Wedding Day, No Sun Required
By Greg Marshall
My husband and I got married during a thunderstorm on a farm in east Austin. I remember the weirdest stuff about it—my mom speaking chicken to the chickens, the wedding planner’s fedora, the stolen bottle of vodka (thanks, sis)—and none of the stuff I should remember. I couldn’t tell you the Adele song my mom and I danced to, but I’ll never forget sipping my gin and tonic with satisfaction, a sweaty arm around Lucas, and the moochers from the food truck on the property (not our guests) who came out of the fancy port-o-potty our parents had paid for and doused themselves with Febreze they thought was free bug spray.
The farm came with a vintage airstream trailer named Miss Bliss. It was supposed to be a retreat for Lucas and me, but both our families piled in before the ceremony to get out of the heat, rendering the trailer some granny-chic version of a clown car, the doily-covered windows steaming up with the swelter of soon-to-be in-laws, not lovemaking.
Not that I blame the fam. Miss Bliss had the only AC on the farm. It was late September and so hot and humid I had to change my shirt four times over the course of the day and night to keep from walking around drenched in perspiration. I drank and sweated and danced and sweated some more. The wedding tent I’d almost cheaped out on renting (only an 80 percent chance of rain, and all that money…) was covered in fallen tree branches from the storm by the end of the night. Temperature-wise, it was a veritable sweat hut trembling with the euphoric sounds of Whitney Houston and Sia. We didn’t have a wedding, I tell people. We had a shamanic experience. What I mean is: It was very hot.
“Don’t rewrite history,” Lucas says. “We had a great wedding. You cried the entire time.”
“That’s my point,” I say. “I was severely dehydrated.”
I hadn’t wanted to walk down the aisle. It’s not that I didn’t want to get married or that I balked at the idea of my mom giving me away. I just couldn’t stand the thought of limping in front of all our guests, the zippers on the sides of my stealthily orthopedic boots tinkling. Step-drag. Step-drag. I knew walking down the aisle was traditional, but screw tradition. There was nothing “traditional” about two thirtysomething dudes tying the knot anyway.
I had been visiting my mom in Salt Lake the morning the Supreme Court ruled on Obergefell v. Hodges, the 5-4 decision that made same-sex marriage legal in all 50 states. By the time I texted Lucas and figured out how to work Mom’s DirecTV in the living room, President Obama was singing “Amazing Grace” at a Methodist Episcopal church in Charleston, a eulogy that didn’t have anything to do with marriage but one that was tangled up, for me, with grace in a larger sense. It was the kind of transformative moment that could lead to the White House being bathed in the colors of the rainbow and a new saying: Love Wins.
“I hadn’t wanted to walk down the aisle…I just couldn’t stand the thought of limping in front of all our guests.”
My relationship with Lucas has always smacked of serendipity. We know couples who had waited years, decades even, to get legally married, with all the tax breaks and protections and nice dishes that come with it. It sounds a little smug, but we were keenly aware that we had the kind of opportunities our forefathers didn’t.
A few years into our relationship, a silver-haired man seated behind us at Hamilton primly demanded that we move our heads apart; he claimed our canoodling was blocking his view. In reality, we’d probably only been rubbing his nose in the good fortune of finding each other, of getting to come of age in a kinder, more inclusive world. Kindness was all around us. Getting off a flight to Hawaii one spring, a woman stopped us out of the blue to say that she hadn’t seen two people so in love in a long time. “Enjoy each other,” she said, and we did. We do. We know our luck.
My path to matrimony hadn’t been smooth. I had lost a boyfriend to AIDS seven months before meeting Lucas and was still so traumatized by the experience I had convinced myself, high on a friend’s super strong weed on a trip back in Utah, that Lucas was too good to be true. I didn’t know if two men could make it work, period; we were probably all meant to be alone.
I’d called Lucas, who was back in Texas, and told him all this. Instead of being scared away by my paranoia and inability to handle any drug more potent than caffeine, he picked me up from the airport when I landed in Austin and told me to open the glove compartment, where I found, in a tidy stack, every piece of government-issued ID he owned: social security card, birth certificate, voter registration. The message was clear. The man was who he said he was—and so much more.
“If you ever break up with him, we’re taking him and not you,” my mom told me after our first Christmas together as a family. Lucas had volunteered to play Santa for my nieces and nephews. Donning the costume my mom had rented, he strapped a fake beard over his real one, pulled on his cowboy boots and endeared himself to her forever.
The year of our engagement was spent in the typical frenzy of searching for a venue, and finding a caterer, and hiring an incompetent wedding planner. We skipped the bachelor party but in the hotel the night before the wedding my sister Tiffany slipped a hot-pink sash over me. BACHELORETTE, it read in sparkly rhinestones, except Tiffany had picked out the ETTE, casting it in stubble. My sash now had a five o’clock shadow.
Anyway, the big day was finally here. We felt good. Hillary was ahead in the polls. Justice Scalia, the staunchest of opponents to marriage equality, had died at a resort 45 minutes south of us and was rolling over in his grave, a little bit of information my future father-in-law would note over cracks of thunder in his toast later on. Forget the old ways: We were making new ones. Miss Bliss had a sign in it: “MR. & MRS. … and they lived happily ever after!” We stuck our pointer fingers in there to make it MR. and MR. S. That’s “S” for Sodomy!
I decided I’d just wait for Lucas under the chandelier in the pecan tree.
“You little shit,” my mom said when I brought up the idea at the rehearsal. She poked me with her water bottle. “I didn’t survive a bazillion chemos and outlive your father so you could stand under a tree.”
It sounds a little smug, but we were keenly aware that we had the kind of opportunities our forefathers didn’t.
It was sunny while we took pre-ceremony pictures, but by the time guests started arriving the sky had turned to a dimmer whitish blue. By the time they got drinks at the bar and ambled to the picnic benches around the pecan tree, it was thundering.
We lined up to walk down the aisle.
The sleeves of my suit jacket were a little too long and I kept fussing with them, thinking they made my hands look boyish, like I was dressed up for a play.
Lucas and I had bought our suits off the rack at Macy’s. It hadn’t occurred to us to have them altered. They were even the same size, which made no sense because Lucas is a good three inches taller than I am and an inch or two slimmer.
“You’re bigger in back,” the saleslady had told me, making a scooping, butt-shaped motion with her hand. “It makes up for your shorter legs.” It had never once occurred to me, in 32 years of questioning everything, to question the size of my ass. Thanks, marriage.
“Let’s go,” shouted my future father-in-law, pumping a stringy arm in a circle like a first-base coach. “It’s about to start pouring.”
The wedding planner put a hand on her fedora to keep it from blowing off. “We’re waiting on the last party bus!”
“Screw the last party bus,” screamed Tiffany, pulling down the hem of her cocktail dress. Even in the gloom it sparkled.
I chugged half my beer and set it next to a cactus.
I suppose it was a good sign it wasn’t the lifelong commitment I was about to make that freaked me out. It was the 35 steps it would take to get there. Thirty five or so. I’d tried to count them during the rehearsal but lost track when Mom dropped to her knees, wrapped her arms around my legs, and started fake-sobbing. “I won’t give him up. I won’t!”
I’m not a numbers person, but when I look back on that day, it’s the numbers that stand out. We got married 45 days before the 2016 presidential election, an overcast slice of paradise before a prolonged national nightmare, one that would culminate in the mishandling of a pandemic that continues to this day and has meant a year spent largely apart from family and friends.
And to think of that stormy, scorching Texas wedding now: So many of the most important people in our lives were huddled together around an old tree, sports coats and shawls pulled over their heads, umbrellas opened, Lucas and I about to climb into the center of all that love. “It was our Camelot, with chickens,” I tell anyone who asks. “It was there and then it was gone.”
“’If you ever break up with him, we’re taking him and not you,’ my mom told me after our first Christmas together as a family.”
We had chosen to walk down the aisle to “Here Comes the Sun.” Really, I’d chosen it. It was the song my mom and dad played at St. Ed’s in 1978. I’d meant it as a tribute, but I think Mom was a little offended. We weren’t paying tribute; we’d stolen their song.
Mom took my hand, squeezed it. She was wearing my dad’s wedding band, the only way he could be here. In the distance, the chandelier shook on its 100-year-old bough, like someone upstairs was testing the plumbing. A drop or two of rain hit my face. “Your Dad would have loved Lucas,” Mom said. “I’m sorry they never met.” Lucas was just ahead of us, a parent on each arm. He reached up to scratch his mustache with a long, tapered finger. Lucas! The man I vowed to limp beside the rest of my days.
Looking back some four years later, I can say that the wedding traditions I rolled my eyes at gave the people in our life a chance to share our joy, to turn their love into homemade pies and heartfelt toasts, pink sashes and first dances. It was the kind of love that can turn an abstract right simply into a way of being.
My route to marriage was indirect, through doubt and fear. It was an indirect route to happiness, too. I wasn’t special or more deserving than anyone else. I just got lucky. But no one can say I didn’t walk here on my own two feet.
Greg Marshall, the recipient of a 2020 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in prose, has been published by Southwest Review, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Joyland, Electric Literature and The Best American Essays 2017. He lives in Austin, Texas, with his husband.