Last week I was wrapping a wedding present (knives, no couple just starting out ever buys themselves a decent knife set) and reminiscing about my own early marriage that, against early odds, has endured 37 years. We had several strikes against us to start. Not just extreme youth, but two cultures and one food service job between us added to the peculiar realities of my young husband’s chronic disability had friends and family placing bets on our timeline. Even we had no intention of marrying while still in our teens, but the unexpected availability of married student housing at the University of Arizona prompted a hurry-up wedding to beat a 'be married or miss out' deadline.
Couples and families often waited for years for one of the scarce married student housing units, especially after the restriction to veterans only was lifted in the sixties. Marc and I were finishing our freshman year in 1976. Each of us lived in on-campus dorms during the week and went home to our parents’ houses on the weekends so I could work and Marc could study—he is visually impaired, and managing that disability in a college setting sucked up huge amounts of time). We were not only planning on graduate school, we were both on ‘the five year plan’ since we had both changed our majors. With such long-term plans, we figured we’d eventually want to take advantage of the ridiculously cheap but limited number of WWII era apartments, so in March Marc added our names to the long wait-list.
On the last day of his finals in June, Marc wandered into the student housing office just to see where we were on the list. The clerk said, “Well, I have a unit available unexpectedly, and I can’t reach anyone on this list. As far as I’m concerned, if you’re married, you can have it next week. Marc called me later that night when I got from the cafeteria in a mall on Tucson’s east side where I worked on the weekends to ask, did I want to get married a little earlier than we’d planned, say on Monday?
I took a bit of persuading, not for the eventuality, but for the timeline. My parents were mightily unhappy, certain that this meant I’d never finish my degree, but the two families put a few hurried plans in place: Marc’s mother, Harriet, had been told ‘Judge Fenton did a lovely ceremony’, so she arranged a 10:00 appointment in his chambers down at the Pima Courthouse. I gave notice at the restaurant, planning a transfer to the Speedway location, but not really following through. All that was certain was my last night at work would be that Saturday. Marc’s father took him to get the license and the rings. I hemmed a never-worn pink prom dress. After my mother saw me reading the ingredient list on the Ovaltine jar and heard me wondering aloud how simple vitamins and minerals could possibly affect ovulation, took me to my first GYN visit for a hurry-up, double-dose regimen of birth-control pills.
On Saturday night, I was ‘striking the line’, i.e. carrying the serving pans from the steam tables to the pot-boy in the kitchen. On my third trip, I backed through the swinging door with the double-decker mashed potato pots (the lower one held about a gallon of hot water insulating the upper pot with the spuds). Someone had spilled oil, gravy, I never knew what, on the tiled floor and down I went, losing my grip on the pots on the way. The mashed potatoes were at this point room temperature so their heavy warmth after they plopped onto my hair and my face, and down inside my uniform was rather pleasant; the boiling water from the steam jacket splashing all down my left side was anything but. Someone ripped off my white nylon uniform before I could stand. I remember sitting up to hook my thumbs under the waistband of my nylon slip and drag it off, along with the stockings we were required to wear. Unfortunately, that action took the blistering skin on my thigh and calf along with the clothes, so I was a starchy, sticky, oozy, half-naked mess when bundled into an ambulance and taken to St. Jo’s hospital, a half-mile away.
While I was being cared for in the emergency room, my father, still gruff and disapproving of the whole endeavor, called Marc, saying bluntly, “There’s been an accident, Lynn’s in the hospital. We’ll call you when we know more”, and hung up. Marc told me later that he walked outside his parents’ house and sat on the curb with his head in his hands, imagining everything from car accident to assault, and thinking back on a short life long on disappointment and concluding, “Good lord, I just can not catch a break.”
I left St Jo’s around midnight wrapped from ankle to hip in white gauze and high on Percocet. Sunday remains a mystery to me still, but early on Monday morning, I swallowed some more painkillers and the Orvo-whatever, washed my hair, slathered on the blue eye-shadow we all wore in the ‘70s, and struggled into that pink dress. I managed to get it up, down and mostly around all the bandages on my left side. My parents, my little sister and I met Marc, his brother and parents at the fountain in the courthouse and we all crammed into the same elevator to the third floor office. Judge Fenton bustled in the room to perform the ceremony in a rushed recess between two murder trials.
I was only hazily aware of the whole event, woozily clinging to Marc’s arm while Judge Fenton, kept emphasizing ‘this is forever, it is not easily undone, it’s a commitment’, etc, all the time looking pointedly at my dress, which with all the bandages, was very full about the middle. I wanted to say “Hey, Bud, I am so not pregnant!”, but my obvious nausea from all the meds was additionally misleading. I managed to say a simple “I do”. At that moment, the summer heat in the stuffy chamber overwhelmed my mother and we all rushed to the cluster of overturned chairs where she'd fainted.
We’d planned a family dinner with presents and cake at my parents’ house but first was a side trip to the GP for a check on my burns. When Dr. Grossman saw that the emergency treatment Saturday night had been….inexpert…, he said, ‘I’m so sorry, this is going to hurt’, braced his left hand on my forehead (!!?), and with his right, ripped away the gauze stuck to the wounds in one rapid sweep. More painkillers before leaving that office made the mini-reception a blur. Neither of one had a driver’s license, so my new father-in-law took us to the El Dorado Hotel as planned for the three-day, no-refund honeymoon he and Mother-Harriet given us. Since I couldn’t even walk, Papa-Bob helped Marc get me to the honeymoon suite and then brought us pizza for dinner. By Thursday, I was mostly mobile and almost drug-free, so we asked our parents to take us, our books, bicycles and an upright piano to the as yet unseen ‘housing unit’ west of the U of A Medical Center we’d scooped.
In the quiet of our first summer night in our new home, I looked at the rusty steel walls and plywood floor of our new home and reflected that some women marry for money, whereas I had apparently moved heaven and earth for a 400 square foot, roach-infested Quonset hut.
