Marrying Sis: A Story That Never Should Have Happened

Background notes on Marrying Sis. Some of you will wonder whether this is a work of fiction or an autobiography. I know that I would not wish what happened to the protagonist in this story on anyone. All I will say is that truth is the best defense to slander, and if you think some parts are true, count yourself among the lucky ones. For those of you getting married or know someone getting married, let them read this serial story. It might change their perspective on what is important for a wedding. (Pretty much nothing except love.)

I’ve added in facts that are obviously untrue to be confounded with some of the facts that shouldn’t be true, couldn’t be true, yet are nonetheless too true. The ridiculoso-ness of this makes me believe in Existentialism. To give you an idea what this wedding was like, here are other titles that I have entertained for this story:

Getting Married the Crazian Way

The Thing That Should Not Have Happened

A Thesis in Support of (the Existence of) Existentialism

There are Some Things that You Just Cannot Laugh About, No Matter How Hard You Try

and

How I Almost Died but Am Not Out of the Clear Just Yet

Here Begins the Story:

Chapter 1: Something That We Thought Would Never Happen (But It Did With a Vengeance)

I am going to try now to do what I have been trying for a while now. I am going to try to purge myself of the voices that keep running in my head, for they rattle like a cluttery poison that will not lie still. Nor is the poison toxic enough to do me in mercifully. I have no choice but to excise it myself, for it can be done by no one but me. No therapist, no counselor, no friend, no friends with benefits. They have helped, but they cannot hold my hand while I do it. In the end, I must do it on my own. And there is only one way. Transfer those voices to paper, where they can continue to scream their obscenities to others. Any who may hear will never feel the sting of the poison, for it dissolves the soul when inside the body. Careful before you turn the page, lest you catch the poison, too.

That is how I feel, and that is a good beginning for any truly traumatic story. I think you must think that this is a story of death, broken hearts, a genocide, or someone gone insane. A soldier returned from war with posttraumatic stress syndrome. Perhaps, but no. This story is milder, thanks be. But the intensity and the duration of it would have killed me, even a better person. It was a mingle of waiting for Godot and ludicrousness to the extreme. Made more bitter by the fact that the story is about a wedding. Specifically, it was about marrying sis.

Nobody thought that sis would ever get married. I never gave it much thought in that direction, for I am one of the few happy people in my family. I mean truly happy. I don’t get off on other people’s misfortunes, as is so often the way with the world. Comparisons to others is an inherent defect and virtue in humans, as it pushes them to achieve more, and lo, we have progress, the Industrial Revolution, the Technical revolution. Jealousy, among other vices, advances humankind. Envy of others makes us work harder. Lust has ensured that our species will survive and that we are the dominant nasty-basties on this earth. Anger fuels our need for revenge, and the best revenge is success. Not sure about gluttony but sloth, it is the Second Law of Thermodynamics. It is a law that we observe empirically but does not have to theoretically hold. That is why people cling to the hope of eternal life. Maybe our bodies do not have to degrade over time after all. The clincher though, is time. Ahh.

When we were young, there were four of us. There are four of us today, but in a very different sense. The oldest is a physician. She’s a Bible Belt bigot, BBB for short. (It’s funny tough, because her husband calls my mother a racist. More on that later.) I call her a Religigo, pronounced like “gigolo”. Religigos are religious bigots who are hard, inflexible, unyielding in their thoughts, not in a good way either, as my uncle the priest described my sister the Religigo before he died. (Not on his death bed, sometime when my uncle was visiting California and I took him around Los Angeles.) He meant it in a way that caused trouble. Oh yeah.

The second oldest is my sis that was getting married, the one nobody thought would get married. Of all people, I never spoke these words and was too happily busy with my life to think about it. I don’t think about negatives, and have endless hope. Like the eternal flame of the Olympians. That flame almost extinguished this past year. It was a close one, but I refused to let a thing like a wedding, sibling rivalry (had no idea that existed in my family until this wedding), general family feuding, constant inconsiderateness the type that will leave you freezing in the cold because someone locked the door and forgot they borrowed your key earlier that afternoon kind of inconsiderateness, kill my hope. Even if it was the kind of lack of consideration that kills.

The third is my brother, who first became an attorney, and then a priest, also in that order. Before he was a priest he was the Queen Bee of gossip. Now, he refuses to talk about anything, the good, bad, or ugly, nor lend a listening ear. It’s hard for him to tell the difference between busybody talk and conversation that has a purpose. For time and over I have tried to explain (to the imaginary audience in my head): discretion is not an acquired taste. You can’t learn it, neither can you forget it. Remember this, dear brother.

The youngest is me, dilettante extraordinaire, a committed one I’d like to point out. I was the student who aced the exams by cramming the night before and made 99 percentiles on the standardized exams. And when there was one genius score in our class when the IQ exams were administered…You got it. I come from a highly intelligent family. For instance, my oldest sister might not have made national Merit Scholar but she came close. I made it even after arriving late for the exam. Ouch. But she made Salutatorian. Some people get it, some people plug, but we all get there in the end, tortoise or hare.

I left home when I was seventeen and on hindsight wished I had left when I was sixteen. Could have started school early at USC. But senior year high school was a blast, and there were a lot of cute boys in my class. I was excited to go to prom, even if it was with my cousin. We grew up in Texas after all.

My parents forbid me to leave. They threatened up and down and round about what I’m not sure I wasn’t paying that much attention. It was a great surprise to my parents not only that I left but the small amount of heartache that I left behind. For you see, in my family, decisions are made as a group. The herd mentality of the clan takes over, and there is a vote on what you are going to do with the rest of your life including what you are going to have for lunch today, no arguments. And that was what I gave my parents. No arguments. They still have not figured out that if one side refuses to talk, there can be no argument. Subtle as that may seem, it rarely happens, especially in my family.

My family is composed of a whole fucking lot of people. Two brothers married two cousins and basically bred like rabbits. It was a good thing that my great-grandmother was reasonably wealthy in the old country. After she was widowed, she refused to remarry, unheard of then, sort of like leaving to go to college out of state. Gasp. Even my great grandmother rang up my father and said that I could not go to California to go to school. “Good girls did not do that.”

“What can I do,” my father replied. It was not a question because I was decided. “She’s going and in America, you can’t chain a child to the bed.” Too bad, I’m sure my great grandmother thought. Because the world is going to hell in a hand basket because parents cannot tie their children to the bedpost. What is this world coming to. Not a question but a gloom-and-doom prediction. At college, I prospered, earning several degrees, some of which I forget I have until someone asks me how many degrees I have and pull out both hands and start counting. Kidding. But it’s easy enough to earn a sixth, I suppose. Kidding again.

My family pulled themselves up like the American dream. No, we didn’t become manicurists or open any manicure shops. Tippi Hedren, you should be ashamed of yourself. For those of you who know that she is the gorgeous actress in “The Birds”, you should also know that she helped some Asian refugees when they first came over to America find work. And what sort of work do you think she found them? To this day, I have never had a manicure. I have had people stop me outside a manicure shop asking if I had an opening, yet I have had a pedicure once, for my oldest sister’s wedding. When my parents expectedly were against her marrying a boy who was not Vietnamese. Same old Montague and Capulets with only the Capulets protesting. The Capulet parents that is. My siblings and I, second oldest sis, older brother, and I all supported my oldest sis, which is why it’s sad that she tried to break up my second sis’s engagement.

There is a concept in law that says, even if you don’t have an intent at the forefront of your mind, if you act that way, talk that way, well then, you’re a duck. And if you really think you didn’t have motive, then you are even daffier than a duck. That’s one way of describing my oldest sister’s mindset during her younger sister’s engagement period. (Not me, second sis. Three sisters, one brother.)

It didn’t help that my parents were all for second sis’s nuptials when they were dead set against my oldest sister’s marriage, my mother until the very day of the wedding, yeah, that bad. My mother has since profusely apologized, a long, windy apology that kept me in my room wondering when I could come down to get a bite of food. My oldest sis and her husband were downstairs listening to my mother apologize. I had started down the stairs when I realized the significant moment was happening and quietly scurried back upstairs, my stomach growling at me for keeping it empty.

Red Herring Number One: my oldest sis claims that my parents lack of support during her nuptials and my parents complete support of my middle sis’s wedding was why she was so angry and tried to not purposefully, but for all practical purposes, sabotage middle sis’s wedding. Nice try, except that doesn’t explain why my oldest sis was so cruel to my middle sis, who was my oldest sis’s maid of honor and did everything in her power to give my oldest sis the best wedding possible. That part has never been explained adequately, but as my sister is a smart physician, she came up with a rationalization that jives in her mind while revealing her as more uncaring as I would have liked to have believed in any sister, brother, friend, but possible foe.

The rationalizations will come in their own good time, dribbled out in the manner my oldest sis delivered them, with gusto and a straight face that a poker champ would envy. Let us go to the approximate time that my middle sister came up to the room that I stayed in when visiting my parents. She was going to announce her engagement and wanted to tell me first.

I had been home with my parents a lot because my mother had been ill for a long time, bedridden ill, so I came home to help my Dad take care of my mother. He had wasted away to virtually nothing, which foreshadowed my same state during the wedding preparations. We both lost almost twenty pounds. My dad was a good weight to begin with prior to my mother’s illness; I was very slender prior to my sister’s engagement. Going from a size extra small to an ultra small is not a happy change. Stress releases cortisol in people and they tend to gain weight. People who sleep little tend to gain weight also (more time to eat). But at the extreme, overwork and undernourishment will make you look like someone who has been under a forced starvation. I don’t mean to disrespect to the people who suffered this, but this is how I looked at the end. No two ways about it. I lost my signature chubby cheeks, my firm, but fully packed derriere, small but not flat, and the small cupcakes of boobs that I cherished for the sake of their scarcity. If this was all my sis’s wedding cost me, I would be happy. Really.

But the cost of this wedding has yet to be told. So I will tell it and let you calculate the cost.