Wedding – Glenda Adams
‘Wedding’ by Glenda Adams is a short story about the fatality of incompatibility. The main character looks forward to marital bliss with her chosen life partner and takes it upon herself to be selective in her choice of negligee for the wedding night. But the dialogue around her, even on her wedding day, includes all but the bride herself. It is unclear whether her husband truly loves her or not but it is clear marriage does not grant her entrance into his world of intellectuality.
You cannot help but feel sorry for the story’s protagonist who is uncertain about the conversational duties of a wife, feels everything she does not go quite as planned and finds winning affection from her husband on her honeymoon a daunting task. Her dress is lost during travel, her wedding cake is ruined and the fault line is repaired with a border of funeral flowers while her lover prefers to watch Wuthering Heights starring Laurence Olivier as Heathcliff rather than get busy.
The first line of the story makes you hope her sweet, girlish dreams come to fruition. Anticipation is slowly built up when things keep going wrong but its turning point leaves you deflated in defeat. Yet the writing by Glenda Adams is superb in keeping you hooked through all the pages till the very end.
Between You and Me 
carldagostino said,
02/05/2011 at 3:35 PM
I think Norman Rockwell did a painting of this photo.
LikeLike
cea said,
01/09/2012 at 7:08 PM
That story always made me very uncomfortable, perhaps because the author is my mother (she died in July 2007). But it captures that discomfort perfectly. Though it is fiction, I can see the incompatibility between her and my father in it (they separated when I was one year old). Thanks for this piece–I miss my mum and love running across mentions of her and her writing. I keep several blogs, one about reading my mother’s writing: http://readglendaadams.blogspot.com/.
LikeLike