Or Not to Be Read Online Free PDF

I’d been dreading the time when he would leave me when he started medical
school. I’d never even considered going with him. I was headed to frigid
upstate New York for my own doctoral program in the fall.
    Eddie put the bag of fries on the dashboard and turned to
me. He took the little box from my clenched claw and popped it open. He looked
from the box to my eyes and said, “Oh, look Anna. It’s pretty. Just like you.”
He pulled the ring out and wiggled it in the midday sun to make it catch the
light.
    I was mesmerized by the sparkle of the
tiny diamond. Graduate students are poor. It’s a requirement.
    I could barely breathe, but I heard myself ask, “You want
me to come with you? Wait. You mean you want me to marry you?”
    “Yes, Anna, I do.” He leaned to me and
touched my lips with his salty ones.
    And that’s how Eddie Wixim, my hot
teacher, asked me to marry him without ever saying the words. Without actually
asking. Just the same way he loved me during our marriage—without actually
saying the words. That man got away with a lot of crap because I was so crazy
about him. After the tiniest feather of a kiss, he slipped the ring on my
finger without my verbal consent, but I let him because my answer to the
unasked question was clear when I kissed him back. And why bother answering a
question that was never asked? Logic prevailed. The car behind us beeped
loudly. Just like that, I was engaged to marry the best guy I’d ever known—my
favorite person on the planet—and all of my future plans succumbed to an
entropic scramble.
    | | | |
    Our wedding day arrived seven weeks later. My vintage dress didn’t fit me. It was too big in the boobs
and three inches too long. I wore heels and held my shoulders back. Mom, who
sniffled behind me, helped me get into the dress.
    “Mom,” I asked, unable to see her face in
the big mirror, “are you crying?” I think it’s genetic: my mother doesn’t like
to cry in front of anyone.
    “No, of course not, Anna.” But she was.
She’d made it clear all summer and even the night before the wedding that she
didn’t want me to go through with this. I couldn’t convince her and was tired
of arguing, so I just stayed silent and let her stew. But I didn’t want her
crying.
    “I’ll come visit, Mom. You know that,
right?”
    “No, you won’t. You can’t afford it. And
in a year or two you’ll have my grandchild and you’ll never finish your
education.”
    I didn’t argue. I didn’t want to fight
with her on my wedding day. But in the end, as always, my mother was right.
    Daddy walked me down the aisle, which was
just a path of grass between two blocks of twenty chairs. Eddie waited for me
in front of everyone, beaming like he was the luckiest man alive. I was dizzy
and relieved when Daddy transferred my hand from his arm directly to Eddie’s so
there wasn’t an instant during which I had to support my own weight. This was
good because during most of the ceremony I was certain I would pass out.
    A giant oak provided shade, yet I sweated
through my heavy silk dress. Eddie wiggled his eyebrows at me and nodded to my
left shoulder as my too large dress began to slip off. I hunched it back up and
grinned right back at him.
    The professor who married us had little to
do during the ceremony except to welcome everyone, ask that ridiculous question
of the spectators about whether anyone wanted to object to our union—as though
that would have had any impact on our decision to marry each other—and
pronounce us man and wife at the end. He did his part to start us off. I held
my breath and waited for my mother to object, and when she did not—Daddy must
have gagged her—I took my first full gulp of oxygen in almost twenty-four
hours. Then we took over.
    Eddie went first.
    He looked alternately from my eyes to his
wrist, where he had scribbled some notes, and began, “Anna, since our first
date, I have been unable to think of anything, anyone, but you.”
    I smiled.