The Wedding People

by Alison Espach

Having a mother helps you believe that everybody wants to hear every little thing you think. Having a mother helps you speak without thinking. It allows you to trust in your most awful self, to yell and scream and cry, knowing that your mother will still love you by the end of it.

And through the eyes of a man falling in love, she could see how spirited Woolf had been, how beautiful she was at the right angle.

If she is going to live, she’s going to live differently this time.

She is surprised that she genuinely wants to know. She has always been so afraid to know things about herself—so afraid of reading the truth in course evaluations, or seeing her large nose in a photograph, or listening to her therapist draw unbearably accurate conclusions about her.

Just submit, Phoebe thinks. Put your head back and close your eyes and let the water rush down your body. Let the bride wash the shampoo out of your hair if that’s what the bride wants to do. You’re the maid of honor now.

They are still partying. The wedding people are always partying. It feels like what they are sent here by God to do. To have loose ties around their white collared shirts and to laugh very hard while slamming the tables with their palms.

Phoebe has no other option left but to join—she tried to opt out, tried to sit on the sidelines, tried to leave this world. But she is still here. So she walks into the group, and they celebrate her arrival, clap and twirl around her. She feels silly at first, but they make it so easy. They are generous with their enthusiasm. They give it all to Phoebe, hold her hands and bump her hips, and by the time the song is over, Phoebe feels so overwhelmed, so part of the group, she excuses herself to go to the bathroom. She looks in the mirror. I am here, she thinks.

“Your husband is not going to take care of you the way you think,” Phoebe says. “Nobody can take care of you the way you need to take care of yourself. It’s your job to take care of yourself like that.”

What do you do? Do you start all over again? Do you fixate on the new thing that you are sure is going to make you happy? How many times does a person do this over a lifetime? Is that just what life is?

It was Lila who gave her the gift of today, and Phoebe is grateful. It’s a day she’ll remember for the rest of her life. It reminded her of a feeling she stopped believing she could have, a feeling she thought belonged only to other people.

She wonders if her feelings for Gary could be a new form of love, one she’s never known before: love without expectation. Love that you are just happy enough to feel. Love that you don’t try to own like a painting. But she doesn’t know if that is a real thing. She hopes it is.

It’s what Phoebe is supposed to say as maid of honor. She is ready to tell any lie. So the transformation is complete: Phoebe is one of the wedding people now.

It is so much easier to sit in things and wait for something to save us.

becoming who you want to be is just like anything else. It takes practice. It requires belief that one day, you’ll wake up and be a natural at it.