How to Grow Up (19 page)

Somewhere along the way I began blogging about our attempts to get pregnant, with Dashiell's blessing. I was a little scared to ask. The people I've dated all hate turning up in my stories—but then, I always write about them after the whole romance has crashed and burned. It's easy, sort of, to write about love gone wrong, but more challenging to write about the happy times in a way that doesn't bore the shit out of
you
, let alone your readers. I'd never written about a happy relationship before. I'd never had one! I didn't want Dashiell to feel like I was using her for writing material. She is also a much more private person than I am; I didn't think she'd take kindly to having these most intimate details of her life exposed. But to my surprise, she said yes.

“I'm proud of us,” she said simply, and proudly. And so I began blogging about our fertility misadventures, and the sisterhood of self-impregnated women swelled to include all sorts of women who had tried, failed, and tried again to have a baby. Some were
doing it themselves; some had husbands, or female partners. Some were on fertility diets, drinking fertility shakes and popping fertility supplements; others were downing Clomid in a clinic, getting IUIs at home from a midwife or on a table from a doctor. Some did IVF. Normally, when I wrote for the Internet I avoided the Comments sections, as they were inevitably filled with anonymous, mean character assassinations and the like, and even though you know they are written by sad people with serious emotional problems, it still feels shitty. But these comments were
wonderful
. A chorus of strangers cheering me and Dashiell on, plus sharing their own stories for perspective and comfort,
plus
offering the tips and wisdom they'd gleaned on the way. Most of my friends found children grotesque, so to suddenly have access to a community of women with so much experience, information, and support was incredible.

Because of these women and their stories, I know it is not unusual to have to try and try and try to get pregnant, and I know that regardless of how many disappointments there are, for many women there is a healthy baby at the end of the journey. Dashiell and I have so many options—more of her eggs on ice, and when we run out of those she can perhaps get pregnant (though she'd really, really,
really
rather not). Or we can adopt, or we can say fuck it to the whole thing and go live in Paris for a year. We can start hoarding animals, an alternative to parenthood many of my friends have opted for. It's really hard to say what the future will hold, but even if I never wind up anybody's mother, I will never regret all the years I've spent trying. It's introduced me to this whole other part of the world, the world of babies and the people
who have them. My community has widened, and includes people I wouldn't have gotten to know otherwise. I've learned about how resilient I am—okay, I probably didn't need
more
proof of that, but there is something about struggle and perseverance that makes me feel close to myself. And close to Dashiell. Throughout it all we don't fight or squabble, or let dark moods infect us. We keep it together for one another, and always show love. All I know about our future is that it will be the two of us together, and there will be love—stable, healthy, grown-up love.

Ask Not for Whom the
Wedding Bell Tolls

I
n 2006, my little sister shared some exciting news with me: The handsome, gentle, intelligent man she'd been dating had finally popped the question. I barely had a moment to experience pure, unadulterated happiness for my sister's dream coming true, because swiftly after she made her announcement she issued me the sweetest, most terrifying invitation: “Will you be my maid of honor?” Of course! I shrieked. I am accustomed to shrieking, “Of course!” to anything my sister asks me, because I love her to the core of my heart and there is nothing I would not do for her. I think I even felt a tingle of joy, joy that I, too, would get to wear a special dress (you
know
that I was ill acquainted with weddings if I thought a bridesmaid dress was exciting) and share in my sister's big moment. But then the terror set in. I had
no fucking clue
what a maid of honor does. Surely there would be duties, and I was totally ignorant as to what they were. I knew that I would
be in some sort of service to my sister, and this set my nerves buzzing. My sister, you see, has always managed, somehow, to be an adult.

As the big sister, I should have been paving the way through life for Madeline, but it's always been the opposite. As a teenager, the most I could have helped her with was how to not get busted drinking in public, and even at that I failed: The first time Madeline ever sipped an underage beer, she was nabbed by the cops on a beach. I felt terrible for her. I had been successfully dodging the police for years, once even hiding in a stranger's unlocked van while a couple of officers swept their flashlights across the night streets in search of yours truly. It was a point of pride that despite my many youthful indiscretions I
never
got caught by the cops—not drinking, not doing LSD or mescaline. Not vandalizing, not trespassing. Maybe if my first beer had been interrupted by a trip to the clink I would have laid my bottle down, like Madeline did, but I doubt it. As similar as we are, the products of identical places and times, we are deeply different. We are like the inverse of those twins separated at birth and reared in dramatically different homes who turn out the same—we were raised in the same home, yet wound up dramatically unalike. Scientists should be studying us.

Madeline seemed to have been born understanding how the world works, and how to fight her way into it. In spite of the lack of support at home, she made it to college, and she graduated. Not a community joint, either—not that there's anything wrong with that!—but a fancy private institution. She may be still paying it off two decades later, but she figured it out. She managed
to move to New York City, and nabbed a job in casting, building herself a career that took her to Los Angeles, where she met her soon-to-be husband, a guy with the good looks of a model and the bookshelves of a really hip English professor. She owned a new car, while I had never even managed to learn how to drive. Her home furnishings were purchased in stores, rather than found on the street or scrounged off Craigslist. She got her eyebrows done. The first time I ever got a manicure was with Madeline, following her into her regular Manhattan nail salon, where I paid a stranger to torture my ragged cuticles. I may have a coat of crimson gel polish gleaming on my nails as I type this today, but back then I thought it absurd to pay anyone to do anything you could do for yourself, and I could certainly paint my own fingernails. Sloppily, globbing the varnish onto the skin, dragging the brush over the chunky band of cuticle because I didn't exactly understand what you were supposed to do with it. I looked like perhaps I had just dunked my fingertips into a pot of finger paint, but I had done it myself! I had to admit that my nails postmanicure looked elegant, lovely, chic; like they were someone else's. Still, the experience had left me unsettled. Pay someone to paint my nails? Next thing you know I'd be wanting
servants
!

I needed to figure out how to be a competent maid of honor for my sister. I sussed out my bridesmaid duties with the help of the Internet. I was to be her right-hand man, her fixer, the one she brought glitches and problems and assorted bridal conundrums to. How the fuck was I going to be able to fill this role? My taste level and basic understanding of the modern world was . . . well, I don't want to say it was
below
hers, as that sounds so judgy,
but let's just say that when she bought eyeliner she went to Bloomie's and I hit the Wet n Wild rack at my local Walgreens.

Unlike me, my sister had always known she wanted to be married, and she'd never had any qualms about it. I'd always thought there was something funny about
wanting
to be married—don't you just fall in love, and then the love inspires the yearning for marriage? When I was younger it seemed strange to want to be married before you'd even met the person you'd be married to, but I know I'm in the minority with this type of thinking—just look at the bazillions of wedding dream boards on Pinterest, pinned by hopeful singletons. Like my sister, these ladies must have understood something about the concept that I didn't. They clearly trusted in it, believed in it. Surely, dating a mishmash of men, women, and in-betweeners never made marriage seem like something I could attain fairly easily; it simply wasn't legal for me to marry most of the people I had crushes on. And so the idea of it remained remote, in spite of the stubborn aesthetic attraction I had to the notion of a big white dress and a party for love—and the deeper attraction I had to the notion of a love so sturdy it could last forever.

Maybe my sister knew how ignorant I was—it's not like she didn't know me; we're sisters—but, then again, maybe she took for granted that my social life, like her own, had been peppered with attendance at various friends' nuptials. In fact, the last wedding I'd been at was my uncle Rocky's marriage to Rita when I was seven. I don't know if I explained to Madeline that Uncle Rocky's wedding was the last I'd attended, but perhaps there was another reason why she may have assumed I understood
marriage: Madeline knew I was sort of, kind of, not really married myself.

Remember that ex I told you about, the rapper I lived with for eight years? Well, one night after a drunken bingo game at the Blue House, we got fake-married. It wasn't totally spontaneous; we had done perhaps a week's worth of planning. My ex had found a dress being sold by a homeless man on the street. It was pale blue and cut on the bias, velvet on top and silk on the bottom. The man agreed to sell it for five dollars only if he was promised that a beautiful girl would get married in it. Voilà, my wedding dress. I wore a crown of feather butterflies, curling ribbons, and plastic rhinestones, found in the toy aisle at Target about a year prior. I phoned my friend Candy, a witch, and asked her if she'd marry us. She told us to come over and bring a check for $19.99. My roommate spotted me and my ex sneaking out of the house postbingo, me in my crazy outfit, and demanded to know what was going on. She was bummed that I hadn't let her in on the momentous occasion. “We're eloping!” I explained. “No one knows!” I'd planned to tell folks casually as I ran into them, mention it to my mom and sister next time we talked on the phone. Still, I felt bad and let my roommate come along to photograph the ceremony.

Candy resided with her wife, Joey, in a live-work space, subsidizing their rent by throwing occasional sex parties. The place was in slight disarray when we arrived, with a grocery store carrot cake sitting on the counter. Voilà, our wedding cake. Shoved into the frosting was a tiny Barbie figurine, hair colored blue with a Sharpie, meant to represent me, and a squat Batman figure
meant to depict my ex. Candy decided that my dress could fulfill the something old
and
the something new requirements as well as something blue. For something borrowed she pinned a thrifted rhinestone brooch onto the velvet bodice, and then took a pot of glitter and sprinkled it into my hair. She didn't really know my ex, so she gave him a quick interview, mainly wanting to make sure he wasn't on drugs. Of course he was, as was I, but we lied. My roommate took some pictures, Joey played the theme from
The Godfather
on her guitar, and we all did tequila shots. She presented us with a marriage license crafted from construction paper and crayons, and voilà, we were fake-married.

It's not that the marriage was a fake because it wasn't legal—lots of gay people are forced to marry one another without legal recognition or protection, and those marriages are real. It wasn't fake because we eloped—elopements are real. It wasn't that we didn't have rings—we'd bought the cheapest ones we could find, from the Joyeria on Mission Street. Mine even had a tiny chip from a tiny diamond wedged into the setting. (At least we
thought
it was probably a diamond.) The wedding wasn't fake because we only paid $19.99 for it—cheap weddings are real. It wasn't real because it just wasn't real. It was a feeble, drug-addled stab at commitment that did not stop us from breaking up eight years later. I know that even the realest of weddings can't keep a couple from splitting up, that most unions end in separation. But trust me, this one had more in common with the backyard play wedding I'd had in first grade, when I'd married Georgie next door with rings from a gumball machine, than it had with my
sister's pending nuptials—nuptials I was expected to be a fairly important part of.

Thankfully, by the time my sister got engaged I had sobered up. One thing I'd learned from my 12-step brainwashing was that life wasn't all about me, an important if heartbreaking lesson for any alcoholic. I'd become better at putting other people's needs before my own when appropriate, had gotten good at showing up for the folks around me. I knew I couldn't make my sister's wedding be all about my potential failure as a maid of honor. The wedding was about one thing and one thing only: my sister's happiness. I always find it sort of relieving to have something larger to pledge yourself to. I couldn't think about what a fuckup I was, or how my own marriage was a sham and how maybe that felt lousy.

All in all, I was not the worst maid of honor ever. Madeline was a merciful bride and required very little of me; she's a woman who knows what she wants, and she didn't need a lot of advice. Or maybe, in the words of one of my many 12-step programs, she knew “not to go to the hardware store for a bag of oranges.” At DSW I dutifully snapped pictures of various strappy sandals with my phone, sending them to her for approval. I was psyched when she trusted that the chunky silver forties-style heels I preferred looked best with the open-necked forties-style bridesmaid dress she'd selected for me. Unlike the dress, I really
would
wear those shoes again!

The day of the wedding—held in motherfucking Rome, of all places—I was at my sister's beck and call. I accompanied her
to the hair salon, where a handsome man named Maurizio whipped her locks into a perfect Audrey Hepburn updo. It went perfectly with Madeline's tea-length wedding dress, very sweet and modern and
Roman Holiday
. I was delighted when Maurizio insisted I, too, sit in the chair and get my hair done. My first time in Europe as an adult, I easily mistook the flamboyance and neat grooming of the men to be signifiers of gayness, and the whole time Maurizio played with my hair I obsessively tried to figure out how to say
I'm bisexual
in Italian; the closest I came was
I'm half-lesbian
. Thankfully I resisted the urge to queer-bond with my hairdresser, because as it happened he was very heterosexual and would have found my comment at best random and at worst a kinky come-on.

At the hotel where the wedding would soon occur, I stood fidgeting by Madeline, who sat fidgeting in her chair. We were waiting for our cues to walk, and she was getting increasingly flustered at how long it was taking. Was there a problem? Had something happened? Of course not; it was just Italy. Things move slower there. I scanned the skirt of Madeline's gorgeous Monique Lhuillier dress, making sure the strips of feathery ruffles that gave it texture and volume had not picked up any hitchhiking lint. She looked perfect. The day, which had threatened rain, had delivered only sunshine. Eventually an Italian person came and signaled it was time for us to proceed.

I went first, clutching my little bouquet of white tulips, down a stone ramp that led to the little landing where Madeline and her beau would say their vows. I stood in my spot and watched Madeline descend, looking crazy beautiful and stylish in her veil.
I felt a surge of pride for her; she had done so much to get here, weeding through the glut of truly assholish boys who were the only option in the city we'd grown up in, contending with commitment-phobes and potheads in her adult dating years. Now she had found this truly excellent guy, and here we were in motherfucking Rome, and she looked like she'd stepped out of the pages of some impossibly chic wedding magazine.

My mom sat in the front row of folding chairs, already crying. When she rose to recite an Irish poem in her shaking, emotional voice, I almost cried, too. But panic dried up my tears when my sister, realizing she had forgotten her vows in the hotel room, turned to me. Because I was the maid of honor. And I should have been carrying a copy of the vows for this exact moment. But I wasn't. I was carrying only flowers. I looked back at Madeline, my face slowly shifting into a bug-eyed expression of
oh shit
. It was the moment of maid-of-honor truth, and I was failing her.

Before getting into casting, my sister had been a dancer. And dancing is showbiz, and in showbiz the number one rule is the show must go on. Madeline, lovely and lighthearted, seized the spirit of the moment and free-styled her vows to her husband, who free-styled them back, the both of them conjuring up heartfelt promises before our teary eyes. I didn't want to let myself off the hook for being a bumbling maid of honor, but perhaps this was one of those moments when a mistake really leads to something more special than the original plan.