ME (shaking her hand): Good to meet you, finally. I feel overdressed.
HELEN (hugging me): You’re not overdrehthed.
We entered a room set aside for private parties such as ours. Colorful obstructions called “flower arrangements” took over the tables. The walls were painted to look like the pre-9/11 Manhattan skyline. From the way the flat perspective-free buildings and their yellow squares of light were painted, one could argue that this was also a pre-Renaissance skyline. The ceiling was low, as was my tolerance from previously staying with my parents for a week. I spotted an open bar approximately 9.2 feet to my left. Francine galloped over to me and pulled me into a group of bridesmaids. I had met Stacy at the shower. I nodded and smiled at her. She blinked at me stoically, her eyelids caked in purple.
“Ladies,” Francine said. “Ladies, I have an announcement to make.”
Oh, my sweet Jesus, she’s with child.
“Ladies, after much consideration, I have decided not to take my husband’s last name.”
On the one hand this news was bizarrely comforting to me and on the other it was fittingly disturbing. Not taking the husband’s name is a traditionally untraditional move on the free-spirited bride’s part. This was the old Francine talking. However, this has become a bit of a fad within an antifad and was commonplace enough that I didn’t think it warranted three “Ladies.” I guess if I had a third hand, on that one I wouldn’t really care either way. But then intrigue began to percolate.
“The thing is”—she leaned in, conspiratorially—“I’m not keeping mine either.”
I had a vision of Boris and Francine with no last names, falling off the grid somewhere in Idaho, living off the fat of the land, for-going utensils and property tax and having a dog named Bark and a kid named Slipper Bubble. The most vividly imagined portion of this scenario came when I realized this meant they’d have no U.S. postal address and I wouldn’t have to send a wedding gift. I smiled. Francine grabbed my hand and jerked it toward her.
“Isn’t it great? We’re going to be Mr. and Mrs. Universe.”
“Like, hypothetically?” I said. “As in ‘of or pertaining to the world’?”
“No.” Her fingers were boa constrictors around mine. “As in ‘of or pertaining to reality.’ We’re changing our last name to ‘Universe.’”
“Francey, that’s amazing!” Stacy squeaked like a dog toy.
I laughed very hard. Wine shot up into my nose, which I decided was God’s way of telling me it was time to switch to hard alcohol. It quickly became apparent that I was alone in my amusement when all the women stopped chattering and looked at me like bunny rabbits.
“I mean…” I stammered and punched Francine on the arm with my free extremity, “ha! Good for you. Way to buck the system.”
I got up to get a martini. I had questions. Unaskable questions. How was it that I actually knew someone, however tangentially, who blithely named herself after a trillion bodies of burning gas? What did her parents think? His? Is it even legal? Was “Universe” not a touch on the unabashedly self-righteous side? What, the “World” is not enough? Furthermore, if they had a baby and that baby was a girl, would she automatically win the pageant? Or maybe they’d give her the tiara but not the cash prize and list of duties?
But all those questions could wait, because I had the one thing that would carry me through the mundane small talk of the rest of the night. I had the one thing that would make my brain hurt less when I struggled to recall amusing anecdotes about Francine for her relatives from Missoula, the one thing that would allow me to tolerate Francine smacking my hand when I bit my nails, the one thing that would bring me comfort later that night when I was crouched over the toilet like an Olympic skier and violently ill from too many martinis mixed with shrimp gnocchi in vodka sauce.
I had her new initials. F. U.
Sleeping in my parents’ the night before the wedding, I took stock of my childhood bedroom—a hermetically sealed vault with the exception of a defunct NordicTrack and a box of padded dry-cleaning hangers. I was bored. I was drunkish. I thought of a high school report I did on the Belgian artist René Magritte and a quote I once read from him, something about his favorite walk being the one he took around his own bedroom. He said that he never understood the need for people to travel because all the poetry and perspective you’re ever going to get you already possess. Anaïs Nin had the same idea. We see the world as we are. So if it’s the same brain we bring with us every time we open our eyes, what’s the difference if we’re looking at an island cove or a pocket watch? These people must have had bigger childhood bedrooms than mine.
Though I don’t know the precise square footage, I do know that it wasn’t meant to be a bedroom but a study of some sort. Or a kingdom for hamsters, which is how I used it. You can’t lie down in my room and point your toes without touching furniture on both sides. And this has been true since I was twelve. I remember having a conversation with Kenny Stein, a short kid who moved into a house identical to ours but two streets over.
“So”—he came up to me on the playground with a kickball under his arm and a yarmulke on his head—“big or small?”
“Excuse me?” I was sitting with a group of girls I wanted to impress so it came out “Excuuuuuse me?”
“Big or small bedroom, yo. Which one you got?”
Kenny’s family was from Missouri and he was eager to practice his regional diction.
“Oh.” I looked away from his distractingly different-colored eyes, which because of his diminutive stature were on level with mine. My older sister had the real bedroom, the one with the little hallway, the walk-in closet, and the two full-sized windows. Kenny was an only child.
“Small.” I shrugged as if my parents had offered me the big room but I had turned it down for Buddhist reasons.
“Ha!” he said. Then he spiked the kickball against the concrete touchdown-style and marched off to join his new friends, who would eventually turn on him and stuff him head first into a tire swing.
I turned the lights off and lay down on my old twin bed. I began counting glow-in-the-dark stars until my brain felt like the sand whirling in a hula hoop. When I was done, I turned the lights back on. I played with some tennis trophies, flipped through a plastic-covered dot-matrix report on the major exports of Bulgaria (textiles and cheese), and sniffed and threw out a dried corsage. I tried to do sit-ups with my calves on the bed. I reached up to a high shelf with a pile of more vellum-covered dot-matrix reports on subjects ranging from the life of the sea anemone to that of F. Scott Fitzgerald. They fell past my head and onto the floor with a surprising thud. I looked down to see my high school yearbook facedown and spread open on the pile. Huh, I thought, so there that thing is.
I picked up the postprom picture of a group of girls at the beach. It had slipped out of the inside cover. Standing there in the sand, with our arms around each other, we all looked so effortlessly unified and I became deeply envious of past me. It seemed that having girlfriends was a sign of innocence and a boundless capacity to care about other women. The hearts in that photograph had multiple strings attached to multiple other hearts. Everything was less about cliché and more about camaraderie. We weren’t out for ourselves, we were out for each other. When had I forgotten that? When had I cut the pink wire?
When I woke up the next morning, my head radiating pressure, I swore I heard my alarm clock say, “You’re not eighteen anymore, jackass.” In the light of my bedroom, I took a second look at the photo and saw that we were all grimacing. I suddenly remembered the cattiness, that some of us were barely speaking to each other while others were speaking too much behind turned backs. Our faces were scrunched up against the glare of the sun, smiling because someone had no doubt told us to smile. I am holding car keys in my fist. We’re just about ready to pack it up for the day, find our shoes in the sand, toss tepid bottles of water into the trash, and say good-bye for the next decade.
We see the world as we are.
In the movies, brides cry of joy on their wedding day, sashaying down petal-covered aisles in six-thousand-dollar dresses. In real life the crying comes way earlier, usually in the confines of a bridal suite bathroom, and results from the stress of a bouffant gone awry or a missing mother-in-law. The six-thousand-dollar dress, much to the dismay of child laborers everywhere, is real. Francine noticed that two pearls beneath her armpit had fallen off sometime during the course of the day. She started breathing heavily and had us scour the bridal suite and then the entire hotel for any sign of them. What, I thought, a six-thousand-dollar dress and no plastic pouch of spare thread and beads? I nearly went blind, getting rug burn on my knees from the heavily patterned hotel carpet. Like a starved man crawling through the desert, I’d think I see pearls everywhere when there were only balls of lint and, in one instance, a Tic Tac. Didn’t they ever steam clean this place? Also, they weren’t real pearls.
But no matter. The bride on her wedding day is like a giant eggshell of emotional turmoil ready to crack and turn this whole feast of love into a trauma scramble. And the unstable bride is that much closer to the frying pan. Modern cinema makes allowances for this kind of bride as well, largely in the romantic comedy format, where the portrait tends to be far too generous with her. In real life, the five-alarm freak-out comes not from cold feet or anything having to do with something silly like the actual prospect of sleeping with the same person for the rest of your life. It comes from not wanting to look puffy in posterity.
This is where the bridesmaids come in. We are to have an innate understanding of her fragility. We live under the constant fear of “ruining the wedding.” Weddings don’t get damaged, they don’t get mediocre: they get ruined. One lost limo driver and the entire day goes from Zero to Destroyed faster than you can say Swarovski-encrusted Vera Wang. To have a traceable part of the destruction is a high crime against the highest order of femininity. One is not allowed to complain or object or give one’s opinion ever, especially when directly asked for it. I, I was a poor candidate for this.
After getting our nails done at a place that criminally charged eighty dollars for manicures and pedicures (I inspected the finished result for flecks of gold leaf only to find nothing), we were off to the hair salon. I had forgotten what it was like to have my hair done in White Plains. My senior year of high school a mall called the Westchester opened with a Versace, a Burberry, and a Red Door Salon lined up on the first floor like kernels of corn on a Venetian marble cob. But we were on our way out, off to college or rehab or both, when these new avenues for shoplifting were putting down their roots. Many of us had jobs there, including myself, but there wasn’t a whole lot of reflection done in between paychecks. We didn’t think about what was to come. While we were away, the expansion continued—new stores opened in the mall and the Bloomingdale’s down the street doubled in size. A Fortunoff ’s went up, followed by a Whole Foods, followed by, understandably, a Container Store.
But that is now and this was then: growing up, pre–Elizabeth Arden, my mother cut my hair over the kitchen sink rather than take me to the Galleria (where legend had it, some girl was raped in the food court) or the White Plains Pavilion (which held the DMV, a sushi restaurant called Panda Empire, and a Mexican restaurant called Salsa Town—in typical suburban fashion, the Japanese got an empire while the Mexicans got a town somewhere on its borders). I guess I should have known that Francine would have the same degree of awareness as I did. Surely perfectly reputable salons had opened across the street from places we used to go on avenues we used to turn down, but who knew anything about them?
With none of these new possibilities in mind and kitchen sinks not being five people wide, the mother of the bride booked the entire bridal party at the Garden of Desires salon, located on a low-grade highway of strip malls and car dealerships. A tiny place with floor-to-ceiling glam shots from the ’70s visible through purple-tinted windows, it had the kind of surprising but mandatory valet parking you’d pay not to use. We checked in at the main desk beneath an airbrushed rendition of the Sistine Chapel. This is when Francine whirled around in anticipation of the gratitude she was about to receive as she announced that anyone who had come in from out of town for the wedding would be “taken care of.” I wondered if the phrase had ever been used with anything but extreme malice within the walls of the Garden of Desires salon before this moment. I also wondered if coming in via commuter train qualified as “out of town.” All of the women burst into spontaneous applause, including a cousin bridesmaid whom I happened to know still lived over her parents’ garage in Scarsdale. I swiveled my head back like a bird of prey and furrowed my eyebrows at her.
“What are you doing?” I mouthed.
“Rolling with the punches,” she said through clenched teeth, loud enough for only me to hear.
My stylist’s name was Cindy. Cindy had the kind of hair that reminded me of a story I once heard about a Catholic girls high school in the Midwest. The entire senior class had to have their yearbook photos retaken because all the girls’ bangs were so high, they got cut off in the pictures. The girl who told me this story was ten at the time and from rural Illinois. The story was told in defense of her own bangs, a tsunami wave of hair, frozen in midair never to crash, like a Japanese political cartoon. Cindy reminded me a little bit of her as well.
“So what we doin’ today?” asked Cindy in a thick-as-cheese-cake central Long Island accent. She spun me around in her chair and cut off the blood flow to my head with a giant bib. Then she spat gum into my hair.
“What the—?”
“It’s fine, sweetheart,” she said, holding up her hand to show me the gum in her palm. Then Cindy started attaching a claw-shaped item to a nuclear missile that plugged in and called itself a hairdryer.
I said: What are you doing?
She said: Drying your hair.
I reached up and felt the top of my head.
I said: But it is dry.
She said: I know that.
We were silent like an old Western film before the shootout. I thought I saw a tumbleweed blow past in the mirror. Then I realized it was some satisfied client’s head. This was bad. Cindy and I were having communication issues at such an early stage in what was to be a meticulously scheduled three-hour relationship. After a series of diplomatic questions in which I repeatedly deferred to her infinite hairstyling wisdom and to which, Cindy being Cindy, she saw right through and became exasperated, I ascertained that she wanted to straighten my hair in order to put it up. Shampooing would apparently cause it to dry out.
“But if it’s already dry—”
She cut me off, firing up the missile.
“Wait, wait. What if you don’t shampoo it but just…use conditioner?” I suggested.
And that is how Cindy and I reached the compromise that was to make things much worse for me in the end. At the time I was quite proud of my hostage-negotiating skills. I felt like I had talked myself out of getting mugged by convincing my attacker to put down her gun and splash vinegar in my eyes instead.
Cindy hosed my head down and slathered me with stripper-scented oils. Then she put a megaphone attachment on the dryer and turned it on. In under an hour she burned the fleshy curl of both ears numb, a power I had previously thought was exclusive to ice cubes. In the end my hair hung so that the tips of my ears stuck out through it like a hobgoblin’s. Cindy poked a new hole in the ozone layer spraying my follicles into place and stabbing me with forty-two bobby pins (I counted them after the wedding, when their journey away from my scalp was just as quick, violent, and painful as their journey toward it). She topped the whole thing off with a clippy-claw thing whose proper name and genus I do not know.
“Is it possible to use a bit less hair spray?” I coughed.
“Honey,” she said as she leaned in, grabbing my shoulders from behind, “less hairspray? That’s like asking a duck not to quack.”
With that, the question-and-answer portion of the hair appointment was over.
I glanced over my shoulder to see other members of the bridal party getting curled and colored, teased and smoothed, until they were each at least two inches taller. Francine was getting small silk roses and extensions wound around her head that made her look like a windblown Princess Leia. She chatted on her cell phone. “No, but I’m serious! Someone has to tell her to stop confusing food with love…”
Cindy put her nails on my cheeks and snapped my head to center. I thought about how if I saw a duck and it was really annoying, I think I just might very nicely ask it not to quack.
A can and a half of Aqua Net later (Me: “Didn’t they discontinue that stuff?” Cindy: spraying sounds) when I looked adequately enough like a poodle-peacock crossbreed, Cindy undid my bib and released me.
“Turn around!” the other girls oohed and aahed in unison. You would have thought there was a salad spinner pinned to my head.
I knew what they were thinking, having thought it myself numerous times. I have seen something on another woman—a sweater or a hairdo or a new pair of glasses—and because it is so heinously ugly that I have been overtly staring at it, I have no choice but to compliment it instead.
That’s when the music started. With Francine’s hair finished, “Going to the Chapel” came on full blast through the speakers so used to channeling light rock. All the stylists dropped their curlers and straightening irons and came rushing over to sing and clap. The other girls started singing and clapping, too, like an off-Broadway musical. Way off. Francine smiled nervously; even Mrs. F. U. was embarrassed by this display. The three customers not tied to the wedding began clapping in their chairs and putting their hands to their hearts. Cindy got in on the action, dramatically waltzing with Francine. Others took turns. Who knew that “Going to the Chapel” is longer than “Stairway to Heaven”?
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