My So-Called Marriage

For a long time after my parents' divorce, I wondered what my mother did with her wedding ring. One day it just vanished from her finger. I suppose she might have tossed it into a dresser drawer or donated it to the Salvation Army. She might have thrown it into the sea. I took my own wedding ring off shortly after my husband and I separated, in 1997, but it was a while before I lost that reflexive pang of alarm at the sight of the naked finger.

The young married women in the new anthology "Young Wives' Tales" are not worried about rings. They're too busy altering the label of wife to fit -- snipping, tucking, letting hems out, embroidering here, embellishing there. Marilyn Yalom discovered the same radical transformations in "A History of the Wife," in which she charts the evolution of the American wife through the centuries, concluding with a chapter titled "Toward the New Wife."

I like all these daring young wives on their matrimonial trapezes. I wish I'd known some of them when I was married because, presented with the raw material of wifehood, I ended up with a Frankensteinian creation I hardly recognize in hindsight.

We were married in the dog days of August. The ceremony took place outside on a narrow wooden footbridge that spanned a creek at an old resort. We liked the symbolism of crossing from one life to the next -- we didn't consider that bridges buckle in high winds and wash out in floods. And surely we should have known better than to get married at a place called White Sulphur Springs, consigning us to a perpetual, sulfurous August of the soul.

There are artifacts. A receipt for $45 from the county clerk's office for the marriage license. A crumpled note left that day for a visiting friend: Out getting marriage license, back soon. PS: Please don't let cat out.

We decided that we would not have one of those artificially festive affairs intended to appease family and friends. Our wedding would be intimate, poetic, unique. We talked a lot about the wedding, but the conversations never included our hopes and expectations for the marriage itself. We invited four of our closest friends; we crossed our bridge, we made our toasts. Then the best man tied a can onto the back of the car, and we drove away, wedlocked.

My passage into married life, however, did not go smoothly. Almost instantly, I began to mutate into the version of wife most alien to my personality -- a retro-wife. I planted flowers. I took an inordinate interest in window coverings. I cleaned house madly; people often commented on how spotless our house was. And I hardly ever wrote.

Who was this creature? She was certainly not my mother, a self-reliant woman who had raised three kids while holding down a full-time job. I was living the wrong life, with the wrong person, but I didn't know that yet. My unconscious knew it though and tried to tell me with an insistent parade of nighttime images. I dreamed my wedding band was made of glass, that it fell down a mine shaft, that it was too big and kept slipping off my finger. In the most preposterous, and obvious, dream of all, I was at a theater where a terrible play was being performed. The actors, one of whom was my husband, kept flubbing their lines, so impulsively I decided to rescue them. I threw on an ill-fitting wedding gown, tossed a veil over my head, grabbed a bunch of flowers from a nearby vase and leapt onstage. Quick thinking! someone yelled, and the audience cheered.

My husband did his best to pretend that all was well. He cleaned out the rain gutters. He bought a weedeater. He did all of this with self-conscious awareness of his new role, or what he thought his new role should be. He was as confused as I was. Neither of us knew -- how could we? -- that you had to consciously reinvent these roles or you would wind up wearing the threadbare hand-me-downs of previous generations.