Come Up and See Me Sometime. Erika Krouse

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       My Weddings

      I’m single because I was born that way.

      —Mae West

      My first wedding was Aunt Marcia’s second. I wore a straw hat with a baby blue ribbon. The church was like an old schoolroom. Before the “I do,” before the kiss, I fainted away in the pew. My mother carried me out the back door, rolling her eyes.

      Queasy, I sat on the cement steps. “You’d better not do that at your wedding,” my mother told me, and spat on a handkerchief to wash my face. I started to cry, because I was confused, and because I had lost my hat. My mother touched my tears with the corner of the handkerchief. “There,” she said, “that’s a little more appropriate.” When I got home, before I even unbuckled my patent leather shoes, I opened the big blue dictionary and looked up “appropriate.”

      MY FRIEND Pamela liked to play Bride. She was usually the bride, since we played at her house. I was usually the minister.

      We had wrapped her head in a bedsheet with lace doilies stapled to it. Her bouquet was green and red tissue paper. She wore her best dress-up clothes—orange beads, and a pink evening gown that trailed behind her. The only trouble was, she kept stepping on it in front. “This stupid thing,” she said as she walked down the hallway, while I sang, “Here comes the bride,” in my loudest, most celebratory voice.

      “Hey,” I said as she approached the cardboard box altar. “Your dress isn’t white.”

      “So?”

      I tried a different approach. “When can I be the bride?”

      “After I’m the bride,” Pamela said, adjusting her veil.

      I knew that this offer meant nothing. A second bride was no kind of bride.

      “Do you take this man to be your awfully wedded husband?” I said in a bored voice.

      “I do.” Pamela was demure, holding her bouquet lightly in her fingers.

      “Kiss the bride.”

      Pamela kissed the air passionately.

      After the kiss, I stood at the altar. Pamela looked at me. The bouquet dangled from her hand.

      I suddenly remembered. “Oh—throw the bouquet.”

      She threw it, and I ran from the altar to pick it up. It withered in my clutch. Pamela’s ankle suddenly lopped sideways, and her foot fell out of the large shoe.

      “What happens next?” I asked.

      SAM VISITED me in September, and I drove him to Rocky Mountain National Park. Sam wanted pictures of elk, bighorn sheep; he wanted a mountain lion. I pulled the car over for every herd of animals. Sam jumped out with his point-and-shoot every time. He paused. The elk stared right at him. The bighorn sheep tossed its big head in Sam’s face. One after another, the animals stood СКАЧАТЬ