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

by Jen Doll

  “I’m sorry!” we said, too loudly and nearly in unison, our words ringing in my ears, making me consider whether I could, in fact, vomit and feel any better, because that would be better than this. “I passed out,” “I had the spins,” “I totally flaked,” we offered, our language itself as inelegant as our hangovers.

  “Oh, God.” She rolled her eyes at our antics and her own. “I went back to my room, put on my pajamas, and cried myself to sleep. It was ridiculous.”

  Oh, no. What had we done to the bride? “What happened? Why were you sad?”

  “I was just being dramatic,” she said. “I felt rejected and lonely.”

  “But you’re getting married!” we said.

  “I know, I was drunk!”

  “We were all drunk, too . . .” With renewed shame, I thought again of all the ways I’d already failed at this wedding. Some maid of honor, a puke can next to her, her duties to the bride forgotten.

  “What a weird night,” she continued. “The night before the night you get married. What does it mean? Should it even matter? There’s so much pressure that’s not even real, but it also feels like you’re jumping off a cliff. I think I just needed to let out some emotions. I feel way better now! Did everyone else have fun?”

  “Everyone except Jason,” I said, and she gave me a curious look.

  “Are we ready for hair and makeup?” she asked.

  • • •

  I chose an updo so I didn’t have to consider the state of my hair for the rest of the day—at least until the end of the evening brought the need to dig from my scalp the thousand pins that had been sprayed into my coif. Kate and Violet both wore their hair down, and Kate’s blond locks, flat-ironed and sprayed and back-combed, so resembled those of the caricatured songstress who’d come to Nashville to make herself a star that she dubbed her look “big country hair.” Our tresses styled and makeup applied, we sat outside the salon in the sun in our jeans and T-shirts, chugging Diet Cokes and eating sandwiches that Marjorie’s mom had brought us for strength. (Wedding Tip: Always get the French fries.) None of us could look at each other without breaking into punchy giggles, what with the hair and the hangovers. Though it still felt like my brain was pulsing angrily inside my skull, the laughing helped with just about everything.

  Then I was back at the hotel, slipping into my bridesmaid attire, and Jason was talking to me, though we didn’t address what had happened the night before.

  “You look nice,” he said.

  “You look nice, too,” I told him.

  We both did look nice, even if we didn’t feel nice together. We went to the church to see Marjorie get married, Jason with his trusty camera to take pictures from the pew. I stood at the front of the room, facing the crowd after walking down the aisle carefully, a poised maid-of-honor smile on my face. I held Marjorie’s bouquet for her, and we all smiled big grins when the bride and groom were married and then when they kissed. Afterward, for my final maid-of-honor duty, I witnessed the signing of the marital document, and it was over. We’d done it. We’d all done it, and no one had had to vomit even once.

  There was one thing more, though. At the reception, where little girls and boys ran around tapping glasses with their silverware and shimmying on the dance floor, where a cheesecake wedding cake was served, where we toasted to the happy couple from our perch high at the top of a building with windows on all sides overlooking the city, and where Jason was quiet, again, fading into the background, there was a bouquet toss. Violet and I, still unable to stomach the thought of bourbon or even beer, were both drinking small cups of hot tea when it was announced.

  “Oh, no.” Violet shook her head.

  “Oh, yes,” I said. I was suddenly reminded of that other bouquet fiasco, the one I’d tried to banish from my mind. Those fallen flowers had signified the beginning of the end of a friendship. I could not let that happen again, not with Marjorie. “What do we do?”

  “Let’s stand and hold our tea,” she suggested. “We’ll participate. But it’s not like we’re going to make a dive for it holding teacups.”

  What we didn’t know was that Marjorie had us covered, too.

  We found spots at the edge of the dance floor and watched as the bride lifted her bouquet high into the air, doing her best Statue of Liberty impression. She then turned, her back facing the crowd, before dropping her arm at the elbow and letting her cluster of bright flowers slide down her back and to the floor. The bouquet landed some six inches away from her feet. Her two little nieces, who, she told me later, she’d intended as the recipients of the toss all along, were waiting right there. Three and five, they grabbed the flowers, shouting happily. Violet and I sipped our tea, smiled, and looked at each other. Sometimes things resolved themselves, if you could only be patient and wait.

  Other things you had to figure out yourself.

  The next day we all flew back, into high winds in New York City. The plane stayed in the air for what seemed like hours, circling and circling, waiting for a safe opportunity to land. There was a pilot on the plane as a passenger. He’d caught a ride up to New York to see family, and he was furious that he’d made what turned out to be such a bad decision. “I should have zigged when I zagged,” he kept saying. “I should have zigged when I zagged.” Jason sat next to me with his headphones on, annoyed that we were still aloft when he should have long been home. With each passing moment I felt more about my relationship as the pilot did about his choice of plane. Like him, I was zagging when I should have been zigging. Or the opposite. In my case, though, it wasn’t too late to change course.

  Jason and I kept dating for a few more months. When we finally ended things, we promised we’d still be friends. It seemed an unrealistic pledge even then, but I think it gave us the courage to break up. It is very hard to lose your best friend, and sometimes you need to take the severing of those relationships in small steps. For a while we spoke on the phone every evening, but the proof that our lives had gone on without each other in those nightly reports became too difficult to endure. We stopped talking and it felt better, and after that still, when there was distance to insulate the feelings, we’d e-mail occasionally and get together for a drink to catch up. It hurt less every day and then it didn’t hurt at all, and then we stopped feeling the need to communicate with each other in any way. Humans are adaptable. What pains us deeply will eventually fade, even if it never goes away completely. Even if it doesn’t seem like it will ever stop hurting when we’re right in the middle of it.

  On Valentine’s Day of 2012, after we’d been broken up for six years, I saw him on the subway. It was evening, and the 6 train was nearly empty. He was immersed in a New Yorker, and he didn’t look up as he stepped onto the train at Union Square. I recognized him the way you do with people you once knew, and sometimes celebrities, an involuntary resonating vibration in your core: Oh, yes, you. He was much the same. He had a beard now, but his head was still closely shaven, his eyes were still very blue, his skin was pale, and he was as thin and tall as I remembered. I was standing down the car from him, and instinctively, I stepped toward him, thinking he might look up and see me, too, but when he didn’t, I thought better of it and stepped back. He was married, I knew that, and had been for a few years. They’d had their wedding at the Bronx Zoo, he’d told me in one of our e-mail exchanges, his long-ago plan of getting married in his hometown backyard forgotten or, more likely, evolved. I surmised that he was on his way home from work, that he was going to see his wife for whatever Valentine’s Day plans they might have. I was just an old girlfriend, someone from long ago whom he didn’t need to be thinking about ever, but especially not on this day. So I said nothing and got off the train one stop later to go to a bar where I was meeting some friends.

  “I just saw my ex-boyfriend on the train,” I announced when I got there. “On Valentine’s Day. How weird is that?”

  “That is weird!” they
agreed. “Lady, get a drink.”

  It sounded more dramatic than it was, a corny plotline in a Lifetime movie: I saw my ex on Valentine’s Day. It did mean something, but the something that it meant was nothing. We’d been over for years. We’d both moved on, and on again still, and what was most notable about any of this was that but for the time we’d once shared together, we might as well have been strangers. How confounding that is, the course of so many of our romantic relationships: You know each other so well, are indispensable partners to each other, love and are in love. And then a day comes and you don’t know each other at all. The decision to not be together forever means, to each other, you become nothing more than a memory, a series of photographs, some stories, and, of course, whatever you’ve learned and will take with you to the next relationship. Those things are not nothing. Yet there was love there once, and then there’s not. I wonder where it goes.

  10.

  Please Accept My Regrets

  As painful as it is when it happens, we’re used to romantic relationships ending. It’s par for the course that most of the affairs of love we’ll have in life will, in fact, be finite. We tend to date far more people than we marry, after all. Those who come before “the one,” or the two or even three, will be, if not forgotten, confined to a certain time and place in the past, and in some cases not remembered at all. And that’s okay, that’s the way these things work. The high school sweethearts who meet and fall in love and stay together forever are a rarity.

  But friendships ending, particularly those that end not in a fade-out of geographical distance or changing interests or stages of life that no longer seem compatible, but because the friends decide they do not love each other anymore, and not only that, they don’t like each other, either—that happens far less frequently. These friend breakups can be even more painful than uncoupling with the men and women we have loved. I’ve had boyfriends who have stuck around for anywhere between two months and three years. The women I consider my close friends have been so for two, five, ten, and as many as twenty-five years. I don’t know what I’d do without them.

  When Ginny started dating the man who would become her husband, I never suspected that what happened in her relationship, in any of our relationships with men, could so drastically change our friendship. It began so typically, and not inauspiciously: They were introduced by mutual friends; they got to know each other while watching sports at their local bar; they went on dates; they had a good time. All seemed promising, but as they grew more and more serious, there were worrisome stories she would share, the sorts of things friends tell one another, promising not to judge and to keep such things just between them—he’s my boyfriend, this might sound weird or maybe even bad, but I’m telling you because I know you’ll support me. This is where things get so complicated. Perhaps your friend is just blowing off steam, or wanting you to say, Oh, that’s not bad at all! But you are invested in your friend’s happiness, and the more stories you hear—even if they may not ultimately denote deep, intractable problems—the more you are inclined to worry. So what do you do? Do you step aside and let it be, because their relationship is their relationship? Or do you get involved?

  I got involved. Hers was the bouquet I could not bear to acknowledge.

  It had been two years since Ginny had married her husband. We were thirty, and we’d hung on to our friendship, but it kept being tested. At various times, her marriage would appear to be foundering and, right along with it, there we were, too, crashing headlong onto the rocks. A piece of information would be revealed that I hadn’t known, and my resolve against the man she’d chosen would strengthen. At one dark point she called in tears, asking me to come over, and I rushed to her aid. We called her parents, who agreed to help pay for a divorce lawyer, if that’s what she wanted. Enough was enough. They’d help her. I’d help her, too. I felt concerned, but also relieved. My friend would be okay. She could put this past her and move on.

  Days later, though, when I asked, she seemed to be changing her mind, and still later, when we met for dinner, she told me she’d decided not to do anything at all. She still loved him, she said. She wanted to work things out. I couldn’t see why, and several drinks in, I told her so. That’s not all I said. I told her that I didn’t know how I could be friends with someone who not only couldn’t stand up for herself but also was so intent on continuing to pull me into her life dramas. I told her that her decision to stay with this guy made me think she was, well, not very bright. I told her I couldn’t take it anymore, and I think I gave her an ultimatum: It was him or me. I said it all and was hopelessly, unreasonably cruel. I left feeling awful, knowing that I’d likely just delivered a fatal blow to our friendship, but not wanting to believe it, either.

  Afterward, I reached out and tried to apologize, but it was too late. Unforgivable things had been said, and we were at an impasse. I didn’t understand how she could keep doing this. She didn’t understand how I could fail to support her decisions, nor how I could be so heartless when she needed my support. If I were a real friend, I’d be there for her and respect her choice. But I didn’t know if I could have a real friend who kept making these sorts of decisions and looping me into them, over and over again. How can you support someone when you believe what she’s doing is not only wrong but also hurts her and you, and she continues to do it anyway? How can you respect those choices? And, on the other hand, how can you love a friend who refuses to love your choice of a husband, a man you’ve promised to stay with so long as you both shall live? How can you love a friend who doesn’t seem to understand that this is the paramount thing—this is your marriage? It was awful, and it was also awkward, especially given our broader social circle, which included people who had far more patience with the relationship than I had (not to mention more inherent diplomacy), along with others who were only now being included in the drama. I felt rejected, replaced by this latter group of friends who were so willing to suddenly step in and give the support Ginny needed. They looked like the good guys, yes, but they hadn’t been there the whole time, I thought bitterly. They didn’t know how it felt—then or now.

  For weeks after that fight Ginny and I didn’t talk, but we were bound to see each other again, and as it happened, this would be at a wedding. Our friend Heather and her longtime on-again, off-again boyfriend, Rex, had decided to go on-again for good. They’d met while working as office receptionists the summer before our senior year in college, after we had all returned from our semester in Italy. Now, nine years later, they were sealing the deal with a marriage license. By the time of Heather’s ceremony in Los Angeles, the aftershocks of my fight with Ginny were no longer reverberating through our group, but she and I still weren’t exactly speaking, either. There was a big, raw wound that existed for both of us, hidden underneath the sheerest strip of emotional Band-Aid. We decided silently if mutually to cope by ignoring it. We’d all stay together in a big suite in West Hollywood for this event, happy, happy. Thankfully, Ginny’s husband would not be joining us.

  The wedding was downtown, at the top of an old art deco building in an apartment that had once been the residence of a Hollywood billionaire, a protected old-world hideaway with turrets and secret rooms and sweeping views of the city. It was beautiful. We arrived just as the sun was setting, and in the distance, beyond the imperious modern office buildings, you could see blue skies morph to pink and red and orange, speckled with white clouds. If you squinted you could see the Hollywood Hills in the distance, or at least, that’s what we said we saw. Heather and Rex were married outside on the terrace, and after the ceremony, we danced under the stars, Hollywood-adjacent to the thousands of lights still on in the buildings that surrounded us. Even closer, small palm trees decorating the patio twinkled with white lights. Everything and everyone was sparkling.

  I had on a black wool minidress that I’d bought on this very trip to LA, partly because at the hotel, our friend Alice had told me the green-and-blue si
lk with the Marilyn Monroe–Seven Year Itch silhouette I’d planned to wear was “too young” for me. While I didn’t love being called too old for anything, I’d wanted a new dress anyway, and the one I bought was certainly not too young. It had short sleeves and a mod structure, with buttons all the way down the back. There is a photo of me at this wedding, dancing on the terrace with my hands in the air, flapper-style, and a huge smile on my face.

  The waitstaff dispensed with any propriety, and so did the guests, in the end. They’d handed us bottles of wine and Champagne and not even bothered with glasses, and in the last moments of the party, people stood in the fountain at the top of the building and drank it all in, as much as we could hold. When the bar closed down, we gathered ourselves and our belongings for the after-party at a hotel just down the street. Somehow, though, between the time we left the penthouse in the sky and our arrival at the hotel, the mood had shifted.

  On the way up to the bride and groom’s suite of rooms, somewhere between floors one and nine, that thing Ginny and I tacitly agreed not to discuss trickled out. And then there was a stream, a river, a flood, a tsunami. How could she have gone back to him? Didn’t she see? She was trying to make her marriage work. Didn’t I see? Didn’t we both see everything we’d lost in the process, and everything that still stood to be lost? Why couldn’t I support her? Why couldn’t she be honest with me, with us, with herself? Why couldn’t I be a good friend? Why couldn’t she be? By the time we arrived at the floor where the after-party was taking place, brutal damage had been inflicted on both sides. I got out of the elevator and numbly entered the room where the wedding party was still celebrating, sort of. No one followed me.

  Inside, Heather was lying on a bed, one of her bridesmaids untying the red satin bow of her white strapless gown so she could change before she vomited. “Hurry,” she said, the word muffled into “mmmmphrrr” by the combination of Champagne imbibed and her pillow. Her husband, Rex, was casually chatting with a friend who was wearing a garter around his head and chugging a beer. Apropos of nothing, there was a large statue of a foot in the corner of the room.