1984, North Queensland, Australia

By Jane Williams

She never wanted a wedding dress. Not in any traditional sense. But here it is, peeking out from behind the backs of her soon-to-be mother- and sister-in-law like a child who can’t wait to be found in a game of hide and seek.

Lacy. Off the shoulder. Full tulle skirt. White. Wedding dress. Something to be passed down from mother to daughter. A keep-sake. It will mean something, they tell her, in years to come. She feels the weight of this symbolism and as in a dream tries to run from it but cannot. This must be what the magazines call ‘nerves,’ she tells herself.

It isn’t a shotgun wedding. No matter what people say. She asked him before she knew she was pregnant. He sucked in his breath in mock hurt. “Hey wait a minute, that’s not how it’s supposed to go.” Later that night, when he proposed the question, she feigned surprise and said “yes” and they both laughed because this is what it meant to be happy.

She sits in a high-backed kitchen chair while over her own face the face of the bride is drawn, then colored in with tropical shades reflecting that part of the country. Her hair is brushed, pulled back and sculptured into a small bun at the back of her head. It is too tight but the discomfort gives her something else to concentrate on so she says nothing.

Her fingernails are painted peach. Her lips are painted strawberry. What will she will look like center stage? Will the memory of the applause and held breaths be enough to live off and if so, for how long? She has the overwhelming feeling that she has landed the lead role in a play she knows nothing about. She cannot feel the ground beneath her and wonders if this is what is meant by cold feet but doesn’t think so.

The wedding car is a golden Valiant as shiny as their matching, two-for-the-price-of-one wedding rings. Valiant. Harley. Steed. Batmobile. It all amounts to the same thing. Rescue from one kind of life and propulsion into another. She senses this but to no great end. She will be an old woman before she has found the words to describe her self, her true self, and by then she will be someone else entirely.

The wedding car belongs to an uncle who plays bocce and drinks grappa. Whose accent makes her thinks of fish and chip shops. Years later the memory of the accent will remind her of olive groves and ironically of the garden of Eden.

The wedding does not take place in a church because of the baby. She hasn’t told her parents about the baby, only about the wedding, to which they have been invited but will not attend. Perhaps they have already guessed about the baby. In any case it is not a good time for them to leave the family business. Her mother says this but she suspects the words are her father’s. She wonders how long she will be in disgrace. She knows they will never speak of it after the fact.

A few weeks before the wedding a black horseshoe arrives in the mail. For Luck. In the card between the congratulatory lines she reads the prayers she knows will be offered up on her behalf from now on. Let him be good to her. Let the children be healthy.

Let the marriage work.

Against a backdrop of mango trees people say they look like the perfect postcard couple. She looks like a china doll (which she isn’t) and he looks like a boy in a suit (which he is).

The reception is held in the local football hall. Everywhere streamers and music and wine and beer. There is an abundance of sweet and sour prawns made by the groom’s mother’s 12 brothers and sisters.

When the bride churns the air in front of her face with her hand to emphasize some point, the one-size-too-big zircon engagement ring slides around her finger and makes her think of a ring from a gumball machine. Was it so wrong to trade in the dodgey dole check for a little bit of respectability?

Now and then she stops everything, fork midway to her mouth, eyes glazed over, and is suddenly, momentarily somewhere else. Perhaps she is back in the two-man tent they called home when they were runaways from the rest of the world. When they lived off two-minutes noodles and each other. When she read aloud from Wuthering Heights and he sang Johnny Cash’s “Long Black Veil” as a lullaby.

In this way she passes through the reception party, slipping in and out of daydreams. Sometimes she gets confused and thinks that it is only in the daydream that she is a married woman and a mother-to-be.

Where did the money came from? For the dress and for the prawns? This gambling, shoe string household that had all but adopted her for the sake of their son and the growing image of their first grandchild. How many of them put themselves in debt for this? In a gesture of belonging she allows an uncle to tuck money down the front of her dress.

Years later the photo she will always refer to, to prove how young they were, how different, is the one that shows the groom with a rare, open-mouthed smile, revealing teeth gone bad from neglect. It shows also the small silver cross around his neck. The cross she’d persuaded him to trade his shark tooth in for.

And she’ll wonder just for a moment if things could have been different. More honest. But no matter how she re-invents it there will always be a time when she sells the wedding dress for the price of a Greyhound bus ticket. When she is asking her mother how you ever know if you’ve found the right one and her mother is saying, “You don’t, you don’t ever know.”

But for now the whole world shimmers like a first date and they are stepping out, china doll and boy in suit, husband and wife, Superman and Lois Lane. Protected and invincible.

Jane Williams is a poet and short story writer living in Tasmania, Australia. She is the author of two poetry collections and one short story collection. More information can be found at www.janewilliams.wordpress.com.

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Friday, April 27th, 2007 | Email This Post

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