Always a Bridesmaid (for Hire) Read online

  “Now you listen up,” I’d say, sticking my index finger into their faces. “I have something very important to tell you.”

  “What? Are you pregnant? Do you secretly live inside the pizza shop across the street? Are the Feds looking for you because you haven’t paid your late library book fines in over a year?”

  “Shhh,” I’d say, not looking to get busted for another crime. “No, no, it’s nothing like that. It’s much worse.”

  I’d instruct them that when they walked into my apartment building and the doorman called me Kimmy, they were to make no sudden moves, flash no awkward smiles, emit no weird giggles, ask him nothing like, “What did you just call her?” My friends would roll their eyes, wrinkle their noses, and look at me like I was nuts. It didn’t matter, as long as they didn’t blow my cover.

  I came close, once. I went to pick up a birthday gift that my mom had sent me when I turned twenty-six, and I asked Jimmy if any packages had come for me. My brain was running hamster-like circles around what could be inside that gorgeous brown birthday box, and I forgot to remember that my mom would have mailed the package to someone named “Jen Glantz.” Of course! She had no idea about this name game I was paying over $1,500 a month to play. So when Jimmy saw a package with my address on it, sent to someone named Jen, he shook it in front of my face and said it was a mistake, probably meant for another resident in the building.

  “Oh,” I said, eyeing the box that inside held all of my theoretical medium-sized treasures from my favorite clothing retailer. “Weird.”

  I never had the guts to go back and get that package. My package. Who knows, the box with the pink, sparkly Forever 21 dress could still be sitting there, waiting to be claimed. Or perhaps someone tossed the box in the trash because it didn’t have a rightful owner, and now my flamboyant dresses were buried six feet under in a landfill outside East Brunswick, New Jersey.

  The thought of having to walk up to Jimmy at this point in our relationship and tell him that my name is not Kimmy and has never been Kimmy makes me feel icky. It ruins the ebb and the flow of what we have. It makes me think that all of this can be easily solved in one simple way, and one way only: marching down to the Centre Street courthouse and asking the clerk if I can legally change my name to Kimberly—Kimmy for short, and Kim for those who really know me well.

  This isn’t going to be the last time someone calls me someone else’s name. It has now become a regular part of my job.

  Rose asks if she can call me Jessica. Her wedding is three months away, and we are smack in the middle of our first phone session together. I have no idea if she pulled the name from a book of the most popular girl names of the ’80s, or if the name has significance to her. All I know is that from now on, I’m Jessica.

  Here’s how it usually works with a client. First, I’ll get to know the bride—her pet peeves, her wedding conundrums, and her big-day fears. Then the bride will get to know me and learn about my experience as a bridesmaid for hire. I’ll give her some pre-aisle precautions, and we’ll discuss what I should say during the champagne toast at the reception, before the cake is cut and the bouquet is tossed. And then, together, we’ll get to know “Jessica.”

  Jessica is the one with the story, the girl who has been places before. The protagonist who enters the wedding from stage left and recites how she knows the bride and how happy she is to be able to stand by her side after all these years. Jessica is the bridesmaid who shows up on the wedding day in my five feet seven inches lanky-armed body.

  Sometimes Jessica is Christiania or Meghan with an H. It is always entirely up to the bride. Sometimes I can have as many as three different names and three different stories in one weekend as a bridesmaid for hire.

  After a while, it didn’t matter what people called me anymore; I was subliminally trained to answer to everything. Whether I was out in a restaurant with terrible acoustics, sitting in the middle row of a movie theater, or taking a quiet walk around the Central Park reservoir on a Sunday afternoon, whenever I heard someone call out a name, any name, a nervous twitch inside me would ignite an immediate answer. Without flinching, I would turn around and wave, say hello, and smile to a complete and total stranger, who was probably just saying hi to her dinner date, chick-flick companion, or a friend she bumped into while also taking a brisk stroll on a casual Sunday afternoon. But just in case she was talking to me, because she recognized me from a rehearsal dinner, the linoleum dance floor, or even perhaps a wedding toast that I gave for a bride I had just met only months ago, I acknowledged her. I transformed, for a couple of seconds, back into that person she might have known for a few minutes, a few hours, or a few days.

  “So where did Rose and Jessica meet?” I ask, trying to give birth to our “How do you two know each other?” story—the first, and sometimes only, question people ask at a wedding.

  Rose doesn’t want anyone, including her five other bridesmaids and her fiancé, to know that she hired me. She made me virtually pinky-promise that before she pressed Send on her signed contract and deposited her payment into my account, this would be our forever secret. She wanted me there as a bridesmaid on her wedding day because she was having panic attacks over how her other bridesmaids were going to ruin what she hoped would be the best day of her life. They were already doing a pretty good job of trying, with their overbearing opinions and their disdain for following directions. She was exerting too much energy keeping tabs on them and making sure they didn’t lash out at each other—or her—and ruin everything. She was hiring me as their babysitter, as the peacekeeper, making sure that if they had any diva moments—and she promised me they would—that I would intercept them like a 125-pound linebacker.

  I had a track record of falling in love with every person that I met on the job, so I agreed, signed a contract with her, and imagined that this would be pretty easy. I would distract them with candy, jokes, and a night of electric slide–like dance moves.

  “It doesn’t really matter,” she went on, nonchalant and blasé. “Because my bridesmaids already hate you and probably won’t speak to you.”

  “Oh, okay,” I responded, caught off-guard, realizing, once again, that with this job, I never know what people are going to say. No matter how many times I work with a bride, I can never predict the situations, the stories, and the plot twists that will fly my way.

  “I just want to warn you, Jen/Jessica,” she says, giggling over this Frankenstein-like person she had created, “that they might not be the friendliest to you.”

  I understood why, and I couldn’t blame them. They had never heard of me before, and they were probably wondering why they had never seen me at any of Rose’s other parties or life milestones, like the birth of her son, Roger, two years ago, or her annual Christmas party where her fiancé would dress up like Santa and she’d be his naughty elf. I didn’t shake my booty with them at a nightclub in Atlantic City for the bachelorette party or cry happy tears when Rose opened up a brand-new blender, coffee maker, and set of dish towels at her bridal shower. In their eyes, I was the elusive bridesmaid who showed up whenever she felt like it. I was the girl who always seemed to have better plans, who always put Rose second.

  This was nothing new. Most wedding parties felt this way about me—the bridesmaid who pranced into the bridal suite on the morning of the wedding as if she belonged there and would automatically be welcomed. It was customary for me to spend the first thirty minutes surrounded by whispers: “Who is she?” like we were at a first-grade sleepover and I was the new kid in town who hadn’t been invited. But this time, I had a feeling things would be different. Rose was hiring me because her bridesmaids were the problem and I was the solution.

  On the day of the wedding, I paced back and forth outside Rose’s hotel bridal suite for fourteen minutes, figuring out how to make my grand entrance. Everybody will love Jessica, I tried to convince myself, wondering what the people watching through the hotel security cameras were thinking about me. Give her five more minutes,
they were probably saying as they drank their Keurig-brewed coffee and hovered over the tiny black and white fuzzy screen. Then we’ll send security up to have her removed from the premises.

  I repeated the facts over and over to an empty hallway of sleeping hotel guests, singing them like they were the lyrics of a new Justin Bieber song. Jessica, thirty-two, studied business, likes jazz. (Jen certainly does not.) Jessica is in a long-term, long-distance relationship with a guy she met at Rutgers. Rose introduced them, and now they’re about to get engaged. (Jen is certainly not even close to getting engaged.)

  All of a sudden, the door of the bridal suite swung open, like a cattle pen, letting out a single bridesmaid who angrily trots up to me. “Can I help you?” she asked pointedly.

  “You must be Betsy,” I said, matching her face to the gallery of images I had saved in a folder in my brain called “people I want to forget the minute this wedding is over.”

  She scrunched her face and moved her head in a figure-eight motion. I bit my lip.

  “I’m Jessica,” I continued, going in for a hello hug, realizing, halfway into the motion that this was not a good idea. I stuck out my hand instead.

  She didn’t shake anything.

  “I’m one of Rose’s bridesmaids.”

  She placed her hands on her hips as if she were about to call the attitude police for backup.

  “Okay.” I raised my eyebrows at her. “Well, I’m going to go inside now and see Rose.”

  She continued to block the entrance to the door, leaving me the option of either crawling between her legs or squeezing past her armpit. I chose the latter.

  When I saw Rose for the very first time in person, she looked nothing like her photos, which reminded me of every online date I’d ever attempted to go on. I stood there in the middle of the room of unfamiliar women until finally, fifteen slow seconds later, one of them made a rapid move toward me, trampling me to the ground.

  “Jessica!” she cried out. I sighed in relief. There she was: my bride, Rose.

  Don’t say it’s nice to meet you; say it’s nice to see you, I said over and over in my head before responding.

  “Finally!” I said, keeping it neutral and fighting off the anxiety of having five pairs of eyeballs drilling into me at the same time.

  “These are Amber, Shelly, and Marque,” she said, pointing out who was who among her bridesmaids. As she said their names, they turned away instantly, avoiding all eye and verbal contact. “This is Betsy, but you two already met,” she said, flipping me a beware kind of a smile. “And this is Janna.”

  Janna waved hello to me immediately, like a kind human being. Rose told me that none of the bridesmaids liked her either because she was the only one out of the rest of them who wasn’t from Newark, New Jersey, so she wasn’t able to attend many of the prewedding events either. Finally, an ally, I thought to myself.

  I plugged in my curling iron and took out bags of candy from my duffle bag, my sweet secret weapon, and made myself at home in a place I wasn’t wanted. “Does anyone want a chocolate-covered raisin?”

  Nobody moved a muscle. My words hung in the air for a while until they felt awkward and crawled right back into my mouth.

  Janna walked over and grabbed a bag.

  “Tough crowd,” I said to my new loyal gal pal.

  “Tell me about it,” she said.

  That’s the funny thing about young friendship; it takes something as simple as a brief moment of shared laughter, isolation, or awkwardness to bond two people together. We’re attracted to other people in situations when we desperately don’t want to be alone.

  Betsy came over to us and interrupted our moment of budding friendship. “Excuse me,” she said with a slap of attitude, grabbing a bottle of hair spray that I thought was peacefully communal. “Who do you think you are?”

  “Well, I’m Rose’s friend from school,” I respond. It looks like my job starts now. “And I’m a bridesmaid.”

  I was never a good liar. One time when I was five, I took my mom’s wallet out of her purse to use as a prop for an afternoon game of “playing grown-up” (a game I still find myself playing now). When she knocked on my door, interrupting my meeting with high-powered “entre-pen-manures” (as I called them back in the day, and still sometimes do now), and asked if I had seen her wallet, I shook my head back and forth, collapsed into a pile of my own tears, and instantly presented her with the wallet and my sincerest apologies.

  But I didn’t start this business because I wanted to be a professional liar; I started it to help people. Lying was something I had to do occasionally, though it wasn’t on my résumé of skills.

  Betsy starts the inquisition off with an easy question: “Where do you know her from?”

  “NYU.”

  “I thought you met in Atlanta?”

  “We went to Atlanta,” I say, trying not to tremble. “Once.”

  “Why haven’t you shown up at anything in the past five years I’ve known her?”

  “I’ve been traveling.” I grab Janna as a shield of distraction and start combing the ends of her hair. “For work and for love.”

  “Good excuse,” she says, dismissing herself from our Ping-Pong match of questioning to reboot with a caramel macchiato and a cigarette.

  Phew, I thought, I survived.

  Betsy reenters the room, slamming the door shut, squinting her eyes as if she’s trying to read the brain waves inside my complicated mind. “There’s something weird with you.”

  “There’s a lot weird with me,” I say, laughing so hard a half-chewed chocolate-covered raisin almost flies out of my nose.

  After being tossed into rooms of standoffish bridesmaids week after week, I’ve learned that the quickest way to get them on my side, on my A-team, is to help them out with something they need. Whether it’s a last-minute pep talk to calm their nerves because they’ve never walked down an aisle before, or a tampon or a hair tie or blister cream—items I always carry in my bridesmaid survival pouch, strapped underneath my dress, or stuffed into my two-sizes-too-big strapless bra—these small gestures usually earn me a bit of trust. So when Betsy’s dress split open, right above her derriere, seconds before she was supposed to lead the bridesmaid entourage down the aisle, you better believe who was there, on her hands and polyester-covered knees, with a sewing kit and a mini-bag of safety pins.

  “Don’t move,” I told her, finally and literally putting her in her place.

  The bride was starting to break out in panic-induced hives. The flower girl was getting restless, tossing her bin of flowers upside down and stomping down on a hundred red rose petals. The organist had already started playing Pachelbel’s Canon in D, and the guests were turning around in their seats, waiting for someone to walk toward them.

  But here was Betsy, with her tangerine-colored underwear shining out of the hole in the back of her dress. I tied a piece of dark blue thread on a sewing needle and got to work. In less than three minutes, the dress was functioning again. Hello, Project Runway, here I come.

  “It’s good for now,” I said, taking a deep breath, my heart racing, a nervous bride squatting down next to me to examine my handiwork. “Just don’t do any crazy dance moves down the aisle.” And together we laughed—until I looked up at Betsy’s face, and the bride’s, and realized I was the only one here laughing.

  Betsy didn’t thank me; she eyed the back of her dress in the mirror and brushed off the wrinkles on the front, pretending none of this even happened. She scooped her right arm into the groomsman’s left, and they took a step, then another, and then another, down the aisle, away from where I remained hunched over. I shoved the needle and thread back into my bra, where they had been all afternoon in case of an emergency just like this.

  Janna tapped me on the shoulder right before I was about to take my first step down the aisle and right after I’d shoved my makeshift sewing kit back into my brassiere. “What are you, some kind of professional bridesmaid or something?”

  �
�Something like that,” I said, as if I weren’t, and I marched forward into the ceremony, the church door closing behind me like the mouth of a whale.

  It’s only after dinner is finished and the dessert tables are beginning to sprout up around the room that I heard someone call the name Jessica.

  It was 10:30 p.m., and there was only half an hour left before I could disappear onto an Amtrak train heading for New York City. I’d sit in the very last car and peel off my fake eyelashes, my blue polyester dress, and this evening as Jessica.

  I turned around and, two feet away, found my archenemy, Betsy, glowering at me. I wondered what I had done now to get her tangerine-colored panties in a wad.

  “Thanks, or whatever. For before,” she said, before heading over to the fondue machine.

  I nodded, giving her a silent bear hug, my finest and final peace offering. I could smell the invisible incense burning.

  When the clock struck 11:00 p.m., I packed up my bags and tiptoed toward the exit door, avoiding any final questions, any unwarranted good-byes.

  “Jessica,” I heard again. This time it sounded familiar and pleasant. I turned around to find Janna. She pulled out her phone. “Let’s be Facebook friends.”

  “Oh, I don’t have an account,” I said, because it’s true. Jen does, Jessica doesn’t. Janna looks at me like I’m eighty-seven.

  This is the part of the job that I dislike the most. Other than a party favor or a photo strip from the photo booth, I can’t take anything else home with me from a wedding. Everything must stay there, as is—even the people I meet.

  But maybe that’s okay. Maybe some people are supposed to enter our lives just long enough for us to share a slice of ourselves and a night on the dance floor before we disappear. That’s the strange thing about strangers: you fall in love with a moment in time with them, tattoo that moment onto your memory, and move on, never to see them again.