I never thought of myself as the type to get married, really. When I was younger, everyone seemed too phony to me. Everyone's façade eventually falls, and I didn't want to be stuck with what was underneath because I'd fallen for the shell. I figured it would be safer just to never get married, ever. After that day when I took Phoebe to the carousel, though, things starting changing. I started changing.
You should have seen old Phoebe at the wedding. She was 28 years old by then, I was 36. She was wearing this bright blue dress that was long and plain, but she looked so beautiful. She'd gotten married herself in June of 1964. He husband was a decent enough guy. Tall, sort of handsome. At first he'd reminded me of Stradlater, and I didn't like him. But Phoebe forced me to spend some time with him and I realized he wasn't too bad. Their wedding had been small and simple, like mine, and I don't think I've ever seen her happier.
Like I said, our wedding was pretty small and simple. Mary invited her parents and her family, and I invited mine. We invited a few friends, and a couple of our especially liked doctors and nurses from the institution. Mary looked so beautiful. Her dress had one of those corsets, but the skirt was huge and long with lots of layers. It made her look so much smaller and more fragile than she already was, but that didn't bother me. I thought of her as my little china doll, so fragile and beautiful.
The marriage ran smoothly, despite all my fears of what was going to go tragically wrong and ruin it for Mary. I won't bore you with the details. It's sort of all a blur to me anyway.
We got a house in upstate New York. A little cottage in a little town. It's not one of those weird, boring, hillbilly towns though. Mary's too much of a city person for that. We'd had a long discussion about where we were going to move to once we were married. She wanted to live in the city, I wanted to live in a little secluded town. I still wasn't fond of people. Everyone I knew in the city was so loud or phony, and we were losing lots of friends to drugs like acid and heroin and whatever, and I just wanted to get away from it all. So we compromised and picked a decent sized town to live in, with a city nearby in one direction, and lots of woods and wilderness in the other. It's nice here. It almost feels like we're stuck in time here or something. Like everything that's going on in the rest of the world barely effects us here.
Mary got a job in one of the stores in town, just something for extra income. I wrote this book, called "The Catcher in the Rye" about the time leading up to me being committed. I put it under the pen name of J.D. Salinger. It sounded refined or something. I'll probably publish this under the same name. We got a pretty good amount of income off that book, and I'm running another one of the stores in town as well, so we're well enough off for a couple of crazy drop outs.
I eventually got off of the medications for my "anti-social disorder". Mary is still taking medications, though not as much as she used to. She still washes her hands more often than most people, and she can't stand it when things are dirty. Her thought process is still sometimes a little off, but she's getting much better. She hasn't had any major attacks for a good five years now. Even when we went to Woodstock together, she held up well. I was proud of her.
We're expecting a kid in August of this year. I don't know how that's going to work out. I'm pretty scared; I'm not sure how well I'm going to do at this whole parenting thing. Kids were another thing I'd never really honestly considered. It seemed like a lot of work to put into someone who was going to end up leaving you anyway, probably hating you for messing up their life or whatever. I also just didn't really see the point in bringing another human being into this world full of phonies and fakers and everything else. But it's different when it actually comes down to it, when you know you and the person you love are going to have a kid, it's a whole other ballgame.
Phoebe has a kid now, a little girl; she's the most beautiful thing you'd ever seen. I just hope my kid is half the kid Phoebe was. I hope I can raise my kid right, and not end up messing them up. I'll admit it, I'm petrified of having children, but there's nothing I can do about it now. I'll love the kid no matter what, I just don't particularly feel like being the one person who completely and utterly ruins the life of another.
But that just goes back to being the catcher in the rye - something I'm not.