My One and Only(48)
I waited, too, for my mother.
See, she’d followed a man, too. My mother, a California girl, had come to Martha’s Vineyard at age twenty-one with some friends, met my father—seven years older, tanned and manly. Legend had it that my mother had been doing a modeling gig in Boston. She and her pals had decided to pop out to the island, and Dad was fixing the roof on the cottage one of the friends rented. He was tall, handsome, quiet—the best of the blue-collar clichés. Mom invited him to a beach party. When her friends left the following week, she decided to stay. A month later, she was pregnant and voila…our family.
As of my wedding day, my mother had been gone for more than eight years. In all that time, I’d received four postcards, all of them in the first year and a half of her desertion. They were all similar…Florida is hot and muggy, lots of orange trees and huge bugs. Hope you’re keeping up the good grades! The second one came from Arizona. Sure is hot here! You should see the way people water their lawns! Don’t they know they live in the desert? The third from St. Louis (Clydesdales, the arch, a baseball game), the fourth from Colorado (bluegrass festival, Rocky Mountains, thin air). None of the postcards had a return address. She signed them all Linda…not Mom.
I guess I hated her, except I missed her so much.
I had no real reason to expect her to show up. And yet, our engagement announcement had run in the paper. Martha’s Vineyard had a small year-round community; if she’d stayed in touch with anyone, she would’ve heard that her only child was getting married. So it wasn’t impossible that she’d come—it was just extremely, extraordinarily unlikely, and yet every time I heard the ferry’s blast, my heart rate tripled.
She didn’t come. That made more sense than her appearing, but it was crushing nonetheless. I don’t know what I would’ve done if she had. Still, in the back of my mind, a little scenario played in which my mother, gone these many years, would come home at last, and in all the excitement and happiness (because it was a fantasy, after all), my wedding would be postponed indefinitely.
Then I’d look over at Nick and see his smile, and shame would blast me in a hot wave, because I did love him so. But as much as I wanted that to be a good feeling, it wasn’t. It was simply terrifying, as if I’d been walking innocently along one day, and a yawning pit opened in front of me. Ever since he’d knelt down on the Brooklyn Bridge, I’d been scrambling back from a crumbling edge, trying to save myself from whatever lurked in that dark hole, quite sure it was nothing good.
Yet the appointed hour arrived, and there I was, putting on a white sheath dress and painful shoes, my hair worn down for once because I knew Nick loved it that way. BeverLee tried hard to be a good mother of the bride, hitting my hair with Jhirmack every time she walked past, fussing over my flowers, my dress. If my mother had been here—if she’d never left—we’d have gotten matching manicures, as we did when I was little. She’d have worn a pale blue silk dress, not the orange polyester that Bev had chosen. She’d have told me that marrying young was the best choice she’d ever made, and she could tell that Nick and I would be just like her and Dad.
Instead, I had BeverLee, chattering constantly, forcefeeding me coffee cake and bemoaning that I’d opted against the dollar dance. While I knew her intentions were good, I’d wanted to tap her with a magic wand and render her silent, stop having her tell me I was “purdier than a new set of snow tires.” How could I be getting married without my mother? How I could I be getting married, period? How was it that I’d let things get so out of hand?
No one else seemed concerned. My father told me Nick was “a good kid” and imagined we’d “do all right.” Nick’s father was beefy and charming and shallow…alas, he was Nick’s best man; Jason was already half in the bag, his hair worn long for Tom Cruise’s Interview with a Vampire look. Christopher, then in high school, flirted with Willa, whom he wouldn’t see again for thirteen years.
Even as I walked down the aisle on Dad’s arm, that little voice in my brain was whispering furiously. You don’t have to do this. This has disaster written all over it. Nick’s face was solemn, almost as if he guessed what I was thinking. He recited his vows in a somber voice, his dark eyes steady, and even then I thought the words almost ridiculously naive. Did anyone believe that vows meant anything anymore? My parents had said the same things to each other. Nick’s parents had also promised till death did them part. Who were Nick and I to believe that our vows would be any more lasting than the breath it took to say them?
Then it was my turn. “I, Harper, take you, Nick…” and suddenly, my eyes were wet, my voice grew husky and I wanted with all my heart for those words to be true. “To have and to hold from this day forth…” We could do this. We could be that little old couple who still reached for each other’s hand. “…all the days of my life.” And I looked into Nick’s gypsy eyes and believed.
After the wedding, we spent a few days in one of those huge sea captains’ houses on North Water Street in Edgartown. It was owned, as are they all, by a fabulously wealthy off-Islander for whom my dad occasionally did some work. He’d generously offered his house for our brief honeymoon, as he wouldn’t come to the island till the Fourth of July. And so, for a few days, Nick and I played house as we were playing grown-ups…we drank wine on the vast back porch, planned our trip for next summer—our true honeymoon, we called it. We made love in a room overlooking the lighthouse, cuddled and watched movies, and for those five days, I believed in happily ever after. For five days, it seemed possible that Nick and I would have a house, children, a life, an old age together. Maybe I was wrong to be so…dubious. I wasn’t.