I Never Promised You a Goodie Bag

by Jennifer Gilbert

  First, I started a company that swallowed me whole and gave me no time to think or pause. Then, as if that wasn’t enough to overwhelm me, I broke up with Jimmy. The launch of my company was a welcome distraction—even if the timing was a little ill-advised. But breaking up with Jimmy at that moment was so insane that it was self-destructive.

  I told myself that Jimmy and I weren’t really meant for each other. Travel was my passion, and he’d never left the country. He liked football, and I hated it. We wanted different things from work and life. None of those reasons for breaking up with him were wrong per se, but they weren’t the real catalyst for me choosing that exact moment to end what had been a perfectly happy relationship. In truth, the rational me went into high gear and wanted to protect Jimmy from the chaos that was about to ensue.

  Falling in love with Jimmy, I’d let my guard down. He allowed me to be vulnerable, and in return I didn’t put up any walls with him. But the soft, needy person that I could be with Jimmy would never survive what I was about to endure. So I walked away from that sweet, steady man and went back to work constructing my walls.

  It’s of course deeply ironic that while I was running away from my own long-term relationship, it was my job to plan weddings for other young couples. I could always be far more optimistic on someone else’s behalf than I could for myself.

  Planning someone’s event, particularly a wedding, is a very intimate and complicated process. Most couples don’t know exactly what they want when they meet with me, and it’s my job to figure out what their dream feels like, or looks like. Sometimes all I get is a song they love or a color. One couple said, “We feel strongly that it’s all about blue.” Now I’m thinking, Blue like a Smurf-themed wedding, or blue lighting, or simply blue hydrangeas on the tables? It’s my job to figure out what they really mean. Sometimes I know what they want by eliminating what they don’t want, so I can create some ideas from the other end of the spectrum. A couple might say, “We want something totally different,” but when I show them a raw industrial loft space they say, “Oh, not that different.” So then I realize that to them, “different” just means that they don’t want it in a hotel ballroom. It’s all a matter of asking the right questions, and all of us being open to the discovery. I become part detective and part therapist. By letting people reveal their fears, desires, and needs to me, I can piece together their perfect event. This all seemed perfectly logical to me, except for the fact that I was the one in desperate need of that same self-examination and therapy.

  Of course there are times that even my on-the-job event therapy still isn’t enough for some persnickety clients. I remember one particular wedding when the bride actually locked herself in a bathroom not once but twice during the reception. Each time she threatened not to come out, and each time I had to lure her back to her own wedding by painting a happy picture of her married bliss.

  She was the perfect example of what I’ve come to call binder brides. They’re the women who walk into our first meeting to plan their wedding with a loose-leaf binder stuffed full of pictures and ideas that they’ve been collecting since the age of five. In my experience, these women are almost impossible to please—no wedding can ever live up to their outsize expectations. They forget about the meaning of their upcoming event, including their fiancé’s feelings, because for them it’s all about the fantasy they created years ago. Usually I’d figure out a way not to work with brides like that, but sometimes I went back on my own rules. This particular bride, Bunny (her given name was Madeline), had come to our first meeting with everything she wanted for her wedding already booked (and neatly filed away in her binder, of course). She’d picked the florist and the band and reserved the Central Park Boathouse months before she even got my name as a planner. The only thing she wanted me to do was coordinate the day of, with neither my input nor my opinions.

  The wedding was set for the beginning of September, and back then the Boathouse wasn’t air-conditioned. I strongly advised the bride about one hundred times to bring in portable air conditioners, because September in Manhattan can be hot and humid. But her father was watching the budget, and he insisted my suggestion was unnecessary. A hot reception is a miserable reception, and so I begged them at least to pay a deposit to reserve the air conditioners—then they could decide a few days before if they’d need them. Still the answer was NO.

  Inevitably, the wedding reception was a disaster from beginning to end. The first time Bunny fled to the bathroom, it was at the sight of the centerpieces. They were supposed to be huge topiaries in the shape of bears (to me they looked like Edward Scissorhands meets The Three Little Bears). Bunny called her fiancé Wade her “little bear” (they were a match made in Noah’s Ark) and thought that would be a great idea for a floral theme. Bear centerpieces? Sort of random, but to each her own. Unfortunately, Bunny thought that the topiaries came out looking more like monkeys, sort of bears but with oddly shaped tails, and she was apoplectic. She ran into the bathroom in a rage, screaming, “It’s not at all like the photo I showed my florist!” Then she locked herself in a stall.

  I could have just thrown up my hands—after all, the bride’s nervous breakdown over floral arrangements she had chosen way before she chose me wasn’t really my responsibility. But the secret, hidden romantic inside of me couldn’t bear to see a beautiful wedding ruined over something that couldn’t be changed at that point. So while she cried, I told her how lovely the wedding was, and how lucky she was to have found the man she wanted to spend the rest of her life with. I said what a miracle it was that everyone she loved was just outside that door ready to celebrate with her. When she continued to rail about the monkey/bear topiaries, I said, “Bunny, honey, they are on the tables and your guests are all seated. No one knows what they were supposed to look like but you, so you need to move on now and enjoy your wedding!” I said she could call the florist and rant after the honeymoon, but right now was not the time. Finally, she stopped crying and came out. But that’s not the end of the story.

  So of course it was a gorgeous September day that hit eighty degrees. We were all warm, but she had on this enormous dress—her dream dress, but the last dress you’d want to wear on a Saturday afternoon in a park with no air-conditioning. I tell every client, “Practical is beautiful.” But that advice wasn’t going to help this client, not now. There she was, in layers and layers of heavy and HOT satin. After the first dance set she was dripping, and her makeup was a mess. She was already emotional, and the heat pushed her over the edge. I saw another breakdown coming, and I said, “Let’s get you into the ladies’ room and clean you up.”

  While I was getting out her blow dryer, she was looking through her makeup bag and she had to pee, so she unzipped her huge dress and went into the stall with her bag. Somehow she thought it would be a great idea to pour baby powder all over her body, and instead of soaking up her sweat it had combined with the sweat to form a thick white paste (think cement or papier-mâché). When she emerged from the stall, she looked more like a kabuki stripper than a bride, and then she started screaming at me, “GOD DAMN IT, HELP ME!” We were both in a complete panic. She tried to pull her dress back on, but her skin was so sticky that the satin wouldn’t budge. Before I could tell her not to force it, she yanked and we both heard a rip, and her shrieking rose a good few octaves. I took her by the shoulders and said, “Stop! Take the whole thing off and back away from the dress.”

  Bunny was a full-figured woman, and was standing in her blue thong (I guess that was the something blue) in front of me and freaking out. Since we’d been away from the reception a good ten minutes and the speeches were scheduled to start, everyone no doubt would be looking for the bride. I told her, “This is your day, nothing starts without the bride.” This was a bit of a crisis, and first things first. It was humid, a zillion degrees in that little bathroom, and we had to get her dress back on. I had to apply wet towels to scrape the paste off, then blow-dry her body, the
n get her (painfully) back into the dress, fix her hair, and send her back to the crowd. She looked at me and said, “Everything’s ruined, my whole wedding is ruined!”

  Once again I told her how loved she was, and how sometimes things go wrong, but it would be okay—only I knew what was happening, and the love of her life was outside waiting for her. This time, though, I could see that my words weren’t hitting their mark. I’d lost her. She stopped crying, but instead of going back to her reception with a smile on her face, she looked grim. There was no way anything was going to meet her expectations, and instead of just enjoying what she did have, she had a bit of a scowl on her face for the rest of the day. I forever thought to myself, Beware of the binder bride; you’ll never make her happy.

  I learned an interesting lesson from Bunny and her wedding. I saw the shadow side of having fixed expectations. They are an awfully hard thing to live up to. If you spend your time measuring your reality against your fantasy, you’re inevitably going to lose the joy of just being in that moment. This holds true for events, relationships, business, and life. Bunny taught me that some people just don’t know how to be happy, and they will never look at the bright side. And that’s not a person I want around me in any situation.

  While I was building my company and ending my relationship of two years, I was also deeply involved in every detail of Nicolette’s upcoming wedding. Nicolette and I had met on my first day of freshman year at UVM. There was some sort of magnetic pull that brought us together, and we were inseparable. We’d grown as close as family in the three years that we lived together at college. She was a year ahead of me in school, and during that time she became the slightly older sister I’d never had. We used to laugh and say, “She’s my sister from another mother.” She was outspoken and confident, and I learned so much from being around her. While I was from the suburbs and relatively naive, she was sophisticated and worldly, the only daughter of a close-knit, loving Greek family that lived in the Bahamas. I spent most holidays with her family there, and they all opened their arms to me.

  Nicolette’s wedding would have been momentous for me anyway—here was one of my dearest friends embarking on a new life we had always dreamed about—and on top of it she had chosen me as her maid of honor. She had a six-pack of friends of her own and was extremely close with them, but she had asked me to be the only attendant in her side of the wedding party; it was just me and a mass of groomsmen. I was touched and honored, while also feeling no small degree of pressure to perform. Nicolette’s fiancé, Hans, came from a prominent Norwegian family, so the wedding was going to be a spectacular international event—we only half jokingly called it “the coronation.” Her soon-to-be in-laws actually began referring to me as Nicolette’s lady-in-waiting.

  A serious breakup, a new company, and your best friend’s wedding are enough to send anyone in for counseling, but then that little time bomb inside me blew up. I was alone in the apartment I shared with Deanna and Rachel when the phone rang. It was the district attorney’s office, telling me that the trial had been scheduled to start just days after I returned from the Bahamas. When Rachel walked in a few minutes later, she found me on the kitchen floor. I was having such a powerful physiological reaction to the news that I wasn’t just crying, I’d lost all feeling in my legs. I couldn’t stand up.

  I went into therapy just to try to prepare myself to talk about the attack on the witness stand, and to emotionally survive being in the same room with the attacker. I found it so difficult to talk about the trial with the therapist, a woman named Ann, that it took me two full sessions before I could bring myself to tell her the real reason I was feeling a little stressed out. And if I couldn’t tell her, how could I ever tell a jury? If I failed to convince the judge and the jury what he’d done to me, and the attacker was acquitted . . . oh my God, what then? The terror I’d felt while standing on the other side of that one-way mirror on the day of the lineup came back to me in waves of sheer panic. After I was finally able to explain what I was going through to Ann, we then began emergency therapy, and we met three times a week.

  It didn’t hit me until the phone call from the DA’s office that I’d been in posttraumatic stress and denial for three years. How could I have achieved any kind of real closure since the attack, while knowing that the trial loomed ahead of me, and not knowing what the outcome might be? I’d managed to put a semblance of a life together—at least superficially. But internally I had never dealt with the attack, and that call propelled me into what I can only describe as a nervous breakdown.

  And yet in the two weeks before the trial, I wasn’t at home meditating and pulling my thoughts together, I was in the Bahamas with Nicolette, embarking on a dizzying number of wedding-week events. There were parties upon parties, and endless details. It was an exciting, highly effective distraction, enabling me to keep busy doing instead of thinking. In between tearful heartfelt speeches, outfit changes, and fits of giddy disbelief with Nicolette, I would suddenly feel a pang of terror. I had this secret internal countdown to the trial, and I couldn’t talk about it to anyone. Who wanted to be Debbie Downer at this unbelievable wedding? So on went my red lipstick, and I concentrated on my friend’s special day.

  There was one unexpected oasis during that adrenaline-fueled week that gave me solace. My parents had been invited to the wedding, and one day my father came back from scuba diving describing the most magical place he’d ever seen. For my father to rave like that, I knew it had to be heaven, because in our sailing days we had seen every pristine beach that part of the world had to offer. He said it was a tiny little island two hours from Nassau by boat. There wasn’t time for me to see it myself, but I kept an image of that little island in my mind, and it became a vision of peace in the midst of the chaos, soothing me in the weeks that followed.

  By the time I got back to New York, even I had to admit that I needed more help than I’d been letting on. My therapist was guiding me through coping with testimony, but meanwhile I ached for Jimmy in a profound way.

  When it finally hit me what a mistake I’d made—at least in my lousy sense of timing—I did my best to explain things to him. Miraculously, he took me back. He’d been devastated and uncomprehending when I’d broken up with him, and I couldn’t expect him to fully trust me again. But he was too big a person to abandon me during the trial. He was one of the few who truly understood the road I’d traveled to get to this point, and what this next leg in the journey would take out of me.

  Chapter Seven

  Miss Gilbert, This Is Going to Be Very Hard for You

  I lost about fifteen pounds in the weeks leading up to Nicolette’s wedding and the trial. I lived on nothing but air, panic, and sheer force of will. While I wore all my hats of maid of honor, friend, and boss, the secret, singular focus of my life was to do my job at the trial: show up, tell my story, and finally see if the man who had been locked away all these years was indeed my attacker.

  When I heard that the charge in my case was attempted murder, my reaction was both shock and vindication. It was horrifying to hear the words that said someone had genuinely wanted to kill me, and yet it felt like a kind of proof that I wasn’t crazy. It was scary, but definitive. Now I knew for sure: I hadn’t just survived an attack, I’d survived death. It might seem obvious to anyone who heard what happened to me, but the black-and-white terms of the charge against him were a revelation to me. No longer could I even try to downplay what had happened.

  By the time my trial was scheduled, the alleged attacker had already been tried for his assault of the first woman, but it had ended in a hung jury. That attack took place on a set of subway steps, and it should have been a straightforward case of assault, but just one juror held out, and they couldn’t reach a decision. The third victim had been so damaged—I’d heard there were broken bones in her face and possibly even severe injuries to her eyes—that she hadn’t been able to identify her attacker. This meant that I was now the
only remaining victim who could say with certainty that he was the man who had done these horrible things.

  The burden to put him away was all on my case, and I felt enormous pressure. Meanwhile, the last time I’d seen the attacker was through a one-way mirror, and I’d been so terrified that I’d actually identified the wrong man. As soon as I walked out of the lineup, I knew I’d made a mistake, and although I tried to correct it, I was afraid it would come back to haunt me during the trial. I dreaded being asked about the lineup, and the fear that I’d done irreparable damage to the case kept me up at night and closed my throat when I tried to eat. I was frightened of failing, and even more terrified at the thought of the attacker being acquitted and once again walking the streets—while knowing my name and everything about me.

  These are some of the things I’d learn after I’d testified.

  They called the attacker Mr. Clean in prison because he had a thing about keeping his clothes clean, and he obsessively washed his hands until they were raw.

  Prior to the lineup, he had been identified from the posters all over town by someone he worked with at Street News. The first place the police looked for him was at the Laundromat where he always cleaned his clothes.

  They finally caught him in Penn Station with a ticket to Boston in his hand. Not knowing this particular detail, I’d headed to Boston myself just a few weeks later.

  It was early June 1994 when the jury trial began. It took place in one of the large, formal courtrooms in the New York City Criminal Courthouse at 100 Centre Street. The lead prosecutor for the Manhattan district attorney’s office was a woman named Margaret Finerty. Tall and attractive, probably somewhere in her early to mid-forties, she came across as focused and aggressive. She was sympathetic but she didn’t try to get emotionally involved with me—she was very much my image of the cut-and-dried all-business trial lawyer.