The Crying Bride

by Susan J. Hudson

On the morning of the wedding, Liz woke with a searing pain in her guts and blood in her panties. She crawled to the toilet, where more blood gushed out. In the bowl, she saw lumps and clots she didn’t want to examine too closely. She flushed them all away, then curled up on the cool tiles of the bathroom floor, clutching her stomach, and began to moan.

Her mother heard her and came in to help. Liz groaned that she was having terrible cramps. No way was she getting married today.

“We can’t call off the wedding! What would everybody think?” her mother wailed. Then she brightened, digging through a bathroom drawer to retrieve a small cylinder of Valium. She tipped out one of the round, blue pills into her daughter’s hand. “Every bride gets nervous on her big day. Take one of these. It will pass.” Looking past her daughter to the blood-spattered toilet seat, she smiled. “And your monthly friend has come to visit! At least no one can say you had to get married.”

Liz took the blue pill, hoping it would ease the cramps, relax her muscles. But in a few minutes, she was too relaxed to dress herself. After several tries, her mother finally gave up on stockings, and Liz slipped her bare feet into the white pumps. She was barely able to hold up her arms as her mother wrangled her into her grandmother’s high-necked lace wedding gown.

The blue pill fuzzed her thinking, too. There was something her mother had said, something about not having to get married, that she should follow up on. But how? And now she was feeling so very weepy, tears tracing trails through the pancake face powder her mother had so carefully applied.

On the way to church in the back seat of her father’s Buick, she began to wail. “I can’t stop,” she told her mother, who patted her hand.

“Just a few more minutes, dear, and you’ll be a happy bride,” her mother said. “I know you and Lance didn’t really want a big ceremony, but it’s going to be beautiful. You’ll see. And Lance is such a good catch. So educated, so respectable.”

When Liz got out of the car, someone thrust a bouquet in her hands and pulled the veil over her face. She tugged at it, frightened by the way it made what she saw as blurry as her thoughts. Her father took her arm, and they began to walk. She wept.

Why was she here? Why were so many people staring at her? Why was she doing this?

Oh, that’s right, for her friend Lance, the cute young English professor, so he’d be a “family man” and get his tenure. No, that wasn’t right. Lance was doing it for her, because her stupid Harley-riding ex-boyfriend had gotten her pregnant. But now Lance didn’t have to marry her. There was no baby. She wailed afresh at the loss.

She was standing at the altar now. How had she gotten here? And there was Lance, his curly brown hair falling into his eyes, his smile making a dimple in one cheek. Lance would know what to do. She had given him a codeword to stop the wedding if he got cold feet. Maybe she could use it, too, if only she could remember it. Cherish? No, ‘cherish’ was the word they had substituted for “obey” in the vows. It was 1976, not 1776, and neither of them wanted to obey or be obeyed, thank goodness. But the word, the magic word, started with a ‘C’. Code? No, it was a codeword, but ‘code’ wasn’t the word. It was longer.

Lance lifted her veil and brushed away her tears with his handkerchief, telling the minister, “Tears of joy.”

Then the piano music stopped — why had the woman been playing so loudly? — and they were watching one of her little boy cousins, the ringbearer, putting the cushion on the aisle floor and trying to do a headstand, and everybody was laughing, laughing. Everything was copacetic. And then she remembered. ‘Copacetic’ was the word.

She turned to Lance and slurred out the magic word: “Co-pa-ce-tic. Everything is co-pa-ce-tic.” Then she gave him a sloppy wink with a false eyelash that was starting to detach from her eyelid.

Lance smiled at her, squeezed her hand, pointed to the little ringbearer now upright again, although with his bowtie askew. Then, gently, Lance turned Liz to face the minister.

They said some words. They exchanged rings. They were pronounced man and wife. They kissed. And everything was not copacetic. Maybe Lance hadn’t heard her say the word over all that laughter. Maybe she only imagined she’d said it.

They settled into their marriage of convenience and a two-bedroom home in married faculty housing. When she realized why, in this gossipy Southern town, Lance needed their marriage so desperately, she never minded his “backgammon games” with the beefy history professor, and he never mentioned her visits to the biker bar in the next county.

Lance got his tenure in 1979, but a few years later, he also got very sick. Liz told everyone he had cancer. Only the two of them and the doctor knew the black lesions spreading across the papery skin of his gaunt body actually were symptoms of a terrible new illness called AIDS. When pneumonia set in, the doctor told them to prepare for the worst.

She sat by Lance’s bedside, holding his wasted hand, blinking back tears. “Still the crying bride,” he whispered. Suddenly, he struggled to sit up, triggering a drawn-out bout of coughing. She rubbed his back and held a cup of water to his lips. He sipped, then took a shuddering breath.

“I heard you say the word on our wedding day, Lizzy,” he wheezed quietly, “but I pretended not to.”

Liz leaned in, touched her forehead to his. “I know. Everything is copacetic. It’s always been copacetic.”

BIO: Susan J. Hudson is a former journalist who now does communications for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her short fiction has been published by Sky Island Journal, Hoxie Gorge Review, Gramercy Review, Half and One, and The Write Launch. She is currently working on a historical novel set in colonial Virginia.