This Close to Happy by Daphne Merkin

Author:Daphne Merkin
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

19

I never got it together to make the sort of wedding album that people used to make (and for all I know still make), with “X and Y’s Wedding” embossed in gold lettering on a leather cover, followed by the date. I still have, all these years later, a box of photos on a shelf in a closet that I was supposed to go through and choose from for precisely such a book, which had been paid for ahead of time by my mother. I kept postponing the task of looking through the photos and deciding which to include; something about having to study those posed images of celebration—all the dressed-up grown-ups and children—made me feel profoundly sad just to contemplate. Maybe it had to do with the discrepancy between the elegant look of the affair, which had taken place in my parents’ apartment, and my chaotic experience of being a bride, outfitted in full bridal regalia bought in a mad rush at Kleinfeld’s, the famous bridal emporium. At any rate, before the photos were chosen for the wedding album, Michael and I got divorced.

* * *

I had been utterly apprehensive about getting married; it was something I knew I was supposed to embrace even though I wasn’t at all ready for it, not even at the antique age of thirty-four. The truth was I wasn’t ready to do anything that involved leaving my mother in such an official, wholesale fashion, and the decision to marry had been made not in a blurry, love-struck moment with my husband-to-be, but under far stranger circumstances. Less than a month before the wedding, Dr. E., the female therapist I was seeing at the time, scheduled a session for my mother and myself, at which the three of us discussed the probability of a marriage between Michael and me working out as though we were placing odds at a betting parlor.

You would have thought that the fact that I had broken off our engagement only months earlier didn’t augur well for our future, but no matter. My mother opined to Dr. E.—a young and inexperienced blond WASP analyst who was clearly no match for this embattled-but-entwined Jewish mother-daughter duo—that I was “loyal.” “That’s one thing you can say about Daphne,” my mother repeated in her heavy German accent. “She’s very loyal.” Ergo: once I got married, however much I kicked and struggled, I would stay married. This implicit line of reasoning seemed to carry the day with Dr. E. and the date was set for three weeks later, to ensure that I wouldn’t have enough time to reconsider.

In addition to everything else, I remained deeply unsure of my femininity and the various roles—girlfriend, wife, mother—attendant upon it, and standing under a chuppah bedecked with white flowers on a late November evening before the group of about seventy people who had congregated in my parents’ living room would do little to clarify matters. As the assembled guests watched me walk stiffly down the staircase in

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