Borrow-A-Bridesmaid

by Anne Wagener

  As if to remind me of this, the happy couple stops by the table, and Stacey reaches down to give me a heartfelt hug. I take a deep breath so the anger will recede enough for me to return the hug with genuine warmth. She steps back and raises her voice so Kalil can hear. “Please stay as long as you’d like, and eat some more food!” Kalil holds up his samosa, and she nods. “Enjoy!”

  She and Raj beam as they move past us to greet the next set of guests. As I watch them move away, fingers linked together, the fissure in my emotional dam cracks open, and I can’t hold back the waters.

  I return his gaze and imagine my eyes flashing. I’m not really sure what it means for eyes to flash, but I sure as hell hope mine do. I picture a lightning bolt in each pupil. “I can’t pretend to say I understand what it’s like for you with your mom. I don’t. I haven’t been there. But I didn’t ask to be put through all that.” I drop my voice almost to a hiss. “I just wanted the decency of being let out the fucking front door.”

  His lips part. His beautiful, full, bullshitting lips have finally stopped moving and are frozen in a little O of surprise.

  I’ve never talked this way to anyone, only in my wildest dreams. It’s exhilarating and terrifying at the same time. I feel as if I’m going to blast up on a current of steam through the ceiling, and it buoys me for what I know I have to do next. Fixing him with my best steely glare, I say, “Get out.”

  When he doesn’t move, the urge begins ticking again, counting down with each pulse of blood in my temples. When he still doesn’t move, the last tick has tocked. I calmly take my mango lassi from the table and slip it under the cover of the tablecloth. In one swift movement, I pour the contents of the cup on his crotch.

  “Philosophize about that, asshole,” I mutter under my breath as his eyes go wide and he makes a quick exit, dripping lassi all the way.

  Twenty-One

  The following Tuesday Alex comes around the corner of my cube, and her eyelined eyes widen. I look up from my seat—where I am literally swimming in three-ring binders—and meet her gaze.

  “Did they—” she starts.

  “Assign me to Billy? Yes. What tipped you off, the Everest-sized stacks of binder dividers? Or the task spreadsheet with its own special column for my completion times, to the second?” I hold up a tabloid-size printout.

  Quick profile of my new boss: William J. Smathers III; thirty-seven; metrosexual; lover of all things expensive; immaculately dressed and even more immaculately organized. Favorite catchphrases and, incidentally, phrases I’ll be okay with never hearing again the rest of my life: “Pop that in my inbox”; “No, no, NO!” (said in quick succession and with increasing intensity); and “Bubble up.” I haven’t seen his Facebook profile, but I bet his picture alone would set off any decent woman’s douche-o-meter. His diction is sharp, each word delineated as with one of his precious color-coded binder dividers. I secretly call him BILLY! in an exaggerated Southern accent. Billy, Billy, BILLY!

  My encounters with Billy remind me of conversations I had with a counselor I saw during college for social anxiety, who was always trying to get me to go into the subtexts of my interactions with people: “What message did you take away from your interaction with that person?” For Billy, the answer is unflinchingly: He thinks I am about as important and worthy as a scab. Productive and useful, perhaps, but a bit itchy and icky to look at.

  Alex perches on my desk and picks up one of the binders. “Wow. I always heard he was OCD.”

  I pick up a matching binder, pinching a divider tab between my thumb and forefinger. “Yellow tabs for year-end reports, blue tabs for client profiles, green for revenue tracking. He also gets a cappuccino every two hours.”

  “What happens if he doesn’t get a cappuccino?”

  “I have yet to find out, but I’d imagine he turns into the Hulk.”

  “I’d kind of like to see that.” She sets down the binder and inspects me more closely. “You’re different this morning.” She pushes her glasses farther down her nose and looks at me over the top of glittery pink frames. “You had sex last night. Didn’t you?” She pokes me, then crosses her arms, matron-style. “Dirty, sweaty sex. And it was fantastic, wasn’t it? Oh my God! Who is he? Tell me every last detail.”

  “Gross! No.”

  “Well, what is it, then? Third base, at least. You don’t get that kind of glow from anything less.”

  “Third base? What are we, middle-schoolers?”

  “Fun fact,” she says, holding up a finger. “No one ever let me in on the whole base-system lingo until college. I always thought people were playing a lot of baseball.”

  I sigh. “I was playing neither literal nor metaphorical baseball last night.”

  Her eyes twinkle. “Maybe you went to the batting cages alone and did some practice hits?”

  “Alex!” I pick up the binder on my lap, snap it closed, and glare at her. “No baseball. Whatsoever.”

  “What is it, then?”

  I groan. “If Billy comes looking for his year-end report, I’m blaming you for putting me two minutes past my ETA.”

  “Trust me, I can handle Billy.”

  “Okay. Remember that guy I told you about, the one who shut me in his closet? I poured a drink on his crotch.”

  Alex blinks and pushes her glasses back up her nose. “You go, girl!”

  “Apparently, after being taught my entire life to express my feelings passive-aggressively, I’ve transitioned to expressing them just plain aggressively.”

  “This is huge! You’re so cute. Like, you lost your anger virginity. Now, listen—imagine if you put that kind of energy into other areas of your life.” She sighs, gesturing at the folders covering every square inch of my cubicle. “I feel responsible for getting you into this job. You hate it here, don’t you?”

  I survey the place. Behind Alex, the gray walls seem to stretch on for infinity, reminding me of the perspective drawings I used to do in middle school, where straight lines move gradually closer to create an illusion of indefinite distance. Directly behind Alex is a photograph of a man on top of what looks like Mount Kilimanjaro, sipping his coffee and typing on a laptop. I want to punch the picture into the cosmos.

  I close my eyes. “Yes, God help me, yes. I hate this place. Though I’m so, so appreciative to you for helping me get a steady paycheck.” I don’t want Alex to think I’m ungrateful.

  “And what are you going to do about it?”

  I fill her in on the City Paper article contest and potential job opportunity. “But I’ve got to get another gig. If I can put this article together, get published, get my foot in the door, it would at least feel like a tentative step in the right direction.”

  She’s nodding. “I’ll help you get another gig. I feel horrible that I got you this job, and now it’s turned into—” She gestures around us. “A binder orgy.”

  I give her a probing look, wishing I had my own pair of glasses to push down the bridge of my nose. “Did you get some last night? There’s an awful lot of erotic language flying around this cubicle.”

  My phone buzzes, sending both of us on a scavenger hunt to find it underneath the binders.

  “God,” Alex says, “I hope it’s that guy, so you can tell him off again and I can witness it. I’m getting a contact high just hearing about it.”

  I finally find my phone—underneath the binder entitled “Client Communications and Consultations, 2001–2002.”

  A text message from Susan: Where are you? I need help!

  I text back: At work. What’s up?

  I have a gig for you, but only if you can make it to Alfred Angelo Bridal at Tysons mall in the next 30 min.

  Tysons Corner Center is not for the faint of wallet. This could be a high-profile job, or at least a lucrative one. But Billy has me hostage until five, and it’s only 2:37. There are twenty-one incomplete tasks on my chart.


  “Double-wide shitbag,” I mutter under my breath.

  Alex claps her hands. “There’s that anger! What now?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  Alex steps over, one of her heels piercing “Client Communications and Consultations,” and reads over my shoulder. “Who’s this from?”

  “My first client, aka Charlie’s sister.”

  “Cock-a-doodle-DAMN Charlie?” she asks. In a fit of boredom last week, I told Alex everything about Charlie. When I mentioned Lin’s and my alliteration train, she was all too eager to hop aboard.

  “Obviously, you should go,” Alex says.

  “What about Billy?”

  “What about him? I’ll create a diversion.”

  “Really?”

  Alex nods. “I’ll come up with something. Tell him I absconded with you to run some errands for me. I’ve got that man wrapped around my finger.” She holds up her pinkie. “Remind me to tell you about the time he propositioned me during a Web conference. In Wingdings font.”

  I roll my eyes. “Who hasn’t propositioned you?”

  “Get going, Ms. Anger Virgin, and tell me all about it.”

  “Of course! I owe you a drink.”

  “You owe me a double-wide margarita. Let’s make it a special Hump Day lunch tomorrow at P. J. Skidoos.”

  “Perfect.” I flash Alex a grateful smile and slip out from behind my cubicle, my heart beating in my throat. Billy is terrifying in a completely different way from Sal, in the sense that his repressed anger radiates out from his exfoliated skin and carefully groomed cuticles. Like one day, if I were to hand him a binder incorrectly color-coded, he’d burst forth from his Armani suit, buttons ricocheting off gray walls and any unfortunate coworkers in the general vicinity, and HULK SMASH me in the clavicle.

  As I escape to the parking lot, I’m struck by the recent prevalence of sneaking around in my life: escaping from Kalil’s apartment, escaping from Billy. If my life were a work of literature, Professor Quillen would lean on his desk and ask, “What themes or motifs do we see here?” And I’d raise my hand and answer, “The protagonist is in a perpetual liminal state.”

  I guess that’s what I’ve learned from college. Not any job skills—no, nothing that utilitarian—only the capability to identify my sad state with precisely the right word.

  By the time I escape to my car, a faint mustache of sweat has formed on my upper lip. The July afternoon is searing hot—as I make my way through blessedly sparse traffic, I glance down at the dash to see that the thermometer reads 101—but car air-conditioning was long ago demoted to a luxury item. I’m just glad Wulfie has been resurrected. The first stoplight I come to, I take the opportunity to pat the dashboard affectionately.

  Radio stations are all playing songs like “Hot, Hot, Hot” and “Fever.” At the next stoplight, I press the “off” button and slip in an old cassette tape. I conjure Charlie in the passenger seat, turning his freckled face toward me to sing. I visualize concentrating all of my Charlie thoughts into my fist, then I stick my hand out the window and open my palm to let the hot breeze take them away. Lin suggested once that we hold “love memorials” for our exes. Maybe that’s what I need—a semblance of closure.

  When I walk into Alfred Angelo, the air-conditioning wraps itself around me. It takes a moment or two for my eyes to adjust (sunglasses: also a luxury item), but I finally make out a U-shaped cluster of dressing rooms, each decked with floor-length mirrors inside and out. A raised platform in the middle of the U glows subtly from within. It looks more like a fashion show runway than a chain store, but this is Tysons, after all.

  Susan ambushes me, appearing from out of nowhere. “You made it! Bless you.”

  Since I’ve mostly seen her dressed for wedding occasions, I’m struck by her quasi-bohemian appearance this afternoon: ballet-style Mary Janes, huge wooden earrings, and a paisley scarf tied around her head to hold her hair back. A few curls have slipped past the scarf to frame her head like horns. Her clothes are all black—she’s come straight from rehearsal, I’m guessing—and her instrument is perched like a diligently waiting pet on a nearby chair.

  “There’s not much time to explain, and in a way I’m sorry to drag you into this, but there’s no one else who can help.”

  I blink at her. My mind, like my eyes, trying to adjust. “This is a bridesmaid gig, right? Not major surgery?”

  Susan puts her hands on my shoulders. “It’s both. You ready for this?”

  As if on cue, at the crux of the U, a dressing room door bursts open and a bride emerges. She is, by all accounts, perfect. Tall and slender, a face that could have been airbrushed, flawless hair. Blond as blond can be.

  And the dress—well, I sometimes can’t tell dresses from nightgowns, but this is a Dress with a capital D. A beaded empire waist crowns her ribs with a cascade of pearls. The rest of the dress makes elegant lines to the floor, with intricate lace covering her midsection and tapering off into the silky skirt folds like a softly snowing cloud. She seems to float onto the platform. As she does, a cavalcade of beautiful brides floats behind her in the surrounding mirrors.

  At once, all the women in the room—including me—stop what we’re doing, tilt our heads to the right, and exhale a collective “Ahh.” The estrogen is thick in the air, a blast of intense humidity despite the roaring AC. The style of the dress makes her look like a goddess—you can envision a gold band across her temples and Roman-style sandals on her feet. Though I’m sure her footwear is actually a brand of killer heels too sharp to pass through airport security. The platform, with its soft glow, lights up the bottom of the dress like thundersnow.

  And then the bride thunders: “Would someone puh-lease get me a drink? It’s like a desert in here.”

  One of the staff walks to the edge of the platform with a silver tray of mimosas. The bride wrinkles her nose. “No, no, NO! Something hydrating.”

  Her use of Billy’s catchphrase makes my gut contract. She narrows her eyes, and my first impulse is to dive behind one of the red velvet chairs and rock back and forth, whimpering. But I’ve been spotted.

  “Is this the girl?” She addresses Susan, who gives a quick nod.

  Susan whispers, “Piper, this is Holly, the bride.”

  Holly beckons me, and I take a cartoonishly large gulp. Before I reach the edge of the lighted stage, the shop door bursts open, sunlight invading the space once again, a rush of heat coating my back.

  Upon seeing whoever has walked in the door, the bride’s eyes widen, and she drops whatever hydrating bevvy she’s just been handed. “What the hell are you doing? You can’t be here!”

  Susan turns to see who’s intruded—I’m guessing the hapless groom—but I’m more interested in watching this bridal creature, who’s beautiful even in her anger. She reminds me of The Little Mermaid, when octo-witchy Ursula turns herself into a young beautiful human to ensnare Prince Eric. Yes, this woman may be evil, but she’s hot as balls. I watch as she disappears back into the dressing room, followed by a couple of supplicant staff members holding bottles of Perrier and cooling hand cream. I smile to myself, hoping to catch a purple tentacle slithering under the dressing room door as it closes. Then I stop smiling. This is my new boss. What Inferno circle am I in now? Wrath? Pride?

  Susan catches up to me. “He’s here. I should have prepped you—I know you two got pretty cozy at my wedding. I had no idea he’d show up here.”

  A strange feeling revs in my gut, like someone trying to start a lawn mower. The cord is taut, there are some grumbling noises, but the engine hasn’t quite turned over.

  That’s when I turn around and see a man standing at the store entrance. A beautiful, beautiful man wearing an “I Love Yeats” tie.

  Twenty-Two

  Before I can even think to be mad at him—before I can wonder whether he was engaged when he kissed me—I think about
how he’s a total sexpot. Big brown anime eyes, dimples, tie askew. Oh, Charlie.

  But that’s me thinking with my ovaries: my own little minions, all clamoring and giggles and mischief. Poking each other, they say: “Should we hump him? Let’s hump him! Evolution favors dimples!”

  I put a hand on my abdomen. Silence!

  After the hormone cloud passes, I close my eyes and breeze through the first four stages of grief.

  Denial: Maybe I haven’t had enough coffee today and this isn’t even real. I’m hallucinating. If I’m not hallucinating, maybe I’m dead. Maybe I was tragically killed in a fit of Billy rage, and my body is lying behind the scanner while my soul lingers in this strange brand of purgatory.

  Anger: Check out this smooth talker! Had me in his clutches one minute, engaged the next. God, maybe I was his last hurrah before tying the knot! Reassuring himself that he still had the old charm before locking it down under the heel of Holly’s Golden Goddess Shoes.

  Bargaining: I’ll be the best bridesmaid ever, just please don’t let this be the groom. Let Billy be the groom. Anyone but Charlie.

  Depression: Maybe I’ll sit in one of those red velvet chairs and never get up again.

  I linger in this fourth stage. In slow motion, all the thoughts and feelings I’ve carried around in my heart in the month since we kissed flash before my eyes. I summoned a Ghost of Relationships Future: the two of us at coffee shops, me doodling a heart at the top of his notebook while he hashes out dialogue. Getting to know his body’s personality. Finding his fault lines of sensitivity—I guessed he liked to be touched in unexpected places: the arch of his foot, behind his ear.

  All this longing exits my heart through a trapdoor and spills into my gut, where it makes my intestines spasm. I try to reconcile my feelings about him with the reality of his being engaged to octo-witchy.