Every Bride in Our Family Loses Her Ring Before the First Anniversary

Every bride in my family loses her wedding ring within the first year. This is not a saying. It is a record, and I have checked it, and it is unbroken across four generations.

My great-grandmother lost hers down a drain three months after her wedding. My grandmother lost hers in a garden and never found it. My mother lost hers in the ocean on her first anniversary, off her own finger in calm water, gone. And I, who grew up hearing all of this and swore up and down it would not happen to me, who taped my ring, who took it off for dishes, who was careful in a way that annoyed my husband -- I lost mine at eight months, and I still do not know how, and it has never turned up.

My mother always called it carelessness, an inherited flightiness, women in our family who did not respect nice things. She said it a little cruelly, actually, as though losing a ring were a character flaw handed down like a weak chin. She never once considered it might be something else, because my mother did not believe in something else.

I might not have either, except that when I lost mine I fell down a bit of a hole about it, the way you do, and I went digging through the family papers looking for I do not know what -- a pattern, a comfort, an explanation. And in a box of my great-grandmother's things I found a letter she had written but, as far as I can tell, never sent. It was addressed to her own mother, back in the old country, and it was dated the year of her wedding, 1911.

In it she confessed something. Before she left for America to marry, she had made a promise to a young man in her village -- not my great-grandfather, another one, the one she had actually loved. They could not marry; he had no money and her family had arranged the American match. But before she left, the two of them had made a vow at a particular stone by a particular well, the way young people did there, and she had promised him that she would never fully belong to another, that some part of her would always be his, and to seal it she had given him a ring -- a plain band -- and kept its match, and sworn that her true wedding had already happened, at the well, and any other was only paper.

She married my great-grandfather anyway. She had to. But in the letter she writes, with a guilt that comes right off the page a hundred years later, that she is afraid. She writes that the old women in the village said a vow at that well was binding, that you could not swear yourself to one man and then wear another man's ring, that the well would not allow it, that any ring given falsely would be taken back. She writes: I am afraid to wear it, mother. I am afraid of what I promised. I do not think this ring will stay on my hand.