Dressed like some fancy dessert made of lace, fingernail disarmingly blue, watching friends, family members, and those friends and family members insisted had to be included, Toni still did not know about the best day of her life. She examined this minute and the next, trying to find one happier than the last. Some, but not all. Some were less happy, though this may have been only that she held them so tightly in examination that she squeezed the pleasure from them.
Taken together, as an average, they were happier than yesterday's. Would they be happier than tomorrow's minutes? Would this be her happiest--?
No, she thought. Tomorrow would be its own experience, one of packing up and leaving this wedding behind. She doubted it could be happier than marrying, but she could not know. There might be more joyful moments still. She couldn't sacrifice the preciousness of this one in wondering. The past had been exhaustively written, and the future was too vast to imagine. She had these minutes, precious and exquisite, while she was still a legally separate entity from Jason (even if they have emotionally been joined for what felt like the whole of her adult life). She would savor them.
Toni walked down the hill to the strings of her late grandfather's composition. She could barely hear the music over her heartbeat, but it compelled her to step at a regular pace. Left foot, pause, right foot, pause, she urged herself until she was at the edge of the chairs that someone had placed in rows at the bottom, next to the pond, cartoonishly green with algal blooms.
Jason stood at the end of the rows, next to Nathaniel, the latter seeming far more at ease in his suit. Her fiance, her soon-to-be husband, looked at her with such affection that she fought two impulses: to run into his arms and to stand longer so she could be more thoroughly admired.
Toni was grateful in the moment for psychopharmacology. She did not think she could have handled this moment with her native neurotransmitters. Whoever invented anti-anxiety pills had done it with this in mind when fifty-odd people sat staring at one's supposed radiance and silently wondering if one might trip in the grass. As she had opted for ballet flats, the sponginess of the earth beneath her feet did not result in her skidding across the grass and sticking in a hole.
She heard a sound, the keening of some small animal with an injured leg, and could not make it out from beneath the music and the beating of her pulse. Another few steps, and she understood that it was Jason's mother, whom Toni had only ever seen with a sort of wry anxiety, barely holding back tears. She had not seen this woman crying enough to have a context between tears of sorrow or joy, but the twisting of her face did not seem happy. Toni couldn't help wondering what was happening in his mother's head, why she was so emotional. It was just a wedding, one to a man she had known for years. One who honored and loved her. Hardly a cause for tears.
The steps now came slower and sweeter, as though through molasses. Then, too soon and forever, she stood in front of everyone. Before the mother-hen gaze of Rowan, Toni joined Jason. Rowan instructed Jason to take Toni's hands in his and gaze into her eyes, knowing that he was holding the hands of his best friend.
It was possible other people still existed somewhere in the world, though she couldn't swear to it.
"Don't you cry," he whispered, smirking fondly. Despite this, Toni could feel tears welling in the corners of her eye, unbidden and unwanted. "If you cry, you are going to look like a raccoon."
He was right, and this was enough that she somehow assumed conscious control of her tear ducts, keeping her cheeks dry and an unmarred, largely uniform color.
She looked into his eyes, but she didn't feel overwhelmed. They had been through so much together. This was merely another step on their long journey.
Rowan tied their hands together with a braided cord, one strip full of Jason's descriptions of Toni and their relationship to this point, another with Toni's painting, and the third blank to represent the future they would create together.
The ceremony glided in a liminal space where even time dared not enter.
Rowan asked if Jason was ready to say his vows. He appeared startled a moment. Toni thought at first that this was because he had been struck dumb and had forgotten his vows and then understood that he was too moony, looking at her. It was flattering, but she wanted to get to that kiss.
Toni had refused to listen to Jason's vows in advance. She had cautioned him to keep the jokes to a minimum, not because this was not an occasion for levity but because she knew that he hid in his humor. He needed to be fully present, or he would regret it forever, dissociating from the only wedding he would ever get if he knew what was good for him.
Rowan cheated the written vows out to him so that he might not forget them in the excitement of the moment.
"I vow to write my story from this point on with you as a main character," he said, gazing with intensity. "I don't know if it will be a comedy or tragedy, but I know that I will hold you close as we walk through the paragraphs. I vow to find the joy in our every day, never taking a moment I get to spend near you for granted. I promise that my truest intention will ever be in honoring our life together. I vow to hold your hand when you need security and let you roam when you need space. I swear to work to keep our art watered and nurtured so that it may always bear fruit. I will remain grounded with you to build the foundation of our life together. I will follow your flow, even if it takes us deep within the earth or scattered in the ocean. I will burn up self-importance and unnecessary things that block our progress. I want to wake up beside you for the rest of my life, one I cannot wait to begin - and continue - today. A day full of possibilities. It's a magical world, Toni, ol' buddy. Let's go exploring."
If she didn't love him before, she would have once he quoted Calvin and Hobbes in his vows. Yes, they would explore. That was the point of this. Marriage between them would not be mutual stagnation but mutual weirdness.
Toni began by quoting Anais Nin, who dared to phrase better what she felt in her heart, "'I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naive or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.' This isn't the Big Day for me, this wedding, the most important one in our relationship. It is a big day, but there are so many big days behind us. When I saw you across that backyard for the first time, and you smiled at me. When you kissed me for the first time, and when I figured out that, yeah, this relationship was for keeps. Those were big days. This is a party acknowledging all that, because I've been married to you in my heart for so long. I don't need to sign a piece of paper for it to be real. I didn't need this wedding to know that I am your wife. I choose you today as I've chosen you for a thousand days, as I'll choose you for twenty thousand more."
Rowan, full of smiles, released them from the binding and replaced it with two woven gold rings held by their nephew. "Not that I think these two would mind being tied together for the rest of the day," she added with a maternal grin.
After the ceremony, they rushed to the rust-spotted boat. With some help from the wedding party, Nathaniel in particular (though Charlotte appeared to tell him to put his back into it), Jason got them unmoored enough to float in the muck.
Jason fumbled with the oars as though barely recalling why one would have these with a boat.
She thought about offering to take one of the oars to expedite their journey, but it was too cute watching him struggle, and she didn't want to let even a dot of the water on her fairy princess dress.
She looked back at the guests climbing the hill. If she didn't fear someone photographing her eating potato salad, she would have stocked this dinghy with snacks and candles, so they could float aimlessly until people forgot about them. That was all she wanted for today, to be alone with her best friend. To revel in their love for one another. And, possibly, for some potato salad. It was a picnic, so some must have materialized when she wasn't looking.
She told him to pause in the middle, a reprieve for which he appeared grateful indeed. His brow was lightly perspiring, giving his face a sparkle that made the ride seem more magical.
"How are you--?"
She shook her head. "I just want to look at you."
Jason bit his lip, honestly blushing that his wife (she was his wife now!) wanted to take him in.
They drifted for a minute, then two, saying nothing. She would look at him until he could not help diverting his eyes and grinning, then would give it back just as good as he had gotten it.
He picked up the oars then, not asking, not needing. It was the right time. As they had gazed at one another, the boat had drifted, as though it knew the way, near to where they had planned to land.
Jason grunted as he made his way across, taking only a few more minutes to complete the journey than was reasonable. Nathaniel, Charlotte, and Amy waited on the other side, the former two grabbing the rope to haul them back into shore.
Amy helped her out of the boat to preserve her dress from potential slapstick. Jason jumped out with apparent accomplishment, a grin on his face as though he had rowed them across the English Channel.
As they made their way for photos, Jason said, "I feel like we crossed a threshold. I am now different from other people because I married you. In the multiverse, there are versions of me that did not have this experience, and a chasm gapes between us."
"What would you shout across the chasm before the distance got too insurmountable?" she asked.
"That they are idiots for wasting even another day not being your husband."
They stood under a willow to allow people to take photographs of them in a variety of poses and configurations: them kissing, Toni's mother and father, Toni attacking Jason with the bouquet, the bridesmaids, them kissing again, Charlie's Angels pose. Toni had no trouble smiling. She had to actively force herself to resist dopily grinning at everything, so glorious did the world seem. It was not merely that she was happier than she had ever been but indeed happier than she estimated she could be. She could think of past moments of exhilaration, first kisses, and getting her first solo show, but not outright happiness. Her daily life was on the charmed side of neutral, with occasional awareness that clouds looked especially nice but not feeling as though much touched her.
She imagined she would like marriage.
Thomm Quackenbush is an author and teacher in the Hudson Valley. He has published four novels in his Night's Dream series (We Shadows, Danse Macabre, Artificial Gods, and Flies to Wanton Boys). He has sold jewelry in Victorian England, confused children as a mad scientist, filed away more books than anyone has ever read, and tried to inspire the learning disabled, gifted, and adjudicated. He can cross one eye, raise one eyebrow, and once accidentally groped a ghost. When not writing, he can be found biking, hiking the Adirondacks, grazing on snacks at art openings, and keeping a straight face when listening to people tell him they are in touch with 164 species of interstellar beings.
