No One Tells You This

by Glynnis MacNicol

  Asking a single woman to give the toast at her best friend’s wedding the same week she turns forty sounds like a bad punch line, or the tagline to a film I would only watch on cable reruns when I had the flu. In the movie version, of course, the main character would not be forty. She’d be much younger. In My Best Friend’s Wedding, Julia Roberts’s character is twenty-seven. According to the setup, she and her best (male) friend once made a promise that if they weren’t married by twenty-eight they would marry each other. Instead he’s marrying Cameron Diaz, whose character is twenty. Jealous hijinks ensue. Julia does not get her man. Instead, the story leaves her dancing in the arms of her gay best friend, Rupert Everett. “Maybe there won’t be marriage,” he says. “Maybe there won’t be sex. But by God, there’ll be dancing.” In 1997, the year the film was released in theaters, this was admittedly a somewhat bold story line move and launched the I’ll just marry my gay best friend film and TV franchise that was so popular in the late nineties. But behind the subverted happily-ever-after there was, of course, the assurance that Julia, aged twenty-seven, still had many years of potential love and life ahead of her before things would get really dire.

  It’s the same assurance Billy Crystal gives to Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally (1989) after she discovers her ex-boyfriend is getting married. “Why didn’t he want to marry me?” she wails. “What’s the matter with me?” And then: “No, no, no. I drove him away. And I’m going to be forty!” Here Billy Crystal swoops in. “In eight years,” he says pragmatically. Translation: there’s still time.

  Which was literally what a nice older woman at Mauri’s wedding party assured me of after she wished me happy birthday.

  It was the Sunday afternoon after I’d made my mad dash to the Rockaways, and I was standing at a small table in a backyard in New Jersey with Maddy, Ally, and Kara, three women I’d known since my early twenties, when we all, Mauri included, worked together at the Cedar Tavern in Greenwich Village. Mauri had married Ben a few days before my birthday at Manhattan’s City Hall, with only their immediate families and me in attendance. Now they were throwing a big party at Ben’s parents’ house near the Jersey Shore for everyone else.

  It was approaching 5:00 p.m., and the party was in full swing around us. It looked like a picnic from Brooklyn’s Prospect Park had simply been lifted up and transplanted into Jersey; the women were in sundresses, and most of the men sported beards. The sun blazed through the sweeping leafy green trees onto the lawn, where a dance floor had been placed. Mauri’s now-husband, Ben, owned a wine bar in Brooklyn, and there were huge silver ice buckets along the walls of his parents’ home, filled with bottles of champagne and rosé.

  I’d been recounting the sudden reappearance of 646 on my fortieth birthday, a story which itself sounded like a questionable plotline for a romantic comedy. Just as I’d been making my way back into the city, feeling victorious, he’d texted me to warn me he was going to be in the gossip pages the following day because he’d been sleeping with a twenty-five-year-old who hadn’t taken kindly to his treatment.

  “Did he know it was your birthday?” asked Ally, frowning as though she had misheard me.

  “He was texting to warn me and to apologize. But no, he didn’t know it was my birthday.” Or he didn’t remember, I thought, thinking of his surprise appearance the year before.

  “Well, that’s bullshit,” said Kara, practically spitting out the words. “What a motherfucker.” Kara had the skin of a twenty-two-year-old and the mouth of a truck driver, and she taught special education and English to sixth graders in Brooklyn.

  “That’s really all he wanted to tell you?” asked Maddy skeptically.

  I nodded.

  “Well, that’s nice, at least. The apology, I mean,” offered Ally hopefully. “At least he’s thinking about you.” Ally lived in Los Angeles, and after some spots in commercials, now made a living as a successful voice actress.

  That had been my initial reaction, too. As if I should be grateful he thought enough of me to let me know I was right in thinking he’d treated me badly. It had quickly worn off. “I suppose. I think he just likes apologizing. It’s like a performance piece: something else he can get applause for. He also said that he’s working on himself.”

  “Like fucking hell,” said Kara.

  “It would have been nice if he’d tried to imagine how you felt before he found out it was being published in the gossip pages,” said Maddy flatly.

  “I just don’t get it,” said Ally. “All that texting. What did he want? It’s bizarre.”

  I had spent months wondering the same thing. Wondering, just like Meg Ryan’s Sally: What was wrong with me? Wondering if I had a right to be upset. And then eventually wondering why I had let it go on. I had interviewed a professional matchmaker for a story once, and she had taken a long look at me and said, “People who are unavailable attract unavailable people.” Only recently had I started wondering what was wrong with him.

  “I think it was an emotional blow job,” I said. “Getting off on knowing he still had me on the hook.” It pained me to say it. It was easier to believe there was something wrong with me than admit someone whom I had held on to for so long had considered me so disposable.

  “That is fucking sick,” said Kara. Her fury made me feel better; I tossed it back as though she had handed me a shot. It was Kara who’d first trained me to be a waitress. She’d been “living” on a mattress in the corner of a yoga studio on St. Mark’s Place and Third Ave., which she had to vacate every day between 7:00 a.m. and 10:00 p.m. so classes could be held there. She was always pissed off she couldn’t convince our manager to put Bikini Kill on the jukebox, an anger lost on me at the time since I had no idea who Bikini Kill was.

  “I guess. But I was in it, too. Maybe I’m the star fucker.” I said this not because I really thought it was true, but because I was hoping it wasn’t. As much as I trusted them to tell me the truth, I also counted on them to be kinder to me than I was able to be to myself.

  “You’re not a star fucker,” said Maddy so calmly it was as if she were giving the temperature. It was comforting to hear her say it, but I also knew it would take way more than this for Maddy to think I’d done something wrong or behaved stupidly. Maddy was the native New Yorker among us. She’d had the sort of chaotic, traumatic upbringing that in the movies is trotted out as a courtroom defense for major felonies. We’d met seventy-two hours after I’d landed in New York, at a coffee shop in SoHo where we both worked; I was just past twenty-three; she was twenty-one—a year and a half younger, but decades older in experience. By the time we’d met, she was living with her much older boyfriend, whom she’d moved in with when she was sixteen, and co-owned her own vintage clothing store in the city. She had both a cell phone and a pager, which in 1997 was exotic. She schooled me on the importance of maintaining good credit in order to be able to sign a lease. That was years and years ago. She was married now, and living in a house in Brooklyn with her husband and daughter, doing school runs and scheduling play dates. The fact that she had managed to construct outward markings of a conventional life always struck me as the most wildly unconventional outcome of her story. Nonetheless, it was nearly impossible to shock or offend her.

  “It’s pretty intoxicating to have someone shower that much attention on you,” Ally said kindly.

  “He’s a fucking psychopath,” said Kara.

  It was at this point that one of Mauri’s relatives, an older woman with short fluffy hair and heavily lined lips, came to the table and Mauri introduced her around before floating back away.

  “You must be Glynnis,” the woman said, her Southern accent floating through the New Jersey backyard like a heavily scented perfume. Mauri was from a small town in Tennessee, where most of her family still lived. “I’ve heard so much about you. You’re the person Mauri always travels with. The pictures of y’all’s trips are so incredible. What adventures you two have. I hear you just had a birthday.”

  “I did,” I
said, smiling at the y’all.

  “Well, my goodness, you’d never know it. You look wonderful.”

  No one I knew looked their age anymore, or looked how women past a certain age were supposed to look. Decades of drinking eight glasses of water a day and slathering on sunblock had apparently paid off. But I took the compliment in the spirit it was meant.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  She leaned in and placed her hand reassuringly on mine. “And don’t worry, dear,” she said conspiratorially. “I know it will still happen for you. There’s still time.”

  There it was. I could feel the reaction of the table without turning, as though it were the shadow of a villain in cartoon movies, growing ominously behind me. They weren’t affronted on their own behalf. All three of them were married; Maddy’s and Kara’s children were playing together on the still-empty dance floor. They were offended on my behalf, at the idea that anyone could think of my life as lacking. Too much of my life was their life, too. When we talked about ourselves we tended to use the first-person plural.

  I didn’t have many practical skills, but I did have a genius for friendship. I didn’t have a best friend; I had best friends. I didn’t have a group of close friends; I had groups of close friends. These women were the inner core. No doubt, if I’d landed in an office after I left school, I would have collected a similar group of friends, people I could return to over the years to talk about our shared foundation. But there was something particular about the bond formed sprinting to and fro across a floor, food and drink and cash in hand, for hours on end. Hours that became years. There was a strange carnal connection between us, too, borne of the fact that we had waited tables together for so long, and, in the case of Maddy and Mauri, had lived together.

  There was no infrastructure to our jobs. No human resources to complain to, or sick leave, or benefits, or mentors. We became those things for one another. When a customer got handsy or physical or abusive, we passed them off and then cut them off, and on the rare occasions that didn’t work, the baseball bat might come out from behind the bar and they’d be physically removed by the bartender and the line of regulars who emerged behind him.

  We had no parents who stepped in to supplement the rent. Or college networks, or Ivy League connections; I would be well into my media career before I realized the latter even existed. We were those things to one another, too. For most of our twenties we’d lived in the racing, relentless now. In shared physical space. We knew without looking how the other person moved and when; we stepped around one another like choreographed dancers, forever keeping our drink trays from landing on the floor. The service station had space for only one plate of food when we got hungry, and one shared pint glass of soda, which one of us surreptitiously poured half a bottle of wine into partway through our eleven-hour-shifts-with-no-breaks. To this day, when we had dinner together, the unspoken assumption was that we were ordering as a group. We knew each other’s horoscopes, crushes, boyfriends, one-night stands, birth control preferences, sleep habits. There were no secrets; our shifts were too long, and too intense; secrets didn’t stand a chance. Our social lives were inextricably intertwined. Our after-work drinks took place at 4:00 a.m. once the gate had been pulled down. Sometime around 6:00 a.m. we’d bike home over the bridge to our apartments.

  All of this had woven a decade of our lives together so tightly that our formative years seemed nearly indistinguishable from one another’s. It was more than ten years since that job had ended, and we still had the ability to start conversations as if we’d just seen one another the day before.

  I never had to explain myself to these women. Even if they thought I was being stupid, I knew they were still on my side.

  But much to my surprise, I didn’t need to lean on my collective self to navigate around this nice woman who thought she was providing me comfort by assuring me that, despite my age, I appeared to be someone to whom things could still happen. That, despite all available evidence, there was probably someone out there still who would be willing to fill up the vacant space that was so evident inside me. For a minute I felt all the old defense mechanisms go up, like metal toward a magnet. I took a deep breath and prepared to deliver my well-rehearsed responses: to throw up my hands in defeat and remark on how the good ones were taken, or check my wrist dramatically and say, I hope they hurry up! Or just simply nod my gratitude and implicitly offer up my apology that I was still alone. All the things I was used to saying to get out of this conversation and make the other person feel more comfortable. Instead, I found myself resisting the urge to laugh. Not at her. At the suddenly absurd idea that I was running out of time. I was no longer running, I realized. I was off the clock.

  “I have to tell you,” I said, making sure there was not one ounce of defensiveness in my voice, “I think it’s going to be pretty great even if it doesn’t happen.”

  I could see confusion flicker across her face like a shadow over the sun, and then she smiled and excused herself, and I promptly felt guilty. I knew her comment had been meant kindly; it had likely never occurred to her I could be feeling anything but bad. It hadn’t really started to occur to me until a few days ago.

  “Yeah, don’t worry, Glynnis,” said Maddy flatly, refilling my wine. “I’m pretty sure it’s not over yet.”

  “Yeah, what the fuck does that mean?” said Kara. “Like you need a fucking man for things to happen to you?”

  Mauri glided by the table on her rounds and took a large swig out of my glass of rosé. It would never have crossed her mind that asking me to give a toast this week might have been considered by some to be loaded; she never saw me as lacking. “Whew, this is a lot,” she said, gesturing to the party crowd who all wanted their moment with her. She’d put the white slip dress she’d been married in back on and pinned the white netting back on her sleek bob. She looked like a vintage photograph someone would put on their wedding inspiration board.

  “I’m still working on my wedding toast,” I said. “I should warn you, I might end up getting up there and reciting the old restaurant beer list.”

  Ally rolled her eyes. “You haven’t written it yet?”

  Maddy, with relief: “Oh good, you can speak for all of us.”

  Mauri laughed. “I’m sure whatever you do will be fine.”

  She meant it, too. This was the glue of our friendship, for better or worse.

  Mauri was eight years younger than me, but unlike most people I knew, had managed to slide through her twenties unencumbered by self-doubt or anxiety about getting things done by a certain point. The first time I’d met her, on her first or second waitress training shift, I’d asked her if she was on drugs because she seemed inexplicably cheerful. She’d always thought this was hysterical, even though I’d been dead serious. She’d arrived in New York to be a dancer, and eventually after touring with a small company, opened a home goods store in Brooklyn.

  Mauri was also the person I most often traveled with, always willing to jump aboard my latest whim. I’ve just watched the episode of Mad Men where Don disappears to Palm Springs. Let’s go. I’d written her one night shortly after midnight a few years earlier. I’d been working twelve hours a day, seven days a week for more than a year and had finally finagled a week off. The idea of disappearing was making me drool; did she want to fly to Vegas with me and rent a car and drive around the desert for a week? I’m in!!! How do we make this happen? came the response the next morning. The following year, when I was planning my first-ever paid vacation, I texted her again: Plane tickets to Barcelona just dropped below $500, feel like a Spanish road trip? An hour later: Ok I’m in! Want to book these tonight or in the morning?

  It was always I’m in. It had been like that even when we were waiting tables, and our trips had been limited to days at Jacob Riis beach in Queens or house-sitting gigs an hour upstate. Or merely a last-minute drink at Bemelmans, where we’d “dress for the day we wanted” and skip dinner so as to afford the martini, counting on the fact that
the bow-tied server would continually restock the free snack bowl of chips and nuts. She was my partner in my favorite version of my life. And now she was officially not. She was in with someone else.

  I’d been thinking for the past few days about what I should say in my toast. I wanted to avoid the usual jokes and saccharine reminiscences and figure out how to recognize that it wasn’t just Mauri’s life that was dramatically shifting, but also what that meant to those around her. Particularly our friendship. When I’d watched her exchange her vows in a little corner room at City Hall, I felt myself beat back the familiar sensation brought on by the knowledge that I was about to be called upon to rearrange my life again. It was a mix of panic and resentment. I’d been through this before, many times. It sometimes felt like my thirties were an updated version of the old children’s game Ten Little Indians (which no doubt goes by a different name these days); every year someone exited to marriage or babies, until now at age forty, there were none.

  For a while this disappearing act had been literal. I’d lived with Maddy and Mauri for many years; they were a support system I’d relied on for more than a decade. And then in very short order they had all moved out and in with husbands or boyfriends.

  We had all survived that with our friendships intact. But as I had watched Mauri and Ben exchange vows, I could feel myself steeling against the knowledge I was about to have my foundation knocked out again, and there was nothing I could do to stop it. I struggled to figure out how to articulate these emotions without sounding envious. There was no way to talk about any of this being hard without casting myself squarely in the role of the bitter, jealous friend.

  I wasn’t envious of Mauri. If anything, I was envious of our past lives together, and I was mourning a life I was losing. The resentment, I’d realized, was rooted in the fact that I never had any control over this upending of my life. It had never occurred to me that I was allowed to do anything but silently accept it. The fact that no one acknowledged that I had anything to be upset about made it all that much worse. It was hard work to root yourself so deeply in life that you could still love people and rely on them, knowing at any point they could make decisions that would leave you scrambling to find solid ground again. This was the better or worse of friendship, undeclared. What I wanted was for there to exist some way for me to say I’m happy and sad and not jealous all at the same time, and also This is a loss and is still beautiful. Maybe that was the wedding toast. We are really the ones giving you away. And it’s hard. And I will miss our life. And I am still so happy for your happiness. And so proud of you.