Keep Calm and Carry a Big Drink

by Kim Gruenenfelder

  “I think it’s ‘the rest is history,’” Nic corrects.

  “You know, I’m trying to have a moment here…”

  “Sorry,” Nic says quickly.

  “Anyhoo … open your boxes.”

  I open my box to see a silver bracelet tucked into black velvet. As I pull the bracelet out, Seema explains, “I made a charm bracelet for each of you. Nic, yours has a baby charm, like the one you pulled at your wedding shower, and your moon charm from my shower. Mel, yours has a chili pepper, and a money tree. And I also included a shovel on both of yours, to remind you of how much I care about you both.

  “Here’s to many more celebrations with many more charms.”

  Nic and I gush thank-you’s and admire our new jewelry. As Seema helps Nic put on her bracelet, I look at my charms and smile. There’s a chili pepper, a money tree, a shovel, and … wait … “There’s an extra charm on mine.” I look at a gleaming-silver Eiffel Tower.

  “Oh, I loved that one,” Seema says, finishing Nic’s bracelet, then turning to me to help me with mine. “According to the chart, that’s supposed to symbolize a honeymoon is in your future. But I figure in your case, this is not the universe talking. It’s just your nosy roommate telling you to go to Paris and see what happens.”

  I smile blushingly, touched by Seema’s approval. I nod slowly. “You know, I just might do that.”

  Seema clicks the clasp of my bracelet shut, and we both hear Nic start crying.

  We turn to see her waving her hands over her face. “I’m sorry. It’s pregnancy tears. Even the lame stuff is so sweet.”

  As Seema gives Nic a hug, my phone rings. I look at the screen to see it is Jay, who should now be in the baraat, dancing toward us. I pick up immediately. “Sorry. We were just having a girl moment.”

  “Scott may be making a run for it,” Jay says to me under his breath.

  “Shit!” I overhear a surprised Nic say.

  Her damn hearing. I turn to her and glare.

  I don’t take my eyes off her and Seema as I say into the phone, “You know what? She looks stunning.”

  Without missing a beat, Nic turns to Seema and says, “I just realized your mother’s probably waiting right outside your door, and she should be downstairs with the rest of your family so we can get that milni started! Mel and I are going to get her out of here.”

  “That’s not necessary,” Seema says calmly, unaware of the tornado about to hit. “We’ll all go.”

  “No, no, you”—Nic points at Seema—“need to make an entrance. And we are going to make that happen.” Nic grabs her phone from her purse, takes my hand, and drags me out of Seema’s suite.

  I continue talking to Jay very quietly. “Does your mom know yet?”

  “No. The wedding planner called the bride’s side to say we had a glitch, and we’re coming soon. I’m going to get into a cab and track him down. Just don’t let Seema know what’s going on.”

  “Okay. Keep me posted.” I hit end-call on my phone.

  Nic is texting something on her phone and says, “He’s not answering his cell.”

  “Of course he’s not answering,” I say a little too harshly to Nic. “Grooms don’t carry cell phones!”

  “They do if they’re running,” Nic argues.

  I shake my head, as I turn to walk back into Seema’s suite. “I cannot believe this is the second time in a year I am dealing with a wedding runaway.”

  “Excuse me,” huffs Nic, offended, “I was not a runaway bride.”

  I try to give her my best sarcastic look. “How do you figure?”

  “I locked myself in the bathroom. You knew where I was the whole time,” she tells me self-righteously.

  Yeah … that’s much better, I think to myself. I wonder, what would it be like to be in a normal wedding? Seriously, I have to think about finding some new friends.

  As I reach for the doorknob to the honeymoon suite, Nic grabs my wrist. “Don’t tell her anything yet. Just stall.”

  I nod, unsure of the best course of action.

  Nic and I walk back into the bridal suite, where Seema takes one look at us and says, “Shit. What’s wrong?”

  Nic and I exchange a look. Nic shakes her head no at me.

  I force a smile. “Nothing.”

  Seema has the same look on her face that my mother used to get when she knew I was lying.

  “Okay,” I begin, “I need to tell you something. But you have to promise me you won’t freak out.”

  “Has there ever been a good conversation that started with that statement?” Seema asks.

  “Um, well…” I begin, looking up at the ceiling. “There have been some productive ones.”

  Nic elbows me hard in the ribs, then bulges her eyes out at me.

  “Ow!” I yell, doubling over. “How is that helping?”

  Nic chastises me. “Mel, I told you not to say anything yet.”

  I rub my belly and struggle to breathe. “Uh-huh. So we’re going with the ‘utter denial’ card? You think that’s going to work better?”

  “We played that card all the time when Seema was dating,” Nic reminds me. “What’s it going to hurt for a few more minutes?”

  Seema juts out her lip at us, but stays calm. “I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that,” she tells Nic. Then she turns to me. “What’s going on?”

  I look down, trying to find a way to let Seema down easy. “There is the remotest possibility that your groom is MIA.”

  Nic shoots up her arm to elbow me again, but I instinctively jump back and point my finger at her. “You are eight months pregnant. I could totally take you.”

  Nic narrows her eyes and cocks her head at me ever so slightly to indicate, Oh, you think so?

  I step another foot back. No, actually I do not think so.

  Seema snaps her fingers in front of me. “Mel, eyes on me. What do you mean MIA?”

  “Missing in action.”

  Seema raises her eyes to the ceiling. “I know what MIA means,” she tells me with excruciating patience. “What happened?”

  Nic’s cell phone beeps a text. She quickly starts reading and typing back as I tell Seema, “Apparently, everyone on Scott’s side gathered to start the baraat. Then Scott walked out of the lobby, got on his horse, and promptly galloped away.”

  Seema’s eyes widen. “I have a runaway groom?”

  “Now, we don’t know that.” I try my best to sound reassuring.

  Nic reads the text from her phone. “He’s been spotted racing down Olympic Boulevard, heading towards Staples Center.”

  “Are they sure it’s him?” I ask.

  Nic looks up from her phone. “How many thirty-three-year-old men wearing white sherwanis and riding white stallions do you think are in downtown today?” Nic’s phone rings, and she picks up. “Talk to me.”

  Seema grabs her chest and begins to hyperventilate. “Oh my God. I’m being left at the altar. Who does that actually happen to? I’ve never heard of someone having that happen to them.”

  Well, that’s a lie—it happened to her brother. I mean, how could she not have told me.

  Wait—bad Maid of Honor! Back to the subject at hand. I try to sound soothing. “Okay, calm down. This is not the time to panic.”

  “Are you crazy? This is the perfect time to panic!” she snaps at me. “It’s one of those FOAF stories you hear: the Mexican rat, and the friend of a friend who gets left at the altar after her groom leaves her for her slutty maid of honor.”

  “Well, obviously, that didn’t happen. Your slutty maid of honor is still here,” Nic chimes in.

  I turn to Nic and put my hands palms up. “Really? Now?”

  Nic waves me off. “What? I meant that as a good thing.”

  Seema continues to monologue. “And the bride ends up marrying the geek who loved her in high school, who she wouldn’t even give the time of day to back then, because what other options does she have so late in life?”

  Nic covers her phone. “You’ve j
ust described Ross and Rachel. That never happened to anyone in real life.”

  “It’s happening to me now!” Seema exclaims. “Oh my God. I’m going to end up spending the rest of my life with a Milton or a Leonard.”

  She collapses onto an overstuffed, white satin chair. “I can feel my gut clenching.” Seema grabs her stomach. “Oh, God, please don’t let me throw up all over my wedding sari.”

  Nic covers her phone. “The cops tried to pull him over, but he galloped onto the sidewalk, then escaped diagonally through the square in L.A. Live’s courtyard.”

  I rush up to Seema and put my arm around her. “Everything’s going to be fine. Scott loves you. This is just some horrible misunderstanding.”

  Seema starts gasping for air like a trout just yanked from the river. Nic absentmindedly hands her a paper lunch bag while she listens to more groom updates. Seema immediately grabs the bag and breathes. The bag puffs up, then contracts, puffs up, contracts …

  “Okay, the cops have him down,” Nic declares triumphantly, giving us a thumbs-up.

  “Down?!” Seema exclaims just as her iPhone plays “Highway to Hell.” Scott’s ringtone. And a joke she’s probably regretting right now.

  Seema keeps exhaling and inhaling into her paper bag while I rifle through her purse, grab her phone, and pick up. “Hey,” I say, attempting to be casual and breezy with Scott. “So what’s going on?”

  Scott sounds worried. “How’s Seema doing?”

  I watch Seema continue to hyperventilate into the bag. My voice is squeaky as I eke out, “Well … you know … every wedding has its little glitches.”

  Then Scott says the absolute worst thing a bride could hear on her wedding day. “She is going to hate me for this. I have fucked everything up. I tried, but I just couldn’t do it.”

  I take a deep breath and quietly plan his death.

  “Can you hand Seema the phone please?” Scott asks.

  Seema puts down the paper bag, and I hand her the phone. I can overhear Scott on his end say, “Okay, don’t hate me.”

  “You don’t have to give up your loft,” she says to him as quickly as she can, her tone desperate. “You don’t have to give up your loft, and we don’t have to go out to dinner on Sunday nights, and I don’t need kids right away, and we can go camping in Kenya, I don’t need room service, and we never have to go to Burbank again, you were right, I was wrong, the police in Burbank can be real jerks—”

  Nic and I can hear Scott interrupt. “Speaking of police, I’m about to be arrested.”

  Seema stops talking. Pauses a moment. “I’m sorry. Say what now?”

  “Turns out you need a permit to ride a white stallion through the streets of downtown Los Angeles on a crowded Saturday afternoon. Which is kind of secondary to my other offense: you’re also not supposed to actually ride your horse in the streets, as it blocks traffic.”

  A look of understanding crosses Seema’s face. “Oh my God. You can’t ride a horse, can you?”

  “Technically, I can. If by ride you mean not falling off the horse. He and I just had a little disagreement about where we were going.”

  Apparently, when Scott got on his horse, he spooked it, and it started running in the wrong direction from the rest of the groom’s party. Scott quickly galloped past a police car, and the cop inside started his siren and told Scott to pull over. This spooked the horse even more, so it pretended to be a quarter horse and ran even faster. Soon, the horse had run off the road, and into the middle of the L.A. Live courtyard, a crowded tourist spot in front of the Nokia Center in downtown. Scott was eventually pulled over by a policewoman on her own horse, who calmed down Scott’s horse and got it to stop. As soon as he got off his high horse, so to speak, he called Seema.

  Within minutes, Nic is in the lobby stalling the wedding guests, and I am in a cab, racing to Olympic Boulevard and Flower Street. Soon, my taxi has pulled up next to two police cars, a chestnut-colored police horse, several police officers, Prince Charming, dressed in his white sherwani and turban, and his trusty white steed, who from here on out will be known as Soon to Be Glue Stick.

  I tell the driver to keep the meter running and climb out of the cab in my full-on royal-blue silk regalia, which inspires a few tourists (and possibly some locals) to start snapping pictures with their cell phones.

  I walk over to Scott, who sits at the curb, deep in thought.

  I ask the policewoman if we can have a moment (we can), so I gingerly sit down next to him.

  “Hey,” I say softly.

  Scott forces a smile. “Hey.”

  “The trainer is coming now. She took off for lunch, thought you had it under control. She’s also bringing the permits, so I don’t think you’re getting arrested.” Scott just stares back in response—says nothing.

  So, there on the curb, the two of us sit in silence. With all my heart I want to believe that Scott is still a decent guy and that he’s going to say something profound—something about romance or love, I don’t know. But something that will inspire me.

  However, I’ve been around enough guys to know they do stupid, cowardly things, and he might very well say he can’t go through with it, then become a douche right in front of my eyes by waiting just long enough to indelibly humiliate my best friend in front of the people she loves most in the world.

  He continues to say nothing. How the hell are men capable of saying nothing?

  Finally I sigh. “Okay, so how are we going to play this?”

  “I’m not getting back on that thing!” Scott exclaims with that tone of panic men get when they don’t want to admit they’re scared.

  “You don’t have to,” I say, handling him in the calmest manner possible. “The trainer will take her back.”

  “I do have to. That’s the problem.”

  “You don’t have to. You don’t know how.”

  Scott’s voice starts to rise. “Don’t tell me I don’t know how to do something. Men have been leading baraats for thousands of years.”

  “Yes. Men who have ridden horses. What if the ceremony had involved flying a plane? Would you have just climbed into the cockpit without lessons?”

  Scott thinks about that, sighs. He makes a growling sound that doesn’t quite sound human, followed by “Fuck! So how am I supposed to lead the baraat to marry my wife?”

  “I don’t know. Walk?”

  “I can’t walk. I need to be on the horse.”

  “Why?”

  Scott sort of blows up at me. “Why? Because otherwise I am showing my future wife that I can’t do yet another thing she thought her husband would be able to do when she was a little girl playing bride. She’s already learned that I can’t cook, that I can’t wake up in the morning on my own, that she hates my clothes, and that, yes, I watch football, and, yes, I even have a team. Do I really need to add can’t ride a horse to that list?”

  I’m not sure how to answer that. I assure him, “No one ever broke up with a guy because he couldn’t ride a horse.”

  “But they do break up with men for ruining their wedding,” Scott agrues. “Do you know what I miss about dating? All the women I went out with thought I was perfect. Whatever they thought I should be, I’d just let them think that’s the guy I was. A month or two in, the cracks would start to show, I’d break up and move on.”

  “Yeah, and have the girl think you’re a dick!” I blurt out.

  “Not all women think—”

  “Yes. All women. All women you break up with think you’re a dick for at least the first month afterwards. We may still want to get back together, we may still want to sleep with you, but we think you’re a big, fat … meanie!”

  Scott gives me a face. “Meanie?”

  For that, I shove him. “Do you have any idea how lucky you are that someone knows everything about you and still wants you?” I yell at him. “Do you know how many of us are still searching for that, dreaming of it, worried it may never happen for us, and you’re going to throw that all away just
because you can’t ride a fucking horse. Get over yourself!”

  I stand up and angrily say, “You’re, like, really fucking awesome usually, and even if you don’t see it, someone else does. So you’re going to stand up, you’re going to follow me into my cab, and you’re going to marry that woman, quickly, before she has time to realize what a putz you’re being right now. Let’s go!”

  I determinedly march over to the cab. Scott slowly stands up and follows me.

  Huh. It worked. Note to self: being a raging lecturing bitch works.

  * * *

  A few minutes later, the Singh-Jameses begin a new tradition: Rather than the groom leading his family and friends to the wedding on his trusty white steed, this one rode in the backseat of a yellow Prius taxi and slowly led his party to Seema’s hotel, where his bride and her group happily waited.

  I have never—never—seen anyone as happy as Seema looks when Scott emerges from the cab. I watch him get out of the car, kiss her on the cheek, and whisper something in her ear.

  She bursts out laughing.

  Then she looks at me, standing by the cab to pay the driver, and mouths, Thank you.

  I must be grinning from ear to ear, and I nod my head slightly and watch the two of them as they lead both families to the first ceremony of the day.

  And there was much rejoicing.

  Oh, except Seema’s future mother-in-law was already tanked on vodka gimlets and had been hitting on Seema’s dad in the lobby while I was gone. But what family can’t say that?

  TWENTY-SIX

  The first wedding ceremony of the day was beautiful, colorful, exotic, and romantic. After Scott led the groom’s party to the bride’s group, we all danced over to the ceremony site.

  I have never been to such a colorful wedding. Many of the female wedding guests are dressed in saris and lehengas in vibrant hues of all sorts of colors: pink, purple, green, blue, every shade of the rainbow, and many wear bangle bracelets in gold and other colors.

  I’ve also never heard a wedding so loud. But in a good way.

  At the site, the mandap has been built as a stage over the hotel pool, which also had a makeshift fire pit in the middle of it. The best of fire and water.