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Search Results for: My fiancée walked down the aisle in an enormous old man's suit in front of a hundred guests and would not tell me why. Then she folded back the cuff and showed me a label stitched inside the sleeve
The only thing she was odd about was the dress.
“You’re not seeing it.”
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“I know I’m not seeing it.”
“No, but you’re going to try. In about April you’ll be in that wardrobe pretending to look for your boots.”
“I’m not going to be in the wardrobe.”
“Ike.”
“I might be near the wardrobe.”
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She said she wanted the first time to be the aisle. Which is a completely normal thing for a person getting married to say, and which I have thought about roughly once a day since.
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Her mother went shopping with her in the November. Sunny went to a fitting in the January and came back and would not tell me one single thing and enjoyed it enormously. There were garment bags moving round that house all spring that I was specifically told not to go near, and I did not, and I was quite proud of myself about it.
So I had nothing. Not one flag in eleven months.
The morning was the good kind of nervous.
We were at a farmhouse two miles from the orchard — me, my brother Row, and two mates — and there was a great deal of coffee and somebody had brought bacon rolls and we checked the forecast every eleven minutes because it had been swinging all week.
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Row ironed my shirt twice, because the first time he did it with the iron on the wrong setting and left a mark you could see from a car.
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“Nobody’s looking at you,” he said.
“There are two photographers.”
“They’re looking at her.”
Which turned out to be the truest thing anybody said to me that day.
At about half eleven one of Delphi’s bridesmaids went past the open door of that room. Erin. She had a bag in each hand and she was walking the way people walk when they are carrying something that is not in their hands.
“Everything all right?”
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She stopped. Properly stopped, both feet, which people do not do when they are only passing.
“Yeah.” And then, after about a second: “Delphi’s fine.”
Which is not what I asked.
I thought she was nervous. That made sense. Delphi cannot stand being looked at by more than about four people and we had a hundred coming.
I went back in and had another coffee and let Row tell me about a man at his work.
It started at one.
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A hundred people on wooden chairs in an orchard, in that light you get through apple trees in May, and a plain arch at the front that Delphi had made the florist redo twice.
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I stood at the front with Row. I could feel my own pulse in my jaw.
Breda came in on Sunny’s arm and sat down, and I remember noticing she looked like she had already been crying, which did not strike me as odd at a wedding.
My mother was in the second row in the hat. My uncles were three rows back being loud.
The bridesmaids came up. Erin was last and she did not look at me.
Then the music changed, and everybody stood, and I turned round.
And for about four seconds I genuinely thought something had gone wrong at the back.
Delphi was at the top of that aisle with her bouquet. Hair up, exactly the way she had decided in February. Face done. Smiling straight at me.
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In an enormous black suite
An old one. The shoulders were out past her actual shoulders by about two inches. The sleeves covered half her hands. The trousers were bunched on her shoes and there was too much fabric everywhere, the way a man’s suit is when a woman of five foot four is standing inside it.
She had a dark tie on.
I heard it start behind me. Three rows of it. That noise a crowd makes when it has not decided yet.
Somebody said, clearly, “Is this a joke?”
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I looked at my mother. Her mouth was slightly open and her hand had gone up to the brim of the hat.
And then I looked across at Breda. She was crying properly by then, and she did not look anywhere near surprised enough. She did not look surprised at all. She looked like a woman watching something she had known about for four hours.
And I want to be completely honest about the next ninety seconds, because everybody who has heard this story wants me to have been moved, and I was not.
I was embarrassed.
There were two photographers. There was a man there from my father’s firm. My uncles were behind me and I could hear exactly which one of them was talking. We had spent eleven months and a quantity of money I am not going to put in writing.
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