Always a Bridesmaid (for Hire) Page 4

  “Eyes on the prize!” someone screams from the crowd. I have an inkling that it’s one of my family members who’s hoping that my first time as a bridesmaid will also be the last time I attend a wedding single.

  As my cousin tosses the bouquet, the bundle of fresh peonies comes zooming toward my forehead, and I have no choice but to reach up and grab it. To stick my hands up in the sky like Rafiki holding Simba aloft. But right as I reach for it, my treasure chest comes undone. The mints, the tissues, the Band-Aids, the Dr. Scholl’s inserts: they all come tumbling out of my bra and land beneath the hemline of my bridesmaid dress. The clunks and bangs of CVS inventory hitting the wooden dance floor frightens the other single gals, and their eyes turn from the bouquet to the floor almost instantly. I fall to the ground, slipping on a travel-size lint roller, and before I even get up, I notice the other girls have cleared the dance floor. But clutched in my left hand is the bouquet. Such is the price of victory.

  My first experience as a bridesmaid will always be defined by two very important things: I caught the bouquet, and the entire wedding learned a secret that I already knew when I woke up that morning: I am not a D cup.

  On the car ride home, I sit in the backseat, patching up the blisters on the bottom of my feet with extra-strength Neosporin and Power Rangers–themed Band-Aids. The strapless bra snuggles up beside me, like an innocent puppy who still manages to ruin everything, and the bundle of peonies rests in my lap.

  “Catching the bouquet doesn’t mean anything,” I say to my mom as she slides into the passenger seat of the car.

  I watch her buckle herself in, her smile as proud as any mother who watches her child win her second-grade spelling bee or say, “I do,” to the man of her dreams.

  “I’m telling you,” she says, fidgeting with her diamond ring. “You have the flowers, the luck, and, now, the bra.”

  I start plucking off my fake eyelashes, one by one, desperate to peel off this bridesmaid costume and return back to the messy-haired, braless girl that I am, deep down to my sports-bra-wearing core.

  “Now,” she continues, adjusting the air-conditioning. “All you need is the guy.”

  chapter four

  For the Love of JDate

  Her voice is panicked, as if the world is coming to an end and she wants to make sure that I have enough canned food in the pantry and jugs of water hidden underneath my bed. As if Ann Taylor Loft is having a 50 percent off sale, which is a step above their usual 40 percent off sale, and she wants to make sure I snag another pair of business casual slacks to hang beside the five pairs I haven’t worn yet.

  “Jennifer, what are you doing right this second?” my mom asks, more curious than usual.

  “I’m, umm,” I look down at my shaggy cuticles, figuring I’ll use them as an alibi since I can’t tell her what I’m actually doing right now.

  It’s Sunday afternoon and I’ve fallen into my weekend routine of scrolling through my Facebook newsfeed and clicking on one friend’s friend and stumbling all the way to a friend of her cousin to discover a wedding trailer of a bride and a groom I’ve never met and watching it on repeat until my keyboard is drenched with pathetic tears.

  “I’m filing my nails,” I reply, convincingly.

  “Stop everything,” she continues. “Check your email. There’s something special in your inbox.”

  I will always view my life as two distinct periods: the time before my mom got a smartphone and a Facebook account, and the time after. The time before was, of course, simple. It was safe. If my mom wanted to know about my life, she had to pick up the house phone and pause from chopping onions to find out. Now, if she wants to know what I want for dinner or where I know my most recently added friend on Facebook from, all she has to do is post on my wall whenever she wants, still not understanding that all 2,032 Facebook friends of mine can read her frequent comments, like, “Remember to use your pimple cream tonight.”

  I press Pause on the muted wedding trailer that’s playing for the sixth time in the background and switch over to my inbox.

  There it is. An email from my mom with a subject line that reads: Fwd: Living Social Deal of the Day: 70% off Match.com.

  I can hear my mom on the other end of the phone taking out a coffee cup from the top shelf of the cupboard and placing it underneath the coffee maker. I can hear her putting the phone closer to her ear to gauge my reaction. But I don’t make a sound as I drag and drop the email into my spam folder, rolling my eyes and thinking, only briefly, about reporting it as illegal activity.

  “You know,” she starts up again, interrupting my silent treatment. “Susan’s son met his wife on Match.com.”

  I break open my locked lips, eager to find out if Susan is real. “Who’s Susan?”

  “She is in our Thursday mah-jongg group.”

  The word our is casually thrown around here. Just because I’m perpetually single doesn’t mean I’m thirty years too young to be part of any kind of mah-jongg, Tupperware, or Oprah’s book club group.

  I stick my claws out at the idea of online dating because none of my friends met their Mr. Forevers that way. They all met them in some amazing, movie-like, meet-cute way, so many years ago, when braces and midterms and money for fast food was all we really had going for us. But back then, I was just trying to get a first kiss, a second date, anything but a third-wheel kind of gig. I was what most would package up and label a serious late bloomer.

  I have a (Facebook) friend who met her boyfriend seven years ago, in high school gym class, and now they’re married with a minivan full of kids. I have a (real-life) friend who met her husband on her first day of work, when the elevator stopped thirteen floors short, and they were trapped inside for fifty-six minutes, staring at each other in sheer, desperate hope.

  What’s my online dating meet-cute going to be? We met after I liked the About Me section of his profile? We fell in love after he messaged me a winky face or a pickup line like, “Sup, cutie?” Will it be hopelessly romantic to admit that when we finally met in person, he looked absolutely nothing like his photos? Or that I accidently swiped right when I meant to swipe left and it was the best mistake I made in my twenties?

  When I moved to New York City, I thought dating would be easy. I thought I would go to a bar and have a line of guys eager to shake my hand hello and ask me for my number so they could call the next day and ask me out. I thought I’d meet someone in line at the Chase Bank ATM or while waiting to speak with a Time Warner Cable representative about how I haven’t been able to connect to Wi-Fi in my apartment in twenty-six days. But the only guys who seem to be knocking at my door are my landlords asking me to shell out enough cash for last month’s rent, and delivery guys who never judge me for ordering the same meal three nights in a row or for wearing pajamas with teriyaki sauce stains on them.

  “I’m sure this Susan lady’s son was very successful with the online thing,” I say, dragging and dropping the email from my spam folder and placing it in my permanently deleted folder instead. “But I’m not interested in giving it a try.”

  I hang up the phone and press Play on my video, crying once again, as if on cue.

  If I’m going to give this whole online dating thing a whirl, I think to myself, I’m going to do it my way. I’m going to spend as much time as I want browsing profiles and running elaborate background checks, first through Google and then through the NYPD. If I find a guy I’d like to meet in person, I’ll meet him—behind a glass window, prison visitation style.

  I figure if we hit it off, we could then compose an elaborate story together, a blended version of each of our fantasy meet-cutes. Perhaps he’d want to say we met while running around the reservoir in Central Park, and since everyone who knows me knows I never run, I’ll ask him to change our story to how we met while reaching for the same J. D. Salinger book at The Strand. Nobody will ever have to know we met online, ever.

  I start typing Match.com into a new browser and quickly mash down on the backspace key. If I
’m going to find someone to go on a date with, I should at least try to find a guy I can also bring home with me for Passover. I type in JDate.com and start drafting up my personal details:

  Username: MyMomMadeMeDoThis1234

  Location: Behind my Mac Book Pro, trying to scratch off the dried-up smear of peanut butter that’s made itself at home between the G and the H keys.

  Hair: Blonde. Okay fine; it’s more of a Jack and Coke color, but every three months I give a chunk of my paycheck to a patient hairstylist who makes it look like champagne.

  Body type: Fits nicely on an L-shaped couch.

  I’m really good at: Knowing all the lyrics to Jay-Z’s Hard Knock Life album, writing what I want to eat in haiku on napkins at fancy restaurants, fumbling around in my purse and trying to find my wallet when the bill comes.

  Looking for: A mensch who likes me as much as I like pizza.

  I upload three photos of myself from three years ago and go to press Send when, all of a sudden, a pop-up window enlarges and takes over my thirteen-inch monitor. “One more step until you can spin your dreidel around love,” it reads. I contemplate shutting down this secret operation, tossing my laptop out the window, and erasing this whole premeditated attempt at finding a husband. “You just need to insert your credit card information.”

  I forgot that this thing cost money. I forgot how expensive finding love could actually be. I click the X at the corner of the window. I’m done.

  Another pop-up ad zooms forward: “Did Hanukkah come early this year? We think so. Sign up today for only $39/month.”

  I can’t afford that. I’m a bottom-level PR assistant at a three-person company, where my salary resembles that of a top-level intern. My paycheck is enough to cover my rent, a couple of slices of one-dollar pizza, and half of my Con Edison bill every month. Anything extra that I want has to be free. I’ve become really good at sneaking into fancy hotels and stealing soap, an hour on their gym’s treadmill, and a muffin and some stale coffee from their continental breakfast.

  As I go to delete my perhaps too-honest profile, a blue blinking box on the side of the website pulls my eyes toward it. It’s for JDate’s blog, and it says they’re looking for new writers. I’ve been writing about every detail of my life, publicly, on the Internet for years now, I think to myself. A couple of thousand people read about how I really uggghhh wearing bras, or how I was rejected from 256 jobs before getting my first in-person interview, or how I have extreme sweating problems that allow me to wear only white or black. Why not introduce the world to my dating life, or painful lack thereof, in the name of getting a free JDate account? Count me in.

  Two days later, I’m JDate’s newest blogger, and ten days later, I’m on my very first online date with that guy named David who told me I was smarter than I looked. This was all totally paying off.

  I manage to keep my newfound dating life and my blog tips a secret from everyone until one day, two months later, this happens.

  My roommate, Kerri, screams at the top of her lungs, as if she just won the lottery. Kerri and I have been sharing a 500-square-foot apartment for a year and a half, and the only time her voice has climbed up an octave above normal was when she saw a mouse crawling around inside our refrigerator. Other than that moment, she’s been as calm as a Buddhist monk.

  “Your face, oh my god, your face!” she yells.

  “What is wrong with my face? What’s wrong with it?” I scream back, wondering if it’s somehow on fire and I don’t even know.

  “It’s—” She tries to continue but can’t, pointing at the computer and allowing her face to turn red and then even redder until it looks like a pepper. “It’s all over JDate!”

  I grab her laptop out of her hand. My secret’s out, but not because she found my profile or my blog posts, but because, on the very front page of JDate, at the very top, there’s a giant banner ad with my photo. With my name. With a snippet from my profile reworked into copy: Follow Jen Glantz as she searches for a mensch who loves pizza.

  “Jennifer,” my mom screams when I pick up the phone, just minutes after Kerri discovered I was bartering prose for the chance to meet bros. “Barbara’s cousin’s sister, Michelle, said her son saw a Jen Glantz on the front page of JDate? Is that you?”

  Now the secret was really out.

  I can hear her breathing heavily into the phone, crossing her fingers, praying to Hashem.

  “Mom,” I say with every ounce of patience left inside of my newly exposed self. “How does Barbara’s cousin’s sister Michelle know that you know me?” I’m starting to think that there’s some secret society for Jewish mothers with single children, an underground offline dating club.

  “Not important,” she goes on. “It is you! Isn’t it? Have you met anyone on there yet? Oh, I am so proud. The guys must be, well, they must be messaging you by the second.”

  “Mom,” I say, watching my roommate’s eyes bulge as she zooms in on the banner ad, enlarging my face to take over her entire screen. “No, there’s no one on there for me.”

  “I don’t believe it,” she says. “I bet if I went on for you, I’d find you a guy in twenty minutes.”

  I had been on JDate, secretly, for three months and had gone out with only three guys. After David, the second guy, told me he was still in a long-distance relationship, and the third guy rolled his eyes when I told him I was madly in love with pizza. I was sick of skimming through messages with spelling errors, addressed to another girl, laced with wink faces. I was sick of having to write five hundred words of dating tips a week just so I could have a free account. And now, here I was, sick of my face being advertised to over 2 million people as a single girl looking for a guy who loved pizza.

  “Really, do you want to bet?”

  “If I find you a guy,” she says, her confidence climbing up a notch, “you have to go out on a date with him.”

  “And if you don’t,” I jump in, “you have to stop nagging me about dating for one whole year.”

  “Deal.”

  The deal did come with more terms. I said she could not be Skyped in for the date, and she said she had to choose the guy and send him the message. I said she couldn’t be on our phone calls, and she said I could not preapprove the messages she sent. I said she could not plan our wedding, and she said I could not plan how this whole thing would come to a tragic end.

  “Here’s my log-in info,” I say, typing my username and password into the body of an email. “Enjoy.”

  I grab the computer back from my roommate and type into Google, “Who do you call when you want to shut down the Internet forever?”

  “Did you just give your mom permission to manage your online dating profile?” Kerri asked, concerned, wondering if I have some kind of stress-induced concussion.

  “Is this even allowed?” I ask her, slowly coming back to awareness. I don’t remember seeing anything in JDate’s rules about your mom not being allowed to log on and take part in the most intimate details of your dating life for you.

  None of my rabbis or Hebrew school teachers ever mentioned, when I turned thirteen and had to recite a Torah portion through my braces, that when I finally grew up to be twenty-five, my mom couldn’t stick her nose into my dating life.

  So here I am, over a thousand miles away from my mom, with the phone squished against my ear as I listen to her type my username and password into JDate’s login box. I can tell she’s overwhelmed the way a child would be as they paw through their collection of newly acquired Halloween candy.

  “Look at this one!” she squeals, but I can’t see. I refuse to be on the site at the same time.

  Instead, I’m hiding under my covers, pretending to be invisible, pretending that what my dating life has succumbed to at that very moment—my mom hand-picking candidates off a website, as if we’re shopping for vacuums on Amazon—is not actually happening.

  But it is. My mother is scrolling through the profiles of guys like “MazelTovMan0132” and “JacobTHEMensch2013,” wond
ering why in the world I wasn’t into them.

  “Mom, come on,” I plead. She begins to read their bios out loud. The “Jacob” guy used a “;)” on his profile, and MazelTovMan mentioned that he was looking for a girl to cook him dinner and join his fantasy football league.

  I glance down at my phone. We’ve been at this for one hour forty-seven minutes. That has to be some kind of online dating record, at least for me. Any second now, JDate’s fraud team is going to call and report that someone has hacked into my account, because this is more activity than they’ve seen from my username than in three months combined.

  “Oh! Here we go,” she announces suddenly. “I’ve found the one.”

  Before I even hear who this “Jonathan” guy is, I imagine my mom texting our rabbi to see if he’ll be free, in a year and a half, to marry us. Apparently Jonathan enjoys reading nonfiction, eating pizza, and has family in Florida too.

  After Mom and I agree that he sounds like the most compatible person on the site so far, she asks the unthinkable: “Will you let me message him?”

  I’ve come this far, I tell myself. And since Mom has expressed nothing but patience regarding my negative attitude over the past two hours, I figure this would be a proper prize. (Plus, if it does work out, what a funny story we’d have to tell our kids one day!)

  She reads me the three short, formal sentences she wrote him: Jonathan, we have a lot in common. I would like to chat further with you. Please respond if you are interested.

  Jonathan responds, almost immediately, with a simple answer. His tone, almost identical in its lack of enthusiasm and overseriousness, says, Let’s get a drink on Thursday, 7pm, at Wine 33.

  No witty banter about what we do for a living or how awful cubicles are. No pretending that I didn’t spend my weekend on the couch, binge-watching thirteen episodes of House of Cards. He’s direct—very direct—and to my mom, he is perfect.

  At 6:45 p.m. on Thursday, my phone rings.