The other feeling was more basic, yet more surprising to me. I am neither a personal nor a political cynic about weddings, and I have generally experienced those I’ve attended as somewhere on a scale from fun to beautiful. But I hadn’t been the kind of little girl who dreams about the one she’ll someday have, and even the loneliest stretches of my adulthood hadn’t inspired in me any fantasies about one day standing up and declaring my abiding love for someone in front of all my family and friends. In my entire life, only C. had ever made me want to do that, and by the time we were discussing what to do about a wedding, everyone I was close to already knew how much I adored her. Yet I found myself wanting to pull them into the circle of my gladness, to rejoice with them as she and I made fast the “and” between us.
So we would get married, we decided, the conventional way, in front of those who had helped shape us and filled our lives with joy. By the time we worked that out, however, together with various other emotional, philosophical, and practical priorities, and finally got around to planning the actual wedding, we discovered that we were extremely late in doing so. (At one point, C.’s younger sister, meaning to be helpful, gave us some kind of bridal-magazine timeline for planning a wedding. As I recall, we had already missed the first deadline by a year.) There was the matter of where and when; of what to eat and drink; of what to do about music, since we both love to dance; of what to do in the event of rain. In an ideal world, we would have gotten married in the backyard of our own home, but we were still in the middle of renovating it—a process that, for most of its duration, looks indistinguishable from demolishing it. Committing ourselves to finishing the job in time for the wedding we were simultaneously scrambling to plan was, we realized in a moment of sanity, insane.
At any event, all those dire warnings turned out to be unnecessary; once we finally began planning, everything fell into place with affirming speed. C.’s father, that finder par excellence, told us about a spot he’d heard about down at the tip of an island in the bay, and as soon as we saw it, we knew it was the place. C. herself was friends with a caterer she had worked for all through high school and on college breaks, and he had urged her many times in the subsequent years to call him the moment she decided to get married. When she did, though, he groaned and gave us the you’re-awfully-late speech, then told her that he was booked for the next fourteen months, minus one weekend in May, for which he was waiting to hear back on a bid. We hung up and turned our minds to Plan B. Ten minutes later, he called back. He’d pulled the bid, he said; if we could do that weekend, he’d be there.
That solved two problems: the food and the date. We made the invitations ourselves, out of card stock and rubber cement and beautiful old postage stamps, thanks to C.’s mother, the letter carrier, who bought us a batch at a yard sale. The flowers came to us courtesy of C.’s younger sister, who knew of a farmer in their hometown who grew acres of wildflowers. C.’s older sister, a beer and wine connoisseur, said she’d handle the drinks. An old friend and professional baker who had furnished dessert for every family celebration beginning with C.’s seventh birthday (and carrying on through the acquiring of puppies, the winning of farm-queen pageants, miscellaneous parties, high school graduations, college acceptances, new jobs, parental anniversaries, and recoveries from various illnesses and injuries—at a conservative estimate, some hundred and fifty confections in total) made our wedding cake.
It had all felt charmed at every stage, and never more so than on that lovely day in May. Still, if it had occurred to us to pause in our happiness to feel relief, I suppose we would have done so, because we had each had our share of concerns about the wedding in the months leading up to it. I had never for a moment forgotten that my father wouldn’t be there—that a ragged edge would gape open in the place where the family I was forming met the family that formed me—and I worried that grief in its most overwhelming incarnation would come find me that day. C. was spared that anxiety but harbored another I had never had to face. Some years earlier, at the wedding of one of her cousins, she had looked around at her relatives and wondered how many of them would show up if she got married. Her immediate family loved her and would always be at her side, she knew, and, from the beginning, they had been wonderful to me. But she was from the kind of place that made the comparatively rapid and widespread acceptance of same-sex couples seem distant, a wave in the culture that had not yet reached its farthest shores, and that day at her cousin’s wedding, she had felt a steep and unexpected sadness. She had grown up close to her many aunts and uncles and cousins, hunting and fishing and going on camping trips with them, traipsing from one house to another for birthdays and crab feasts and another round of food on Christmas Day. And she is at home among them in a way that goes deeper than every other home she has in the world. The first time I met a wide swath of them, at a retirement party for one of her aunts, I watched her, at ease and full of laughter, and thought about what a giddy relief it had been, in the years when I lived abroad, to meet a compatriot and spend an evening speaking English. For C., there was no way to think about marrying me without confronting the painful likelihood that some of the people she loved most in the world might choose not to be there.
If you ever want to have a larger wedding than you anticipated, try underestimating your extended family. We invited them, hopefully and doubtfully; to a person, they came. That day, when the ceremony was minutes from starting, they were all already settled and beaming in their chairs. Behind them, standing next to C. on the porch, I felt almost unable to contain my emotions, as if more of them had showed up than expected, too. Falling in love, getting married, having children, grieving, dying: how commonplace all of life’s grand transitions are in the abstract, how overwhelming when they happen to you. C. walked down the aisle first, between her father and her mother, then turned around alone to face me, framed against a backdrop of flowers and trees and water and sky. It was Main Street, inverted and completed; there she was waiting for me, in all of her remarkable specificity, and there I was, about to marry her.
There was, in the end, nothing to worry about, everything to celebrate. I met one of C.’s more conservative uncles for the first time that day, a giant of a man with a beard like Grizzly Adams and a build like Stonehenge; one of my fondest memories from the entire wedding is how he swept me up into a bear hug that could have lifted off the ground an actual bear. I have adored him ever since (even after the following Fourth of July, when he accidentally almost hit me with a firecracker that must have been illegal in forty-one states), and I like to think the feeling is mutual. As for my father, his loss was palpable to me throughout, but only in the way that the moon is sometimes visible by day: faint and strangely beautiful, there only because it is always there.