Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress Read online

  For the next four hours, I stood in front of the mirror, zombielike, refusing to take off the dress. Occasionally, Annette would come over and check up on me, “How you doing up there? Still liking that dress, huh? Well, you just let me know if you need a glass of water or something.”

  All around me, women came in, tried on dresses, twirled before the mirror, then left, while I stood there, catatonic in their midst.

  “That girl by the mirror, is she all right?” I overheard one of the other customers whisper to Annette. “I don’t think she’s moved in over an hour.”

  “Oh, she’s doing just fine,” Annette assured her with a chuckle. “Just a little bride shock, is all.”

  What can I say? I was having a total ideological meltdown right there in the middle of David’s Bridal salon. Because this was not what I was supposed to look like. This was not who I was supposed to be. This dress was symbolic of everything I’d railed against, everything I feared and fought again. Putting it on hurtled me closer and closer to becoming Superbride, Susie Homemaker, Giant Mammary Mom.

  I was supposed to be the Anti-Bride, goddamn it! I was not some insipid girlie-girl dolled up like a parade float. But in that dress, with the tiara, I was intoxicated with myself. I felt gorgeous, indomitable. And I loved it. And I hated myself for loving it. Yet I couldn’t stand to take it off.

  And as I stood there, something else occurred to me: why did it take so long to have this experience? Every woman should have this experience—and not only if or when she gets married. Every woman should see herself looking uniquely breathtaking, in something tailored to celebrate her body, so that she is better able to appreciate her own beauty and better equipped to withstand the ideals of our narrow-waisted, narrow-minded culture.

  When men shop at ordinary department stores, they are treated like brides all the time. I’ve watched a salesman literally get down on his knees in a dressing room to pin the cuffs on a pair of off-the-rack slacks Bob was trying on. I’ve seen salesmen fawn over my brother, adjusting the sleeves on a sports jacket. I’ve heard them tell my father, “Let me get you the single-breasted version. That will look better on you.”

  Men’s stores seem determined to make every schmucky guy who walks through their doors feel catered to, powerful, supremely attractive. At the time that I was planning my wedding, in fact, a commercial for a popular menswear chain featured the owner assuring his customers, “You’re going to like the way you look. I guarantee it.”

  When was the last time women heard that from a salesperson? Most clothing stores only inflame our insecurities and our sense of limitation. “If you have wide hips, don’t wear stripes,” we’re instructed. “Designers don’t make that in your size.” “At your age, you can no longer get away with a hemline like that.” Even the bridal boutiques, while telling women that this is “our special time,” implicitly punish anyone who can’t fit their sample size.

  David’s Bridal, I thought. What a bizarrely feminist place: a froufrou heaven staffed by women dedicated to making sure that other women look astonishing. In the dressing room, I saw three-hundred-pound blondes, wiry black women, Asian brides with asymmetrical haircuts, voluptuous Hispanic girls, acne-splattered bridesmaids, birdlike middle-aged women saying, “So what if this will be husband Number Three? This time, I’m doing it right.” And every woman was treated like royalty. Yes, they have sizes 2 to 32. Yes, they have all price ranges. Yes, they will alter if for you. Yes, they will make you look beautiful. For you—you, my dear—are a goddess.

  Shortly after 6:30 that evening, Annette came over to me. “Listen, I hate to do this to you, but we’re closing the store for the night.”

  Panicked, I only then realized what I should have done hours before. Whipping out my cell phone, I started frantically calling my girlfriends and leaving incoherent messages on their answering machines, sounding, finally, like the hysterical five-year-old the bridal industry had been encouraging me to act like all along:

  “Quick! It’s an emergency,” I cried. “I’m at David’s Bridal! And they put me in this dress! And then they put me on a pedestal! And then they put a tiara on my head! And now I want to stay this way for the rest of my life!”

  Lucy called back almost immediately. “Put the saleslady on,” she commanded like a platoon leader. “I’m logging on to the David’s Bridal Web site.”

  I handed Annette the phone. I heard her say, “Oleg Cassini. A-line. Keep scrolling down. Now click. That’s it, with the lacy train … oh, yes. It does look gorgeous on her. I should know. I’ve been watching her wear it for the past four hours.”

  Eventually, with Lucy talking to me on the cell phone and Annette holding my hand in the dressing room, the two of them managed to coax me down off what I’d come to think of as “my” pedestal. Slowly, I changed back into my street clothes, but not before I’d put the dress on hold, called my mother, and arranged for the two of us to return the next day. You weren’t supposed to buy the first wedding dress you fell in love with, but the truth was, I doubted my mental health—or anyone else’s—could withstand another shopping trip.

  That evening, I returned to Bob’s apartment as if a tragedy had occurred.

  “What’s wrong? What happened?” he said with alarm.

  “I found a wedding dress!” I sobbed, flinging myself down on his futon.

  Bob looked at my heaving form on the bed before him. “I’m sorry,” he said. “But isn’t that supposed to be a good thing?”

  “But it’s BIG. And WHITE. And LACY. AND I LOOK LIKE A BRIDE!” I cried.

  “Okay. I think I’m missing something here,” he said. “I thought you were a bride.”

  “Well, technically, yes, but I’m not supposed to LOOK like one! I’m supposed to be the Anti-Bride! I’m supposed to be a renegade. I’M SUPPOSED TO BE SUBVERSIVE,” I wailed.

  Bob sat down beside me. “Honey,” he said after a moment. “Don’t take this the wrong way but: You? Dressed in a big, white, traditional wedding dress? If you ask me, that’s about as subversive as you can get.”

  “Really?” I sniffled.

  “If you want to shock people and defy all expectations,” he said, “frankly, I can’t think of a better way to do it.”

  I rolled over and gazed at him, tears streaking down my cheeks and pooling in my ears. My fiancÉ had an intense, brooding face, a landscape of complicated thought. That is, until he smiled. Then, his face became a circus marquee lighting up, boyish and gleeful, and you couldn’t help grinning back at it. Looking at him, I saw his profound goodness, his poignant strength, his refusal to be cowed by either convention or rebelliousness.

  Decades earlier, on the afternoon that my mother and my father had announced they were engaged, both their families had inexplicably declared war on each other. Battles were pitched over who paid for liquor at the wedding, who paid for the flowers, who could invite an extra cousin. By the time my parents finally got married, an invisible line seemed to have been drawn down the center of the chapel. My mother’s family sat on one side in frigid silence, my father’s on the other. It was like a wedding with the Berlin Wall plunked down the middle of it. In the photographs, my poor parents look miserable. They were only kids at the time. Trying to build a life together on such a fractured foundation, in the face of such volcanic animosity, why, they’d hardly stood a chance.

  The decision to pledge your life to someone is such an enormous leap of faith. You grab each other’s hand and jump, hoping you’ll manage to navigate together whatever life hurls at you. It’s crucial to be good to each other, to feel supported and endorsed.

  Lying on the futon, looking at Bob, I saw a man who would not fault me for my own contradictions, but rather, see their humor and encourage me to live with them.

  If I married him in a big, pouffy white dress, he’d appreciate equally the irony and the beauty of it. We would stand before our lesbian Wiccan priestess and our highly elastic rabbi, surrounded by our innermost circle of family and friends. Michelle
would be there, plus Jill, Vanessa, Jeff, Maggie—all my childhood friends who’d seen me through so much of my life. It would feel like the grand finale of some great, epic musical, but also like a lavish, opening overture to one. I would stand there shimmering, regal and self-assured, because the wedding gown, like Bob, fit me uniquely—because it, like him, brought out my best qualities in spite of myself. Adorned in that dress, I’d go on to become who I wanted to be, regardless. I would let hope vanquish fear. I would grasp Bob’s hand tightly. I would say clearly, “I do.”

  Chapter 15

  Speak at the Tuna

  BEFORE I MET my husband, the Amazing Bob, I dated a guy who dreamed of living in the suburbs of Cleveland. He painted pictures for me of big, family barbecues we’d have in our backyard and of trips we’d take to Disney World. As he waxed rhapsodic about his own suburban childhood—in which his mother spent hours in the kitchen preparing twice-baked potatoes and homemade chocolate cake—it became clear what my role in his scenario would become. When I told him I didn’t want to spend my life driving kids around in a minivan, he put his arm around me reassuringly.

  “Don’t worry, hon,” he said, squeezing my shoulder. “You can always car-pool.”

  The first time I met Bob, I made a point of asking him where he ultimately wanted to live. Please say “a city,” I prayed. And please, by a city, don’t mean Cleveland.

  I shouldn’t have worried. His answer was even better than I could’ve imagined.

  “Where do I dream of living?” Bob said. “Abroad, I guess.”

  When I was in elementary school, I spent every Saturday night transfixed before the TV watching that paragon of romantic propaganda, The Love Boat, followed by the equally preposterous Fantasy Island.

  “Love—exciting and new!” I’d sing along to the lounge-music-y theme song of the first show, before shouting and pointing, “Look, boss. Zee plane! Zee plane!” along with Herve Villechaize during the opening sequence of the second. Both TV programs had a nearly criminal effect on my imagination, but one episode of The Love Boat in particular made a lasting impression. Its story line featured a sophisticated older couple (Shelley Winters and Bob Goulet, perhaps?) who’d spent their entire married life traveling the world. For three days on the Lido Deck, they regaled Julie, Doc, and Gopher with tales of their foreign adventures.

  The husband would say things like, “Once, when we were riding yaks in Kathmandu—” His wife would interrupt, “Remember, dear? That was right after we had dinner in Monte Carlo with the Aga Khan.” Showing off their snapshots of Florence and Cairo, they modestly referred to themselves as “citizens of the world.”

  Never mind that these characters had been cooked up to resuscitate the careers of C-list movie actresses and struggling soap opera personalities. Watching them, I felt a bolt of recognition and desire: that was how I wanted to live. Adventurously. Wildly. Like a character in a great novel. When I grew up, I vowed, I’d travel the world. I’d ride camels across the Sahara and drink absinthe in Parisian cafes. I’d take up residency in exotic-sounding cities like Sparta and Perth. My husband and I would celebrate our wedding anniversaries with three-day Princess cruises to Puerto Vallarta. Our glamorous, international lifestyle would be devoid of ring-around-the-collar, PTA meetings, and all the other banalities adults seemed to worry about.

  It was a childhood dream that far outlasted my tutu. A few months after we were married, Bob came home from work and said, “So. How’d you like to move to Switzerland?”

  There was a temporary posting in Geneva, he explained, that his boss was encouraging him to take. If I could arrange a sabbatical from my job, we could spend a year or two living out our fantasies, then paying for them in Swiss francs.

  Hearing the news, I took a few steps backward. “You want us to move to Geneva?” I said. I then proceeded to do what people often do when they realize a lifelong dream is about to come true: I had a full-blown anxiety attack.

  Stupidly, belatedly, it dawned on me that for all the years I’d said I’d wanted to live abroad, what I’d really meant was live abroad in London or Paris. What the hell did I know about Geneva? Not much, except that it had something to do with the treatment of war prisoners, which hardly sounded promising. A huge disconnect existed between bragging to people that I “lived abroad,” and actually moving to a foreign country, which was enormously migratory and difficult.

  Yet Switzerland was not exactly a “hardship post.” A nurse I’d known had spent three years in the Amazon rain forest caring for indigenous tribes; in her e-mails home, she’d described how rats ran up the ropes of her hammock each night to bite her while she slept. Switzerland, by contrast, had laws forbidding people to flush their toilets after 10:00 P.M. lest the sound of the plumbing wake up the neighbors. Moreover, it had the highest per capita chocolate consumption of any population on earth. If that alone wasn’t a reason to move someplace, what the hell was?

  I then thought of Ernest Hemingway, Katherine Mansfield, Truman Capote: so many great writers had lived abroad in Europe, it practically seemed like a rite of passage. If we moved to Geneva and I ever managed to fulfill my delusions of literary grandeur, critics could refer to this time in my life as “Her Switzerland Period.” How cool would that be? Her years in Geneva, I imagined my biography reading, proved to be enormously inspiring for her—not only literarily, but also in terms of dark chocolate truffles.

  “Okay, let’s do it,” I said to Bob resignedly. “I mean, it’s not like we have anything better to do, right?”

  “There you go,” he laughed. “That’s the spirit.”

  In the months following our wedding, life had thrown us a few proverbial curveballs. Several of our family members had undergone major surgery, and the September 11 attacks had literally hit us where we lived. For weeks after 9/11, I’d staggered around Washington like a mental patient, traumatized and paranoid. I couldn’t eat, sleep, write, or concentrate. Amazingly, people told me I’d never looked better in my life.

  “Oh my God,” they cried. “You’ve lost so much weight. You look fabulous! How on earth did you do it?”

  We had to resume living, I knew—and living courageously. Bob and I would move to a foreign city we’d never been to before, where we knew no one, where we had no place to live, and where, from all reports, a pound of ground beef and a box of macaroni could easily set you back $146,000.

  Oddly, many of our friends didn’t understand the appeal of this.

  “Why on earth would you want to move to a country where it’s dark all the time and everyone’s an alcoholic?” they said. “Why move to a place whose entire culture consists of ABBA and meatballs?”

  They’d confused Switzerland with Sweden, but we didn’t bother to point this out. Geneva was smack-dab in the center of Europe. It was possible to wake up there each morning, then go to France for lunch and a former Axis power for dinner. No doubt, in Switzerland, we’d live in a quaint little cuckoo-clock house overflowing with geraniums, then take off each weekend for some incredibly thrilling international destination. If our friends ever knew this, we assumed they’d commit hari-kari out of jealousy.

  The day our Swiss adventure finally began, Bob’s new boss, Shiv, picked us up at the Geneva airport and installed us downtown in a modern, concrete residential hotel called Studio House, where Bob and I would have to live until we found ourselves an apartment.

  The narrow corridors smelled of fried onions and sizzling meat. As we passed doors to other studios, we could hear televisions blaring from inside, couples arguing in indistinguishable languages, babies crying shrilly. A barefoot man in a batik robe stood in a doorway, eating a plate of curry. The hotel was a holding pen for transients and foreigners—a category which, I realized suddenly, Bob and I now fell into.

  Shiv set down our suitcases. “I hope this is all right,” he said, gesturing to the small living area that looked like a dentist’s waiting room. The bed was in an alcove partitioned by a rubberized curtain. The room smelled of
vinyl, of cigarettes.

  “It’s fine. It’s great,” said Bob, nodding. “We really appreciate this.”

  “Okay then,” said Shiv, clearing his throat. “Come by the office tomorrow, and we’ll get your residency permits in order.”

  Residency permits. Right now, technically, we were aliens. Watching Shiv leave, I felt a jolt of panic. Please, don’t go! I wanted to dash after him, shouting, Don’t abandon us here!

  Blearily, Bob and I plunked down on the miniature couch. For a while, we just sat there, listening to the purr of the hotel’s ventilation system and the unrelenting growl of traffic. The name of street we were on translated to the Route of Acacias, but I was already mentally rechristening it as the Route of Little Fucking Motorcycles because it was overrun with mopeds, scooters, Vespas, Harley-Davidson wannabes, and dirt bikes, every single one of which sounded like a turbocharged leaf-blower.

  Ambulances whooped by. People disembarked from hissing city buses, women in high heels pushed strollers over the pavement—click, click, click. An entire world was thriving beyond our window, thoroughly indifferent to us. There was nothing for us to do, nowhere to go. Back home—we kept checking our watches, subtracting six hours, mentally transporting ourselves back to Washington—everyone was asleep. We were in uncharted territory, beyond any radar, suspended between worlds.

  “I guess this is it,” Bob said after a moment.

  “Yep,” I said. “Here we are.” Internationals. Expats. Citizens of the World.

  Surveying the modular European light fixtures, the incompatible wall sockets, the 1970s plastic furniture, I suddenly wondered: Did Hemingway ever have to stay in a residence hotel like this? Did F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda ever feel so disoriented and out-of-place when they first arrived overseas? Probably not, I surmised, if only because they’d had the foresight to stay drunk all the time. Funny how glamorous stories about people going abroad always conveniently seemed to leave out this part—the unnerving schizophrenia of arrival—the panic you can feel in a strange city when you realize: whoa. This is it. You’re not going home next week with a bagful of snow globes to hand out at the office.