A More Perfect Union by Hana Schank

Author:Hana Schank
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria Books
Published: 2006-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

6

Tradition!

No marriage contract is made without a quarrel.

—Hebrew proverb

“E VERYONE HAS A FUCKING STRING QUARTET,” my brother grumbled over the phone.

I had made the mistake of asking his opinion on the ceremony music. It was getting on toward mid-April and Steven and I had been struggling with the ceremony music for the better part of a month. We’d finally narrowed down the choices to a wind trio or a string trio.

“It would be a string trio ,” I explained. “Not a quartet.”

“Whatever.”

Joshua had been going to a seemingly endless parade of weddings ever since graduating from college four years earlier; for some reason his friends were more eager to rush down the aisle than mine.

“Everyone has strings,” he said. “And a perfect little choreographed walk down the aisle, and a perfect little string quartet, and it’s all so perfect and lovely it makes me want to puke. I mean, what, not one person can have, like, a trumpet or something? An accordion? A harmonica? I hate weddings.”

My brother is not usually a bitter person. He generally thinks that whatever he’s doing is the greatest best most wonderful thing ever, that his friends are the greatest best most wonderful friends ever, and that the events he goes to are the best most fun thrilling events ever. I think he’d just watched one bride too many walk down the aisle. In any case, after that conversation there was no way I could even consider hiring a string combination of any kind, so the wind trio it was. Wind instruments were a little hipper than strings. Sort of. (See we’re being different! No violin!)

As with everything else, I felt slightly stupid hiring the usual musicians for the usual stroll down the aisle. But there seemed to be no other option. One can’t walk down the aisle in silence, and I didn’t have any musically inclined friends or family who might want to contribute to the ceremony, so the choices were classical music or the wacky route. The wacky route being walking to, say, the theme from Star Wars or the baseball stadium favorite, “Another One Bites the Dust,” but I didn’t really see myself using my last walk as a single woman to express my sparkling sense of humor. Steven and I had briefly discussed using something from our CD collection, but the only groups we had in common (aside from classic stuff that everyone on the planet listens to, like the Beatles or the Rolling Stones) was Elliot Smith, the singer-songwriter, who sang mostly about death, loneliness, and the general misery of humanity; and, although we didn’t know it then, he was only a few months away from committing suicide. The standard classic rock stuff was out by virtue of the fact that my parents had used it at their wedding. And not many people use “Here Comes the Bride” anymore, unless they’re being smugly ironic. So classical music it was.

One Saturday afternoon Steven and I holed ourselves up in our office

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