Always a Bridesmaid (for Hire) Read online

  Kisses,

  Your Boys

  I have watched enough of MTV’s Catfish to know that when someone says they don’t have a webcam, they 100 percent are not who they say they are. But still, for some odd reason, I decide to press on.

  July 18, 2014—7:33pm

  From: [email protected]

  To: [email protected]

  Rob,

  Are there any public libraries you can go to? Friends that have Wi-Fi or an iPhone? Would love to chat face-to-face.

  Best,

  Jen Glantz

  I heard nothing back from them.

  • • •

  The crowds have started to thin, and the theaters on Broadway have begun sweeping the popcorn and ticket stubs off the rugs from their final show of the evening. I’m left feeling defeated. Feeling wrong about this whole thing. The police officer is mostly confused. It’s been another thirty-five minutes and I haven’t said a word to him, occasionally rolling my eyes or nodding my head, letting him know that while he doubts the outcome of this adventure, I still do not.

  I throw my hands up in the air. “You’re right,” I say, backing away slowly, as if the officer and I have made a bet, which now has me surrendering and leaving the premises upon his silent request.

  I head down into the subway, wondering how I fell for this. I’ve only been working as a Bridesmaid for Hire for a couple of months now. Maybe this whole thing was a premature decision—something that sounded really great on paper, but in real life, was a risky, unpredictable, and even potentially dangerous idea.

  As I go to swipe my subway card and find a spot on the F train heading south, the text I’ve been waiting for all night flashes on my screen. It’s from Rob.

  Sorry love, traffic. We’re here now. Tell me, are you?

  The F train pulls up to the platform, and exhausted straphangers with doggy bags of overpriced restaurant food step inside.

  I turn my back to the train and run away. I’ve waited this long to find out who my mystery men are, and I’m not going to lollygag the night away on my couch, stuffing my face with Doritos and Arizona Iced Tea, trying to figure it all out.

  I run past the police officer, who can’t help but look at me like I went down into the subway and came out a different woman, one who has now completely gone bonkers.

  Underneath the flickering Aladdin sign are two guys and an officiant holding a book of handmade notes. The guys are in tuxes. They’re brown-haired and over six feet. They’re everything they said they would be, happily in love and miserably lost in Times Square.

  I take a deep breath, whispering, “They’re real, they’re real.”

  October 14, 2014—1:15pm

  From: [email protected]

  To: [email protected]

  Jen Jen,

  Your boys here! Sorry we haven’t been in touch sooner, love. We apologize. We haven’t told you much. We’re pretty private people but we want to tell you this. We’ve been together for 17 years and we work together every day. That seems like a lot for most people, but for us, it just works. We can’t get married in our country, so we figured we’d go to a country and a place where you can feel and be anyone you please.

  New York City tomorrow!! See you then? You know where!!

  Hugs and kisses from the Grand Canyon.

  Your boys,

  R & C

  I start typing a response but pause for a moment, realizing that whatever I send next, I will stick to: either I’ll meet them or I’ll tell them that this isn’t going to work.

  October 14, 2014— 8:47pm

  From: [email protected]

  To: [email protected]

  Saved in draft folder

  The next morning, I wake up and rub the crud out of my eyes. It’s time to let them know if it’s a yes or a no. Some things feel wrong, but even more feel right.

  October 15, 2014—5:15am

  From: [email protected]

  To: [email protected]

  See you then.

  Love,

  Jen Glantz

  The officiant performs the ceremony in less time than it takes for the light to turn red, then green, and red again. Rob and Chuck kiss, and then for the second time tonight, they give me a wide-eyed, wide-armed, hug.

  They’re complete opposites; one is clean shaven and the other has deep-rooted stubble. One laughs when he’s nervous, and the other fidgets with a blue-beaded bracelet on his wrist. Both of them, stopping in the middle of a median, spend the first couple of minutes married to each other, breathing in taxicab exhaust and cigarette smoke, the scent of a late-night stroll in Times Square.

  “I have to ask,” I say, interrupting their stargazing, “what’s the secret? What’s the true way to make it seventeen years with someone?”

  By now, Rob and Chuck have gone from being strangers to me, anonymous and questionable over the Internet waves, to being my love gurus.

  Seventeen years, I think to myself, recalling my last relationship with a guy named Andy that lasted only seventeen days. That’s seventeen New Year’s Eve smooches, seventeen Fourth of July fireworks shows, seventeen Christmas presents (17 x 8 if you’re Jewish).

  “It just works,” Rob says, feasting his eyes on a billboard for a phone company that reads #NeverSettle. “We’re opposites but we communicate well to each other, though not so well online to others.”

  The three of us let out a laugh. My police officer, close by, does too.

  Some love, I’ve noticed, much like Times Square itself, is resilient.

  Some love, I’ve also seen, can be totally flimsy. It can’t even survive a trip to IKEA, let alone a Thanksgiving where Aunt Beth is asking your significant other about his views on the government’s tax system while piling up mashed potatoes on Grandma’s 1914 hibiscus-patterned porcelain plates.

  “Everything changes constantly,” Chuck says, pointing out the differences between what he’s seeing in front of him and what he imagined Times Square would look like from his years of seeing it in magazines. “You need someone who will latch onto you and love you no matter what season it is or what version of yourself you are that day.”

  I nod my head furiously, hoping one day I can stand in the middle of the busiest intersection in the world, with someone who loves me no matter what, even when the T-Mobile billboard turns into a Verizon one, or the shivers turn into sunburns.

  chapter thirteen

  Famous Last Words

  The first time I was sent to the principal’s office, I was only four years old.

  I was in prekindergarten, sitting next to my two dearest friends in the world on a knotty, sunshine-colored area rug in my fire-engine red overalls, my hair a tangled, chlorine-tinted mess. Mrs. Kay gave us the task of counting silently to ourselves—which is exactly what I was doing, until suddenly, out of the blue, my friends presented me with a challenge: count to twenty-five, out loud, in front of the whole class.

  I didn’t question this random dare for a second. I was trying to rid myself of my reputation as a thumb-sucking baby who pees in her pants, and I figured that by accepting this dare, I would earn some street cred among my baby friends. (I should note that my preschool wasn’t some rough-and-tumble jungle gym; it was in a synagogue in Boca Raton. Everything there was kosher, including our Play-Doh.)

  I accepted the challenge and started screaming “Twenty-three! Twenty-four! Twenty-five!,” so loudly that I felt my tonsils vibrate.

  The next thing I knew, I was on my way to the principal’s office, my little fingers locked in the hands of my teacher, Mrs. Kay, who was leading me down a long, red-carpeted hallway, straight to the place all of us tiny tots feared the most.

  Back then, I wasn’t shaking in my OshKosh B’gosh overalls because I thought this incident would be etched into my permanent record, which I always imagined as some kind of stone tablet, like the ones the Ten Commandments were carved on. And I wasn’t worried that I’d be rejected from college one day because of this mishap. I was mo
stly concerned about what my immediate punishment was going to be. No graham crackers during snack time? No naps during nap time? No monkey-bar-swinging, jump-roping fun during recess?

  I started to cry. I cried so long and loud that they had to call in backup: my mommy.

  When she arrived, she held me tightly on her lap as the principal taught me a lesson that I would eventually file away under Things They Teach You in Diapers That Apply to Life in Big Girl Underpants. A lesson that would be taught to us next year, after we learned the importance of not shoving six Oreos into our mouths and sharing them with our pals instead, or why it’s not very nice to eat with our fingers when a fork and knife are resting beside our plates.

  “Jennifer,” the principal said, looking at me as if I had personally pushed her buttons—or doused her desk in finger paint or stolen her peanut butter and jelly sandwich from her lunch box. “You need to think before you speak.”

  I remember asking my mom what that meant. It was a pretty heavy lesson to teach someone who had just traded in flailing hand motions for actual words less than a year ago and was still confined to training wheels and training pants.

  My mom gave me a big kiss on the cheek, leaving a big, smeary lipstick mark on my face, and handed me a semimelted KitKat bar from her purse. “It just means to wait a couple of seconds before you speak so your brain and your mouth can hold hands.”

  I think what the principal really wanted me to learn that day was the difference between right and wrong when it came to using our words. That even if we feel something, like the desperate urge to go potty, we shouldn’t announce it at the top of our lungs, in the middle of learning about what fruits are the color red or what animal makes a moo sound. We should wait until the teacher has a free moment, tug on the hemline of her Gap skirt, and let her know that we have some business to take care of.

  But every so often—say, once a week for some of us, and once a year for us more disciplined and manners-focused humans—we let ourselves go. We revert back to our four-year-old, rule-breaking selves again. We stuff those six Oreos in our mouths instead of offering to share with our loved ones. We find ourselves yelling the wrong things at the wrong times, living in utter misery as they stick around to haunt us.

  What I know now is that this principal of mine was actually trying to teach me something about having a filter: an imaginary device we rely on more and more as we grow up to prevent us from announcing every single thing we think and feel out loud to the world.

  If my filter decided to stop working at this very moment, I would probably blurt out to a room full of macchiato-drinking strangers that I just felt a bead of sweat drip down my rib cage, or tap the guy sitting next to me with the Beats by Dre headphones to tell him that his Adam’s apple is almost as big as a baby turtle’s shell.

  My filter is working just fine these days. I think it finally learned its lesson after it was caught taking the afternoon off, lounging at the pool, slathering on sunscreen, and thumbing through the pages of a Nicholas Sparks novel, too busy to stop me from saying something I would later regret. At least, that’s what I assume happened when I found myself in front of 350 people; twelve idle cameras; eight producers with walkie-talkies; and comedian, Emmy-winning television host, and bestselling author Mr. Steve Harvey.

  “Now, Jen,” he whispered to me at the end of our filmed segment together so nobody else in the studio could hear. “Are you single?”

  “Steve!” I pulled away from our warm embrace, turned to the studio audience, the cameras, and the producers, and blurted out, in the same way I had belted out those numbers in pre-school, “Are you hitting on me?”

  The words shot right out before my brain had a chance to catch them.

  Oh no, oh no. Oh no, oh no. Did I just ask Steve Harvey, in front of all these people and these cameras, if he was hitting on me?

  I was pinching my arm, squeezing my eyes shut tight, asking my overworked/nonexistent fairy godmother for my eighteenth wish this year. I’m not very religious, but in that moment, I thought about getting down on both knees and praying to Hashem. But I didn’t want to alarm the studio audience and Steve more than I already had. So I lightly clasped my hands together, looked up toward the crackling white ceiling, and prayed just a little bit.

  Hello, up there. It’s me. Jennifer Glantz. Yaffa is my Hebrew name, I think? I guess I should start by saying I’m sorry for eating pizza, pasta, and a veggie delight sandwich on wheat bread during Passover this year. Oh yeah, I’m also sorry for missing out on temple during Yom Kippur last month. I’m still feeling guilty about both of those things, okay? My great aunt won’t let it go. She’s constantly asking how my pants and my heart feel about myself after I stuffed my face with unleavened bread. I even ran into Rabbi Solomon last week outside the Second Avenue Deli. He asked me whose couch I was watching Netflix on when I was supposed to be at shul for the High Holidays this year.

  Anyway, here I am, once again, asking for a favor. If you help me, I promise I’ll give JDate another chance, and I promise to start fraternizing with more members of the tribe.

  Just please, please tell me that was a dream. Please tell me I thought about asking Steve Harvey if he was hitting on me but my filter kicked in and I swallowed that thought before it had the chance to escape my mouth. If it wasn’t a dream, if I did indeed say that to him, to a packed room of people, please tell me that he thought I said “kidding” or “knitting,” not “hitting” on me. I don’t care that those words wouldn’t make sense; I’d rather him think I was Cuckoo for Coco Puffs than become known as the girl who accused him, a happily married TV host, of wanting to jump her bones.

  “Did you all hear that?” he said, looking out at the audience, while his finger pointed directly at me. “She thinks I’m hitting on her.”

  In that moment, my filter decided to put down the Nicholas Sparks novel and kick into overdrive, erecting an iron wall between my vocal cords and the rest of the world. My brain followed suit. I couldn’t even think of a way to defend myself.

  “I’m a married man,” he said, gesturing toward the stunned guests, showing off his wedding band in the act, as if he were a magician who had just pulled a rabbit out of his hat. He was waiting for the audience’s applause. “I am not hitting on you.”

  I caught a reflection of my face on the screen behind me. The cameras were recording my word-vomit defense to Steve’s accidental offense. My face was glowing the same fire engine red as my dress, and my eyes were desperately searching for the exit sign.

  My ears were buzzing with the echoes of laughter. I felt as if I was back in the fourth grade, sitting in a plastic chair in the center of the lunchroom, listening to Jean tell me that he wanted to buy me tampons.

  I wanted this moment to be over. I wanted someone to grab my wrist and drag me to the principal’s office or, in this case, the executive producer’s office, read me the Joan Rivers riot act, and ban me from network television so I wouldn’t have the opportunity to embarrass myself again. I wondered whether, I cried hard enough, for long enough, my mommy would show up with a semimelted KitKat bar in her purse, ready to save me.

  “I asked you if you’re single,” he went on, “because I’m a matchmaker, and I may know someone who would want to take you out on a date.”

  At those words, I saw the image of my mother yanking the KitKat out of my hand. You missed out on an opportunity to be set up on a date? On daytime TV? Oh, Jennifer.

  “I’m just really, really . . .” My mind struggled to match the right thought with the right words, but at that exact moment, my stomach let out a giant rumble, as if to say, Get me out of here! I’ve had enough embarrassment for one pathetic lifetime. I just want to eat.

  Our stomachs don’t have a filter. They always sound off when we wish they wouldn’t, like in the middle of a buttoned-up business meeting or halfway through a lecture in algebra class. Whenever your stomach decides it’s time to make itself known, it will whine like a puppy that’s been left alone at home
all day. At first, you convince yourself that nobody can hear it. It’s your stomach, and it’s buried somewhere deep down, between layers of flesh and blood and tummy flab. Maybe it’s just extra loud because it’s bouncing off my muffin top, you think. But you would be fooling yourself.

  “Hungry?” Steve asked, laughing so hard he curled over and grabbed his own stomach. “Someone get her a pie from Giordano’s and let’s get on with this show.”

  The audience roared and a producer rushed forward to direct me offstage, like a crossing guard ushering people across a busy street.

  “Wait, please, wait,” I called out as she was shepherding me to a staircase that led back up to my dressing room. I felt as if I had just walked out of a courthouse with a guilty sentence for a crime I didn’t mean to commit.

  “Great job, Jen,” the producer said, handing me a bottle of water and a washcloth so I could wipe my sweaty brow.

  Had she missed the second half of my performance? The one where I went totally off script and out of my mind?

  “I need to get back out there.” I eyed her, letting her know that I had important business to take care of. “I need to say I’m sorry.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “He’s got to keep taping the show, and you have a plane to catch.”

  People always make such a big hoopla over first impressions. They always tell you that you need to have your hair combed, your shirt tucked, and your hand ready to deliver a strong and confident shake. They say the first words out of your mouth will decide if someone wants to hire you, befriend you, fall madly in love with you. But I don’t think that’s true. The truth is, I think it’s the way we say good-bye that leaves more of an impression on a person than how we say hello.

  I needed to fix my good-bye with Steve. But I didn’t have the chance to. He would forever remember me as the girl who asked him if he was hitting on her.

  Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night, drenched in cold sweat, wondering, Why, why, why, did you say that in front of 350 people?