Running Away…And Towards A Wedding

Part 1 is here

We tried dancing, but we both led. This meant we needed a morning wedding where everyone stayed in their seats, a sort of garden party with the kind of restrained sophistication that elegantly disguised our tight budget.

Who needed a band anyway, it might induce people to take a twirl. It might show us up. And the photographs? We’d have one of the staff photographers on the newspaper take them. They’d be different, newsy. I liked that.

On the morning of my wedding day I woke up like I do everyday, with flat hair. In those days it was worse. Caught between a perm and a straight place I was forced to enlist professional help. This meant getting to the mall before it was really open. Our stylist would come in early to meet the challenge. I was dressed as a bride disguised as a bag lady. It was 8am, the mall was hollow, silent, slightly creepy. The stylist meant well, she tried everything. She tried curling, twirling, furling, but my hair persisted in registering in one dimension only.

Feeling more bag lady than bride I disengaged myself from this pursuit of the impossible to take a bridal leak. The restrooms were buried down a long, deserted passage in the basement, more like a tunnel. There was absolutely no-one around, just my mom all those floors above me along with the impotent stylist.

I swung the door open without touching anything with my hands and chose a stall out of the several as though it mattered. I sat down and did what I normally do; put my elbows on my knees and my chin in my hands and contemplated 

The sound I heard might have been inside my head. I lifted my chin and felt something cold stroke its fingers up my spine. There was another sound, furtive. I felt a presence, something very close, watching me. I couldn’t think. I slid off the white cold of the seat onto my knees. If I could get my head down to the right angle I could scan the full extent of the linoleum.

I turned my head to the left, miles of white. Nothing. I could still feel something. I turned my face to the right. I had my hands balled in fists on the floor, less than a foot away was this hand, a mirror image of mine but big with coarse black hair, so close it was intimate. Still, very still and silent. Strong and alive. I could reach out and touch it.

I stood up so fast I left parts of me still kneeling. There was a man in the stall next to me. He could reach out and grab my ankle. I couldn’t breathe. My mind was racing. He was there, still as death. Waiting, just waiting.

It was a race. I could feel his breathing life like a shadow over mine. Without thinking I slipped the latch on the door and ran and ran the miles across the vast floor to the restroom door and then the miles down the white tunnels, up the stairs, past all the stores, still closed, and into my mom’s arms.

When I walked down the aisle two hours later, I looked around me at all the people, I watched my shoes, one foot then the other, kick out the ivory broderie anglaise hem of my homemade wedding dress. We were all so alive on my wedding day.

Gail Walter © 2009