by R. R. Banks
"Right. All the white. OK. No coffee. Check. Water? Pastry? Is there anything I can bring you?"
"I won't be eating another pastry until after my honeymoon. I have to look perfect in my dress."
That’s a lot of perfection.
"Noted. Alright, then I will see you soon."
"Hurry! Our appointment is in fifteen minutes!"
Damn. Thea had only been engaged for two weeks, and I was already the worst maid of honor ever. Maid of dishonor, really. I sighed, thinking about my own permanently single status. Old maid of dishonor.
I hung up the phone and rushed out of the office, leaving Kevin standing there expectantly. Terri looked at me with the skillful I-told-you-so expression she has cultivated over years of working in an office. She had, in fact, told me so.
"I know, I know," I said as I ran by her desk. "You told me I forgot something today. You could have at least told me what."
"Oh, no," Terri said, jotting something on a sticky note and smoothing it onto the edge of her desk in her own form of intra-office communication. "I wouldn't dare. You informed me in no uncertain terms that you hadn't forgotten anything and that you couldn't possibly have missed anything in the first place because today was the day you were working on the fundraiser and interviewing for the open position."
I glared at her from where I stood in front of the world's slowest elevator.
"I really hate you sometimes. "
"I already have you listed as taking a personal day today."
"I love you."
"The stairs are faster."
“Kevin, we’ll have to reschedule!” I shouted.
I turned and ran further down the hallway toward the door to the dark, narrow stairs that wound down the back of the building. I always thought this staircase seemed to have been built with the cliché climactic chase scene common in horror movies in mind. I hated the stairs and only used them when absolutely necessary. More often than I would like to admit, I would be running late and sprint down them so fast I would lose control, trip, and end up on my ass with my skirt pushed up around my waist.
Like right now. Shit.
I scrambled to my feet, pushed my skirt down, and burst out of the stairwell into the parking lot. I berated myself the entire way across the pavement to where my car was parked in the far corner. I had started parking as far away from my building as possible to try and get some extra exercise during the day, a decision I was really regretting at this moment. How could I forget this appointment? It was the only thing Thea had been talking about since she managed to snag a coveted slot in the months-out reservation window that was usually imposed by the boutique. It was the only reason she had flown into the city this weekend. Maybe if she had let me pick her up from the airport and bring her to my apartment the night before instead of insisting on staying at a hotel because her flight came in so late, I would have actually remembered this morning. Maybe we could have hung out and had brunch together somewhere before the appointment. Too late for that now.
What could have made me so freaking flaky that I forgot something this important?
As I got into my car and skidded out of the deck, I realized that I knew precisely what had pushed the appointment out of my mind. There was something else occupying that space, and if I was going to get through my responsibilities as maid of honor, I really needed to get over it. I had to. I had been preparing for this event my entire life.
I had also prepared to live out my adult years in a town where cars could actually make their way down the street faster than the pedestrians could, but that was all blown to hell when I impulsively decided to move to New York less than two years ago. I had adjusted fairly well to my new life during that time, but I still wasn’t comfortable driving in the congested, gridlocked city streets. I could feel time ticking past me and felt like the wheels of my compact car had barely moved an inch, even though I had been sitting with the throng of other vehicles outside of my office building for several minutes. Finally, we started moving, and I was feeling hopeful, only to slam on my brakes a few seconds later.
Frantically, I looked around, trying to identify the source of the delay, even though I knew there probably wasn't one. An image of Thea standing outside of the boutique, her hopeful, love-filled eyes getting progressively sadder the later I was, suddenly flashed in my mind and I knew this wasn't going to work. I spied a parking garage ahead of me and willed the traffic to move forward enough that I could turn in. When the cars ahead of me inched forward, I accelerated and made a death-defying turn, screeching into the structure and spiraling through the levels until I found an available spot. When I did, I ran back out of the garage, around the corner, and down a block before I started flailing my arms to get the attention of a cab driver.
Some people hail a cab. I flail.
The gods of failed maids of honor must have smiled down upon me at that moment as an empty cab slid up to the curb. I jumped in and grabbed the headrest, leaning around toward the driver.
"Drive!" I shouted.
I gave him the name and address of the boutique and sat back, willing the traffic to move faster. We were only a few blocks away when I reached for my phone and sent Thea a quick text, so she would know I was almost there. When we finally less than a block from the boutique, I had the driver to pull over, threw all the cash I was carrying in my purse at him and jumped out of the cab. I jogged down the street toward the boutique, scanning for Thea among the people wandering the sidewalk. When I finally saw her, I waved, and she smiled back. Thea was a tall, tan-skinned, beauty with a curvy body and ample breasts. She was as gorgeous as ever. A surge of happiness filled me as I realized just how much I had missed her in the months since we last saw each other. We really needed to do better at making time to see each other. I rushed forward and gathered her into a tight hug, squeezing her close to me.
"I'm sorry I'm late," I said. "I had such a crazy morning. I didn't know what to wear, and then you said I shouldn't bring coffee, so I had to drink it, but it was scalding hot, so that took me a little while, and by the time I was finished with that, the traffic…"
"You realize I called you on your office phone earlier, right?"
"Damn it," I said, sighing in exasperation. Thea laughed while I glared at her. "And you just let me babble like that? Why didn't you tell me you knew that I was at work?"
"Well, first of all, I thought you would realize the gig was up when your secretary transferred my call to your office phone, and you picked up. When I realized you were trying to lie your way out of it and pretend you weren’t at work, I figured I would just see how long it would take for you to get here. See what kind of excuse you would come up with this time."
"That is such a terrible thing to do to your best friend."
"So is forgetting a wedding dress appointment, going to work and then trying to pretend you weren't there."
I thought about this for a second.
"I guess we’ll have to call it even then."
She grinned and reached out to wrap her arm around my waist, pulling me close and starting toward the door to the boutique.
"OK. We're even."
"I really am sorry for lying, though."
"It's fine. I lied, too. Our appointment isn't for another half hour."
I stopped and stared at her, open-mouthed.
"Are you serious? I nearly killed myself trying to get here. I'm not even entirely sure where I left my car. And I very likely wildly overpaid the taxi driver. Or possibly underpaid him."
"And I've been your best friend since we were toddlers and you forgot my wedding dress appointment."
"You're just going to keep bringing that up, aren't you?"
"Even."
I had to hug her again. I knew I had my reasons for moving away from our hometown of Maple Grove, Massachusetts, but when I saw Thea, it was hard to justify being without her. We had always been inseparable growing up, and I still felt her absence in my
daily life every day, even after nearly two years. I took her hand in mine, and we walked into the boutique together. I knew I needed to make the most of every second Thea was with me, and part of that was making sure every single one of her fluffy, princess-style wedding gown dreams came true.
Thirty minutes later I was sitting on a white sofa which had been positioned so that I could see at least six reflections of myself in the curved bank of mirrors surrounding a circular raised platform. I assumed that platform was designed to showcase a bride in her dress. Right now, it reflected nothing. It hadn't the entire time we had been there. I picked up the glass of champagne that one of the highly caffeinated sales clerks offered me when we first walked in and squinted through it at the mirrors. I could see tiny versions of myself floating in the bubbles.
I wasn't allowed to bring in coffee for fear of accidentally staining a gown, but it was perfectly fine to ply us with copious amounts of alcohol before noon. Seems reasonable, especially when I thought about the price of said gowns.
I was stunned at how long it was taking Thea to come out and show me even one dress she liked enough to do so. To be fair, before heading into the dressing room Thea warned the clerk she was very picky about the details of the dress and that this wouldn’t be easy. She then proceeded to list off every wedding dress detail imaginable. I couldn’t even imagine the nightmare of trying to narrow that down to a starting point. That poor sales clerk. A blurry image appeared in the sparkling pale gold liquid, and I lowered my glass just in time to see Thea step up onto the platform. She was wearing a truly astonishing amount of white lace and tulle. So much, in fact, it looked like it was swallowing her whole. A large teardrop shaped pearl dangled from a headpiece on the middle of her forehead, and her ample breasts threatened to spill out of a sweetheart neckline that was a little less than sweet.
She had never looked so beautiful.
My breath caught in my throat, and I felt an unexpected sting of tears in my eyes. My hand covered my mouth, and I tried to get my emotions under control as I stood up and took a few steps toward her. Thea looked at her reflection and tried to smooth down the voluminous skirt. She watched my reaction in the mirror.
"Do you like it?" she asked, sounding unsure.
"I hate it," I said as I took my hand away from my mouth. "I hate it so much. But it's a wedding dress. You're a bride!"
She nodded, smiling wider now.
"I know!" She focused on her own reflection again. "This is kind of a lot," she admitted.
"Well, that's good," the clerk said. "We found your limit. That makes it easy to scale back."
"Way back," I said.
Thea stepped down from the platform and shuffled back toward the dressing room. I sat back on the couch and slowly sipped my champagne, preparing myself for another long stretch of nothing but silence and the faint sound of sappy instrumental love songs playing over the sound system. It was only a few moments later, though, that Thea appeared again. This dress was the scaled-down version of the first the clerk had promised. There was still plenty of poof and sparkle, but the headpiece was gone, and I could actually discern Thea’s body from the layers of fabric.
"What do you think of this one?" she asked.
"I think it's closer," I said. "But I'm not ready to toss birdseed on you just yet."
"You're right. I think I'm going to try a couple more." She glanced over her shoulder at me. "Are you sure you don't mind?"
"Not at all," I said. "We've been waiting for this our whole lives."
"You don't need to go back to work?"
"I took the whole day off. There's nowhere else I'd rather be than right here with you."
I settled back onto the couch for the next two hours and watched as the fantasy Thea and I had since we were little girls played out in front of me. It was beautiful yet surreal. I had thought about this day so much, however, my mind had focused solely on the "one day" aspect. We were dreaming about it, thinking about it, planning for it...and suddenly we were living it. Now that it was here, it seemed like it had happened so fast. Thea was the epitome of a bride. She looked gorgeous in all the dresses, even the ones I was reasonably sure she put on just to test my loyalty to her, but above all, she looked happy. There was a look of sheer joy on her face I had never seen before. I was so happy for her, in fact, I didn't even protest when the clerk ushered me into my own dressing room and stuffed me into a purple Mermaid-style bridesmaid dress that might have been the reason Ariel left the ocean before any of her sisters got married.
I continued to sip on glasses of champagne while Thea tried on dresses. Finally, I stood beside her in a lavender dress with an excessive train connected to my hand with a loop around my middle finger, and a massive veil that I felt was the only appropriate accessory.
At least the champagne told me so.
I rested my head on Thea's shoulder and looked at her reflection in the bank of mirrors. Since the first dress, the pendulum of styles had swung all the way to the other end of the spectrum, and she was wearing little more than a satin slip and a fascinator in her hair.
"I think we might have gone too far," I said.
Thea nodded.
"I really loved the one with the lace."
"Which one with the lace?"
"The candlelight one."
"Candlelight?"
"Not white but not really ivory."
"Oh, yes. Candlelight. Three dresses back?"
"Four."
"With the sparkles on the top."
"Yes."
"Really?"
"What's wrong with it?"
"Nothing," I said with a shrug. "It's lovely. It just seems a lot simpler than what I imagined you would choose. I thought you'd go for something more ball gown-inspired."
"I thought so, too, but that wouldn't really be appropriate for the resort."
"The resort?"
I felt like I had missed a step.
"Didn't I tell you? Bryce wants a destination wedding."
"Destination wedding? You're not getting married in the chapel?"
We had ridden by the tiny century-old chapel on our bikes countless times while growing up. The small town she still called home was still stuck in the past in many ways, including original historic buildings, little opportunities for nightlife, and the ability for children to put on their bathing suits and ride down to the community pool without anyone batting an eye. Sometimes I shudder thinking about that. I would barely go through town by myself now, much less consider allowing a child to do the same. Maybe that’s a result of the culture shock from moving to the city. Perhaps it came from too many late nights watching TV shows that scared the hell out of me and stopped me from ever opening my windows. Either way, I now looked back on those peaceful, idyllic rides through our hometown with a sense of nostalgia and terror. Now, though, there would be a hint of sadness to the memories.
"No," Thea said, shaking her head. "It doesn't work with the plans we've made."
"You've only been engaged for a few weeks. How many plans can you possibly have made?"
"A lot, actually. Bryce really wants to be involved."
"You've always wanted to get married in that chapel," I said, reaching up to take off my veil. It didn't seem as playful in the room anymore. "You used to talk about the flower wreaths you would make and the rose petals you wanted the flower girl to sprinkle down the aisle. We even tried to sneak in there that Halloween night, so we could practice throwing open the doors for you to run down the front stairs."
Thea smiled.
"We didn't try to sneak in. We did sneak in. What we didn't do was sneak out. We didn't know that the doors had an outside latch and by the time we had slipped in through the back window, it was too late. Don't you remember? We weren’t tall enough to climb back out the window and we couldn't find another exit, so we ended up having to spend the night on the pews. It was the scariest night of my life."
"We thought it was haunted because of all of the creak
ing."
"And we were in so much trouble when they found us the next day. Our parents told us we weren’t allowed to go trick-or-treating the next year."
"But we did," I said. "They went with us, and it was so embarrassing at the time, but we still got to go."
Thea sighed and smiled. I could see a faint glimmer of tears in her eyes and knew she was looking back on our childhood with the same sense of nostalgia I had.
"I can't believe how many years ago that was," she said softly.
"I know," I said. "You've been thinking about having your wedding there for all these years, and now you're just going to forget about it?"
"It just doesn't fit in with our vision for the wedding," Thea said. "Besides, he has a huge family, and combined with my family and all of our friends... that chapel is just too small. The resort he chose is going to be beautiful. And it's historic too. Maybe not as old as the chapel, but it really is reminiscent of home, but a little bit more special for my wedding."
"I didn't think anything was more special than home," I said.
I took a step back from the platform, trying to control the emotions filling me. I had been having so much fun. I hadn't expected the emotional crash and burn I had just experienced.
"What's wrong?" Thea asked. "Are you actually upset about the chapel? I promise where we're holding the ceremony is just as adorable, and you're going to love the rest of the resort."
I shook my head.
"It's fine," I said. "It's your wedding, after all. All that matters is that it makes you happy. I guess I always thought we would plan your wedding together and now I feel like you've done most of it without me."
The smile suddenly faded from her face.
"Roxie… You haven’t been around," she said.
I felt like she had wrapped her hand around my heart and crushed it. I nodded.
"You're right," I said. " I'm going to go change out of this dress." I took a few steps toward my changing room and then looked back at her. "You should definitely go with that dress. You look really pretty in it."
By the time I came out of the dressing room, Thea was waiting for me on the white sofa. I suppose not being under the influence of a little too much champagne and having a dedicated team to help you dress and undress, can be very useful in this situation. I was embarrassed as I walked toward her, and she jumped to her feet, looking just as upset as I was.