Free Wedding Cake for Breakfast by Kim Perel

spider over our bed. If we are so inclined, we can combine our DNA to create brand-new people, practically from scratch, and then we have someone who will watch those people for free when we go to Palm Springs with our girlfriends. If we’re extraordinarily lucky, we’ll still be bitching and bickering when we are so old that we don’t care which way the toilet paper rolls because we can’t wipe our own asses anyway.

 
    WE WILL SURVIVE

Shared Anniversary
    DAPHNE UVILLER
    With apologies to my children, I can confidently say that my wedding day was the happiest day of my life, a goal I mocked when wedding vendors used it to try to win our business.
    â€œI know you want this to be the most special, the most perfect day—”
    â€œNo.” I would interrupt the well-meaning catering contestant. “If this is the most perfect day, does that mean it’s all downhill after this?”
    Before she began her confused apologies, I soothed her: “It doesn’t have to be perfect. I just need to wind up married to Sacha.”
    But in fact, it was a glorious, scorching day on the banks of the Hudson River (nine years before Chelsea Clinton had the same idea). Except for one friend, our cohort was still childless and thus full of energy, enthusiasm, spontaneity. My dad was alive and healthy. My mother, with authority vested in her by the state of New York, married us with unsurpassed art and wisdom. We danced our butts off. And, icing on the cake, a friend confided that her chronically ill mother was up for a heart transplant that could put an end to her troubles and give her another thirty years on this earth. We all still moved about in a bubble of innocence we became aware of only after it popped.
    No one who was there forgets our anniversary. It turned out to be a good-bye party to the way the world was.
    â€¢ • • • • • • •
    Less than forty-eight hours later, we were atop a ridge in the Shawangunk Mountains when a pair of tourists told us two planes had hit the World Trade Center. I actually didn’t believe them, took them for a pair of morons. A few hours later, when we finally got through to New York City, a remote reality began to dawn as my father reassured me that my mother was alive and walking uptown from her office. Another friend left a message that he’d begun a phone chain to account for our wedding guests, many of whom were scheduled to be on flights home to California or Boston that morning. That was day two of our marriage.
    â€¢ • • • • • • •
    On September 12, we were supposed to head home to start the rest of our lives, but all of Manhattan was in lockdown. Instead, we drove to my in-laws, who lived upstate, not far from our honeymoon hotel. During breaks from the news, we opened the wedding presents we’d had shipped there instead of to our small apartment. I’ve tried to understand how I was able to take some pleasure in excavating new wineglasses and linen place mats and even a melon baller from the folds of Crate & Barrel tissue paper. I’d glance up at the screen, watch my native city burn, then snip open another box. Denial? Shock? A desire for tangible evidence that our married life was beginning—gleaming, unchipped, unstained—regardless of what the world threw at us?
    Two of Sacha’s relatives were also staying at his parents’ house, stranded after the wedding, unable to get flights home to points west. One of them was so anxious she could barely speak to us; she’d worked up the courage to leave an ailing husband in order to attend our celebration, only to be punished for her generosity. She spent most of her time on the phone making sure he had enough to eat, that he was warm enough, that he hadn’t fallen. At one point she answered call waiting and handed the phone to Sacha. He listened to the new call, his face calm. It was only from the pauses