“Do you, Jesse, take Anna to be your beloved wife?”
“I do.”
“Do you, Anna, take Jesse to be your beloved wife?”
“I do.”
Crowd breaks into wild applause, interspersed with shouts of Mazel Tov!
Cut. Cut!
Wait. I never said that.
I know I never said it, because I’d never been allowed to say it. And when I finally could, I’d lost the desire.
Never wife.
Our wedding, like every wedding, carried freight, some of it typical and some unique, because we were two women marrying. “Joining in Civil Union” was the term permitted, we couldn’t legally marry. The M word was reserved exclusively for “one man and one woman.” (One? What about divorce? I hear you saying.)
Certainly the coverage of our wedding was unique. While most couples choose to announce their marriage in the society pages of their local newspaper, the story about Our ceremony appeared on the front page of the Washington Post, complete with color photographs of the smiling brides.
How did such a private celebration become a media event?
At first it seemed simple. The decision to allow a reporter to write a human-interest article about our wedding practically made itself. Helen worked at the Post. Anna knew her from visits to her parents just down the dirt road where she came to unwind from the demands of city life. Anna and Helen talked politics outside the barn, later Anna introduced her to the finer points of the dairy goat business. So you can imagine how pleased we were when she dropped us a note to let us know she’d landed the assignment to “put a human face” on civil unions. Such an ally. When she heard a couple of months later that we were getting married, she grabbed the opportunity – could she base her article on our civil union?
This question presented itself during final wedding preparations, something else to consider, forcing us to take a break from deciding whether the catering staff should wear traditional black and white or casual attire, whether the band should play ’60s rock ’n’ roll or something less raucous? – important questions like that – to talk it over. How would it feel to invite a public we’d never meet to share our wedding with us? Well, why not? Who could humanize the story better than Helen who knew us and appreciated our lives? Ultimately, it was the phrase “putting a human face on it” that swayed us. A cliché maybe, but it motivated our decision.
Well, we made the paper all right. Bottom of page one: a beautiful color photograph of us with our arms around each other, smiling directly into the eye of the camera. Look how great we look, they chose a good photo, didn’t they? then I froze at the headline: SAME-SEX UNION DIVIDES SMALL VERMONT COMMUNITY. I stared at those words. “DIVIDES”? What are they talking about?
It wasn’t like that. That’s not what happened. Noah, world-weary at sixteen, waited for my protests to subside before informing me, “Mom, everyone and her cousin has a happy wedding. That’s not news. There’s got to be some ‘angle’.” Angle. Wasn’t two women getting married enough of an angle? Wasn’t the fact that William Sloane Coffin – weakened by a stroke but still fighting the good fight at eighty – performed the ceremony, wasn’t that enough of an angle? Weren’t the one hundred guests, a crowd that stretched from three months old to ninety-three, all of our brothers and sisters; my father and step-mother; other friends and family who traveled from as far away as California to stand with us on this Vermont hillside, weren’t they an angle?
The article was somber and dark, the women besieged. A cloud of controversy hung ominously over them as they struggled to express their love in a ceremony that aped a real wedding.
How did someone who knew us, who claimed to be supportive, get it completely wrong? The newspaper account of our wedding was so different from my experience that, for a moment, I wondered if Helen was actually writing about some other event. I know reality can be subjective, but this was an out-and-out distortion.
Furious, I sought relief in tearing the article apart, line by line, word by inaccurate word, starting with the implication that Anna is a bigot who decides whether to tell the truth based on appearances:
‘I’m not telling that guy I’m marrying another woman,’ says Anna Rosewood ... she’s judging by what she sees through the window: big arms, shaved head and a scar ... The drama – won’t tell him, will tell him – repeats that morning ... Now that Rose-wood has decided to put up a white tent the whole world can see, nearly every encounter is making her nervous.
Anna was nervous all right, but I can tell you that what was making her anxious wasn’t the tent man. We’d divided responsibilities for our wedding based on who was good at what: I’d arranged the catering, so I was focused on whether the food would be as delicious as it sounded on paper. Anna, the expert gardener, was responsible for the lawns and grounds of her hillside farm. She was worried about whether the grass she’d mowed, edges clipped with special shears, and the flower gardens she’d lovingly tended, looked sufficiently welcoming for the guests about to drive up the hill.
The fight over gay civil unions used to be waged among strangers ... but now as Rosewood and hundreds of others begin to exercise the new rights, it’s getting more intimate, played out on front lawns, neighbor to neighbor.
Part of that, at least, was true. Anna did invite neighbors. And they came: Dusty, the dairyman from the next farm over, arrived wearing his usual outfit, tight brown T-shirt stretched over his enormous belly. He was escorting his wife Matilda and mother, Polly, who came up to his chest. He embraced Anna, saying, “Now I guess I’ll have to take your name out of my little black book,” winking at me. Marybelle, at ninety-three our oldest guest, grew up on this farm in the early part of the century. She lived in California now and had traveled the farthest emotionally and geographically – to celebrate with us.
Carla, Maggie, Julia, Lizanne – the Women’s Group – arrived together, walking up the long driveway accompanied by spouses, boyfriends and children. These women had heard in exquisite detail every struggle and joy on the way to this wedding day.
Family arrived: our brothers and sisters with wives and husbands, cousins, nephews, nieces, babies. My eighty-year-old father remembered Bill Coffin from when they met at a SANE/FREEZE rally thirty years before. Aunt Judith, whose life as a closeted lesbian had almost destroyed her, clutched me so tightly she squeezed the breath out of me. “I never thought I’d live long enough to see this.” I could only glimpse what she’d barely survived.
As you know, Anna and I had each lived an entire history before we became a couple. Honoring our pasts, embracing our future, we had gathered people we loved from every part of our lives. A grab bag of past and present, sharing one common denominator: they had come to celebrate.
We’d designed a ceremony to embrace our different backgrounds. I wanted Jewish tradition and group singing. Anna needed classical music. She’d asked Lizanne’s son, an accomplished musician, to play the piano, another friend played the cello. The spirit of Anna’s parents, long gone, inhabited those moments before the ceremony as we sat together listening to Bach and Tchaikovsky. My arm around Anna, I glanced over at her sisters and brother, who were all weeping. They knew who we were honoring.
After the concert, we walked behind the chuppa to the circle of maple trees. Kids ran in front, old women with walkers maneuvered cautiously down the stony driveway. We formed a long line. A hundred people spread out makes a slow procession. Anna’s dairy goats gamboled and pranced along escorting us, thrilled to be included in the festivities.
The chuppa is traditionally made of the Jewish groom’s prayer shawl, but since there wasn’t a groom, I’d asked Noah if we could use his. The sixteen-year-old’s version of yes was not effusive, but I could tell he knew he was making a special contribution. Certainly everyone who was a chuppa holder understood the honor. Noah, Sophie, Anna’s sister Gerri and niece, Barbara took their responsibilities seriously. We had stretched the tallit between four hand-cut sticks from Anna’s woods, another melding of two traditions.
We arrived under the trees. Our guests sat in a semicircle on folding wooden chairs, facing us, looking out over rolling hills. Anna and I stood holding hands under the tallit that the holders had to raise high, arms extended straight up. When they relaxed their grip, the chuppa sagged down, draping Bill Coffin’s white head.
But that’s not what subscribers to the Post read over their morning coffee. They didn’t hear the concert, didn’t meet our family or any of our friends. They met the Johnsons.
In this standoff, Cabot turns out to be a perfect stage not upscale like the nearby skiing resorts at Stowe but headed that way. Drive the one-mile stretch of Joseph’s Pond Road ... and you’ll pass, on your left, the Johnsons, who politely declined an invitation to the ceremony because, ‘We believe in the word of God.’
That’s true, they did say that. And since that’s what they believe, thank God they didn’t come. But drive a half-mile the other direction and you’ll pass, on your right, a biracial lesbian couple who raise sheep, and two houses down, a gay man who’s a professional bird carver.
Before Silverman arrives, Rosewood is remembering her first image of lesbians: two women who lived in the ‘haunted house’ deep in the woods near her child-hood home. One day someone knocked on their door and found them dead, one of alcohol poisoning, the other of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Somehow Anna deduced that this would be your natural end if you were a farm lesbian and preferred to be around girls.
Farm lesbian?
She kept quiet, or closeted as they say now. For forty years. Fumbling through silly relationships with men and destructive fixations on women. Throwing her energy into her career as a professional runner and drinking, lots of drinking.
Yes, there had been a lot of drinking. But how was this relevant to our wedding? If we’d known that the article would air a troubled past, focusing on Anna’s personal struggles, we would never have even considered it. Maybe we were naive, but we never entertained the possibility. Why would we? This wasn’t the National Enquirer, after all.
We thought our-friend-the-reporter was writing about one subject, but she was searching for an angle, something to capture an audience. Something sensational: Famous athlete, after years of struggling with her lesbianism and alcoholism, finally emerges: Victorious! The human face we’d thought we were showing wasn’t dramatic enough for the newspaper.
And there’s something else: I was embarrassed to admit that it bothered me, because I most definitely did not want to be over-exposed the way Anna was. But I was invisible. Like a photograph where the foreground is in sharp focus but the background fades, in shadow, insignificant. Was Anna the only one getting married? Or just the only famous one? Good thing they printed a photograph so you could see the two of us together, because you sure couldn’t tell from the text.
Here’s how I showed up. Regina Johnson got her say. I’m the “partner.”
Anna’s partner has a little girl, named Sophie I think. ‘It’s her I worry about,’ says Regina Johnson. ‘I’m afraid she’s going to be swayed, you know, taught to live that way. And I’d hate to see her hurt.’
“Taught to live that way.” We appreciate your concern for Sophie’s well-being, Regina. Now if you’ll just deal with your own prejudices, Sophie won’t be hurt by you.
‘My feeling is it’s her business, but if we went to the wedding, or whatever they call it, we would be approving it,’ says Donald Johnson. ‘I believe in God’s word, and that’s what I wrote her in the reply note. But we’re still going to be friends.’ ‘Yes, she’s a very nice girl,’ adds Regina. ‘They are good people. Very good people.’
Yes, Donald, they call it a wedding.
If truth be told, he’s not really very religious, Donald Johnson says:
If that means you go to church every Sunday and quote the Bible by heart. But what bothers him is the change coming so quickly, stealing a state and a way of being he has known all his life.’
Now that I think about it, “stealing the state” is a dramatic, terrifying image: I can understand why Donald was upset. But how my wedding steals the state that’s more power than I ever knew I had.
But let’s address what’s really upsetting Donald, “a way of being he has known all his life.” The way of being I’ve known all my life is hiding, fear, denying who I love, hearing that I’m sick or a sinner. I’m sorry Mr. Johnson has to face changes, faster than he wanted, so I can have the same rights he has. The right to celebrate my love in the daylight.
It’s not as if he didn’t know who was gay in town, but they used to keep ‘very quiet.’ Now, you’re supposed to celebrate. ‘Now it’s right there near the Wedding Section, a picture of Jen and Susie or whatever, and that ain’t right. It’s too open.’
Oh, my God, right near the Wedding Section. But at least Mr. Johnson got something right. Now you’re supposed to celebrate.
This next part is wrong geographically, since these guys, the Rogers brothers, live too far off the road to see any traffic going by. But they, too, have their say:
By 2:30 p.m., the traffic gets heavy as cars make their way up to Roseland’s house. The Rogers brothers watch it all from the trailer they use as a hunting lodge, wondering what’s going on. They helped their neighbor put up his ‘Take Back Vermont’ sign just across from their trailer ... but they want to emphasize that they too are good neighbors ‘If a gay guy wants to come hunting with us, that’s all right,’ offers Darryl Rogers, ‘But he has to be tough, not a pansy ass.’
That’s pansy. Or candy-ass. But never, never pansy ass (you dumb redneck).
Polly Chamberlain, 71, has lived and milked cows here most of her life. When she was a school girl, she never knew the word, ‘gay’ except, of course, to mean she explains ... cutting poppy seeds from her garden, her boots still muddy from morning chores at the barn ... Later she thought about it and figured ‘you can accept it or fight it. But I’ve got no fight left in me.” – So she wrote this reply to Roseland and Silverman: ‘I will come to the wedding. Anna is a good friend and a good neighbor. Everyone is the same no matter who they marry. The best to you both.’
Divides a small community? Sounds like our wedding is giving people in town the chance to rethink old prejudices. The headline should be, CIVIL UNION OFFERS SMALL TOWN OPPORTUNITY TO REPAIR ITSELF. That would have been closer to the truth.
Joan Solomon leads the guests in a group chant in Hebrew. Then William Sloane Coffin talks about true love, forgiveness, homophobia and his friends’ bravery in ‘helping millions of others create a world in which cruelty is more of the exception than the rule.’
Finally the touching conclusion, the human face.
‘Anna, will you have this woman to be your beloved wife?’ Coffin asks.
‘Yes, I will.’
Then the echo: ‘Yes, I will.’
And they hug like old friends.
The final ritual of a Jewish wedding is the moment the groom stomps on a glass, shattering it. But, of course, we each insisted on our own glass. So two glasses smashed, then clapping and cheers. Mazel Tov! from the crowd. We had agreed that we would wave and, holding hands, run up to the house for some private time before joining the party. But, plans being what they are, Anna dropped my hand and turned back to embrace Bill, who had blessed us with his presence, and to kiss Sophie and the other chuppa holders, who were just now lowering their trembling arms.
She caught up with me part way up the hill. We had an ecstatic escort all the way along the fence line to the house, Anna’s goats frolicking and calling. Two shattered glasses, goat escorts: the birth of a new tradition.
The food was delicious. Guests, old and young, loved the rock ’n’ roll music and danced like dervishes. The dancing chair, another tradition, was modified as Anna and I were both hoisted into the air by the strongest men and danced around to a raucous rendition of “Hava Na Gila.” Anna, ever the athlete, loved it, bouncing up and down and shrieking in time to the music. I was terrified and couldn’t wait to be delivered back to the ground. Anna could’ve bounced on her chair all night.
That’s what really happened.
But back to the article. “They hug like old friends.” Can you imagine describing any heterosexual wedding anywhere, anytime – like that? So much for romance. Good-bye, passion. Evidently old friends is reserved for middle-aged lesbians who aren’t supposed to care about being lovers.
And finally that freighted word, wife. That’s not really such a terrible word, you say. And you’re right. Unless it’s been denied you an entire lifetime, long enough to absorb weighty connotations like belonging to, like man and wife, like wifely duties. I don’t object to anyone else using it. I’m a tolerant person – but it could never describe me. If not wife, what then?
1. lover (too sexual) 2. significant other (too ’70s) 3. partner (too business-like) 4. sweetie (too cute) 5. spouse (too distant) 6. beloved (too schmaltzy)
We’ll work on finding a fitting term. For now, it’s Anna, just Anna.
Meanwhile, how could she do this to us, our friendly neighbor-the-reporter? We had welcomed her, opened our private world, and she’d used us. Never in a million years would we have offered our wedding as a vehicle for ignorance and hate.
Since Anna was closer to Helen she had more reason to try to maintain some equanimity. She read the article through once. I read it over and over, raging – VIOLATED, EXPOSED, BETRAYED – trying my damnedest to engage Anna. She listened, but refused to reread the article.
Married now, I remembered the famous quote from Kahlil Gibran:
Let there be spaces in your togetherness, And let the winds of the heavens dance between you and stand together yet not too near together: For the pillars of the temple stand apart, And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow.
The winds of heaven were dancing now. And no one was standing in anyone’s shadow.
But for all my fuming, it was Anna who finally summed it up best by telling me the story of Helen’s wedding, which had been celebrated two years earlier at the house down the road. Family had flown in from Washington and New York, then driven into Vermont hill country, where they arrived looking shell-shocked, convinced they were in the hinterlands, worried they might never find their way home to civilization. Helen and Daniel had a traditional Jewish wedding, complete with chuppa, an imported rabbi and elaborate Kosher spread. Uninvited neighbors drove by, staring at the fancy cars, the men in yarmulkes, the ritual canopy. These were neighbors who didn’t know they knew a Jew. How would Helen have felt if some reporter had interviewed those very neighbors, soliciting their opinion about the skull caps and Hebrew chanting? Inviting them to give voice to ignorance, prejudice ? When we called Helen to complain about the story, she just sputtered, flummoxed, because she’d been waiting to hear from us, she just knew we’d love it. Anna was patiently explaining to Helen what the problem was when I wrestled the phone from her. Because I was on the verge of exploding.
“Helen, how could you do that to us? What were you thinking?”
“What do you mean?”
“Look, we invited you to our wedding, which is just about as personal as you can get. How could you say those things?”
“What are you talking about? Everything I wrote was absolutely true.”
“From your perspective, maybe. But you got the tone all wrong.”
“I wrote what I saw, and quoted exactly what people said to me. There wasn’t anything inaccurate in that article.”
“But I’m telling you the tone distorted the entire day. You made it sound like we were under siege and that the neighbors were up in arms, and you know that’s not what it was like.”
“Why are you harping on tone? I got the facts right, like I just said.”
“You’re a journalist, Helen. You know facts can be manipulated to create whatever impression you want. Look at how you framed the story, starting with that headline. The angle you took distorted the reality of our wedding day.”
“I can hear you’re upset, Jesse. Let me tell you what happened on my end.”
“Do I want to hear this? Our wedding divided the community? “The word of God … taught to live that way.” Come on, Helen, you invited the neighbors to give voice to prejudice and hate for the sake of your story. It certainly wasn’t our story.”
“Will you stop talking long enough for me to tell my side? I showed the first version to my editors. They said it was too long and told me to cut some descriptive stuff and add more context. That’s when I went out and got those quotes from neighbors. But their main complaint was that you two looked too good. That you were heroes of your own story.”
“So what? Maybe we did look good. Isn’t that what every bride wants on her wedding day? After all the fear, all the hiding, what’s wrong with taking center stage? You said you’d put a human face on civil unions, which is why we agreed to let you write the story in the first place. You put a face on us all right. It’s just not a face I’d recognize as mine.”
I’d exhausted myself and it was obvious Helen had stopped listening. I imagined her holding the phone away from her ear, letting me go on and on. But I had to, just had to, say one last thing. “Helen, you know we never said wife.”
It was not possible. We could be heroes, maybe. But never wives.
