(In honor of Spring Cleaning: Seven Days. Seven Dresses. This is Day Five. Day Four is here)

Just after midnight, Istood with my three best friends (and the charming Brooklynite dating one of them) at the edge of the ugly oval fountain, in the center square of my otherwise lovely hometown. It was a starry night, warm and mild. The streets were almost silent, though it was the first Saturday in June: high tourist season in a resort community But in middle of the 1990s, downtown was still so deserted on a weekend that our voices echoed against the building and filled the empty spaces with tinny boasts.

We’d all had too much to drink,  and teetered around in uncomfortable heels and slick-soled dress shoes. We talked too loud, trying to sound tougher and cooler than our tuxes and party dresses implied. I hoped we might appear sophisticated, like we’d been at a some where glamorous and dissolut  instead of at my Mom’s wedding.

All weddings are surreal. That’s doubly true if you’re a member of the wedding party. Parent weddings are next level, because you never really expect you’ll have to go to one while everyone is still alive.  Even though Mom and my new stepfather had been dating for years. Even though he was a wonderful person who adored her and said he loved me and my sister.  It was still  Mom’s wedding. And the man she married was Not Dad. And  wasn’t it weird that I was almost same age at that moment as Mom was when she married for the first time?

I figured this would be messy. I’d wanted to avert the possible, public humiliation of sobbing at the altar, not so much because I missed Dad, but because it signaled the end of the old fantasy of a messy, Bohemian nuclear family built on easels and old typewriters and stacks of New Yorkers and the dreamy looks my still young parents shared when they talked about Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald as if they were an aspirational couple-which is a big fucking red flag right there, buddy. And sure, I recognized that things back then were not-great and sometimes maybe a little dysfunctional  and the fantasy really was just a fantasy but it was my childhood we’re talking about here and it was a hell of a childhood, not like my other friends’,and  in so many of the best ways, and was that getting canceled out too? And what if this permanently changed my relationship with Mom  who was my best friend? What if she Stepford Wived into a totally different person once she moved across town? And what if my stepfather was not as cool as he seemed and didn’t actually like me at all he’d just been pretending  and what if he hurt Mom  or my sister and what if? what if? what if? How would I achieve a modicum of stability in this avalanche of a life turned upside down?

I’d invited the  three people who formed the core of my teenaged life, who’d felt as important as family, yet knew me outside of family in the ways that family could not They would take care of me. But things were weird with them now too.  Two of them—Ivy League and Indie Rock—were exes. One of them, Punk Roommate, maybe hated me at little, and for good reason.  All three were changing at nearly light speed, on an almost cellular level that would have been impossible for me to  emulate, even if  it were a thing I was sure I wanted I mean, aren’t we supposed to be authentic? Don’t we mock posers? Why is it suddenly okay to act like someone else entirely?

I wasn’t completely immune to the lure of transformation. I loved Ovid. But I suspected, have always suspected, that on some unshakeable level,  you are who you are and that is, in part, where you’re from in all it scenic byways and grotesque deviations. Life may allow you to add to the picture, maybe even elaborately enough to obscure it, but you can’t subtract.

That’s so old-fashioned, Ivy League had told me earlier that day, as Brooklyn strummed Big Star songs on his guitar between us, when I tried to explain, because I was struggling with the casual way she’d started to edit and refashion our shared  past. You’re such a misplaced modernist, she said. Don’t you know that “real” is just another construct and that there’s no such thing as authenticity?

 I did. I’d spent four semesters hounding Ivy League for copies of her Ivy League syllabi for fear that I might miss reading something. And I could have waded into that debate to remind Ivy League that my closest friendships disintegrating in real time for what seemed to be the most bullshit of bullshit reasons was not a question for post-modern theory.  But it was already two o’clock. I was expected back at the hotel to dress in the bridal suite with Mom and my sister. I left my friends on the veranda at Ivy League’s mother’s house, the breeze off the lake rattling the rhododendron leaves in near-rhythm with the guitar. I worried that, without me as buffer, the three of them would sever their remaining ties and vamoose before the wedding. Did they ever really like each other?  I wondered, driving downtown. Did they ever really like me?

By midnight, alcohol had obscured whatever grievances. Spirits were high. I horrified  everyone by shuffling off through a chorus of Ew to a pee in one of a battalion of Porta-Johns at the edge of the square. At least one of the others had her feet in the fountain. I don’t know why you’re judging me. I can absolutely guarantee that there is human feces in that fountain, I said, even though I couldn’t.

 As I opened the door, I thought, I really wore the wrong dress for this.

#

The dress was a floor-length, lavender chiffon number, flecked with rhinestones, made for me by the same seamstresses at the same local fabric shop, who had been making dresses for me since  Aunt Laura’s wedding in 1979. Mom let us pick our own bridesmaid dresses. I took them a picture of Uma Thurman’s Prada dress ripped out of magazine. I said, size 14,more rhinestones. I hadn’t worn lavender since the fifth grade. I thought it might make me feel light and dreamy, that it might counteract the lumpiness, the waxy, unintentionally Goth pallor of a girl that barely saw daylight, whose current hair color was somewhere between Johnny Rotten and gaping wound.

Various people tried to sort me out pre-wedding, torturing my hair into bouncy curls and  slathering on several applications of make-up thick as mortar because I fell into several poorly-timed crying jags. The tectonic shifts in my family and social lives had laid bare all of my personal fault lines. And as Mom liked to say, all of your dragons were up.

My dragons were legion. I was broke and unemployed. I was lonely and depressed. I had basically not gone to class[1] in almost two semesters. I’d received a letter informing me of my Academic Suspension, which was administrative for you’ve failed out of school, but we’re not a discriminating enough to forbid you from coming back. I’d endured the judgement of a university higher-up, who’d opined, some people aren’t cut out for higher education. I worried that meant I was actually an idiot, which was embarrassing, given how much of my identity was constructed around being clever. I was terrified of having to move home, especially into the unknown of my mother’s new life. I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t know what I would do.

Nana came in to straighten me  because I was upsetting my mother, who just trying to get married for Heaven’s sake. She took me downstairs to the lobby bar for a stiff Vodka tonic and hissed at the terrified bartender when he asked for my ID. She told me she loved me  but I had to ixnay on the uncontrollable furious weeping.  I was being selfish and juvenile and that being a woman in the world means keeping yourself together so you can keep everyone else in line, even when they make you mad, even when they disappoint you, even when they break your heart. Because they will. And then things will be wonderful again. That’s life. I know you can be strong enough to put on a brave face and get through it.

It was a good speech, a bit reminiscent of the one Mom always recounted  having heard on her first wedding day. She’d had been dressing in the back of Nana’s house, suffering nervous jitters, when Dad’s grandmother, a real force of Nature, stalked past the rest of the family and informed Mom that Fields Women never cry. This was categorically, even hilariously, untrue[2], but it sounded tough as shit and evidently served much the same effect as Nana’s pep talk.

The wedding took place at my high school chapel, a small Art Deco riff on Gothic architecture that glowed pink in the afternoon light. It was weird being there. I’d never expected to miss high school once I left and saw it as embarrassingly sad that I did. Only losers did that. Only people that had squandered all their promise at seventeen.. In the chaplain’s office, while my new stepfather’s secretary adjusted my mother’s make-up and handed us our bouquets, I remembered I once stowed a choir folder behind the bookshelf after a performance. It was still there.

Mom had madrigals sung at her wedding. The group performing them included my high school drama teacher, my 10^th grade English teacher, and my middle school piano teacher. They would be singing two pieces I’d sung with my high school choir. As they lined up in the vestibule, I chatted briefly with my drama teacher and my piano teacher. No, I hadn’t auditioned for any plays. No, I didn’t play the piano anymore. They looked sad. Saying it made me feel sad. I couldn’t remember why I’d stopped exactly They filed up to the choir loft. I wished I were going with them; I still knew every note.

A snapshot confirms I was at the ceremony. I look like a perfect brat of a teenager at the crossroads of boredom and rage. Mine was the face of a person trying not to appear uncool to her friends now visible in the back of the nave. Mine was the face of Fields Women never cry.

 #

 The reception had concluded by the time we wobbled back to the hotel. I sent my friends upstairs to the room we would all share and staggered back down the spiral stairs to the event space, where my beautiful, beaming mother was enjoying a nightcap with her new husband and her own longtime best friend as the band broke down. Someone handed me my gloves—long, over the elbow, torch-singer style. They’d been found between the cushions the corner booth table where I’d spent the night at a comfortable remove from the family. The fingers were sticky, almost black, and it took me a moment to remember I’d forgotten to remove them before availing myself of the chocolate strawberries on the buffet line.

Upstairs, I found my friends in the hotel room. They’d  acquired another bottle of champagne from God knows where.  There were two queen-sized beds. One would be occupied by Ivy League and Brooklyn; the other by me, Punk Roommate, and Indie Rock. We’re all drunk enough it won’t matter.

 I changed out of my dress, leaving it a dusky puddle on the tile, and hollered to inform the others that there was both a jacuzzi and a tv in the bathroom. I changed into a bathing suit in the shower stall. Ivy league filled the tub and turned on the jets. It wasn’t really big enough for everyone.  Because it was Saturday night in the mid-90s, we turned on “120 minutes” and passed the Champagne bottle around the steamy bathroom like germs weren’t even a real thing. Brooklyn discussed Afghan Whigs  with great ardor because they were in-studio. Punk Rock roommate made fun of him for it. They aired a video for a Girls Against Boys song and we had an earnest conversation about whether they had sold out. We smoked in the bathroom, even though it was a non-smoking room. For a minute, it felt like we were all in high school again

I was spinning when I crawled into bed. At twenty years old, I’d spent most of my college years a designated driver and could count on one hand the number of times I’d been truly drunk. Because I was the biggest person in my bed, I tried to take up as little space as possible, so I clung to the edge of the mattress, with one leg balanced against the wall. Beside me, Punk Roommate and Indie Rock settled. Across the room I heard hear Ivy League and Brooklyn kissing. Indie Rock tried to kiss Punk Roommate. She spurred his advance. He tried again. She threatened violence. The kissing noises increased in volume. Indie Rock kicked me by accident, and I felt hot and nauseated and claustrophobic. I went to the bathroom and splashed water on my face like they did in movies. When I came back out, there was no room for me in the bed. I took the room key and went out into the hallway. I was afraid of knocking on anyone else’s door—my sister, my grandmother, certainly my mother– so I settled onto a love seat by the elevators, and felt as luxuriously sorry for myself, adrift, alone, with family and friends seemingly out of reach, as only utterly self-involved  twenty-year-old can. I slept fitfully until a hotel employee woke me around 5 to say that I couldn’t sleep there.

He followed me back to the room, to make sure I had a working key and a right to be there. I bolted to the door behind him and went back to sleep on the floor by the windows.

#

I said goodbye to my friends after breakfast. I saw them all again, but never all together. I drove back to our apartment with Punk Roommate.  She and I both would both enroll in summer classes to restore our standing. She would drop out and move  to Atlanta. I stayed on, and in the most oddball sort of way, found my way back to my way. Things got  better. Things got worse. And better and worse and wonderful all over again. That’s life.

When Mom moved into her new house, she threw out my childhood collection of paper dolls and my stack of “Sassy” back issues, but she  kept  the lavender dress. She even had it dry-cleaned to remove the chocolate, the grimy fountain, the Porta-Potty, the downtown streets, of the ash from cigarettes, and what felt like the end of everything but was actually the countless new beginnings to new stories that wouldn’t all belong to me and maybe never did.

Most of those stories will tell you that that night was amazing. That my mother looked like a princess. That my stepfather looked like the luckiest man in the world. That everyone had a wonderful time. And that my mother and my new stepfather were in in the kind of love that lasts decades, through thick and thin, and has.

Thankfully, most of those stories will remember me as a marginal character. A girl on the sidelines drinking champagne until her head hurt in a sparkly lavender dress.  Most of those stories will see me as a supporting character in a gorgeous chapter, a kid, the daughter of the bride, with own her life just barely begun, with her own story yet to be written.

And those stories, impossibly, marvelously,  . . . those stories were not wrong.

In fact, they’re usually the ones I remember.

 

____________________

[1] Save this ambiguously named 19^th century Brit Lit class that surprisingly (and to my utter delight) ended up being a semester-long seminar on Oscar Wilde.

[2] A short list (verified) of things Fields women cry at: paintings, injustice, cathedrals, poems, stories good jokes, Aretha Franklin, disappointment good whiskey, frustration, sunsets, good food, soul music, r&b, gospel choirs, opera, Broadway musicals, television commercials, Renaissance motets, Judy Garland,ripe peaches, the Atlantic Ocean, the Pacific Ocean, Otis Redding, the Mediterranean, furry animals, nice sweaters, cheese,  mustard, heartbreak, bad movies, good movies, bad TV, Italy, excellent curry, Christmas presents, the moon, the stars, excellent wine, morning light, massages, the Chrysler Building, funerals, cocktail parties, bars, shows, restaurants, Central Park, Paris, San Francisco in the fog, pretty boats, the Alps, “Christmastime is Here”—Vince Guaraldi, Disney movies, fireworks, waterfalls, Bill Evans, Nina Simone, thinking about how much we love people, “Queer Eye.”