Since the last post set a record of a whopping 10 comments, I'm holding you readers to the same standard (but feel free to exceed my meager expectations) if you want to hear my account of what happened at Merella's wedding on 8/16! He hee.
While I was working for the Central Utah Writing Project this summer, I didn't finish anything I started writing, except this. I had writer's block for all four weeks until the night before we were supposed to submit our anthology piece. I wrote this draft and saved its debut for our 6th wedding anniversary.
"The Romantic Obsessions and Great Expectations of Sarita Rich"
I fell in love before
my legs were long enough to touch the floor while sitting on the couch.
My
favorite place as a seven-year-old was the living room couch with my parents’
wedding album perched on my knees. I spent hours slowly turning the pages after
taking in the details of the photos—my dad in his ivory barong, the embroidered
formal shirt custom-made by my mom’s Filipino family tailor; my mom sitting in
front of a mirror in her wedding dress with her hair dresser holding her bun in
place before putting on her veil; five bridesmaids in mint-green taffeta with
baskets of Sampaguita Jasmine petals.
But
the thin brown rectangle cut from the
Herald News personal ads was the best:
American teacher, 30,
visiting in Cebu, wants to meet sincere Filipina pen pal for honest marriage.
College-level, pleasing personality, good English. Call 7-30-51, between 10 a.m. and 6
p.m., ask for Mr. Shuster in room 915 Skyview Hotel.
The
day my mom answered the ad my parents met in person, the next Dad was gone,
flying back to America. A letter arrived in the mail for my mom weeks later.
Inside the envelope were 100 pesos for postage, Dad’s picture, and the first of
what would become many chapter book-length letters sent to Mom’s childhood Cebu
City address. My parents were married in Manila one year later and came home
together to begin their happily ever after.
I
was in love with their love story—enamored of exotic serendipity and a romance
that unfolded across 5,000 miles through hundreds of pages written in Dad’s
blue medium point Bic pen ink and Mom’s neat, cursive pencil script. This was
how love should be. Just like in the movies. But better, because my parents were
living proof that it worked in real life too. Naturally, I thought my life
would be romantic too.
Growing
up I consumed a steady diet of Disney princess romance. My favorite was
Cinderella, especially the part at the end when she floats down the stairs,
boards the coach, and waves out its window while driving away. The last thing
you saw, through the open coach window, was a kiss that meant blissful
happiness without laundry or flatulence or getting fat.
Such
Disney movies, along with my parents’ wedding album, inspired the only real
ambition I had as a first grader. When I had to answer the question “What do
you want to be when you grow up?” at school I always said—aloud or on paper—I
wanted to be a teacher. But secretly the real answer was, “I want to be in
love!” or “I want to be romantic!”
Before
high school, my fixation on love and romance developed in various phases. I
had a Barbie phase in which I designed toilet paper wedding attire for our
favorite dolls. Valentine's Day was my favorite holiday. In third grade, after
watching the episode of The Simpsons
in which every kid dumps piles of Valentines on his or her desk—except for
Ralph, whose box is empty—I stayed up all night feverishly decorating hand-made
personalized cards for every kid in class, as well as every teacher and
administrator in the whole school. When I played with the plastic figures of
the My Littlest Pet Shop
series, there was always a backyard wedding in the sandbox where the Border
Collie named Larissa married Brad Pitt, the Saint Bernard. Later in middle
school I had a bride couture fetish. I stood in the lines of grocery stores,
thumbing through Modern Bride magazine,
where I met Badgley Mischka, Vera Wang, and Alvina Valenta for the first time.
I sat on my roof one summer when I was 16 and made my list of desirable
qualities in a potential spouse. My ideal husband would be a devastatingly
handsome lawyer/doctor/mechanical engineer who moonlighted as a handyman at
home in case our toilets ever broke, and he also had to be musically gifted
(any instrument except the tuba or xylophone), muscular, athletic, and from
anywhere except my hometown or California.
And
creativity was a must. Ideally, my guy would be like Patrick, a graphic
designer I read about in Reader’s Digest,
who saw “his perfect girl” on the number 5 train in the Union Square subway of
New York City. Before he had a chance to talk to her the train pulled into
Bowling Green station where the doors opened to a swarm of passengers who
momentarily blocked his view before he realized she was gone. He found her
after making a website with a picture of her he sketched himself, the site went
viral, and two days later he knew her name—Camille—and that she was an
Australian interning at a magazine. He finally met her officially when Good Morning America set up their first
date on national television. Here was another perfect love story, made even
more appealing by the fact that Patrick displayed neither symptoms of insanity
nor a penchant for stalking beautiful strangers. He was just in love. I was
convinced that somewhere out there, another psychologically sound Patrick was
waiting to find me—but with a cooler name—and that he was living off his
family’s vineyard in Sicily as I spoke.
But
things had gone terribly wrong by the time I finished high school. I
traded Modern Bride magazines
and dreams of applying to the Parson School of Design or RISD for Kaplan SAT
prep books and advanced world literature courses that kept me home writing
rhetorical analysis essays on Friday nights. The
first boy I kissed fit my potential husband description almost exactly—except
for the criteria of being Italian and muscular, but all rules have exceptions.
He was going to Harvard medical school while I didn’t even know what classes I
should take during senior year. He dumped me because my SAT scores were too
low. And
I went to my junior and senior proms mostly because I felt obligated to help
set up tables.
My
paradigm shift from inhabiting a world of love-crazed naïveté to the most
boringly unromantic person at school coincided with the dawning realization
that my parents’ happily ever after did not exist, for various reasons:
1)
Mom didn’t call the number in the Herald
News. She saw the ad one day and forgot about it until her jovial,
homosexual neighbor came over the next day to inquire if there was any “toilet
paper,” i.e., newspaper, to be found in Mom’s house because he had run out.
Although the ad was eventually rescued from being plastered to this gay man’s
rear end in an outhouse, Mom couldn’t take credit for saving it. Instead, the
neighbor, in his best falsetto, impersonated Mom on the phone to set up her
first date with Dad at her house while Mom did her best to stifle rolling waves
of laughter in the background.
2)
Their first date was an evening of prolonged awkwardness with Dad sitting in
her living room facing a couch full of siblings, stepparents, and extended
family members who passed him slices of papaya, mango, and guava while telling
stories about Mom contemplating life in a convent.
3)
Mom couldn’t really say why she married him, except that he wrote beautiful
letters—Dad later said they were full of “shameless flattery and p.r. hype”—and
had good spelling and that her family liked him.
4)
Mom hated
Alaska.
5)
Mom’s wedding ring fell down a sink drain and Dad flushed his down the toilet
after a heated argument.
So, with a romance IQ of -560 and the discovery that I had inherited really unromantic genes, I went to BYU, a Mecca for amorous youngsters, where even I managed to go on a few dates.
There
was Dan the aspiring dentist, whose idea of a rough and ready fling was to
scour the racks at D.I. for costumes to wear at the midnight showing of The Return of the King. There was Andy, a
balding accountant major who took me to P.F. Chang’s and cracked open his
cookie and read aloud a suspiciously convenient fortune: "A new, tantalizing prospect awaits you." Then
he looked me in the eye and said with one arched eyebrow and his head cocked at
an angle, “Are you that new,
tantalizing prospect?” Then Hue, a Vietnamese philosophy student
whose spontaneous deliveries of long-stem white roses and impeccably clean car
faded into oblivion after he turned down his acceptance to Yale law so he could
go to beauty school instead. And after Steve gave me a lecture at church about
the spiritual perils of bowling on Saturday night (all his idea in the first
place), I stopped returning his calls.
But
then Jesse from next door called. He seemed normal, so I kept going out with
him. Even after the world’s most unromantic first date. My version of the story
is that I got a call at 8:00 on Friday night after studying all day for a test.
Jesse asked if I wanted to go with him and his friends to the hot springs and
all I needed was a bathing suit and there would be a short hike to get to the
springs and we would definitely be back before midnight.
If
I hadn’t really cared what he thought, I would have said, “I can’t because I
need to go to bed so I can get up at 5:00 a.m. tomorrow and do my homework
because I’m going to the homecoming dance with Steve (later
“bowling-on-Saturday-is-evil-Steve”) and my entire day will be consumed in
giddy preparations, so I’m already wasting time.” Jesse saw through my lame
but-I-don’t-have-a-bathing-suit excuse. So I went.
We
all stood in the parking lot staring at each other for ten minutes. Jesse
didn’t invite me to ride in his car, so I got stuck in the front seat of his
friend’s truck—the friend bore a striking resemblance to Disney’s Quasimodo—and
Jesse drove alone with some other girl. Both drivers got lost on the way, and the hike was an hour
because we had to go single file up a winding mountain trail in the dark. None
of the Eagle Scouts on this trip brought a flashlight, except Jesse, but he was
at the front of the line and I was at the end. And Jesse’s friend walked with
his hands on my shoulders to make sure I didn’t fall off the edge of the
mountain and die.
We finally got to the hot springs. And just sat there. Smelling like sulfur. For hours. I fell asleep in the water at least once. I
fell asleep again on the ride home and stumbled into bed at 4:30 a.m. I swore
never to speak to Jesse again—because the invitation to the hot springs was obviously an elaborate scheme to set me up with Quasimodo. I contemplated
burning Jesse in effigy or sewing a makeshift Voo Doo doll with his name on it
and poking pins in its eyes. If we were Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet, this is
what I might have said to him: "From the first moment I met you, your
arrogance and conceit, your selfish disdain for the feelings of others made me
realize that you were the last man in the world I could ever be prevailed upon
to marry."
And his reply would have been: "So this is your opinion of me. Thank you
for explaining so fully. Perhaps these offenses might have been overlooked had
not your pride been hurt...Forgive me madam, for taking up so much of your
time."
Jesse gave me a few weeks to calm down before calling again. Ten months later
we got married. Since I'm a little slow on the uptake, it took me a while to
figure out two important things: 1) The entire hot springs trip was a Rube
Goldberg experiment from hell incarnate—one bad mistake after the other,
starting with Jesse getting stuck alone in his car with his "Caroline
Bingley" (a.k.a. Katy); and 2) Jesse was my Mr. Darcy, sans Pemberly and the funny trousers. Like Darcy,
Jesse was simply being shallow; he couldn't bear the thought of speaking up for
me in the parking lot, lest he publicly announce his undying love in
front of his friends. But this was also because, like Darcy, he didn't
"rattle away like other young men."
Our wedding was more utilitarian than romantic, because I married an economist.
Our happily ever after hasn’t been what I imagined as a child. For
my part, the “romantic” gestures fizzled out after our first Valentine’s Day as
newlyweds when I rushed home during my lunch break to punch heart shapes out of defrosted
chicken breasts with a cookie cutter and throw them in the oven.
We’ve
spent the first six years of our marriage finishing our bachelor’s degrees and
doing homework for graduate school, which means that we’ve developed the
dangerous habit of procrastinating, and sometimes forgetting to acknowledge,
our birthdays and all major American holidays because there was always a paper
to write or an exam to study for. Which means that we’re also the most boring
couple we know.
After
Jesse, real love isn't defined by romance. Real love has less to do with
romance and more to do with seeing the other person’s potential and learning to
say, “I’m sorry,” or knowing that he’s done the laundry—every week—just so I don’t
have to. Love is more about how long I celebrate the unremarkable moments of everyday
life, and about liking the real Jesse: he knows what widgits and utils and
Marshallian Demand Curves are, he reads Roald Dahl's books, he fixes the broken
things in our house, and he used
to play the piano, and when he pulls up in our driveway all the little kids on
our block run up to him and shout choruses of “Hi Jesse!” But he is not
romantic.
And
neither am I. And I didn’t have to travel halfway across the world to figure this
out. All I really wanted was right next door.
This
summer I read Kyoko Mori’s Yarn: Finding the Way Home, in which she describes
advice given to her by college writing teachers: “Write what you know,
but don’t understand.” So I picked a topic I hardly understand, but one
I’ve been thinking about for a while. Rena’s scribble prompt about falling
in love and Stacy’s question about the dichotomy of internal vs. external
realities helped me start. P.S., Jesse is from
California.
