June 29, 2007

• After the Wedding

  I remember how I felt the night of my wedding, in that cheap and smelly motel room after my mother dropped us off and drove away.  I had mixed feelings.  At this stage of my life, now, I always have mixed feelings and I acknowledge and accept them.  Back then, I was more inclined to deny or dismiss whichever feelings it suited me not to accept.

  Sometimes, I would suppress joy or optimism out of fear that I’d jinx myself.  Many times I talked myself into expecting a worst case scenario so that no matter what happened, it would be a pleasant surprise.  I loved happy surprises and hated “bad” ones.  Everything in my life has always had at least two sides, but in my youth I tended to choose one and ignore the rest.

  On my wedding night, I swallowed my fear because I was determined that my mother was not going to be proven right.  My marriage was made in heaven.  It would work out.  Ford and I would live happily ever after.  I would show her.  We would show them.  Ford expressed similar sentiments.  It was us against the world, and against the two of us the world didn’t have a chance.  If he was as scared and uncertain as I was, he never expressed it to me, and I was working so hard to hide my fear from myself that I certainly didn’t reveal it to him.

  The first part of the night was a sex feast, as we tried different positions and talked to each other about our feelings and physical sensations.  We were quiet about it, no moans or screams, only some talking in whispers.  It was the first time that our lovemaking hadn’t been conducted in total silence, the first time we didn’t need to hide it.  That alone made the experience special.  For me, being married, belonging to someone who belonged to me, was a big turn on.  I was such an insecure, needy, nincompoop — naive enough to believe that those vows had some supernatural power.

  Our first time that night was the usual missionary position.  Ford finished fast, leaving me hanging, and we cuddled until he was erect and ready to go again.  That time he suggested we do it “doggy style,” a phrase I’d never heard before that night.  I could guess, anyhow, what it meant, so at least I didn’t have to have it explained to me.  Again, Ford finished without me, but not quite as quickly as the first time.  I was having fun, anyway, enjoying the sensations.  In retrospect, my husband’s initial orgasms served as my foreplay.

  The next time he was ready to go, he lay on his back and told me to get on top.  That time, through a combination of his taking longer to get off and my being able to make better clitoral contact, I had the first orgasm of my life that wasn’t self-inflicted.  I finished that time before he did, went limp, rolled off him, and almost fell asleep while he was pumping away trying to get his rocks off.  He fell asleep immediately afterward, and I lay there with my head on his shoulder, feeling euphoric, and thinking, “This is my husband!“  The emotions accompanying that thought were amazement, pleasure and pride.

  In later days, I let my husband know that it was better for me when I could get off, but he had his own preferences.  That night and for the rest of our married life, he never made an effort to help me achieve orgasm.  It wasn’t important to him.  Sometimes if he was tired, or feeling magnanimous when I asked, he’d let me get on top and get off.  Otherwise, it was just the same old up and down.  I accepted what I got, and in the beginning I just felt lucky because sex was never quite as awful as my mother had made it out to be.

  That night, after his third orgasm and my first, we slept.  In the morning, we called Ford’s mom and she picked us up.  It had been arranged that we would stay at their house while we worked on Grandpa and Grandma’s old house, less than a block away, to make it livable.  He, his two brothers, their mother and stepfather lived in what had once been a ranch house before the ranch was subdivided and my step father-in-law’s parents and his younger brothers and sisters moved to a house in the middle of town.  By the time Ford and I married, most of those step-uncles and aunts were married and out on their own.  The old wood frame house rambled, with several lean-to additions.  Ford’s room was at the back, had once been the dining room off the kitchen.  Its isolation from other bedrooms gave us some privacy at night even though there was no door, just a wide open archway between his room and the kitchen.

  I remember sitting at my MIL’s kitchen table that morning, my first as a married woman, drinking coffee as she worked around me.  She was cooking, setting the table, talking, making plans for picking up my things from Mama’s house, getting things we’d need to set up housekeeping in the old house.  I heard her step up behind me and gasp, then I felt a sharp pain as she pulled a hair out of the top of my head.

  She reached over my shoulder and handed me the hair, snow white, and said with surprise, “Marriage must not agree with you.  You’re going gray-headed already.”  It may not have been a hair that had lost its pigment and gone gray.  My hair has always been a mix of many colors, from deep auburn to strawberry blonde.  Later on, while I was in prison, one of my butch friends used to enjoy sitting in the sun and collecting one hair of this color, one of that….  That hair my MIL found was silver, platinum, white, no doubt about it.  For a long time after that, I kept expecting them all to turn white, but they didn’t.  They still haven’t, but occasionally I find white ones in my hairbrush.  When they lose their color they seem to lose their grip.  I’ll probably be bald before I’m gray.

  

  • 11:08 pm
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