by Jen Doll
I had never been to a David’s Bridal. I think Marjorie was the only one who had, and she was the only one who was properly prepared. It’s a vast behemoth, with storefronts all over the country. This one was situated somewhere on the edge of town, far enough away from the city proper to lend it the geographical span required to house the hundreds or thousands of dresses it contained. Inside, among the rows and rows of endless white, mostly white, but also hunter green and taxicab yellow, rosy pink and royal purple, and blue—so many blues—and red and puce and even mahogany fabric, underneath dizzying fluorescent lighting, were sample dresses that could be tried and fitted and purchased. They were in similar fashions but different colors, or similar colors but different fashions, and somewhere in this massive array of hanging clothing you might find the one you had dreamed of, if you looked hard enough and long enough, if you put your mind to it and really, really tried.
Weaving through the racks of material were women who seemed as if they might be twins, triplets, quintuplets, or possibly clones. They were small of stature, with pins in their pincerlike, lipsticked mouths and their reddish-brownish-blondish hair cut short for practical reasons. These were the wedding-dress matrons who, I had heard tell, would usher an unwitting girl into the giant dressing room at the back of the store and, within seconds, have her pinned up, tucked in, and matched with this gown or that one. They’d prop her on a platform facing a semicircle of full-length mirrors so she could see the front, back, and sides of her look, and they’d coo and sigh and, most of all, sell the dress. Then they’d start with the add-ons: a veil, the proper underwear and panty hose, the bridesmaids’ dresses, the garter, a wedding purse (Why? Why not?) and on and on and on. You could spend your life buying things for your wedding, buying more and more things with money that would never see the satin-lined insides of your wedding purse. These women were pros. They took no prisoners.
One such lady saw us as we entered the store, the four of us girls, dazed and clearly out of our element. The lights were blinding; the air felt thin. All the white, shiny dresses in the room loomed before us like ghosts of brides past. “Hi,” she said brightly. “Can I help you?”
We’d planned ahead that we would avoid revealing the whole truth about Marjorie’s dress, since technically it was supposed to go to another store, and we didn’t have time to be told no. Marjorie started. “I brought my wedding dress in,” she said. “They were supposed to steam it, but it’s a wreck.”
“I’ll take a look at that,” said the woman, pursing her lips to keep nonexistent pins steady. She glanced at the tag attached to the plastic wrap on the dress. “This is strange. Did you buy this here?”
Marjorie frowned, knitting her eyebrows. I knew she didn’t want to lie. I took this as my moment to be a real maid of honor. I’d fight her battles for her so the bride could stay cool, calm, collected, and honest—bridelike—to the last. “It’s from David’s Bridal,” I said, which was itself true. “You should have it resteamed for free. It’s only right.” Around me, Kate and Violet pretended to shop. They wanted none of this. Marjorie smiled sweetly, and the woman started punching things into the computer in front of her. I tried to look vaguely threatening, like I was From New York and Got Things Done. “I’m sorry,” said the clerk. “I can’t find you listed in our store database.”
“We’re also here to find three bridesmaids’ dresses, and a veil, too,” I said, playing our only trump card.
“Oh?” She perked up a little.
“Yes. But, tell me, why should we continue to shop here if you can’t fix the problem that your establishment caused in the first place?” Ooh, I had this. I had this. Below the counter, Marjorie squeezed my hand.
“Hold on for a moment, please.” The woman disappeared into a small room adjacent to the checkout counter. The minutes ticked by. I hoped I hadn’t pushed too far. If she came back and said tough luck or, worse, booted us from the store, we’d be up a creek without a wedding dress. She returned, a satisfied smile on her face. “We’re happy to steam the dress again for you as a complimentary service,” she said. “Now, what else can I help you with?”
Ha, I thought. I was the best maid of honor ever. I turned to look back at Violet and Kate, who’d discovered what might be described as the “neon princess” aisle. They were alternating between holding gowns up to themselves and doubling over in laughter.
Marjorie, in her efforts to be a laid-back, relaxed bride, had told us we could wear whatever we wanted as her attendants, but we didn’t think that would look right. As much as bridesmaids complain about hideous dictated dresses that can never be worn again, or gowns that give the initial impression of comfort only to become chambers of torture at the actual event, in this case our matching wedding attire was completely our own doing. We had wanted uniformity. We’d wanted, I think, to be bridesmaids, and to be seen as such. We strolled through the aisles and aisles of racks, searching, and we found our gowns: chocolate-brown satin strapless concoctions with little rhinestone belts and tea-length skirts that would match Marjorie’s. They were understated and inexpensive and, to our amazement, quite comfy. (They would, in fact, later morph into chambers of fashion torture, but not until several hours in on Marjorie’s wedding day.) After we’d had the dresses fitted, we selected an array of undergarments, a pretty, simple veil for the bride, and a satin wrap she could don if it got chilly. No wedding purse, but still, the saleslady had gotten the last laugh.
We checked out with about an hour left until the three of us had to get to the airport to fly back to New York. We were in a nondescript shopping center, the natural environment for a nondescript, mammoth bridal store, and right outside there was a nondescript chain restaurant. “It’s no Per Se or anything,” said Violet, ironically, as our budgets were quite clearly far more beer than they were Champagne. “But I suppose it’ll do.”
We filed into a booth, ordered icy Diet Cokes all around, and were just about to place our orders for four different highly photogenic chicken salads when Kate leaned over the table. “Do I have red marks on my neck?” she asked, scratching.
We inspected. Red was the least of it. She had large welts running from the bottom of her chin down into the V-neck of her T-shirt. “Um,” I said.
“Yeah,” managed Violet. Marjorie started digging around in her purse for some Benadryl.
“Holy shit!” Kate yelled, peering into her shirt. We sat looking at one another in shock as she rushed to the bathroom for a closer analysis of her skin condition. Was this what weddings could do to a person?
Minutes later she returned with a rueful expression and announced matter-of-factly that she had broken out in hives to her waist. “I need a real drink, I think,” she said, and we agreed a round was in order. It all became funny.
“I think Kate is allergic to David’s Bridal,” Violet quipped.
“You’re like the princess and the pea of weddings,” I added.
“Yeah, I’m so high-end,” Kate agreed, reaching toward her neck for a momentarily satisfying scratch.
Marjorie grabbed her hand. “Don’t touch it,” she said, the same way I could imagine her instructing her inevitable children when they were struck with inevitable chicken pox. Kate acquiesced and sighed, sipping her beer.
Back in New York she saw a dermatologist who confirmed she had a form of dermatitis that may have been brought about by the stress of wedding-dress shopping, or a sensitivity to certain fabrics at the store. It might have been a combination of both; it could have been something else entirely. She was prescribed steroids and an anti-itch cream, and the rash eventually went away. Whatever its cause, which we’d never know for sure, when Kate walked down the aisle at her own wedding several years later, she was not wearing a dress from David’s Bridal.
• • •
Some weeks later we were flying back to Nashville, and this time Jason was with me. As he slept, I ran through what I planned to say
at the rehearsal dinner and thought again about how best to fulfill my role as maid of honor. I had an anticipatory fluttering in my stomach. I’d tried on my bridesmaid dress the night before, and it fit perfectly. I couldn’t wait to see my best friend again, and to be with her for this moment. I thought back to us in high school, our crushes on boys, our confessions, our dreams. I also thought about what this wedding meant for Jason and me. For years I’d been asking my mom to get my grandmother’s ring—the one she’d designed herself and had a jeweler make using the diamond Hamilton Booth had given her before he died—out of the security vault at the bank. She had finally said she’d give it to me on my thirtieth birthday, which was now just a few months away. I’d imagined it being my own engagement ring. But I was no longer so sure that Jason and I would still be together for that date. We’d been a couple long enough that I should know if he was the one, I reasoned. If I still didn’t know for sure, I worried that could only mean he wasn’t.
We got in the Thursday night before the wedding. We’d have most of Friday to ourselves before the rehearsal dinner, for which we’d be bused to a nearby country club. Saturday would be filled with wedding preparation, from early morning (hair-call time was nine thirty a.m.) to midday (for wedding party photos and church arrival), and then the wedding itself in the early afternoon. Jason would be mostly on his own until I could reconnect with him at the reception, after my most consuming maid-of-honor duties were done.
After we checked in, we headed to the hotel restaurant for dinner, and I texted Marjorie that we’d arrived. “Let’s meet at the hotel bar in an hour?” she suggested.
“Yes!” I wrote. I couldn’t wait to see her and hoped Jason might feel the same way, but when I told him the plan, he said he didn’t feel well. Disappointed, I went to meet her alone.
There she was at the bar, a glass of wine in hand. I suppressed my squeal of pleasure at the sight of her, and we hugged. “I have a present for you,” I said, handing her my gift, a large white bowl with a tiny bride and groom etched into the bottom atop the word Happily. When I’d purchased it, I’d imagined her using the bowl through old age, remembering her wedding day as the years passed by.
After she oohed and aahed, the inevitable question arose. “Where’s Jason?” she asked.
“He’s sick,” I explained, and she made worried noises, hoping it was nothing serious and that he’d recover quickly. I nodded, but I didn’t understand it myself. He’d only met Marjorie once before, when she visited New York early on in my relationship with him. Couldn’t he have made the effort for a brief hello in the hotel bar, a chance to again see this best friend of mine, the bride to whom I was maid of honor, before the wedding pitched into high gear? As she and I talked excitedly about what the weekend would bring, the lack of his presence hovered in the background.
“Are you feeling better?” I asked him when I got back to the room.
He was busy working at his computer. “Yeah, it was just a stomachache,” he said. Well, he’d always been shy and less socially inclined than I was. I’d give him space and let him get his wedding legs, I decided. Everyone reacted to these situations differently, after all. Maybe he really had felt sick.
The next morning, we woke, had coffee, and planned out our day. We’d walk around town, find a place for lunch, and see some of Nashville before returning to get ready for the rehearsal dinner. It was sunny and warm enough in November that we didn’t need more than light jackets. But even our relaxed plan to venture out and see things failed. That old indecision and incompatibility, which, to tell the truth, we’d never really combatted, rose up again in this new town. We couldn’t find a place to eat that we agreed on, and when we did, we found that it was closed. We tried again, and finally settled on a hole-in-the-wall spot near Vanderbilt’s campus. We ate bad pizza in silence, and at the end of lunch, Jason told me he had work to do. We returned to the hotel, he headed to our room, and I went to check on Marjorie. “How’s he feeling?” she asked me.
“I’m not sure,” I said. “He’s under a lot of work stress. I think he’s a little bit out of his element. I guess it’s hard to be here with so many strangers.”
“But he hasn’t been around any yet,” she said. I couldn’t deny that.
It got worse. At the rehearsal dinner, surrounded by Marjorie’s family and all of our friends, I gave a speech about how much my longest-sustaining friend meant to me, and how happy I was to see her with someone who was such a great match for her, who loved her so much, who wanted the same things she did. Marjorie cried, and Violet and Kate and I cried, too, and then we hugged in a big, warm friend circle and toasted with Jack Daniel’s shots, which Marjorie’s dad and brother delivered to us from the bar. I looked around for Jason and found him staring off into space.
Throughout dinner he continued to be distant, unapproachable, and largely silent. At one point he was offered a shot but said no, opting instead to hover in a corner and check his phone. I felt myself getting angrier. This was not just a bad mood, a stomachache, or work stress. He wasn’t even trying. Marjorie’s dad asked a group of us if we wanted to step outside for a cigarette, and though I didn’t smoke, I went and puffed on one anyway. I’d had a lot to drink by that point, and I was somewhere between thrilled for my friend and very, very pissed at my boyfriend. I confided in Marjorie’s dad, “I don’t know what’s wrong with him. I don’t know why he can’t just have a good time. What should I do?”
“Dump him,” he told me, taking a drag of his cigarette. “There’s plenty of fish in the sea. This is not the guy for you.”
Well, I’d asked.
I wonder how many weddings take place because people have gone far enough into those relationships that it’s simply too terrifying to turn back. I wonder how many of those marriages end in divorce, and how many go on to be actually pretty great. There are so many factors going into the decision to marry. Each of us can only know what we feel, and what we want to feel, and try to figure out if what we have and what we want can be compatible. Sometimes just knowing what we feel is hard enough! Trying in the course of a relationship is honorable, but there are times when the best thing a person can do is to stop trying.
At this rehearsal dinner, something in me woke up. I knew I could be happier if Jason were different, but I didn’t think Jason could be different. He was only being himself. He would be happier if he wasn’t here, I realized, and I also knew in an instant that I would be happier at this wedding by myself than I was with him. It dawned on me that this was not just true about us at this wedding. It might be time to let each other go.
“I’m going to break up with him,” I told Marjorie’s dad. “I just have to figure out when.”
“Good for you,” he said. “’Atta girl.”
I put my head on his shoulder, he patted it, and we drank our Jack Daniel’s.
• • •
As the guests boarded the bus to head back to the hotel, I stumbled on the stairs in my high heels but managed to keep myself from falling outright. There in the bus seat was Jason. He looked miserable. I sat down with a thud next to him. He said nothing, I said nothing. The trip back to the hotel was just the two of us sitting next to each other, waiting for the other to apologize first. Neither of us thought we’d done anything wrong. In some way of looking at it, neither of us had. We were at a standstill. When we got back to the hotel room, I threw myself on the bed without changing and fell asleep.
At some point in the early morning, I woke up and realized two things. First, he’d put the hotel wastebasket next to my side of the bed in fear I’d have to vomit in the middle of the night (I hadn’t). That was his way of showing he cared as much as it was an admonishment, and it was both sweet and bitter because of that. Second, I remembered in a flash: Kate, Violet, and I had said we’d go to Marjorie’s room to hang out as single girls—one last night!—following her rehearsal dinner. And instead of putting on my PJs and heading t
o her suite, I’d passed out. In one evening, I’d gone from being the best maid of honor ever to the most disliked girlfriend at the wedding to the terrible friend who left the bride alone on the night before she stepped into her newly married life. Feeling disgusted with myself and simultaneously too drunk to deal with any of it, I went back to sleep.
At nine a.m. my alarm buzzed, and my brain did the same in my skull. Oh, man. I was hungover. Hair and makeup was happening in thirty minutes. I managed to dislodge myself from bed and get in the shower, which helped a little. I left Jason still sleeping. “I have to go get ready,” I whispered.
“Okay,” he said from underneath a heap of blankets, and rolled over. In a way I was grateful I had a reason to get out of there.
Downstairs, Kate and Violet were waiting for Marjorie. “Did you go to her room last night?” asked Violet.
“No,” I admitted. “I passed out on my bed with all my clothes on. I feel so bad.”
“Me, too,” said Kate.
“Me three,” added Violet. “We’re the worst.”
“I’m unbelievably hungover,” Kate said, and we nodded gingerly. Everything, inside and out, felt bruised. “Oh, there she is.”
Marjorie was headed our way. I couldn’t tell from the expression on her face if she was angry.