I Was Told There'd Be Cake

by Sloane Crosley

  This decision wasn’t for me to make. I opened the bathroom door just enough to let myself out into the kitchen. Mops, check. Brooms, check. Where was Nabokov’s giant butterfly net when you needed it? I walked into my roommate’s empty room and picked up his bike helmet. I turned it over a few times, tossed it gently in my hands, and put it back. I paced in the kitchen. Finally, equipped with a plastic colander and a wooden chopping block, I captured the butterfly. It had come voluntarily this far so I wasn’t sure why I felt the need to keep it confined now. I looked through the holes of the strainer. The butterfly was suspended from the top of the dome like a bat.

  It stayed that way the entire walk back to the museum, a trip I made with the steady steps of someone with dynamite strapped to her torso. It was getting dark. A mother and her little girl passed me on the sidewalk. The little girl craned her neck at the colander and I could just feel a question about to be asked. Christ, I thought, is this what it’s like to own a golden retriever puppy and take it for a walk? Or to be eight months pregnant and take yourself for a walk? Why do people always want to put their hands on vulnerability? I sped up.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said to the butterfly, who didn’t move. “I can’t even remember if you have ears.”

  I climbed the front steps of the museum, balancing my goods as if they were a dessert in a metal dome, but the doors were stuck shut when I pushed on them. The overhead lights were out. The T. Rex was getting his beauty sleep. So down the stairs I went, knocking on the service entrance door. For some reason, no one was at the desk by the door. In the distance, a security guard passed by a row of computers. I put the butterfly down gently on the pavement and rapped on the glass. I couldn’t tell if he saw me or not but pretty soon he would be out of my sight, under a marble archway. As I had no laminated museum ID to press against the glass, I was running out of options. I made the sign for “butterfly” in sign language to the security guard. If he couldn’t hear me, I had no reason to believe he could see me, but in my desperation I hooked my thumbs together and wiggled the rest of my fingers. He passed under the archway and up the stairs.

  Despondent, I ambled across the street to the entrance to the park. I moved the colander slowly across the cutting board until a space opened up, flipped it dome side down, and let the butterfly go. I expected it to flee happily into the trees. Pigeon epidemics be damned. Go forth and spread your incurable diseases, friend. Instead, tentative and traumatized, it hung out on my side of the wall, eventually landing on a homeless person sleeping on a nearby bench and covered in quilts. I stood there watching them for five, ten, fifteen minutes. I remember thinking that now would be the time to give money to the homeless. I was overwhelmed with the poetry of the moment. Not a soul would be around to pat me on the back for committing this kind act and for once I was okay with that.

  One of the few things Lindsey had taught me about butterflies came back to me. Many of the poisonous ones aren’t born poisonous. It’s not yet pumping through their cells when they escape from their cocoons. But they feed on milkweed as soon as they have the equipment to do it and that’s where the toxins come from. So there’s a moment at birth when they could choose something else. They could choose to be better, to be gentler, to be of no harm. Of course, butterflies have been feeding on milkweed since before we existed. A biological defense mechanism, it’s not in the cards for them to feed off anything else. If it was, it would only make them more palatable to vicious jungle birds that would eat them for breakfast. It’s a lose-lose situation.

  I stealthily approached, not wanting to wake the man beneath the quilt or scare off the flapping thing that seemed so comfortable perched on his shoulder. At the end of the month, I would receive an invitation to the end-of-season annual butterfly volunteers’ party. I never RSVP’d and I never heard from the museum again.

  The butterfly winked at me gingerly, opening its wings for a moment and then leisurely letting them shut. I opened my wallet. All I had was a twenty.

  I looked at the butterfly.

  I looked through my pockets.

  I looked at the homeless man.

  I looked through my purse for change.

  I looked at the twenty again. Then I tucked the money beneath the quilt before I could change my mind, folded my wallet, and walked away.

  YOU ON A STICK

  There are two kinds of people in this world: those who know where their high school yearbook is and those who do not. I do not. Never did I expect to find myself, almost ten years after the prom, back in my hometown, at the base of a cul-de-sac, high heels sinking into someone’s front lawn like it was quicksand. A victim of sanctioned déjà vu, I was smiling for the camera, flanked on both sides by women wearing bad dresses and flowers to match them. Once again our limousine came with plenty of upside-down glasses but no alcohol. Except this time the plan was to make a quick pit stop at the altar before we hit the dance floor.

  There’s a natural Darwinism of the brain that forces most people to let go of high school. We need our paltry three percent storage space for more contemporary information like the location of car keys. This is why childhood phone numbers sneak away like socks in the dryer. It’s why the names of once beloved teachers get whittled down to the vibe of a single letter. (See: “It starts with an L. L something…”) The order of life events gets fuzzy, as if it were not your own life but the life of some historical figure. Did Charles VIII get syphilis before or after he invaded Italy? Was I using tampons before or after I learned to tie a cherry stem with my tongue? I can never remember. And if any set of memories has a bull’s-eye on its back, it’s those from the four years leading up to the senior prom. We lose or, worse, we manipulate our memories of this time. It is my belief that people who speak of high school with a sugary fondness are bluffing away early-onset Alzheimer’s.

  So imagine my surprise when I received a phone call from a long-lost high school friend asking me to be in her wedding. High school was the last time I had a formal group of female friends that exceeded, say, three. We shared a lunch table, a yearbook page, and a near-debilitating fear of STDs. This particular friend and I were quite close when we were five feet tall, playing in each other’s backyards and writing letters from our respective summer camps. But as we grew up, we also grew apart. As if there was this half-visible Cheshire cat ushering us through our social lives, she went one way and I went the other. By senior year I had forgotten where her locker was. We had exchanged nary a birthday card in the decade since.

  There was a steady electronic vibration against my desk. I watched my cell phone seizure with the unregistered display of a 617 area code. Boston? I thought, Who the hell is calling me from Boston?

  “Hi, Sloane! It’s Francine,” she chirped.

  I responded with the same degree of skepticism I use for people with clipboards who employ familiarity as a means to get me to sign petitions.

  “Sloane, it’s Francine.”

  My mental Rolodex began to spin. Bingo. Francine Davis, Class of ’96, Latin Club President, Video Yearbook, pot yes, liquor no. Wait a minute. High school? Was I, unbeknownst to myself, one of those girls that peaked in high school and stayed friends 4evR as the backs of our yearbooks decreed we would? Sixteen-year-old me would have been flattered by this notion of female solidarity. Twenty-six-year-old me was freaked out.

  “Hey there.” I cleared my throat. “How are you?”

  “I’m engaged!”

  Incidentally, this is an unacceptable answer to that question.

  “Oh, that’s great. Wow, it’s been so—”

  “And,” she continued, “I want you to be in my wedding.”

  I was stunned. I pulled the phone away and looked quizzically at the hole-punched speaker. Aside from the blood obligation to be my sister’s maid of honor, it had never occurred to me that I would get asked to be in anyone’s wedding. I thought we had reached an understanding, the institution of marriage and I. Weddings are like the triathlon of female friendship: the
Shower, the Bachlorette Party, and the Main Event. It’s the Iron Woman and most people never make it through. They fall off their bikes or choke on ocean water. I figured if I valued my life, I’d stay away from weddings and they’d stay away from me.

  They were easy enough to fend off. At few postprom points have I had a large circle of girlfriends. I have certainly sat at brunches, looked around at the delicate wreath of glossed faces before me, and thought: Finally. I did it! But like a chemistry experiment, it seems stable for a moment just before it disintegrates. I could never keep invisible girlfriends, never mind the solid kind.

  Moreover, I wasn’t raised with weddings. Being the youngest of a small and relatively unsocial family, I was twenty-three when I attended my first wedding. Funerals? Funerals I could do. Picture a graph charting the luck of the entire Kennedy family. Now make them all smokers. That was us. But weddings? I knew nothing about weddings. I never had the childhood experience of being a flower girl. I never saw the word “marriage” and thought: Big party. Free cake. Sips of champagne! I didn’t know enough to dream in fondant.

  Then one day I woke up in my midtwenties and boom: I was attending one every three months. It was an epidemic and I was invited. Though never ever “with guest.” While I understand financial constraints, when you begin to realize that at any given wedding, there is a better likelihood of you being “with child” than “with guest,” something is very wrong. Hand to God, I had a dream the night before one particularly isolating ceremony that I was a duck-billed platypus, begging Noah to let me on the ark, but he refused because my other duck-billed platypus was riding the baggage claim carousel at the foot of the dock.

  Beholden to no one, being a single guest also made me ripe for labor. I understand the need for programs but why must I be the one to fold them into paper cranes? Is this not why God created immediate family or, at the very least, interns? And if you’re going to rent 250 folding chairs, why not get the kind that don’t splinter in your girlfriends’ hands when said girlfriends stand in the rain propping them into rows?

  ME (picking wood shrapnel out of my thumb): Say, where’s Lucy? I thought she was going to help.

  BRIDE: Oh, she’s with her boyfriend.

  Truth be told, it was the more intangible tasks I found straining. I can stuff save-the-dates with the best of them, but it’s the conversations one has midstuff that I found challenging. It suddenly seemed that a lot of those drunken nights and private jokes about bad dates were no longer an end but a means—fodder for the rehearsal dinner speech. Watch closely: If a woman has one eye out for a potential husband, chances are she’s got the other out for potential bridesmaids. And yes, this does turn her into a cross-eyed freak.

  Once, at a coworker’s birthday party, a woman I had met twice announced her engagement.

  “Congratulations.” I lifted my plastic cup of wine.

  “Save the date,” she responded, squeezing my hand.

  I didn’t know the name of her fiancé. I didn’t know where she lived. I knew her last name sounded like “crevice,” but I could never remember it. I was definitely getting a C vibe. Yet she felt she knew me enough to invite me to one of the most sacred events of her life. And that was just the beginning.

  It wasn’t long before oversized envelopes started appearing in the mail every two months. Like a tidal wave stronger than the vows themselves, they could not be stopped. Gold calligraphy came swirling under my door while I slept. It crept into my closet, taking stock of my strappy sandals and pastel pashminas. It curled and swirled and wrapped its vowels around my wallet. I could click through the Williams-Sonoma registry blindfolded. The phrase “it’s the thought that counts” had become hyperliteral as I spent more and more time calculating my bridal expenditures. Yet for all the financial burden, I had grown accustomed to my rank as Random Female Guest #7. I thought if I could just get through my twenties and thirties flying under the radar, if I could just stuff the occasional envelope and get passed over for the actual bridal parties…

  And then Francine called me to be part of her wedding party. A wedding that was to go down in the middle of July. Oh, the humidity. Out of all the girlfriendships in all the world, what made her call out like a foghorn for mine?

  “Isn’t it great?!” I could hear her grinning through the phone.

  “Boris and I. Married!”

  “Yes!” I involuntarily squealed. And it was. For her and for Boris, whom I had never met.

  The subplot of modern marriage assumes that a wedding is the crown jewel of any best friendship, a time when otherwise rational women are legally permitted to misplace their minds, and treat their friends like heel-skin-shaving employees. This is something we tolerate of our closest pals, but I had barely spoken to this woman in a decade. If I got married tomorrow, chances are it wouldn’t occur to me to invite Francine. It’s a wedding, not an episode of This Is Your Life. I thought: What’s wrong with her? I thought: Where is her big group of girlfriends?

  I thought: Hypocrite.

  So I agreed because, barring exorbitant plane fare or typhus, you can’t not agree. Not only is it a social slap in the face and a personal kick in the feelings, it also puts a silent price tag on the friendship, no matter how faded that friendship is. If the average bridesmaid’s dress costs $250 and the average bridesmaid’s shoes cost $125, and you refuse to participate, that’s like saying you wouldn’t pay $375 to maintain that friendship. It’s like saying if deranged pirate terrorists kidnapped the bride and demanded $375 and a few hours of your time in exchange for her life, you’d hand them the musket yourself. Sure, Francine and I had drifted apart and the last time we hung out we were wearing Z. Cavariccis and intentionally shattered heart pendants. Mine said “be fri,” hers said “st ends.” Sure, I couldn’t remember her middle name or her natural hair color, but what kind of bitch lets someone get kidnapped by deranged pirate terrorists?

  I had no choice but to respond not only with a “yes,” but with a “yes, I’d be honored.” On one tacit condition. There was an unspoken understanding that I would be standing up there with her as a one-time favor. In an effort to mask her apparent lack of sociability as an adult, that evening the role of “old friend” would be played by yours truly. Like the best man’s polyester-blend tux, I was a rental.

  In order to get married these days, God isn’t witness enough. You have to have someone present who helped find your retainer after a sleepover. Although some overlap is permitted, the women you see each week are almost never the same set of women lined up behind you at the altar. Your current friends are wild cards and while they may be invited, they are not to be tortured with envelope licking. Marriage is about the permanence of one’s future and it can’t proceed without a well-earned past of trick-or-treating and bloody ten-speed accidents. As Francine’s “something old,” I felt sorry for her but would never say anything of the kind and, in return, she wouldn’t make me wear baby pink.

  Even after being part of the wedding, the most vivid thing I can remember about Francine dates back to the seventh grade. My father drove five or six of us to a dance at our middle school, which was in a semiabandoned part of White Plains, close to a highway and between some houses with no front yards. A few years back, they shut the school down and combined the middle grades—sixth through eighth—into a single middle school on a castle-like compound closer to the Scarsdale border. I have no idea what became of the old building I had my formative slam book years in. Like any red-blooded American kid, I like to imagine my middle school as a ruined catacomb of a crack den with boarded-up windows and junkies sleeping beneath the blackboard where I got every algebra equation of my life wrong. In my case, there’s a good chance I’m right.

  To the dance we all wore skirts with polka dots, each one with various-sized dots. I also wore an exceedingly hip combination of a see-through top with a bouquet of solid roses in the middle and earrings that made it appear as if a gold-plated dolphin was diving through my lobe.

  Fr
ancine was the last to be picked up and my father, as usual, was embarrassingly early. He had his hand on the steering wheel for a third honk when Francine came out of the house—a vision in duct tape and sling-back jelly shoes. She had ripped up the pages of Seventeen and YM and duct-taped glossy models into a collage and, somehow, applied it to her body in a stiff dress shape. Twirling on her porch like a pinwheel spoke, she was straight out of the Betty Friedan paper doll book. On some small level we must have realized the irony of taking this unspoken body ideal, literally ripping it into pieces, and wearing it on your underdeveloped breasts as fashion. Parsons students have been given honors degrees for less. At the time, we only knew she looked cooler than Jem and her Holograms and Barbie and her Rockers combined.

  She accessorized with a plastic charm necklace that included a snow globe with a dolphin in it (dolphins were a favored animal of the time), a working abacus, and a battery-operated toilet that made a flushing sound when you opened it. I was so proud to be her friend. She was brave and creative and that night we walked into the gymnasium in a girlish clump. We sat in the corner and played MASH (Mansion, Apartment, Shelter, House). When we were ready, we got up and danced like idiots.

  “You down with OPP?!” I screamed along to Naughty by Nature, bounding my awkward and bony twelve-year-old body off the shellacked floor.

  “Yeah, you know me!” Francine shouted back.