Dalton’s mom spills her apple martini on my shirt while explaining that she was “basically” Mexican since two Mexicans had married into her family. Her son apologizes, ushering her away while aggressively patting napkins on my yellow button-up. I assure him that it is fine and proceed down the line. “Disculpe,” I say, and the bartender looks over.
“Sí señor.”
“Una lima y tequila?” He nods and pours, doing a neat trick by shooting the bottle from his left hand to his right, then popping it back into his left. Dalton’s mom notices and pulls away from her conversation, applauding the bartender while Dalton tries to drag her away. I contemplate waiting for Tricia so we can share the shot, but decide against it as hasty fingers place the shot glass in my palm. I drink it there.
Uncle Rudy sees me drink it and indiscreetly cuts me off, placing his burly hands on my shoulder and guiding me back to my seat. When I make it back to my seat, Tricia asks where I went; I tell her the bathroom. Her hair is curled, natural, she says, but she repeats it a little too frequently for me to be fully inclined to believe her. She is a bit lighter than Joel, so way lighter than me. The black freckles on her face stand out, but they are quite nice to look at and do not draw too much away from her full lips and deep, tired eyes. She is wearing a red dress, accompanied by long red earrings. She asks me if I want a sip of her martini, and I accept.
Joel is dressed in a white tuxedo, sitting alongside Radha in the center of the cabana. Blinking yellow lights stretch from wall to wall, brightening his palm tree skin. He is a large guy, 6’3 now, but even when he was small, he was a giant to me. His beard is well trimmed, and his hair is cut short. It sprouts from his scalp like blades of grass, combed back. His best man, Dom, asks me a question from across the table about NYU. I notice that he had not come with his wife, Welescria, even though I had met them both two days prior. He is in a baby blue suit that complements his dark skin well. His biceps and chest protrude from the lining, and I imagine he debated getting a larger size but figured that he does not work out two hours a day to hide his physique. His hair is cut shorter than Joel’s, so he must have decided sometime within the last two days to cut off his cornrows. The answer I give him is stale and uninteresting, because so many things about NYU are stale and uninteresting if your questions do not hit the sweet spot of engaging information.
The DJ is a little annoying since he believes weddings should be all party and no ceremony. Hindu destination weddings are likely not the best place to detest tradition. His large headphones and Americanized Caribbean accent only assist his alienation. He is dressed in Hollister from head-to-toe and, in more ways than one, reminds me of how I looked in my freshman year of high school. Time passes of his failed Caribbean-stand-up comic jokes before he announces Dom first for speeches. He walks up to the center of the cabana, standing on Joel’s side of the table, and pats the groom on the back. The speech is fine: Dom recalls a moment when he and Joel helped a woman who had rushed into their office, terrified for her life. She needed police and medical attention, and Joel was the first to rush in to help her. I wanted to hear more, but he stopped it there, instead focusing on Joel’s bravery and leadership.
Next is Tricia’s mother, Aunty Cheryl. Her blue dress bedazzles in the lights as she makes her way up, her notebook shaking in her hand. Tricia and I had told her she might be overdressed, which we did not even know was possible for a wedding. She assured us she was fine, however, and wears her future-wedding blacklist dress proudly. She fumbles with the microphone for a bit, then compliments her brother Rudy for making a son that takes her to Mexico. Her nerves are eased as we laugh. Her speech entails how proud she is of Joel, how he should never forget that he is Joel Peters, and always will be a Peters. She calls him her favorite nephew, joking that she can say that because “none of my other nephews are here.” Tricia and I share puzzled glances before bursting out into laughter. The rest of the audience is laughing too, but for a much different reason. When I point my eyes back to Aunty Cheryl, I glimpse at the DJ in the distance, frowning at the crowd for reacting so positively to a joke that wasn’t his. When Aunty Cheryl comes down from the podium, I poke fun at her. “None of your other nephews are here?” She apologizes at first, dumbfounded, but we laugh it off, not actually bothered. Besides, just wait until she finds out who my favorite aunt is.
Aunty Indira is not much of a talker, so Uncle Rudy handles the speech for the both of them. Interestingly enough, he focuses mostly on Radha and her introduction to the family rather than commenting much on Joel himself. Joel’s sister, Jessica, does much of the same. It takes me off guard at first, but a major thing about this wedding, and weddings in general, is the unionization of the families involved. When Radha’s parents have to do the same, they speak much of Joel. The same for her sister. I think this is when the DJ really begins to realize that his energy is not in tune with the rest of the wedding, because he lowers the frequency of jokes and jabs at family members.
After speeches, Radha stands to toss the bouquet into the arms of belligerent bridesmaids and Peters women. Tricia manages to catch it, and we all cheer her on. The cabana staff seats her on a chair in the middle of the dance floor and has Dom dance with her since he is the best man. Most people wince at the sight because the dance does not hide its suggestive nature well, and we all know he has a wife somewhere in Cancun right now that is supposed to be here.
Awkward formalities aside, time to party! I did so for a little while. Ultimately, I am not feeling much for Mexican mosh pits, so I make my way down to the beachside. Gesebelle, a girl I met at yesterday’s mixer, is sitting on a hammock, staring at the fun going on without her. I ask her if she is okay, and she tells me she has a headache. I offer to get her water, but she declines. I offer to get her a drink as a half-joke, but she declines that too. We got along well yesterday; I showed her where Arcturus was in the sky, and she thought it was cool how “I knew stars.” She also bitterly joked from time to time that NYU was her dream school, and I took the scholarship she applied for. Today, it seems, she does not care much for my company, so I leave her alone.
I pass a bridesmaid named Dawn, tall and slender with dark skin and nice tattoos. I overhear that she models for an agency, but she doesn’t like it too much because of the time it takes from her and her daughter. Penn asks me where I am going as I slide between the gates, and I tell him that I am taking a walk. He gestures to me in the other direction, reminding me that “the party is over there.” I nod and fake-laugh, informing him that Dalton’s mom was asking about him and that “she isn’t saying the kindest things.” He excuses himself and sprints back toward the wedding.
Treading down the dock is slightly nerve-wracking at this time of night. I tend to lean on the paranoid side of things (I have panic attacks if I touch a joint), but I swear the water is both quiet and loud at the same time. Anyone could sneak up on me, and I would only see the silhouette of a bush nearing. Along the beachside, there are small rocks, untouched and likely unnatural. I think the marital crew sprinkled them there to give the beach more of a glamorous feel. I pick up a few and throw them into the sea, trying to make them skip across the horizon. I manage to get one to skip thrice before it dives into the water. A little further down the beach, a small rocky peninsula forms where I walk through the gravel and bushes to get a better view of the ocean.
I sit at the end of one of the rocks, ensuring I avoid any lizards and mossy patches. I shine the flashlight on my phone on the ground side-to-side to make sure that nothing is close by. Then I scan in all directions to make sure no bushes are sneaking up on me. I look out at the waxing waters. This was the third time in the last eight months Joel and Radha got married. Normally, a situation like that means dysfunction, but it was quite the opposite for them. They got married three times so they could celebrate it thrice, in different ways with different people. This was the only wedding that I could make, and they assured me on the cab ride to the resort that it was fine because this was “the most important one.” I also found out he was pushing thirty-years-old on that ride. In my mind, he had been twenty-two for the last six years.
I was surprised to receive the treatment I did at this wedding, not because Joel and I were on bad terms, but because we were hardly on any terms at all. I am family, however, so I suppose that is enough. Joel and Radha met me with warmth, humor, and a bit of candid annoyance with other family members that were coming. It is hard sometimes to remember the attitudes of the people you have been separated from for so long, but it never strays far from natural. They had breakfast with me nearly every day. Over the course of many mornings, they told me two things that altered my self-perception, but I will not delve into the nuances of them here. One was that I reminded them of a professor they knew with weird hair. The other was that my glasses hide my eyebags well.
In truth, I do not know Joel as well now as I did when I was young. He used to travel with me and my father from place to place. One time, when I would have been seven and Joel would have been seventeen, he was bothering me at a hotel in Miami, punching me and pushing me around on the bed. I spat at him. My father, not to be confused with the father people see me with today, slapped me until I had a wedding ring imprint on my cheekbone. There is a scar there, but I tell people a silly story about bedbugs when they ask about it. I cried in the hotel bathroom until it was time for us to leave. Joel never apologized for that, though years later, and being older than he was then, I can hardly see how that was his fault.
But on the other end, and the ones I choose to preserve, there are memories of us when I was nine and he was twenty. We would play Luigi’s Haunted Mansion on my WiiU in mom’s room while she and dad were out at dinner. Sometimes Jessica would come over with him, and the two of them would play games against my sister and me. He was not very good, and that is when I realized that he tends not to use his head for things he is not serious about. That is probably a better way to live life, but back then it created serious weaknesses in his Wii abilities. I was always very serious about everything, and even now, I still am. It is hard for me to imagine when we drifted. I do not think we ever did. We simply got serious about very different things, and we did not really see the end until it had passed us by. But so it goes for children. Change is never really a decision we make; it is a decision that is made for us.
“It is easy to see the beginning of things, and harder to see the ends.” – Joan Didion
Earlier that day, my first-semester writing teacher forwarded an email to me detailing the systemic ways NYU was trying to force her out of her job. I mentioned it to Gesebelle in an effort to get her to consider that her dream school is not all that dreamy, but it was minute information compared to her steadfast praises of Washington Square Park and $1 pizza. Anyway, my professor said NYU was giving her terrible hours and disjointed classes in an effort to push her to find another job. She complained that it was happening to many other writing professors as well. Her point: People need to need people, and once they don’t need you, they cut you out. I did not care much for the latter half of that statement, and I know it personally to be untrue. It only feels true when life is standing on your neck, but that is when it is most important to remember that it is not true. I thought about the former: “People need to need people.” Do Joel and Radha need to need one another? Is that what love is? Is that what it should be? I do not have an answer to that here.
I remember mentioning to my not-girlfriend at one time that Joel and Radha were high school sweethearts. She quoted some statistic about how only two percent of high school sweethearts actually make it to marriage. In retrospect, the inverse might have been true, and I told her that statistic, but it hardly matters who said it, only that we both knew it. I spoke to Joel briefly about it, and he said that Radha and him didn’t like one another until the end of high school. There is something so profoundly weak about hearing of people who can make it happen and convincing yourself that it means that you must too. That is a weakness I pretend not to have, but know deep down I do. My not-girlfriend also mentioned that she would not be making this trip with me, but that was months prior, before I really knew (but began to figure) that pushing people out of nests doesn’t give them wings to fly. I wonder if Joel and Radha had to overcome something similar, but I do not imagine I will get an answer that I am happy with.
I do not know if Joel is religious. He used to be, I think. There was a brief time when he and Tricia, perhaps simultaneously, but I doubt it, would come to our house on Sunday mornings as mom was pushing me out of bed, urging me to slip into the clothes she had hung up the night before. I remember Joel in the shotgun of dad’s car, then sitting on the back benches of the congregation, humming to the tune of the hymns. He never seemed too crazy about it, and I always wondered why he was there. I think he is more in tune with his Hindu side now, much to the dismay of the other Peters relatives, but I tend to support any religion someone chooses if it has an overall positive impact on the person.
Similarly, Tricia tells me that she was enveloped in our religion at the time; she remarks that she even lived with us for months when I was five or six, but I do not remember any of that. My mind floods with memories of us visiting her at the house upstate and me being too young to ever have a proper conversation with her. I was always nervous to talk to people if I felt like I would see them from time to time. Tricia was exactly that type of person, a time-to-time. She recalls that she would change my youngest sister Natalie’s diapers and give Kristy baths. She was trying Christianity, but ultimately, it was not for her. She is a therapist now. No reason. No need for an explanation. She was simply serious about a very polar thing.
I have always been a believer that what goes missing is gone. And that the thing you retrieve is never the thing you lost, not actually anyway. It’s different, having been lost and now returned. Things experience dismal yet necessary growth in the absence of one another, and they work out only for the best. I think that of people: Joel, Tricia, my now ex-not-girlfriend, and many dozen more names that come to mind who I pray never come to mind again.
Why fight a decision that is never ours? I choose to remember things for what they were in a way that does justice to what they are. When I see the dust building up on my old WiiU, I see a tear run down Joel’s face as Radha walks down the aisle, and I understand for the first time the tenderness of watching men you have looked up to cry. Whenever I peek at the Polaroid wedding-gimmicked photos Tricia and I took at the photo booth, I see her sitting next to me in a church pew. And even though I know it is a false memory, it is at least real enough. There is a picture of me and my ex-not-girlfriend displayed on my mirror from when we were something. I look at it now, and I do not see us anymore, at least not the way I did. I see only her. I see only me. I see only the purple lights illuminating our brown skin as they bounce off our ironed clothes. And that is all that is, 98% of the time.
Water begins to splash on my shoes, and it slides off the brown leather into a mossy crevice between the rocks. My socks get slightly wet at the ankles, so I step back. The ocean sings. Glistening in the moonlight, a crab smaller than my pinky is crawling away towards the mermaids. I pick it up by the shell and redirect it toward the beach, but I do not think it prefers Caribbean tunes to the open seas; it turns right back around.
In hindsight, I spend too much time in Mexico doing things that only I would know I did, which is an alternate way of saying I spend too much time doing things that I would write about. Five hundred feet away, Caribbean music vibrates through the rock and moves through my bones, but the sea is humming to me both softly and loudly. As the moon soars slowly across the northern sky, glints of wedding light share that same purple hue as they bounce across the horizon.