Always a Bridesmaid (for Hire) Read online

  “Yes, I would love to. I’m free always, whenever!”

  I’m very bad at playing anything cool.

  “But we’d like to have you on with the first bride you decide to work with. Do you know who that will be?”

  I could tell her about the India bride or one of the other requests I scrolled through when trying to sort through my emails. But I want the first bride I work with to have a story. To be the kind of bride who really needs somebody by her side, and not just because she wants an even number of bridesmaids and groomsmen. That’s not the reason I wanted to start this business. I wanted this thing to take off, to really go somewhere, to help strangers who felt like they needed something from another stranger that they couldn’t find in anyone else.

  “Yes, of course, I have someone for sure.”

  Note to self: become a better liar.

  “Great, what’s her name?”

  Note to self: this is why you should never lie.

  “I’ll send you her info. When do you need this by?”

  Please say there’s no rush.

  “Tonight would be great.”

  “Tonight it is!”

  I click back over. “Jay, Good Morning America just called. They want to know the bride I’ve chosen to work with first.”

  “Okay, let’s keep reading through these emails.”

  “Should I just tell Good Morning America I’m not ready for all of this yet?”

  “Okay, now you’re finally sounding crazy. Of course not. I’m forwarding you a new email from a bride named Amy.”

  I keep Jay on the line and check my email.

  Dear Jen,

  Let me preface this by saying that I have never been a bridesmaid. I am one of the first of my friends to be getting married and am 25 years old. I am getting married this September, weekend after Labor Day, and it has been quite a learning experience at that. I had to let my maid of honor go, due to her issues of not being able to be part of the big day and rearrange. That was a stressful part of planning. :/

  I knock the pizza box off my bed and put my brother on speakerphone, tapping the reply button as my eyes begin to flutter shut. My body clearly isn’t on the same page with my brain, which is screaming that professional bridesmaids don’t get to nap.

  Dear Amy,

  Thanks so much for taking the time to write to me. Congratulations on your upcoming wedding! It’s great to hear about your interest in having me as a professional bridesmaid at your wedding, especially since you’ve had some problems with your maid of honor. I’m very sorry about that, by the way. I’d be happy to see what I can do to help between now and September.

  I would love to jump on a call with you to chat more about this. Please let me know when is best for you.

  All my love,

  Jen Glantz

  “I really hope she says yes, Jay. I think I could really be there for her. I think I could really help.”

  “I do too. But now . . .”

  “. . . we wait?”

  “No. Now we go back to figuring out this business.”

  “Oh yeah. This Bridesmaid for Hire . . . thing.”

  chapter ten

  The Strange Thing about Strangers

  He says my name like I’m an Egyptian goddess who’s getting fanned with a giant palm leaf on a warm sunny day.

  “Jen, Jen, Jen.”

  “Say it again,” I purr.

  The third time he says it, there’s a tap on my shoulder, and the fourth time, a little shake.

  “Yes, my darling lover?” I say, squishing my lips together for a kiss, right before my eyes start to unglue themselves. The sand, pyramids, and camels dunking their faces into waterholes begin to melt away as I surface from sleep and remember I’m on an airplane, in the middle seat, and the Stranger Danger hunk of a guy in the window seat is shaking me awake.

  I look around and there’s nobody else left on the plane, which leads me to believe that he’s been doing this for a while.

  “Welcome to Minnesota,” a cheery flight attendant with a missing bottom tooth says as she pulls my seat forward and grabs my zebra-print carry-on bag from the overhead compartment. “Aren’t you such a cute little thing?” She hands me a moist towelette to dry up the drool that’s now dripping onto my pleated Ann Taylor Loft clearance rack shirt.

  This is where I am. This is who I’m with.

  “Sorry about that,” I say, grabbing The Great Gatsby from the pocket of the seat in front of me, tucked next to an empty Doritos bag, an unused puke pouch, and a crumpled-up Sky Mall magazine. My face is an attractive blend of all the shades of red from the Pantone color chart.

  “You were out for a while,” he says, in awe of my deep-sleep abilities.

  “Are you from here?” I ask, rubbing clumps of dried mascara out of the corners of my eyelids, trying to salvage any chance I have of making him my future boyfriend.

  “Ohio,” he says. “I’m here for a wedding.”

  “Me too.”

  “Family?”

  “No.”

  “Friend?”

  “Kind of?”

  His eyebrows climb to the top of his forehead and I can tell he’s interested in hearing more. But more, I fear, will scare him worse than my drooling and sleep muttering already have.

  “I’m a professional . . .” I begin, trying to feel out his reaction, to get comfortable saying something that’s still very new for me. “Bridesmaid.”

  “Jen,” he responds, his voice drags in a familiar and protective way. “You’re not asleep anymore. You know that, right?”

  “I know, I know. This is my first time. I just started a business, and I’m here to see if it works.”

  “So let me get this straight,” he says, wiggling out of his seat, trying to get comfortable with the oversized baggage sitting next to him in 13B. “You’ve never done this before?”

  Everything happened so fast. I remember posting the ad, reporters calling, brides emailing, friends stopping by to see if now was an acceptable time to toss me into the loony bin. I remember staying up late one night with my brother on the phone, reading through emails. I remember one from Amy, and how, after my eyes scanned her email, I wanted to call her right away. How I wanted to get on a plane to Minnesota, and be there for her on the most intimate and memorable day of her entire life.

  I fall in love, just a little bit, with almost every person I meet. It might be the most dangerous thing about me. So although Amy and I had never sat across from each other ever or even had a conversation, I knew I had the tender cojones to fill in for her ex–maid of honor and be her step-in bridesmaid, her wildcard gal pal.

  The morning after her reply hit my inbox, I splashed a handful of cold water over my limpid eyes, drank a chai tea latte out of a mug the size of my face, and dialed Amy to say hello and ask her if she would be the very first bride to hire me as a professional bridesmaid.

  “I’d love to be your bridesmaid,” I said to her, as if it were that easy. In most other situations, the bride does the asking. But in this case, things were different—very different—and I felt perfectly okay with shaking up the status quo.

  “Listen, I don’t really know what you do, or who you are, for that matter,” she began, admitting the obvious up front, “but I wrote you because I have a situation and you seem to have an answer.”

  Her email had highlighted the details, but over the phone, she shared more.

  Amy’s maid of honor, Dani, was her best friend from high school. They were there to giggle about each other’s first kiss, dance side by side at senior prom, and rip open college acceptance letters with their fingers crossed and a bottle of champagne chilling in the fridge. But when Amy got engaged, Dani switched from loyal friend to silent ghost, ignoring phone calls and telling Amy she’d rather work a double at Panera Bread than go dress shopping or cake testing with her.

  Amy found herself with an aching heart and an MIA best friend. So two days before she emailed me and less than two months before h
er wedding, she told Dani she’d rather not have her as maid of honor, or even a guest at her wedding.

  I wish this was the first time I’ve heard of a bride and her best friend having their friendship torn apart once an engagement ring came into the picture and the wedding plans seemed to crowd out any other plans. But weddings have a way of making everyone go just a little bit cuckoo, and sometimes the end result is the end of a once-beautiful friendship.

  I saw a bride fire her maid of honor just one day before she was going to walk down the aisle with a bundle of pink and white peonies. I saw a bridesmaid not show up to a wedding as a premeditated way of saying a giant “I uggghh you” to the bride.

  “I’ll be there for you before your wedding and on the day of,” I said, laying out my offer: twelve phone sessions before August to chat about any challenges and go over her to-do list and a trip to Minnesota to toss on the dress and stand by her side. Anything she needed, even if it was a midafternoon vent session or writing her vows, would be my priority as her professional bridesmaid.

  “Can I sleep on it?” she asked, warming up to an idea that she didn’t even know existed before she read about my new company in The Knot, the online wedding-planning site.

  “Of course,” I said, realizing right then that I had another plot twist for her. “Just one more thing.”

  “What is it?” Amy asked, as if she weren’t already making a big decision.

  “Good Morning America wants to know if they can come too,” I blurted out, like a nervous child asking her mom if she can have a sleepover party—a gigantic one, with two cameramen, a sound guy, and a lighting pro. “They’d like to film us together at your wedding. Maybe I can get them to fly you out to New York City so we can meet before.”

  There was an almost unbreakable hush of silence. I need to get better at my sales calls, I thought to myself. Note to self: when chatting with potential brides, I probably shouldn’t toss a mammoth proposition at them willy-nilly. But this was my first Bridesmaid for Hire call, ever. I was allowed to make a mistake—or fifteen.

  “Oh boy,” she jumped in, thirty slow seconds later. “Let me digest all of this. I’ll call you with my final answer tomorrow.”

  “Of course. No problem!”

  There was something about Amy, and the way she told me the story of her breakup with her maid of honor, that made me want to help her more than any of the other brides who had emailed me. Maybe it was her honesty, or the way she answered the call like she had already saved my number in her iPhone favorites list, but I felt my heart beating and my gut screaming, This is right. This is why you started this whole thing in the first place.

  I had no idea if this business was going to work. Everyone was saying it was crazy. I was saying it was anything but. I needed Amy to help me find out, just as much as she needed me to help her out.

  “Amy,” I said, as if I’d said her name many times before over a bottomless mimosa brunch, as if we’d been friends since Montessori preschool. “Thanks for considering taking a chance on a stranger.”

  “You’re not a stranger,” she said, gulping down a nervous laugh. “At least not anymore. You already feel like a friend.”

  “13B and 13C,” the flight attendant says sharply, interrupting our goo-goo-eyed get-to-know-you love fest. “You have to take this somewhere else.”

  I’m glad she interrupts because I need a minute to gather my belongings and pull myself together so I can make a grand exit off this plane and into my first gig as a bridesmaid for hire.

  “So let me ask you,” he starts back up again as we’re keeping pace with each other on the jet bridge. “Do you think any of this is . . .” He pauses, looking for the right word to finish the sentence.

  “Strange?” I say, giving him a hand with diction.

  “Yeah, I guess so. You’re jumping into someone’s life pretty abruptly.”

  He wasn’t wrong. When Amy and I met for the first time, it was abrupt as much as it was awkward. But not because it had been only four weeks since Amy phoned me and said, “Yes,” or because we had talked only about ten times so far. It was because, when we met, at 6:00 p.m. outside a Starbucks in midtown Manhattan, three weeks before her wedding day, we went in for our first hug in front of a Good Morning America camera crew.

  Amy, in person, was nothing like I imagined her to be. She was inches shorter, her dark brown hair longer, and her Midwest charm almost suffocating to a jaded New York City transplant, but in the most necessary kind of way. She couldn’t get through a whole story without making me laugh, referred to me as “my dear” within just seconds of meeting me, and pulled me underneath her umbrella, without hesitation, when the raindrops threatened to ruin my freshly ironed dress.

  She had never been to New York City before, so to her, meeting the place she’d only seen in episodes of Sex and the City was more terrifying than it was to meet me.

  After the cameras filmed us shopping for dresses, honeymoon lingerie, and centerpiece flowers, we ditched our third wheel and went back to my apartment. We ordered linguine with meatballs and cheesecake and cannolis from a spot in Little Italy and spent the night playing an accelerated game of Who Are You?

  “Is this whole thing strange to you?” I asked, stuffing down a peppermint-flavored cannoli the size of my forearm. After spending just forty-eight hours with Amy in person, I felt that she was a friend I’d known since the days of Barbie and OshKosh B’gosh overalls.

  “Not at all,” she says. “Everyone you become good friends with was once a stranger.”

  Maybe Amy was on to something here.

  I thought about Kerri, my sole voice of reason in this city. One day I knocked on the door of her already-decorated Manhattan apartment with two gigantic suitcases covered in luggage tags that read: If found, please return to Boca Raton, Florida. I had been to New York City only twice before and I had decided on the spur of the moment to pack up my belongings and move. So there I was, knocking at a stranger’s door after we had connected on Facebook, giving her a hug hello, and saying something awkward like, “Hi, I’m Jen, looks like we’ll be spending the rest of our lives together.”

  My best friend, Jaya, and I were strangers at a school of 65,000 students until we both signed up for the same dance competition and were matched as partners for the routine. When the day finally came for us to perform, she kicked me in the head and I dropped her—onstage. Ever since, we’ve spent nine birthdays together and a month traveling around Europe, and we live a few blocks away from each other in New York City.

  Amy was right. Everyone we cherish in life starts out as a complete stranger, batting his eyes across the table on a first date, asking to borrow a pen during geometry class, craning to catch a glimpse of us on our first day on the job. Even people we no longer hold on to were strangers to us before they moved into and then out of our lives, becoming a stranger once again.

  Which is what I fear is going to happen if Stranger Danger the Hunk doesn’t ask for my number.

  “Maybe that’s the only way to enter someone’s life?” I say, my eyebrows waggling in my puny attempt to be flirty.

  My mystery man, aka potential future husband, shuffles his muddy Converse around the carpeted floor of Gate A17, ruminating over what his next move should be. He pulls out his phone. Yes, he’s going to ask for my digits! I did something right! But he scrolls through Google Maps, eyes his next location, and puts his phone back in his pocket.

  “Well, it was nice to meet you, Jen,” he says, grabbing his brown leather messenger bag and slinging it over his head and across his chest.

  Thanks for the shortest love affair I’ve ever had, I want to say, but I don’t. I feel my heart sink down to my pelvis instead.

  “Hey,” I call out, as he starts to walk away. “How did you know my name this whole time?”

  I remember Amy telling me that people from the Midwest are above and beyond nice. But I don’t remember him shaking my hand or asking for my name. The butterflies in my stomach are starti
ng to laugh at me, and I fear that during my sleep escapades, I was talking out loud and said something potentially harmful like, “I’m Jen Glantz and I love the way you sit with your elbows on the airplane windowsill.”

  “Look down,” he says, swirling his finger in the air until it points to my ticket stub that’s sticking out of my stolen library book.

  My face can’t keep cool any longer, and it darkens to a fire-engine red.

  “That’s the strange thing about strangers,” he says, waving good-bye and walking away without an ending to that sentence.

  • • •

  Being a professional bridesmaid for Amy feels almost identical to what it was like to be a bridesmaid for my friends. Amy and I had a fast friendship, the kind where you condense years’ worth of gabbing phone calls and coffee dates into a sixty-day time frame. But none of that matters on her wedding day. I’m there for her when she needs me. I help her lace up the silk corset of her wedding gown, sit by her side, and talk out the family drama surrounding her cousin, who brings a date without an invite or an RSVP—and whose date brings her own kids as well.

  Yet unlike my friends’ weddings, where I knew at least some of the bridesmaids, things are a little different this time.

  The second I walk into the church dressing room where the bridal party is getting ready and say hello to the other women, questions start flying fast and furious at Amy in not-so-hushed whispers.

  “You just met Jen two months ago?”

  “You’re paying her to do our job?”

  “Have you gone completely bridezilla mad?”

  Amy has three other bridesmaids, and she’s honest with them about who I am and why I’m here.

  “Her job is not to replace you,” she says, and I nod furiously in the background, trying to make peace with them by mixing homemade mimosas out of champagne and a bottle of Orangina. “She’s here to do some of the bridesmaid dirty work so you all can have fun.”

  Note to self: hire Amy as a spokeswoman for Bridesmaid for Hire, because she is on fire with these answers.