Save the Date: The Occasional Mortifications of a Serial Wedding Guest

by Jen Doll

  This is the story of a serial wedding goer. Thank you for having me. I’m sorry to anyone I’ve ever offended. I really did have a very nice time.

  2.

  Something Blue

  All the single ladies! All the single ladies! Single ladies, please come to the front of the dance floor!” The call reverberated through the room, causing the chandeliers to shake and the ice cubes to clink in our crystal water glasses. All of us so being roused were human women between the ages of twenty and thirty; all of us were living on our own, had been living on our own for years, in fact. All of us were gainfully employed, and some of us were aspiring for things more than gainful. We were also, yes, unmarried, though that’s hardly all we were, and we’d tell you that, point-blank, if you were to ask.

  We were at a country club on Cape Cod, surrounded by acres and acres of manicured, impossibly green golf course. But more than green, we were surrounded by blue: blooming blue hydrangeas the color of baby bonnets and Easter eggs, planted around the perimeter of the building and then some—out in the distance, amid all the green, you could see more blue. Farther out, the deepest shades of the sea met those of the cornflower horizon. Inside the country club, the walls were lined in periwinkle, or maybe it was Wedgwood, a slightly lighter tint than the deep royal of the plush chair cushions upon which we perched, legs crossed at the ankles, ladylike, sipping Champagne. Still lighter were the pale blue linen napkins spread primly across our laps, and darkest of all was what pumped through the veins of so many around us, or so I had heard whispered, mouths covered by handkerchiefs held in the withered blue hands of some of the older women present. It would have been impolite to mention, so I didn’t, but many of these blues appeared to be in fierce competition with one another.

  It was late afternoon. The day had been hot and long, beginning on the beach, where we saw our friend marry her now-husband as the tide came in a few minutes too soon, or the wedding, more likely, had happened just a few minutes too late, despite careful timing based on the lunar schedule. For a moment midway through the ceremony, we were separated from the couple and their minister, the three of them on a temporary reef while the rest of us watched from a narrowing peninsula. Many of us took off our shoes and moved our folding chairs; others chose to stand on top of those chairs, a precarious decision that ended wetly for a few. There was a brief pause while, some of us damp, others damper, we found our way to drier land and laughed and hushed one another and laughed some more at this sudden, unexpected lightness in the serious, formal moment. Quickly, before the tides moved farther, the vows were given and the ceremony was over. The string quartet disappeared into the tall sand grass and up into the dunes with their cumbersome loads, the rest of us traipsing behind, happy to be headed indoors, on to the next portion of the wedding.

  I was wearing a white dress. I know, I know. I was twenty-eight and had been fully versed in the etiquette—one is not supposed to wear a white dress to a wedding unless one is herself the bride—but my justification for the choice was that the dress was only white in the most basic of ways, as a canvas. On top of the white, at the neckline, the dress was embroidered with an array of flowers, purple and pink and yellow and red; notably absent, in this small case, was any blue. There was a wide purple sash that clasped around the waist, and though the majority of the full knee-length skirt was white, there was stitching around the hem to match the flowers that lined the top. The three thin straps that held the dress up over each shoulder were purple, the same hue as the belt and my kitten heels. I liked this dress, and I wanted to wear it. So there, I thought. This was not my first rodeo.

  Inside the country club there was a plentiful spread of upper-crust fare, food like chilled shrimp and new potato salad, rare steak, pâté with grainy mustard and sour gherkins, and the tiniest, sweetest decorated cakes for dessert. The string quartet had repositioned themselves to provide blithe musical accompaniment to our eating and drinking. There was always so much wine at these things, but wine was something I associated with this friend in particular—the one who was now a Mrs.—and, in fact, with all of us. There were six of us here who were close. We’d gone to college together and had become inseparable during a semester in Italy, which itself was permeated with wine. At night during those spring-into-summer months we’d sit together at alfresco cafés, sipping countless vinos and smoking cigarettes badly as we chattered in the way of college-aged American women in foreign countries. Smoke billowed from our mouths, but our pleather pants, comfortingly tight, kept us in check as we reminisced about what we missed back home: our boyfriends, American cheese, our hairdressers’ mastery of subtle blond highlights. More and more frequently, though, we spoke not of what we’d left behind, but of the future.

  I was arguably the one closest to the bride. We’d dated brothers: hers the younger who went to our school, mine the one who’d graduated from another university a few years earlier and come to visit his sibling on the weekend we met. Once we’d dined out with the boys’ parents, gossiping to each other in the ladies’ room about the meticulous mother and avuncular father. There we’d confided our mutual surety that we were hated by them, even as, I think now, we each felt ourselves to be the one favored in the parents’ eyes. We eventually broke up with the boys—me first, Ginny shortly thereafter; or at least, that’s how I remember it. But she and I stayed together and grew closer. We graduated from college and at one point were nearly roommates. It was not to be. Neither, ultimately, was our friendship. This was the friend who chose marriage over me.

  It sounds complicated, even illicit, but in one way it was actually very simple: Ginny and I were the best of friends until she chose a man whom I found I could not be friends with. She could not forgive me for that, and for what transpired because of it, no more than I could forgive her for choosing as she had. As I saw it, she’d done the unthinkable: marriage to someone who didn’t treat her the way I felt she deserved to be treated; marriage, even, for the sake of being married. That she wouldn’t acknowledge my concerns galled me further. I didn’t understand how with this engagement she could pretend all was rosy and turn a blind eye to what, from my vantage point, still felt so unresolved. She thought that I didn’t understand—that I refused to understand, perhaps—and should have supported her choice regardless; friends should have each other’s backs, in romance as in everything else. Quite possibly, she was right. Definitely I should have done things differently. But by the point it became clear that our friendship would be the sacrificial lamb in all this, we’d gone too far down that road to turn back.

  At her wedding, however, we were still okay. We were still friends. I may have had my doubts, but I was hiding them, I thought well. I had put on my dress and I would dance and celebrate and enjoy myself, and enjoy her, too, my friend who looked so beautiful and happy I could almost forget about those other things, information about her relationship I held in my mind but wasn’t supposed to consider now: the bitter squabbles, the unkindnesses and misunderstandings and questionable truths. These are behaviors exhibited by nearly every couple in some way or another, but in her retellings they had made me wonder whether my friend might be making a terrible decision. Worse, it was a decision I worried she thought she had to make because she was on the verge of thirty, and he had asked, and would there be another chance again?

  But this was hardly productive thinking. I was at a wedding! This was a fresh start, the leap they were taking together, and he wanted it, and so did she. Would it kill me to embrace it? Your friends always tell you about the fights, about the problems in their relationships, far more so than they share the good stuff, I reminded myself. It wasn’t as if he’d been physically abusive, or done anything illegal—the circumstances were far less black and white than that. Yet in some way that only made how to negotiate the situation more confusing. If it was purely that I thought she could do better, well, who was I to say? Who was I to tell them, or anyone, how they should live their lives, who they shou
ld date, who they should marry? It’s not like I had things figured out, but she, by all appearances, had figured this out. She’d chosen him. Here we were, amid all the pomp and circumstance of that choice.

  So I pretended to be happy, so happy my face felt like it would nearly split from all the happiness. Outside on the porch a boy who I suppose was really a man, with brown hair and too-intense eyes (I didn’t need anyone to see through me to the truth), told me he liked my dress. He asked if I was single. I told him I was seeing someone, which was true, though he wasn’t here with me. Awkwardly, the most recent person I had dated previously was here, with another woman. He was the man whom Ginny and her husband—husband, I had to get used to that—had introduced me to in the beginning, when it seemed like everything was shaping up to be great, when it seemed like we’d at the very least double-date our way into the blue, blue horizon. My feelings for this ex had by now dulled into near nothingness. The fact that he had brought a date who was wearing a tacky neon-green dress, a date who all of my friends told me I was so much better than (they were kind, my friends, even if they were liars), didn’t thrill me with the satisfaction it might have months ago, when the breakup had been fresh and my feelings raw. The sadness in me was a different kind and not something that could be fixed with a man, whether it was getting attention from a new one or making an old one feel regret.

  “Single ladies to the dance floor!” came the cry again, a masculine voice urging us forward. Couples parted, creating a narrow path for the responding train of unmarried women to parade through in their finery to that designated spot where they would be awarded the opportunity to grapple for what was far more than a clutch of secondhand flowers. But we single ladies no longer looked so fine, so sparkling or radiant as we had that morning. We were worn and tired, sweat beading down our necks, hair up in makeshift buns, sand between our toes and crunching unpleasantly in our shoes, which were wearing raw the backs of our heels. Our faces were red and shiny, and our mouths had the slackness of a full day of drinking. We should have been lying down in cool rooms elsewhere, dresses uncinched, the blinds drawn, glasses of icy, hydrating water next to us. But the wedding was not over. We knew what was next.

  My friend Nora grabbed my arm and pulled me close. “Do we have to do this?” she whispered. “This is so embarrassing. Isn’t it sort of, you know, sexist? I cannot believe bouquet tosses still happen in this day and age.”

  “Let’s go hide out in the bathroom,” I suggested. The bathroom was a nice place at this country club. I’d noticed it had supplies of deodorant and hair spray and hand lotion, as well as wipes for dabbing the day’s perspiration from one’s nose and cheeks and forehead. There were mints and packs of gum and miniature bottles of Listerine, too. It was better than being out here. We could probably even take a bottle of wine with us. But it was too late. We’d been herded along with the rest of them, and there was no way to hide or break rank without making a scene. I could see the bride’s mother eyeing me. It seemed that she, if no one else, was keenly aware of how I really felt. So we proceeded in mincing little chain-gang steps as if we were all somehow attached at the ankle, a line of grown-up women marching forward in our brightly colored dresses, once smartly pressed, now limp from the doings of this long July day. There was Ginny, next to the band, facing us. Her new husband stood away from the crowd, watching her with an expression that I found inscrutable. The guy with the biggest instrument, the cello, I think, picked up the microphone and said with one of those comedic trills in his voice, as if to be followed by a bah-dah-bum: “It’s time, ladieeeeees, the big moment you’ve all been waiting for—the bouquet toss!”

  Nora and I glanced at each other, and I mouthed, Hell, no, because somehow we were positioned front and center, and then Ginny was closing her eyes and thrusting her two hands skyward. Her wedding-toned arms followed in a graceful arc, her triceps rippling with the slightest edge of defined-yet-ladylike muscle. Her diamond was glinting in the sun, and that photo-ready bouquet of ice-water-blue hydrangeas she’d picked from her mother’s own garden was soaring up high. I closed my eyes, too, because I didn’t know what else to do. There was a light thud, and then there was silence.

  When I opened my eyes, there it was. The women had not moved. Not one of us had spoken or stepped across the invisible line that separated us from the bride. A few spots down, another guest gestured silently, Pick it up! Pick it up! but it’s not like she was leaning in to grab it, either. Nora was frozen, halfway between laughter and tears, and I didn’t dare look at Ginny or her mom, so instead, I did this: I stepped back. I stepped away from the bouquet, which had landed, a flat sack of impending floral decay, directly in front of my feet in their dainty purple shoes that had seemed comfortable so many hours ago. I tried to put as much space between those plucked flowers and myself as I could, without seeming to notice them at all. Oh, I must be going now, I really need a drink refill, it’s time to take my medication. What’s that you say, we’re at a wedding? Thank you so much, I don’t even golf! I feigned complete befuddlement and obliviousness because I simply could not pick up those flowers. I was physically incapable. It would break me. So I stood, shuffling infinitesimally backward, and the seconds seemed like hours.

  I was saved from imminent social disgrace by our friend Mattie. Quick as heat lightning preceding the summer storm that would follow that evening, she rushed forward and stooped down and scooped up the bouquet, which she held aloft in her right arm, proud and tall, as if showing off an Olympic gold medal. She even managed a little hop in the air as she shouted, “I got it!”

  Ginny beamed. The crowd went wild.

  3.

  Anything for a Story

  Here’s a great irony for you: A wedding is something that signifies permanence, but itself is the very opposite of that. It’s one day, one insanely orchestrated, improbably beautiful day, that most people hope they won’t see fit to repeat in a lifetime with anyone else. And just as the bride and groom and the wedding planner or whoever is in charge do their very best to tell the single story they want to convey at a wedding—to reflect an enduring life state, to make the grand, high-concept, intricately planned moment represent “forever”—the guests, especially those who’ve been around the wedding block a few times, come with their own small and large dreams, goals, and even a certain number of meticulously plotted MacGyver-esque missions. We all have stories we want to tell, and stories we want to experience so we can tell them later, as we engage in the self-propelled mini-dramas, comedies, and occasional tragedies taking place across the wedding stage. We may not be the main plot, but we are a subplot, and a not unimportant one at that.

  From one wedding, I vividly recall moshing sweatily on the dance floor to the Killers and, later, wandering around the after-party looking for the cute guy I’d seen at the reception and had just started to make promising conversation with when the band stopped playing and the bartenders ceased to refill my glass. (Weddings can have the worst timing!) The sweat dried on my bare arms, and later, my skin felt almost crunchy, smelling of salt and sun and eau de Chardonnay. I remember finding that guy and arranging to meet him at a bench outside the bar after I returned to my room for the Red Bull and vodka I had stashed in the mini-fridge. But by the time I got to the room, which I was sharing with a friend, I’d decided not to go back out after all. As she and I compared our own reflections on the evening, we occasionally guessed at the absent third perspective, the guy waiting alone on that bench. Of course, I don’t know whether he showed up at the bench at all. Whatever happened to him that night is no more my tale than it is the story of the bride and groom.

  At some deep midpoint down the wedding road—say, ten weddings in, in our late twenties or early thirties—we may even try our hand at creating our own stories, inventing dramas to keep things interesting and ourselves on our metallic-sandal-clad toes. It’s not that weddings are boring, but sometimes we want to bring a piece of ourselves to them that we d
on’t get to put forth in our normal lives. The manufactured ecosystem is already primed for excitement. It’s a quick and easy step to throw ourselves on the stage, too, trying out new roles, just to see. We become inherently unreliable narrators, unreliable characters, because we are each there in some way in our own interest and to continue the storyline for which we have come, even as we’re ostensibly there for our friend/this blessed event/to support the sanctity of marriage/for love/for fun/because we want cake. I suspect that even the most selfless among us can’t help bringing it back home now and again, making the wedding in some small way just a teeny-tiny bit about ourselves. It’s human nature, and human nature is often bared to its core at a wedding.

  • • •

  I was thirty-three years old and had been to more weddings than I could count on both hands by the time Lucy and David’s invite came. I’d met Lucy at the ad agency that had hired us both in our first post-college jobs more than a decade before, and David through Lucy. She’d gone on to become a lawyer, and he was one, too, each of them as ambitious and driven professionally as they were personally unpretentious and laid-back. They’d met at a firm where they’d worked, and they’d become friends there. As they told it, he had a deep crush while she was preoccupied with someone else. Eventually he convinced her to go on a date, and then another, and at some point, the other guy was forgotten and David became the one.

  Their wedding would be in June, in Jamaica, and they urged guests to stay for as long as they’d like; make a vacation of it! No longer was I a naive twentysomething with a sundress and a giant bottle of Coppertone traveling to see my first college friend do this crazy grown-up thing. I was a grown-up, at least by the standard definition, earning nearly $400 a day as managing editor at OK!, a celebrity weekly magazine. And I hadn’t left New York City in months. The photos on the resort’s website depicted an island paradise with tiny villas scattered throughout rocky cliffs, tropical forests full of flowers and lush greenery, and suspension bridges dangling romantically over cerulean water. Plus, free yoga in the morning, open-air showers, fresh fish at the resort’s three restaurants, coconut cocktails, sunsets, snorkeling, massages. The wedding itself would be a breeze: Throw on a dress. Walk a few steps to the designated area of the resort where the ceremony would take place in front of a sweeping ocean view. Watch. Celebrate. There were no kids under twelve allowed on the premises given the danger of their falling and injuring themselves on the jagged terrain—an oversight, then, that they did allow drunken thirtysomethings. Danger be damned, I was in.