Always a Bridesmaid (for Hire)

by Jen Glantz

  “Jennifer,” she starts. “Are you wearing something clean? Without any stains and wrinkles?”

  “I have to go, Mom,” I reply.

  “One more thing,” she goes on, before I’m able to press the End Call button on my phone. “Give him a fair chance, please. And don’t eat with your fingers!”

  Fifteen minutes later, I see Jonathan walking toward me as I lean against the wall outside the restaurant, one foot on the pavement and one foot flat up against the wall in case I need to drop down into a sprinter’s stance and run away.

  Surprisingly, he looks exactly like his photos. He’s attractive in an “I would bring him home to my mom kind of way,” which is fitting, since my mom picked him out of a lineup. He doesn’t have tattoos, wear a leather jacket, or have a beard or any visible piercings, like the last twelve guys I dated. But a bet is a bet, and I’m here, ready to give this whole thing a fair chance.

  As we sit down, I break the awkward silence with my infamous game of Here is What Matt Lauer said on the Today Show. We find ourselves talking about Obamacare and a segment that we both watched about it on 60 Minutes last week.

  We’re in a heated argument before the waitress even has a chance to come over and ask us what our drink of choice is. Note to self: Find a new, less controversial topic to break the awkward first-date silence with in the future.

  I can hear my mom’s voice inside my head. “Jennifer, be charming. Don’t do this.” So I politely smile and try to change the subject to something less provocative. Something I know very little about.

  “So, those Mets,” I go on.

  “Who likes the Mets?” he says, showing me the background of his phone, which is a giant Yankees logo.

  I can see this isn’t going well. I can see he knows this isn’t going well. So we don’t even order a drink. I take a sip of my stale water and he reaches for his coat.

  “It was nice meeting you,” he starts. “But . . .”

  “I know,” I say. “I understand.”

  He walks toward the door and I linger at our table, fidgeting with the menu, with the rolled-up napkin, with the five-dollar bill he left as a tip for the waitress we never had the chance to meet.

  It’s 7:20 p.m. If I text my mom now, she’s going to think something happened. Either he tried to kidnap me and I stuck him in his soft spot with my Payless clearance rack shoes, or it was love at first sight and I’m giving her a polite heads-up that she should jump on that sale she saw in the newspaper for hand-made wedding invitations.

  He was awful. I type. We argued over Obamacare and then he walked out on me.

  I press Send, collapsing my head into my hands and slamming the phone down on the wooden table. My mom is going to be so disappointed. She’s going to think this is all my fault. She’s going to remind me of a rule our gal pal Patti Stanger always says, which is to never talk about Obamacare on a first date. She’s going to sign me up for Match.com and eHarmony.com and MothersWithPerpetuallySingleDaughters.com.

  All of a sudden, as I go to grab my coat, as I go to leave behind the shortest first date in the history of first dates, I feel my phone buzz.

  It’s a text message from my mom.

  Jonathan is old news, it reads, and I take an enormous deep breath. I already found you someone else. His name is Mark.

  My mom, the online dating machine. The secret is out.

  chapter five

  All of My Friends Got Engaged

  When my friends call me and say they have good news, I hang up, because now that news no longer involves me.

  When we were in our early twenties, my friends used to call for three reasons. The first kind of call was the most common: “Hey, Jen! Wanna go out tonight and bar-hop across the Lower East Side and see how many guys with thick-rimmed glasses and a studied affinity for craft beer ask us out?”

  Sometimes they would call to say, “Hey, Jen! Let’s blow our savings accounts and book it to the Bahamas this spring. We can sprawl out on extra-large towels across super-hot sand, slather ourselves with globs of tanning oil, and bake under the sun with an overdue library book and a freshly blended piña colada while we pretend we don’t have 563 unread messages in our Gmail inboxes.”

  I used to wait all week for this one: “Hey Jen! Let’s spend Friday night plopped on the couch and stuff our faces with handfuls of cheddar jalapeño–flavored Cheetos and Three Buck Chuck from Trader Joes. We can rewatch season one of Gilmore Girls on Netflix and laugh at all the other people posting Instagram photos of the unpronounceable food they’re eating on their dates at fancy restaurants.” Escargots in their cargos, we’d say, and take a swig of pinot gris directly from our bottle of wine that cost less than the round-trip subway ride to procure it. Le Pew to you too!

  What I’m saying is that whenever my phone buzzed, I knew it meant that some kind of adventure would slap me across the face and drag me outside my apartment and bring me back home at around 4:00 a.m. with a phone full of photos that would lift my spirits through the next week of 9-to-5 days and meetings with stern-lipped people in boring three-piece suits.

  But now that we’re in our mid- to late twenties, I’ve been getting three very different kinds of phone calls from those same friends, in this order:

  “Hey Jen. Guess what?” I should note that when I first started getting these “Guess what?” calls, I naively thought the big reveal would still involve me. I would assume that my friend had just won the lottery and was inviting me to travel around the world for ham and cheese sandwiches in Madrid and cliff-diving in Dubrovnik in Croatia. Or to tell me she had free tickets to the Maroon 5 concert and a plan to sneak backstage to take selfies with Adam Levine.

  But that’s not even close to the kind of heavy-hitting, world-spinning, exclusionary news that followed the new batch of “Guess what?” questions.

  “We’re engaged!”

  “Who’s ‘we’?” I say, because it’s always, somehow, a little bit shocking to me when friends get engaged, mostly because I still view us as sixteen-year-old versions of ourselves giggling over guys and cooties.

  A year or two later, that same friend will call to say, “Hey, Jen. Guess what? We’re gonna have a baby!”

  “A what? How?” I say, a little pissed off because now there’s yet another person pushing me out of the equation. “But you just got married. Also, didn’t you just drink half a bottle of coffee-flavored Patrón and pee in your pants after laughing so hard at that YouTube video of a dog dancing to Backstreet Boys?”

  But the third kind of call is the hardest, and no matter how hard I try to prepare myself, I’m never fully ready.

  “Hey Jen, guess what?”

  Do we have to do this again? I think. It’s beginning to sound like a knock-knock joke gone wrong—and I’m the punch line.

  “What now?”

  “We’re moving back home to Florida!”

  This is the worst because I know what this means for them. It means they’re going to take out a mortgage on a house with more square footage than the entire floor of my New York City apartment building. They’ll probably have a pool with a marble surface and a lawn that needs constant grooming and flowers that need more attention than their darling hyperactive children. They’ll have a dishwasher and a laundry machine and a two-car garage. They’ll have space to grow into real-life adults, with investments beyond the savings bonds their grandparents gave to them at their bar and bat mitzvahs. They’ll have family sit-down dinners prepared with gifts from their wedding registry, and they’ll eat with utensils that aren’t hoarded from the hole-in-the-wall Chinese restaurant across the street with a C grade in the window from the New York City Health Department.

  Do you know what this means for me? Well, it could mean a booming career if I decided to start my own babysitting business. But what it really means is that while I was trying to land a job that paid me more money an hour than the price of a tomato mozzarella panini from Starbucks, and while I was learning how to use Tinder and wishing I c
ould forget how to use JDate, all my friends were getting engaged. It was as if an alert popped up on their phones at around some point that said, What are you waiting for, girl! Now’s the time to start dropping hints to the person you’ve been dating for two years to let him know you’re ready for that diamond ring and a monogamous life of expanding waistlines and synced iPhone calendars.

  While my friends were waking up on Sunday mornings with the guy of their dreams, sipping mocha cappuccinos in bed and binge-watching The West Wing on Netflix, I was inventing ways to remember all the guys I met online and documenting them in my phone with nicknames so I wouldn’t confuse one Joshua with another, an Evan with a Steven, or a David with a Daniel.

  While my friends were merging lives with guys who complemented their personalities, I was dating Chase the Cheapskate, who would never pick up the check when we went out for dinner and somehow, always, forgot his wallet when we went to happy hour on Friday nights. I went on exactly one date with Lucas the Lizard Tongue, who went in for a kiss on the first date and ended up making out with the side of my earlobe.

  Forgive me, Father, but I will never, ever be able to forget Michael the Mensch who was a rabbi in training at the local synagogue and met me for brunch one weekend after finishing a circumcision on one of our neighbor’s newborn babies and didn’t wash his hands. There was even No Job, No Problem Rob, who thought the idea of sitting in a cubicle all day was a shameful waste of time and had vowed never to have a real job again, living purely off the land and paying whatever bills he had with money he made from teaching people how to hang-glide.

  My friends, those lucky saints, never had to go on a date with Jeremiah the Jean Shorts Wearing guy from Williamsburg, who wouldn’t drink coffee from mass production companies like Starbucks or Coffee Bean. They never had to sit through drinks with Ryan the Russian Riot, who would pick a fight with just about anyone who looked him in the eye, including in the middle of a JetBlue flight to California or while shopping for pillows at Macy’s.

  My friends were rounding up the rare Prince Charmings of the world, signing leases together for proper one-bedroom apartments, and going on dates to places that were reservation only. They had routines that involved yoga on Saturday mornings and sushi-making classes on Saturday afternoons.

  I started to ask myself, What the heck is wrong with me? Where did I go wrong?

  It was only appropriate that I started to wonder, to really wonder, if the batteries on my biological clock needed to be changed. For some reason, my clock wasn’t ticking as fast as the rest of the women I knew. I felt so young and so completely and wholeheartedly unsure of myself. How could I even consider getting married at this age when the contents of my résumé were about as coherent as ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics to anyone but an Egyptologist?

  I wanted a career before I wanted a husband. I wanted a closet filled with Ann Taylor Loft pencil skirts and cotton button-down shirts; I didn’t want to make life-changing decisions with a closet full of Forever 21 lace crop tops. I wanted a 401(k) and a boss who would sit down with me once a year to give me a review and a 10 percent raise.

  A part of me even wanted to keep dating. I wanted to make some more mistakes with Recovering Alcoholic Alex and Wannabe Stand-Up Comic Samuel. Sure, I wanted to find my Mr. Right, but I’m pretty sure that even at this very moment in my life, if he were standing right in front of me with a bouquet of freshly cut yellow roses and waving them frantically in my face, I would walk right by him.

  College doesn’t prepare you for the moment when all of your friends start getting engaged, though it really should. Your advisor should tell you that after you graduate, three things are likely to happen. First, you might not find a job right away. You’ll probably have to take an internship at a company that will make you wake up in the middle of the night, soaking wet in your own stress sweat, trying to remember if you sent that email your boss asked you to send earlier that day. You’ll work hard at that job, even though you could make more money working at McDonald’s, forcing you to reevaluate why you just spent $25,000 (or lots more) a year on your education. Second, if you can’t score that full-time job, you’ll probably have to move back into your parents’ house—if they’ll have you. If you have too much pride to do that, you might start couch surfing until your friends who just got hired at their first jobs as accountants or preschool teachers or grad school teaching assistants have enough of you and your whininess about being unemployed. Third, all of your friends will suddenly get married.

  I kind of thought we would suffer through the first two things together a little longer before I felt left behind, like one of those kids who fails the state standardized test in the fourth grade. I thought we would all meet at a dive bar every Thursday night for the rest of our lives, where the beer is four dollars a pint and the French fries are a little bit frozen, and talk about how writing cover letters feels like a giant waste of time, or how we just quit our third part-time job that year.

  It all started to fall apart when I got a text message from my friend Gina, whom I’d known since my freshman year of college. My phone buzzed, and I unlocked the shattered screen of my iPhone 5. There it was: a picture of a gigantic diamond ring on Gina’s itty-bitty ring finger.

  “Oh, that is cute,” I said out loud to myself. I thought she was just bored at a jewelry store and decided to try it on or that it was someone else’s hand in the photo. Gina had been dating her boyfriend for only eight months, hardly enough time to truly know someone. They didn’t even live in the same city. They hadn’t even made it through one full circle of seasons together. But before I could write back or send a, “Is this an early April Fools joke?” my phone was buzzing again. Gina was calling me.

  “Jen?” she said with hesitation, as if she were expecting someone else to answer my phone.

  “What’s with the photo, Gina?”

  “Jen,” she said again, this time certain she had the right girl on the phone. “Guess what? We’re engaged!”

  “Who’s ‘we’?”

  “Jon and me. Duh!”

  “Oh. Really? So soon and everything?”

  “I know!” she said. I could hear the same note of excitement in her voice that used to be there when she’d invite me to hijack a dance floor in a gritty club with neon flashing lights. “I can’t believe it!”

  Neither could I. Maybe a part of me was jealous because I was being demoted from best friend status to third wheel. But I think a bigger chunk of me was jealous that my best friend found love, when all I could find were terrible Tinder dates. I was happy for her, but I was also starting to feel a tingle of desperation to experience that kind of happiness for myself.

  As if things couldn’t become any more traumatizing, exactly two months after the first ring picture, while I was trying to get home in the middle of a late-season New York City blizzard, my phone buzzed again. This time, the voice on the other end of the line sounded so jubilant that I knew something bad was about to happen.

  It was Gina again. “Jen! So, I have a question for you.”

  “Sure,” I said tentatively. “What’s up?”

  “Will you be my bridesmaid?”

  I immediately pushed the End Call button with my chin and spent the next fifteen seconds considering my options. Should I call back, lie and say the call was dropped, and enthusiastically accept? Or should I throw my iPhone into a snowdrift and never look back? Before I could make a decision, before I could figure out a way to never receive these kinds of calls again, a text from Gina appeared on my screen.

  I’ll take that as a yes!

  And so it began.

  chapter six

  Bridesmaid Is Just Another Name for a Warrior in a Taffeta Dress

  Back when I was just a Nick-at-Nite-watching, fleece-pajama-wearing, brace-face preteen, I remember my babysitter Erica telling me a bedtime story about a wedding she went to where a bridesmaid passed out at the altar.

  My knowledge of what a bridesmaid was and what a bridesma
id did was limited to what I’d seen at the first wedding I went to when I was three years old. I remember watching a girl in a bubblegum-colored gown saunter down the aisle as the rows of people to her left and right oohed and ahhed. I remember her holding the bride’s bouquet and fluffing the edges of her lace dress. I remember them hugging and dancing and clinking glasses of pee-colored liquid together. I remember thinking being a bridesmaid was the most beautiful and exquisite thing you could grow up to be. I had no idea that being the bride’s side chick could leave you temporarily comatose.

  “How did she pass out?” I asked, relaxing in my twin bed, my face sticky from the Fruit Roll-Up I’d just eaten. “Did the priest pause the ceremony? Did the bride start to cry? Did the bridesmaid get off the floor?”

  “No, Jen.” Erica answered, in a hot flash, as if all of my comments would have sounded off the buzzer on the game show Family Feud. “They just went on with the ceremony.”

  “Did they get married over her passed-out body?” I asked as I snuggled under my polyester Power Ranger sheets.

  “Someone in the front row dragged her out of the room, got her some water, and gave her a tissue.”

  I remember trying to picture the whole thing. A girl zonked out on the ground, pretty in pink, while the happy couple, front and center, kept things moving along, their gazes full of loaded promises to love one another through thick and thin, and the downfall of everyone around them.

  “Weren’t they worried about her?” I asked.

  Erica just shrugged. “They slumped her next to the confessional booth for the rest of the ceremony.”

  At eleven years old, I was more horrified by this news than by an episode of Are You Afraid of the Dark?

  That was the beginning of my realization that being a bridesmaid required way more than just zipping up a poufy confection of a dress and flirting with a half dozen handsome groomsmen in penguin-like tuxedos. It was a test of human survival. It was something you walked into belly-up and left, potentially, belly-down. It wasn’t for the dainty, the manicured, or the high maintenance. It was for those who were strong as an ox, the resilient ones who could endure being screamed at by a bride one moment and hugged tightly by her the next. It was for the ones who approached a wedding like they would a Tough Mudder competition, power-crawling through the day on their elbows, dragging their bodies beneath barbed wire, covered in mud as thick as cheesecake. Because if you walked in there as if you were entering a safe zone, a home base, a massage day at the spa, there was a good chance you would leave with rug burns from being dragged across microfiber carpet and left alone, with a half-drunk water bottle from Aunt Matilda’s purse and a handkerchief from a kind stranger in the first row.