Wedding Weight

Chapter 1 - The Photo (Part 1)

As Assisted Living Facilities go, this was a nice one.

Bright and airy, the citrus-scented disinfectant almost completely masked the smell of urine. The hallway walls were a drab institutional white, of course, but they were almost completely obscured by large cork boards, covered with colorful posters and homegrown art of wildly varying quality. The most eye-catching works were created by victims of a stroke, apparently God's way of saying that you are never too old to start painting like Picasso.

A fair number of the residents could still get around on their own, in cautious shuffling steps or hunched over a walker's aluminum frame. The ones that couldn't were pushed in wheel chairs by friendly, and for some unknown reason disproportionately Filipino orderlies, who kept up a pleasant stream of chatter with their geriatric patients. True, the residents did not generally understand them, finding their accents nearly impenetrable, but they welcomed the warm sounds and honest laughs.

In short, it was a perfectly acceptable place to spend your days as you waited to die.

Robyn was five years old then. A plump and giggly girl with springy curls of golden brown hair spraying from her head in all directions. As she had every day for the past few months, she wore a Snow White costume, because nobody has a stranglehold on a little girl's imagination like The Walt Disney Corporation.

Her mother had brought her to this semi-private room to visit with her great grandmother, a woman who, to Robyn, was so unfathomably old that she was barely recognizable as human. Her white hair was falling out in clumps, exposing patches of liver-spotted scalp. Cloudy irises were half-obscured by droopy eyelids, on a face that was more crease than skin. A complex work of origami, unfolded.

Robyn stood very still as her great grandmother leaned forward and kissed her on the cheek. Brittle whiskers scraped against tender flesh.

"So nice of you to come visit me!" her great grandmother said, the tremor in her voice matching the one in her left hand.

"Mom said I had to," Robyn explained ingenuously.

"Robyn!" her mother said sharply.

But her great grandmother laughed, exposing gray teeth and elaborate bridgework. Robyn turned away, fearful of what the old woman's breath might smell like.

And then something caught Robyn's eye. "Great Gramma," she said, pointing past her arthritic shoulder. "Who's that lady?"

"You can see her, too?" her great grandmother said with a mixture of relief and apprehension. "Thank God! I thought I was losing my mind!" She leaned in and whispered in Robyn's ear, "She keeps telling me to do things. Horrible things."

Wide-eyed with concern, Robyn looked up at her mother for help.

"No, Grandma," Robyn's mother said in that loud, exasperated voice people use when they talk to the elderly. "She means the picture."

Her great grandmother chuckled. Her mind, as Robyn's mother would later explain, went in and out.

She looked behind her at a faded black-and-white 8x10 photo on the wall. Framed in tarnished silver, it was a portrait of a slender young bride in a wedding dress, serenely contemplating the bouquet of flowers she held in her gloved hands.

"That's me," Great Gramma explained proudly. "On my wedding day."

Robyn looked back and forth, trying to reconcile the elegant, porcelain-skinned young woman in the photograph and her fossilized great grandmother, with loose, fatty skin hanging from her arms and hair sprouting out of the moles on her neck.

"You were so... beautiful!" Robyn gushed and her great grandmother smiled. "What happened?"

Robyn's mother gasped at her daughter's tactlessness, but the old lady just barked out another laugh. "Time, precious. Just time."

Robyn stared intently at the old woman's face, studying it for an unseemly long while. Her embarrassed mother was going to say something, but Robyn's great grandmother waved her off. Something special was happening here.

And finally, Robyn saw it. It was hard to explain what it was, exactly. Something in the eyes, maybe. Or the bearing. The smile. The spirit. But she understood now that her great grandmother wasn't just a bent and withered crone with an inexhaustible supply of hard candy. She was also the diaphanous woman in the photo. Happy, radiant and in love.

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