When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.― Czeslaw Milosz

Maid of Horror

When my sister was planning her wedding I was asked to be the maid of honor. Maid of horror, I called it under my breath. The wedding was to take place at our childhood home in New York. I was very uncomfortable about going, since I had run away from home for good reason back in 1978. I knew that my family was assigning me a role in the wedding hoping I'd become a doting, dutiful daughter. I knew that would be impossible. My sister and I never got along. We were oil and water, repelling magnets, we viewed each other as Martians.
When my sister's wedding day finally arrived it was August and 95 degrees. I drove down to my parent's gigantic Westchester Georgian-style brick home. I wore my favorite dress, a 1950's sleeveless flowered dress with a full skirt which I had found in my favorite thrift store in Rhode Island. People I'd never met before kept coming up to me saying We thought you weren't coming! Finally I said Why did you think that? Because you weren't here last night. What was last night? The rehearsal dinner. Nobody had told me! I guess I was supposed to just know. The wedding role they assigned to me was meant to trigger a psycho-genetic understanding of what was expected of me. It didn't work. It would have been better if I hadn't gone, but at the time I wasn't courageous enough to stay home.