In the years we’ve lived together, Steve — who is even more in tune than I with Bartleby’s mantra — and I have kept much to ourselves. It’s not that we don’t have friends, but we’ve seldom set the table with more than two place mats. When we finally decided to marry, Steve’s inclination was to do the deed in Costa Rica, with monkeys as witnesses. But I was adamant: I wanted a party. Right here in town, with a hundred people, more, everyone we know. We compromised on a guest list of forty. We’d have the June ceremony in a nearby wilderness park, informal enough (“Attire: Goodyear or Rustic,” we said) that people could come in shorts, and then we’d all come back to the house for a party. So with Gregory Corso’s cry “O God, and the wedding!” ringing in our ears, we began to plan.

The Bride, 1892-1893
(Oil on canvas, 146 x 88 cm)
BY Jan Thorn Prikker
Kröller-Müller Museum

I’d had a wedding before. I was nineteen when Larry and I married, on the hottest August eleventh in the history of Phoenix. Two hundred and fifty of the three hundred guests were my father’s business acquaintances and their wives. But although the temperature that afternoon reached one hundred and eighteen, the evening reception at my parents’ house had all the warmth of a refrigerator tidily stacked with tightly-sealed Tupperware containers. Most of the crustless sandwiches remained geometrically arranged on the caterer’s platters, and ice watered the already insipid champagne punch. Larry and I spent the evening obeying the photographer’s orders. Our own wedding, and we were mannequins, frozen figures in a pageant, required only to “hold that pose” and smile.

Just as we were freed finally to talk with our own friends, my mother ushered me back to the bedroom to change into my “going away” outfit. People had already begun to leave, she fussed, so at 9:30 Larry and I were rushed out the door in a limp flurry of rice, to roar down the hill in his open-topped blue Triumph.

Somehow — this was decades before cell phones — we arranged to meet Larry’s oldest friends Sonja and Richard at Bob’s Big Boy on Central Avenue where, ravenous, we ordered Double Deckers with cheese and unanimously agreed the reception had been a flop.

This would be an occasion no one would ever forget, perhaps not as legendary as the gunfight at the OK Corral, but one that would become etched in the town’s memory…

Maybe that was why, months later, with eight place settings of Lenox platinum-band china crammed into our mobile home’s kitchen cabinet, Larry decided we needed to throw a party of our own. By the spring of 1963, he had taught in Tombstone for almost two years, and he wanted to repay the townsfolk who had welcomed him when, fresh from the University of Arizona, he arrived as the school district’s new music teacher. But Larry didn’t envision an ordinary party, and we wouldn’t be using the Lenox. This would be an occasion no one would ever forget, perhaps not as legendary as the gunfight at the OK Corral, but one that would become etched in the town’s memory, ammunition for a write-up in The Tombstone Epitaph.

Consisting of a thousand inhabitants, or, counting us, a thousand and two, Tombstone lacked the social hierarchies characteristic of larger towns: among our friends were the postmistress, the high school and elementary school principals, the bank manager, and the teller, who, with her husband, the mayor, owned the trailer park we lived in. Our guest list also included the editor of the Epitaph and the retired Army colonel and his wife (who never greeted me without crying “But honey, you can’t possibly be married, you’re still a child!”), as well as the high school janitor, the high school principal’s secretary, the football coach, and the band teacher. At least thirty people on the patch of mown lawn outside our trailer.