by Jen Glantz
17. “Single Ladies.” I’ll leave it at that.
18. “Cha Cha Slide.” I appreciate that the exact moves are called out and easier to understand than IKEA instructions, but I’d prefer to dance to a song that doesn’t remind me of the hokey pokey.
19. “Shout.” The part in the song when everyone shimmies down to touch the dance floor with their hands is usually the part of the song when I realize I’m too old and don’t have the leg strength to get back up.
20. “Gangnam Style.” I was never very good at galloping.
21. “Cupid Shuffle.” When everyone is moving to the right, I always find myself moving to the left.
22. “Come On Eileen.” Yes, come on. Put down your sixth cocktail. It’s time to go home.
23. “Girls Just Want to Have Fun.” I once danced with an eighty-six-year-old grandma to this song who was twerking during the they just wanna, they just wanna part.
24. “Wobble.” I look like I’m grinding coffee beans when I dance to this song.
25. “Whip/Nae Nae.” Sometimes I confuse these dance moves with “Gangnam Style.”
26. “Bohemian Rhapsody.” I wish we could just jump to the second half of the song, when the beat picks up and everyone can jump around like they’re tap dancing in a Broadway show.
27. “The Twist.” A true throwback for the adults in the room—not the wannabe adults who think a throwback is a picture they post on Instagram from a year or two ago.
28. “Cotton Eye Joe.” My goal for this song is not to elbow, knee, or stab someone with my toes.
29. “Time of My Life.” By the time this song plays, I’m trolling tables, looking to stick my fork into any and all uneaten slices of cake.
30. “Last Dance.” By this song, I hope I’m already halfway home.
chapter twenty-four
Love Always Perseveres
“Love is patient.”
I take a deep breath of cool air through my nose, letting it burn all the way down through my lungs. When I exhale, my eyes fly toward the watchful guests, my attention bouncing like a quarter in a washing machine. I see the grandma, who is wiping away tears of joy with the edge of a lace handkerchief. I see a family of four, dressed in their October best. I zoom in on the dad, who’s bobbing his head in silent approval of what this day means for his family for the rest of his life.
All of a sudden, I feel an elbow digging into the meat on my ribs. It’s the pastor.
“Keep reading,” she whispers through a frozen smile, her lips barely moving.
I continue: “Love is kind . . .”
The groom is gripping the hands of his bride like a metal binder clip on the rolled-down end of a bag of potato chips. His eyes meet hers before falling to the grass, his smile taking over.
When you’re bursting with happiness, your facial muscles take turns showing it. Your eyes go first, pushing your lids wide open, then your mouth follows suit; even your ears perk up. The bride’s eyes are everywhere. On her groom, the crowd, me, and then, ultimately, on the uncut, dewy grass.
I know she sees all 150 guests squirming in their ties, or adjusting their hemlines and leaning forward in their white resin folding chairs, cotton cardigans draped over their collarbones.
I know they look at her thinking she must be the happiest person in the room. How could she not be? She found her Mr. Forever, something that requires constant vigilance, like finding an outlet in an airport or a size small at a sample sale. She has something that I have found, lost, found, and lost again, like car keys or an unpaid American Express bill that got stuck in the sections of Sunday’s paper.
Keep it separate, Jen. Put it in a place you’ll remember, people always say, as if I’m begging to forget it, as if somehow, in some way, I want to lose it. This bride has found love, and even better, she’s found a way to hold onto it.
The guests are jet-lagged. They smell like hotel shampoo and conditioner, and their tummies are full of watered-down coffee and continental breakfast. I can tell the men spritzed on extra cologne when they got out of their rental cars and the women applied an extra coat of Roma tomato red lipstick before taking a seat. They’re all here for this early-afternoon celebration because it means something to them.
The bride looks at me once more, like a puppy that’s scared her owner is going to leave her home all afternoon.
“Jen. You can go on,” she says, as if there’s a chance I might not.
I nod. “It does not boast. It is not proud.”
• • •
“Okay, okay, let me try this again,” I said to Monica. It’s a week before her wedding, and this is the seventeenth phone call we’ve had. We’ve never met face to face; she’s in Georgia, and I’m in New York, but we’ve become close enough that we finish each other’s sentences and laugh at jokes from weeks past.
I wanted, once more, to run through all of the facts that I had memorized about her because in just seven days, I’d be sitting in seat 9b on my flight to Georgia and exiting the airplane as Jen Smith, her friend since we were fourteen.
I’d made note cards, each one handwritten in pencil with some fact about Monica. I took them with me everywhere, snuggled at the bottom of my purse for whenever the F train got too moody or a first date was running late, or while I was massaging a homemade apple cider vinegar and Greek yogurt mask onto my face. (Thanks, Cosmo.)
“Thirty-one as of August, born in Sacramento, vegan who occasionally flirts with a piece of salmon, met me at Newton High School.”
“Hewton High School,” she cuts in, with a chuckle. It’s fun getting to know someone else, but it’s even more fun listening to them getting to know you.
“Hewton High,” I say three times over before going on. “You have a sister in Germany, a brother in Kentucky, and your mom lives five miles away, behind the Stop and Shop, on the south side of town. Your son’s name is Dallas, he’s thirteen going on twenty-six, and he lives with you and Rick, who you met about five years ago when you were traveling for your job as a data analyst. You’re known as a hot blonde nerd at the office.”
She laughed again, and I started to as well. Laughter, like yawning, is contagious, but only once you’ve made a connection with another person; otherwise, your mouth doesn’t even move.
“Anything else I should know?” I asked, patting myself on the back for remembering the facts without glancing at any of the note cards that were now displaced across my full-size mattress.
“Actually,” she said with a pregnant pause, as if she were searching her own mental database for the precise information to retrieve. “There’s one more thing.”
“Sure, what is it?” I asked, pulling out a blank note card and uncapping a ballpoint pen with my teeth.
“The guy I’m marrying . . .”
“Rick,” I interrupt, name-dropping him casually, as if we’ve known each other forever.
“Well, he’s gay,” she said, rushing through the bomb she’d just dropped. “And I’m marrying him for a different kind of love.”
Love does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered.
I threw the pen and note card on my bed and started pacing around the twenty square inches of spare floor space in my bedroom.
I waited in silence, trying to conjure up something to say, waiting for a just kidding to follow, like a joke that shows up unexpectedly at the wrong party, when it belongs next door, with the Natty Lite beer and the strobe lights. But I knew Monica—or, at least, I thought I knew her—and she didn’t joke like that. Everything she said was with purpose, with heart, with intention. I could wait there, counting my steps for hours, but I knew that a just kidding was not going to come.
“Jen?” she said, wondering if I was still on the line.
“Hi, yes.” I responded. “I’m still here. It’s just, I, umm . . .” I didn’t know what to say.
“That’s okay,” she cut in.
“I guess I’m wondering why you’re marrying him, then?” I a
sked as I searched for the right response that would make Monica feel comfortable and allow me to make sense of the situation.
“What are you? Some kind of journalist?” she joked. That was her way of humoring the situation, her way of letting me know that she felt comfortable telling me all of this but also not comfortable at the same time. Like when we tell someone something serious and then laugh after, as if to say, I’m okay, but also may need you to walk on tippy-toes with your questions and judgment for the next five minutes so nobody gets hurt.
“Well, what do you mean by a ‘different kind of love’?” Thinking, wrongly, in the moment, that there is only one kind, just like a person foolishly thinks there is only one way to order steak.
She went on to tell me how they started dating, how she liked him, as one would like anyone with an edge of charm and a heart full of kindness and compliments. She told me about the way her stomach would fill with butterflies when her phone lit up with his name, or how she would have trouble not smiling when he said her name out loud, at the dinner table.
Things didn’t get as intimate as she would have liked, so a year into their relationship, she asked him why not.
“That’s when he told me,” she said, calmly, the memory filtered by still fresh. “He loved me, but in a different kind of way.”
Rick, she went on, was attracted to guys. He wanted, one day, to be able to be in love with a guy, but was terrified what his conservative family would think. He told her that he wasn’t ready to live his life as a gay man. Monica was attracted to the way Rick made her feel, how he helped raise her son, how he made her up-in-the-air life seem stable for once. She wanted to make him feel comfortable and hoped one day, in the future, he would go off and live the life he was meant to. She wanted to be there for him in a way he couldn’t trust anyone else in the world to be there.
Monica spoke for sixteen minutes straight, without pausing for anything more than a deep breath. I paced back and forth in silence, repeating the story she was telling me in my head, trying to grasp every single bit about it.
Rick was gay. Monica was straight. Rick was scared to be gay. Monica wanted stability in her life. Rick wanted stability in his life. Monica wanted to help Rick by being there for him, so he could one day live his life as an openly gay man.
I wanted to interrupt. I wanted to ask her, “Why marry him?” Skip the paperwork, the $50,000 event, the pain you’re going to cause the people around you when they one day learn this was all a sham. I understood that she wanted to be there for him and he wanted to be there for her, but I didn’t understand why they had to fool others in the process. Why they had to disguise the lives they wanted behind a diamond ring.
“So why marry him, right?” she went on. I exhaled, relieved that she had asked the question I so desperately wanted to know the answer to.
“Yes, why? Why do that when you know it has an expiration date? When you know that one day, you’ll both go your separate ways?”
“Because I love him, and he loves me,” she said, without a moment of hesitation, as if she had been waiting for someone to ask her this but no one ever had. “Love between two people is never the same; when you add everything up, it always yields a different number.”
I sighed, overwhelmed with emotion for someone who had become a part of my life, and I, a giant part of hers, despite the fact that we’d never met before.
“Jen,” she cried out, desperate for a virtual hug of approval. “Haven’t you been in love before?”
“I have,” I said, wondering who the journalist was now. “Twice.”
“So tell me this, was the first time the same as the second time?”
Love keeps no records of wrongs.
The second time I was in love, I told the guy after twenty-one days of knowing him. We were eating a burrito and he told me that I had a chunk of guacamole on my eyebrow. I told him, “I love you.”
But he didn’t say it back. Spoiler alert: they don’t always do. Love isn’t fair; it works the same way a carnival game or a slot machine does. Just because you give it your all and hit the pad as hard as you can with a hammer, you might walk away without that stuffed animal the size of your torso. It takes more than effort to land the ultimate prize: someone who loves you back.
He told me that he didn’t know. How do you not know? I wondered. Either you’re in love or you aren’t. Either you want to eat pizza or you don’t.
He told me he would know by January, so I waited around for four months, because love for a person doesn’t expire like milk or a parking meter. If you love a person, you have that feeling forever, like a birthmark, until you optionally, painfully, have it removed.
Eventually he told me he didn’t love me back, and I finally understood what one-sided love feels like: making out with a plastered wall, or sending undeliverable pieces of mail, over and over and over again. Eventually you have no choice but to take that love elsewhere, whether to the frozen desserts section of Trader Joe’s on a lonely Friday night or Tinder.
I sat on the edge of my mattress pad, thinking about that guy, that burrito, those three words I blurted out so quickly. That unadulterated feeling. I thought about Monica and Rick and how those three words meant something entirely different to them. To me, I wanted the phrase to mean allegiance, and I wanted it to be endless. To her, it meant safety. It meant growing together before, one day, they would, rightfully, grow apart.
I listened to Monica and watched the skyscrapers darken against the Manhattan skyline as they fell asleep outside my window. I often thought during the daytime, from twenty-six floors up, that it looked as if everyone was doing the same thing. But at night, who knew; you can’t see into the windows of those buildings once night falls.
I thought about the person who helped approve the shapes of these buildings. Who gave his thumbs up, the ultimate okay, to have it look so messy, so uneven, so all over the place that if you tried to draw them, your hand would get exhausted from the ups and the downs, the curves and the nonsensical dips. I couldn’t help but cringe at how the skyline looked at that moment: a mouthful of crooked teeth that needed a year and a half of braces to straighten out, to make everything line up. But love, and every single thing I’ve ever tried to get my hands on, seemed to make much more sense when it was a little bit imperfect, broken in, flawed around the edges. And I did love this skyline, after all.
Love does not delight in evil.
“I just need you to be there for me,” she said. “Ever since I hired you, you have been there for me more than anyone else in my life, and now this, this thing I just told you . . . nobody else can ever know. Nobody else will ever understand.”
• • •
The pastor steps on my toes, wanting to make sure that I’m still awake, that I’m still committed to reading these words out loud. I let the air out of my nose, unexpectedly, like a deflating balloon.
“Love rejoices with the truth,” I say.
I’m thinking about the moment right before the ceremony as I fluffed the waterfall of lace cascading from Monica’s dress. Her flower girl stood eagerly by her side, waiting to take her very first step down the aisle.
“Do you want to know a secret?” I asked the flower girl.
“Mmhm,” she replied, lollipop in one hand and a basket of hydrated flower petals in the other.
“Find a person you love, but not because they’re good at smushing their lips against yours or because their hair is a perfect shade of cinnamon.”
She giggled at the thought of lips smushing together. I laughed too.
“Love always protects,” I tell her, no longer holding back the words.
“Where do I find that?” she asked, thinking beyond the rainbow-colored wooden doors of her kindergarten classroom and the swing sets on the sandy playground.
“You’ll probably find it in the place that makes the least sense,” I said, hoping that she’d remember those words when she was my age.
“Love always trusts,” I say no
w.
• • •
I fell in love for the first time when I was twenty-two with a guy who said I was too young to fall in love. There’s no age limit on love, like there is on an R-rated movie, but was there a time limit? Because after seven months, the I love yous turned into How are yous? which turned into I’ll call you back laters, which turned into silence. Until one day, when May was pushing April out of the spotlight, he called me and told me he didn’t love me at all anymore.
• • •
That was when I threw my phone into a rose bush in front of Jimmy, my doorman, and told myself that I would never love again. Once was enough. I would retire, move to a sunny condo in Florida, and feast on early bird specials at local kosher restaurants.
But love, like a night of drinking that leaves you with a nasty hangover, or a stomach filled with unsettling food that makes you spend a couple of hours hunched over the toilet, has a way of quickly fleeing, making you forget the pain and never again promises that come with it.
• • •
The pastor leans toward me to grab the microphone out of my shaky hands, and I signal with bulging eyes that I’m ready to finish up this poem, which has taken me three minutes to read when it should have taken me only one.
“Love always hopes.”
If love had a texture, I think to myself, it would be like rice pudding, filled with chunks that make it hard to swallow. Love is the reason for my acid reflux. Long-distance love is the reason I don’t have a 401(k). One-sided love is the reason I can’t help but try to fall in love again. This was my experience with love, and it was my kind of different.
• • •
Monica is the sixteenth bride I’ve worked with this year, and I realize now that each one I’ve worked with got married for a different kind of love. Some brides married the first person they kissed; some married for the third time to the fourth person they loved. There were times I watched brides get married to grooms who didn’t seem to love them at all.