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

by Jen Doll

  Many drinks and dances later, I found my way back to Ginny and her husband. Not surprisingly, he and I wound up in a conversation that did not go well. Out of a combination of, I think, self-protection and drunkenness, what exactly was said has been locked in the far reaches of my memory and cannot be withdrawn. I do know that it was bad, with remnants of LA and what had happened before, all that unfinished business, surfacing yet again. Maybe I was trying to explain, but more likely, I wanted to hurt him for how I felt he’d hurt my friendship with Ginny. In this too-soused wedding moment, I tried to strike back, and I failed utterly, coming across as even more unreasonable than before. Harrison came to my aid as things got heated and pulled me away. On the way to the bar designated for the after-party, I tried to explain the past years of that friendship. He listened and nodded. Morose at our destination, I had another drink, and I decided I needed to leave. This wedding had gone to a dark place for me. It was best to get home, and, in fact, I thought I might be sick.

  We emerged from the bar, and Ginny and her husband were sitting outside. “Well, no surprise, Jen’s drunk off her ass again,” he announced loudly, and though it was absolutely true, I cursed him out with all the power I could summon on my precariously heeled legs. Harrison dragged me away again and brought me back to the hotel, where I cried and cried and vomited in the bathroom. He consoled me, holding my hair back from the toilet, nurturing and kind.

  I passed out on the hotel bed, and later, Nora and Mattie came back and took an array of lurid photos of me. Semi-awake in them, I look beyond drunk, my dress wrinkled and twisted around my body, my retro-chic jacket long discarded as this new version of me, a gross replica of an American Apparel ad that would never be approved to run on billboards, emerged. I’m holding a belt, which I lashed at them because—at the very bottom of it all, one true, id-like emotion—I didn’t want my photo taken. They thought these pictures were hilarious. I was embarrassed I’d lost control again despite my promises to myself that I’d be different. And I was mortified that there was photographic proof. All that stung far more than being called maternal.

  The next day, after a shower and food had helped me pull myself together, I sat on the deck of the hotel’s rooftop pool with Alice, who was now officially a married woman. It was too cold to swim, but warm enough for the sun to feel good on our skin. I was flying back to New York in a few hours.

  “What happened with you and Ginny last night?” she asked.

  “I don’t know.” I really couldn’t explain, not in a way that made reasonable sense to either of us. “I messed up again. I tried to talk to her. I got drunk and ended up cursing out her husband.”

  “Oh, Jen. That’s not good. You need to let it go,” she said.

  “I know. I wish I’d done that already. This only makes it worse.”

  “Yeah,” Alice said.

  I knew all this, and I’d known it, and yet the night before, I hadn’t been able to help myself. I guess a part of me was still furious about having lost my friend, and angry at the man I believed had caused the rift. I didn’t know where to put all that emotion. When they ignored me (the better choice, really), I got drunk and lost it. All this had affected not only my relationship with Ginny, but also, it was starting to wear on my relationships with our common friends. They hadn’t given up on me, but I was testing the boundaries of what they could deal with. And it felt awful for me, too. I imagined it felt just as bad for Ginny, maybe even worse. This had to stop, for real.

  “She chose him, you know,” said Alice gently. “They’re married. That’s what it is. They’re the family now.”

  “I know,” I said. “It’s just hard.”

  “It is hard.”

  None of us, married or single or engaged or boyfriended or otherwise, with kids or without, were sure we had the right answers. We were only trying to do the right thing based on what we knew, what we thought we wanted, what we hoped we wanted to be.

  “Did you find out anything more about the missing cash and cake?” I asked her.

  “No,” she said. “Oh, well. I guess whoever took that stuff needs it more than we do.” She sighed. “Wait, what happened with Harrison last night? He likes you.”

  “Oh, God.” I couldn’t understand why anyone would have liked me in that state, or even this one. “He took me back to the hotel room and held my hair during my puke-cryfest. I need to e-mail him thank you. I should send him a gift. A check, or one of those fruit baskets, or something.”

  “Oh, Harrison,” she said. “I’m sure he didn’t mind.”

  • • •

  A year or so after the wedding, I was at a church in Brooklyn for the christening of Alice and Xavier’s first child. There I ran into Ginny and her husband. She had their first baby with her, a little boy, sleeping in a baby carriage. The tension between us had faded. She had far more important things to deal with than me—her family, which, I’d finally realized, had always been the most important thing to her. And I had moved on, too. While we weren’t friends, we didn’t have to be enemies, either. Things, I think, I hope, had been forgiven on both sides, and we had both forged ahead to find the lives we’d wanted.

  “He’s so adorable,” I said, touching the chubby, impossibly soft-skinned hand of her son.

  “Thank you,” she said. “He’s our little angel. He’s my love.”

  Together, we watched him sleep.

  • • •

  Years later still, I sat with Alice at her house in the Pacific Northwest, where she had moved with her husband and child. They had another baby, a girl, on the way. The topic of children came up, along with the topic of my birthday. I was turning thirty-seven, and while I knew that I still didn’t know, wasn’t completely sure, what I felt about having children, she thought she did: “You don’t even want kids,” she said. “You’re focused on your career.”

  “I don’t?” I asked. “I might. I don’t want to say for sure I don’t.”

  “Well, do you?” she asked. “You don’t have to want kids. Having kids is a pain in the butt, you know. It changes everything.”

  “I was asking Heather if she had any tips for having a happy marriage, and she told me, ‘Don’t have kids, kids make everything harder,’” I said.

  “Ha! And she’s pregnant with her second child now, too.”

  “Right, so obviously they’re worth it for her, and for you . . .”

  “It’s never the fairy tale,” she said. “But, yeah.” She paused. “Anyway, if you do want kids, you should probably get going on that. We’re not twenty-five anymore.”

  “Thank goodness,” I said. I knew that while I wasn’t ready to get going on that, having children wasn’t something I was ready to give up on, either. Sometimes things just didn’t happen the traditional way, and that was fine, too.

  “Oh, you know who just got married?” she asked.

  “Who?”

  “Harrison!”

  “I saw that on Facebook,” I said. “Good for him.”

  “They’ll have the most gorgeous kids.”

  “They will,” I agreed.

  13.

  Never Settle for Less

  I was on the Garden State Parkway with a man I’d met less than a handful of times before. We were not dating, but we were both the bride’s friends, and he’d agreed to give me a ride to Cape May, New Jersey, where the ceremony would take place and where a pre-wedding welcome party was happening within the hour. But the car had gotten a flat tire, and we were stranded on the side of the highway, inhaling tar and dirt and diesel fumes. The man, whose name was Ted, was on the phone with AAA. I was trying to remember whether you were supposed to stay in the car or not when you were broken down on the side of a highway. I was pretty sure one thing was dangerously wrong and the other was right, but I couldn’t remember which.

  When Elizabeth, who was getting married, had suggested I ask Ted
for a ride, I’d considered it the ideal solution to my dilemma. I hadn’t figured out how I’d get to her wedding otherwise. I didn’t, as it turned out, know too many people who had been invited. I could rent a car and attempt to make the drive myself, but that seemed dicey considering I hadn’t driven in years. Luckily, Ted had said he’d take me, no problem, I’d only have to get myself to Newark, where he was working at the time. Well, public transportation went to Newark, so that was easy enough. But now here we were. I couldn’t help thinking that if I’d come to the wedding with a date, I might not be in this predicament. I shook that idea off as silly, though, and entirely regressive. I didn’t need anybody. I only needed to relearn how to drive.

  My driver and I looked at each other, and he tried to smile. “A guy with a tow should be here soon,” he said.

  “Hey, at least we’ll have a story to tell everyone at the party,” I offered, attempting to soothe him.

  “Yeah,” he said, not looking much happier. “At least we’ll have that.”

  • • •

  Elizabeth and I had met the summer of our junior year of college, when we both interned at a publishing company in Manhattan. Though we went to separate universities, we had stayed in touch, and as I plotted my return to the city from Boston in 2002, her sister was making her departure from New York and the apartment they shared in Hell’s Kitchen. Elizabeth e-mailed and asked if I knew anyone who’d take her sister’s spot. I answered, “Me!” An apartment at the ready, with a friend and without a broker fee? It seemed too good to be true, but there it was.

  We lived together for two years in that apartment, and then came another too-good-to-be-true real estate situation: a two-bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side that Elizabeth’s coworker and his wife were vacating. It was a duplex, with one bedroom on each floor, and each bedroom had—wait for it—its own bathroom with shower. Despite the pain of moving, we agreed we could not pass it up. Sure, one of the bedrooms was technically in the cold, dark basement, and you could hear the elevator swinging into action with a ker-thunk whenever it was called from above, but so what? A two-bedroom, two-bath apartment for $2,000 a month in New York City was akin to finding a unicorn in Central Park, or a sweet, upstanding young man at a bar in the East Village. The cherry on top of the real estate sundae was that this apartment had a patio. A giant patio, for barbecues, for parties, for sunning ourselves, for a garden! Most of those dreams were crushed when we realized that the patio, surrounded as it was by the column of buildings around it, got almost no natural light. Fine. It was still a place to have parties. Even if someone in one of the apartments above us shouted rude things out the windows and threw down pornography whenever we went outside, we had that most coveted of New York City things: outdoor space.

  Life on the Upper West Side was grand. We had plenty of room to spread out and live our own lives, with or without boyfriends, or men we were considering for the role. In Hell’s Kitchen, we had shared a wall between bedrooms; on the Upper West Side, we had our own wings of the house and couldn’t even hear each other leave for work in the morning. I was still dating Jason when we made this move, and I figured it might help improve our relationship—there was more privacy, and he loved to grill outdoors. Even though I was technically farther away from his East Village apartment, I was on an express train line where it was far more civilized to debark than, say, Times Square or, worse, Port Authority.

  It seemed for a long time that if Elizabeth had a boyfriend, I would not, and vice versa. Before I’d met Jason she’d had a serious, several-years-long relationship with a slightly older man she thought she’d probably marry. They’d even gone so far as to discuss “the chip,” his family’s name for the heirloom diamond in the family. Then they broke up, and while she dated other guys, she was still hung up on “Chip,” conflicted about why and how and what had gone wrong, exactly—was it somehow her fault? Should she have done something differently?

  Jason and I ended things, and Elizabeth and I swapped relationship places again. She met a new guy, who was British and of Indian descent, while on a trip to New Orleans with her sister. She liked him and he liked her, and they had kissed and promised to stay in touch, but when she got back to New York she didn’t announce, “He’s the one” or “I’ve met my husband” or “I might have a new boyfriend.” After all, he lived in London. She counted all of his potential flaws on her fingers as she told me about him. “He’s nothing I’m looking for in a guy,” she said. “Long distance. Not my religion. Not even American. A vegetarian.”

  “None of that might be so bad, though,” I said. “You’ve dated plenty of guys who fit what you were ‘looking for,’ and it’s not like they’ve been so great. Remember the one who pronounced calamari ‘calamars’?”

  “True,” she said. “That guy was the worst! Anyway, he said he’d call. We’ll see.”

  Of course he called. When they’re bad on paper, they always call. But this guy, Lagan, was really only bad on paper if you looked at the paper in a certain way, squinting and with no imagination at all. He was a consultant, and after they’d been talking a while, each conversation burrowing further into the hours of the night, they started making plans for him to visit. That first trip a success, another followed, and another. He was able to transfer to a project in New York for a few months to allow their relationship to unfold in a more geographically friendly fashion. She’d told him if all went well, after that, she’d try out London for a while. Eventually the day arrived on which she flew across the ocean, all her worldly possessions packed in two suitcases, wearing the extra clothes she couldn’t fit in those bags on her own body. “I hope you don’t get stopped in customs,” I’d said, laughing as she topped her head with a stocking cap to venture out into the eighty-degree summer day.

  Well, it worked, right? This is a book about weddings. Earlier in this chapter, we left me waiting on the side of the road on my way to hers. So, yes, it happened. Time passed. He asked. She said yes.

  They were still living in London at the time, and it was decided that they would be one of those modern-international-religiously-and-ethnically-intermixed-sophisticated couples who have two weddings to accommodate the family needs of each. One would be in the UK, in the summer, primarily attended by Lagan’s Indian relatives who mostly lived there. Before that, in the spring, there would be a wedding in Cape May, where Elizabeth’s family had summered since her grandmother was a child. Tickets to London in June left me sticker-shocked. I’d definitely go to New Jersey, though, I promised myself, and her. Not being able to afford to go to New Jersey wasn’t an option. It got close to the date, and I got the ride with Ted. And now, here we were. Side of the Garden State Parkway, on our way to a wedding. Still waiting.

  “You know what?” he said. “I think I have a spare in the trunk.”

  “Oh!” I said. “That seems promising. I think.”

  We headed to the back of the car and, yes, there it was, small and precious cargo. He pulled it out of the trunk, where he had a box of tools, too, and we stared at everything for a minute. “Um,” he began, and that’s when AAA arrived. Quick as a wink, the driver was clambering out of his truck, assessing damage, and installing the spare. “You shouldn’t go too far on this; it’s only temporary,” he advised. We nodded. It was a wedding. Any long-term plans beyond that, for us, at least, could be put on hold.

  With renewed cheer, we took off again, heading straight to the party without stopping to check in to our hotel. We didn’t want to miss everyone, and there they were, still eating and drinking and celebrating. We greeted them and told of our near-mishap. “You could have been stuck by the side of the road for days!” Elizabeth exclaimed in mock horror. She was tan and bridally radiant in a yellow silk dress she’d had made while on a trip to Vietnam with Lagan.

  “You are so beautiful!” I said, hugging her. “We should get drinks,” I told Ted. “Want a beer?” He nodded, and I went in search of the
cooler. It seemed the least I could do.

  We went our separate ways for the rest of the party and, in fact, for the entire wedding. This was partly because Elizabeth was introducing me to every single man in attendance one by one, as a bride often does, surreptitiously or obviously attempting to set up her single friends. “Lagan’s business school friends are cute,” she said. “And smart, too. Have you met Cody?”

  I hadn’t met Cody. He was blond, with curly hair, round, ruddy cheeks, and blue eyes, a quintessential all-American boy. He was standing next to a table laden with appetizers, his hand reaching toward a bowl that contained Elizabeth’s mom’s trademark pickled eggs. “Oh,” I said, turning to Elizabeth, that dish a reminder of another. “I brought you something!” It was her wedding present, a white, sculpted porcelain bowl embossed with a wavelike pattern. The secret was, I’d bought the bowl for myself, because I really liked it. When it arrived there was an extra bowl in the box, along with a note that explained that as thanks for my order I was getting a second, matching bowl for free. I had no idea what sort of profitable bowl business could exist with that model, but I didn’t care. Two bowls for the price of one! I wouldn’t look a wedding gift horse in the mouth.

  “A bowl!” She inspected it. “I love it.”

  “Nice bowl,” said Cody, observing our interchange.

  “Thanks,” I said. “You went to business school with Lagan?”

  “Why do you assume that?” he asked. “Because I could tell it’s a bowl?” Elizabeth had been waylaid by an aunt.

  “Yes,” I said. “You probably got a degree in Bowl Identification Processes. That’s big at Harvard, right?”

  “Huge,” he said. “Good old B.I.P. How do you know Elizabeth?”

  “We were roommates,” I said. “For the last few years. Until she moved in with you-know-who.” I jerked a thumb in the general direction of Lagan.