Always a Bridesmaid (for Hire)

by Jen Glantz

  I lean in as if we’re going to hug, but we don’t. I’m unsure how a person is supposed to greet another person who used to mean so much to her and now means the same amount as the guy with the hairnet behind the produce counter.

  Her hand flails wildly, as if she’s trying to get rid of a mosquito. So I do the same and wave back.

  “When did you move home? What are you doing now?” she asks as her eyes wander from my stained Converse all the way up to my split ends.

  “I just moved back,” I say. “I, well, I’m trying to be a—”

  “Well, I’m doing great,” she cuts in before I even have the chance to ask. She tells me she does social media for a nonprofit and got the job three months before she even strutted her full-priced Marc Jacobs wedges across the stage at graduation.

  I’m glad she cuts me off because, to be honest, I don’t have an inkling of what the heck I want to do with my life. I’m proficient in dissecting Shakespearean sonnets and writing headlines for breaking news about local house fires, which means I’m qualified for few real-world jobs and have to apply for a little bit of everything to find anything that’ll stick.

  “Jen,” Cheryl continues, sensing that I stopped paying attention forty-five seconds ago. “I just got my nails done because Josh is asking me to marry him.”

  “You have a job, an apartment, and a guy?” I say, genuinely awed, but mostly jealous. “Good for you.”

  Cheryl places her hand on my back, as if she’s about to tell me a secret filled with excitement and gossip, like we used to do when we were in the fifth grade. This time, though, she does it in a way that feels like a gesture of pity, as if she’s about to whisper into my ear, Honey, I’ll pray for you.

  “Well, I’m moving to New York City next month,” I say, delicately removing her hand and leaving it to land on an avocado. My mom, lingering in the background, hearing this breaking news for the very first time, nearly knocks over a display of on-sale cantaloupes. “I plan on doing something big and becoming something wonderful.”

  Competition shouldn’t be a part of friendship or a part of any relationship we once valued. But can you blame me with this one? She went from peeing in her pants to becoming a social media director. I went from nap time crybaby to unemployed and living with my parents at twenty-two. I had to say something.

  She giggles, flails her hand at me again, and says, “We should get together soon, or something.”

  “Yeah, or something,” I reply.

  Our shopping carts collide awkwardly before we untangle them and make our way toward different aisles—and different life paths. I know we’ll never get together, never catch up over a cappuccino, or stuff our faces with kale salad and reminisce about our past. We’ll just wait for the next time we bump into each other to compare how many ticks we’ve jumped in our grown-up time lines, never fulfilling the “forever” in our best-friend-forever promise.

  Later that night, I find myself back in my childhood room, which looks like some strange museum of mismatched souvenirs from all the eras of my life so far.

  It always boggles my mind how you can be inseparable from a person to the point where she knows all your disgustingly bad habits, intimate secrets, and darling dreams—and you, hers. And then one day, she walks by you like she would a stranger, as if you were never part of the blueprint of their life. As if you hadn’t spent thirty-two consecutive Saturday nights wrapped up in Limited Too fleece pajamas, watching All That and making masterpieces out of lanyards and promises out of an unpredictable future. As if you were never more than just a comma in her life sentence, a brief pause before she continued on without you.

  Places are like that too, I suppose. No matter how many Beanie Babies or board games or middle school love notes written in milky gel pen that we shove away in garbage bags, boxes, or the cavity beneath our mattress, what that place once meant to us will forever remain a major reason that we always find ourselves back at home again. A grounded memory that we can temporarily run away to until we’re ready, again, to move on, to move forward, to move away.

  I have to figure out a way to move to New York City or find a new grocery store so that I never run into Cheryl again, because I know that in this town, I will.

  My mom knocks on my door as I’m tossing a handful of Barbies into a box labeled, “Give Me Away Now, Please.”

  We hug tightly, and as my heart beats hard at the realization that this spur-of-the-moment promise to move to New York City could be the biggest disaster of my life yet, I whisper in her ear a simple, “What if?”

  But before I can carry on, before I can let my words unravel around my boundless fears and the questions buzzing through my brain, she pulls me in a little bit tighter and whispers back, “Jennifer Sara Glantz.”

  That’s how I know I’m about to be put in my place.

  “You can always come back home.”

  That’s how I know, once again, that everything will, eventually, somehow, be okay.

  interlude

  A Brief History of My Life after Graduation

  • I lived in my childhood room in Boca Raton, surrounded by Beanie Babies and Clay Aiken posters. I watched a lot of HGTV shows and Hallmark movies with my mom.

  • I worked as an assistant for six months at a local magazine for a woman who resembled Cruella de Vil. My unofficial job duties included picking up the poop of her two Chihuahuas, climbing ladders at her mansion to take down Halloween decorations, wrapping Christmas presents for her family, and doing her husband’s taxes.

  • I applied for nearly four hundred jobs during this time and did phone interviews in the bathroom or my car. My resume was pretty bare. At first glance, it looked like a haiku, a Shakespearean sonnet, or lyrics to a Jay Z song. The objective section contained a giant question mark.

  • My first boyfriend (ever—I was a late bloomer in the love department) broke up with me after four months, mid-job search, because he said I was too lost in my personal life to be found.

  • I gained twenty pounds after graduation and realized that, if I wanted to be happier, I had to be healthier. I went to daily boot camp classes, where I learned that burpies aren’t something you get after eating pasta with red sauce and having acid reflux. They’re much worse than that.

  • I finally got a job—in Manhattan!—at a two-person PR agency that represented nonprofits. I had zero PR experience, but I told them I’d be a fast learner if they’d be a fast payer.

  • I booked a one-way ticket to New York City and moved into a three-month sublet with only two thousand dollars in my savings account. I met my new roommate, Kerri, who would end up becoming my best friend/therapist.

  • My job turned out to be ruthless—and my new boss just as bad as my old one. I went on five job interviews a month, but since I still wasn’t sure what I wanted to do, I didn’t get a new job for another year and a half.

  • After eight failed attempts to start a blog, I launched The Things I Learned From. I wrote once a week about applying for jobs, getting funny rejection letters, dealing with heartbreak, and my quest to move to NYC.

  • I did a lot of karaoke.

  • I often found myself in Queens or the Bronx because I got on the wrong subway train or didn’t get off at the right stop.

  • I read a poem at Bowery Poetry Club.

  • I spent New Year’s Eve in Times Square, because nothing says “Welcome to New York” like watching a glittery ball drop when it’s seventeen degrees outside.

  • I ate a ton of pizza since it was all I could afford. (Two slices and a cherry Coke for $2.25. Can’t beat that.)

  • I joined an ultimate Frisbee team as my last attempt to meet guys in person without having to download a dating app. It didn’t work.

  • I was very, very single, but my friends were very, very not. Which leads me to the rest of my story . . .

  chapter three

  Will You Be My Bras-Maid?

  Ivanka eyes me from across the room and I reluctantly move t
oward her, doe-eyed and afraid.

  She leads with her chest, or maybe it’s her chest that leads her, but either way, she’s marching toward me, her lips a thin slash of tomato-red lipstick, her eyebrows merging into a single, untweezed bush. She’s dressed in all black, like a crypt keeper.

  Some people have this twinkle of a superpower, where all they have to do to make you fall goo-goo eyes in love with them is just to say hello. My first boyfriend was blessed with that innate charm. I had been double-fisting pizza on the boardwalk in Santa Monica when he approached me, gawked at the mozzarella cheese hanging from my nose, said the magic word, and ta-da! Tiny little cartoon hearts were popping out of my ears for him that very instant.

  Ivanka is the opposite. She skips the hello, the handshake, the “How are you doing today?” and looks me up and down as if her eyes are a TSA body scanner.

  “What size are your babushkas?” She’s draped in tape measures and staring pointedly at my chest.

  My right eyebrow reaches the summit of my forehead as I try to think back to the Russian words my grandparents used to toss around whenever they pinched my cheeks or rewarded me with crisp ten-dollar bills for my birthday.

  “Oh—you mean boobs! Well, this one is an A,” I say pointing to the right side of my chest like a proud mom introducing my child for the first time at a casual neighborhood picnic. “And this one is a—”

  Before I can finish my sentence, Ivanka is squeezing my avocados like she’s checking to see if they’re ripe enough to make a nice guacamole.

  “It would have been nice if you bought me dinner first,” I mumble into her eyebrow.

  “You’re a D,” she shouts, as if she’s announcing a special 10 percent off deal today at Victoria’s Secret. “Maybe even a double-D.”

  “Excuse me?” I say in utter disbelief. Did my lady lumps explode overnight?

  Maybe it was just a language barrier. Maybe she got her alphabet mixed up. When I was in first grade, I had trouble remembering the order of R, S, T, U, V, so I would mumble through that part when we had to sing the alphabet song out loud with the rest of the class. Maybe she temporarily got her Ds and Bs mixed up. Common mistake! I will forgive her.

  “You mean B, as in bazooka, bumblebee, bee’s knees?”

  She hands me a 34D strapless nude bra with a chicken-cutlet-like padding double-stitched inside each cup. I gawk at it. If I were to fall out of an airplane and land on my stomach, I would be just fine.

  The only thing worse than shopping for a new pair of hip-hugging jeans is shopping for a bra. Both garments require you to stuff your junk into tight, conforming contraptions that are cut to a specific body type that doesn’t quite resemble the jingle-jangles of your own bodacious body. Except I really do not mind wearing pants—that is, if you consider leggings pants. But I am completely fed up with bras. If you ask me, they’re a health hazard. Bras are an attention-grabbing, stage-five-clinging, suffocating relationship, and some days I really want out. And just like relationships, I always settle for the wrong bra—the ill-fitting one, the one that doesn’t give me the kind of support that I desperately need, the one that sticks around for the sole reason that it has nowhere else to go. Everyone around me knows it too. That’s the worst part. At work one day, someone anonymously left a business card on my desk for a place called Moshe’s Bra Factory on the Lower East Side. Attached to it was a handwritten note that read, Jen, it is time you let Moshe do a miracle for you. But I didn’t go, because just like with love, my coworker saw a harsh reality that I was too busy making excuses for, so I continued to wear sports bras underneath my business casual work attire.

  The wake-up call happened when I was a bridesmaid for the first time and discovered, the morning of the wedding, that I didn’t own a proper bra to hold up my baby girls in my strapless black chiffon dress.

  Nine months earlier, during my family’s Passover seder, I had just finished asking the four questions about why we have to spend seven days eating something that resembles a cardboard box when my cousin texted me to meet her in the pantry in five minutes because she had something very important to ask me. I thought to myself, Yes! She’s going to ask me if I want to sneak away and hit up Bob’s Bagel Store or smuggle in some Papa John’s pizza to slap this whole unleavened bread thing in the face. But as she took my hand and led me deeper and deeper into her parents’ walk-in pantry, past the Costco-sized boxes of Cheerios and Charmin, I knew this was much more than a plot to plan a late-evening carb fest.

  “Jen,” she said, her smile almost hitting her earlobes. “Will you be my bridesmaid?”

  I remember feeling light-headed. Maybe that was from the lack of carbs, but I threw my arms around her and screamed out, “Yes, of course!” We exited the pantry right as the rest of our family was reading about the nine plagues and dipping their pinky fingers into cups of red wine.

  I announced, on the spot, that I, Jennifer Sara Glantz, was going to be a bridesmaid. I felt as if I had just scored the supporting actress role in an Oscar-worthy movie. But just a few hours later, after I left my aunt and uncle’s house, I remember sitting in the backseat of my parents’ car, trying to wrap my head around what the heck I was supposed to do next.

  How to be a bridesmaid is really something they should teach you in school. Right before you finish your final exam for your last class of your senior year, your professor should collect your blue book, break your number two pencil in half, and wrap up your twenty years of education with this statement: “Just so you know, every single person you know is going to get engaged soon, and there’s a good chance you’ll be a bridesmaid. So learn how to make someone a bridal shower bow bouquet and be prepared to dance the hora beside someone’s ninety-two-year-old Great Uncle Joe.”

  Being asked to be someone’s bridesmaid for the first time felt to me like a rite of passage. Something that I could check off my bucket list of titles and honorifics I wanted to achieve in this lifetime, alongside CEO and pizza taste tester. Except I had no idea where to start, or if it was my job to start anything. I only knew what I had seen in movies like My Best Friend’s Wedding and The Wedding Singer, or what I witnessed at the one wedding I went to when I was a flower girl, for which all the bridesmaids wore gigantic taffeta dresses like they were in some terrible fashion show in Milan.

  “What do I need to do?” I asked my cousin, one week later.

  “It’s simple,” she said. She was always experiencing everything four years before me, and because of that, I held on tightly to every piece of advice she gave. “Just get the dress, walk down the aisle, and maybe catch the bouquet.”

  She picked out a fitted black chiffon dress, and since I ordered it three months too late (rookie bridesmaid move), it arrived on the morning of the actual wedding. So when I tried it on for the very first time, I realized I didn’t own the right bra. I owned bras with straps, racer backs, and even those suction cup things you place over your boobs to prevent you from taking on the world with a terrible case of nipple-itis. But no strapless bras.

  I pulled out a bandeau bathing suit top and tried to zip the dress up over it. This will work, I began convincing myself. Except when I moved, even just a little bit, the printed flowers from the floral bathing suit popped out, bursting free from a dress that was fourteen times more expensive. I couldn’t ruin my debut moment as a bridesmaid with a tropical paradise suddenly sprouting from my chest when I least expected it.

  That’s how I found myself doing the Argentine tango with Ivanka two hours before walking down the aisle.

  I rush out of the store, robbed of forty-five dollars and every remaining ounce of my dignity. Everything I thought I knew about my knockers was suddenly in question. But if there ever was a reason to be an unquestioning, jumbo-bra-wearing fool, it was that I never wanted to tiptoe into another Victoria’s Secret again and get pounded like a piece of veal by my brand-new gal pal, Ivanka.

  I try on my bridesmaid dress one last time, a dress rehearsal before the main event. My cell ph
one buzzes against the wood of my dresser, echoing my own panic.

  “How are the babushkas?” Ivanka asks, her voice three octaves deeper on the phone. I had forgotten that we exchanged phone numbers, became friends on Facebook, and made tentative plans to do this all again, next month, during the semiannual sale. I put her on speakerphone, ripped the tag off of my brand-new flotation device, and hooked it around my chest. But no matter how much I wiggle the thing around my anthills, it keeps falling down around my waist. “Victoria has a secret,” I shout into the receiver. “She’s a liar!”

  I dump every single thing out of my purse and survey which items I can stuff my bra with. Tissues? Yes, of course, those will do the trick. Spearmint Life Saver mints? I can work with that.

  By the time it’s my turn to walk down the aisle, I’ve stuffed my strapless 34D bra with so many different household items that I’m a walking CVS, at risk of dropping Band-Aids and individual to-go packets of Advil with every step that I take. A bridesmaid behind me makes a casual remark that she wishes she had a hair tie. I reach into the sweetheart neckline of my dress and pull one out for her.

  At the reception, things don’t get any easier. “Will all the single ladies make their way onto the dance floor?” the DJ announces. I watch a cluster of single girls giggle their way to the center of the room. “It’s time to see which lucky girl is going to catch the bouquet!”

  I stay put at table number two, beside a crew of my married cousins, and think long and hard about my options. I’ve come to understand that this ritual is a spectator sport for the rest of the guests, and as a bridesmaid, I can hardly refuse to go. I could use my hands to make sure my bridesmaid dress doesn’t slump down to my waist, taking my loose bra with it, or I can go hands-free and flash my ta-tas to a crowd of 300 people, 150 of whom are my blood-related family members.

  I make my way to the dance floor. One girl digs the pointy edge of her heel into my pinky toe, while another hikes up the hem of her dress, getting down low in preparation for a jump-and-catch situation.