1. The Wedding Night
1988
My new husband looked like a mound of biscuit dough. He had his mother’s hips. Unless you actually saw his private parts, you might not realize he was, in fact, a man. He waited for me under the hotel blanket as I tiptoed out of the small Vanderbilt bathroom in my chenille robe, reluctantly exposing my skin to conditioned air as I slipped it off. He smiled like a dimpled three-year-old about to eat pudding. It was dark except for glowing shafts that wound around the open bathroom door. I hurried into the stiff, clean sheets with him, a bit of moonlight misting in through a crack in the heavy sixth-floor drapes. The clock on the polished nightstand said 1:15 a.m. I missed my mother.
An hour ago, somebody else’s wedding party reveled in the lobby as we arrived at the hotel. The other bride still wore her finery, her updo falling in a sexy droop, and her friends laughed and glistened with perspiration in their cocktail dresses, like they’d been dancing for hours. They looked breezy and comedic, in the way of Eddie Bauer models. A hunky groom stood by this other bride, joking with tuxedoed friends. Her gaiety gagged me—I had no idea why. At this moment in the sheets with Ted, I thought of her. She was happier than me.
Just do it already.
Without prelude, my husband hoisted himself on top of me, facedown, balancing on his toes in plank position, ready to perform the deed for which we’d come to this fancy Nashville hotel. We observed this milestone in our human development as if following instructions from a textbook on how to create a Christian marriage—the chapter: “On Your Honeymoon.” I detected a faint breath of reluctance in him, the weight of his body pressed me into the fresh linens. I thought I might suffocate, my lack of oxygen causing hallucinations of “Eugenia,” who’d made this bed for us today and left her scraggly signature on a white envelope resting against the pillows. I saw her standing in a corner with her feather duster.
I saw myself leaping up from that bed, pulling the telephone into the bathroom with me to call my mother. At this moment, she slouched in a metal folding chair with a lapful of cranberry ribbons plucked from my wedding decor. You’re so fortunate to have a man who loves you.
Ted pounded against my tight young thighs while a screen full of inappropriate images played on the backs of my eyelids. I thought of all those Waltham boys I did not marry. Because they did not ask.
Wife Material: A Novel of Misbehavior and Freedom Description:
Wife Material tells a story of religious abuse and sexual repression in the modern Church of Christ denomination, an American sect that forbids women speaking in services.
Elizabeth Campbell’s parents are violinists. Her father seems gay. Their church disallows musical instruments and homosexuality. Elizabeth succumbs to the twisted violence in her family and the pressure for early marriage at conservative Waltham University, the flagship Church-of-Christ college where suicides abound. Then, she escapes fundamentalism through a series of liberating sins.
