LARRY, LARRY, MY SISTER, MYSELF Nonfiction by Zara Bell
The first few times Larry and I were married, it was more or less for sport. Gaming. I love you. OK, I’ll match that love and raise you: marry me. There was the time under God at the coffee shop across the street with his friend who was a minister; the time in private that we downloaded a generic wedding license from the Internet, signed it and taped it to the refrigerator. I called home and said, Hey, guess what? That led to the time under pressure, with stakes, with an audience—family. It was a hot, dry August in New Mexico and my mother wanted a wedding. The conversation went something like this: “A wedding is not a marriage,” I said, probably thinking that that was the grownup, emotionally mature thing to feel. “But a marriage is not only between two people, it’s about community, too,” she said. “Family.” “But we don’t have time,” I said. We already had plans. We were moving to South Carolina. We had already arranged a moving truck and rented an apartment. This is the way Larry does things. He does them now. When I first became smitten with Larry, spending time with him felt kind of like some kind of carnival ride. Not a roller coaster—there were no extreme highs and lows, ups and downs. Larry seemed to not have a down, or a low speed. It was more like a Tilt-A-Whirl—constant unpredictable motion, action and reaction, centrifugal spin and magnetic pull—and as I look at it now, I was not the only person on the ride. I’d visit him at his office in the lumber yard he owned in Albuquerque, and on any given afternoon, there were people coming and going, needing, wanting, bargaining, reminiscing, bullshitting, laughing, always laughing. I met police officers 43