closer, his great-grandmother’s diamond makes glimmering stars on the wall and I notice him turning it nervously in his hands. It could be anything, really, a rubber band, a Ring Pop, I don’t care, I just want to wear it. He tells me that he loves me again and his eyes fill with tears.
“Ruthie, will you marry me?”
I can hardly speak but I say enough of a yes. We hold each other and my cheek settles in its favorite place against him. We let Ray sing us another song and we rock back and forth, not really dancing, just hanging on while the music carries us for three minutes.
We barely know each other, we barely know ourselves, but we make new promises to erase the ones that we broke. After we make them, we feel a wonderful relief that we don’t talk about and pretend isn’t there. I call my parents, who have been waiting by the phone, and Jack calls his. I pick out a new dress and we go to a restaurant that serves cheese plates and champagne, and as we spread buttery slabs of Brie onto hunks of bread, faces bathed in candlelight, we build a life together with our words. I dream up the little house we will buy and the dog that will teach us how to be parents; Jack talks about seeing the world together and we commit to only buying real Christmas trees. We play a little game of house.
That night, I fall asleep in Caroline’s bed and he sleeps in mine. We’re pretending to be virgins again, we’re course correcting even though we’re engaged. I look up at the ceiling and think about picket fences and Christmas trees and babies and wonder if marrying someone is just playing a game of house that lasts forever. The heaviness that Jack knows finds me. I’m scared and lonely, even though I’ll never be alone again. Maybe it’s always trying to do the right thing, or growing up. Maybe it’s the hormones left over from the Plan B. I don’t think it has anything to do with the weather.
7 Southern Baptist Romance
There is a church down the road from my family’s farm. Only about two handfuls of people can fit inside, and once a month, they have a Sunday service at 6:30 a.m. that my mom loves. This quiet, humble, gunmetal-gray building tucked up in the trees off Old Laurel Hill Road is where I become Jack’s wife. This is where we begin.
When I was a little girl, I wanted to invite a thousand people to my wedding; I wanted two thousand eyeballs glued to me all day long and a horse and a carriage and a sheet cake from Baskin-Robbins as big as a dog bed. I wanted to hear a thousand gasps at the same time when I walked into the church and my special song started to play. During Communion, I practiced what it would be like, plucking up the edges of my church dress and walking slowly between the pews toward my cracker and wine. Right, stop. Left, stop. Right, stop. Left, stop. The pastor smiled at me and I smiled back. He was my handsome husband in this game, even though he looked a bit like a tree frog. When I got back home, I changed into my shiniest leotard for the big party that came after the procession and I slow danced by myself, arms straight out, resting on a pair of invisible shoulders. The spotted dogs watched me sway and I serenaded them with Madonna’s “Crazy for You.” It reverberated through the forest and made the birds fly away. To be watched is to be wanted and to be wanted is to be loved. I closed my eyes and daydreamed it, the dress, the dancing, the desire, as hard as I possibly could.
When I actually do get married, there are no horses or ice-cream cakes. There is no Madonna. Only a couple of dozen people are invited to behold me when I walk down the aisle, and the only set of eyeballs I care about belongs to the shivery, nervous man who waits for me at the end of it. Little Ruthie would be bored; she would wrinkle her nose at the smell of the great-granddaddy chapel, the old songbooks, and the soft, rotten wood. She wouldn’t understand the quiet sacredness of it all, but she doesn’t have a say. Little Ruthie doesn’t cross this threshold with me.
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