For Better or for Worse
My wedding day should have ended with a skeleton key opening the locked door of the bridal suite at The Clifford Lake Hotel. I had made the 35-mile drive out to the inn one week before my wedding, fixated on creating the perfect wedding album, beginning with the place where I would spend my first night as Mrs. Janet Defever. With camera in hand, I walked up the wide staircase at the front of the hotel, prepared to capture the future and have it printed on acid-free paper.
The hotel maid was clearly indifferent to my status as bride-to-be. Sighing heavily, she unlocked the door and walked away. I stepped into the room just as the afternoon sun washed through the lace curtains. Click. It looked like designer Laura Ashley had been here and left her trademark floral wallpaper glued to the walls of this 1881 inn. The butter-soft duvet, the chintz covered loveseat, the clawfoot tub with polished brass feet. Click. Click. Click. I left the hotel a half hour later with an entire roll of film tucked safely into the zippered compartment of my purse, unaware that I was well on my way to becoming Mrs. Sadly Mistaken. With the grace of the soon-to-be-wedded, I crossed the expansive porch and descended the staircase. Crisp oak leaves blew across the tops of my suede, olive green loafers that I was breaking in for our honeymoon trip to Vermont. The October air had a bite to it. A sharp, toothy bite that was alluding to the storm slowly brewing on the horizon.
My wedding date was chosen by my father-in-law. I had always wanted an October wedding, and The second Saturday in October, he said, was the only option. He and my future mother-in-law would be returning from a trip to Belgium the week prior, and then harvesting his soybeans the week after. There simply was no other date that would work for him. And so, October 14, 1989, became The Day. The days leading up to The Day were bitter cold, with snow threatening to make a shoulderless dress seem like a poor choice. Fortunately, there was enough lace and satin left over after the seamstress finished making my dress and with five days to go, my mother carefully created a beautiful shoulder wrap that would never be worn because the weather would turn again just as she snipped the last thread.
The night before The Day was spent decorating the local VFW hall and covering the tables with plastic tablecloths and twirly crepe paper in an elegant shade of mauve. Tables had been set up to accommodate 425 of our closest friends and family members. The space felt a bit crowded, but I was certain that everyone who had been invited wouldn’t actually show up. A corner of the huge hall had been left untouched for the next-day arrival of the Klancnik Brothers Orchestra/Polka Band. I looked around and drew in a long, deep breath through my mouth as there was almost no air getting through my nose. Storing all 50 bud vases filled with dried flowers in my bedroom closet for the past two weeks had turned out to be a big mistake. My monthly allergy shot made a valiant effort to respond to an unexpected attack, but it was no match for the German Statice.
The next day, I arrived at the small country church exactly two hours before the wedding. There is certainly a place in heaven for dear friends and sisters who can smile convincingly while wearing tea-length, mauve, polka dot puff-sleeve dresses. Lucy Maud Montgomery, author of Anne of Green Gables, would have been impressed with my ability to make it seem as though my entire bridal party had just arrived from Prince Edward Island. With my mullet-influenced hairstyle heavily sprayed into place, I pinned my bridal hat to my head. Entire time periods were colliding all around me, but I only saw a wedding vision finally realized. Mercifully, the photographic evidence would not be available for another six to eight weeks.
My oldest brother had been given two jobs that day. The first was to usher wedding guests to their seats. The second was to push ‘play’ on a tape recorder that was set to play the wedding song that I had written and had professionally recorded. He forgot the second job. His eyes went wide just as we were introduced as husband and wife and the organist began playing the recessional hymn, “Ode to Joy”. My husband’s friend was waiting just outside the church to capture our exit on videotape. He was not a professional videographer, but he assured us he had recorded many wedding videos for friends and family. He told us that he would be delighted to make this his wedding gift to us. The wind had picked up just minutes before the wedding ended, and I planted my left hand on top of my hat to keep it from blowing away. Five minutes into the video footage, his friend’s focus had shifted from the receiving line to a young blonde woman wearing an extremely short dress at the edge of the parking lot. His camera zoomed in on the young woman and her billowing hemline, his low but distinct whisper completely audible, “Blow wind, blow. Blow wind, blow.”
When planning a wedding, it’s impossible to know which things require a plan and which things magically fall into place. Afterwards, I realized that not one single thing magically falls into place. In particular, the moment when the newly married couple walks into the reception and the entire place erupts with joyful cheering. Apparently, grand entrances require a plan. With no plan having been made, we wandered in unnoticed, keenly aware that there should have been a plan. After several minutes of waiting for someone to notice we’d arrived, I grabbed my new husband and steered him toward the buffet table. The caterers sprang into action and moments later, the stainless-steel covers were pulled from the steaming trays of food. Finally, guests were noticing. They were noticing the food, but either way, our derailed train was back on track.
I sat at the head table with my chicken dinner and watched the entire room erupt like an ant hill. The lack of a plan to dismiss tables was painfully obvious. Even with a line on both sides of the buffet table, it was going to take forever for everyone to get their meals. My maid of honor nudged me and asked, “Do you seen him yet?”, referring to her new boyfriend who was expected any moment and would be meeting her parents for the first time that night. No, I did not see him in the crowd of 425 people. I went back to eating my chicken. This scene would repeat itself several more times, with me giving her the same answer each time. “No, I don’t see him yet.” In my head, I was screaming, “I am the BRIDE, for God’s sake! I’m not watching for your boyfriend!” But outwardly I smiled, diligently pretending to scan the crowd for her special guest of honor. With dinner finally finished, it was time for the traditional bouquet toss. Everyone knows that the lucky woman who catches it will be the next to marry, so covert plans had been made in advance for me to throw the bouquet over my shoulder directly to my maid of honor.
Change of plans.
I think it was probably the tenth “Do you see him yet?” that did it. As I look back now, it was probably closer to three times but, in the moment, it felt like ten. In the most passive-aggressive way imaginable, I glanced over my shoulder, took note of where she was standing in the crowd of young singles, and threw it as far away from her as possible. The photographer’s timing could not have been better. A single photo captured this moment for all eternity. The bouquet sailing toward the opposite side of the group. My maid of honor’s furious face. My new sister-in-law’s wide smile and outstretched hand, knowing that the trajectory practically guaranteed her a husband within the next 12 months. There is no such thing as losing gracefully when it comes to the wedding bouquet toss. My friend stomped toward me in her mauve high heels. She was outraged and let me know it. I was outraged and let her know it. We screamed at each other for several seconds, the band’s warm up song drowning out our collective ranting as several couples twirled past us to strains of The Beer Barrel Polka.
When it was time to cut the cake, I made my way toward the back corner of the hall where the cake had been waiting since ten o’clock that morning. My groom was already there near the table, but there was no way to move quickly through the overcrowded room. I had managed to make it almost halfway there when my mother suddenly appeared at my side, informing me in a panicked whisper that the toilets were not working. I have three brothers. Any one of them would have been a better person with whom to share this news. “What do you expect me to do? Go plunge the toilets in my wedding dress?” I was incredulous. The look on her face told me that she hadn’t really thought the logistics through until that very moment. She mentioned seeing an emergency phone number posted on a cabinet in the kitchen. “I hope to hell someone actually answers,” she huffed as she made her way back through the crowd.
The rest of the reception was one blurred moment after another until around midnight when the band played the last song of the evening. The bright fluorescent ceiling lights were flipped on, inducing boos and hisses from the remaining partygoers. Women carrying their high heels made their way toward the door as groomsmen with neckties tied around their foreheads quoted the best Rambo lines before letting their disgusted dates drive them home. I hugged my parents and told them that we’d meet everyone at 9:00 a.m. to clean the hall. The rental contract stated that the hall must be returned to pre-event condition by noon the next day or we would lose our $250 deposit. Putting the whole cleanup ordeal off until the next morning has seemed like a good plan. It was a horrible plan, with no consideration given to the fact that letting the deposit go was the only plan that should have been made.
My new husband was nowhere to be found, and I asked one of the lesser-inebriated Rambos if they knew where he was. They did. He was outside somewhere throwing up. I walked outside to look for him, only to be met by a dense wall of fog. Good God. The Clifford Lake Hotel was 40 minutes away on a good day. We needed to get going. Now. Somehow my husband had found his way to our locked car and was leaning against the trunk, the fog making him look like a ghost in his ivory tuxedo. I unlocked the doors and he slid like Jello into the passenger seat and passed out before I had even left the parking lot. It was going to be a long ride.
At speeds somewhere between 10 and 15 mph, I navigated the twisting back roads that would take us to the Clifford Lake Hotel. Without a map or the benefit of being able to see anything other than five feet of gray pavement in front of my car, we somehow miraculously made it to the place at 1:45 a.m. My now semi-sober husband had woken up just as the car came to a stop in front of the inn. I turned off the engine, my brain no longer capable of thinking about anything other than falling into bed and sleeping. We were mere steps away now, with suitcases in hand. I sighed with relief as I reached for the antique brass doorknob of the inn’s front door.
It was locked. Thinking that maybe the door was just stuck, I turned the knob harder and pushed my shoulder into the door. We were locked out. The side of my husband’s fist flew past the brim of my bridal hat and landed hard on the heavy door. Neither of us were in the mood for polite knocking. Several fist pounding sessions later, we were still standing on the wrong side of the door, the flickering porch light creating a horror movie vibe in the damp fog. We decided that a place this big had to have other doors, so we began wandering around the perimeter of the building in search of another way in. He hammered on doors as I followed behind, screaming hello. Thick, wet grass had thoroughly soaked my ballet flats, every step feeling more like slime and less like shoe. Several locked doors later, we were back where we’d started. I ransacked my brain. Was I supposed to have gotten a key? Had I missed some major check-in rule? The flickering yellow porch light was still hinting at potential murder.
Reinvigorated by raw anger and temperatures in the mid-30s, my husband grabbed our luggage and headed back to the car. We were less than a mile from the nearest town, which gave us time to come up with a plan. The gas station was closed, but the phone booth nearby seemed like our best bet at getting someone’s attention at the inn. I looked up the number in the directory that hung from a chain attached to the booth, and my husband prepared to unleash his verbal wrath on whatever poor sap might answer the phone. The phone rang well over a dozen times. No answer. He slammed the phone down, growling expletives as I sobbed, the heaviness of the day finally catching up with me. He stormed back to the car, returning with a fist full of quarters like a gambler hellbent on beating the house. After several more episodes of dialing and receiver-slamming, he admitted defeat, leaving the phone still ringing and the receiver dangling from its black spiral cord. If we weren’t sleeping at The Clifford Lake Hotel tonight, then none of their guests would be either.
Behind the wheel again at 2:49 a.m., I drove the 35 miles back home. Between my intermittent bouts of crying and my husband’s rants about giving someone a piece of his mind on Monday, we discussed our options for where to sleep. Given that we had to be back at the VFW hall at 9:00 a.m., spending $100 for four hours of sleep at the local hotel back home seemed foolish. His house was wall-to-wall groomsmen, so that was out. Navigating the sharp curves of the roads, I switched back and forth between dim and bright headlamp options, eventually deciding that both were only slightly better than nothing. At exactly 4:20 a.m., I pulled into my parents’ driveway, maneuvering past several cars with out of state license plates. My mother met us at the door looking horrified, as if maybe I were being returned when the unwritten policy had clearly stated there were no returns. We gave her the condensed version of events as we stepped inside, looking like discount plastic cake-topper figures. Cousins from Ohio were occupying all of the bedrooms, but the floor and living room sofa were available. I fell asleep on the sofa in my soggy wedding dress, my left hand holding the hand of an equally soggy groom who had fallen asleep on the floor beside me.
The next day, after helping with the hall clean-up, I called my maid of honor from the phone booth across the street. I apologized for my horrendous behavior, and as all lifelong friends do, she graciously accepted my apology and forgave my outburst from the day before. When she asked me if it had been the wedding of my dreams, I told her that it had, in fact, been the worst day of my life.
On Monday morning, a more clear-headed version of my husband called the Clifford Lake Hotel and received an apology along with an explanation involving a 20-year-old night clerk, a bachelor party he really wanted to go to, and his 1:15 a.m. assumption that we must have changed our minds about staying there since we had still not arrived. As compensation, we were given a refund for the room, a $40 gift certificate for dinner on the house, and a voucher for an overnight stay. My husband accepted the dinner but declined the voucher. He didn’t want to appear to be taking advantage of the situation.
Exactly one week later, we left Michigan for our honeymoon in Vermont. We headed southeast on the expressway toward the Green Mountains, unaware that expectations and actuality would once again slam into each other at a crossroads somewhere between Middlebury and Stowe. Some things in life cannot be predicted, and this was one of them. I cried for days, and could not stop crying. It took almost six months for me to wrap my head around this new reality and to stop panicking over the weight of the words ‘to death do us part’. Every prince charming I had ever dated had turned into a toad, and it took a long time for me to believe that this same pattern would not eventually repeat itself.
The plastic sleeves of our wedding album are filled with permanent reminders of how hard it was for me to adjust to being married at the age of 29. My bloodshot, puffy eyes were apparent in every photo taken in Vermont, except for a single snapshot that captured one of the better days. Two smiling newlyweds standing in front of the Williams River in Chester, Vermont. It had rained the night before, and damp, crimson maple leaves were clinging to my shoes. I had envisioned this exact moment – crisp air that smelled like apples, leaves rustling overhead, and those beautiful suede, olive-green loafers. One single, perfect memory among a collection of all the less-than-perfect moments. 37 years later, it still makes me smile.