Save the Date: The Occasional Mortifications of a Serial Wedding Guest

by Jen Doll

  • • •

  My family moved around a lot: Texas, South Carolina, Illinois, South Carolina again, another place in South Carolina, another stint in Illinois. When I was in fifth grade, we moved to a midsize town in northern Alabama named Decatur. We’d stayed there for eight years, until I graduated from high school—the longest amount of time I’d lived in one place in my life up to that point—and then, as I headed to college in the Northeast, my parents would move yet again. With all that moving around it was hard to pinpoint what place I belonged to, exactly, and what I could claim in return, so I learned to choose intriguing vagueness rather than specificity. If you gave the place a name, you had to deal with the repercussions. Nowhere felt right enough to want as my own, not only for what it was but also for what it reflected of me, forever. I didn’t have an accent. My parents were Yankees. I could be from anywhere.

  So “we moved around a lot” was what I would say when the inevitable question was asked. “Military brat?” would often be the follow-up, and I’d shake my head and give a second routinized response: “My dad’s an engineer . . . not the kind that drives trains,” which for a number of years seemed a vital clarification. If the person asking actually cared, I might explain further, listing the various cities and the whens and hows and whys. Usually, though, “we moved around a lot” was enough to satisfy the fleeting interest of strangers who were just asking to be polite, the geographically based version of the “How are you?”/“Fine” exchange that could be broadly deciphered as, “We are both acknowledging that we are living humans on this earth; okay, carry on, thanks.”

  Anyway, it was true, we moved around a lot. By the time I was six, my mom bragged to her friends, I’d lived in six different houses. And when I left for the first day of kindergarten in my new town in a suburb of Chicago, Illinois, I walked through the door not of a house but of our Winnebago motor home, which was parked in the driveway of the mustard-yellow two-story abode my parents had purchased but not yet had time to move us into. Something in this peripatetic existence appealed to my mom and dad, who’d, respectively, grown up in the same neighborhoods of Chicago and northern Michigan their entire lives. We were hardly roving vagabonds or wandering hippies, though. Dad was a chemical engineer who stayed with the same company for his entire career, responsibly putting in for promotions that might allow our family to venture to new soil. I think they liked the idea that however bourgeois we might be, we were attached to no place for so long we’d become stuck. We had packed up and left home before and could always leave again. Home was where you made it; the home you could take with you wherever you went was your family.

  As a kid, however, I didn’t want to make a place home. I wanted it to be home, an entity I could rely on and even start to take for granted. Instead, the excitement of every new house was tempered with the knowledge that we could move again in a matter of months, through no decision of my own. Perhaps it was because of this that I was shy around strangers, preferring to make my brother—a handy, built-in companion who didn’t mind being instructed and would talk to anyone—order our root beers at the mini-mart or ask the bowling alley attendant for change to play an arcade game.

  My parents persisted in urging me to speak up and not be afraid to say what I wanted, and by the time I reached fifth grade in that same Illinois suburb where I’d gone to kindergarten, an epic stay for us, I was starting to come into my own. I had just won a fierce electoral battle for treasurer of my class against a male opponent who’d run his campaign on the assertion that girls should not be in charge of money. That I’d beaten him soundly was progress for women, but progress, especially, for me. And then it happened: Shortly after we celebrated that win, my dad came home and told us we’d be moving to a new town in an entirely new state. It’s rare that a bookish fifth-grade girl with glasses wants an adventure that doesn’t come in the pages of one of her beloved books, but that’s what it would be, I was told. An adventure. Second-grade Brad relished the idea, but I was not so thrilled. It hardly mattered what I thought. It was not my choice.

  We packed up and moved to another two-story house, this one gray with giant decorative columns and a large, willowy tree in the front, an attached three-car garage to the side, a deck in the back, and a big backyard with grass and trees and even an enclosed hot tub. It was located in a neighborhood within walking distance from my new school. By all appearances, it was a very nice place.

  The disasters began nearly immediately.

  The first problem was my new teacher. I’d never had a teacher who didn’t like me and whom I didn’t adore in return. After all, I played school for fun and kept lists of must-read biographies and wrote letters to the president in my spare time (to my great disappointment, he never answered). My fifth-grade teacher in Illinois had been young, with curly, golden hair and an infectious laugh. But in Alabama, Mrs. Pilcher had clawlike hands tipped by pointy coral nails, and a Southern accent so deep I had trouble understanding her. A pouf of colorless hair sat on top of her head, and her powdered, papery skin sagged around her eyes and chin and elbows. She frowned a lot, which made everything seem to sag further. I was not her dream at all; instead, I seemed a special affront to her sensibilities: an interloper in an already full class and, worse, a misfit who hailed from a place she didn’t much like. Before we moved I had never heard of the War of the Northern Aggression, but I learned quickly that the Civil War was called something different in this state where battle reenactments were held on weekends, and where, in those reenactments, the South won.

  I muddled along. Then came the Ma’am Incident. Mrs. Pilcher was standing at the front of the room, a piece of chalk in her crooked fingers, scrawling on the board. She asked a question. I raised my hand and answered. I do not know what that question was, nor what I responded, but I know what happened next.

  “What did you say?” she asked.

  I repeated my answer.

  “What did you say?” she said again.

  I turned red. Could she be hard of hearing, like my grandma? Was she confused? “Uh,” I stammered, and slowly repeated my answer again, louder. Her frown cut deeper into her face. I squirmed in my desk. The class laughed, uncomfortably.

  “Jennifer,” she said, waving her hand with the chalk still in it, her fingers gnarled like those of witches. “In my classroom when you address the teacher, you say ‘ma’am.’ Yes, ma’am. No, ma’am. This is the answer, ma’am. Do you understand?”

  The class stared at me. Some of them were still laughing; others looked plainly horrified. “Yes,” I said. It came out in a whisper, and she jabbed her chalk at me, accusingly. “Ma’am.”

  I hadn’t even known ma’am was a word, much less something I needed to say in school, and when I went home, I explained what had happened and cried. My mom called the teacher to tell her I was not intentionally rude; we were simply from another part of the country. I don’t know that that helped.

  The next humiliation came at the hands of my own classmates. People were pantsing one another on the playground; it was a phase, and I was desperately afraid it would happen to me. I thought about it when I put on my clothes in the morning. If the underwear I picked for the day was going to be seen by twenty kids, it better not have something embarrassing on it, like cartoon characters or hearts and stars. Better stick with solids, preferably in dark colors, and definitely, definitely make sure there were no holes or raggedy spots. The pantsings were generally done by the popular girls, who probably picked the game up from the popular boys, who may have done it to one another congenially for a day before moving on to playing dodgeball. With the girls it was less game and more psychological torture, a form of bullying that escaped being called that because, ha ha, wasn’t it hilarious? No one got hurt; it was kids being kids! When the teacher sent us out for recess in the afternoon, the most awful part of the day (she got to stay inside), I clutched my hideously uncool pants, which had been fine, even hip, in Illinois�
��stone-washed jeans or Z. Cavariccis—tightly to my waist, wary of other girls, dressed in matching brightly colored outfits with brand names like Benetton and Esprit, getting too close. When it did happen, I was prepared. Oversized Coke-bottle lenses can come in handy. I saw my attackers reflected before they pounced and held tight enough that my high-waisted bottoms did not give. The other me, the Illinois me who had never struggled to keep her pants up on a playground, felt a long way away.

  The adjustment to the South wasn’t so hard for the other members of my family. My dad, who’d received a raise and promotion in his move to this new town, had a whole set of coworkers who had to treat him well since he was the boss. As for Brad, from the moment we arrived he had a host of new friends, including some who lived just doors away. His afternoons were spent running through the streets, playing in the creek, and terrorizing the nearby cul-de-sac in the way of prepubescent boys, more mischief than malevolence. There was a bunch of second-grade girls who wanted to marry him, he’d complain. My mom was more like me, ill at ease in this strange land of buffets and sweet tea and neighbors who said “Bless her heart” when they really meant “What an ass,” though she at least had the safety net of being the boss’s wife. No one would dare pull down her pants on a playground or make her say ma’am; she’d get all sugar and Southern hospitality, at least to her face. Meanwhile, behind her back, her use of multicolored Christmas lights instead of the neighborhood-approved white-only ones caused a stir for several seasons among certain ladies of the town. Those who were too young to know better were more upfront with their opinions. Mom volunteered for a field trip with Brad’s second-grade class, and one of the boys, hearing her thick Chicago accent, asked my brother what planet she was from. We might as well have been from Mars.

  In a departure from historical precedent, we stayed put, and as always, I adjusted. By the end of elementary school, my report card would read “excellent” for my courteousness and respect for authority. The years kept passing, and it became home, if not the home I might have chosen. Along with when to say ma’am, I learned what to wear, how to say y’all, and who to be friends with. I met Marjorie in seventh grade. By eighth grade we were hanging out in the elementary school playground where I’d nearly gotten pantsed, experimenting with smoking cigarettes. By ninth we’d graduated to wine coolers and loitering in the parking lot of that school at night, in the cars of boys who could drive. Her family lived in a rambling, multi-winged brick-red house with neat white shutters and matching trim, perched on the top of a hill near the edge of town. Its kitchen was warm and well lit and usually smelled of fresh-baked, delicious food homemade by her mom, who for a while had run a catering business. Marjorie and I shared crushes on senior boys whose girlfriends were the girls we dreamed of growing up to be. We joined the same clubs, running for different offices. We sat next to each other in our classes and passed notes in plain view of our teachers, our allegiance to each other, not them. We rushed for the same high school sorority—an association of girls intended to prep us for the real thing in college—and when those parties and formals started happening, we would ask boys who were inseparable twosomes like us to go as our dates.

  Around that time I took to wearing my mom’s engagement ring, the one that her ex-husband had given her, an emerald-cut diamond that looked like what I imagined an engagement ring should be. Given what I knew of my mom’s marital history, it may have been odd that I chose this ring as my preferred accessory, but somehow its wearing seemed an important thing to practice. Plus, it was a diamond, and from what I had heard, diamonds should be seen, not hidden away in jewelry boxes and forgotten. For some reason my mom let me appropriate it, and because it fit there, I wore the ring on the fourth finger of my left hand, not knowing there was any presumed marital karma in that decision. I worked for a while in a grocery store in town, and people would see it and ask if I was married, and I’d give them dirty looks because I was still in high school. Marriage? I was far too young for marriage or, for that matter, even a permanent declaration of love. I’d only just gotten my driver’s license, for heaven’s sake.

  That didn’t mean romance wasn’t something I longed for. As sophomores, Marjorie and I had noticed two senior guys who did a funny thing in our yearbook. In all the photos in which they appeared, they were always the tallest boys, and they tilted their heads and gave knowing, goofy looks to the camera, gesticulating with pointed fingers at each other. One of them had loose, floppy skater hair, an overgrown brunet bowl cut. He became my new crush, but he had graduated from high school, and there was little chance of my ever meeting him. Until, suddenly, there was. He was staying in town and going to community college. Over the summer before junior year, I was in a car with a friend one day. We went by his house, and she pointed it out, a landmark: “That’s where Nathaniel lives.”

  “Oh,” I said, nonchalant, but after that day, I drove by again and again. Sometimes I was alone, sometimes I had friends with me, sometimes I was in another friend’s car. It was a shortcut on the way to a drugstore, I reasoned; this was entirely acceptable behavior, not creepy at all.

  He was rarely outside, though, and the little blue house sat quietly and low on its haunches, unassuming. Sometimes his Volkswagen Golf would be parked in the carport, and I’d think, He must be home, and try to imagine what he might be doing. All of the drive-bys did not go unnoticed. Sooner or later it got back to him that there was a high school girl with long brown hair who wouldn’t stop driving by his house. We met, awkwardly. We met again, less so. And then we were a couple. It had all been so simple, but for the gas money and, later, the breakup. As the conclusion to my senior year approached, I tried to tell him we needed to end things. He couldn’t understand why, and I couldn’t, really, either, only that I knew it was something that I had to do. I needed to go on to the next stage of my life on my own, without him. It didn’t make sense—How do you love someone so much, and then abruptly change how you feel?—but it was the only thing that made sense.

  On graduation night at a party in a cornfield I kissed another boy, and though it meant nothing, it was freeing. I was done, I told Nathaniel, it was over. He did not take it well, nor did my own family, to whom he was very nearly one of us. “How could you?” I remember my brother saying. “Oh, Jennifer,” my mom had groaned. My dad had been silently disappointed, feeling sorry for the nice young man he’d gotten to know. Of course, they’d forgiven me, and in the years that passed, it seemed that Nathaniel had, too. He’d sent postcards, and word would occasionally come about his whereabouts from friends. I was glad he was doing well, glad in the way that you can be glad for someone you used to know while also feeling that pang of What if. What if I’d done things differently, where might I be now? You can’t go back, and it wasn’t that I wanted to. But a person couldn’t help wondering.

  • • •

  Like romantic relationships, high school friendships don’t always make it through college separations, but Marjorie’s and mine did. We’d made a commitment, promising each other that after we graduated from our respective universities we’d move to New York City. We’d rent an apartment together and be successful career women and have the best lives ever, although Marjorie planned to stay for a few years only, after which she’d move back to the South, get married, and start a family. I planned to stay as long as I felt like. I had a feeling New York could be my new home, the permanent home I’d been looking for. I needed one, because my dad’s job had taken my parents to London the summer I graduated, and then to Singapore and Indonesia, farther and farther away from that Alabama town in which I’d spent eight years.

  Marjorie and I did what we said we’d do: We moved to New York, and we got a place on the Upper East Side with another high school friend, Violet. It was a three-bedroom apartment insomuch as there were three bedrooms side by side, with thin walls between them and their doors connected to a narrow communal living space. Not one but two brothels were busted in the building
in the time we lived there, and at one point, a cop knocked on our door, thinking one of those apartments was ours. Marjorie let him in and insisted, “We’re not prostitutes!” and he nodded and said, “Three girls living together? Sure.” We didn’t know if we should be horribly offended or proud of ourselves. It was awesome, this grown-up life. Mostly.

  Together, we got our first and second jobs and learned the ropes of our newly adopted city. We had bad dates and hookups and breakups, got dumped and dumped others, dealt with boys who called repeatedly and those who never spoke to us again after the first or sixth night. We even stayed friends through the one time a man peed in our refrigerator. Then, just like she’d warned us she would, Marjorie moved back to the South, to Nashville, a few hours from our hometown—close enough, not too close—but not before she met Brian. From the beginning there was a seriousness to their relationship, and it threw me for a loop. That you could identify the person with whom you wanted to make a life, nail it down, and do it, seemed so inexplicable, so incredibly slippery. Did you just know? Did you close your eyes and turn and point and hope for the best? Perhaps choosing had the power of making that choice the one you wanted. The only person in my life who seemed remotely worth choosing, in retrospect, was Nathaniel, and yet that didn’t feel right, either. If it was true that someone was better than no one, what was the deadline for picking that person? Why did no one tell you this stuff?

  With Marjorie leaving town for good, and Violet enrolling in an out-of-state graduate program, our three-person unit was broken. There was nothing keeping me in New York, so I decided to make some changes. Like my parents, I would move, if only to prove for certain that New York was the place I wanted to be. I chose Boston, where a close college friend was living, and where, when I visited, things had seemed rather pleasant. Though once I got there I began to strategize my move back nearly immediately, just knowing I could get up and start a life somewhere else was confidence-inspiring. My excessively mobile parents had been on to something after all.