Cake

In the glimmer of what can only be called warm wedding lighting, I stare at my wine glass. I’ve put away several glasses of it at this point, and have just gained the courage to inform my grandparents that I would be a much more fun asset if I were to visit them in Paris today, rather than when I had visited them as a naïve sixteen-year-old. My grandmother has just informed me that they have purchased their tickets for around six hundred dollars each. I accidentally comment at how expensive that is. Apparently it’s not. That’s a sobering thought.

At the first slow song, my grandfather, ever the gentleman, becomes a shy child in junior high school, and asks my grandmother to dance. My mom sees, and it’s the first instance that I’ve seen from her in which she has shown a love for both of her parents at once. I feel weird about it, but maybe that’s because I’m still sitting with my wine at the table while the dance floor is approaching full. Or maybe it’s because my wine glass and I are feeling almost empty.

Before getting up to return to the bartender who, at first glance, gave me a quarter glass of wine because he didn’t trust that I was 21 (or maybe because I didn’t immediately tip him, but I thought you were supposed to do that after the wine glass has been filled?), I glimpse an old woman sitting alone at the table next to mine. I don’t know who she is, but I remember seeing her march down the aisle at the ceremony. It was a small wedding, she wasn’t sitting too far away from me, but she was obviously placed in the front row for a reason. Younger adults appear to give her a sort of sad reverence; it’s the type of behavior that the mind associates with a life that appears to have climaxed almost a generation ago.

Anyway, she’s sitting quietly at her table, and she’s smiling softly. I cross and uncross my legs and bring the wine glass to my lips. I realize that I’m watching her and she’s watching the dance floor. It hits me like a wave: she was probably a young woman at a wedding once. At one point, her husband probably took her hand, escorted her to the dance floor. I’ve seen the way her children take her hand—it’s not unlike the way my grandfather took my grandmother’s. Holding the hand of one’s loved one fulfills a sense of duty, but it also addresses a sense of desire. And it’s thanks to the occasion of slow songs like this one that the woman and I become blatantly aware of how no one has asked to take our hands.

Picking up one of the decorative bottles of olive oil that will later be given as wedding favors, I realize the irony in the fact that I have recently become very skeptical of monogamy. Maybe it’s a delayed part of my rebellious phase, but I’ve somehow found myself able to escape into dreams of being alone and traveling the world, rather than spending my time falling deeper and deeper into a world of just one person. It’s been a few hours into this wedding, and I have not yet felt sad. Until at this moment, staring at this woman, I picture a life that contains both love and solitude. There’s no telling, after all, when a life spent together with one person will end. And there’s no telling when a life spent alone will suddenly require the presence of one person—as if they’ve been meant to be there. I picture myself sitting alone in a chair, at a table (as if I’m not there already), as a very old woman. I’m not so concerned with my wine glass, the relationship between my own mother and grandparents has faded. Instead, I’m focused only on the people currently drifting slowly across the dance floor. As this old woman, I realize I was one of the people on the dance floor, once. It isn’t me any longer, but maybe I’m a little drunk on wine, and maybe I’m missing someone terribly. It’s almost as if I can feel a hand on mine, can shift my head onto someone else’s shoulder. He and I, this missing stranger in my fantasy, we haven’t heard this song before. But we’ve both found a way to dance anyway.

The song ends, and I return to the body of my current self. Despite the sadness I’ve felt for her, the woman is not crying. Neither am I, but I have finished my wine absentmindedly and forgotten about it. I stand up to refill it, nonchalantly pull a few crumpled dollar bills out of my bra, smooth them and hope the bartender doesn’t notice. I’m not used to being old enough to drink at a wedding. I return to my table and the woman is gone. My mom walks over and hands me a piece of cake. “It’s better than the cupcakes,” she says, hushed. “It’s homemade.”

I take the plate and she sits down. She asks if I would like to take a picture with her at the Polaroid station. Of course I would. I’ve been getting compliments all night on how good I look in my dress. I leave the cake with only a bite taken out of it, and we go on to take the picture.

At the end of the night, when I return to the hotel room, throw my bag on the floor, and nearly forget what union of lives I have witnessed this night, I remember the cake my mom brought for me. We left it on the table, unfinished, with only one bite taken out of it. There’s no chance someone would have eaten it when perfectly whole pieces are on the cake table just to the left. This saddens me for some reason. We all grow old, and it’s inevitable that at some point in time we will all have a bite taken out of us in one way or another. That doesn’t make us less whole than anyone else.

I can’t say exactly what the woman felt as she silently watched the dance floor and I silently watched her. Perhaps she felt the power of loneliness associated with being alone at a wedding. Or perhaps she felt nothing at all.