And yet the next day, when I woke up, the wedding day, I thought, “How foolish of me, I love this man and we will be happy,” and all the weeping of the night before had been silly, only nerves. And it had blotched my face, made it puffy, and I was angry with myself for being ugly. By afternoon, though, the puffiness was gone and the dress was perfect; my father came to my bedroom, put his hands around my waist and kissed my forehead, wished me happiness, and he had tears in his eyes; but I was back in the dream and could not cry with him. We drove to the church and I got out of the car carefully, hating to have any marks on my perfect dress, and inside the music started and I took my father’s arm and we were walking down the aisle, Stephen’s white face far away, other faces turned toward me, smiling, nodding, familiar faces now unrecognized, and then the sonorous voice of the Anglican priest and Stephen’s voice, faint, trembling, and then my own, and signing my name on the register and having pictures taken and the music again, following us out of the church, and being hugged and kissed by the familiar faces that were still unrecognized. There was no happiness or sadness in me; I was inside the wedding and watching it at the same time. I was — I was not myself.

And then later at the reception, dancing, still vague, hearing myself laughing and talking, no idea of what I was saying, no memory of it, did people know I was not there?

I slept most of the way to Toronto in the car beside Stephen. I knew that it wasn’t the way a new wife should behave on her wedding night, but I was exhausted, a vast sense of something finished was on me, the event was over and reality was ahead and inconceivable. I wasn’t sad, it wasn’t the terror of the night before; it was simply done. There were no more tears.

Stephen woke me up as we parked behind the store. We unloaded our bags from the trunk, Stephen tired now too, and walked up the stairs to our apartment for the first time together. We turned on the lights and it looked cozy, and suddenly we were at ease with each other, and simply went to bed, without unpacking or showering, just falling into bed, holding each other, filled with pleasure that it had all happened.

There were four weeks before Stephen’s classes started. We went to Hanlan’s Point for a picnic, bicycled through High Park, held hands at the museum, and made love. But I was also applying for jobs, and in two weeks I had one and was going out to work. We hadn’t thought it would happen so quickly.