Always a Bridesmaid (for Hire)

by Jen Glantz

  My body is trying to tell me something. It’s telling me I can’t keep going like this. And I’m finally starting to believe it. Like crazy, I am. I step out of my heels, surveying the damage on my soles, and count the blisters that form a constellation-like pattern on my Achilles tendon.

  Beside me is my cell phone, but I have no one to call. Everyone is asleep. Besides, it doesn’t work anyway. Last night I dropped it down a staircase, and it bounced off thirteen steps before I was able to catch it. The screen is cracked into a pattern of desolate streams on a map. I have to squint and turn and twist it just to see anything, which I do now—and discover that I have a voice mail from a bride asking me where I am, an email from my boss wanting to talk to me first thing on Monday, and a text from a guy I met at the wedding last night, asking when he’ll see me again.

  He won’t.

  “What are you trying to do to yourself?” I ask, my breath fogging up the mirror.

  The bathroom attendant hears me, so I look at her and wave, apologizing silently for disturbing her early-morning sink cleaning with my gloomy monologue.

  “You are not some kind of superhero,” I mumble into a rough paper napkin that could sharpen a knife.

  • • •

  “If you could have any superpower in the world, what would it be?”

  You know that a date is taking a sharp turn south when you start asking each other the kind of questions you would hear in an interview with Google. The second he asks where I see myself in five years, I’m going to tap out.

  “I don’t know,” I said, giggling nervously into a plate of tortilla chips. Is there a superpower that lets me see how this date is going to end? Can I skip ahead to the future and find out if he’s going to pick up the check? Walk me home? Lean in when we finally say good-bye and engage in some tonsil hockey?

  “Come on,” he prodded. “Pick one.”

  I took another sip of my margarita, refusing to play along. It tasted like raspberry and Lysol.

  “What would you choose?” I asked the waiter, who was delicately removing the guacamole-coated silverware from our table, probably placing a mental bet on how quickly this first-date relationship would come to an end.

  “That’s easy,” he responded, arm full of empty plates, feet shuffling as he went about his business. He stared directly into my eyes, his gaze focused like a laser beam. “I would live multiple lives.”

  Did he know something about me from my dinner order? Two veggie tacos with beans, two without; two tacos with cheese, two without.

  I felt my body flush and my cheeks glow red, as if he’d just exposed me to the world.

  “Jen likes that one,” my date said, reading into my blush. He was right, and suddenly, I realized, so was the waiter.

  Because I was living a double life.

  • • •

  There will come a day, at least once every year, when you will find yourself in the middle of a full-blown emotional breakdown, an episode when you lose your cool and your ability to be a functioning, nonhysterical member of society. When you’ll be ugly-crying into a bowl of cereal or onto a copy machine you’ve used a hundred times before that Just. Isn’t. Cooperating. When you feel like nothing in your life, not your job or your long-term relationship or your financial investments with Citibank, are going well, though everyone observing you on Instagram or even from a cubicle thirteen feet away thinks that you’re fine, that you’re perfectly put together, that you’re smitten with all of the above. But you know you’re not.

  I beg you, when that moment happens, try to be in a place where you can hide. Like the back row of a movie theater, or in the dressing room at Target, surrounded by ten items or less. But if it’s going to be in public, and most likely it will be, maybe it could at least be somewhere appropriate, like a Rangers game, where the people around you are shouting like cavemen or at the grocery store; people are always losing their minds in the fruit aisle, anxiously squeezing lemons and limes and asking the man behind the produce counter to inspect a bag of plums for them to make sure they’re organic.

  I couldn’t help myself. I was in an airport bathroom, wearing a shredded bridesmaid dress, a hot curling iron in one hand and a loaf of bread in the other, when I had my full-blown mental breakdown and identity crisis of 2015.

  The loaf of bread wasn’t mine. It was from a nice Orthodox woman who found me crying underneath the row of sinks, in a happy-baby yoga pose. She saw me on her way to the third stall from the left, ran out, asked her husband for something that would make the girl on the bathroom floor stop crying, and came back with a fresh-baked challah. L’chaim to her.

  I should have tried to make it into the bathroom stall before having this breakdown. People have meltdowns inside stalls all the time, which is the reason they have doors. But it was 7:00 a.m., and a handful of flights were about to board, making it prime time for people to take one last pee. I couldn’t outlast them.

  I took stock of the numbers. I had been at the airport for four hours for a flight I needed to make three hours ago. I was working as a bridesmaid in two weddings, in two different states, in just one weekend. The moment I was done dancing to “Closing Time” at the first one, I grabbed a party favor, hugged the bride and groom good-bye, and hopped into a taxi to zoom to the airport; I had a 5:00 a.m. flight to Philadelphia to catch, another aisle to walk down, and another set of dance moves to unleash at my second wedding reception in under twenty-four hours. But right before we were about to board, the gate agent got on the loudspeaker and told us there were “some problems” with our plane.

  “Deep breaths,” I said out loud, as if this were my own personal, calming mantra. Some problems? Okay, that’s okay. They’re not huge problems. This can be fixed with a hammer and a nail in no time, right?

  Wrong.

  “Some problems” lasted over two hours, and by now it was 7:00 a.m., and the gate agent said our flight was officially canceled until further notice. By now, I was supposed to be 583 miles away from here, in the bride’s suite, hair in curlers, face airbrushed, dress going through one final pass under the steamer.

  • • •

  The kind lady with the bread in her hand asked me, “What’s your name?” trying to get me to snap back into human mode and out of deranged bridesmaid mode.

  “It’s Jen . . . umm,” I thought carefully, wrapping my head around who I was talking to and what the situation was. “Jen Glantz.”

  The previous night I was Jen Smith, and that day I was Jen Finkelstein. On Monday morning, I would go back to my desk, at my full-time job, as Jen Glantz. I would be as many as three different people in less than forty-eight hours. I was exhausted.

  She looked down at the dirty tiled floor. Items from my carry-on bag were scattered everywhere, as if I were making myself at home in a sorority house. An eyelash curler, a strapless bra, a pair of foldable flats. In her hands was an escort card with the name Jen Smith on it from the night before. She rubbed her fingers around the rough edges of the card stock, studying the name and looking back at me, then down once more.

  “Who are you?” she asked again, this time observing the wrinkles on my blush-colored bridesmaid dress and the false eyelash glue pilling on my eyelids.

  Emotional breakdowns like these don’t just show up randomly, like the G train whenever it wants to on a Sunday afternoon, or an ex-boyfriend who decides to ask you out for coffee after five years of radio silence. They brew in our stomachs and erupt at the smallest, most innocuous trigger. It could happen while you’re trying to find your black suede wedges while your friend is waiting for you outside, or when you realize you have no idea where Jane Street is in Manhattan and your meeting was supposed to start twenty minutes ago. In my case, it was because my flight was delayed indefinitely. But that’s not even why I was on the floor, choking on my own mascara-streaked tears. It was all of the other things: the background characters and the understudies who lived inside me, delivering competing monologues, filling my head wit
h noise. Meanwhile, I, the lead actor, was slumped over in the corner, fanning myself with a Playbill.

  “Let me ask you this,” the bread lady said, calming me down with a handful of Cheerios she pulled out of her pocket. A magician of breakfast foods. “Why are you in a bridesmaid dress?”

  I was breathing slowly, deeply, like I was about to go into labor on the bathroom floor of Terminal 2.

  “I’m a bridesmaid for hire,” I said cautiously, knowing there was a chance she was going to alert the authorities—or my friends who were already eager to toss me into the loony bin. “I’m late to work, at a wedding, and I can’t lose this job because I’m about to lose my other one.”

  It had been almost a year and a half since I started my business, and my life was a complete mess. Nobody knew any of that because I did a good job of hiding it behind six hundred milligrams of caffeine and carefully written Facebook posts. But there I was, spilling the truth to a lady who was just trying to pee and get home to Crown Heights in Brooklyn. Her eyes fluttered like the wings of a butterfly. But even after all I told her, she didn’t try to fly away.

  “I work nine hours a day as a copywriter, and then I come home and try to run a business out of my office, which is really just my full-size mattress. I meet brides for dress fittings on my lunch breaks. Sometimes I tell the HR department that I have a doctor’s appointment, but really I’m running twenty-five blocks to Fox News to film a segment for a show before I have to hustle back in time for a 3:00 p.m. conference call with my boss.”

  Come to think of it, the people I worked with must’ve thought I had some kind of strange ailment, one that had me leaving work disheveled and returning with my hair combed and curled and my face painted like a clown.

  Sometimes guys at work would tell me that their wives saw me on TV that morning, canoodling with Matt Lauer, or in the late-afternoon, high-fiving Steve Harvey, and I would tell them they must be mistaken. That I hadn’t left my desk all morning. I was a terrible liar, though I was becoming an expert escape artist.

  “I’m not a businesswoman,” I said to the bread lady. “I majored in poetry.”

  She nodded her head, trying to relate. “You know what’s happening? You’re living two people’s lives with one person’s heart.”

  • • •

  My date leaned forward, excited to whip out an SAT word from his past. “There’s a name for that.”

  The waiter put his tray of dirty plates down on an empty table beside us. “Oh yeah?”

  “Yeah. It’s called bilocation.”

  “Sounds like something the doctor prescribes for constipation.” I laughed so hard, snorting directly into a dish of mild salsa.

  “Bilocation,” the waiter repeated out loud, hoping if he said it enough times, it would somehow become real.

  “My superpower would be to find a way to be okay with living just one life at a time,” I said.

  “Sounds boring,” my date said, clinking his empty glass of Patrón against the fistful of dirty forks in the waiter’s hand.

  • • •

  The bread lady wiped away my tears with a tissue, and then something happened. Something made me realize why falling apart on the floor of an airport bathroom in the arms of a complete stranger, who was in danger of missing her own flight, is never a good idea: she started crying too.

  Airports are the worst place to have a mental breakdown. Everybody around you is already on the verge of having one themselves because security confiscated their extra-large jar of organic peanut butter, or they realized that their gate, F17, is in a different terminal than all the other F gates are and now they have to navigate their way back to the AirTrain in thirty minutes.

  So when it happens to you—and it will happen to you—don’t do it in an airport, because if you do, it will create a domino effect. I was ninety minutes into my breakdown, and now a crowd of women had gathered beside me and the bread lady, oohing and ahhing over us on the bathroom floor.

  “We’re going to get you on a flight to Philadelphia,” one of them said between her own strangled sobs.

  “Yeah!” they all exclaimed in unison as if we were at a feminist gathering in the 1960s.

  I left the bathroom with the cord of my curling iron wrapped around my shoulder and my carry-on bag unzipped, wedding invitations and Band-Aids streaming behind me. I walked up to the gate agent’s desk with an army of equally unstable women behind me. How’s that for oversized baggage, JetBlue?

  “My name is Jen Glantz,” I said to Rhonda, the lady behind the counter, her hair fastened together with a sheet of bobby pins and her lipstick melting onto her two front teeth. She looked at me like whatever I was about to say, she’d heard many times before. “I’m just wondering if, um . . .”

  She tapped her pen against the linoleum desk, rolling her eyes before I even finished my sentence.

  “Listen, I need to get to Philadelphia in the next two hours,” I went on. By now, my Sisterhood of Traveling Emotional Breakdowns had hugged me good-bye, wished me luck, and dispersed to their own gates.

  “Yeah?” she said, pointing to a line of people behind me fanning themselves with expired plane tickets. “So does everybody else. Next!”

  I turned around to the man walking forward to take my spot at Rhonda’s desk and held up my index finger, silently asking him to give us a few more minutes alone. He took three steps back because when someone asks you to do something, and she is in a beaten-up bridesmaid dress, with makeup stains all over her face, her hair a bee’s nest of tangled curls, you have to do it.

  I leaned forward. “I’m about to get fired from my real job, and if I don’t make it to this wedding,” I said, pointing at my dress like Vanna White, “I’m going to be fired from this job too. So could you please do me a favor and book me on another flight so that I can stop scaring these passengers with my unstable emotions and embarrassing airport attire???”

  She picked up her walkie-talkie and I took a few steps back, all the way back. I couldn’t end up in airport security looking like this. I couldn’t have the TSA calling up my parents and making them hop on a last-minute flight from Florida to Detroit to pick me up from the airport holding facility. Imagine what the car ride home would be? It would be 1,214 miles of Jennifer, we told you so. We told you that you were doing too much of that and too much of this. You should have focused all your energy on one thing: dating what’s-his-name instead.

  I leaned down against a metal beam in the middle of the terminal and rested my head in my clammy hands. I had no place else to go.

  A girl with a tricep full of colorful tattoos sat down next to me, plugged in her cell phone, and snapped pictures of the crowded airport.

  “Hey,” she said, handing me a wet wipe from the inside of her backpack. “You look like you could really use this.”

  “What makes you think that?” I said, laughing as I grabbed the wipe from her hand and began rubbing off all of the gunk off my face.

  We weren’t going anywhere, any of us. They were sending more people in lime green vests with tool belts strapped around their waists onto our plane to fix it. Even if we left three hours from now, I would miss the whole thing. I wouldn’t be there for the bride to walk down the aisle. I wouldn’t even be there for a slice of almond vanilla wedding cake.

  “I saw your performance over there,” she said. “I wanted to give you a standing ovation. Or a Xanax.”

  I looked at her with eyes that said hug me, and she did.

  “You know,” she went on, handing me a candy gummy worm. “You’re not the only twentysomething girl in the history of girls who’s trying to do two things at once.”

  I blew my nose into a sock from my still-open carry-on bag.

  “What I’m trying to say is, you’re not alone. Consider yourself a modern-day Cinderella.”

  “I bet Cinderella didn’t have this many blisters,” I said, showing her the pads of my feet.

  I wondered what would happen to me if I left one of the
se on-sale Guess shoes from the clearance rack of DSW on the floor of the airport. Would my Prince Charming find it and locate me inside my tiny apartment in Midtown East? Probably not. Airport security would confiscate the shoe and swab the insides to see if there were any chemicals on it before sticking it into one of their industrial-sized trash cans.

  The girl sitting beside me was wrong. I was nothing like a modern-day Cinderella. I was more like a modern-day Tasmanian devil.

  And then the knights in shining armor showed up. If you consider brightly colored construction vests to be armor.

  I watched as the airplane repairmen exited the plane, and my heart soared with hope. Rhonda got on the loudspeaker and cleared her throat to get the attention of the crowd of aggravated passengers. “Good news,” she said, flatly. “You can all get on the plane now.”

  I hugged my new friend once more and thanked her for the candy, the wet wipe, and the early-morning quarter-life-crisis perspective.

  The plane would take off in a couple of minutes, and I would make it in time for the ceremony, right before the second bridesmaid took her first step down the aisle. I would do the cha-cha slide on the dance floor beside the other guests I’d just met that night, and I’d give a toast to a lifetime of love and adventure to a bride and groom I’d also just met that night. Finally, I would make it home and crawl out of another polyester dress and toss on my cut-up Van Halen T-shirt. On Monday, I would walk up to my boss with a fresh cup of coffee in hand and listen as he said this was hard for him but he had to let me go. The company was downsizing and I was on the list of people getting laid off.

  I would be okay because I’d already met my quota for emotional breakdowns that month, right? Wrong. But I would find a way to walk out of there and say good-bye, going back, once again, to a life where I could be just one person, with one job, perhaps even with a new goal of finding just one person to love.

  The previous sixteen months were an adventure, an experiment that mixed up all the pieces of my life and bound them together with dental floss. I entered people’s lives at the last minute, I sat in front of TV cameras in front of national audiences, I went to work every day, and I came home at night to another job. I was slowly becoming so many things to so many people that I was losing every part of myself.