Let Me Tell You Something Page 11

  Al met my father while he was planning the wedding. I remember my father loved him and came home and told me that he’d love to have a son-in-law like that, a guy who worked hard and was friendly and decent. My dad wanted him to date my sister Ann; she’s the same age as Al. I was dating Mark at the time, so Dad didn’t even think of Al for me.

  One day Al walked into my dad’s shop to deliver the place cards for the wedding. I’ll never forget it. I was doing the books in my father’s office, and I looked up and I saw him, his hair parted in the middle, heavyset, dressed all wrong. Not cool at all. I was used to dating the guidos, the big muscle guys, and I said out loud, “Oh my God.” My father’s secretary said, “What’s wrong?” I said, “I’m going to marry that guy.”

  I just knew. And it wasn’t even that I was attracted to him, I just knew it the second I laid eyes on him. Before we spoke. He was walking down the hallway and I turned my head and saw him walking toward me, the complete opposite of anything I’d ever dated or even looked at. And it hit me like a ton of bricks. We didn’t even really talk until my brother’s wedding, and I can’t explain the feeling in any other way than I just felt certain that this guy was my destiny.

  Al’s version is so different. He liked my sister. He had heard I was a good girl and he wasn’t interested in a good girl. He was only twenty. My sister looked a little wilder, so he was interested in Ann, not me.

  It’s funny how things happen. My sister Cookie liked his cousin, who was a bartender. And the night before the wedding, we were all out and I made a dare with Cookie that if I could get Al to dance with me at Anthony’s wedding the next day, she had to go and talk to his cousin. That’s the funny thing, I asked Al to dance so that Cookie could get with his cousin.

  So at the wedding—which I went to as Mark’s date—I went up to Albert.

  “Do you remember me?” I asked.

  “Yes, you’re Caroline,” he said.

  “Listen,” I said. “I’m the maid of honor tonight and you have to dance with me.”

  It was the first big wedding The Brownstone had done. He said he couldn’t, he was too busy. I refused to take no for an answer. His version of things is that I was wearing a low-cut dress and he could see right down my cleavage, and that’s what got his attention.

  He says that as soon as he saw my cleavage that was it, he would dance with me.

  We danced a slow dance and we got to talking, and poor Mark was there with his parents, realizing he’d lost me, and by this point I didn’t give a shit.

  Al walked me back to the table because he had to get back to work. And we walked past his parents; they were guests at the wedding too. His dad was a huge bear of a man with a boisterous voice. “Hey you, what are you doing with my son? He’s supposed to be working!” he said as we walked by.

  I stopped and looked at him—I’d never met this man before in my life—and I said, “I’m gonna marry your son,” I said, and I kept walking. I don’t know how I knew, but I remember that even then, I was certain. And I can’t tell you how happy I am that I followed my instincts—I ended up with my soul mate, and I can’t imagine my life without him.

  Love can triumph over tragedy.

  My engagement was a triumph of love over horrible tragedy. Al and I had been dating for two years. Every day after work, Albert would come pick me up and he’d take me home. We had discussed getting married, and of course, we’d been planning our engagement ring with Al’s father. One night after work, I’ll never forget, we were driving along Totowa Road, in Paterson, on our way to The Brownstone. As we got to the underpass that goes beneath Route 80, Al suddenly pulled over and parked the car.

  I was confused until I saw him fumbling in his pocket and pull out some tissue paper. He unwrapped a gorgeous engagement ring, and held it out to me.

  “I love you,” he said. “I want you to be my wife!”

  I couldn’t believe it. I burst into nervous laughter “Are you kidding me?” I replied. I looked around at the dirty underpass and the cars zooming by. This was not exactly where I’d imagined our proposal would take place. And then I looked at his face, and I saw how much he loved me, and I saw that he just couldn’t wait one more second to ask me. I burst into hilarious laughter. “Yes, of course, yes,” I said. Then I cracked up some more and added, “Is this a joke?” And then we kissed. I was so happy, and my heart was bursting because his love for me was so strong that it had forced him to be so spontaneous, to ask me right there on Totowa Road.

  Al’s dad bought The Brownstone in 1980 for quite a bit of money. Five months after we got engaged, Al tragically lost his father, in August 1983. They only had the place three years, and with his father’s passing Al and his family inherited The Brownstone—and the responsibility to make it work.

  In many ways, we were lucky. We had a huge engagement party at The Brownstone before Al’s dad passed, and he had the chance to see us so happy. It was a beautiful night, and it became all the more special since he did not live to see our wedding.

  For Albert, the loss of his father was the most horrible time, especially considering the tragic way it occurred. We were engaged, and everything in our lives was supposed to be special and romantic and easy. But on August 18 of that year, just four months after we were engaged, Al’s father disappeared.

  They searched everywhere for the next four days, and found nothing. At 4:00 AM on August 23, which also happened to be my birthday, the doorbell rang. It was the police, and they had found my future father-in-law’s body.

  Al is the oldest of his siblings. He was twenty-three at the time. He had to go to the police station and be questioned about his own father’s death. He was gone all day. I stayed at his house, and people started arriving immediately. When Al finally got home, the house was chaos already. There were people everywhere, there were news crews out front all over the lawn. Literally hundreds of friends and family arrived at the house. But I couldn’t find Albert.

  I searched everywhere. I asked if anybody had seen him, and nobody had a clue as to where he went. I was worried sick, running all over the place looking for him. He was gone for about an hour and a half. We didn’t have cell phones back then, so I was panicked.

  When he showed up again, he took me outside to the yard. He led me to a quiet corner, out of sight of everybody, and he put his hands on my face. He looked me in the eyes, with all the hurt and loss on his face, and he said, “Happy birthday.”

  I was so shocked. I had completely forgotten it was my birthday. It was the last thing on my mind that day.

  Albert took me in his arms and gave me a huge hug and a kiss. As he held me, in the middle of all that was going so horribly in his life, he apologized for ruining my birthday. The day they found his father dead, he was concerned about me. And then he gave me the most beautiful ruby and diamond ring. Albert had designed the ring as my birthday gift that year. He had been dropping hints, and I knew that he’d gotten me something cool, but I didn’t know what it was. It was a beautiful special ring that he wanted to reflect this amazing time in our lives, and how much I meant to him.

  I’ll never forget it. We were sitting outside by the pool. My heart burst; I couldn’t believe the honor of this man, the man I was engaged to. What kind of guy, at that age, with that horrific thing going on in his life, thinks of somebody else? Albert, that’s who.

  To this day, the circumstances around what happened to Al’s father are a mystery to us, and the years that have passed haven’t made it any easier to accept. We spent the rest of our engagement getting stronger and stronger as a couple. The adversity of this time brought us closer together. After it happened, Al told me that he would understand if I didn’t want to marry him anymore, but I told him to quit being stupid. Some people told us to postpone our wedding, but we decided to push ahead and stick to our original plan.

  That ring that Al gave me for my birthday meant the world to me, and I’m sick to my stomach that I don’t have it anymore. My house was robbed just after
we were married and it was stolen.

  As the years went by, I always teased Al that he never got down on one knee and actually said “will you marry me?” So, as viewers of the show saw, in season three, Al had secretly had my engagement ring redone—same gold, same jewels—and he took me back to that Route 80 underpass. He pulled over, and this time, he got out of the car. As soon as he got down on one knee, I knew what he was up to, and I burst out laughing, exactly the same way I did the first time.

  I remembered the clumsy kid in jeans and a short-sleeved plaid shirt who had nervously proposed to me thirty years ago, and then I looked at the handsome, well-dressed, successful man on his knee thirty years later, still loving me just as much. It was probably the best feeling in the world. And Al said the magic words. For that moment, that dirty underpass became the most romantic place on earth, for the second time in my life.

  Don’t become a Bridezilla!

  I never lost my mind as a potential bride. I loved being engaged and I loved planning a wedding, but I was never obsessed with any of the details. In fact, I wanted it all to be simple and modest. My father-in-law couldn’t get over how I acted when we were choosing an engagement ring. He had a friend who was a jeweler, and he’d come home with all these diamonds, wrapped in tissue paper, for me to look at.

  They were huge. Some of them would come up to my knuckles. He would show them to me, hoping I’d choose one. And I’d just shake my head. He’d be so shocked; he would tell me that any girl in the world would die to have a ring with such a large diamond. I’d just keep shaking my head.

  I’m a tiny woman. A huge diamond would look stupid on my hand. One time, after I had rejected an entire bag of absolutely gorgeous, huge diamonds, my father-in-law got so angry he snatched them off the table and shoved them into his pocket. He stormed over to Albert and told him he wouldn’t bring any more diamonds home for me.

  “Good,” Albert said. “I’ll get my own ring.” Albert knew what I wanted, and he went and got me the exact perfect ring.

  That set the tone for my approach to the whole wedding. I knew that people I loved could be trusted to do things the way I liked. We were engaged in April, and after we dealt with the loss of Albert’s father that August, we decided to not change our wedding date for the following July.

  I was never a Bridezilla. That wasn’t how I wanted to approach my own wedding. I wanted to be carefree—well, almost. I kept myself involved in the planning, but we had never done a big, crazy wedding in my family at that time. My oldest sister had eloped, and the next sister had married so quickly we didn’t have much time to plan anything special. My brother had had a big wedding, but we didn’t really plan it. We consciously downsized our wedding due to what had happened to Al’s father. If he had still been alive, we would have had six hundred people at our wedding. As it was, we had three hundred, and I managed it without a single screaming fit or headache.

  Ask Caroline

  Caroline, I need your help! My fiancé and I have been engaged for two years and we’ve saved enough for our wedding. We’ve set a budget of fifteen grand, which is modest, but we are also saving up for our first home. My problem is, there are a lot of family weddings, and things are getting competitive. Do we stick with the modest wedding and get ahead on our first home, or do a bigger, more memorable wedding? His family is pushing for the lavish wedding. Mine doesn’t care. I’m starting to hate planning the wedding. What should I do?

  You sound miserable, and I’m sorry. You have your head on straight and your priorities in order. Spending more money on a wedding doesn’t make it better or more memorable. Trying to buy the approval of others is pointless, and so is trying to compete with other weddings.

  If your future in-laws want to contribute some cash to make the wedding more lavish, then fine, let them. If not, they’ll have to deal with your simple, beautiful, modest wedding.

  Every girl dreams of the perfect wedding, and maybe you won’t have all the silly bells and whistles at your wedding, but at the end of the day, you’ll have a husband waiting for you with keys to your new home in his pocket, and that’s priceless.

  Everyone around me helped make my day special. Albert asked what I wanted for our wedding meal. “It’s our wedding and I want meat loaf,” I told him. He was surprised, but he knew I was just joking to make a point about how little I cared about details like that. I was pleased when the menu for the wedding was veal rollatini and fish. That worked just as well as anything I could have spent hours agonizing over.

  I went to buy my gown with my mom and my dad, and I chose the first gown I tried on. I fell in love with it the minute I laid eyes on it—it was a Sposabella gown from Italy. There were two versions, one with sequins, one without sequins. The version with the sequins was double the price. My mother and I looked at each other, knowing how crazy it would be to buy the one double in price, so we bought the plain one and put the sequins on ourselves.

  I have such great memories of the night before my wedding, my mom and all my sisters and my sister-in-law, all sitting around, putting the sequins on that dress. We laughed and talked and beaded my entire wedding gown.

  My mom made silk flower arrangements, and I let her do whatever she thought would look good for the floral centerpieces. And she did—it looked great. I didn’t worry about a single thing and it all worked out perfectly.

  If you just got engaged, or when you do, remember that nothing else matters on that day as long as you are happy. A wedding needs to be fun, and it needs to be about love. You can have a great wedding using paper towels for napkins and plastic tablecloths if the room is full of love.

  The problem now is that a lot of women are losing sight of what a wedding is. A wedding is a wonderful party; it’s a time for a woman to shine and have the moment she’s dreamed of all her life. But at its core, a wedding is two people coming together to begin a shared life. I’ve seen so many kids waste hundreds of thousands of dollars of their parents’ money on stupid things like flowers that cost ten thousand dollars and will be dead in two days, or two thousand dollars on linen tablecloths that will never be used again. Guess what? People go home and say they went to a great wedding if people were laughing and dancing all night. Nobody has ever said a wedding was great because the tablecloths were awesome.

  I was calm all the way right up to my wedding. Honestly nothing mattered, and I knew the thing I wanted out of that day was to become Albert’s wife. Everything else was unimportant. I even let my mother-in-law plan our honeymoon. She suggested San Francisco and Hawaii, and we said, sure sounds good, book it. I just didn’t care about anything. I was the furthest thing from a Bridezilla on the planet.

  Tips to plan a perfect wedding

  Consciously avoid stress. Enjoy the day. Don’t get caught up in the event so much that you forget about why you’re there in the first place Hire people with experience to take care of the details, or let friends help out.

  Enjoy your guests. Take time to sit and chat with each of them.

  Anything except a natural disaster is fine. If it rains or snows on your wedding day, that’s all just part of what makes your wedding day unique.

  Don’t micromanage your wedding day. Let the day unfold as it is meant to. It will never be what you think it will be, but it’s your wedding whatever happens. Relax and enjoy the ride.

  Take time to be with your husband. You’ll both be pulled in a million directions, but it’s your day. And when you sit to eat, actually eat your food!

  The only thing that has to be perfect on your wedding day is your love for each other. A good wedding needs three things: Good food, good music, and lots of love. If you have those three things, nothing else matters.

  Marriage is a marathon;

  you gotta stay in shape!

  My children have been my priority since I became a mother, but I’ve always made sure to be a wife first and Mommy second. My marriage is the foundation that supports my whole life, and I have always been conscious of keeping i
t healthy.

  The secret to a long marriage is in the details. Always take the time to be thoughtful, always take time to make sure that your partner feels loved, appreciated, and special. If you do that, then it’s easy.

  The details are small, and they mean the world. Al has to take a bunch of pills every day, for blood pressure and whatnot. And every night before I go to bed, I lay out his pills, and I put a little handwritten note for him to see in the morning. The note will say something along the lines of “please take these pills, I love you and I like having you around!” And when he sees the note, he can smile and know how much he means to me.

  It’s crazy to me when I look at photos of us when we started dating. I see two kids who had not much of a clue what they were doing. And then I think of him and me these days, how embedded we are in each other’s soul. We’ve been through the best of times together and the worst of times. And we’re still here.

  I used to love running my fingers through his hair. I could lay in bed for hours and just run my fingers through his hair and be content. Thirty years later, he’s bald, and now my favorite part of his body is this tuft of hair on his chest. I run my fingers through that now, and it makes me just as happy.

  It’s the stupid things like that that keep a marriage fresh. We say silly, parochial things to each other, it’s almost corny. But we communicate. If I’m cold, I’ll put on one of his coats and smell his cologne and I’ll always call him and tell him that I smelled his cologne and it made me smile.

  You don’t have to give someone a box of chocolates or a bunch of flowers, you just have to let them know you love them every time you talk. We’ve probably never ended a phone call to each other without saying “I love you.”

  The place where Al and I are now did not happen overnight. This place in our relationship was thirty years in the making. We were romantic and dating at first and then life got in the way. Al’s father’s murder and then back-to-back kids made for a difficult period in our lives, but they made us stronger. It was tough to make time for each other when we had the kids, but we did whenever we could. We came up with a perfect solution—I’d have a sitter come over at midnight, while the kids were sleeping. Al would come get me at around 2:00 AM when he was finished with work, and we’d head into New York City. We’d go to Blue Ribbon, I love it there, and it’s open until 4:00 AM. I knew I’d be exhausted the next day, but this was our time to be romantic. This was when he’d hold my hand and we would just be that same couple that fell in love years earlier.