“You left me alone. In the dark. With a live rattlesnake,” Victor repeated in a whisper.
“Well, I had faith in you,” I said sweetly. This is one of my favorite phrases to use in an argument, because it’s hard for someone to contradict you without blatantly admitting that your faith in them is utterly unjustified. I use that one a lot. In fact, it sounded so good I said it again. “I knew you could handle that snake. Sometimes you just have to have faith.”
And faith was exactly what I was trying to have in the week before our wedding. Personally, I was terrified of being the center of attention in front of other people, and I’d wanted to just elope and get married in tennis shoes in Las Vegas by an Elvis impersonator, but Victor was an only child and his family desperately wanted a real wedding, so I’d given up and gone through the motions. I was never much of a big-wedding girl, so I gave no thought to unity candles and rehearsal dinners. My mom and I made a veil out of hot glue, mesh, and a flowered headband, and we picked out a cake at the local grocery store.
Neither Victor nor I was religious, so my grandparents bribed their church to let us use their small side chapel. The wedding lasted an entire twelve minutes, as we’d asked the preacher to cut almost all of the Jesus references out. (“Jesus is totally invited,” we explained to the preacher. “We just don’t want him giving any long speeches.”) Then we had a twenty-minute reception in the basement, which looked just like a basement except somehow drearier.
But at the chapel of the church where we’d said “I do,” none of that seemed to matter. All that mattered was that we loved each other. And while our families made their way to the church doorsteps to prepare to throw birdseed at us, we hid in the empty church sanctuary and I made Victor promise to love me forever. “Have a little faith in me,” he said with a proud smile. In retrospect, I probably should have asked for something more substantial, like “Promise me you’ll always clean up the cat vomit in the hall,” or “Promise me you’ll never ask me if it’s ‘that time of the month’ in the middle of a totally rational argument when what you really need to do is just apologize and stop being such an asshole.”
But no, I was young, and naive, and wished for love, and I tried to have faith that that would be enough.
Sometimes you just have to take it on faith.
Our official wedding portrait. If you didn’t know us you could almost imagine that we’re whirling around a candlelit ballroom instead of standing in front of the Sears Portrait Studio backdrop at the mall. Still, there was a Lionel Richie song playing over the intercom. It was “Dancing on the Ceiling.” It was like even the mall was mocking us.
There’s No Place Like Home
After we were married, I started working in HR. Victor worked in computers. We bought a small seventies house in San Angelo, the same town outside Wall where we’d gone to college. The house quickly grew full of memories. It was the house we were in when I became convinced that Y2K was basically the end of the world, and so on New Year’s Eve of 1999 I filled up the bathtub with water, so we’d have something to drink when the water from the tap turned into blood, but my cat didn’t realize it was full and fell in it, contaminating the whole thing. Then Victor laughed at my distress, which really pissed me off, because, Hello? I’m doing this for both of us. And then he abandoned me at a quarter to midnight to go check on the computers at work, and he wouldn’t even load the riot gun for me before he drove off. When he came back a few hours later, I’d barred the doors with couches to keep out the looters. I was too tired to move all the furniture, so I just told him that doors didn’t work anymore because of Y2K, and that he should just go sleep under his car. Eventually he convinced me that there were no looters, and so I opened a window for him to climb through.