Here Come the Brides!

by Pat Foran

Pars Sahin

I’m binge-watching “Here Come The Brides,” a 1960s TV show starring David Soul, Bobby Sherman, Joan Blondell and “the brides.”

Shipped to the bluest skies you’ve ever seen are in Seattle from New Bedford, Massachusetts, the brides are in the post-Civil War Pacific Northwest to “keep the lumberjacks happy,” as one of the guys on the show puts it.

“No, you promised each of us a husband if we came,” says one of the brides.

“We’re on opposite ‘The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour’? Jeezus,” says another bride.

***

In kindergarten, Faith and I sat next to each other during storytelling time. We sat on the linoleum floor, sipped metal-flavored juice from wax cups and listened to Miss Clark tell Lyle the Crocodile stories.

One afternoon, a boy named Earnest plopped down in front of us.

“Is she your bride?” Earnest asked.

Faith let go of my barely held hand. I turned ditto-machine purple.

“Do you know what a bride is?” Miss Clark asked Earnest.

“Well, conceptual artist Marcel Duchamp’s bride — ‘The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even’ — is a mechanical piece, a series of forms. An abstraction. Like when you color outside the lines, take a step back to get a different view of your work, your coloring, and think to yourself hey maybe I’m on to something.”

“An abstraction?” asked Miss Clark. “What about intent? Love? Dowries?”

“Okay, fine,” Earnest said. “Ask Lyle, then, why don’t you.”   ***

A “Here Come The Brides” bride dreams she’s running lines with an understudy bride.

They’re on a mountaintop laced with luscious greens and derelict yellows. The sky is bluer than David Soul’s eyes. Bluer than lumberjacks.

“What you said the other day about making your life count for something — did you mean it?” reads the dreaming bride.

“Yes,” reads the understudy.

In the photograph, the bride looks happy. She’s looking at me, the groom. We’re looking into each other’s eyes. I look happy, too.

Another episode of “Here Come The Brides” is on. I want to say The Teenage Mutant Male War Brides are singing the opening theme:

When you find your own true love, you will know it  by his smile — by the look in his eyes…  Look out everyone — here come the brides! *** The things that happen and the things that don’t. When we speak and when we won’t. The vehemence of place. The caress of a curtain, pulled. Everything counts.

Two dozen years and I don’t know what I know. What she knows. What we know.

I know what a parent is. She knows what a parent is. What a bride is what a groom is what a spouse is what a partner is what connection means what a marriage is?

“It’s belief,” a bride says.

“It’s disbelief,” another says.

“You’re cool — it’s about not knowing,” Joan Blondell says.

“Stick with the script!” several brides shout.

***

Look out everyone — here come the brides! There’s a mail-order bride. An all-dressed-in-white bride. An All-Tempa-Cheer bride. A when-I-read-about-his-widowed bride. A princess bride a runaway bride a ghost bride. A resurrected bride. “Come to Seattle!” the mail-order bride says to me.

“Maybe let’s don’t,” the princess bride says.

“Turn purple again!” pleads Earnest.

“The curtain — try pulling it back,” says the runaway bride, lifting her veil as she checks her Uber’s ETA. “But keep it closed. And, mostly, to yourself.”

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Pat Foran is a writer in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His work has appeared in Okay Donkey, Milk Candy Review, Little Fiction, Bad Pony and elsewhere. Find him on Twitter at @pdforan