July 26, 2009 - 5:06 pm
I am sitting on the futon on the front porch, working. Hannah comes onto the porch, grabs the Perfect Wedding Guide and my cell phone and makes off for the living room.
“I need that back,” I call. “You don’t get to keep it.” My glasses disappeared recently, into her hands, I am convinced. They haven’t turned up in weeks, and she swears her innocence. I don’t want my cell phone to fall into the same black hole.
“I have to make a call,” Hannah says.
“To who?” I ask.
Silence.
“Who are you calling?” I repeat.
“I want to buy dresses for you and Mommy.” Let’s be clear. She means wedding dresses. As in gowns. Specifically, the silky lavender one for me and the lacey white one for Jane.
Oh, my.
“I think that’s a little premature,” I say, since there is no wedding in the plans.
“But it’s your anniversary,” she says, sounding disappointed. She’s right. Jane and I will celebrate our twenty-fifth anniversary in September, but not with an elaborate wedding, much to Hannah’s disappointment. And without wedding gowns.
I go and get the phone.
“That’s so sweet of you, Hanner,” I say, and give her a kiss. “That’s just about the sweetest thing ever.”
July 25, 2009 - 9:39 pm
“When it’s OK for two women or two men to get married in Minnesota, will you and Mommy wear long gowns?” Hannah asks me. She has a few options selected already. She’s sprawled on her bed flipping through the pages of the Perfect Wedding Guide, one of those free pubs that get handed out in little faux newspaper kiosks on street corners. Hannah is a total sucker for weddings and the fancier, the better. “Will you ride in a limo?” She turns to a page advertising limo services and points to the black stretch. “I like that one,” she says.
“I’m not sure we’re the limo kind of girls,” I say to her. Actually, I am sure, and we’re not. Although maybe, I think – quietly, in the back of my head – it could be fun.
She ignores me.
She keeps turning pages. “I like this gown,” she says, pointing to a silky lavender dress. “And this one,” with a tight, lacy bodice. “But that one looks like the circus,” she says, pointing to a third. And it does, with its multiple layers of flounce. Some are pretty, some are bizarre, all are improbable.
But does it matter? At the moment, we’re not planning a wedding anyway. We thought about it, about going to Iowa on a chartered bus, along with a group of lesbians from the Unitarian church we attend. But we would be just as unmarried in Minnesota upon our return across the state line as we are now. So we decided to stay home.
I can humor Hannah, though. “That one’s pretty,” I say, pointing to a svelte bride in a lacy dress. Bride is pretty? Or dress? Both, I think,
Then she asks what is clearly her most important question: “When you get married, can I plan the wedding?”
Oh, good Lord. This is a girl who loves limos and lace and silk and rosettes. But this is also a girl who thinks an ice cream wedding cake would be just dreamy. “With chocolate straws,” she explains, “so the guests could drink the melty parts and then eat the straws.”
Well, why not?
July 5, 2009 - 7:43 pm
1. Put her ankle behind her ear.
2. Balance a Monopoly card (Community Chest, not Chance) on her nose.
3. Remember that, in a picture she last saw a year ago of Julie Andrews rehearsing for The Sound of Music in an Austrian barn, it is raining outside.
4. Negotiate. Everything.
5. Apologize and ask what she can do to make it better.
6. Make me crazy.
7. Forget what she ate for lunch.
8. Play Barbies (actually: Ashley, Ruby, Mailey, Alice, Ella, Rose and Rosalina) for six hours straight.
9. Inform me that some people hope that their kids won’t turn out to be gay, but they do anyway.
10. Amaze me.
