Always a Bridesmaid (for Hire)

by Jen Glantz

  My slanted bangs, crooked teeth, and dirty white Converse must have made quite the impression on Jean that afternoon, because the next day, during lunch, he planted his feet on top of a sailor-blue plastic chair and straightened to his full height of five-foot-one, ready to make an announcement.

  “Listen up,” he said as his prepubescent voice dipped low before hitting a high falsetto, the likes of which I’d never heard before. “I want all of you to know that I, Jean, am in love with Jennifer Glantz.”

  I coughed up my pizza bagel onto my orange lunch tray. I prayed that nobody in the lunchroom knew who Jennifer Glantz was. A perpetually shy girl can only dream.

  Alas. Three hundred and forty-three pairs of eyes spun in circles until they found a pleasant resting spot on my forehead.

  I wondered how well my invisibility cloak worked as I pulled the neckline of my sweater up over my noggin and tucked my legs up into the body of the sweater, hiding everything but my widow’s peak. I closed my eyes tight. Just get through this, I chanted in my head, and then maybe you’ll finally be allowed to transfer to a middle school in some other galaxy.

  “I love her so much. I will do anything for her,” he went on. “I’ll even buy her tampons.”

  The room broke out into shrills of laughter. People began whooping and clapping their hands together as if they were welcoming Justin Timberlake onto our campus. A wave of “woos!” went through one of my ears and out the other. I hadn’t even gotten my period yet, but now the entire student body thought I was a bleeding monster.

  Was love supposed to be as uncomfortable as going to the dentist or, when I finally came of age to experience it, the gynecologist?

  I’ll never know why Jean fell in love with me after I pointed him to the bathroom, or why he proclaimed his love like he was conquering a brand-new territory, or why he felt the need to demonstrate the seriousness of his affection by volunteering to buy me tampons. Maybe it was because to Jean, I was a mystery. I was a girl of few words and only slightly more hand gestures, and maybe to him, and only him, that was enough.

  By age fourteen, I thought that if I wanted the right guy to like me, I had to make him aware that I liked him by sticking my tongue down his throat. (I don’t know when the girls I went to school with held a town hall meeting and decided that boys no longer had a flaming case of the cooties, but suddenly it was so, and now we had to kiss them. Which they did. All of them. Except for me.)

  I would practice a lot in case my moment happened. I’d stand in front of the mirror and slather on some cherry Lip Smacker before placing my lips on the cold reflective glass, moving my tongue in rapid figure eight motions and tiny circles, making out with my own reflection.

  When I finally found someone who told someone else he’d be okay with kissing me, I had a mouthful of braces and a deep psychological fear that if the boy also had braces, we’d lock together. Then we’d be rushed to the hospital and my parents would have to see me tangled up in a premarital situation with a guy who was just okay kissing me. They’d probably make him marry me, or at least attend our next Passover seder.

  The day I got my braces off, I went to the movies with a group of guys and girls and told myself that before another car flipped over in Fast and Furious 3, my lips would be glued to a guy with the AOL screen name Bucs314. But I waited too long, and right as our chins touched and our lips pressed together, my right leg started to vibrate. My teal beeper was going off in my jeans, which meant one thing and one thing only: the movie was over, and my dad was waiting for me outside.

  I wondered, then, if love was all about being in the right place at the right time. The never-been-kissed, fourteen-year-old version of myself deemed that I would probably have to wait forever for it. (Now I wonder if I need to fully dismantle my biological clock, or at least take the batteries out; these days, it’s pulsing harder than a Kesha song right before the beat drops.)

  After that ill-fated attempt at romance, with Vin Diesel watching over us, I managed to successfully touch tongues with five people before I met a guy named Ben in college and instantly fell in love. He was the head of Habitat for Humanity at my college and had a pretentious air about him that made him seem as if he was tightrope-walking thirteen stories above everybody else. I melted when he said my name, and I cooed when he repeated world news as if he were taking over Brian Williams’s gig on Nightly News. We kissed for the first time in my dorm room, on the edge of my extra-long twin-sized bed, and by the time he left, I was planning our entire future together. We’d graduate and join the Peace Corps and be the kind of couple who didn’t shower for weeks at a time as we traveled the world, adopting a handful of kids from Third World countries. But one week after our first smooch, he stopped calling. He stopped texting. He stopped responding to me when I sent him emails asking if he’d read the latest National Geographic article on genocide in Rwanda. I was getting ghosted before ghosting had become a thing.

  I started to think that maybe love was just a game. A series of passionate, heart-racing hellos followed by radio-silent good-byes. A factory-defective puzzle in which, for me, the all-important middle piece was left out of the box. Other people seemed to have it all figured out, but I was always “losing a turn,” Monopoly style, or shelling out my hard-earned (and decidedly real) money to fund some guy’s steak dinner because he was on student loans and counting the pennies in his sock drawer.

  Two years after sticking my diploma in a frame and thirty-six days after landing in New York City with a one-way ticket, I signed up for a JDate account and messaged sixty-five guys before finding one whose bio was made up of complete sentences and not just a series of abbreviations and winky faces. It was my first time on an online dating site, but beggars can’t be choosers—the only guys knocking down my door were of the Seamless deliveryman variety.

  When I walked into a Lower East Side wine bar to meet one particular date, I had no idea which guy he was. In front of me was a lineup of freshly shaven gentlemen in gingham button-down shirts, so I went up to each guy, one by one, and asked, “Are you David?” They all shrugged their shoulders and fumbled around with their phones, begging me to move aside so when their internet date walked in, they wouldn’t be caught canoodling with a lost girl with messy blonde hair.

  When David finally arrived, I commented that he didn’t look a thing like his profile picture. He was five inches shorter and his hair color wasn’t the same; in fact, he didn’t have any hair at all. But we sat down and ordered two glasses of sauvignon blanc. I rattled off some of the headlines that Matt Lauer had delivered that morning in order to shatter the nervous silence that was beginning to suffocate us.

  “Cheers,” he said.

  I raised my glass and dinged it against his.

  “To what?” I replied.

  “You’re just way smarter than you look.” He chuckled and placed his glass back down on the wobbly wooden table.

  I told him I wasn’t feeling well. It was winter, and as a Florida native, I wasn’t used to getting frostbite on my exposed flesh every time I left my apartment. I gathered my things to get ready to leave, but when I put my coat on, my left arm got stuck in the sleeve and I knocked down his half-empty—and my half-full—glass of white wine. I watched in slow motion as the glasses shattered and little shards got stuck in the leather upper of his loafers. When the bill came, the restaurant charged us a 15 percent service fee for my performance, and he asked me to pay for the entire bill to cover the embarrassment I had caused him.

  I wondered then, at twenty-three, if finding love meant having to share when I didn’t want to, be uncomfortable, and play a game all at the same time. If so, I was already exhausted. I wondered if I had to earn it, like a child earns an extra gold star, like a teenager earns her driver’s license, like a college kid earns her first win at beer pong. But how many times did I have to sit across from a guy while he swished around his half-empty glass of whiskey and yammered on about how he absolutely hated his job in investment banking and coul
dn’t wait to retire to the sunny isles of Florida? Did I really have to use all of my 60 GB per month AT&T data plan to download sixteen different dating apps to find my Mr. Forever, all while politely smiling whenever someone asked me why I didn’t already have a boyfriend? What did I need to do to find a guy who would eat Doritos Locos on the couch with me?

  Now, at twenty-eight, I’m feeling a little more hopeful and a little less constipated about the whole thing. Maybe if I don’t experience these bad dates, these email breakups, these Tinder messages full of bad grammar and lame come-ons, I won’t know true love when it finally comes up to me and gently smacks me across the face.

  After all, every person we meet is a plus or a minus to our heart. As I stuck my fingers into a glop of birthday cake icing and drew a faint little heart on my plate, I thought, Maybe it all evens out.

  My parents have been married for forty years. I don’t know many things that last that long. My shower curtain needs to be changed at least every seven years. My library card expires every ten years and requires proof of a pulse and a New York City address to get a new one. Even Carnation Instant Nonfat Dry Milk has a shelf life of only thirty-seven years.

  My parents met on a blind date back when “I’ll Google you” was something naughty you said after dessert, right before the bill came. My mom had just moved from Queens to Miami Beach. One night, her friend told her to paint her lips magenta and put on a pair of sleek bell-bottom jeans because they were going out on a double blind date.

  My dad was visiting Miami Beach from Queens, and his friend told him to shower but not shave, because that night, they were going out with two groovy girls.

  That’s the night my dad and my mom met, but funnily enough, they weren’t set up on the blind date with each other—they were matched with the other’s friend. When the date was over, my dad called my mom and said, “I had fun with your friend, but you’re the one I’d like to see again.”

  I fear that now, that would translate into a pathetically blasé text, like, “Yo, you wanna hang again without the other two?” I wonder how my mom would respond to that, or if she even would respond to that, if their meet-cute was adapted for modern times.

  “How did you know Dad was the one?” I asked my mom after we had eaten our cake and I had peeled birthday candle wax from the dining room table. We both glanced over and watched him sitting on the couch, snoring, the TV buzzing on low volume like a lullaby.

  “I didn’t know,” she said, tapping every button on the remote, trying to shut the TV off. “It just felt different yet familiar. A familiar kind of love.”

  Maybe, I thought to myself, love doesn’t need to be complicated; maybe it just needs to feel like everything else. Maybe it just needs to feel familiar.

  “Lloyd!” my mother yelled as my dad shook himself awake and tried to acclimate himself to his surroundings. There he was, on the soft cream leather couch, his eyes meeting the eyes of the same woman he’d been waking up to for forty years.

  “Wake up!” she said. But her voice was filled with patience, and she smiled back at him, as she had so many times before.

  chapter two

  You Can Always Come Back Home

  “Jennifer Sara Glantz.”

  She starts the conversation with my full name, which means only one thing: I’m about to be put in my place. And believe me, I need it.

  You can usually figure out what someone wants to say to you by their tone and how they address you. If she had opened with, my darling, sweetheart, or simply Jen, I would know she was calling about something trivial, like the weather, or to ask for a play-by-play recap of my weekend. But today she’s about to lay it all out there, to tell me like it is, holding nothing back.

  “Mom,” I say, mentally bargaining with my anxious body to calm down before the waterworks set in. “I’m sorry for being so upset. I just have no idea what to do or where to go.”

  “You stop this right now,” she interrupts, powering through in full mom mode, “before you make yourself sick.”

  There are only three more days until graduation from the University of Central Florida, and while most of my friends are watching the minutes on the clock tick away like a New Year’s Eve countdown, pressing their lips to glasses overflowing with champagne and toasting to a bright new future, I’m having a full-blown anxiety attack, curling my delicate limbs into the fetal position and hiding in the crevice between my sink and toilet.

  The days of saying, “I’ll figure out what I want to do with my life next year,” are officially over. Now, I’m lying on a patch of frosted porcelain tile as my tears fall onto a piece of paper: a formal notice that I will need to vacate my college apartment by graduation.

  “Jennifer,” she begins again. “You can always come home. Do you hear me? I made your bed up with those sheets you like and bought you that deodorant that makes your armpits smell like fresh rain.”

  I never really understood what people meant when they said they were at rock bottom. Was it a spiritual place where their mental GPS left them? Or was it a physical location like, say, a bathroom floor? In this moment, it feels like both, because here I am, my mascara-streaked face smooshed against my sunflower-colored Urban Outfitters bath mat, with no job, no place to live, and no more than a couple of crumpled-up twenty-dollar bills that my Great Aunt Rita has been slipping to me every year since my bat mitzvah. I’m pretty sure this is my bottom.

  No college freshman pushes open the lecture hall doors on day one and says, “I’m going to have a really good time here for a few years, and when it’s all over, I’m going to move back home with my parents. I’m going to be unemployed and ultimately unsure of what kind of job I’m even qualified to do! But at least I’ll get to hide in my childhood bed surrounded by Clay Aiken posters!”

  When you’re in college, you rarely think ahead past the next theme party, midterm, or even what you’re going to microwave for dinner that night. No one’s wasting precious extracurricular time wrestling with the possibility of ending up with a degree in poetry and not a clue what to do with it. You never realize that after you graduate, no one is going to dial your numbers and say to you, “I hear you just graduated with a degree in English! I would love to hire you as a paid assistant editor at Marie Claire in New York City.”

  My conversation with my mom ends with a summoning: “You’ll move back home next week until you figure the rest out.”

  “Thank you, Mom,” I say, before I respond with what I desperately would like to believe is the truth. “But I promise I won’t be there for more than a month.”

  My family lives in Boca Raton, Florida, a place that’s infamous for its early-bird specials and hearing aid discounts. There’s not much of a social scene, and anything going on usually ends at 9:00 p.m. When I tell someone that I was born and raised there, they immediately say two things: “There are other people your age there?!” and “Do you know my grandparents?”

  Its year-round paradise-like weather attracts people from all over the world to pack up their lives and settle down for retirement. But my life is supposed to be starting, not winding down toward eighteen holes of golf. I’m going to have to figure out my future and pick a career path among people who eat dinner at 5:00 p.m. and constantly smell like sunscreen and baby powder. How am I supposed to find inspiration or a mentor here? Someone who doesn’t need to turn up a hearing aid to hear me ramble on, someone who would be up for being my wingman at the local bars, which—again—close before 9:00 p.m.!

  But I pick myself up off the floor. Boca Raton, here I come.

  • • •

  My room is exactly how I left it when I began college four years ago. It’s a shrine to myself, full of embarrassing photos of me with braces and baby fat and the kind of bad style that would alert Joan Rivers and the fashion police. If I were to bring a guy here, he’d think he was in some preschool playhouse, and the entire mood would be spoiled. Who would want to make out with me next to a giant stuffed animal giraffe in a magicia
n’s outfit eyeing him from a beanbag chair?

  There’s something about unpacking my collection of shot glasses, all purchased at exotic spring break locations, and lining them up next to my once-darling American Girl dolls that makes it clear that I’ve traded in the 4:00 a.m. dance floors for nights on the couch with my parents’ DVR. I have officially said good-bye to flirting with fraternity boys and said hello to grocery shopping with my mom.

  Which is exactly what I’m doing when I see Cheryl.

  Cheryl was my first real friend. The one you’ll find peeking over my left shoulder in all the Kodak prints from my childhood. The friend I’d eat my entire bowl of broccoli for so that my mom would let me have sleepovers at her house. The occupant of my top bunk at sleepaway camp. She stuck around for matching Halloween costumes, confessions of first kisses, and playing dress-up in clothes too mature for our lanky and undeveloped bodies.

  But she didn’t stick around—or talk to me ever again—after we hit puberty and she grew a pair of boobs that attracted the undivided attention of the male species. Meanwhile, I began sprouting pimples and decorating my overgrown chompers with a set of metal braces from Doctor Woolgoomooth.

  My right eye gets tired from staring at tomatoes so it drifts across the produce aisle—and there she is: a grown-up version of my corduroy-overalls-wearing, monkey-bar-climbing, pinky-promising, used-to-be-best-friends-forever ex-friend.

  “Oh my god!” Cheryl says, as she drops a bag of prewashed lettuce on the floor. “Jennifer Sara Glantz!”

  Here we go with the full name, I think to myself.