Bad wedding

A terrified woman marries a murderer.

Whatever became of the wildwood flower?

In one of his most compelling songs, Gates of Eden, Bob Dylan wrote: "At dawn my lover comes to me/and/tells me of her dreams/with no attempt to shovel the glimpse/into the ditch of what each one means."

Not at dawn, but when I first get up, I find my mate sitting in his Lazy Boy reading the paper, listening to the radio and drinking coffee. I add one more activity to his multiple roster: listening to my dreams.

Not every morning, but just when I have had an unusually vivid one, one that stays with me for a while. This one is already dissolving like frost into the winter air.

I was about 20 years old. I wasn't "I", but this slender, pale wildwood flower of a girl, as if I were barefoot except I couldn't tell if I was barefoot or not. I was wearing a dress like Pippa Middleton's at Kate and Wills's wedding, very close-fitting white satin. My hair was streaming down my back, long and brown and straight and completely unstyled. (I have never looked even remotely like that in my life.) Anyway, I was in a church and was about to be married. I didn't recognize the church at all, or any of the people, though my mother was supposed to be there and I even had dealings with her but didn't know it, didn't recognize her. I had the feeling she might have been one of the people who tried to fuss with my hair.

At one point I even asked someone if the sides shouldn't be pulled up at the back in a ribbon or a rose, and someone else said, "You mean up? Please don't put it up, it looks so pretty that way," but I worried it would look a little too informal or even make me look uneducated and "backwoods". I only recognized one guest, my former English professor from 1991 who kept bustling around very urgently in a suit and tie, as if he was supposed to be doing something. The minister (a youngish guy with a lot of tousled brown hair, whom I had never seen before) kept getting up and blabbing to the congregation about things that I don't remember now.

At one point a woman ripped open buttons on the neckline of my dress (which went all the way up to my chin), leaving the front sprung wide open, and I thought of the man's collar in that Bugs Bunny cartoon, the tenor, when he couldn't stop singing. Then she said, "Ahhh, that looks better," though I worried it didn't look good at all and would look unkempt and out of control, but I couldn't check it because there were no mirrors in the place at all. All the way through this dream I kept hearing the music on this video, which I recently heard on an old Star Trek, a favorite episode called Shore Leave in which the crew of the Enterprise was on a planet where all your thoughts immediately materialized and became real.

There were all sorts of things, a knight, Don Juan, a tiger, Finnegan (asshole from Kirk's Academy days), but suddenly there appears Kirk's old girlfriend Ruth, dressed like an Athenian goddess and so heavily made up (like all Star Trek babes, probably for the grainy b & w TVs of the time) she could barely keep her eyes open. She looked like his date for the Academy grad party or something. Yes, this music came on and from the beginning I loved it, not for its sweetness but for the almost agonizing dissonance in the strings that underlay the innocent flute melody. Anyway, as I was preparing to get married, three girls I vaguely remembered from high school (actually, I only remembered one of them, Janet, who always beat the hell out of me in grades and getting awards) pulled up chairs at the front of the congregation and sat in a sort of triangle (not facing everyone) and began to discuss contract work and contractual obligations and how it was important to know exactly what you were signing.

At this point I stretched out between two chairs in my Pippa Middleton white satin wedding gown and took a nap, thinking I would look more refreshed for the ceremony. The three girls (only about 15) were giving a sort of seminar and no one thought it was unusual. Then I began to worry about the vows, which I had had nothing to do with. I was afraid the minister, who seemed somewhat fundamentalist, would say "love, honor and obey", and I didn't want the "obey" in there, I wanted "love, honor and cherish", but didn't know how to change this because I seemed to have absolutely no control over anything that was happening that day. In fact I seemed to be the least important person in the place, almost as if I were invisible or a walking ghost.

It was not until after I woke up and analyzed this dream that I realized the strangest detail of all: there was NO GROOM - no one, nothing! He was just a cipher, a non-entity. I did not even think about this, did not wonder about it, nor did anyone else. It did not matter at all who I married, in fact it was clear I was not marrying anyone. Hmmm, what else? In a side room, before the ceremony started, a few people I sort of knew from my old church were watching a video on a large flat-screen TV, a movie featuring dangerous mountain climbing. I watched it for a few minutes, then realized it was getting close to the time of the ceremony, so I said, "Will you pause it for me, please?", so I could watch the rest of the movie after I got married.

That flute music appears throughout the classic Trek series, whenever a particularly fetching young woman appears. It's almost a "fetching young woman" signal. The most poignant isn't the one about Ruth but the episode with Jill Ireland, long dead from breast cancer, who falls agonizingly in love with Spock on that planet with the spores that make you fatuously happy. At the end of it she doesn't just shed a tear, she really weeps, with red face and running nose, and Spock speaks to her as tenderly as a Vulcan can.


Watching these Treks again, they're better than the heartless parodies, though of course most of it is standard '60s action/adventure, and Sulu is particularly amusing in his ongoing romantic advances to Uhura (implying it's more acceptable for a gay Japanese man to romance a black woman). Kirk isn't as bad as you remember. Really, he's not. He only overemotes about 10% of the time. This is not the place for Shakespearean soliloquys (though one of these times I'm going to post his Hamlet from one of the daytime shows of the '60s), so he pretty much sticks to the action/adventure hero mode. But as the series wears on he gains levels of humanity, transcending such hokey lines as "No blah, blah, blah!"

The dynamic between Bones and Spock is brilliant, unique to television. DeForest Kelley has some real moments, especially inThe City on the Edge of Forever, in which he runs around crazed but is still compelling and completely believable. I can see how and why this quirky little series somehow spawned a dynasty. But what does that haunting flute music have to do with getting married to an invisible groom? And if that pale wildwood flower really is me, whatever happened to her?

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

Short fiction: The Bridesmaid

She knew she was supposed to be happy. She was not just a "bridesmaid", but "Maid of Honour". When she thought about it, which she did too often, it was a dumb term, something out of the Middle Ages. Or for the Middle Aged. She was thirty-seven and never married. What a horror, in these times of frantic brides knocking each other over to find the perfect foamy, huge-skirted gown.


She had come close, but only just.  By thirty-seven, if you were straight and even nominally attractive, you'd usually be engaged at least once, maybe twice. And yeah. It had been her turn, sort of. She'd had a different circle of friends then. But not really: it was the same circle, before they all got married. They were "different", all right, but in another way.


But it lasted six months, then he moved away for a promotion, promising to stay in touch. The promotion won out.

Then there were the babies. "If you want one," a "friend" said to her the other day, "you'd better get cracking." She was cracking, all right, but not in the way her friend meant.


What was this, anyway - the Wedding Bell Blues? Whatever happened to feminism and equality and the banishing of suffocating old medieval traditions like the virginal white gown and Daddy "giving you away" (which had connotations she didn't even want to think about)? Marriage was on the way out, was what they said, to be replaced by serial monogamy or open relationships where partners came and went, stopping at "home" only to refuel.


But it didn't go that way. Hardly.

Over and over again, she handed over the prize. Over and over again, she applauded, wept, tried to catch the bouquet (hating herself for even trying to do something so inane) , and generally put her heart out on the railroad tracks to be demolished once again.


Her cherished friends were all on the other side of some sort of barrier, especially the ones who had babies. They were exalted in some way. They spoke another language that excluded her, and she knew it. She remembered introducing some of her friends to their future husbands, and winced. She had actually been the agent for their happiness, giving her own away in great armfuls like so many wilted roses.

New Age thinking would say that she made this situation happen, that she recreated childhood hurts and rejections, and that all she had to do was decide to be different. Then a dozen good-looking, single, employed, non-addicted guys would come stampeding into her life. And it would be different. SHE would wear the golden crown; THEY would applaud and weep.



Except that it would be different for them too, her friends.  They were already married, had babies. Their lives were "solved". Never mind how many of these tenuous unions would fall apart in the coming years (and she knew how many of them probably would).


She was alone. She'd helped them along, given them a boost, supported them, gone to the goddamn bridal showers and played the stupid games, gone to stagettes with greasy muscle-bound gay men prancing around in their underwear. But she couldn't say no, because to be Maid of Honour was an honour. It would be like handing back an award, wouldn't it?

She looked in the mirror, took a big fat red lipstick, drew a red x over her face. What was it Liz Taylor wrote on the mirror with lipstick in that movie, Butterfield 8?  Ah yes: NO SALE.


You see, that's the thing. I'll never get to hand that award back because I'm not even in the running, am I? And if I've helped those nominees, given them a leg-up by lavishly praising their novels in my reviews, helped them line up in the gateway for the top literary prize in this country, I'm not supposed to be bitter or angry, am I? Am I?

Because it wasn't really a bridesmaid thing. Not really. And I'm 57, not 37. I guess I'm just living in my imagination again. What a thing for a writer to do. Unthinkable.


I've been reviewing books for a million years, it seems. Not that I don't enjoy it or find it engaging work. I know what it is to BE reviewed, too. I had almost unanimous positive reviews for my two novels, but unfortunately nothing happened. They were sent back to the publisher almost immediately, and now my account with them is in the red.

No one told me it would be like this, that I would owe my publishers for my glowingly-received, non-selling book. It sounds like the most pathetic thing in the world.


It was an honour (were we speaking of honour?) to review those two books, those two contenders for the Prize, and I wouldn't take back anything I wrote, because it wasn't "praise".  I was just saying what I thought.


And  it's not that I don't want them to be in the running. It's just that I want to be in the running too, before I get too old to stand up. And for some reason, that embarrasses everyone. I'm not supposed to mention it or even think of it, or everyone looks away as if I have done something unspeakably humiliating on the carpet.  I've violated one of those thousand-and-one invisible rules I never caught on to.  I guess it makes me look ungracious.

But I do wonder, because I am human and can't shut up the way I know I am supposed to, when in God's name it gets to be my turn.