The Wedding
“Nothing is as bad as a marriage that is a hopeless failure.” – D. H. Lawrence
After the Sicilian proposed, I ordered a glass of wine. I waited for the AA police to slap the glass from my hand, to make a citizen’s arrest. I waited for lightning and thunder and my higher power to speak, but nothing happened. I looked at the waiter. “Help me,” I thought. The glass was set in front of me.
“I thought you didn’t drink.”
“I won’t marry you unless you let me drink.”
And so, I drank. It seemed inevitable. It tasted insignificant. I did not get drunk. But the next time, I drank more, and my brain remembered how much better it felt to shut down. I drank with some degree of control because getting married was on the menu, and if the Sicilian knew the sad heart of his future bride, he might panic. I drank and flashed my diamond at work. I took a brief trip to Dublin and announced I was no longer an alcoholic. I got very, very drunk with Gabrielle, and she asked me if I loved my future husband.
“No. But it doesn’t matter. I have a diamond ring. I want to get married.”
“And then?” Her forehead was lined with worry.
“Then I’ll kill myself.”
“Molly! You mustn’t.”
No, I must because then my mother will finally believe how terrible I felt.
I decided my way out was bridal. Although I wasn’t willing to ask the Sicilian to marry me, it wasn’t hard to get him to propose. I had rearranged the furniture in his apartment, helped him hang some pictures, and we trolled a few flea markets to introduce the idea that someone lived in his place. Nesting was an act, but I had no other role. I started buying bridal magazines, bringing them to work, and tearing out pictures of dresses.
Weddings had never been a thing in my family. My parents eloped at twenty, got married in New Hampshire, and had no money. Both my sisters got married without telling anyone. Brigid married Andrea and called to tell my father while my mother was out of town teaching. He came to take me to a play at Rutgers and asked me to come home and break the news to my mother because no one knew anything about her husband except he was Italian, spoke very fast, and was hard to understand. Also, he was a photographer.
photo by Diego San
I refused. I went to my then boyfriend’s house and cried because she had gotten married without telling anyone. A week later, my sister called my mother and thanked her for accepting the marriage. But the thing was, no one had told my mom, who then got on the phone and called a bunch of shrinks to see if the marriage could be annulled. After a while, it all quieted down. Andrea called me and said with a thick Italian accent, “I love your sister.” My mother arranged for a post-wedding party during which I, drunk as usual, informed a number of people it was a green card wedding. Possibly another reason for my sister to dislike me.
I would have nothing to do with such a lack of bridal vanity. While I had no interest in Barbies or dress-up, the idea of demanding a wedding appealed to some part of me that is hard to admit was still alive despite my sister’s death. I wanted revenge for the lack of ceremony in my family’s life, the unwrapped presents, the absence of my mother at various significant moments in my life, and the lack of a place for my sister’s ashes. Thus, she purchased the Martha Stewart wedding book and modeled my nuptials on Stewart’s uber perfect model of a wedding to a man I didn’t love. We ordered an expensive cake, flowers, and a tent.
We were married by the former mayor of Princeton, Barbara Sigmund, Cokie Roberts’ sister and daughter of Hale Boggs, whose plane was lost over Alaska and whose wife, Lindy Boggs, took over his seat in Congress. Barbara had lost an eye to cancer and wore eye patches to match her outfits. My parents adored her, and she kept the ceremony brief and civil.
Hurricane Gloria ranked as the thirteenth costliest and the sixteenth most intense hurricane at the time of US landfall this century. Gloria first passed over Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, on September 27th as a category three storm. Moving at more than thirty miles per hour, it made landfall again over southern Long Island, New York, as a category two storm. Economic losses were estimated at nine hundred million dollars. Our wedding took place the following day. My father and I went outside during the worst part and held down the tent pitched in our backyard.
“You don’t have to do this,” my father yelled over the wind.
“What about the tent?” I screamed back. “It will blow away.”
“I meant get married,” he screamed. “Don’t get married.”
“I have to,” I screamed back. “There’s nothing else.”
The next day was stunningly beautiful, so clean and clear it felt like a huge wind God had flown across New Jersey with cheeks puffed out, blowing away all the stale air and dust. Some people could not make the wedding because of the storm, but his strange, unhappy family appeared on time and skulked around the backyard.
Radiant in the skintight Betsey Johnson dress I had chosen to marry in, I was sitting on the closed toilet chugging a bottle of champagne when my sister Brigid came in to put on lipstick. “You can still change your mind,” she said. “Maybe you should.”
I was touched. It was rare for Brigid to act like she cared what happened to me. Still, I was determined. “If I climbed a ladder to a fifty foot diving platform and saw the pool was empty when I looked down, I’d still jump.” She looked sorry, but we weren’t those kinds of sisters.
The pictures from that day are exquisite. I look radiant, the Betsey Johnson dress adorably Bohemian, people eating and laughing, seemingly a joyous occasion. The aftermath of the hurricane blew away all the clouds and stale air. But the bride really should have worn black. He had nothing to offer but untapped violence and his own sense that the world had badly fucked him over. We both needed to be taken away in strait jackets,
Instead, we went to Eleuthera. I sat in the bar at the Newark Airport Ramada Inn wearing my wedding dress, explaining to the bartender that I had just married someone I didn’t love.
“Whattya gonna do then?” he asked, looking barely interested. “Annul?”
“Get him to kill me,” I drained my wine glass and nodded for another. “It can’t be that hard. I’m really awful when I drink.”
“Maybe just get divorced,” suggested the bartender. A woman next to me looked horrified.
I shook my head. “His family’s Catholic,” I said. “It has to be murder.”
“What about the honeymoon?” he asked.
“Eleuthera,” I said. “It’s one of the out islands in the Caribbean.”
The bartender nodded. “It’s nice to go to the ocean,” he said. “Maybe you’ll feel different.”
I slid off the barstool, holding my white pumps in my hand.
My memory of our honeymoon is filled with blanks. There was a fight on the second or third day when I drank a bottle of wine, looked at the Sicilian, and said, “I don’t love you. I just miss my sister.”
It wasn’t really his fault that we were married, but I hated him. I woke up the next morning with fingerprint-shaped bruises encircling my neck, one eye black. The room was trashed. Hungover, we decided to take a hike and a swim. My idea was to leave the path and bushwhack towards the blue water. There was volcanic rock around the inlet, and both our legs were scratched and bleeding. After I jumped in I noticed a school of small fish whirling around in a frenzy, swimming up to the edge, attempting to hide. I felt the presence of something wild and dangerous and found a patch of smooth rock so I could pull myself out of the water. Looking into the blue, there was stillness, and then I noticed the shadow of something substantial, probably lured by our bloody legs.
The Sicilian was close to the edge of the inlet when I trilled, “Hey, honey, there’s something in there with you.” There must have been a note of panic in my voice because he scrambled out despite the jagged rocks. It was a hammerhead shark, moving swiftly through the water. We returned to our hotel and confided in the bartender, who looked annoyed. “Oh no,” she presented us with a free rum punch. “It must have been a sea turtle.” That was no sea turtle.
Lying in bed, I realized I regretted warning him about the shark. What sort of person would wish a shark attack on anyone? I got out of bed, took a bottle of wine with me, and then walked out into the night. Grieving sober had been terrible, but drinking and trying to honor the memory of my sister was nearly impossible. I felt poisoned and wretched and guilty and ashamed, emotions I had eliminated by getting sober. Now, I just wanted to be drunk. The eighteen months I had experienced without alcohol seemed like a dream. I woke up wanting to drink, I spent my waking hours wanting to drink, and I went to bed most nights in a blackout.
My promise to Catherine, the weight I carried of Cindy’s hopes were not enough to keep me from drinking until the screen went black until words fell from my lips that were cruel and truthful; I do not love him; I do not love anyone; I want to die; I miss my sister. I have traveled this path before and recognize I am moving further and further away from what is redeemable, what can be recovered. I drank enough for several people and stayed completely conscious, I drank a single glass of wine, and my words slurred. The mornings arrived as flat white light, regret, remorse, and recollections flashed like a slideshow of misery in my brain. One day, I imagined a child full of spirit and goodness, witnessing this incredible waste of life, this idiotic dialogue. I am full of shame and remorse.
On the last night of our honeymoon, we drank a bottle of vodka, and I blacked out. Goats on the runway delayed our tiny plane, so we sat in the heat for over an hour. Finally, a small child was commandeered to herd them away. When we finally landed in Miami, we had a three-hour layover. It was during the World Series, and in each corner of the airport, a small group of men, airport workers, were watching a portable television. I know that because I had alcohol poisoning and was running from one end of the airport to the other to throw up. Thus began our married life. Our Hassidic neighbors treated us as invisible. Ignored in the hallways, lobby, the streets, and local stores, our screaming public arguments were also ignored.
He never put his hands on me in front of other people. The walls of the apartment were marked by fists and indentations in the plaster as a result of the Sicilian‘s tantrums. For the first time in my life, I threw things, but my aim was terrible, and throwing things was childish and awful. Even drunk, I was embarrassed by us, by our lack of maturity and ideas. He left his job and started to work for a Dutch cookie company owned by a friend of my parents. His salary was based on commissions, and as we continued to flail around breaking things and hurting each other, he stopped going to work, and I ended up working for my old lover, the linen manufacturer.
When we were almost out of money, I called the linen manufacturer to let him know I needed a job. He hired me to write a manual for his buyers on the embroidered products he sold. Although I was continuously hungover, I always made it to work, riding the D train for an hour from Flatbush. My brain kept clicking through possible escape plans, but nothing seemed acceptable. I didn’t want my parents to know the sordid mess I was in. I didn’t want them to suffer anymore. Taking the job with my ex-boyfriend was humiliating, but oddly, I saw he actually cared for me more than I had understood. I wasn’t skinny anymore and so his attention was redirected towards some kind of professional relationship. At times, I felt him watching me, bewildered and sorry. More like a hopeful mentor than a former lover.
The Sicilian met the linen manufacturer on the street one day when he picked me up at work. I no longer went to the gym, saw my friends, or spoke to anyone. We lived an hour out of Manhattan and no one had our phone number. I knew enough about battered women to recognize the profile was nearly complete. The linen manufacturer was in an expensive suit about to get into his car. My husband was dressed in skinny jeans, a black t-shirt, a leather jacket, and pointy black boots. They smiled, their teeth showing, then shook hands and sized each other up. I had been vague with the Sicilian; I’d said I’d briefly dated the linen manufacturer but never slept with him. But they signaled one another somehow, my husband telling my lover he owned me, my lover telling my husband he’d been there. As we rode back to Flatbush, I tried to calculate how much liquor there was in the house so I could be drunk enough to not care about the screaming, the threats, and the physical violence that was sure to follow.
The following Monday, I rode the freight elevator with two warehouse men who had worked with the linen manufacturer since he started the business. They were discussing the linen manufacturer’s wife, who had chosen an expensive Italian tile for their bathroom. “You mean his ex-wife.”
“They aren’t divorced. They just renovated their house on the Upper East Side.”
Mildred wasn’t in yet, but I saw a light in his office. I knocked.
“Come in.” He looked up and raised his eyebrows. “You’re early,” he said.
“You’re married. You were always married. You lied to me.”
“Yes. I’m sorry.”
“How could you do that?”
“I wanted you.”
“That’s a terrible excuse. I was broken.”
“You never would have let me help you.” He said. “I wanted to help you. And I wanted you.”
I turned towards the door.
“What are you doing with your life?”
I turned back to face him. “You wanted me?”
“Would you have slept with me if you knew?”
I shook my head.
“You need to get a divorce. That guy’s a loser.”
“It’s none of your business. I know what I need to do.”
He came around to the front of his desk. “Listen, you have so much to offer. I’m worried about you. You don’t look good.”
“I was never going to stay that thin.”
“That’s not what I mean. Even when you were so sad, there was a light in your eyes, a beautiful, strong light. He’s put it out, Molly.”
“I don’t care. Anyway, maybe you put it out.”
He shook his head. “Are you afraid of him?”
“Why?”
“Mildred told me you had bruises. Is he hurting you?”
I could tell him. I could tell him, and he would help me. But then, I would have to stop drinking again, which seemed impossible. He was married, and I was married, and if I had the courage, I would throw myself in front of a train. Except that was a terrible thing to do to so many other people, commuters, the train driver, the people who had to scrape you off the tracks. My parents.
“No. And you can’t fire me now. If you fire me, I’ll tell your wife.”
He shook his head. “Do you need money?”
Of course, we needed money. My husband had stopped working, we spent a fortune on alcohol, even though the rent was minimal, and we were broke. “No. Just don’t fire me.”
After the fights, beatings, cruel words, and drinking, there would be a lull, kindness, quiet, presents. The Sicilian followed the pattern my father established: anger, violence, remorse, regret, and shopping for something to show how sorry he was. As a child, I had gone with my father to help him “make mommy feel better.” We went to Bamberger’s, and I would suggest scarves or a necklace, anything to soothe the bruises. Now, I was married to a man who came home with expensive things, things we couldn’t afford, offerings to his battered wife. I was a battered wife who feared yet another man. Who lived in a Hasidic ghetto with women who had shaved their heads and wore wigs.
Some mornings, I rode the elevator with a woman and a little girl in a stroller. She wore a head covering and a wig. The child had huge brown eyes and stared at me despite her mother’s repeated murmurs to “stop staring.” I didn’t try to speak to her since I had been rebuffed or ignored by the others in the building, but one Tuesday, everything changed.
The night before the Sicilian had smashed my ceramics, all the art I’d made in college, bowls, and several mugs, clumsy but showing some talent. I had tried to take the last bowl from him, one glazed an intense, mossy green, I used to eat all my meals from that bowl in happier days and so little mattered to me at that point, I just wanted that bowl to survive. There was broken pottery all over the floor, and when I tried to grab it from him, he pushed me hard. I hit my face on the edge of the door and then fell and cut myself. A few moments later, all the shards were picked up; he was putting a bandage on my cut arm and a cold cloth where I had hit my face. I hated him more in the aftermath when he spoke with such compassion and sorrow.
Anyway, there I was on that elevator on a Tuesday morning, trying to avoid the gaze of the young Hasidic mother, when I felt a cool, soft hand touch my cheek. She was close to me, and she unwrapped her scarf to show me the marks around her neck, to share with me she, too, was living with a violent man. Neither of us spoke. It was enough to be seen, acknowledged as a victim, and let that tiny wedge of light and sisterhood into the dark rooms we lived in. I was ashamed, and it felt like she understood. I had no cultural excuse for ending up with the Sicilian. Her orthodox religion told her she had to obey her husband, she couldn’t swim with men, and she was unclean when she had her period. The school she attended didn’t believe in college for women; her life was full of restrictions and laws, while her single purpose, according to the sect, was to have children and serve her husband, who beat her.
Battered women exist in a vacuum usually, a necessary lack of information or choices, so they remain intimidated and afraid, too afraid to leave their abusers. I had read the literature when I worked at the shelter in East Brunswick. I had watched the women who came through those doors, their eyes on the ground, hating themselves, afraid and angry. Swearing to myself that I would never allow anyone to hurt me, as those women had been hurt, I had failed miserably. My parents might have been selfish, but they encouraged me to be independent and daring. They valued education and modeled courage and ambition for their daughters. My mother was a feminist and a fighter who had allowed my father’s drinking to hurt her, but their marriage, despite everything, was a marriage of equals and best friends. They might have been judgmental and demanding, but they never hit us.
The elevator reached the lobby, and my Hasidic doppelganger pushed the stroller out first, but then she turned around, looked into my eyes, and smiled. She touched the place on her face where I had been hurt, pulled up her scarf to cover her wig, and then walked out onto Eastern Parkway. Could this be a message from Catherine, I wondered, sitting in one of the strange chairs that flanked the empty desk facing the street outside our building? Was my sister still protecting me, unable to rest because her fucked up little sister was still in trouble?
A week later, we had another fight, a very bad one. Drunk, coatless, and in a semi-blackout, I left the apartment and somehow made my way to a part of Brooklyn that I didn’t recognize and would not visit in full daylight. The next thing I remembered was sitting in a room with a group of people, well, pimps and hookers. Someone was shooting up in the corner. Apparently, a pimp had befriended me, and now I was being introduced to his stable. “I gotta take care of business,” this pimp opened the door. ‘Then I’ll come back for you.”
“I’ll come back for you.” That sentence was terrifying, woke me up, sobered me up, and sent me out of that motel room and running towards Eastern Parkway. Whatever happened to me, I didn’t want to be part of a stable of prostitutes in Bedford Stuyvesant, or whatever burned-out slum I had managed to find myself in at two o’clock in the morning.
I was the smart girl who sat in front, had always read the assigned book, and was full of questions, ideas, and thoughts. I had been my mother’s “Lambie Pie,” Catherine’s “Mouse,” and my father’s novel reader. I was a writer, an actress, and a soccer player, and I would be a mom. I didn’t want to ever sleep with another stranger. I wanted my life to mean something. Somehow, I managed to walk home, and the next morning, I stood in the shower and considered leaving the Sicilian, returning to AA, and starting all over again. I had bruises up and down my arms, across my midsection, and some hidden by my hair. I had bags, jewelry, and books that represented remorse, a pile of untouched guilt presents.
During the previous months, I reached out to two people. One was my ex-best friend from high school who had good reasons not to be friends anymore. She had been my enabler in high school, driving me home and making sure I didn’t get in trouble when we were drunk. I had managed to inspire love in a long-time crush of hers, which wasn’t exactly my fault but we had too much history and I failed her too many times. I had run out of the house and into the subway, trying to find a place to go. When I called her, she sounded cold and distant. She lived in Hoboken in a loft her parent’s money had made possible.
“What’s wrong?” Her voice was flat.
“He’s beating me.”
There was a long silence. It was the first time I’d told anyone what was happening.
“I have people here.”
“I don’t know where to go.”
“You married him.”
I’m not sure who hung up first.
The only other person I’d contacted was my sister Brigid. She had made it clear from the time Catherine had died she didn’t like me. I’d called her a month after the wedding and asked if I could come over. I already knew I had made a terrible mistake.
“Yes. But you can’t tell me anything. I don’t want to know anything. You can come here, but you can’t talk.”
Sadly, I went. After a few hours, I went home. If the Sicilian broke my neck, it would be preferable to my sister’s silence.
I realized the only person who could help me was myself. I had to be brave enough to suggest we end the marriage. Previously I had either disappeared from relationships or behaved so badly the person left me or in the case of my first boyfriend, freshman year I had begun the evening dating one boy and woke up the next morning the girlfriend of his roommate. Clearly I wasn’t good at mature, coherent conversations about relationships and why they might not be working. I threw a clog at the linen manufacturer and had a nervous breakdown with the plumber. I split with the most serious love of my life by sleeping with his best friend and basically managed to find a number of ways to make things impossible and awful. Sometimes I left the country or the city or I moved without a forwarding address. My father was right to call me “The Bolter.”
Since the Sicilian was no longer working, he was able to meet me for lunch. I suggested he come into Manhattan, and we’d have lunch together. He showed up at the place with a bouquet of flowers we couldn’t afford and after the bus boy gave us water I took his hand and said something like, “Can we talk about how badly things are going? I think we should separate.”
Maybe it was too abrupt but he seemed to hear me and he sat for a moment before he stood up and threw the table, a round wooden two-top across the restaurant, glasses breaking, water spilling, the table next to us hit by the chair he knocked over and then he ran away; like someone who had snatched a purse or someone being chased by very bad men. I was sitting in front of empty space with an entire restaurant staring at me. I stood up.
“I’m so sorry.” I walked out on the street.
He had disappeared. I went back to work and when I got off the elevator Mildred was standing there.
“Your husband was just here. He’s crazy.”
The Sicilian had gone into my office, ripped down my pictures, went in the linen manufacturer’s office but he was on a trip to China and so there was no one to fight with.
“I’m so sorry.” If I lost this job, we couldn’t pay our rent.
“You need to leave that jackass,” Mildred never swore.
“Yes. I’m sorry.”
At the end of the day, I went back to Brooklyn. I knew how sad and stupid this was, but aside from my parents, there was no one to call. As usual, the Sicilian was contrite and while I didn’t want to be anywhere near him, my acting training was invaluable. I acted as if I understood how hard it was for him to be unemployed, how well I realized accepting help from his father who subsidized our rent was demeaning and that I too shared his dream of living in California and opening a leather store.
Meanwhile, I tried to plan but Christmas was coming with all of its attendant misery; my missing sister, my grieving family, my horrible marriage, my father’s pattern of ruining things by drinking too much and saying terrible things, and my mother’s denial. I had fantasies of allowing myself to be run over but surviving so I could spend the holiday in the hospital. It wasn’t so much I’d stopped wishing to die, but more a matter of timing. It seemed crucial to sort out the chaos of my current life before I went gently, and willingly, into that good night. Also, I was angry; very, very angry. My anger had always manifested itself with tears. My anger so terrified me I had drank until I was able to rage, a fruitless exercise because no one cares about an angry drunk.
—Molly Moynahan, author and writing coach