Dana Masden

The wedding was soft. It floated in the air like a haunting piece of music. It wafted there as the day turned night, a bold blue night, as the reception nuzzled by the river and the river rushed, the last of the snow was melting from the mountains. The wedding curled up to sleep there, buzzing softly and then reenergized itself to leap, clumsily pouncing among the grass like a new puppy.

The wedding created a freshness that I'd forgotten existed. It wasn't cold. Just fresh. There was a lot of laughter. It was one of those weddings that can rest because it is in a good mood, where people seem to recognize the smart choices of the bride and groom. It was hopeful. It even restored its own institution in others, to create healing looks, romantic tempers, and dancing feet between people who don't otherwise have motivation to do so. Take my parents. I hadn't seen them touch—nice touch, not bad touch—in two decades. Of course, two decades ago, they were different people entirely, and I was a girl. Now I am a girl within a girl, still me, but on the outside, something else completely.

This is what I tried to tell Josh: there are some moments in life, maybe five or six allotted to each person, when the camera zooms way far back, up into the night sky, like what God might see, and invites us to peer down at our usual selves, with scrunched, mashed faces like the babies we are. We see the insignificance of our usual worries and the significance of our usual misgivings. I sighed and looked at him, getting him to see. And then Josh accused me of smoking pot with my cousin.

What the fuck are you talking about, Josh said. I thought you hated your sister.

The catalysts are weddings, funerals, graduations, I said.

Where did you get the reefer, he said.

*

I'd forgotten Susie's face. The way it softened in the light couldn't be captured in Susie's voice, and living in different parts of the country, that's all we could do: talk. The dress made her prettier, but not because of its construction or the way it opened her body—in fact, it fluffed her like a pastry dish, robbing her of sexiness on the last day of her singlehood. Instead, the dress on Susie looked pretty because Susie seemed good. This is how life always goes: Susie=Good; Me=Bad.

Susie and I talked once, sometimes twice a week. She'd become a vegetarian, she said, something I couldn't conceive of. Colorado must be making her a hippie. Sometimes Susie talked about Jake and sometimes I mentioned Josh. Only once did I admit his buffoonery. Susie consoled me, but I knew she stored the information in her brain to apply anytime I said anything about Josh; like: Josh doesn't like tomatoes. My stories became thin. Slivered notions of Josh, arguments for why he wasn't actually a buffoon: he brought me a Gerber daisy, he carried the recycling to the street. As Josh often said, he was stuck with himself, too. He understood what it was like for me. We laughed at them. Why would anyone in their right mind stop eating meat?

The wedding picked and chose conventions. It respected tradition, but wasn't trapped by it. It was innovative in a way that reflected the people it celebrated. Our uncle Jim did the ceremony because he'd once been in the peace corps. There was homemade beer in mason jars, instead of a flower girl, our cousin Jessica in a bee costume. The wedding, according to Josh, was showing off.

Josh wondered what would happen if you could just ask anybody to marry you and then anybody could be a pastor and if anybody could do it, what did it mean anymore? He'd been making these comments about death lately, too, any place in which he saw a broken rule for the world to ooze open. About abortion, specifically, and about homosexuals, of which I believed there were some here. If anybody could kill anybody, and so on. When humans try to become God. When humans smoke too much pot.

I tugged on his sleeve. "Not here," I said. I had not smoked pot in six months. Reason: Josh didn't like it. Hippie bullshit.

We were sipping some beer and I felt okay having one because Josh didn't know I was pregnant. Let's say I hadn't taken the test earlier that day? Then I still would have had this beer anyway. It was early. My baby had been to this wedding, I thought. My baby might feel the way the wedding views the world. My baby might turn out to be good.

"You know," he said. "That's the difference between you and your sister. You don't work so hard to make yourself seem so cool and different."

*

I ran into my mother in the bathroom.

"I see you brought Josh," she said. We hadn't talked in weeks.

I washed my hands and checked my makeup in the mirror and worked to ignore her. I didn't know any other girls whose mothers talked to them this way, so intimate about things a woman ought to keep private. "Yes," I said. "We're still dating."

"I just want you to be happy," she started to say but then I was gone.

I wasn't the maid of honor. It was Lynn, Susie's friend from college. You got a real sense of closeness from them. It was almost sisterly. And when Susie put her hand on Jake's collar they were a pair of new lovers sharing a secret joke. And when Susie linked her arm in our father's and walked toward our uncle following the bee and her new husband and Lynn, then she and my father were a pair of mutual caregivers; and I felt Josh breathing real slow, tears going down my face quick as rain on a windshield. Josh wiped them for me. He kissed my hair. The tears released me momentarily. Only Josh stopped to consider why I was really crying. Only he knew. There would be no abortion. There would be me and Josh together over the years. We'd grow overly familiar with each other's faces and smells and he wouldn't for a moment get better but just worse and worse and worse. We'd never have this kind of night air or restfulness or jubilation. We would spend our lives arguing.

But maybe our baby wouldn't.

Maybe our baby would be good. It was then, in that moment, at Susie's wedding, that our baby got born for the first time. People clapped and clapped. And then, for the sake of the wedding, they cheered, whistled between their fingers and yelled hopeful things at the wedding, as if it were some kind of sports game.