The Early Posthumous Work

I Do, I Do

114 I Do, I Do Last December 31 Melanie and I celebrated our first wedding anniversary on our twenty-first New Year’s Eve, after one year of marriage and twenty years of living together. Call us cautious. I don’t ever remember myself making, back in the seventies , those popular remarks about marriage being “just a piece of paper,” the denial then of a difference between “living in sin”—cohabitation—and marrying. That quarrel seemed a part of some other world, not mine. I do recall the rapacious joy with which married friends avidly greeted the news that cohabitants they knew were getting married, as if their doubt about their own marrying was salved by friends’ caving in and doing the conventional thing, too. And I remember feeling I was just as committed to my girlfriend as they were to their wives. Many of them, of course, are now divorced. The ceremony was held at the county jail, which also functions as the sheriff’s office and municipal courthouse, but it seems more jail-like, perhaps because the two floors above are bedecked with razor wire. Letters over the door spell out “Law Enforcement Complex.” A shriveled white guy in a red plaid shirt rolled past in his wheelchair, looked up at us, and divined that we had never been here before. “Y’all need a good lawyer?” he said. “Not yet,” Mela- Steven Barthelme 115 nie said. The lawyer’s client was a querulous cowgirl at the information /cashier’s counter, saying, “Well, I guess I got to. I don’t feel like I’m guilty, but I’m gonna just go on and pay it.” Also standing around in the big brick-walled hallway waiting on the Justice of the Peace were a young black couple, the man looking like Scottie Pippen, only shorter, and the woman large and shy, and about ten of their friends and relations. A commanding woman stood near us, across the chilly hallway from the group, taking photographs. “Crouch down there,” she told two women in front, and they gallantly bent their knees to stand trembling until the pictures were taken. I was carrying a camera, too. After a moment, the boss looked at us, and having exactly assessed the situation, said, “Would y’all like someone to take your picture?” We would; she did. About this time the judge showed up, a chunky, pleasant man in his thirties, who looked like he fit very snugly in his clothes. He wore glasses. “Everybody come on in here now,” the judge said, bustling through a door. “No sense in y’all waitin’ in the hall.” It was us, the other much larger wedding party, the cowgirl and her wheelchair-bound lawyer, and a group of three country boys, all with plaid shirts and sullen expressions, son, daddy, and pawpaw, as grandfathers are referred to here in Mississippi. The courtroom felt like a miniature movie theater with seats and a steeply sloping floor. The JP married the black couple first. We all congratulated the bride and Scottie as they walked out. He looked uncertain, but he congratulated me, ahead of time. I felt, as he obviously did, that we were comrades. A woman, one of the judge’s assistants, took my camera for more pictures. Then the judge married us, which took about two minutes. Melanie, in a long black dress, looked wonderful. I wore jeans, a coat and a tie and looked dreadful. When I said, “I do” too early, everyone behind us laughed. I had to allow the judge to finish, and say it a second time. My new wife was the dearest thing to me, as she had been for twenty years. But we didn’t marry for love. Love had always been present, through five houses in four states, jobs, schools, cars, 116 The Early Posthumous Work and cats, an extra lover we had for a while, hopes and worries, affairs and arguments, sickness and health, richer and mostly poorer, and so on—the usual record of lives lived together. Still, we had a reason. While we had always worked, for a long time neither one of us had had conventional jobs. And it had been funny for a while, when someone asked who your health insurer was, to say, “broccoli,” but every year it seemed riskier. So only a few years after I got a legitimate and...