob. “Why am I not finding this relaxing?”

  “I know,” I said, while before us, Traci finally began having sex with one of the bridesmaids at her wedding shower. “All I can think about while I’m watching this is ‘Where did she register? Is that serving platter they’re on top of from Villeroy and Boch?’”

  Yet the biggest issue, by far, was The Dress. Quite simply, I refused to wear one—at least not a traditional white one. My plan was to be “the Anti-Bride” and walk down the aisle in scarlet or black.

  More than anything else, big frothy wedding dresses struck me as silly and infantilizing, as leftovers from the Eisenhower administration, the couture of future homemakers and Cinderella wannabes. They were the epitome of every value I rejected and of everything I did not want to be. To join Bob in matrimony, it struck me as foolhardy, even dangerous, to present myself to him as a fantasy, to walk down the aisle with any pretenses to living in a fairy tale.

  “Let’s face it. I’m neither royalty nor a virgin. Who would I be kidding?” I told Lucy. “In a traditional wedding gown, I’d just be a hypocrite in a pouffy white dress.”

  Truth be told, I also rejected the idea of a traditional wedding gown because I couldn’t stand to shop for one. I couldn’t bear spending weeks, if not months, trying on dresses that were supposed to make every woman look beautiful but that would undoubtedly confirm that I was fundamentally, chromosomally yech.

  Clothes shopping, for me, has always been an act of masochism. As every woman knows, the garment industry will routinely cut some size 8s that are more like 6s, and others that are more like 10s. With my hourglass figure, I’m invariably two different sizes on the top and the bottom, thereby quadrupling the equation. After fifteen minutes in a dressing room, all my humor and perspective invariably fly out the window. Buttons don’t close. Fabric pulls across my upper back. Waistbands hula-hoop around my hips, and I’m reduced to a jelly of self-hatred and despair. Never mind that children are starving to death in Africa: I am an un-dressable freak!

  You would think that when you’re shopping for your “dress of a lifetime,” bridal stores would bend over backwards to alleviate such agonies. Yet amazingly, many exclusive wedding boutiques will not even let you try on dresses in anything but their “stock size.” This means they hand you a sample dress in size 8, and you’re supposed to decide if you want it judging from the “idea” you get of yourself in it.

  Any woman who is not built like a surfboard knows it’s impossible to gauge what a dress will look like without trying it on properly first. Big breasts or hips change the drape and distribution of material: you can’t select a style based on hypotheticals. The idea of paying thousands of dollars for a dress that I couldn’t even try on enraged me. I would have none of it.

  My friends, I assumed, would understand this only too well. Most of my girlfriends had tales about shopping for bras and bathing suits that rivaled only “gym class stories” for their agony and pathos. Yet when I told them of my intention to walk down the aisle in red or black, they were apoplectic.

  “Oh no,” Desa cried. “But you’ll never get to wear a wedding dress again in your life!”

  “Try to think about how you’ll feel twenty years from now,” said Stefie. “Trust me. You don’t want to be like those people in the 60s who got married in hot pants and clogs and now feel like idiots whenever they open their wedding album.”

  “Just try one on first before you reject it,” Lucy pleaded.

  Grudgingly, I dragged myself to David’s Bridal, a chain store in a strip mall that subscribes to the revolutionary idea of actually stocking wedding dresses in different sizes so that women in different sizes can actually try them on. My plan was to simply confirm that ‘ I’d look ridiculous before heading up to a vintage clothing store in New York called Trash and Vaudeville to pick up something campy or punk.

  I did everything all the wedding books instructed me not to. I arrived at David’s Bridal alone, without an appointment, and with absolutely no idea of what would look good on me, other than, perhaps, an enormous paper bag.

  A saleslady, Annette, led me back to the dressing room and set me up in a cubby with the few, plain dresses I’d reluctantly selected. “Let me get you some foundation garments,” she called out. “What size bra do you wear?”

  When I told her, the entire dressing room came to a standstill. Okay: so I have large breasts. That does happen to women, occasionally. But one of the mothers-of-the-brides trying on a suit stopped in mid-twirl before the mirror.

  “OhmyGod. That’s your size?” she exclaimed, staring at me over the rim of her glasses. “If I were you, I would have surgery.”

  I wish I could say this was the first time anyone ever said something so awful to me. But it wasn’t. Unfortunately, women feel compelled to remark about my breasts all the time in dressing rooms. It’s another reason I hate shopping.

  My first impulse, of course, was to reply, “I wish you would have surgery. Have someone sew your mouth shut.”

  But instead, I said, “Really? You’d cut up your body just to fit into a dress? What’s wrong with you?” Then I whirled around, yanked the curtain shut across my cubicle in defiance—and burst into tears.

  Annette, the saleslady, had seen the whole thing. When she came back into my area laden with plus-sized bustiers, I was weeping quietly and telling her that I was sick of feeling like a mutant and this is exactly why I didn’t want to shop for a wedding dress in the first place and what was wrong with a bride in a red plastic rain poncho anyway?

  “There now,” Annette said, giving me a conspiratorial squeeze. “Don’t listen to that lady. Some people have no sense. We’re going to make you look beautiful.”

  This seemed hard to believe, given that my face was now what might charitably be described as a mucus farm. But I leaned over the bustier (performing the old “drop ‘n’ prop” as I called it) while Annette hooked it across my back. Then I tried on the first dress.

  Since the only white wedding gown I’d ever liked had been the one worn by Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, I wriggled into a series of plain, spaghetti-strapped white columns. Unfortunately, as I quickly discovered, in order to look good in a dress like Carolyn Bessette Kennedy’s, you essentially had to be built like Carolyn Bessette Kennedy. Studying myself in variations of her dress, the only word that came to mind was “bratwurst.”

  I tried on a beaded, silvery-satin sheath that made me look like a female impersonator, and another with a flouncy la
ce bolero jacket that made me look like a French prostitute on the Place Pigalle.

  “Okay, that’s it,” I told Annette. “Hideousness confirmed. Visit over.”

  “Hm,” said Annette, studying my figure and pretending not to have heard. “Let’s try something different. Just for variety’s sake.”

  Then she hoisted me into a big, pouffy, ivory-satin dress by Oleg Cassini—a dress with a Battenberg lace train long enough to carpet a legion hall, a voluminous, sweeping skirt, beaded, sequined lace-capped sleeves, and a lace sweetheart neckline that revealed a dÉcolletage underneath. It was confectionary, princessy, glittering. It was exactly the type of dress that I had sworn on a stack of Ms. magazines that I would never, ever wear.

  It looked spectacular on me.

  My mind might have been that of a twenty-first-century feminist, but my body was that of a nineteenth-century Victorian, and the dress seemed to have been custom-made for my proportions. It curved where I curved; it went in where I went in. It accentuated my height, it emphasized the smallness of my waist, it lengthened my neck, it lifted my breasts slightly and balanced them with my hips. Granted, it made breathing nearly impossible, but this was not because of the cut, but rather because I simply could not believe what I looked like.

  When Annette sidled over to me and whispered coyly, “Would you like to try on a tiara with that?” a gurgle escaped from the back of my throat that sounded distinctly like “goo.”

  “I’ll take that as a yes. Come here,” she smiled, motioning to the three-way mirror in the center of the room. “Let’s get you on the pedestal, too.”

  Flabbergasted, I climbed up on the pedestal, the dress fanning out around me. “Here we go,” said Annette, pinning the tiara to my head, then turning me toward my reflection.

  I couldn’t help it. I almost started to weep. I looked beautiful. More beautiful than I had ever seen myself look in my entire life. I looked queenly, glorious, uncompromised. The dress swept around me as if I were a great work of art carved from marble, as if I had emerged from the ocean on a half-shell, heralded by angels.