Always a Bridesmaid (for Hire) Read online

  I blame this whole verbal snafu on the disturbing amount of hairspray fumes I ingested before I went on set. It fogged up my common sense. I kind of wish it had sprayed my mouth shut.

  Maybe I was extra nervous this time because it was my first TV interview in front of a live audience. I had done a handful before, just in front of a camera or two and a news anchor. I wasn’t used to having an auditorium of people watching. I felt like I was onstage at an off-Broadway musical, tap dancing along to my story of how I became a professional bridesmaid.

  Or maybe it was because this time, they told me the questions they were going to ask beforehand, and I was practically on airplane mode, reading off a carefully constructed, premeditated, and memorized script. I spent a week role-playing with my brother, who helped shape my incomplete sentences into polished statements with his punch-in-the-gut rebuttals. I had become a rehearsed robot who was trying very hard not to improvise—until I finally let go and did.

  Eleven months and six days later (I began keeping track in my head, recalling that moment at dinner tables and using it as my answer to the icebreaker question on a first date: “What was your most embarrassing moment ever?”), I found myself behind the scenes of another live-audience show, The Rachael Ray Show. As they were misting my hair with a tank-sized can of hair spray and flicking my lashes with a final touch of mascara, the producer ran through the topics Rachael wanted to cover, paused for a second, and asked if I had any questions.

  “Yeah, actually, I’m curious. Who are the other guests on the show today?”

  I was hoping for Justin Bieber. Maybe even Jake Gyllenhaal. I even would have settled for some shared airtime with Blake Lively. But her answer was someone I never imagined I would ever see again, let alone share a green room with.

  “Well, we have you,” she said, reading off her call sheet. “But right before you go on, we have Steve Harvey.”

  I dropped my phone, shattering the glass screen against the makeup room floor. I stood up from the chair abruptly, knocked the curling iron off the counter with my pointy elbows, and shouted over the lyrics Adele was belting through the computer speakers in the background: “I need to meet him!”

  The producers and beautifiers chuckled.

  “Wow, didn’t know you were such a superfan of his, Jen,” the producer said.

  “No, no. It’s not like that. I just need to tell him something.”

  I could see her looking down at her walkie-talkie, probably debating whether to signal to the crew backstage that this Bridesmaid for Hire girl was a little bit off her rocker.

  “Don’t think you’ll be able to meet him. He’s in and out.”

  I paced back and forth, dodging the curling iron and red lipstick the hair and makeup artists held out toward me. I had to meet him. What were the odds we’d be on the same show, at the same time? This was my chance to make a second, first, and last impression on him.

  I waited backstage for him to finish his segment as I was getting mic’d up and debriefed for mine. Right as he stepped offstage and started walking in my direction, I ran toward him, but a group of security guards barred me from him with their strong arms, as if we were playing a game of Red Rover.

  “Steve, Steve!” I squealed one last time, for good measure.

  His head swung to the side, like a bird that heard a familiar chirp in the distance. He looked at me. His eyebrows turned downward, and I could tell that he wondered, for just a second, how he knew me and where he’d seen me before.

  “Steve!” I called out from under the security guard’s armpit, as if I were a fan girl trying to catch Harry Styles’s attention outside a One Direction concert. “I’m sorry!” I shouted, completely oblivious to the fact that my voice could carry to the stage and that I might be embarrassing myself in front of a whole new studio audience.

  By now, he was already through the double exit doors, which swung back and forth until, at last, they slammed shut.

  But right before they closed, he turned, and his eyes met mine. And he smiled. I swear, I saw him smile.

  chapter fourteen

  What Ray Says, Goes

  I announce myself like I’m a contestant in the Miss America pageant.

  “I’m Jen Glantz!” I give a toothy grin, extend a beauty queen wave, adjust my arms into a Wonder Woman pose, and go on. “And I’m the founder of a company called Bridesmaid for Hire.”

  I’m not in front of a live studio audience at Planet Hollywood in Vegas or surrounded by panning cameras zooming in and out on my face. And—as much as I always wished this to be true—I am also not competing to win the title of Miss Florida Orange Grove.

  I’m two feet deep into a closet-sized office, in the back of the Mid-Manhattan Library, on a Saturday morning, making goo-goo eyes at a business tutor named Ray, who isn’t wasting any time trying to figure out how I found him. Instead, he’s signaling for security.

  I’m trying my hardest to look professional. This is a business meeting, and I’m a business owner. But when I went through my closet, all I could find were pleated leather skirts and long-sleeved tops with peekaboo cutouts from Forever 21. I settled on a button-down blouse from my “give to Goodwill” pile and ironed it (or thought about ironing it. In reality, I dunked it in water and fanned my blow dryer over it.)

  I’m a walking, dry-clean-only mess.

  Ray keeps silent after my introduction and slicks his gray hair back with one hand, sliding his chair closer to the cherry wood desk. He pierces me with his green eyes, and I hope he’s about to say that he wants to learn more, that he’s excited to tutor me in the wonderful world of business. But instead he says two words.

  “Get out.”

  I’m used to getting thrown out of places. The library across the street from my apartment kicks me out all the time for chatting on my phone while browsing for books. The coffee shop around the block, with free Wi-Fi and samples of yesterday’s breads, asks me to either buy another beverage or start paying rent whenever I try to discreetly camp out for eight hours with my computer. I’ve been on a date before in which, after fifteen minutes, he gently rolled on his coat, shook my hand, and ran.

  It takes only a minute and forty-five seconds before Ray tries to show me the exit, a new record for me. While I’m completely taken back and a little shaken up, I’m also impressed.

  “Get,” he says slowly, pausing to take a deep breath before the next word, “out.” He motions to the door like an angry-old-man version of Vanna White.

  I wonder what I did to get him all riled up. I’m wearing the most professional shirt I own, after all. Maybe I sound too much like a cartoon character and not enough like a CEO?

  But I came here to learn, and I came here for a one-hour session. I want my remaining fifty-seven minutes.

  “No,” I say, taking a seat and acting tougher than I am. I hide my hands underneath the desk so he can’t see them shake. My once-retired button-down shirt is suddenly soaked with stress sweat.

  The man across from me is probably in his eighties, has never lived anywhere outside Brooklyn (judging from his thick accent), and has probably bullied his fair share of rookie business owners. But these are all assumptions. What I know is that he is thin, his hands are wrinkled, and his shoes are the most modern thing about him. He has the exterior of a huggable grandpa and the mouth of a pit bull.

  I grab the arms of my wooden chair, lean back, arch my eyebrows, and raise my chin in defiance, as if to tell him that I’m not going anywhere, not until somebody makes me.

  He lets out a dry laugh, the way people do when they want to let you know that what you said, or what you did, isn’t funny. At all.

  “Ever seen an ugly baby before?” he asks, taking a sip of his coffee.

  What an odd question. But I’m not here to judge his techniques, I’m here to learn, so I go with it and pull out my pen stolen from Bank of America and my notepad from TD Bank and jot down “Lesson One: Ugly Baby.”

  “Put that away!” he yells. I drop
my pen and shove my paper to the side. “Have you ever seen an ugly baby before?”

  “Well, I don’t know. Maybe?”

  His eye contact is stern, unbreakable. “Have you?”

  “Yes,” I finally confess, feeling exhausted, like I just admitted to something I was brainwashed to believe true.

  “If you saw an ugly baby, would you tell the mother?”

  Okay, now I’m really not sure what kind of business tutoring this is, but I have a feeling I’m not learning anything that will help me with Bridesmaid for Hire. At the most, I’m about to learn what to say to my friends every time they send me Snapchats of their newborn babies and ask me if he or she is the cutest thing I’ve ever seen.

  “Well, I don’t know. Probably not.”

  He pauses, looking me up and down, his eyes glued to the spot on my shirt where a button should be, hinting that I am indeed the ugly baby in the room.

  “Your business . . .” He tries to go on, but I stop him.

  “I get it. I get it.”

  He flicks his hand toward the door again, as if his work here is done. But it’s only just beginning.

  “You don’t know a thing about my business.”

  “I know the name of it.”

  “Yeah, but there’s more.”

  I don’t know where to start or even how much to tell Ray at first. But I need him more than he realizes, more than my cherry-on-top personality makes it seem. The week before, I found myself crawling under my mattress pad, pushing my head into a firm pillow, and having a silent breakdown in my bed.

  When you live in New York City, you don’t have a lot of privacy to lose your mind without other people noticing. If you do it on the street, you have an audience of tourists swarming around you, with their street maps and selfie sticks, convinced that if they stay in Manhattan for too long, they’ll also suffer from periodic emotional breakdowns outside Starbucks. If you do it in your apartment, you have neighbors who just want you to shut up so they can finish watching The Voice while your roommate keeps a silent running tally of how many of these you’ve had this month alone.

  I was on my fifth. My business was eight months old, and all of a sudden I realized that I hadn’t taken a deep breath, a day off, a moment to let it all sink in, since the day I posted the Craigslist ad. I was officially willing to admit I needed help. My website was broken, my business model and sales pitch had me losing money by the second, and my inbox was filling up with too many requests from too many people who all wanted something from me. I was trying to be my own lawyer, my own accountant, and my own investor.

  If I was appearing on the TV show The Shark Tank, Mark Cuban would probably say, “Cute idea, but for that reason, I’m out.” Mr. Wonderful would then say, “You’re a complete mess and, for that reason, you’re dead to me.” My best shot would probably be with Barbara Corcoran, who, I imagine, would say, “Girl, you are in over your head. I’d have to spend way too much time holding your hand,” and then, I would hope, follow up on that comment with a generous offer that I’d be too confused to know the meaning of and decide to decline before even considering it.

  But none of that mattered, because here I was, in front of my very own Great White Shark, wondering if honesty would get me a deal or send me straight back out the door with nothing.

  I found Ray while I was inside of my mattress pad, face down, telling myself that I couldn’t do this anymore. I couldn’t pretend I knew how to run a business, and I couldn’t do the jobs of five people.

  So I pulled out my computer, Googled “free business tutoring in New York City,” and booked an appointment with the only tutor who was available on weekends—which is how I found myself at the Mid-Manhattan Library before lunchtime on a Saturday, sitting in what felt like a confessional booth at the local church.

  I’ve never been good at keeping my mouth shut and not rambling on about what’s on my mind, and my face is horrible at hiding my emotions. I’m prone to letting it all out, often accidentally and prematurely, and this moment was no exception; I told Ray the truth that, for the past 240 days, I have been too scared to tell anybody else.

  “I’m running this business,” I start to say as the tears slip from my eyes, “and sometimes I realize that I have no idea what I’m doing.”

  I tilt my face in the other direction. I stare up at the light. I cover my mouth with my hands. I’m trying every trick in the book to make him think the tears stubbornly falling down my face are just an illusion.

  “Stop being so brave,” he shouts. I flinch and turn my face toward him, revealing that I am indeed crying, that I am a Miss America wannabe with a missing button on my shirt who is secretly just a crybaby.

  “Tell me this right now,” he says. “What is your greatest failure?”

  A hug would’ve been nice, or even an offer to split the pumpernickel bagel and smear waiting patiently for him on his desk. But instead, he pretends that none of this is happening, that I’m not falling apart, piece by piece, in front of him. He’s simply forcing me to go on.

  “Well, my business isn’t a failure.” I decide to start with a positive first—and pull myself together. “I just need a little help.”

  “Tell me a failure!” He slams his fist down on the desk like an unhappy football coach who keeps watching his team turn over the ball.

  I’ve failed. I’ve failed a lot. But I like to take my failures and crumple them up in a ball and shove them in the back of my mind like a pile of clothes that no longer zip all the way up, unacknowledged but there all the same. You know, just in case I want to pull them out and do a dance of self-loathing around the living room.

  “Most recently,” I mutter, “I failed because I gave up on writing a book that nobody said they would publish.”

  “Okay, what else?” He hit back, as if we’re in a boxing ring and he’s pushing me to keep throwing punches in his direction—except the person I’m really punching is myself.

  “I guess you could say my savings account, or lack thereof, is quite the epic failure.” I tap my fingers on my TD Bank notepad. “I’m two years away from thirty, and the money in my 401(k) has never reached four digits.”

  I fall silent again, hoping he’ll pardon me from this exercise, hoping that he’ll ring a bell and end this conversation. I’m ready to bow out.

  He doesn’t, so I go on. I have to fill the silence somehow.

  “There’s my love life. It’s quite the cataclysmic mess.”

  I lock eyes with the fluorescent lights above me on the speckled ceiling, as if to fool Ray into thinking, once more, that I’m thinking really hard about how to keep on answering this question. But I’m starting to cry again.

  Finally, he breaks the silence. “Your problem,” he says, “is that you’re too scared to fail, so you don’t even move.”

  He compares me to a piece on a chessboard that just stays put because it’s too afraid of being tossed out of the game. He compares me to a small child who has just been caught stealing chocolate chip cookies from the pantry, and instead of running in the other direction, closes her eyes and hopes she won’t get into too much trouble. He compares me to a toddler who’s playing a game of freeze tag. And finally, he compares me to exactly what I am: a girl paralyzed in her own footsteps because she’s constantly obsessed with the what-ifs.

  “You want to be successful?” He leans in closer, muzzle fully removed. “You have to fail, fail, fail, and fail until you can sit here, in front of me, and recite every one of them so fluently and quickly that I’ll get bored and ask you to stop. That is when I’ll know you’re ready to learn about success.”

  No one has ever told me this before. Most people say the exact opposite—that you shouldn’t fail. That failing won’t get you out of the third grade, it won’t get you a spot on the baseball team, and it won’t get you a fourth date with a guy whose presence makes you forget your constant urge to check your iPhone.

  Failing isn’t something I strive for or put at the very top of my
to-do list. I cling tightly to the idea that I need to keep myself together, at least outwardly, avoiding risks and tiptoeing around my mistakes. That’s what I had always believed would lead to success.

  I wasn’t ready to give in to this cuckoo crazy advice just yet, so I decided to change topics, to bring up something else.

  “My ultimate dream is . . .” I clear my throat, sit up straight in my chair, and try to regain control of the conversation and myself. But before I can even tell him what that dream is, he cuts me off.

  “Enough with the ultimate dream language,” he says slapping it away with his hand as if he were trying to kill a mosquito. “Ultimate dreams are for lazy people. Ultimate dreams are bullshit.”

  I lean back in the chair and let out a nervous laugh that echoes throughout the entire business library. There’s something charming about an old man who curses.

  “I’m eighty-two years old,” he says. “There’s no time for ultimate dreams. You are either doing it or you’re not.”

  I want to jump in and pepper him with what-ifs, like: What if I’m not ready to? What if I’m not sure? What if I don’t have enough money to take a break from working full time to build the opportunity no one else in this world can ever give me? But I don’t say anything—partially because I know he’s right and partially because I know that if I even say the words, “Yeah, but . . .” he’ll yell at me to get out. He hasn’t done that once in the last fifteen minutes, and I don’t want to jeopardize that. I have no choice but to become an early adopter of everything he’s saying. It’s either that or go back to my tiny apartment and keeping adding to my roommate’s tally of Jen’s mental breakdowns.

  Maybe Ray is right. Maybe I’m not failing enough because I’m too scared of letting go of everything I have, even if what I have feels like a posthurricane kind of mess. I never had plans to start a business called Bridesmaid for Hire. I just had a crazy idea that brought me face to face with my laptop at 9:00 p.m. on a Friday. I remember saying to myself that even if this doesn’t work, that’s okay, because I have nothing to lose anyway. Maybe I still don’t, and maybe that’s a truth I needed someone to remind me of every so often. In the end, doing something, even if I’m not ready or sure about it yet, is better than lying on my back and dreaming about it.