“She even has to come on our honeymoon?” David said.
“Magnolia’s meeting us at the dim sum place, so she can come along,” Rex said.
Olivia leaned into David.
“Oh,” she said, surprising herself by starting to cry. “I’m a June bride.”
A person doesn’t have a right to so much happiness, Olivia thought. But here she was, filled with it. Everything that had come before seemed small and distant now. She imagined riding this happiness through the years, through the rest of her life.
“Next,” a woman called.
She was tall and skinny with too-white skin and stiff black hair and red lipstick that bled past her lips, all of it together giving her the look of a vampire. Her clothes were black and clingy, her shoes thick cork-soled platforms that made her fall slightly forward as she walked toward them in a cloud of tobacco and lily of the valley perfume.
“I’ve come to suck your blood,” David whispered into Olivia’s neck.
The woman thrust papers at them and motioned for them to follow her into the justice of the peace’s chambers. His name, according to a removable plaque on the door, was Rolioli. Vince Rolioli. Like the woman, he had stiff black-lacquered hair like the Dave Clark Five dolls Olivia had had as a little girl. Behind her, Winnie giggled.
“You got your witnesses?” Vince Rolioli asked.
Olivia nodded, waiting for him to stand. Then she realized he was standing, all four feet something of him.
Winnie was holding Arthur in his top hat, and Olivia squeezed her arm. “You look beautiful, Winnie,” she whispered, because it did work—the chocolate brown crushed-velvet minidress and the big black Breakfast at Tiffany’s hat that let just enough of Winnie’s blond bob show and the Prada shoes Winnie got at a You! shoe giveaway.
Olivia looked around, trying to memorize everything: Vince Rolioli and his assistant, and Winnie and Arthur and Rex, grinning in his faded jeans and beat-up leather jacket. And David. He had on Levi’s, too, with a white button-down shirt and a vintage fifties tie. Olivia studied his brown curls, his beautiful nose, his eyes—brown and a little too small for the rest of his face. She even made sure to look at his ears, and the sliver of his neck that showed above his collar.
Then, satisfied, clutching the small bouquet of daisies from the deli, she took a deep breath and said, “Let’s go.”
The Honorable Vince Rolioli read his part with great feeling, as if he had once aspired to the stage. Olivia and David’s vows sounded almost childlike beside his thundering words.
It was Rex who had remembered to bring a camera, an old Polaroid. Vince Rolioli’s assistant agreed to take a picture.
“Smile big,” she said, demonstrating how, showing off her own lipstick-smeared teeth. The four of them obeyed, arms around one another’s shoulders, lips parted for wide, eager smiles.
The camera flashed and then spit out a snapshot. Olivia found herself holding her breath as she watched the black fade and the colors appear—David’s tie first, and then the pink flowers on Olivia’s hat, and slowly each of them growing vivid and sharp. The assistant urged them out of the chambers, shooing them, saying, “Good luck! Congratulations!” as if she really meant it.
The line waiting to get married was still long. More bikers, more pregnant brides. Olivia walked past them, saw flashes of bright blue eye shadow, colorful tattoos, beaded dresses, pierced eyebrows and lips. This was her receiving line, studying her, the new bride, the one who had finished what they were about to begin.
Later that summer, she and David would buy that small purple cottage at the beach in Rhode Island. One hot August day there they would decide to start a family. They would hold all the promise and expectation and hope that two people in love can hold. So much came later that summer that all of it would seem to Olivia a blur of happiness.
But on their wedding day, a sunny, breezy Friday in early June, Olivia wanted nothing more than to begin their life. She stopped at the door that led out and turned to the line of waiting brides.
“Good luck!” she shouted. “Happy lives!”
She felt that all the women standing there—pregnant and pierced, foreign and frightened, hopeful and eager—all of them looked at her and understood.
She turned again to leave, hesitated, then tossed her bouquet of daisies over one shoulder. Someone squealed, delighted. All the brides-to-be cheered. Olivia looked to see who had caught it: a teenager, pregnant, round-cheeked, and nervous. The girl raised the bouquet to Olivia and grinned. Olivia flashed on a vision of herself one day: beaming and pregnant. And then even further in the future: an old married lady.