I Was Told There'd Be Cake

by Sloane Crosley

  After the kooky older ladies had had their way with her, Francine was left standing and swaying and waiting for the song to be over. I watched her on the middle of this makeshift dance floor, upswept hair trimmings at her feet, and I stepped in to dance with her. Perhaps I had been imbued with an instinct for female herding over the past few months because suddenly the sight of a woman by herself seemed…unnatural. Either way we were both relieved. Her not to be swaying awkwardly to the City of Las Vegas theme song and me to understand for a split second what it was like to be in her pristine white shoes. I, too, was a single girl who spent her life standing and smiling and swaying and, sure, hoping someone I care about will dance with me, but more than anything? Hoping that this cheesy music will stop. As the song ended I dipped her for the benefit of everyone around us. The women cheered. Somewhere a flash went off. Francine looked up and mouthed, “Thank you.”

  “Any time,” I lied.

  The wedding was un-air-conditioned. The ceremony, though technically brief, felt like an eternity with hair spray–contaminated beads of sweat dripping into my eyes. I kept winking at the priest. I tried to turn away and found myself winking some more at the most innocuous wedding-goer I could find: Francine’s great-aunt in the front row. A few rows behind her sat my parents, whose presence robbed me of my “least likely to be at this wedding” superlative. My mother, in a linen suit, spent the majority of the ceremony with her head down, rotating her rings and trying to smooth out the wrinkles left over from crossing her legs. My father, in an ill-advised wool suit, looked shiny and supportive. My feet hurt. I’d seen earlier a tray of mini quiche being carried into the reception hall. I have never longed so profoundly for mini quiche as I did that day. When the priest pronounced them Mr. and Mrs. Universe, I searched his face for signs of exasperation.

  Besides my new bestest girlfriends and my parents, who were trapped talking to the parents of the groom, I knew no one at this affair. I took frequent trips to the bathroom during the reception for a little bit of solitude and lip-gloss reapplication. Almost every time I returned to the party, Francine could be found regaling guests with stories about the wedding planning. In each bit of distilled dialogue, a third party—a florist or a photographer or a matrimonial aura cleanser—would end up commenting on what a sane and happy bride she was. No bridezillas here!

  She had asked us not to drink at the prewedding brunch, lest we bloat ourselves out of duty. As if we were astronauts, somehow owned by the government, which was somehow owned by her. The People’s Republic of F. U. Needless to say, I felt that I had some catching up to do. I figured this was fine as, despite being crowned Queen of the Serfs, I had done some impressive foisting of the wedding toast onto Helen. In retrospect, it seems that there were better candidates for this, but it didn’t occur to me at the time. When we discussed it earlier that morning—over a breakfast bonding session of mocha lattes in the new Starbucks—it was more of an electoral decision. Francine’s constant assurances that this was not a bridetatorship had actually rubbed off and we didn’t want to make the assumption that I would give the speech, did we? Just because my name was up in pixels on some dumb website? It was a girlishly democratic game of Red Rover and I made sure we sent Helen on over.

  After all, who was I to talk the talk? What would I do—get up there and make a speech in which Francine’s furniture fort–building skills as an eleven-year-old became a metaphor for life and marriage? Who amongst us has such talent to weave raw silk out of straw? But Helen, Helen approached Francine’s marriage as it deserved to be approached: with the hovering enthusiasm of a hummingbird. The champagne glasses were clinked, the microphone was tapped. Helen looked radiant in her baby pink plaid. Almost as if Laura Ashley herself had thrown up directly on her. She tapped the microphone again and said, “Ith thith thing on?” And then she passed out.

  No one knows why she went down like a sumo wrestler off a balance beam. The worst part of me thinks she faked it. The best part of me thinks she had planned on faking it from the beginning. Clever girl. Stacy and I helped her to a chair and got her water and bread rolls and maraschino cherries from the bar. I have never fainted before but it is my understanding that it almost always has something to do with blood sugar and it dropping. Francine shot up from the head table and covered her mouth but made no move to cross the dance floor. People held their champagne flutes frozen in midair. Helen staggered her way to vertical, holding her head with one hand and handing me the microphone. Stacy glared at me as if I had drugged Helen’s white wine.

  I held the mic and pulled a gold bamboo chair from a nearby table for Helen to sit on. When I went to give the mic back, she shook her head. Our little hummingbird looked like she had just smacked into a plate glass window.

  “Take it,” said Stacy with an unsubtle twinge of bitterness in her voice, “you’re the maid of honor, aren’t you?”

  “That’s my slave name,” I snapped at her. I was intoxicated and ornery.

  “You must be kidding me.”

  “Well, I’m not. But if you insist…”

  “Go,” said Helen, as if reaching out from a foxhole.

  I assured the crowd that Helen was fine in a “these things happen all the time in the theater” kind of way. My position as maid of honor allowed me a certain level of authority, in this case medical.

  “To Francine and Boris.” Everyone raised their glasses even higher. “We just…”

  I looked around the room at all the smiling and hopeful faces, most of which I didn’t know and would probably never see again. My parents exchanged a look of grave concern. I sensed them plotting how to help me out of this. Maybe my father could fashion a large stage hook out of dessert forks and napkin rings. My mother stifled a giggle and mouthed, “Sorry, kiddo.” My eyes fell back on Francine, who was preoccupied with a loose pearl on her left breast.

  “…it’s hard to put into words…”

  Weddings are friendship deal breakers if the friendship is weak. There are too many favors, too many tasks, too much required devotion and Aqua Net for imposters like me. I tried to make eye contact with Francine, to give her a knowing good-bye smile like the ghost of a loved one in a movie. It was no use. I decided to cut my final pink wire. There would be no more yearly “happy birthdays” and certainly no more bonding with the girl in the duct tape dress. That ship had sailed.

  “…we wish you guys a universe of happiness.”

  And everyone chuckled and drank and ate pink cake.

  Recently I had lunch with another high school friend. One whom I see slightly more regularly than Francine because we live within a few miles of each other. Like my other female friends, she does not know my other female friends. But she did know Francine back when we were in our homegrown teenage cult, and I regaled her with the entire story.

  “Remember Francine?” I began and I told her all of it. The call out of the blue that started it all, the ups, the downs, the Helens and the Cindys, the plaids and the stripes. Any compassion I felt for my middle school friend had evaporated, leaving little hard nuggets of infuriation. A symphony of insensitivity poured out of me, growing louder with every put-upon detail. As the priest said during the ceremony, “love is not boastful.” But hate? Apparently hate has a big mouth.

  Ironically, I was high on the key attraction of group female friendships that I have deprived myself of—collective memory. No back-story needed. When you have a steady and lifelong group of girlfriends, chances are the person you’re telling the story to is actually part of the story. I never get to do this and, given the smallest taste, couldn’t stop myself. When I stopped to breathe and take a bite of my food, my friend said: But don’t you feel sorry for her? And I said: Sure, but my wallet doesn’t.

  We went back and forth like this for a while. Finally, feeling as if no matter how hard I tried, I wasn’t aptly conveying the severity of my put-outness, I said, “I mean, it’s as if you asked me to be in your wedding.”

  She smiled politely and d
ug into her salad, intentionally avoiding eye contact with me. We were both silent. I thought of the postprom beach photo tucked into my yearbook. She was there that day as well. In it, she’s standing to my left and squinting like we all are but her smile is genuine as she grips the bare waists around her. I thought of the past and how one should have respect for it, like the elderly. I had known Francine for nearly twenty years. Had I no decency? I thought of britches bulging and bridges burning. My old friend continued smiling and glanced in the direction of the waiter. She had a piece of frisée lettuce stuck in her teeth. It felt cruel to tell her even this.

  Then something familiar washed over me and I recognized it immediately as the same brand of girlish guilt that got me into this mess in the first place. You can’t pick your girlfriend’s teeth, but you sure as shit can pick your girlfriends. Oh, well, I thought, what’s another burned footbridge between acquaintances? At least that’s one less bridesmaid’s dress I’ll have to buy.

  “Go like this.” I motioned to my front teeth with my pointer finger. And then I paid for lunch.

  THE HEIGHT OF LUXURY

  The night before I turned sixteen, I was digging through my mother’s jewelry box, pulling out old necklaces and the impossibly thick gold stickpins women used to wear on wool coats. This rummaging was a favorite hobby of mine, but on this particular evening I was digging with a purpose. I had caught wind of a surprise party to be thrown in honor of my burgeoning breasts. Teenagers are an unsubtle species, and the flood of seemingly random phone calls inquiring about my birthday plans led me to the only logical conclusion: surprise party. Plus, I had never been bat mitzvahed and I knew my parents felt I was owed a DJ and some Mylar balloons. I would need to accessorize.

  I was not prepared to turn sixteen. My mother had taught me no female skills. I didn’t know how to dress, how to use an eyelash curler, how to write in script (whereas they should create a font after my mother’s handwriting). To this day I have no idea how to use eyeliner, but I am willing to forgo anything you have to sharpen before applying to your face. But I did know about jewelry. I knew what a cabochon amethyst was before I could tie my shoes. Like a featherless magpie, I was obsessed with all things sparkly. (My sister took the fixation one step further—she became one of the youngest patent holders in the United States when, at the age of fourteen, she invented magnetic jewelry clasps. She grew up to become a jewelry designer.) But my fascination with jewelry, specifically my mother’s, was more sentimental than mechanical. I loved digging through her collection, asking, “Where’s this from? And this one?” If I was lucky, she’d let me go down to the kitchen to retrieve the Bremner Wafers tin, which contained all her “special occasion” jewelry. Putting valuable things in the kitchen was a tip she’d read about in Redbook or an insurance pamphlet and it stuck. Should thieves have broken into our house and poured themselves bowls of cereal, they would have found all four of our passports.

  My last evening as a fifteen-year-old, I had the Bremner Wafers tin between my legs on her bed. Suddenly I saw something roaming free and sparkly at the bottom of the tin. I pushed aside the rounded boxes and necklace sleeves to reveal a diamond ring I had never seen before. It was a princess-cut diamond, with two round stones on either side and a pink gold band that did not seem like something my mother would wear. I glanced across the room. She was at her desk with a bag of cotton balls, removing nail polish. I tried the ring on. I was unaware that people kept spare engagement rings. If they did, it seemed like something a sultan’s wife would do, the height of luxury. We only lived in the height of suburbia.

  “And this one?” I held up the ring.

  “Oh”—she waved—“that’s from Richard.”

  “Who the hell is Richard?”

  “My first husband.”

  Now, it should be noted that my mother has a long history of being disturbingly unperturbed by what normal people deem perturbing. Certain things simply don’t strike her as worthy of a sit-down. My first year of college, I went on a hypernostalgic rampage through the basement files, smiling at old photographs and science certificates from when it was still called just “science.” (One day you turn around and “social studies” has become “Chilean fiefdoms of the fourteenth century” and that’s how you know you’re in college.) At the bottom of the drawer was a thin album of drawings I had done, including one (crayon on oak tag, age eight) of a teddy bear crying hysterically, wearing deely boppers and holding a windmill. In thick black crayon, I had scrawled the following across the bottom of the page:

  “Teddy bears are best because they understand it’s nice to be alone.” “Jesus,” I said out loud, and brought the drawing to the kitchen table, where my parents were reading the paper.

  “You didn’t think this was cause for concern?”

  My mother studied the drawing. “You were always kind of old for your age, if you know what I mean.”

  “Yes, I’ve heard that profound depression is a sign of maturity. What if I had drawn four stick figures with no mouths and labeled it ‘family’?”

  “Oh, honey,” she said, rubbing my back, “you were too talented for stick figures. You used to steal toothbrushes, though.”

  “That’s right!” Now I was beaming, full of the kind of glee you experience when you remember last night’s dream sometime past noon the following day.

  My father looked up from the paper. “You used to steal our toothbrushes when you were angry with us.”

  It’s true, I did. I bore the plight of the youngest like a pro. Not only was I the youngest of my immediate family, but of all the cousins in every direction. I often felt left out and if I was especially unhappy about it, I’d sneak upstairs during a holiday dinner, collect all the toothbrushes, and line them up at the bottom of my closet. Then I’d hang out with our cat, crack open the door, and watch the before-bed chaos ensue. So thrilled was I to have this memory back, at first it didn’t occur to me that this, too, might have been cause for concern. My mother never thought to come up and look for me.

  “I knew you’d come down in your own time.”

  “But I never did come down.”

  “For breakfast the next morning you did.”

  I could have been constructing toilet bombs up there. But this is her way. So the night before my sixteenth birthday she was only confirming what I already knew of her kookiness—it could strike at any time, most often in the form of nonchalance or forgetfulness. Still—never before had such pertinent information slipped through the parenting cracks.

  “You never told me you were married before.”

  “I didn’t? Huh. I thought I had.”

  “You didn’t.”

  “I thought I had.”

  My mother’s was an ironclad logic, impossible to penetrate. One would think a previous marriage would have come up over the course of sixteen years. One would be mistaken. It seemed strange to think of my mother’s life before our little family. I was aware that she had one—a life—and a history as well, but never had it been brought into such sharp relief. I was aware of her past the way we are of the dinosaurs. Sure they existed, there’s ample proof in the form of large, indisputable bones, but I have never imagined one alive—lightly snoring in the master bedroom down the hall.

  They were divorced after fifty-one weeks of matrimony. Richard turned out to be a real prick. He was very into the barefoot-and-pregnant thing. Not that they ever had a kid together. That I know of. Maybe he just had a foot fetish, I don’t know. They fought, he shoved her once, and he wasn’t particularly fun at any time. He also tried to block the doorway when she left him. My mother ducked under his arm, ran to her car, and drove away. I remember thinking that this was somehow romantic, as it pinpointed the actual moment of my mother’s departure, something you don’t see a lot of outside television. Real people don’t slam doors without opening them five minutes later because it’s raining and they forgot their umbrella. They don’t stop dead in their tracks because they realize they’re in love with
their best friend. They don’t say, “I’m leaving you, Jack,” and fade to a paper towel commercial. She and Richard lived in Delaware and the law on the books in 1969 was one of those ancient east-coasty stipulations stating that if a woman left her husband, she was obligated to leave him with a bed, a chair, and a horse. My mother left him a futon, a giant beanbag, and the cat. They never spoke again.

  I screamed for my sister.

  “Dana, did you know that Mom was married before?”

  “Sure,” she said. She seemed annoyed to have been summoned from a conversation on her much-coveted private phone line. “To Richard.”

  “To Richard,” I mimicked and tossed up my arms.

  “Your father and I really did think you knew,” my mother added, twisting the cap back onto the nail polish remover.

  I wondered what else she might not be telling me. Was my mother a spy? A fly-by-night dominatrix? A Daughter of the American Revolution? Was there a dusty stack of wedding albums in the attic from all her previous marriages? Did Dad know? Suddenly it seemed that my mother’s casual parenting was reserved for me. I had always chalked up my feelings of isolation as a child to being a child. What kid doesn’t grow up feeling left out of the loop? Just being under four feet will do it. But here, under the same roof, was the perception of my mother as a responsible, basic-information-sharing human being and—albeit unintentionally—I was being left out of it. Again.

  “Fine.” I put the ring back in its mock-velvet box and shoved it in the can. “That’s totally fine. You people call me when it’s time to tell me I’m adopted.”

  With that, I marched down to the kitchen and heaved the family jewels back in the pantry. I got ready for bed, furiously scrubbing my eyeliner-free face and brushing my teeth like I was trying to erase them. I looked down at the three other candy-colored brushes, content to be in their holder. I spat into the sink. In less than twenty-four hours, it would be my big day. Hugs given, photos taken, secrets whispered. For one night only, it would be natural for people to tell me everything. I would have to pretend that I didn’t see any of this coming, listening to competing tales from proud friends who fancied themselves spies in the making, thrilled by how slyly they threw me off the scent of celebration. I would be left out no longer. I practiced my “surprised” face in the mirror, a happier version of the “who the hell is Richard” face. I made a dramatic O with my mouth and put my hand on my heart. Then I put my toothbrush back in line with the others and went to bed.