The Wedding Guest
At Le Central (“the affordable French restaurant”), my sister and I are discussing the vagaries of love and friendship; I’ve fallen hard for a Vietnamese girl who is currently angry with me– she and I are in the middle of our first terrible disagreement; it’ll be two weeks before she can bring herself to speak to me again. My sister orders us a couple of glasses of Merlot, and then she asks me if I’ll give her away at her wedding.
Giving away the bride is usually reserved for the bride’s father to do at the beginning of the ceremony; he walks his daughter up the aisle as music plays, and hands her off to the groom. My sister is a year older than me; our father died when we were very young. Of my four siblings, she’s always been the one I’m closest to.
Over the past twenty years I’d managed to avoid nearly every major family reunion that’s involved our many aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces and nephews, and this wedding promises to be chromosome-a-palooza, exactly the kind of thing I’ve found ways to skip out of, but I do love my sister and there’s no way I’m going to refuse her.
The ceremony is going to take place in the mountains, in a beautiful chapel near my sister’s new home. At the wedding rehearsal, the wedding planner takes us through the formal steps of what we’ll do once the music starts, beginning with our entrance at the back of the chapel, our slow advance up the aisle towards the altar, and finally at the front of the big stone room, where the wedding planner tells me I can either kiss my sister on the cheek or grasp her hand before leaving her at the altar to join my immediate family in the front row pew. Later, in private, I tell my sister that a choreographed kiss on the cheek sounds awkward at best, and I’ll be opting for the grasped hand instead…
Just as I’m falling asleep that same night, my Vietnamese friend calls late, as she tends to do– it’s the first time in two weeks that I’ve heard her voice, and the sweet forgiveness of it grants me ample peace of mind to drift off once the phone has been cradled.
My sister’s wedding day is a clear and bright thirteenth of September; she’s mythically beautiful in her white gown; I’m sporting a rented polyester tuxedo and black plastic shoes. We wait just outside the chapel behind closed doors for the music to begin, our arms gently linked together. The organ’s song bursts forth all at once, the doors open up, and every relative I’ve managed to avoid for the past twenty years stands up as one entity and turns to face us; a horde of cousins, aunts, and uncles twisting mechanically towards us like an hallucination of a music box in a bad fever dream. The organ music is deafening, and as we step forward, my body douses itself with fight or flight amounts of adrenaline; I have some idea of the expression on my face as I grimly stalk forward– all I lack is a machete to cut the jungle grass I’m trying to navigate my sister through; my eyes lock on one or two aunts, uncles, or cousins with a joyless confrontation that says, just try and stop us…
It seems a long time before my sister and I finally stand next to the man she’ll marry, facing the minister who asks in sepulchral tones, “Who gives this woman to be this man’s bride?”
“I do, and my family,” I answer, in darker tones than I had at the rehearsal.
And then it’s quiet as snow in the big cathedral as I unlock my arm from my sister’s arm– this girl who used to be mistaken for my twin when we were younger and looked so much alike– and suddenly it’s no longer metaphor but literal truth, this business of giving away the bride; I’m actually handing her over to begin her life as this man’s partner…
Without thinking about it, I lean over and kiss her on the cheek; the sound of it bounces off the peculiar acoustics of the big stone room like a tiny slap, the loudest kiss of all time; we smile at each other and I walk away from her to sit down next to my mother in the front row pew.
The light is clean and all encompassing from the big windows behind the minister as the ceremony commences; I become aware of a tremor in my body which emanates from deep inside of my bones. It’s getting worse; a violent shaking like I’ve never felt before, strong enough to travel into the wood of the bench we’re sitting on; strong enough to be visibly evident to anyone who would look my way…
Good golly, I can’t stop it no matter how I try– try to relax, try to hold still, the tremor just gets worse– will I actually explode? Will I burst into flames? Will the minister stop the ceremony long enough to inquire as to whether I could please settle down over here…?
I close my eyes, and there’s my Vietnamese friend, unbidden and dressed in a gown of white, her raven-black hair laced with baby’s breath flowers, beaming the way she does with that inner light, and my body becalms itself at once, and the shaking stops, and I continue to gaze at the image of my friend until I know I’m alright. I’ll paint and draw this face of hers many times in the coming years, but I’ll never even try to elucidate this particular vision of her, because my private need for it is somehow too terrible and too urgent for me to limit it within paint…
I open my eyes and watch as my sister marries this good man in this beautiful chapel in the mountains where her family and friends have gathered to witness this moment of enormity in the course of her life.
In the years that follow, my sister’s marriage remains strong; I’ve attended my Vietnamese friend’s wedding to another good man– she wears a red gown as per her family’s own bridal tradition. The tremor that had overtaken me is something I haven’t experienced again, but it’s the memory of its cessation– the gigantic power of my love for my friend– that I remember most clearly, and the sheer relief of having kept the promise to my sister that I would help see her through anything that the day might require…
Nov 2, 2009
