On Cake and the
Jockeying of Position (Usual Wedding Fare)
by Mina Iyer
Weddings are
about the cake, right? Let’s not kid
ourselves. They’re about love and fidelity,
yes, blah blah blah. They’re about the sugar
rush that injects your veins and makes you dance,
giddy and high, with anyone who will dance with
you.
At last
weekend’s wedding of my cousin Raj, to his
ice princess bride Min (whom I’ve named
Lemon Face because of her constantly sour-puckered
expression), they never got around to cutting the
damned cake. That was the big disappointment of
the evening to me. I mean, we stayed a pretty
long time, until, well...we couldn’t take it
anymore. No cake. Who does that?
We suffered
through a lot. My personal low moment: egged on
by my beastly cousin (Ph.D. in Sociology, self
satisfied prof at some random university) and her
beastly mom (my aunt), my mom turned to me and
yelped desperately, spasmodically: “Your
aunt said your cousin went right back to work
after she had her baby, because, ‘How could
she waste all of that education?’ You went
to law school! How dare she insinuate
you’re wasting your life by staying home
with Maya? YOU MUST MAKE MONEY!!!”
So, what could
I do? What any good Indian daughter would do.
I casually let it drop to my aunt that I'm
studying for the GMAT and applying to MBA
programs. A flaming lie, but, oh, it felt good...as
good as (let’s say cake). My aunt’s
face fell several miles. And all was well.
The vows were
sweet (bland). The food was elegant (bland). I
was in the doghouse for bringing my daughter,
Maya (no kids were allowed, except my Sociology
Ph.D. monster-cousin’s son, because he was
ring bearer for two seconds of the ceremony).
Maya, who had a cold, stayed hidden from everyone
in my other aunt’s hotel room with my mom.
Still, doghouse. My Sociology cousin and her
brother were icy and detestable. They had
never met Maya before, but pretended not even to
see her, though she was at her most winsome. I
ate the blah food and then danced with a careful,
measured wild and careless abandon. Why? To dance
with my adorable (and, bless him, long suffering)
husband, since we were both all dolled up for
once, and he looks smashing in a suit. And to
show they could all go to hell, and hang their
doghouse. And to buy time until they cut the
freakin’ cake!
This never
happened. On the way out, an uncle looked at me
sadly and feebly joked: “They
‘desserted’ us.”
We had to
drive all the way home from Napa (two hours), and
I had to settle for microwaved whole grain
doughnuts. Eww.
And a voice
mail from my mom, again plaintively urging me to
“MAKE MONEY” (in capital letters).
Sorry, mom.
Nobody’s bitch.
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