Why We Rehearse

James Zoller (for KB on her wedding day) Once you imagined this day though a cousin was bridegroom enough and another cousin stood in. Your gowns trailed badly, train and hem, dragging fore and aft, tripping your small feet, slid to the toes of grandmother’s castaway heels –the unfilled, elevated heels clack-clacking like tack hammers against the hard tiles of her broad front hall. Such a grand procession, gown slid down your thin shoulders, the thin bop of pomp and circumstance from your own too red lips. Once you imagined another part as it should be, who stands where, with whom, what to say, even how it should be said – step and turn and speak, a little louder, but somehow defer . . . until your cousin who wasn’t, yet, groom enough himself lost interest anyway. We have taken pictures to hold against this day. It is a picture I describe. Once when we imagined we failed to imagine beyond that day. But we prayed. And when we prayed with clacking heels and too red lips coming again and again to mind . . . when we prayed we prayed toward this moment, not for shoes that fit or makeup properly managed but for your own deep happiness and for a man who would be groom enough.