Elizabeth McCracken - Niagara Falls All Over Again

How long had they been in love? Well, he’d been in love with her almost forever, at least since she was sixteen; she’d fallen for him definitely post-Quigley, and possibly even pre-. Annie hadn’t known until the day after the funeral, but had since given her blessing; Ed wanted mine, though Rose didn’t care.

“I didn’t tell your father, because I didn’t want him to think I was marrying his daughter to get the store,” Ed said gallantly, though we both knew the real reason: neither one had wanted to test my father’s love again.

The same rabbi who’d eulogized my father married Jess and me four days later. I’d worried that my sisters would think it ghoulish, marrying mere days after burying my father, but they were thrilled: I’d done the right thing, I’d found a nice Jewish girl, an Iowan, no less. “I thought I’d have to read about your marriage in the paper,” said Annie, taking a brisket out of the oven. (Her recipe: Coca-Cola, ketchup; cook forever.) Our wedding was furnished by my sisters and their husbands, the midwestern merchants: the brisket had come from Ida and Morris’s butcher shop; Sadie and Abe brought chocolates and paper streamers from the dime store; Fannie and Ben brought tablecloths, and pajamas for me and a nightgown for Jess. Even surly Joe managed to smile, with all of my sisters making a fuss over him. Everything was easy, and beautiful. All weddings should be so spur-of-the-moment; leastways, all wartime weddings.

Then the sweetest thing: they filled our laps with gas ration stamps so we could drive back to Hollywood. They must have petitioned everyone in the neighborhood. It would take us days and days, what with the thirty-five-mile-per-hour victory speed limit, and we’d have to hope the gas station attendants wouldn’t check our license numbers against the backs of the coupons, but it turned out that Jessica was terrified of flying, would not do it, not ever. At least the coupons weren’t counterfeit. Durante would just have to stick around for another week.

And then Annie walked up to Rabbi Kipple’s portrait and took it off the wall, wrapped it in brown paper, and handed it over.

“How did you know?” I asked.

“You always loved it,” she said, though I knew that we’d all always loved it.

It was March, and the night before our wedding there had been a freak snowstorm, and so Jessica had come to her wedding dinner with a toboggan under her arm — she’d asked me if there was a hill — and wearing slacks.

“Slacks!” Annie said to me, and then, “They suit her.”

We’d been married in the morning of March 9, 1943. Jessica spent the afternoon sliding down the Eighth Street hill, and then came through the back door in her wedding slacks, dappled with snow. Dripping, really, on the clean kitchen floor, and so she took off the offending slacks, and walked through the house in her leotard and tights. She sat down to dinner that way.

And the Sharp family, all of us, gaped.

Our Honeymoon Song

We left after dinner — no time to waste — and drove out of town between the fallow cornfields patterned with pig houses and melting snow. The freakish cold had turned to ordinary warmth. It’s easy to forget the beauty of Iowan skies, especially when you’re keen to leave them: they have the look of reverse glass paintings, backlit and full of a kind of smudged clarity. Our honeymoon sky was blue-jay blue, blueberry blue, mellowing slowly into serge black. The horizon seemed precisely as close as the stars over our heads.

I drove Jessica’s car; she seemed to think that my sisters should see me at the wheel as we went off to our new life. Ahead of us the empty road stretched steady as a sharpshooter’s arm. “Here,” I said to my wife, “take the wheel a minute.” She reached over and held it with one hand, and I leaned over and put my fingers at the back of her hair and kissed her. With her free hand she braced herself against my right hip. We were still driving. I’d thought it would be a momentary kiss, a silly thing, because though we’d been married ten hours, we hadn’t kissed seriously yet: by which I mean, without a rabbi watching us. But we continued to drive and we continued to kiss, my foot on the gas and her hand on the wheel. I could see the barest edge of the road in my peripheral vision.

“Mmmmm,” she said through the kiss, and I understood this meant that we planned to pull over. I felt the steering wheel turn against the left side of my waist, and I put my foot on the brake, and we narrowly avoided tipping into the ditch that fronted the fields. I’m sure we wouldn’t have cared if we had.

We kissed in the car awhile.

“What I don’t get,” I said, “is why you were willing to marry me so fast.”

She shrugged, my practical wife. “I knew I was going to marry you someday,” she said. “That much was clear. Might as well be sooner than later.”

I laughed.

“I’m dead serious,” she said. “Best advice my father ever gave me: never do anything for the principle of the thing. I knew I was going to marry you, and then you asked, and saying anything but yes would have been for the principle of the thing.”

Before this year — my thirty-second on earth — if you’d asked me about romantic love, I would have told you that I believed in it after a fashion. I knew about longing and affection; certainly I believed that people fell in love with other people, and that this state caused them to do stupid, heroic things. But in all of my study of the subject, it seemed that love was a table tennis game: you swung your paddle at the ball, or your partner did, but physics demanded that you waited your turn. One player would eventually pull ahead. Sure, people fell in love, of course they did, but for two people to fall at the same time and to the same depth seemed like the kind of unbelievable coincidence that movie comedy was made of: the keys are in the car you need to steal; the guy who chases you will find you, even six counties away from the start of the pursuit; you sit on the button of the tape recorder just as the villain starts to confess.

With other girls — those girls I was forgetting, just the way songs say you will (though they never mention that eventually your memory returns) — I could think of her, or I could think of me, and I believed that much of my romantic success was my ability and willingness to think more often of my date than myself. Why not? She was mesmerizing, I was not. But with Jessica — once we were married, in hotel rooms from Vee Jay to L.A. and ever after — I somehow kept both of us in mind at once. This seemed more a trick of the mind than of the body, as though for years I’d had to write down the simplest mathematical equation and carry ones and twos and threes and count on my fingers, and then one day discovered that I could multiply ten-digit numbers in my head without even trying.

“Should we find a place to stay the night?” Jessica asked when we went bumping out of the edge of the ditch and back onto the road. I shook my head. All that night we drove, Jessica leaning on my shoulder, kissing it sometimes, my hand on her knee, her knuckles brushing the bottom of my ear, and every time we came to a town she suggested that we stop and I drove past it. I couldn’t explain. I think I needed to turn my longing for her into something noble, a state I withstood for as long as I could. I loved even that. I wasn’t quite done loving it. Maybe that’s why she insisted on driving for most of the rest of the trip. Just because she was now technically a wife didn’t mean she liked being subject to a smitten husband’s whims. It was two in the morning when we pulled off in a town on the far side of Nebraska, where we had to wake the gaunt desk clerk. He wheezed like a bulldog and he sniffed the air like a bulldog but he looked like a collie awakened from a coma, all nose and no brain. He squinted as though we were the most brightly lit things he had ever seen.