A Complicated Marriage by Janice Van Horne

the back I saw a blur of white. Golf dresses. Just the thing. A white linen sleeveless sheath, straight skirt to just below the knee. And cheap. So cheap that I bought a white cardigan with “pearls” on the collar to wear over it. Next door I found a $6 pair of white flats to finish my “ensemble.” Only $32 poorer, I was set to go. And all without a fairy godmother.
    But I did have a real mother. She came to town a few days before the big day. On the few occasions when they had met, my mother had related to Clem through a fluttery fog of bewilderment mixed with flirtation. My mother was a consummate flirt, in her demure way. She would tilt her head down, then gaze up at the man from the bottom of her eyes. I’d seen the look—“bedroom eyes,” they called it—in the old Joan Crawford and Bette Davis movies that I had devoured on our first TV the summer before I went to college. Alone, with the twelve-inch screen on late summer nights, I’d sit in the sunroom and think I’d gone to heaven watching the glamorous thirties unreel on Million Dollar Movie , with its “Syncopated
Clock” theme song. She once asked me if I didn’t think Harry looked like Herbert Marshall. I thought she had a point, though it wasn’t saying much. She then leaned closer and in her hush-hush way confided that she had often been told she looked like Joan Crawford. There, I wasn’t so sure. But whatever she had, she was one of those women whose whole body and voice would shift gears when a man entered the room. As mortified by her behavior as I had been growing up, I was sad that it had never paid off for her. Oh, she caught the men—it was just that she threw the good ones back.
    Now, here she was, sitting on Clem’s and my double bed in our puce bedroom, primed to give her daughter premarital advice. In brief, it covered three salient points: First, marrying someone older can work out very well; you’ll be able to wrap him around your little finger. Second, Jews are very good to their wives, everyone says so. And third, don’t forget, if things don’t work out, you can always come home.
    As she elaborated, my attention wandered. My mother always spoke at length, and always in the clichés of a bygone soap opera. The absurdity of the “finger-wrapping” bit made me think of Clem’s caveat to our marriage—“as long as nothing changes”—with its postscript about an “open marriage.” Funny, on the one hand, it sounded so wholesome, while on the other so ominous. But Clem would never . . . Of course he would never . . . And just as I had suppressed his words before, I quickly suppressed them again. And where in hell had my mother gotten that bit about Jews? I hated to think. And why did everyone keep jamming Jews into a “they” box? As for running home to Mommy, I had heard that one before, when she had dropped me off at college. Except that day she had been crying. Today, she just looked foreboding.
    For her finale, she presented me with her diamond and sapphire Tiffany bracelet. She repeated the oft-told story of how her father had given it to her right before he walked her down the aisle to David, all the while telling her all the reasons he disapproved of the match, summing it up with, “That man never has been, and never will be, good enough for my beautiful girl.” My mother loved that story. I didn’t, for a moment, think she was sending a similar message to me. Not wittingly. Despite
her weakness for melodrama, she was an abundantly loving person and mother. Yes, she had let me down on Christmas Eve, but in a few days she would be standing up with me when I married, when it really counted. She wasn’t a fighter, and I could well imagine what she had been putting up with from Harry and her family. I loved her for that. And I loved the bracelet. That night I stowed it, in its little suede pouch, behind