I Got the Giggles During the Wedding Vows
Solemnity and I have never survived a full ceremony together.
The groom's voice cracked on the word "cherish," swooping up a full octave to the exact pitch of a smoke alarm with a dying battery, and I, the maid of honor, standing eighteen inches from my sister in front of two hundred guests, felt the giggle arrive like weather.
If you have never had the giggles at a solemn event, I need you to understand the mechanics. It is not a decision. It is a pressure system. Somewhere behind your sternum a bubble forms, and every force you apply to it, every bitten cheek, every urgent thought about taxes, compresses it into something denser and more dangerous, until you are no longer a person attending a ceremony. You are a shaken bottle wearing lavender chiffon.
I have a history. In fourth grade, during a moment of silence for our retiring school janitor, I made a sound like a startled goose and spent a week explaining myself to the guidance counselor. At my cousin's extremely serious baptism, I had to leave the church mid-blessing pretending to cough, a performance that convinced no one, least of all the baby. At my grandfather's retirement dinner, a cat walked across the projector screen during his farewell slideshow, and I laughed so hard I had to be given water and walked outside like an overheated dog.
So when my sister Meg asked me to be her maid of honor, she added, in the very same breath, "You will be standing where everyone can see you. I need you to become a different person for forty minutes."
I promised. I meant it. I did breathing exercises in the parking lot. I thought about drought. I thought about the economy. I walked down that aisle with the internal stillness of a monk who has renounced all comedy.
And it was working. The chapel was beautiful, June light through tall windows, peonies everywhere, Meg luminous, Tom already crying in the way that makes mothers elbow each other. The reverend, a small ancient man with a voice like a cello, moved us through the readings without incident. I stood holding two bouquets and my breath.
Then Tom began his vows, got as far as "to love and to cherish," and his voice cracked like a teenager's on the exact syllable where it could do the most damage.
The bubble formed instantly.
I bit my cheek. I studied the floor. I performed long division. My shoulders began that tiny seismic shudder that every teacher of every school assembly can identify from forty meters. And then my aunt Carol, in the second pew, misread the shaking entirely, leaned forward, and pressed a tissue into my hand with a look of profound tenderness, because she thought I was weeping.
Being handed a sympathy tissue while fighting laughter is like being handed a lit match while fighting a gas leak.
The peonies in my hands trembled like a small hedge in a storm. I fixed my eyes on the stained glass and thought about my dentist... I was, I want this on the record, winning.
Then Meg looked at me.
Do not ever look at your sister. That is the entire lesson of this story and of my life.
Meg looked at me, and I looked at Meg, and I watched the corner of her mouth twitch once, twice... and then her veil started to vibrate.
Here is the part I did not understand until later, standing at the reception with a glass of something fizzy. This particular laugh, the one that ambushes us at solemn occasions, is not really ours. It is an inheritance. Our Gran got the giggles at every grave and formal moment of her long life. She laughed during eulogies, during graduations, during a mayoral speech that was interrupted by an escaped balloon. Family legend says she laughed at her own sister's funeral procession when a pallbearer's hat blew into a hedge, and that her sister, of all people, would have laughed hardest.
Gran always said the same thing afterward, unrepentant, patting her chest: laughter and grief come up the same pipe, and you do not always get to choose which one arrives.
Gran died in January.
This was our first big family day without her. Meg had draped Gran's yellow scarf over an empty chair in the front row, and none of us had spoken about it... because we could not.
Meg got two lines into her own vows. She reached "through every season," made the fatal mistake of glancing at the yellow scarf and then at me... and broke.
Fully.
She stood in front of two hundred people in a cathedral of white peonies, laughing and saying "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry" while laughing harder, and Tom lost it half a second later, and then the entire chapel, which had been holding its collective breath through all that solemnity, came apart at once like a dropped bag of marbles.
The reverend waited. He had, I think, seen everything in his years. When the room finally settled, he closed his little book over one finger and said, "In forty years of weddings, the couples who laughed at the altar are the ones I still get Christmas cards from."
They finished their vows. Meg's voice wobbled between laughing and crying for the rest of the ceremony, and by the end nobody in that chapel could have told you which was which, and I have come to believe that was the point.
Solemn is not the same as sacred. Sometimes the most sacred thing a body can do is refuse to pretend it is marble.
At the reception, Aunt Carol found me and squeezed my arm. "You were so moved up there," she said. "I saw you shaking." I told her she was not wrong, technically, and she was satisfied, and honestly, so was I.
All that winter I had been trying to write something about Gran and producing nothing but greeting card lines, stiff little sentences that she would have swatted like flies. In the weeks after the wedding I finally wrote about the grief sideways, through the laughing, through the yellow scarf and the pallbearer's hat in the hedge, and it was the first thing I had written that actually sounded like her. I have been circling memory ever since, the way you circle a house you used to live in.
There is a photograph on Meg's mantel now. It is not the formal portrait. It is the one the photographer caught mid-collapse: Meg laughing with her whole spine, veil crooked, Tom wiping his eyes, me behind them absolutely wrecked, clutching two bouquets like a woman going down with her ship. And in the bottom corner of the frame, slightly out of focus, the empty chair with the yellow scarf.
If you look at it quickly, in the right light... the scarf is blurred.
As if it were shaking too.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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