him she loved him and was quiet for a long time, but awake, fiddling with his chest hair. He was almost asleep when she asked, “Mike? Are you awake?”
He looked over at her. Something about her tone said trouble. “Yeah. Why?”
“I have something to tell you.”
“What?”
“When I was about thirteen?” She paused. “Maybe I shouldn’t admit this.” Her voice gave her away. She was trying not to laugh.
He rolled over with her and pinned her to the bed. “Spill it.”
“My dad bought me a Snurfer for Christmas.”
After a heartbeat of silence, he was the one laughing. And he knew then he wanted to live the rest of his life drinking only milk.
“Sweetheart…Can’t you and Mike just have a normal wedding? In a church?”
With those words, March realized that Beatrice Randolph, her mired-in-tradition and old-fashioned mother, didn’t remember there was supposed to be romance in a wedding. Clearly her parents could never possibly understand the open, unfettered appeal of marrying the man you loved outside of a church, on rolling lawns, surrounded by the freedom of open blue skies and cypress trees twisted by the wind. How could marrying on a San Francisco hillside not be the perfect wedding venue, surrounded by nature’s honest realism?
In the time March had lived away from home, nothing had really changed there. Her parents could never see her unique place in the world, as least not in the way she did.
“It’s a religious ceremony,” her mother said, standing in the family kitchen, a large eat-in room with off-white painted cabinets, copper pots hanging alongside fish-shaped aspic molds, and those classic blue and white dishes that had been around for more than a few hundred years displayed on crisp ivy papered walls. “We belong to a perfectly lovely church. The whole congregation has known you since you were baptized.”
“It’s not their wedding,” March said simply. “It’s mine. And Michael’s.” In her heart, she wanted no traditional trappings. She was acutely aware of that fact while standing inside her parents’ home, which only reinforced her determination to make their wedding about the two people taking the vows.
“The wedding is about the bride, dear, not the groom,” her mother corrected her.
“It’s his wedding, too. It’s our marriage. This is important to both of us.”
“Of course it is.”
“We’re only going to do this once, Mother.”
“Then I don’t understand why you want your only wedding to be in the woods.”
“It’s not the woods. It’s a park. You’ve lived here long enough. You know the city. The view from that hillside is spectacular. When you stand up there, you can see from the ocean to the bay, you can see the bridge and all those blue skies.”
“March. Please…” Beatrice Randolph sat down hard on a kitchen chair, a sure sign she was disgusted. Littered across the painted tabletop were bridal magazines and old-fashioned etiquette books with gingham covers her mother had borrowed from the neighborhood library, along with printers’ samples of engraved invitations on heavy cream-colored stationery with vellum inserts and embossed tissue. Her mother must have brought them home and called March after the very first flush of wedding news.
“The park is closer to heaven than inside any stuffy church,” March told her.
“And so windy you’ll blow away. Think of your veil.”
March snapped her fingers. “Not a problem, Mom. I’m not wearing a veil.”
Beatrice sank her head into her hands and groaned.
“No white lace gown with a train either.”
“You need to think about this. It’s outside, March.”
“I know.”
After a too long silence her mother said, “The seagulls will poop everywhere.”
“Oh, Mom…” March burst out laughing. “If we were Greek, that would be good luck.”
“If we were Greek, you’d still live at home and we wouldn’t be having this argument.”
March sat down across from her mother and took her hand, looking her straight in the eye. “Are we really arguing about my wedding?”
Her mother swallowed, clearly uncomfortable, then looked down at her hands, thoughtful. Her nails were manicured into perfect ovals, cuticles pushed back, and painted with her immutable Coty red. The familiar pale skin of her mother’s hands didn’t have a single mark, not even a freckle. Her mother had the ivory complexion of a natural redhead. For as long as March could remember, a bottle of Jergen’s that smelled exactly like maraschino cherries sat next to the kitchen faucet. Her mother’s hands had always been one of the softest things in her life.
Harsh paint cleaners and hard, city water purified with bleach made her own hands a mess, split her impossibly short nails. Her cuticles were hopelessly snagged and often bloody. The engagement ring Mike gave her was lovely, perfect really: white gold and a row of small baguette diamonds around an oval aquamarine, her birthstone. Just looking at it made her unbelievably happy. But her hands were godawful, and she said as much.
Her mother laughed, took March’s hand and looked at the ring for a long time, her expression slowly changing. “I suppose a church can be stuffy,” she said after a minute.
At that moment March knew she had won. Her wedding would be exactly the way she had envisioned: majestic views and green grass, kites in the air and a hundred wind chimes in the trees. Tomorrow, those gingham-covered etiquette books would go back to the library, the bridal magazines to the waiting room of her uncle’s dental practice, the invitations in the trash, or even better, in a folder kept for her sister May.
Beatrice took her other peeling, dry, ugly hand. “The beauty is inside your hands, not outside; it spills out onto blank paper and canvas. You have the creative hands of an artist.”
Not even on her most cynical day, could March miss the pride in her mom’s voice.
Funny how the small and irritating things in a day could evaporate in the face of a moment of honest emotion. Her conservative family, all of them, would wear whatever she asked, hike up a grassy hill and stand in the Pacific wind to witness the moment she promised life’s most important things to the man who loved her.
She’d grown up in this house. For all its unappealing and stodgy tradition, the kitchen was the heart of their home and had only been changed once, when her parents put in all electric appliances like in all the suburban tract homes built in nearby neighborhoods.
Her own place in the Haight had a tiny kitchen with one of those old gas stoves you have to lean into the oven and light with a match. She always expected it to blow up in her face. She’d come home today to tell her mother the latest, most important news, fully prepared for the same kind of reaction.
“I want to show you something.” March put her portfolio on the table and pulled out her initial sketches and samples. “These are my hand-designed wedding invitations. Each one is a little different. See? No printer could create these for us.”
Her mother took each one, studying it before spreading them all out before her. The paper March had used was raw with frayed edges, soft and fibrous, hand-printed with pen and ink like old scrolls or music from the Middle Ages. Birds and stars, music notes and snowflakes were in free-form designs and patterns, some done as borders. Another had a very small pattern of the male and female symbol on each side of a scale, at equal levels. Her mother looked at them for a very long time. “They’re lovely, and very much like you.”
“Take a look at these, too.” March slid two folded note cards across the tabletop, holding her breath for a few counts, and waited.
Her mother looked