“Seventeen” by Valerie Visnic

There’s a sign on the wall, but she wants to be sure

‘Cause you know sometimes words have two meanings.

-Led Zeppelin, Stairway to Heaven

There are just four things I remember about your wedding day. 

One: It was April 29, 1998. You were 17-years-old. 

Two: You hated that your hair was short and you couldn’t wear it in an updo like a person might wear to prom. A prom you would not be attending the next month since you were about to be a wife, instead. 

Three: The elderly man who officiated the ceremony looked and spoke exactly like the character who married The Princess Bride and Wesley. It occurred to you, standing at the precipice of your future, that maybe he was the only person the city of Norfolk had access to? Norfolk, Virginia, a place you had never heard of before learning in the months prior that you would be leaving your home in Southern California, and your friends, your parents, your 1964 Dodge Dart with the push-button transmission–to live in this military town the sailors who were stationed there called Nofuck Vagina. As the ancient man typed the marriage certificate that would bind you and your high-school boyfriend together forever on a typewriter as aged as he was—one belabored press of a key at a time, you scowled. You winced. You pouted, dressed in white lace there in City Hall, at the “altar”, which really was just this doddering senior standing before two teenagers asking them questions about forever. It’s all on video. Jess still has it. And on that video, you can see the few people in attendance—your 16-year-old sister Jess, the groom, and Richard’s new friend from the Navy—absolutely losing it. To them, this man was laugh-out-loud funny, which is what they did during most of the ceremony. They laughed loudly. But to you, standing there in the corridors of that old building, in an unfamiliar state in an unfamiliar new city on a Wednesday afternoon, you looked like some tragic joke where your future was the punchline. 

Four: Afterwards, you all piled into the groom’s friend’s mini-van and drove back to your new one-bedroom apartment, three feet from the naval base where your new husband was stationed in this new place. You didn’t have a car yet. No furniture. The living room subsisted on plastic patio furniture and a green metal and glass outdoor cafe table you picked up from the garden department at Target in the days before. When you got back to the apartment, you made macaroni and cheese from the blue box for the four of you, listened to Minor Threat on cd, and chain-smoked cigarettes on the back porch.

*

A few days before City Hall, you and Jess walked from the apartment to the liquor store across the street. Boneys. They sold fried chicken under red-hot lights, the smell of reincarnated grease meandering through the neighborhood day and night. More bottles of liquor than you’d ever seen in person, stacked all around the place. You grabbed bags of Skittles, some other candies, Flaming Hot Cheetos. They sold loosies there, too, which you’d never seen in California. Riverside, a place where people bought a whole pack, or forget it. Although you never were old enough, even there, to legally buy cigarettes. You stared at those loose ones though, sitting in a porcelain dish on the counter by the register. Somehow knowing one day soon, there would only be enough money between you and Richard to pick up one or two smokes at a time, and how sometimes, having money meant resorting to donating plasma at the blood bank off Granby Street. And What a convenience, you thought when you saw them, and then Shit, things are gonna get really hard, aren’t they? Surely looking mature, as an almost married person, you asked the man behind the counter for a whole pack of Marlboro Menthol Lights, like he didn’t need to card you. But he did card you. A moment when the truth of your age picked at the edges of a life where doing adult things and actually being one appeared suddenly in graphic contrast. You frowned, pretended you’d forgotten it and scooped your liquor store booty up off the counter, walking with Jess down the street to McDonalds. 

There, you stood in line behind a gaggle of teenage girls laughing and teasing. Pushing and grabbing at each other playfully like how girls that age do. They were probably the same age as you, but you didn’t think too much about it. As they calmed and proceeded to stare blankly at the menu board above, blocking the way to the register, you and Jess turned toward one another and both made that face that said: What the fuck? Order or move. I think one of the girls must have felt the two of you talking behind her, with your eyes, and swung around from the rest, to face you. Looking you dead in the eye, then all the way down to your shoes. Slithering up again slowly, in her own time, which was lots of time. When she said it, you knew you’d remember her southern words. Her southern lull. Her southern way. 

 “You two kin?” The kin part hitting heavy. A movie word, not a real one. Jess’s head whipped over to face yours as she began talking to you quickly with her eyebrows again, like sisters can. “Uh. You mean, sisters?” The girl smiled and nodded knowingly, “Yeah, I thought you was.” Then she turned back around, self-satisfied, as she moved toward the man behind the counter stacking boxes of McNuggets and apple pies.

You and Jess stared nervously at each other. New questions and new words swirling between synapses. And in the language of eyebrow, as you stood there together, you asked your 16-year-old sister, as much as you pleaded with her: 

Where the fuck am I? And how do I get back home? 

*

After all these years, I had all but completely forgotten how you actually did it. Not the emotional part of getting married young, that part was a stain. More so the logistical and administrative steps that allowed you to leave home and do it as a minor. Your story about it had always been that you were emancipated, and for all intents and purposes, according to the state of Virginia, you basically had been. But the paperwork mom and dad signed was not called emancipation paperwork, it was called something else and until recently, your intuition about it was all you had. All you knew was that paperwork had been signed and that paperwork allowed you free reign to murder our adolescence. 

Recently, I even told this half-truth to your co-worker, Greg, although I stopped myself in the middle mumbling, “Well, basically emancipated. It was something else. But close.” His face twisted and formed around his shock, which was an annoying response because I had told him all this more than once. “I can’t believe I didn’t know you got married that young.” 

A month or so before, I had started digging around for info on child marriage and found that at one point, a person could marry in Virginia at 12 if parental consent was obtained and the person was pregnant. Then in 2016, Virginia outlawed child marriage, which meant a person could no longer marry in that state until age 18, or 16, if emancipated by court order. I also learned that according to the U.S. Census’ American Community Survey, nearly 88,000 teens, ages 15 to 17 nationwide, were married in 2019. And if that were true, then statistically speaking, some 44,000 of them would eventually divorce, like you did. Because what people don’t realize is that getting married is easy. As an administrative event, a fucking child could do it. Literally. Getting a divorce, though. That shit’s different. 

*

“Ma’am. You’re gonna need to stand over there and wait behind the yellow line until I call you up,” said the woman behind the plexiglass partition at the Vista, CA County Court’s business office. 

Maybe there was a point in the past when this woman had actually liked her job. By then, though, the woman behind the plexiglass seemed to bitterly despise the stupid twats who flocked to her window, one by one, with unstapled papers. Case numbers not written in their designated spots. “Oh sorry. I thought you called me.” 

She maintained a No but it came out as a mutter, a sigh. When she finally did draft you to her window several sighs later, you slid your stack of neatly organized divorce papers under the partition. The woman thumbed through not even half a page before she stopped abruptly. “Ma’am? If you’re the Respondent, you need to put your name here, and here, and on this part.” She pointed. “Your name has to go in the top corner of every page. And you’ll need to make copies. Two. Do you have a stamp?”

You were 23. 

You had half a pack of Marlboro Menthol lights in your purse, a lighter, eyeliner, and a stuttering blue pen. “Not on me, no.” 

“OK. Ma’am?” her voice raised with mean and bored. “You’ll need to fill this out properly, and make copies of everything, twice, like I said. And come back with a stamp.” Fake smile. Pleased to have emptied her window again. 

*

Your first night in Virginia, after you got off the plane, after Jess and mom went to their hotel and you went to your new apartment with Richard, you were secretly consumed by the idea that you could actually go anywhere you wanted that night. There were no parents to say No. You were free now. You were free? Were you more free or less free? 

But where would you go? 

Where even were you? 

What is Norfolk? 

What was a naval base, really? 

You had all the freedom in the world and absolutely no way to spend it. A car? Who’s got a car? You’d need a map to get anywhere. These thoughts were the opposite of free. These thoughts were crowded, prison-of-your-own-making thoughts, and that night they circled around in your ears like a washing machine. 

As you laid in bed next to Richard, a blanket of smoke hung over the room like a ghost. The two of you chain smoking in this one-bedroom apartment, now your one-bedroom apartment, on a street called Congress Road in a queen bed Richard bought before you got there in a room with 12×12 linoleum floor tiles like in your 11-th grade Spanish classroom. The 5th period class you used to ditch the year before. 

In order to marry at 17, you left high school your senior year and enrolled in the school district’s independent study program. There, you independently studied your ass off and finished two semesters of high school in a little over one. But for years after moving across the country and marrying, you dreamt almost nightly that your 11th grade Spanish teacher, Ms. Pallor, asked the students in your class that year, day after day,  “Has anyone seen Valerie?” a frantic quality in her voice ringing out past the liminal. “Does anyone know where Valerie is?” 

As the years ticked on, those dreams changed and Ms. Pallor’s distress lessened. In the dreams, she no longer asked where you were but instead, resigned to your absence, and failed you from her class. In the dreams of those years, you never did graduate. 

*

Even if back then you never dared admit it, you were, in fact, what’s officially referred to as a late-adolescent bride, or a girl who marries at the age of 16 or 17. Although in the spring of 1998, 72-hours before your wedding, while shopping with mom for apartment things at the Target off Military Highway in Norfolk, Virginia, you were just seventeen and that’s it.

That first full day in Norfolk, mom picked you up in her rental car to take you shopping for apartment stuff while Richard was at work. “Did you find out where the Target is?” she asked as you opened the car door. “Sorta. I brought the Thomas Guide with me.”  

For some reason, mom couldn’t stay for the ceremony at City Hall. She had to go back to Riverside, maybe for work? That shopping trip together would be among the concluding moments the two of you shared the same last name. 

At Target, you both walked up and down every aisle. You bought a broom and a shower curtain and dishes and cleaners and shampoo and more towels because the two Richard had at the apartment were from the barracks and gross and Ego waffles and two kinds of Pop-Tarts and Twizzlers and Hot Pockets and you probably didn’t need dishes. But you bought them anyway. Mom would be getting on a plane headed back home in less than 48-hours and what you would need was a mother. But Target didn’t sell mothers. So you’d buy English Muffins instead. 

*

The day Richard proposed back in Riverside, you were pissed off because you thought he wasn’t going to do it. He couldn’t get time off at the bowling alley where you both worked and whatever day it was, was supposed to be the day he did it. When he did manage to leave work and drove over to mom and dad’s house, you were already fuming. You were vacuuming the hall, mad. You were Mad Vacuuming. 

You’re Not the Only One by the Sundays was playing on the stereo in the living room when Richard popped up behind you, assumed the one-kneed position on the dingy, dusty rose carpeting and said the words you had longed to hear ever since you found out about love. 

In the days and months after he proposed, you wore your new diamond engagement ring on your tiny little ring finger and you felt proud of that single diamond signaling to the world your importance, to someone. And most days, for a few months, you felt that way. But over the next several ones, with Richard away at bootcamp, that feeling would begin to change from pride and excitement, to fear and embarrassment and the only thing you could think to do was hope the feeling would change back again. 

*

Over the years, not wanting to anymore would become a vexing and confusing pattern. A pattern, which would see you changing your mind once you got what it was you thought you most wanted. A pattern born from a desire for independence, which, at the time, felt almost in direct opposition to your needs for validation and security. 

In the months after Richard left for bootcamp, you melted into little more than a puddle of longing. Although, characteristic of your need for forward movement, you quickly got to work transforming all that yearning you felt in the absence of your in all-consuming relationship, into something you could actually work with. School became an important focus, along with getting a job, making some money. You wanted a car. You’d need to beg back the friends you ignored your junior year, when you and Richard moved around town as one person with two heads. 

That fall you quickly found a job gripping skate decks and selling snowboards at a shop in the mall. You made a bunch of new friends. Enrolled in an independent studies program to finish high school as quickly as possible. Bought your first car. Your sorrow reduction plan, the one constructed for the sole purpose of passing the time until Richard returned, became, surprisingly, a new life you actually enjoyed. For the first time, you felt a glimmer of independence. An independence that began to tug at the promise you’d made only months before to your high-school boyfriend.

*

The night you told Richard about your misgivings, you both cried. You were sitting at a little table outside a giant mall someone had the gall to name Ontario Mills, whatever that is. You hadn’t planned to say anything just then, but you also weren’t prepared to say nothing, forever. It was December and Richard was home from bootcamp for two weeks.

What I remember most about that night was not his reaction or yours. It was that as you sat there watching him, tears streaming, all you could think was: 

Is this what love feels like? 

Am I really capable of stirring this kind of emotion in another person? 

And what if this is the only chance I’ll ever have to be loved? 

*

After a month of life as a married seventeen-year-old, you had written through almost every page of the journal you brought with you to Virginia. Day after day, you wrote about home. Your friends. The old job you had come to love and the life you had left behind. I don’t think it surprised you when one day you came home from your new job selling pantyhose in a department store to find that journal open, in the middle of the bed. It wasn’t surprise you felt, it was something closer to naked.

Of course, it wasn’t all Richard’s fault, or yours–the many things that contributed, over time, to the end of that relationship. I don’t even know if fault matters. If it’s useful. Although you would have probably said the whole thing was your fault. But within the confines of that relationship, you were never able to reconcile your feelings of dissatisfaction for any longer than a few months. Preferring, after a particularly distressing bout of internal malaise around the state of your marriage–marriage at all–to pin the blame for those feelings on yourself and the yet to be named, surely unreasonable and conflicting desires for both freedom and commitment.

Usually, those sorts of restless, discomforting feelings started as a murmur, a blurry tone in the head, an aching in the chest. Then an episodic irritability. Food could usually deaden it. No food would, too. Then drugs came in and shaped those unwieldy feelings into video projections, dreams like discordant melody. 

The drugs. 

Those would come in later, and when they did, they would create a familiar, unquenchable yearning that felt to you like how love did, at the beginning. The bits without the bothersome, suffocating business of commitment. Drugs molded your feelings into a romantic, compulsive meandering you never wanted to end. Both generative and destructive–one polarity acting in service of the other. 

*

Recently you attended a retreat on Catalina Island for people who believed love would save them from themselves, if it didn’t manage to kill them first. You and a friend met the other attendees in Huntington Beach where you would board the Catalina Flyer, a ferry-type boat, and float off to a semi-deserted stretch of the island. Once there, the attendees would be instructed to hash out their deepest fears and most haunted fantasies, in a group setting. But before you left, while standing on the dock, uneasy and skeptical, the building next door caught your eye. At first, you didn’t place its significance, yet still you stared hard, eyes squinted and locked on its facade. And this wasn’t only because you hadn’t been back to this very spot since you were 16, but of course, your not registering this place immediately was partly that. Then, as if someone tapped you on the shoulder and whispered in your ear, Remember how hard it was to find parking that night? you knew where you were, all over again. And it looked exactly as you remembered–The Harborside Restaurant and Grand Ballroom. Grand, maybe inside, but weathered by salt and time on the outside parts. 

Suddenly you were 16-years-old again. Dressed in floor-length, baby blue chiffon. Round-faced and wanting something. Wearing your hair in the very updo you longed for at your wedding the following year. Hair you would chop off out of an anxious attempt to control the shape your life was beginning to take. The building locked in your sights was the location of your Junior Prom, one of the last significant scenes from your childhood and the last high-school activity you would attend before moving to Virginia.

Your breath went away as if taken by someone, something. And you looked around making sure no one had spied your sudden lack of air and your physical reaction to this familiar place. In the dappled sunlight of that partly cloudy afternoon in September of 2023, you traveled back in time, feet suddenly supplanted in the instant dreamscape of years past. A distant time when almost everything was possible because nothing yet had happened.

As part of the planned festivities on prom night, attendees were invited aboard the Catalina Flyer to putter around the bay and makeout while wearing pantyhose, glitter, and youthful optimism. But you wouldn’t make it in time that night. Your best friend, Belinda, would drink way too much of something much too strong before dinner at some very fancy restaurant and the sobering up part would regrettably steal lots of the prom time you and your date, and she and hers, were so eager to spend. After looking for parking near the venue for what felt like an hour, the four of you would walk into The Harborside Restaurant and Grand Ballroom just in time to learn you were too late to catch the Flyer around the bay. Disappointed that you had missed most of what you didn’t yet know would be the only prom you would ever attend, inside the ballroom there was still one dance left. One more song yet to play that night–Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven. You and Richard walked out onto the dancefloor and swayed slowly, feeling romantic. The Catalina Flyer asleep at the dock, mere feet away, awaiting your eventual return. 

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