The Only Way Out Was a Wedding Dress
I wanted college. I got a country club reception.
I watched my friends apply to colleges across the state. Santa Cruz. Humboldt. Santa Rosa. I watched them open their acceptance letters and felt that familiar twinge of jealousy.
College was never an option for me. I was expected to get married or get a job that paid the bills. In our house, those were the only two roads, and one of them was a dead end.
My father had made his feelings about education clear long before I was old enough to test them. My brother once brought home a straight-A report card and Dad threw it aside. “What good is this?” he said. A female cousin back East got into Yale. Her father told her she’d be wasting her time. These men weren’t outliers, they were a type. And my father was their patron saint.
The irony is almost laughable. My father’s mother came from an aristocratic family in Italy who were barons and lawyers, some who ran the education system. The men and women in that family were learned, accomplished, and most had law degrees. Somehow, in one generation, that inheritance got buried under cement. My father became a mobster who couldn’t see the point of a report card. He barely made it through eighth grade.
I went on to get a master’s degree. I think about that sometimes. But that came later. First, I had to find a way out of his house.
Dad had a word for daughters who lived alone or lived freely. Puttana. For those who don’t speak Italian slang, the word means whore. In our house, no daughter of his would be one. The only acceptable exit was a husband.
So I dated Steve. He was Italian, 21 to my 16, and the only guy my father approved of. He was a wonderful person who treated me like a queen. I loved him like a brother but I was not in love with him. He proposed when I was 17 and I said yes because I didn’t know what else to say. I was a teenage girl who wanted to hang out with rock-and-roll bands, travel the coast, and go to college.
A girl can dream, right?
When my friends piled into our friend Pammy’s pink VW bus to move up to Santa Rosa, they invited me along. Mom said yes, and told Dad it was an hour away. It was nine hours. Pre-internet. Pre-cell phones. Pre-Google Maps. Lies were so much easier then.
I had never felt freedom like that. Not once in my life.
The house sat back among redwoods on a hill near a creek. Our friend Laurie was already there, and her roommates Jan and Tom met us in the driveway. Tom was tall with brown hair and brown eyes and looked exactly like James Taylor. I was gone.
Within the first week, we were inseparable. We walked through the woods. We swam naked in the Russian River. We caught abalone, battered it in beer, cooked it over an open fire while he played guitar and we all sang. I’d never slept next to a man all night in a bed. I’d wake up to his long brown hair on the pillow and his arms around me and think, oh. So this is what it’s supposed to feel like.
Tom was a photography student and I became his subject. My friends joked that the house was becoming a shrine to me, his photos he’d taken propped up along every wall. I was living in a fantasy where I was Joni Mitchell and he was James Taylor and Joni played on the record player all day long.
By the second week, he asked me to stay.
I called my mother and begged. She said Dad was getting impatient. I said I had nothing to come home to. She reminded me I had a fiancé who called the house daily. I told her I wasn’t coming back.
She told me my brother was coming to get me. He drove nine hours on a Friday and arrived to a long wooden table, twinkling lights and my beautiful hippie girlfriends. My brother had also never quite been allowed to be himself under our father's roof. Dad had a very specific idea of what a son should look like and he was the opposite.
We all ate together in that bohemian house. My brother took one look at Pammy, 18, petite, long blonde hair, and forgot entirely why he'd driven nine hours. By morning, the two of them were walking out of a bedroom together.
Neither of us wanted to go home.
We spent the drive back to Los Angeles along the Pacific Coast Highway talking about someday maybe getting a place up there together. Fantasy built on fantasy.
By the time I got home and reached for the phone to call Tom, it was already too late. He’d gotten my number from my friends. He’d already called. My mother had already answered.
Never call here again. She’s getting married.
That one stung. My mother was always on my side, but she knew better than anyone what my father was capable of. He once chased down a man in a truck just for whistling at her. He pulled him out through the window and punched him in the face. She wasn't protecting tradition when she answered that call. She was protecting Tom.
So instead of planning for college, I planned a wedding. A traditional Italian one. Large amounts of money spent on things I didn’t want. A Catholic church. A country club reception. A long-sleeved lace white gown with a high neck. Pink bridesmaid dresses. Plated prime rib. My mother’s stuffed shells. Pastel almonds in white net.
We honeymooned in Vegas. On our wedding night I thought about running away, catching a plane to Santa Rosa, disappearing into the redwoods. I stayed. Steve didn’t deserve that. Tom didn’t deserve any of it. Neither did I. But my parents were happy.
Tap dance, Toni. Tap dance.
We stayed married five years and had a son. My father died five months after that from a massive heart attack, and I left Steve not long after.
Steve never stopped being family and he never remarried. He called every anniversary with the same line: “Hi toots, we would have been married X years today.” He mailed anniversary cards each year with “ex” written in front of Happy Anniversary to my Wife. My daughter from my second marriage called him Daddy Steve and he earned it. He never missed a holiday call and never missed a chance to show up. When her father didn't come to her wedding, Steve did. No fanfare, no explanation needed. That was just him.
He was 67 when he was diagnosed with terminal cancer. He had left Los Angeles for Las Vegas years before and I flew there to be at his bedside. Old-school Italian, in sickness and in health, even after it’s over. He was hallucinating near the end and asked me if he and I were still married. I said yes.
I held his hand. I told him I loved him, that I was lucky to have met him, to have married him, to have made our son together. And I meant every word.
He asked that his ashes be spread among the redwoods.
Whenever I’m among the trees, I think of him. Tom doesn’t even cross my mind.
Some things take a lifetime to understand. My mother was my hero. I know that now in a way I couldn't then. I was only 21 when my father died. I was still so young, still so sure I'd been robbed of something. And maybe I had been, but nothing that turned out to matter. I look back now and think she may have known me better than I knew myself. I'm a city person. I would have grown tired of Santa Rosa. I need music and art and busy sidewalks under my feet. The mountains go quiet too fast for me. The trees are beautiful but they don't talk back.
I eventually bought my own pink VW bus. Pammy would have approved. It had no business attempting the LA canyons to the beach but it tried anyway, and my little curly-haired son and I loved every rattling mile of it. We'd stop for ice cream and apple juice in Malibu and stay at the beach for hours, Joni Mitchell playing on the old tape deck the whole way there and back. I had more fun on those beach runs than I ever had in Santa Rosa. The fantasy was real, but the fling would have faded.
I may not have been in love with Steve, or at least not in the way I thought love was supposed to feel at 17. But I loved him my entire life. He was one of my best friends. He was always there. Maybe that's its own kind of love story.