Saving Graces - Elizabeth Edwards [37]
In so many ways, John and I were different. I had traveled the world; he had never left the South. I had studied literature in order to teach college; he had studied textiles in order to run the mills in which his father had worked. But we had each moved from place to place, following our fathers’ jobs. We had each lived in company housing—military bases for me, mill villages for John. Neither of us had a chance to be rooted in a place, so we were each rooted in family and faith, the things we took with us. In the essential ways, we were not different at all. By our third year, it was clear we would marry.
The North Carolina State Bar Exam was July 25th, 26th, and 27th in Raleigh. Most of our friends had leases that would run out on July 31st, the end of the month. So we decided to get married on July 30th. It would be hectic, but it would be a grand party. I went home to Alexandria to buy a wedding dress. My mother and I found just the dress I wanted in a small Old Town bridal store, and the owner, his white shirt buttons pulled tight and a tape measure around his neck, looked me over and said he could size it perfectly, I didn’t need to try anything on. I should have known from that shirt that he didn’t have that great an eye. On the Saturday morning before the bar exam started on Monday, my dress arrived. I knew I didn’t need to pass the exam for my job—I would be working for a federal district judge the next year—so I could afford the luxury of being excited rather than just nervous, and I was…until I tried the dress on. Two of me could have worn it. Even alterations couldn’t fix this. In North Carolina in 1977, stores closed at 5:00 P.M. on Saturdays and did not open at all on Sundays. And Monday morning when they reopened, I would be sitting in Memorial Auditorium in Raleigh taking the first portion of the bar exam. I took it just as quickly as I could, and when I rushed out after an hour, the poor fellow at my table, who had already snapped two pencils in frustration, was beside himself. I spent my now-extended lunch hour looking in the downtown stores—at the time, Belk’s and Montaldo’s—but I found nothing. After the exam, John and I drove back to Chapel Hill and I drove to a Durham bridal store. Still nothing. The second day of the exam, I did the same thing, only I went to Crabtree Valley Mall, where I found a dress—not the dress I dreamed of, not even a dress I liked that much, but it fit and I didn’t hate it. It was four days before the wedding. I hadn’t remembered to bring my shoes, but the women at Belk’s said that if I brought them back the next day at lunch, they would hem and then press the dress during the last afternoon session of the bar exam. So lunch on Wednesday was the same as lunch on Monday and Tuesday, but on the ride home on Wednesday afternoon, a wedding dress lay between us.
My wedding, as many weddings, was a picture of my life. In the wedding party my sister, Nancy, and her oldest daughter, Laura, and John’s sister, Kathy, were joined by Martha Hartmann from Japan, Maggie Ketchum from English graduate school, and Bonnie Weyher from law school. My brother, Jay, who went on to be an accomplished filmmaker, took the video; it is not, he would admit, his best work. My mother’s best friend, Hazel Greenwood,