By Marie Look
I was going to have to get down on my hands and knees for my sister. It was obvious as
soon as I entered the bridal suite.
One of the museum’s heavy, mission-style doors closed behind me, muffling the sounds
of the cocktail hour getting underway outside on the lawn.
“We can’t find the darn loop,” my mom reiterated, leading me across the room to my
sister, who faced away from us, her stance rigid. The train of her gown pooled around her. One of
the other bridesmaids was bent over at the waist, staring at the fabric like I did my bathroom
floor whenever I dropped a contact.
My sister’s mermaid gown, with its open back and body-skimming fit, highlighted her
slim waist and curvy hips. Her dark hair was still pinned up as it was for the ceremony, although
there were a few more wisps at the nape of her neck. She had that “bridal glow” the ladies’
magazines mention—rosy cheeks, a bright complexion.
When my sister was a baby, I used to get in trouble for kissing those cheeks too much,
too often. I was two, almost three, years old when our parents brought her home, and I fell
hopelessly in love. Chubby appendages, rolls of skin, and the fattest jowls you’ve ever seen. A
miniature Jabba the Hutt with a full head of jet-black hair sticking every which way. I’d kiss her
until she cried and our mom had to rescue her.
Eventually, we were old enough to be playmates, to roughhouse even. Sometimes, after
we’d both gotten in a few shoves, my sister would slap her own thigh. “Owww!” she would yell,
loud enough to bring our mom running from the next room, ready to punish me for causing my
sister distress.
“There’s a tiny elastic loop,” my sister said, half-turning over her left shoulder. “And
higher up there should be a button you just”—she motioned as though hanging up a jacket—
“hook it over.”
The bridesmaid touched my shoulder with one hand and circled her other pointer finger at
a section of the immense train. “I think it’s somewhere right here,” she said unironically. “Do
you see it?”
Maybe my mom fetched me because my eyesight was sharper than hers. Or my sister
might have decided this fell under the maid of honor’s duties. Or maybe one or both of them
only felt comfortable asking a person to crawl around on the floor of the Shemer Art Center if
that person was an immediate family member. “Whatever the bride says, goes” is common
advice for a bridal party, but the counsel “stretch beforehand” might have also been appropriate
in this case.
My sister and I are both athletic, but she was the more limber one in the family. As a kid,
she was a star athlete in basketball, soccer, and track. Though she went to the trouble of earning a
civil engineering degree from Arizona State, after graduation she began daydreaming about
becoming a fitness trainer or personal nutrition coach instead. And then she discovered CrossFit.
I went with her once to one of these gyms, on a partner workout day that involved
jumping rope, performing sit-ups, throwing a medicine ball at a wall, running laps around the
facility, and completing several other exercises I soon blocked from my memory. The idea was
for the partners to execute their repetitions simultaneously and only move on to the next exercise
after both were finished. We were competing as a team against the other gym-goers.
“We complete the rounds for time,” my sister explained. “As soon as we finish, they’ll
write our time on the chalkboard, and then we can see how we did compared to everyone else.” I
don’t remember our final time or standing. I do remember that my sister, who barely broke a
sweat, made it all look effortless and I, who deeply regretted saying yes, was so sore I could
barely walk for a full week afterward. But at least I had completed every single rep. I hadn’t
given up.
I knelt on the one-hundred-year-old, terra-cotta tiles and brought my face inches from my
sister’s gown. Running my hands over the intricate floral motifs and pearl-like beads, I scanned
the white-on-white layers of charmeuse and lace for an elastic loop smaller than my thumbnail.
My own wedding dress had not had beading. Or a train. Had I actually gotten to wear it,
there would have been no need for bustling. I chose it because it was unfussy, comfortable, and
on sale. This was before I moved it to the back of a closet in my parents’ house, where it would
end up staying, unworn, for maybe the rest of my life.
“Found it.” I pushed a pinky through the elastic loop. The trick now was to fold the train
in an organized fashion, like packing away a glamorous parachute. My mom and the bridesmaid
gathered the fabric while I shuffled my knees forward to hunt for the button.
The surreality of the situation came in little waves. It hadn’t been that long ago I was the
only sister who was engaged and she was bombarding me with questions about all things related
to wedding planning.
“Don’t you have wedding fever?” my sister had asked one day while I drove us around
Phoenix in my red Corolla, the windows down. Her energy had been closer to that of a teen girl
than a woman in her late twenties.
“I wouldn’t call it wedding fever. But I’m definitely excited.” I brought the car to a stop
at a traffic light on Scottsdale Road. The air became still and hot again.
“Ugh, I just wanna be engaged and married,” she had whined.
“Aren’t you two getting close?”
“We’ve talked about it. But we’re trying to figure out the timing.”
“Timing?”
“Yeah, having enough time to plan but not too much time,” she explained. “Like if we get
engaged in the spring but also want a spring wedding, then we’d have to be engaged for a whole
year. Or if we get engaged just a month or two before spring, then we’d actually have to wait
over a year to get married. To have enough time to plan.”
My fiancé and I had been together seven years before getting engaged, so waiting was a
familiar concept to me.
“You should get to pick your wedding date first, though, obviously,” she had continued,
her tone reluctant. “Because you’re the older sister, and you’re supposed to get married first …”
There was the button. I fiddled with the elastic until it felt secure. My mom and the
bridesmaid released the folds, which fell into place, and I got to my feet. The three of us backed
away from my sister, who could move around freely again. She did a quick hair and makeup
check in the mirror, and then she was ready to meet her groom outside the bridal suite for their
formal entrance. She sashayed toward the door, her husband and our relatives waiting on the
other side, eager to celebrate the married woman she had become.
After the traffic light had turned green, I started driving again. There was the warm
breeze picking back up, my grip on the steering wheel, my sister’s little whine from the
passenger seat. The words that had cut me deeply then but cut just as deeply years later:
“Can’t you just hurry up and get married already?”
Marie Look is a Chinese American writer living in Los Angeles. Her literary essays have been published by The Bluebird Word and HerStry. She studied journalism at the University of Oklahoma and creative writing at UCLA Extension. Learn more about her work at marielook.com.
Hot Pot Magazine 