Always a Bridesmaid (for Hire) Read online

  “Jen, why do you look like a complete mess?” she said, sighing with disappointment. We had fifteen minutes until call time, until we’d all be gliding down the aisle as if we spent the morning lounging by the pool, sipping piña coladas, and getting our feet massaged by a strong-handed pool boy.

  I broke away from her grip wordlessly and took a seat on the couch, unwrapped the plastic off a gas station muffin, and starting chugging semihot black coffee straight from the pot. As I watched Beverly suck in her tummy and zip up her dress, I realized, right then and there, that being a bridesmaid was truly no different from being a warrior. The only difference is that bridesmaids go to battle in a periwinkle taffeta dress.

  chapter seven

  The Curious Case of the Serial Bouquet Catcher

  I was the center of attention in middle school, but not for reasons that made the other nine-year-olds want to snag a seat beside me during lunchtime, or eager to copy my every move, word, or Limited Too outfit. Quite the opposite, actually.

  They enjoyed me as an easy target for spitballs, a great punch line for any impromptu joke, the poster child for what every other middle schooler never wanted to become: awkward, shy, clumsy, a little pudgy around the edges, and a tomboy, one who didn’t actually play sports but wore the uniform. Back then, and even sometimes now, I think Nike mesh athletic shorts and a sports bra are more comfortable to toss on than skinny jeans and a crop top.

  After a herd of girls with Sour Patch Kid faces and matching ponytails chased me around the gym, sling-shotting hair ties at me and giggling like hyenas high on sugar, just because I decided to wear two different shoes to school that day—my style resembled someone who frequently got dressed in the dark—I decided to take action. I was going to do something about my social situation, which was definitely a “situation” since my two best friends were the school nurse and janitor. I would go out into the world and become part of a team. I would become a softball player.

  Who am I trying to fool? That’s not how that happened. I wish the nine-year-old version of me had that much confidence and a clear-headed, compass-like sense of direction. I wish I didn’t care what other people thought of my prepubescent acneic T-zone and garage sale jewelry, as if I were an offbeat character in a John Hughes movie. But the truth is, my parents wanted to find an activity for me where I could socialize with other kids my age, since my idea of “spending an afternoon with the girls” was camping out at the library with tea sandwiches and Dunkaroos and spending some quality time with Hermione Granger and Nancy Drew.

  My parents saw a sign for a brand-new softball league in the park right next to our house. Tryouts weren’t required, which meant I had a guaranteed in. I hadn’t made the cut for the cheerleading squad, the chorus, or the emerging calligraphers’ club, but a spot on the softball team and, at minimum, a participant’s trophy at the end of the season, was mine for the price of $186 and a signed waiver from an adult. Softball, I thought to myself, as my parents’ car rolled up to the edge of the field on the first day of practice. Here I come?

  I was not good at sports, though I dressed like I was. Whenever I made eye contact with a ball, whether it was a soccer ball, tennis ball, or basketball, I did what I thought any normal person with a healthy misunderstanding of “survival of the fittest” would do: I threw my hands in the air and ran away as quickly as I could.

  Growing up in Florida, I was always taught that when an alligator is chasing you, you should never run away in a straight line. You should always zigzag. So that’s exactly what I did on my first day at softball practice. When the coach batted balls into the outfield for us to catch, I zigged and zagged all over the park.

  After much thought, I decided that the best position on the team for me was benchwarmer. So I took my spot, resting peacefully beside a Costco-sized box of Chewy Granola Bars and defrosted Capri Suns. But before I got settled in, before I could unlace my cleats and pop open The Diary of Anne Frank, my coach slung open the dugout door and sat beside me.

  “Jennifer,” he said, eyeing me as I shoved five empty granola bar wrappers into my shorts pocket. “What are you doing?”

  “Oh, I just think it’s best if I stay here for the season,” I said, pointing to the splinter-ridden, gum-stained bench.

  “Not happening,” he said, motioning for me to get up. “All members of the team must play. We need you out there.”

  I said good-bye to Anne, tossed my empty Capri Sun onto the crimson dirt, and walked onto the field. I was a member of a team—a lousy member but, still, a member. I could not let my teammates down.

  They found a quiet little home for me as the fourth outfielder and told me to stand behind the other three, as close to the chain-link fence as possible. I stuck a milky pen inside my glove and entertained the other players on the field with haikus, games of MASH (a fortune-telling game that ruled the lives of middle-schoolers in the ’90s and early aughts), and stick figure drawings of our coach. That, right there, was my role on the team.

  I didn’t quit after the first season. How could I? I finally made friends and became a fundamental part of the team. I was the fourth outfielder and the seventeenth person at bat. The team needed me. Plus, I was able to hold my head high once my reputation as a tough softball player began drifting around the halls of my middle school. Kids started coming up to me, asking how I got these watercolor-like bruises all over my legs, and I’d say they were from sliding into home plate during the ninth inning, when all of the bases were loaded and there were two outs. But really, most of them were from when I was twirling around to “Wannabe” by the Spice Girls, using the bat as a prop, trying to land a series of pas de bourrées.

  I played year after year, and eventually, as we all started to grow up a little bit, and some of us went through puberty, and some of us started drinking protein shakes and lifting heavier objects than our Barbie dolls, the balls started making their way to my Area 51–like territory.

  The game was officially on. I had to put my pen away and start using my glove for its one true purpose: to cover my entire face when a ball was hit in my immediate direction. One year, I watched Darcy Munchausen get hit in the face with a fly ball and have her front two incisors knocked out. How was I ever going to get a first kiss with no front teeth? It was hard enough finding someone to give me a smooch with my teeth behind a metal cage of braces. I couldn’t let that happen to me, so I became extra focused, and whenever a ball was hit into the sky, I would find it, stand right underneath it, reach my glove up as high as I could, and catch it.

  Within a matter of four years, I went from MUP (most useless player) to MVP.

  I wanted to take my softball talents to the big leagues and snag a spot on my high school’s junior varsity team, but there were tryouts, and on day one, when I was up at bat, my eyes drifted to a senior football player with no shirt on and bulging washboard abs walking on the other side of the fence, and I forgot to swing. I just stood there, with my eyes on a very different prize, as the ball hit my hand at seventy-six miles per hour. A broken thumb and my name not appearing on the roster became the official end of my mighty softball career.

  Or so I thought.

  I have an 87 percent success rate when it comes to catching the bouquet at weddings. If I ever win a Guinness World Record for this, I will thank my parents for putting me in the position of learning that when something is flying at you, you stick your hands up and find a way to catch it. So when I was twenty-two and at a wedding almost every month, on the dance floor, beside a pack of hungry single women, all stretching their freshly gel-manicured hands up to the ceiling, I would get right underneath the flying bouquet, stick my left hand up, and watch as it fell right into my palm.

  I quickly became a threat among the other single girls of Boca Raton, Florida. People started whispering about me as I walked down the aisle. They pointed right at my face during cocktail hour as they were biting into an avocado mousse barquette and washing it down with a beverage from the open bar, saying,
“That’s the Glantz girl. She’s the one who always catches the bouquet.”

  At twenty-four, right before I went to take my seat at table number five for dinner, a bridesmaid I had just met that evening grabbed my hand and dragged me into the handicap stall of the bathroom.

  “Jen,” she began as a single tear followed a distinct path from the top of her cheekbone down to her chin. “I’m just really sick of being single, and I was hoping that tonight I could catch the bouquet.”

  “You know,” I said, lowering my voice and placing my hand on her shoulder. “I’ve caught that thing about twenty times and I’m still single. Very single.”

  “I know,” she said, rolling her eyes as if there had been some kind of New York Times feature story on my bouquet-catching achievements juxtaposed with my dating catastrophes. “I just really could use some luck over here, okay?”

  “Okay, fine,” I said. How could I argue with that? To me, it was just a clump of soon-to-be-dead flowers tied together with a ribbon. To her, it was a golden ticket to finding love.

  She wrapped her arms around my neck and gave me a squeeze. But before she went to open the bathroom stall door, she did something that nobody had ever done to me before. She grabbed my hand, pulled open my fingers, and slipped me a twenty-dollar bill.

  “If you don’t mind,” she said, switching from sad girl tears to evil-girl grin. “When the bouquet goes up, just step away.”

  I was being paid off.

  When the big moment came, I took a spot on the rear edge of the dance floor, fingering the crisp twenty and feeling accomplished because, even though I wasn’t going to catch the bouquet that night, I now had enough money for an Uber ride home, and I wouldn’t have to wait for my dad to come pick me up from another wedding.

  I became a bouquet-catching old-timer, and as more of my friends got married, I watched my competition start to dwindle down until it was completely nonexistent. At twenty-three, it was a mosh pit out there, as if we were trying to grab a selfie with Justin Timberlake at an NSYNC reunion concert. But now, you can almost see the tumbleweeds blowing onto the dance floor as a couple of unmarried women tiptoe forward, competing for something that, they all know by now, means absolutely nothing.

  At twenty-six, I went to a wedding and waited for my cue. The DJ cranked up Beyoncé’s “All the Single Ladies,” and I dropped my salad fork onto a silver charger and put down my third buttered roll of the evening and started doing the one-handed single ladies shimmy as I made my way onto the dance floor, proudly mouthing the words, “All the single ladies, all the single ladies, now put your hands up.”

  The crowd started roaring, clinking their glasses together, and at first, I thought it was because they all knew about my reputation and they were in awe that they were about to witness a living legend, live and in person. I should start charging admission for the Jen Catches the Bouquet show, I thought to myself as I gave onlookers a royal wave. But when the music suddenly cut out and all the guests became quiet, I noticed that the reason everyone was cheering was that no one else was on the dance floor.

  “Where is everyone?” I whispered to the DJ, with a slight edge of panic in my voice.

  He shrugged his shoulders and made one final, desperate plea on my pathetic behalf.

  “All right, all right,” he said. “Last call for all the single girls out there. Anyone without a diamond ring, please join Jen on the center of the dance floor.”

  Still, nobody got up from their linen-slipcovered chair. As I scanned the room, as I eyed people from table one all the way to table fifteen, I realized there wasn’t another single woman at this wedding.

  That was my real-life version of a nightmare.

  I was used to going to weddings alone. When I was a bridesmaid and the other girls in the bridal party were married or engaged, or in a serious relationship with a guy they didn’t just meet on Tinder a month ago, I was never given a plus-one.

  Going solo to a wedding benefits no one. I am infamous for throwing off seating arrangements, since tables have an even number of chairs. The bride and groom are forced into playing a game of Battleship, trying to figure out where they can stick me since there’s no room at the table filled with my coupled-up, procreating friends. They usually find me a spot at the leftover table of odd-numbered cousins, family members they invited but didn’t think would show up, or those attending solo, of all ages, which is where I almost always find one or two other single girls without plus-ones.

  Everyone likes the idea that the leftover mismatched singles table is where I’ll find my Mr. Forever. They think the success rate of meeting my match at a wedding is 75 percent because their neighbor has a friend whose cousin met her husband at a wedding, once, in 1996. But in real life, meeting someone at the singles table is just as hard as meeting someone on Match.com. I know this to be true because I once saw a single guy at a wedding, on his phone using the Match.com dating app, spoon-feeding himself a plate of soggy salad.

  Being one of the few single gals at a wedding means that the bride and the groom are plotting for months who they want to pair you off with for the night. It becomes part of their wedding planning time line. They pick out their flowers, they chose a DJ, and they figure out which eligible guy they can get you to canoodle with.

  A groom once texted me, eight days before his wedding, and said, “Don’t get too excited Jen. We’ve spent the last hour trying to figure out what single groomsman we can set you up with, and, well, there aren’t any.” I responded with a quick text message back that said, “Well then, rent one.”

  I was never able to wrap my head around, or forgive a bride for, not letting me bring a plus-one to their wedding. Other people were allowed to not go empty-handed just because they were in a successful relationship. But me, the person who was in charge of holding up the bride’s dress while she tinkled or running around to fifteen different beauty supply stores so she could find the perfect shade of pink lipstick, had to show up and occupy the dance floor alone.

  Okay, fine. I get that if I had a plus-one, I wouldn’t have anyone to bring. Maybe I would have to find someone from JDate or eHarmony, but leave that up to me. I promise to run a background check on them through the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s office and heavily vet their social media history. If they have a MySpace page but no LinkedIn page, I’m smart enough to know they don’t belong in my life or at your wedding.

  But worse than having to slow dance to a Miranda Lambert song all by myself, or find out that I’m sitting at a table beside a recently divorced uncle and a single groomsman who’s eating mashed potatoes with his hands, is hearing the DJ call for “all the single ladies to make their way on the dance floor!” and finding out that there’s nobody left to go out there but me.

  Which is where I found myself on that fateful night, looking like the feature act of a circus show.

  “Dance for us,” a drunken groomsman with a wife and three kids under the age of five yelled out.

  The bride hurried onto the dance floor.

  “Marissa,” I said, as if I was about to talk someone out of jumping from a ledge. “Please don’t throw it. Please don’t make me do this.”

  “Jen, I’m so sorry. This is so embarrassing for you.”

  “Can you just hand me the flowers and tell the DJ to put on ‘Gangnam Style’ so that we can divert the attention away from me?”

  I had been standing out there for five minutes, and my face was watermelon red. I wanted this to end. People were putting down their forks, looking at me like I was the saddest girl ever to walk a dance floor.

  I wasn’t sad. I was okay with being single, with being the only single one left. A part of me enjoyed attending weddings alone so I could dance like I was being electrocuted and eat all the leftover cake on tables when people weren’t looking. But here I was, on display to over 250 guests who all had the one thing I didn’t. Who all had something I was starting to believe I never would find. Someone who loved every single inch of them.

/>   “Well it looks like we just have one single girl in the room,” the DJ chimed in, stating the obvious.

  Marissa finally handed me the bouquet of peonies and I scurried back to my table, in the very back, and resumed eating my dinner roll.

  There was a roar of whispers, and people at my table tried not to make eye contact with me as they sipped champagne and thanked their lucky stars that this wasn’t happening to them.

  I put the bouquet of flowers in a glass of water, grabbed my purse and a slice of cake, and headed for the parking lot.

  If I learned anything from my softball-playing days, it’s that you have to know when to walk off the field and retire from the team before you break your thumb—or, in this case, your very own heart.

  chapter eight

  Women Seeking Women— Professional Bridesmaid

  “Will you be my bridesmaid?” Liz asks. The coffee spills right out of my mouth, like I’m a baby who’s been prematurely burped. There should be a universal rule that you have to wait at least thirty seconds after liquid or food enters someone’s mouth before asking them any sort of high-pressure questions.

  “Excuse me?” I respond, wiping off the communal marble table at the restaurant where Liz and I are having coffee. “What did you just ask me?”

  Liz’s face turns a shade of burgundy as she pushes her fingers into the ridges of her cappuccino’s cardboard coffee cup sleeve. “I just wanted to know if you would consider being my bridesmaid.”

  My eyes bulge as I pull apart every syllable of that question, taking inventory on the words she spit out of her mouth for the second time.

  “I know, I know,” she backtracks, realizing that something is very wrong here. “This must seem so random to you.”

  Liz and I haven’t seen each other in over eleven months. The last time we hugged hello was when we found ourselves in side-by-side dressing rooms, trying on a mountain of clothing at Forever 21. It was unplanned, like the downward trend of our once-solid friendship. We chatted back and forth until the dressing room attendant threw us out, bought matching pairs of distressed skinny jeans, and pinky-promised that we wouldn’t let another year pass before seeing each other again. We made good on that promise, by just one month, when she called and asked if I would meet her for a quick Friday midafternoon cup of coffee.