A couple of years I woke up happy one morning, a half pound lighter than usual, and asked my best friend to marry me. She told me to fuck off, hung up the phone, threw her cat from her chest, and was back to sleep within 17seconds. When she awoke two and a half hours later she had no memory of the phone call.
So I went through my address book, not entirely randomly, phoning other single women friends, until finally Brenda said okay, she’d marry me if I really wanted. We arranged to meet at the food court at 12:30. She agreed to wear white underwear once I conceded that the request was an unfortunate reminder of my sexist traditional upbringing.
We met and shared a poutine with extra cheese (a wedding day being once in a lifetime),talked about kids and breakfast foods and the contrast between flannel and Egyptian cotton sheets and where we would live and how often we would do laundry.And we shared a medium diet coke, one cup, two straws.
But when the plastic seats began to be uncomfortable I had to admit that I didn’t know where city hall was, and although she did she said that it would probably be closed on a Saturday, and even if it had been a weekday she thought that maybe being married at city hall was an anachronism(or even an entirely untrue movie myth) and that our best bet would be to find a judge, but she didn’t know any. I recalled I had known a judge in Saskatoon, not that that helped, and anyway that judge had retired and moved toVancouver, and then I remembered that judge had married my brother and sister-in-law, so Brenda was probably right.
So instead we just wandered around the mall, giggling a lot and making up our own connect the dots game, until the stores closed and I walked her home. We almost kissed at her door and then I skipped off into the night.