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

by Jen Doll

  That night we celebrated, all of us together for one last party. Pickles was by my side as we made the most of our final day of love camp. At the end of the evening, when the bar shut down and the music stopped, Emily and Cobra disappeared, and Pickles and I went to my room. We were wedding-exhausted, and I wanted to lie down. Fully clothed and demure, we both got into my bed, and he gave me a back rub as I fell asleep. It felt less a feature of a new romance than something a husband might do, after a long, hard day, for a wife, or vice versa. When I woke the next morning, he was gone, and Emily was sleeping alone in the other bed. I threw a pillow at her and she groaned, opening one eye.

  “Morning, sunshine,” she said.

  “Morning,” I repeated. “Ready for one last breakfast?”

  “Mmmm,” she said. “Always.”

  • • •

  The flight home that afternoon may have had some turbulence, but Emily and I, sitting next to each other, slept through most of it, suddenly so tired from the past days that we couldn’t keep our eyes open. In and out of consciousness I wasn’t scared at all, but even when I woke up and the plane experienced some “gravely road,” I didn’t worry. I thought of Leigh, and I smiled. Toward the end of the flight, just before we began our approach into Miami, I opened my eyes and there was Pickles, standing in the aisle. He was holding his business card, to which he’d added his personal e-mail address in a looping red scrawl. “I wanted to give you my contact information,” he said. “I really hope we’ll stay in touch.”

  I took the card, perusing the AOL e-mail address he’d wanted me to have. I felt goofy and awkward and, at the same time, triumphant. I’d met a boy at a wedding, just like I’d always thought I would. The little girl dream had come true. These things did happen, even if they didn’t happen exactly the way they do in the movies.

  “It gets lonely on the road,” he said, and I suppressed a giggle. “Seriously, e-mail me. I’ll be traveling to the East Coast again soon.”

  “Okay,” I said, and I did, for a while. We sent messages back and forth for a few months, and he sent me a bouquet of flowers, multicolored long-stemmed roses, but soon enough the spell of love camp was broken, and we went our separate ways. I kept the business card, though. It’s in a box full of photos and birthday greetings and notes from people I have cared for. These may be things no longer relevant in any current way to my life, but they are worth holding on to, nonetheless.

  8.

  I Think I’m Having a Reaction

  We’d been in the rental car for twenty minutes and we were already fighting. We were on the West Side Highway, and he was asking me to figure out the directions, to just look at the map and tell him which exit we had to take; he needed it now or we were going to miss it. I was searching and not finding it. I wasn’t so good with maps, I was explaining. I hadn’t driven a car in years; what did he expect? He was too busy freaking out to hear what I was saying. Of course, he knew everything I was telling him already. We’d been dating for a year.

  The truth was, I’d been pretty sure he hadn’t wanted to go to this wedding at all. He was doing it to be a good guy, a good sport, and while I appreciated the effort, I would have appreciated it more if he’d truly been happy to be there with me. I’d packed my strapless J.Crew bridesmaid dress along with shoes, a pair of jeans, a couple of sundresses, and some layering sweaters—the nights were bound to get cold in rural Vermont, even in the summertime—knowing that the glimmer of excitement, of going-to-a-weddingness, that I felt was not something he shared. But he’d come anyway. He really didn’t have a choice. He was my boyfriend.

  Three years after Caitlin married Cash came the wedding of Emily, the second in our college roommate threesome to head down the aisle. Emily and I were still close, though we lived in different states now. We talked at least monthly on the phone, we e-mailed regularly, and we’d even traveled to our respective towns to visit each other. I’d met her soon-to-be husband, Mark, and I liked him. Their wedding made for a reunion of sorts: Caitlin and Cash would be there, and I’d bring Jason, my boyfriend, and the now-coupled college friends would be back together again, like old times but better.

  There was more to it than that, though. At weddings, feelings are amplified beyond the norm, good or bad. When you add someone you’re dating to the mix, especially someone who’s not exactly new but who hasn’t been around long enough to be considered “old,” either, questions and concerns about your relationship are thrown into high relief as you compare yourselves with other couples present and, of course, with the bride and groom.

  After the initial car drama, the right roads were taken and we calmed down and found a kind of symbiosis. The anticipatory wedding vibe I’d initially felt slowly seeped into the car and us both, I think, helped along by the sunny summer day and near-empty highways, the rhythmic turning of the rental car’s wheels, and the music on our favorite CDs. It was just the two of us, with no decisions to make, driving. We arrived at our destination in the early afternoon, pulling onto a dirt road surrounded by trees that led to a colonial-looking inn set on rolling green hills. Emily ran out to meet us, wearing a floral shift with a sweater over it, her dark hair pulled back in a ponytail, her skin lightly tanned and makeup-free. She looked just like the eighteen-year-old girl I’d introduced myself to that first day of freshman year in college. “I’m so excited you’re here,” she said, hugging us both. “We’re going to have the best time!”

  • • •

  Emily had met Mark in their post-graduate premed program. She had a personal connection to medicine, having been diagnosed with a severe peanut allergy as a child. “I touched a peanut as a baby,” she had told me, “and I broke out in hives.” Since then, peanuts were the enemy, to be avoided at all costs. There had inevitably been incidents, when she accidentally bit into a peanut granola bar in high school and had to be rushed to the ER, for instance. Nearly everyone knows at least one person with a food allergy today (check your labels carefully!), but she was the first I’d met who had such an extreme reaction to the otherwise banal nut. She’d shown me how to administer an EpiPen: You pressed it into her outer thigh and, I inferred from her instructions, hoped for the best. I prayed I’d never be in the position of having to ham-fistedly attempt to save my friend’s life.

  This allergy was her only health issue, though, and she didn’t let it get in the way of her physical or mental ambitions. She ran marathons and did a stint on the crew team, along with serving as a member of the group of student EMTs. She came to college wanting to be a doctor, but transferred to the business school after wrestling with organic chemistry. We graduated, and she worked for several years in finance in New York City before deciding to return to her first love and go to med school. She had to finish her premed classes before applying, and that’s how she met Mark. As the older members of their program, they studied together and became friends outside of class, too. That connection led to more.

  While I’d seen her date in college, and I’d heard much about her high school boyfriend, the guy she for a time thought she’d end up with, she sounded different talking about Mark. He was the smartest person she knew, she said, as if worried she couldn’t match his intellect. His other qualities ran like a list of all the right check boxes in a man: He was handsome, athletic, a book lover, intelligent and easygoing, close to his family but not too close, and something of a do-gooder, like she was. He was also a vegetarian, though this part was concerning. He was someone for whom peanut butter was a staple. She was anxious, but not just about the peanuts. I detected the early fear that comes from meeting someone great, someone different from all those who have come before, and feeling afraid he might not return the affection. That was not a concern I’d seen in her previously. “Of course he likes you,” I’d say. “How could he not?”

  Soon it became clear that her worries were foundless, and anxiety gave way to planning. For med school, they applied to and got into Dartm
outh together. They moved into a big, drafty house near campus that had more rooms than furniture, but their minds were on far more important matters than interior design or even heat, and both of them were happy that way, tossing another quilt on the bed, focusing on the future. After med school would come residencies; that they would be married at some point between those two stages became a foregone conclusion.

  The invitation came. The wedding would take place at a quaint old inn in Vermont the summer after they graduated, the ceremony to be held outside in the afternoon sun, the reception under a tent just steps away. Wedge sandals were suggested, as heels would puncture the thin skin of the lawn and push through the soil. As a bridesmaid, along with Caitlin and Emily’s younger sister, Rachel, I would don a reasonably priced pale blue dress with a seersucker pattern from J.Crew that seemed ripe for rewearing. I was twenty-eight, and, for the first time in my wedding-going career, I had a date, an actual boyfriend to be my plus-one. This would be our first—of, if all went well, many—together.

  He and I had met in Pleasantville, New York, at Reader’s Digest, where we’d both been hired to work on a test magazine for an online auction site. Like many such endeavors, the project never really got off the ground. After a few months of work, for which we first commuted from Manhattan to Westchester by train and later hitched rides with a semi-narcoleptic colleague who had borrowed a purple Dodge Neon dubbed “the Grape Ape” from a friend, the whole idea was killed. At least we’d been paid, which was more than some of our friends, toiling in other publishing pursuits, could say. But the most important thing that came out of that job was meeting Jason.

  At first, I didn’t think much about him. He was tall and very thin, with pale blond hair that he kept closely shaved, all the better as I still harbored a vague grudge against blond men on account of my mother’s first husband. He had vivid blue eyes, which he considered his best feature, and usually wore periwinkle shirts and sweaters to highlight them. He was from the Midwest and had just moved to New York, to an apartment in the East Village, after completing a graduate program in journalism. Smart and industrious, he was, like many a twentysomething transplant to the city, eager to launch a successful professional career for himself.

  I had been freelancing for Reader’s Digest prior to this assignment, on projects that required taking the company’s previously published book content and refurbishing it into magazine form. It was by no means scintillating work, but I’d just moved back from Boston and was happy to have a job related to words, even if it did involve a weird backward Metro-North commute, and a lot of cutting and pasting text about, say, vitamins. Quickly, I learned how things worked in that strange, cavernous place, which looked more like a college campus than the office of a global publishing company and often felt eerily vacant. Once the team was amassed for the test magazine, I’d see Jason on my train, and sometimes we’d sit together and talk, or not talk and just listen to our respective music. One day someone took Jason’s spot in the long row next to me, and as he waved and walked past in search of an open seat, I acknowledged I was just a little bit disappointed. I decided I’d do my best to get to know him better, this quiet, funny guy who shared my interests in stories and writing and producing good content. He had at least one vice that I knew of: He was an unabashed smoker, which helped boost his cred from “your average nice guy” into “ever so slightly bad,” and that was appealing, too.

  I don’t think he even thought about liking me, though, until the project was over. One night I invited him to come along with a group of my friends to a bar in the East Village. It was near his apartment, so he couldn’t say no. The hours passed and the evening turned into just the two of us. It became too late for me to go home, or so I said (a total lie: It’s never too late to go home in New York City), and he offered his couch. Sleeping in his apartment that night felt right, even if I was on the couch. The next day, realizing I’d forgotten something, I went back, and that’s when we finally kissed. “Was this supposed to happen last night?” he asked. Finally, he was catching on.

  By the time we went to Emily’s wedding we were an established couple. We’d told each other “I love you” and meant it. That said, we still lacked a certain confidence in our collaborative decision-making skills. We’d attempt to go out to eat, and no restaurant would be good enough. We lived in New York City, land of one million options, but I think both of us were deeply afraid of deciding on something the other didn’t like. The burden of that—the possibility of making the wrong choice and then having to deal with the repercussions—was paralyzing, so we’d stay in and eat grilled cheese instead. He was, it must be said, very good at making grilled cheese. For a while that seemed perfectly fine, even desirable: a guy who would cook the most delicious grilled cheese sandwiches, and the feeling of comfort and safety and togetherness that brought.

  We both knew that a cozy relationship confined to the walls of an apartment was not enough, though, cheese or no cheese. What did it mean if we seemed, when out in the world, so glaringly incompatible? A couple should be able to adapt in different situations and, I thought, have fun doing so. Yet we disagreed on such basics as what we even considered fun. He preferred to stay in and enjoy the creature comforts of home; when socializing, he tended to keep to a small group of friends. I liked to dress up and throw myself into the city, to go out and let whatever would transpire do so—the more, the merrier. But opposites attract! Or not. We’d find out. This wedding meant, possibly perilously, that we were taking our show on the road.

  • • •

  We headed to our room, complete with its gift basket of Vermont-inspired items, homemade jam and honey and (peanut-free) granola bars. Across the hall from us were Caitlin and Cash, no longer newlyweds but full-fledged happily marrieds, who, I feared, put us to shame with their vibrant show of love. We were quieter and less overt about how we felt about each other. Did we love each other less than they did? This wasn’t a competition, I kept reminding myself. Jason was someone I could trust, my best friend, the person I turned to if things were good or if they were bad. He was my ally. Relationships were work, that’s what everyone said. Annoyingly, what no one explained was how much work was the right amount.

  We unpacked, hanging things that needed to unwrinkle, and then went downstairs to sit on the pretty white porch and look out onto the lush grass and talk with our friends, who, of course, were really my friends, not his. But they welcomed him, and he made an effort in return.

  “Oh, so, you guys,” said Emily. “The big thing is, we’re going to have pie at the wedding, instead of cake.”

  “Pie?” asked Caitlin. “Really? Why pie?”

  “I love pie! The wedding planner did not understand at all, but she got on board, eventually. Pecan and strawberry rhubarb. Doesn’t that seem more Vermont?” Emily looked at us expectantly. Who here was an unimaginative cake person, and who appreciated the beauty and simplicity of pie?

  “Pie is better,” I agreed, and Jason nodded.

  “We love pie,” he said, putting his arm around me. It was the most coupled I felt that day, and it felt good.

  • • •

  Emily had a wedding planner. Caitlin had used one, too. Neither of theirs had been high-strung, reality-TV types, bustling around with clipboards and cell phones, yelling about bling and making bouquets pop, though. Instead they were unassuming women who stood at the edge of things, or completely hidden from view, and directed the setup of tents and chairs, told the bridesmaids to walk when it was time to walk, and subtly tried to ensure that things would run on time. The wedding planner was supposed to make things easy, so Emily could focus on her friends and family and not on the nitty-gritty details of the wedding itself. Emily didn’t care much about the nitty-gritty, anyway. She wanted the day to be enjoyable for everyone, but she and Mark were both too pragmatic and easygoing to devote much time to worrying about the color of the napkins or whether there was a salad fork in the pr
oper place at each table setting. Their casualness worked out well for us bridesmaids. I had only to wear the dress (which I would, in fact, wear again), to walk down the aisle with the bouquet in my hands, and to have the requisite number of photos taken as part of the bridal party. Oh, and to smile. Easy as pie.

  The first night we stayed up and had drinks together in the lounge downstairs at the inn. Many of Emily’s friends from high school were there, dates in tow. Emily had something to say about each of them, whispering in my ear, “He’s sweet, but not very intellectual . . . She’s always bossing him around, but he likes it, that’s the way they work . . . She thinks he’ll propose within the year . . . They’re trying for kid number one already . . . Has it really been three years since we were in the Dominican for Caitlin’s wedding? They seem like they’re doing great!” and so on. Part of me wondered what she’d say about me and Jason. The other part didn’t want to know what that same lens cast upon everyone else’s relationships might reveal if turned upon mine. He and I hadn’t slept together in a while—perhaps another symptom of our overall lack of confidence—and I doubted this would change in our hotel room in Vermont, the thin walls such that we could hear conversations in the next room.

  I was right. When we went to bed he fell asleep quickly, and I stayed up, listening to Caitlin and Cash laugh across the hall, wondering if there was something wrong with us, something that couldn’t be made right. My greatest fear was that our relationship was a charade, the two of us attempting to go through the motions of what was expected, but not really knowing how, or whether we even should. I wanted to be happy. I wanted to be in love. Yet at this wedding what I found myself feeling most of all was confused, hopping back and forth between joy and sadness, excitement and worry, optimism and defeat. I was more settled than I had ever been, and yet I was anything but that. Maybe this was just how weddings were, especially when you brought a date along, I thought. Everything felt larger than life, but there were real-life questions that still needed answers.