Susan April Another Turn

Another Turn

susan april

Ialmost didn’t make it to twenty-three. Married at nineteen, I was dazed by the brilliance of a half-carat diamond engagement ring and the shower of gifts, especially one Sunbeam, controlled-heat, automatic frypan, with cooking guide on the melamine handle: pork chops, 360 degrees; minute steak, 420 degrees; fried chicken etc., see recipe book. How I loved that copper skillet! The husband who came with it? Not so much.

In Andrew Forsthoefel’s Walking to Listen, he asks everyone he meets, “What advice would you give your twenty-three-year-old self?” For me, the answer is easy: “Don’t get married when what you’ve fallen in love with is a skillet.” Truth is, there are no easy answers.

On the day of my long ago wedding, I received a gift of unexpected advice from an unexpected person: my brother-in-law Ronnie. He gave this advice in an unusual place: his Lincoln Continental Town Car, which he drove as chauffeur to the ceremony. I didn’t know it was advice at the time.

August 2, 1975. A Saturday. Stifling heat. I sat in the air conditioned back seat with my white gown pouffed about me, fidgeting with my mantilla veil. The bobby pins weren’t holding it right. Ronnie was driving. We were supposed to arrive at the stucco-sided, St. Mary-of-the-Assumption Church, at exactly seven minutes before the ceremony, as determined by plan at the rehearsal. But we pulled up early.

“There’s time for a turn around the block,” Ronnie said, smiling in the rear view mirror. I nodded yes and Ronnie pulled away, just as a groomsman began to reach for the car door handle. Ronnie turned the music up. It was Frank Sinatra. It was always Frank Sinatra.

We took Lakeview Avenue a short way to Myron Street, followed it and Beaver Brook to Vandette, drove up Vandette, banged a left on Mammoth Road, then circled back to Lakeview and the church. By then, it was two o’clock, the start of the wedding. The guests were all in their seats and two nervous ushers ran towards the car.

“People expect the bride to be late,” Ronnie said. He turned and looked me in the eye. “There’s time for one more turn around the block.”

I hesitated, then found myself saying, “If you think it’s ok, then ok.” I laid my bouquet beside me on the car seat.

Ronnie chose a larger block to wend around and he cranked up the air conditioning. My wedding turned out to be a literal hot disaster, the hottest day on record in Massachusetts—a record yet to be broken—of 107 degrees at mid-day.

This time, Ronnie didn’t pull up to the curb. He stopped dead in the road. I don’t recall if there was traffic or if anyone honked their horn. I remember what he said. He cribbed it from Old Blue Eyes. “One day you turn around, it’s summer; next day you turn around, it’s fall.” Then finished with his own, “But it’s never too late for another turn.” He nodded at

the road ahead, his way of saying you have options, if that’s what you want.

I looked towards the church and saw my sister Denise, the matron-of-honor, leaning on the archway of the open door, fanning herself with a program. I heard organ music and saw wilted altar flowers. Denise didn’t frown, look mad, shrug her shoulders, or call out “Well? Are you coming?” She just fanned herself and looked faint. I loved her for that. I loved Ronnie, too, for the advice I didn’t know was advice, but recognized as a gift to be opened by some future me in a future time and not this inevitable August.

I opened the car door.

“Turn the lens on yourself,” Andrew Forsthoefel’s professor told him. He writes that this was “some of the best advice I’d ever received—although I didn’t know it at the time.” I see my brother-in-law’s advice the same way.

The turn we need most is inward, not away and off down the road. Andrew walked 4,000 miles to reach that understanding. I lived the equivalent of his marathon trek in the three-year brutal marriage that I somehow survived, with its Utahs of broken ear drums, Alabamas of split lips, Death Valley of negative self-image, and a Pacific Coast near suicide on a catwalk above the university quad, with me calculating the radius of my body splatter and who would be called to clean it up.

How did I survive? Like Andrew’s self-talk when most exhausted, I suppose I may have simply stayed awake and just kept walking. Then one glorious day, I opened Ronnie’s gift, packed a bag and took another turn.