These are my three most memorable moments. Thanks, WordPress, for the prompt.
Mario
I’m sitting in the back seat of a golf cart, facing the opposite way the driver is taking me. I’m by myself, giddy, giddy, giddy. Everything is white. My strapless dress. The padded seats of the golf cart. My flip-flops with the “Just Married” imprint on the sole, the straps covered in dried hot glue that failed to hold the string of fake pearls I’d tried to attach for the occasion. The tulle wrapped around the armrests of the golf cart. It is late afternoon, and it is humid and windy. I’m getting married and I couldn’t care less that the wind is blowing my hair all over the place, whipping across my face, dragging through my lipstick and possibly smearing it on my cheeks.
Oh Shit, though. I forgot my bouquet. I tell the driver. Hurry, hurry, hurry oh my gosh please hurry back to the casita so I can grab it. I get the bouquet. The driver and I head back to the spot of beach where I’ll say my vows to my best friend, in front of people we don’t know.
We approach the Health Bar, the one where the bar tender makes smoothies and healthy stuff instead of cocktails, and the driver stops. I hop off the back of the golf cart and see Mario in the distance, near the water — his longish hair blowing in all directions, too.
I’m giddy. I see him in his off-white linen suit, just a tiny bit too baggy. I’m as giddy as the first day I saw him, when he came to pick me up from the Human Resources office at my first job out of college to take me back to the cubicle where I’d be working. There is such a thing as love at first sight.
I hold my bouquet too high. We don’t have a wedding planner to tell me things like how to hold my bouquet. All we did was choose from a checklist to note that we wanted the large bouquet (not the small one), a photographer and a videographer. I didn’t even choose the flowers, which turned out stunningly bright with saturated reds and oranges in perfect contrast to the white sand and dark turquoise waters of the Mexican Rivieria.
I’m clutching the bouquet to my chest. I’m straining my neck to look over the top of the bouquet, like a 15-year-old peering up over the steering wheel on her first time in the driver’s seat. I’m giddy. Enya is playing. The resort’s wedding coordinator chose Enya. We hate Enya, but today, Mario and I love it because it’s so stupid that they’d choose this Enya song for our wedding. The red carpet cuts across the sand, stretching from the Health Bar behind me to the ocean in front of me. I walk down the carpet, parts of its edges hidden under sand, to where he’s standing under a canopy of gauzy white tulle draped over skinny wooden beams that had been set up just for our wedding in front of the non-denominational Christian preacher, the judge, and a couple of resort workers Mario and I had met while we were there.
I lower my bouquet just a little. I’m standing next to the man who makes me laugh, the one who brings the things about myself that I actually like to the surface, who pushes me, who takes care of me and loves me.
The wind blows. The waves crash behind us. I breathe in the misty salty air and struggle to hold my eyes open in the sun. We listen to the preacher. We say our vows. We smush our lips together and kiss.
Miles
Everyone has gone home. A nurse comes in and asks if she’d like me to bring in Miles from the nursery. “Yes,” I tell her, and a little while later, she wheels his isolette into my room. He’s swaddled tightly in those stiff hospital nursery blankets with the pastel ducks. I look at him through the clear walls of his isolette. We can’t figure out who he looks like. Allie came out the spitting image of her Daddy. But Miles is Mr. Magoo, a miniature old man swaddled like a burrito in giant, clear lid-less Tupperware container. His eyes are shut.
It’s the hour of sitcoms. I sit up and lean to my left, my abdomen screeching, twisting, pinched and bruised from the C-section, and lift my burrito out of his container. I lean back in my bed with him. I settle him in so that his head rests on the space of shoulder just above my armpit. We watch “Community” together, just him and me. The episode where Joel McHale plays pool in his striped boxer-briefs.
We drift in and out of sleep. Just him and me.
A Fragile Bird
No matter how I reposition myself, I cannot get comfortable in this chair. But at least she stopped talking and is finally, finally asleep. There’s no telling how long she’d been awake until now.
I can’t recall if I’ve ever watched her sleep before. She looks anxious, tight, pinched, even in her sleep, like she’s about to wake up. I want to pet her hair, dyed dark brown to cover the grays. She’s all gray now and has been for many years, really. But I don’t. It’s not my role. It’s almost midnight. I want her to stay asleep long enough for a judge’s signature to be couriered on this Sunday night to the hospital. His signature on these legal documents is the only thing that will allow the doctor to keep her from leaving the hospital. The documents arrive, the judge’s actual signature on them—a faxed copy wouldn’t suffice. I am relieved. I wait with her to be moved from the ER exam room to a real room on the fifth floor of the Jackson building.
She didn’t believe the diagnosis she’d received just weeks prior. Maybe she believed it, but she said that she didn’t know she had to take lithium and an antipsychotic or else she’d relapse, which is exactly what was happening. Which is what prompted a close friend and I to take her to the ER.
In the hours that preceded this, she was talking to people who weren’t there. Mainly to Kathleen Kennedy. “Kathleen, get this.” “Kathleen, get that,” she’d say, pushing her chin in the air and lifting her index finger while she snapped out orders to Steven Spielberg’s assistant. In the presence of her 7-year-old Goddaughter, she had talked about sexual arousal in not-so-vague terms. She never stopped talking. Her voice was hoarse. I was exhausted for her. She hadn’t slept in days. As our friend and I drove down I-635 toward the ER, she realized where we were headed, rolled down the window in the backseat of my Jeep and stuck her head out like a dog—eyes closed, trying to breathe in. She knew she’d be on the psychiatric floor and would not have access to fresh air for at least a few days.
Around midnight, after sitting in the ER for about six hours, we are taken to the fifth floor of the Jackson building. She wakes up long enough to scrawl her signature on some admitting paperwork. She asks me, “Are you sure it’s OK for me to sign these? I trust you, Melanie.” I assure her it’s safe, silently repeating to myself, “Oh God, please let her sign them, please let her sign them.”
She signs them. I tell her I’ll be back tomorrow. She lays down and sleeps some more.
