Free Wedding Cake for Breakfast by Kim Perel Page A

that I sensed something—else—wrong.
    He hung up and took me aside, his eyes bright. We’d been waiting for the other shoe to drop, to learn that someone we knew had been in the towers or unlucky enough to have been downtown.
    â€œAlice died last night.”
    Alice was not someone who was downtown. Alice was the mother of our friend, the friend who’d reported that we might be looking at a new chapter for her mother. It was a coda of a fuck-you from the universe: hey, what’s one more life today?
    We didn’t open any more presents after that. Two planes into two buildings had been surreal enough to permit a kind of compartmentalization. This grief was a knee to the chest, utterly perceivable, and would have shaded our honeymoon in any context. We held each other and wept.
    That was day three of our marriage.
    â€¢ • • • • • • •
    On day four, a national guardsman rested one hand on a police barricade and the other on his rifle and regarded the dried-up bouquet I shook at him. His face revealed nothing. He wasn’t going anywhere. His job that day was to start with no, and then let people prove their cases, like a script reader in Hollywood. The line behind my husband-of-ninety-six hours and me was growing longer, literally by the second. I started to dig through our suitcase. I began to babble.
    â€œI swear to you, he’s been living here for months. But he was finishing grad school and moving in and planning the wedding, and also, we went to Hawaii before the wedding because he had this conference there, so he hasn’t had time to change his license. That’s why this was a short honeymoon. We were even supposed to be back yesterday, but we couldn’t get home. We couldn’t get home.”
    With all the tragedy flaming around us after the planes hit the towers, this was the part that, selfishly, upset me the most at that moment. I count my blessings every day, and one of them is a variation on “I’m grateful I don’t live in a country where tanks roll down Fifth Avenue.” For the first time in my privileged life, I was getting a taste of freedom curtailed: we were required to show identification to reach our West Thirteenth Street apartment, which was still cordoned off as part of the dead zone. I had lived in that building since I was eight years old, but Sacha didn’t have a shred of evidence to prove that this was now his one and only home.
    â€œHere!” I shouted. “Look.” I waved a newspaper clipping at him with the hand not clutching dead flowers. “Our wedding announcement. See?”
    The phlegmatic officer either took pity on me or got tired of our holding up the line. He stepped back and let us squeeze through the splintery blue barricade. It wasn’t the threshold I’d imagined crossing.
    â€¢ • • • • • • •
    In theory, the first year of a modern marriage between offspring of liberal-minded families shouldn’t be much more than a ceremonial transition, an uneventful twelve months preceded by cohabitation and followed sometime later by births, illnesses, and deaths. Compared to those rocky events, why should the procurement of a piece of paper with a seal on it shift the ground beneath you? How could signing a license be as momentous as the day Sacha moved in, a day that a man untroubled by accumulation threw his lot in with a sworn purger? And certainly, uttering vows under a pretty white tent wasn’t more upending than what has followed: children born, parents getting sick, parents dying, mortgages (both approved and denied), renovations, uprootedness, often all together at the same time.
    Why, even, should the officialization have been more momentous than the engagement, the moment at which we truly committed to spending our lives together? The wedding was just the party celebrating the decision we’d already made.
    And yet.
    Think about