Always a Bridesmaid (for Hire) Page 11

  After a glass of bubbly and lending them a box of unopened bobby pins, the bridesmaids warm up to the idea of having me around.

  One bridesmaid grabs me by my pinky and pulls me into the corner of the room; something sharp with a pointy edge flashes in her left hand.

  Oh no, I think to myself. Is this how it’s all going to end for me?

  “Amy’s bracelet is broken,” she says, her eyes beginning to cloud with tears. “I went to put it on her and the stone popped off. We have to fix it before she finds out.”

  I reach into my duffle bag and pull out a tiny tube of false-eyelash adhesive. I rub it on the back of the stone and press it down firmly onto the silver bracelet, but it’s flimsy, as if it’s saying, Let me out of this party.

  I look at my surroundings. We’re in a church, and churches, my Jewish self thinks, must have art supply closets. I casually stroll out of the dressing room and raid the place until I find the goods—and a hot glue gun.

  “Here,” I say, handing the bracelet back to the bridesmaid, rubbing the burn I gave myself from sitting on the hot glue gun in my shorts. “This should do for now.”

  The bridesmaid gives me a hug, grabs the bracelet, and hands it over to Amy as if nothing had ever happened, as if everything has always been okay.

  When it comes time for the ceremony to begin, someone grabs me by the pinky once more and drags me away—this time into the bathroom stall.

  It’s Amy, and she’s completely in tears.

  “Jen,” she says, sweating into her bouquet of red roses. “I’m nervous about this.”

  Her three other bridesmaids are still in the dressing room, putting a coat of gloss over their lips and rubbing deodorant stains off their dresses with a paper towel lightly coated in soap and water.

  She’s known one bridesmaid since kindergarten, another since college, and the last since she moved into the neighborhood four years ago. Why me? I thought. Why is she telling me this, someone she’s known for only a couple of weeks? Maybe that’s the strange thing about strangers. You feel more comfortable telling them the truth because they have no fear, no shame, in telling you the truth right back.

  “It’s just that so many people will be looking at me and taking notes on this whole wedding,” she went on. “I just feel a lot of pressure to make it perfect.”

  “Amy,” I remind her, “remember what you said to me over cannolis and cheesecake? About strangers and how they affect your life?”

  She looks at me oddly, as if we’ve had many memories, conversations, and inspirational quote-swapping sessions over cannolis and cheesecake.

  “No, not really,” she says, dabbing her tears with a piece of single-ply toilet paper.

  “The guy you’re about to walk down the aisle toward was once a stranger to you,” I say, hoping she thinks about the start of their adventure and how she got here with him today. “Now he’s the love of your life, and that’s all you should be thinking about as you take those steps.”

  Her fake eyelashes flutter like the wings of a butterfly.

  “Everything else,” I go on, “is just background noise.”

  “Thank you for everything, Jen.” We hug for the fourth time in the history of our sixty-day-old “situation.”

  “I’d really like it if we could be friends, you know, after this whole wedding thing,” I say, as we head out of the bathroom and into the church.

  I was new to this whole business thing, and I hadn’t yet figured out how to draw a line between a work relationship and a postwedding friendship with the brides I worked with. I was never any good with boundaries anyway, and something inside my gut was screaming at me not to let Amy walk out of my life after she said “I do.”

  “I’d like that,” she says with a laugh. “Considering you’ll be in my wedding album and all.”

  “Considering I’ll probably always have this scar on my arm,” I say, telling her all about my experience with the stolen hot glue gun.

  When it’s all over, I find myself back in seat 13B, returning home after the wedding, hoping that the Stranger Danger Hunk will also be on my plane. Maybe this time he’ll finish his sentence—and, perhaps, ask me out on a date. But he’s not, and just before the door of the plane closes, the last person to step on board takes the window seat beside me. He’s the new 13C, a man with a scruffy beard who jams the armrest down, partitioning our space, and lowers the window shade before falling asleep. He snores in perfect harmony with the flight attendants giving us instructions on how to use the oxygen mask.

  “That’s the strange thing about strangers,” I mumble out loud, mocking my ex-potential lover, thinking of possible endings to that sentence.

  They mean a lot to you and then you never see them again?

  They have the potential to become your soul mate, but they don’t ask you for your number?

  I look over at the guy next to me, in la la land. They teach you how to deal with mouth breathers?

  I flip open The Great Gatsby to the page bookmarked with my plane ticket. Sticking onto page 15 is a note from my stranger. Please be his number. Please be his number. Please be his number. This could be the meet-cute to end all meet-cutes. My friends will ooh and ahh when I tell them that I fell in love with a guy on an airplane and he left me a romantic note inside a forty-five-day-old library book that I have no intention of ever giving back. I sweep the hair out of my eyes, shimmy up in my seat, nudge the guy in 13C to stop hogging the armrest, and prepare to read a love letter that will become the source material for the sequel to The Notebook, but with a more positive ending.

  Dear Sleeping Girl, the note begins. Read Let the Great World Spin. It’s my 2nd favorite to Gatsby.

  His handwriting is a little hard to make out, like a doctor’s or a fourth grader’s, so I read it once more. And then again, staring at it, twisting it, holding it up to the airplane reading light, hoping to find some encrypted code, a set of numbers, anything else. But there’s nothing but a book recommendation written on a Delta Airlines cocktail napkin.

  Maybe that’s the strange thing about strangers: they have just as much control as you do over how the story ends. They can make you feel so much in such a short amount of time. But either way, they sure know how make life gain an extra heartbeat of pulsing excitement over the what-ifs, the unexpected unknowns. So maybe the strange thing about strangers is that there’s nothing strange about them at all.

  chapter eleven

  The Perfect Match

  She makes choosing a life partner feel like ordering a coffee at Starbucks.

  “Tall? Short? Light? Dark? Fat? Nonfat?”

  Kind. Passionate. Selfless. Forgiving, I sing over and over again in my head, taking a sip of stale warm water and staring at my matchmaker with an exhausted look.

  “Earth to Jen! What does he look like?” she presses me once more, as if I have the ability to look right into the sparkling eyes of my Mr. Forever and describe him to her in 140 characters—or less.

  Who knows where he is right now, or what he’s even doing. Perhaps he’s canoodling with some other blonde girl whom he thinks is The One, until he discovers she’s twisting her tongue in some other guy’s mouth when he’s not looking. Maybe he’s on a scuba trip with his high school buddies and taking selfies with the most exotic fish south of the Galapagos Islands. Or maybe he’s in a cubicle right here in New York City, mistakenly hitting Reply All and picking his nose.

  I hear the sound of an ambulance speed by outside. I wonder if my Mr. Forever is inside. Or maybe he’s on his way to come and rescue me. That last one is the most unlikely, but a girl on the fourth floor of a matchmaker’s office at 6:00 p.m. on a summer Friday can dream.

  “He looks like Jake Gyllenhaal,” I say, after I glance down at my phone and notice that our precious time together will be ending in ten minutes and I’ve yet to give her an answer that isn’t totally blasé.

  “But,” I continue, picturing the version of Mr. Forever in his cubicle touching a booger, “he al
so looks like Jack Black.”

  She jots down my answers, critiques my body language, and swishes the water around in her cup, as if the liquid inside is from a bottle of well-aged chardonnay.

  “Tell me this,” she says, leaning in closer so that nobody else in the vacant Fifth Avenue, fourth-floor, stuffy shoebox office can hear. “What are three qualities you must have in a partner?”

  “He has to like pizza,” I say, letting loose a laugh that hits the ceiling and echoes through the room and bounces right back down to the white shaggy rug.

  Her eyes bulge.

  “Okay,” I start again, leaning forward in my chair. “He should be passionate about something, anything. He should be understanding. He should be patient and forgiving.”

  It’s a Friday night, and while other single women are probably slipping on a pair of cork wedges, spritzing their pulse points with Flower Bomb, and giving themselves a pep talk before a first, second, or even third date, I’m making googly eyes at a matchmaker.

  It’s not because there’s something wrong with me.

  Okay, maybe there is.

  There’s a little something wrong with all of us. We all have our “things.” Some people are terrible at making decisions, too stubborn to get along with others, or too picky when searching for their perfect match.

  I’m just stuck in this wild affair—with my couch. I spend nearly every free evening nestled deep against the cushions, spooning with the remote control. I’ve also found myself in a dysfunctional relationship with dating apps, downloading them and then deleting them from my phone more times than the average girl changes before heading out on a Saturday night.

  “Does he love cats or dogs? Is he a doer or a dreamer? A night owl or an early bird?”

  “Both! In the middle! The first one! Or how about a combo?” I say, thinking of another bird I’d prefer him to be. “What about a flamingo?”

  When I was thirteen, I started having this recurring daydream that my meet-cute would be inside a bookstore during its buy-one-get-one-free sale. My arms would be wrapped around a stack of books up to my chin, and he would accidently bump into me but somehow catch every book before it hit the floor. Maybe he’d be an off-duty magician, or just really good at balancing, but his smile would make my cheeks flush fire-engine red, and he would feel so bad about almost knocking over my leaning tower of paperbacks that he would offer to buy me an iced chai latte. He’d even pay for the almond milk upcharge.

  Someone knocks twice on the outside of the wood-paneled door, distracting me from my reverie. It must be her next victim.

  I wipe away the sweat beads making their way down my sideburns.

  “Just so you know,” she says before getting up to answer the door. “I have the perfect guy for you.”

  “Really?” I ask. “Are you flying him in from Mars?” I laugh so hard I snort clumps of air. It sounds like I am popping popcorn from my nose. She shakes her head, as if I’m hopeless.

  “You’ll meet him in two days,” she says.

  I get up from the distressed brown leather chair and check behind me for any puddles of stress sweat I might’ve left behind.

  “And, Jen,” she says, as if we’re long-time pals, the kind of friends who often browse the clearance racks at Bloomingdale’s together or go halfsies on a chopped salad at the Cheesecake Factory. “Give him a fighting chance.”

  Once I’m out the door, I call my mom. “It’s Friday night,” she says. “Do you have a hot date?”

  “I just left a matchmaker’s office,” I say as I exit the lobby of the building. I can almost hear my mom sitting up and pulling the home phone receiver closer to her face.

  “You did?” she says, eyes probably expanding her eyelashes so wide they wiggle on her T-zone, ice water glasses being shoved away, a guide for mothers with no grandchildren being tossed into the recycling bin beside empty Zephyrhills water bottles and yesterday’s newspaper.

  “What did you say? Who did they find? Did you mention that he needs to have a job?”

  I can see my mom already Googling available wedding venues for April 2017.

  I had just deleted all of my dating apps for the sixteenth time this year. When I mustered up the courage to use them, I found the acid in my stomach start to bubble over messages that said things like, Sup, Fool? or Want to chill 2night?

  Earlier that night, Glamour magazine’s web video team had called after they saw a news article cracking jokes over how I was a professional bridesmaid but so single that I would never be a bride. They asked if I would be interested in doing a web show with them called The Perfect Match.

  “Think Millionaire Matchmaker meets The Bachelor meets real-life Tinder,” they said.

  I had been wearing pajamas with holes in them, finishing off a bucket of Trader Joe’s strawberry licorice that served seventeen and watching year-old episodes of The Real Housewives of Atlanta on my DVR. Basically, I was doing the least sexy thing I could do on a Friday night in New York City.

  So when they called, I had no choice but to say yes. If I said no, it would be one more tick mark toward watching my expanding waistline creep up and down all alone.

  • • •

  I like to call my biological clock “Cynthia.” That name seems so down to business, cut the bullshit, serious. The opposite of who I am and how I date. So whenever I download a dating app or agree to go out with a guy whose profile says he spends his free time going to the gym, doing laundry, and tanning, I know Cynthia’s behind the wheel, steering me toward the path of reproduction, and whatever else my bodily to-do list says I need to get out of the way before menopause—at which point I imagine Cynthia will retire to a farm in Georgia with the other expired biological clocks.

  “Cynthia made me do it,” I say at Sunday brunch when my friends ask me, over hot oatmeal and berries, how I ended up having a staring contest with a matchmaker.

  “Who’s Cynthia?” they ask, before taking sips of their green juices.

  I always think I’m one comment, one manic laugh, one dating story away from them tossing me in the loony bin and telling the good-looking guy at the front desk to throw away my bedazzled key.

  “You,” I point to the friend who is breast-pumping in the middle of a SoHo restaurant so her nipples won’t leak all over her brand-new Gap maxi dress, “have a baby!”

  “And you,” I point to my friend who keeps using her nondominant left hand to reach across the table for the salt shaker to flash us her engagement ring, “are practically in Lamaze classes already.”

  “I,” I say as I brush a chunk of dried oatmeal from my eyebrow, “am hopeless.”

  In some strange and twisted way, it seems as though everyone I know who has already found their endless love thinks of themselves as a certified matchmaker.

  It took a year and four months for an ex-coworker of mine, who is under thirty with two kids, a wife, and a mortgage in Long Island, to get me to agree to have dinner with his friend, whom he promised was my perfect match. So one night after work, I met the friend at a restaurant with nine tables and eight items on the menu. He sat across from me, cross-legged and phlegmatic, and stared into my eyes, as if he was trying to figure out what planet I traveled in from. He never spoke to me again.

  My cousin, who lives in Westchester with two kids, a husband, a dog, and a house with a driveway she has to shovel after snowstorms, tried to set me up too. Except she tried to set me up with another cousin—a third cousin, but still, a cousin. We share family members, DNA, and slices of apple pie during Thanksgiving dinner. Were there no other eligible single guys in the area code, or the planet, that she could find for me?

  “You don’t need professional help,” my breast-pumping pal says. “You just need to put yourself out there more.”

  “Step away from the computer screen,” my engaged friend says, waving her fingers in the air so the entire restaurant can see her sparkle. “And charm them, not harm them.”

  Here I was, at Sunday brunch with the
girls who once accompanied me onto dance floors until 4:00 a.m., or spring break trips to the Bahamas, or late-night phone calls discussing the whos and whats of the single guys who lived in our college apartment complex, treating me as if I’m on an episode of Hoarders. As if they are knocking on my door of boxed-up attempts at love, trying to fix the damage, to hand-pick the Mr. Nos and Mr. Wrongs off my puny heart to get me swept up and ready for the world once again. Except for a task this large, it was almost like they needed to call the National Guard. The Big Guns. The mobsters of love to pitch in and help out. Which is why I agreed to go to a matchmaker. I needed a professional who didn’t lead with, “Put yourself out there more.”

  This wasn’t my first time flirting with professional help. I am indeed a proud member of Patti Stanger’s Millionaire Matchmaker’s club. But not as a millionaire or even one of the girls invited onto the TV mixers, in a suffocating dress and six-inch heels that squish your toes together until they look like soggy fish sticks.

  I’ve always had a theory that Patti and my mom are related. They have the same edge, unwarranted opinions, and last name. So when my hairdresser in Boca, Vicky, told me that she used to color Patti’s hair blonde and that I should reach out to her for help, I busted out my iPhone and wrote her a letter.

  Dear Patti,

  You might be my aunt. But you also might be my one-way ticket toward finding a guy who doesn’t burp on a first date. Please reply.

  It took forty-eight hours, but I heard back. Not from her, of course—if she read that email, she might also be on team “toss Jen into the loony bin”—but from her team. They gave me an application to fill out and asked that I send over seven unfiltered photos of myself.

  “We have the perfect match for you,” a lady with a squeaky voice, and the capacity to chew gum and form sentences at the same time, said to me over the phone six months after applying.

  “Do I get to meet Patti?” I said, thinking how happy my mom would be to know that I finally found her long-lost potential sister. “You know, there’s like a 15 percent chance she’s my aunt because my mom and she have the same last name, and they look alike, kind of.”