I thought. This is how my father feels about my mother. This is how his father feels about his mother. This is how it starts, and eventually you end up with a cadre of beautiful children and a house and jobs that you talk about over dinner, holding hands on the way to bed.
And here is where it begins, the foreverness, the fruition of an ideal. This is the start of a parade of pictures on a mantle, the ones from the wedding and the ones from the twenty-fifth anniversary party. This is the script my friends and I rehearsed since I was four in our basement plays with Barbie in her white gown and Ken in his impossibly stiff tuxedo, his body without arms, his hair nubby. But this time, it was real. This was perfect.
I thought how lucky I was to be loved by a man this tender and giving, this kind and this determined. He is as good a man as my father. We will live happily ever after. The vision—paper thin and pasted to me—became stubbornly adhered at that moment, driving south on Highway 53. It was a vision I held tenaciously and would not relinquish, even years after it was clear that this man was not who he seemed. I held on to that vision even when it was evaporating and the untruth of it threatened to erase me.
But that warm, glorious night, with the windows open and the car rumbling fast and the calming voice of his mother distant and soft, melodious, dreamy, his arm on mine—there I felt loved. This must be it. Nothing has ever felt this good.
I was twenty-six in the early summer of 1984, and some of my friends already had gotten married. From where I stood as a bridesmaid in all those satin dresses—eleven in all—it looked so easy. You marry the one you are dating in your twenties. Just as in a board game, you land on the marriage square when you have moved enough spaces, counted off enough turns. Everyone wins. It’s about time, I thought, as if I was on a schedule. I’m on the right square.
I felt part of the club, the esteemed sorority of women who had husbands, fiancés, or boyfriends who could only see them as treasures, who never saw the flaws, who never complained about dinner or having to take out the garbage. Who never made a cutting remark.
The partners for life. The perfect husbands.
Card received on our eighth anniversary, August 23, 1994
M,
Can you believe it has been eight years since I raised my hand in joy walking out of Saint Vincent’s church? Eight years and three beautiful sons. We have been so blessed.
I love you.
Fiesta Forever
Moving to Dallas in July might not have been the best idea. It was blow-dryer hot every morning and suffocating at night. The evening we stepped off the plane and into a life together, it was 103 degrees. I learned not to touch the steering wheel of the car after it had been in the sun for more than an hour, and I set the thermostat in my apartment on Gaston Avenue to 64 degrees. The city seemed strange in its sounds and its smells, its small town-ness and its hulking, empty glass buildings. People talked differently in sharp, slow Southern accents. The pickup trucks had gun racks. There were drive-through beer barns and jokes about Yankees.
But I had work that was nearly perfect, writing stories that filled me, and experiences that were new, meeting almost every new experience with a man who loved me. The people I met at the newspaper were like characters from a play. I had a column called “Michele Weldon’s Glitter Gulch Gossip,” so I was invited to parties, concerts, openings, balls. I wrote feature stories and profiled celebrities I flew around the country to interview. I wrote about authors, actors, advocates, anyone in the eighties with an idea to push or a product to sell. From a distance, my life was charmed. I even spent a week in a suite at the Savoy Hotel in London filing stories about the marriage of Margaret Thatcher’s son, Mark, to Diane Burgdorf, the daughter of a Dallas businessman. I was happy.
What could go wrong? For the most part, there had been an ironed, protected smoothness to my life and the lives of the people I knew. With few exceptions, I was not struggling; the pieces came into place as expected. For someone who moved through the world predictably, with a gelatin ease, there is a danger of being insulated and oblivious, of being blind.
It will all be perfect, I thought. I will have this perfect job and this perfect boyfriend and this perfect life. He will become a perfect husband. I will be the perfect wife.
My boyfriend rushed to fill the still, dark, vacuous holes left by the absence of my family and my close friends. Like water pounding into an empty cavern, he flooded the spaces of my life and did not leave me air to breathe. I thought it was love.
He wanted to be near me every second. I craved his company, his closeness, his attention. We would talk a dozen times a day, have lunch together, meet for dinner. Delirious and young, we would kiss and plan and dream, planting the passion for a lifetime that would be as good as we dreamed. He read my stories in the paper and came to all the black-tie dinners in a tuxedo he bought secondhand just so he could be with me. Sometimes he was called Mr. Weldon at events. He said it didn’t make him that mad.
He got a job immediately in Arlington, Texas, at a small daily newspaper on a recommendation from one of my professors at Northwestern University. It was a thirty-minute commute to Dallas, and he lived in an apartment on Pioneer Parkway with a loft and a stubborn population of roaches. But it was an adventure, our adventure.
I missed my girlfriends and my family. I missed my parents, my sisters, and all the birthday parties for my growing school of nieces and nephews. He was thrilled to be away from his family, and from mine. “Now we can work on our relationship alone without the pressures of your family,” he said.
“Your parents hang on every word you say,” he told me once after a dinner with my mother and father at the Drake Hotel’s International Room before we moved. “It’s disgusting. Your mother finishes your sentences, and your father sits there as if everything you say bears the wisdom of Buddha.” He said he was repulsed.
“They get a kick out of me,” I said.
It turned into a circular argument about the kind of person I would become if everything I said was treated with such blind reverence. I ended up apologizing and saying that I knew he was only trying to make me a better person. I dismissed the notion that he was a jealous ass.
Over the months and years, he met my friends, and they mostly liked him and thought he was suitable enough, if a little intense. When Dana, my roommate and closest friend from college, visited from Los Angeles, he was nervous, awkward. He later told me it was because he wanted to kiss her, that she was beautiful and exciting. He told me he loved me so much he could be completely honest with me. “All men really think this way,” he said. I was furious, but I guessed I never knew a man as sincere.
Lorraine, who became my closest friend in Dallas, worked at the newspaper with me and lived two doors down in an apartment complex on Gaston Avenue. She and I spent hours talking about him by the apartment pool and debating if he was the right one. What did we know? We both decided he was worth the minor trouble: his possessiveness, the jealousy he denied but was there nonetheless, the intense arguments out of nowhere about nothing that lasted hours. I mean, he was cute.
Lorraine and I compared him to my brothers, her brothers, our male friends, old boyfriends. He came out ahead on some of the criteria and fell short on others. Still, he was a nice boy from a nice family. What could go wrong?
Lorraine and I both thought it was strange, though, that he called her and a handful of my other women friends when I didn’t come right home after work one night. I’d gone to the Galleria in North Dallas to do spur-of-the-moment shopping, which Lorraine knew (I’d told her on my way out of the office) and explained when he called her, frantic. I was gone two hours, tops.
By the time I got home, he had left a half-dozen messages on my answering machine. Lorraine first thought it was weird, then said, no, he’s really protective, he’s just concerned about you. I never went anywhere again without telling him exactly where I was. I didn’t want him calling everyone in the phone book every time I went to Saks Fifth Avenue