Borrow-A-Bridesmaid (17 page)

“She chose love. Just not in the exact way you imagined.”

Stacey's mom closes her eyes, her mouth puckering as tears slip past her eyelids.

“The way you can show her your love today is by walking through those doors.” I gesture in the direction of the
mandap
. The sound of the priest intoning prayer reaches us in the lobby.

“I don't know what any of this means. I don't know what I'm doing.”

“Me, neither. Why don't we go in together?”

I grasp the door handle and wait. She swallows, takes a deep breath, and gives me a curt nod. I swing open the door and hold it as she walks through.

No one seems to notice at first. I follow her toward the front, where she hesitates between the congregation and the
mandap.
Standing on the boundary, she
reaches a hand out toward Stacey. The priest goes silent, and his wife stops rearranging items on the gold plates. Stacey turns, hesitating. The priest exchanges a careful glance with his wife, who looks away from the women as if to give them a little privacy in the roomful of onlookers.

Stacey stares at her mother, fingering the petals of her garland. Then she reaches out and skips her mother's outstretched hand to wrap her in a full-on hug. Her mother's eyes are closed; Stacey's, too. To my surprise, tears slip onto my cheeks. I wipe them away quickly, grateful to witness this moment, even though I feel like a trespasser.

The rest of the ceremony goes smoothly. The priest's wife quietly signals me to perform my various roles. First I pour puffed rice into the bride's and groom's hands so they can toss it into the sacred fire. Then I pour seven piles of rice onto the floor and cover the piles with rose petals. Stacey rests her foot on the petals, one by one, each symbolizing a step the married couple is taking together. The priest's wife translates the Hindi into English.

Step one we take for health, vitality, and prosperity.

Step two we take for strength and energy.

Step three we take for progress.

Step four we take for eternal happiness and harmony.

Step five we take for offspring.

Step six we take for fulfillment in all life's seasons.

Step seven we take for bliss born of wisdom.

After the priest recites the final sacred mantra, the guests are invited to move into the restaurant for a buffet dinner. Across the back of the restaurant, several tables are loaded with silver tins of food. While I'm waiting in line, wondering whom I'm going to sit and eat with, Stacey finds me and squeezes my shoulder.

“Thank you,” she says, giving me a huge hug. I hug her back, my arms lost in the folds of her sari. Her mother joins us and shakes my hand: a good, firm handshake.

Stacey pats my back as she pulls away. “I've got to mingle for a while—you understand—but please help yourself to the food and stay as long as you like. There's a rumor there might be dancing after dinner.”

As they depart, I inhale the aroma of the steaming chicken and rice dishes and feel my stomach grumble. I can't remember the last time I had a nice big meal. Probably my last gig.

“Oh!” Stacey turns back. “I almost forgot! There's someone here for you—a date, I think.” She winks.

I flush, looking left and right. It can't be Lin—he had tickets to take Steve to a concert in the city tonight. Two warm hands reach around and cover my eyes. I catch a hint of cologne.

I put my hands on my hips, my heart racing. My hope rises like a hot air balloon. “I give up.”

The hands drop from my eyes.

Twenty

K
alil steps in front of me, holding a bouquet of purple flowers. It takes me a second to process. I must have inhaled too much incense; for one beautiful moment, I thought the hands over my eyes were ones I held that night at Susan's wedding. The hands that got tangled in my hair as we slow-danced outside the reception hall.

Back to reality. Kalil holds the flowers out to me, trying to breach the space between our bodies. He looks as good as he ever did, but the only thing I feel is a sense memory of his shirtsleeves slapping my cheeks, which are likely tikka-masala red.

“What the hell are you doing here?”

He clears his throat. “I, uh, wanted to talk to you. You know, explain.”

“You can't be here! How did you even know I was here?”

“You mentioned on our last date you had a wedding gig tonight at an Indian restaurant in Sterling. This is only the third restaurant I tried.” He offers a sheepish smile to supplement the bouquet.

The line is building up behind us, and my stomach is growling for naan. I say nothing to Kalil and turn to pick up a plate, fork, and napkin. My hope balloon has popped, its pieces tangled in a nearby shrubbery.

“Listen, I know I can't make up for what I did to you that night, but I thought coming here would count for something,” he says.

I begin piling food on my plate, taking in the smell of the warm naan and samosas. I'm hoping the pleasant sensory boost will quell the urge building up inside me to grab his neck and give his head a swift dunk in the tin of spicy curry. The thought of the yellow curry dripping from his eyelids makes me smile, and Kalil mistakes this for a weakening to his plea.

“So, can I join you for dinner or what?”

Do not dunk him in the curry.
My hand flutters up, beginning to indulge in the urge, and I scratch my ear instead.

“Leave me alone.” I'm hoping my six-inch voice can sound formidable. The last thing I want is to cause a scene on Stacey's special night. She and Raj are standing by her parents' table, and she's planting a kiss on her mother's cheek.

Must. Not. Dunk. Head. In. Curry.

I cram some golab jamun onto my plate and walk to the nearest empty chair. Kalil trails behind me. The nerve—he's pilfered a samosa!

“Anyone sitting here?” I ask Raj's family pleasantly. They smile and gesture to the seat. As I set my food down, Kalil sits opposite.

I raise my eyebrows and grip the back of my chair, cocking my head toward the door. “Did you hear me? I said leave me alone.”

He sets the flowers down on the table. “Please sit. I just want to talk for a minute.”

My hands are gripping the chair so hard my knuckles are white. “Hand over the samosa and skedaddle.”

He looks at the offending samosa and laughs. “Seriously? C'mon.”

I close my eyes. It would be so much easier to let him say his piece and leave, but behind closed eyelids, I see Lin shoving my ringing phone under the couch. I think of my new jeans full of shrubbery debris and the scratches up and down my legs. I think of a puppy suffocating in a box.

“Hear me out, okay?” he says.

Silence.

“Okay, I get it. You're still mad. But you don't know my mom. It would not have been a pretty sight for her to see you there. I did it as much for you as for me.”

I sit and commence eating the butter chicken. It's quite tasty.

His shoulders slump. “Look, I'm sorry I didn't tell you about my mom. She sort of runs my life. And I'm sick of it. She wants me to date a Muslim girl, but it goes further than that. She wants me to date one she approves of, maybe even—I mean, most likely—one she's picked out.” He reaches out a hand. “I like you, Piper. I mean,
really
like you. More than anyone in a long time.” I can sense he's giving me a long, hard look, but I don't return it. “Going against my mom's will is going to take a long time for me to learn how to do. And I don't think it's fair for me to drag you along through all that. But maybe we could still hang out?”

Hang out as in make out, methinks. This time I see the blimp message: “He's never going to take you home to meet the parents.”
We'll never be more than friends with benefits. Even if the benefits are quite, erm, beneficial. But I want someone who's going to stand up for me. Like Stacey and Raj did for each other.

As if to remind me of this, the happy couple stops by the table, and Stacey reaches down to give me a heartfelt hug. I take a deep breath so the anger will recede enough for me to return the hug with genuine warmth. She steps back and raises her voice so Kalil can hear. “Please stay as long as you'd like, and eat some more food!” Kalil holds up his samosa, and she nods. “Enjoy!”

She and Raj beam as they move past us to greet the next set of guests. As I watch them move away, fingers linked together, the fissure in my emotional dam cracks open, and I can't hold back the waters.

I return his gaze and imagine my eyes flashing. I'm not really sure what it means for eyes to flash, but I sure as hell hope mine do. I picture a lightning bolt in each pupil. “I can't pretend to say I understand what it's like for you with your mom. I don't. I haven't been there. But I didn't ask to be put through all that.” I drop my voice almost to a hiss. “I just wanted the decency of being let out the fucking front door.”

His lips part. His beautiful, full, bullshitting lips have finally stopped moving and are frozen in a little O of surprise.

I've never talked this way to anyone, only in my wildest dreams. It's exhilarating and terrifying at the same time. I feel as if I'm going to blast up on a current of steam through the ceiling, and it buoys me for what I know I have to do next. Fixing him with my best steely glare, I say, “Get out.”

When he doesn't move, the urge begins ticking again, counting down with each pulse of blood in my temples. When he still doesn't move, the last tick has tocked. I calmly take my mango lassi from the table and slip it under the cover of the tablecloth. In one swift movement, I pour the contents of the cup on his crotch.

“Philosophize about that, asshole,” I mutter under my breath as his eyes go wide and he makes a quick exit, dripping lassi all the way.

Twenty-One

T
he following Tuesday Alex comes around the corner of my cube, and her eyelined eyes widen. I look up from my seat—where I am literally swimming in three-ring binders—and meet her gaze.

“Did they—” she starts.

“Assign me to Billy? Yes. What tipped you off, the Everest-sized stacks of binder dividers? Or the task spreadsheet with its own special column for my completion times, to the second?” I hold up a tabloid-size printout.

Quick profile of my new boss: William J. Smathers III; thirty-seven; metrosexual; lover of all things expensive; immaculately dressed and even more immaculately organized. Favorite catchphrases and, incidentally, phrases I'll be okay with never hearing again the rest of my life: “Pop that in my inbox”; “No,
no
, NO!” (said in quick succession and with increasing intensity); and “Bubble up.” I haven't seen his Facebook profile, but I bet his picture alone would set off any decent woman's douche-o-meter. His diction is sharp, each word delineated as with one of his precious color-coded binder dividers. I secretly call him
BILLY!
in an exaggerated Southern accent. Billy,
Billy
, BILLY!

My encounters with Billy remind me of conversations I had with a counselor I saw during college for social anxiety, who was always trying to get me to go into the subtexts of my interactions with people: “What message did you take away from your interaction with that person?” For Billy, the answer is unflinchingly: He thinks I am about as important and worthy as a scab. Productive and useful, perhaps, but a bit itchy and icky to look at.

Alex perches on my desk and picks up one of the binders. “Wow. I always heard he was OCD.”

I pick up a matching binder, pinching a divider tab between my thumb and forefinger. “Yellow tabs for year-end reports, blue tabs for client profiles, green for revenue tracking. He also gets a cappuccino every two hours.”

“What happens if he doesn't get a cappuccino?”

“I have yet to find out, but I'd imagine he turns into the Hulk.”

“I'd kind of like to see that.” She sets down the binder and inspects me more closely. “You're different this morning.” She pushes her glasses farther down her nose and looks at me over the top of glittery pink frames. “You had sex last night. Didn't you?” She pokes me, then crosses her arms, matron-style. “Dirty, sweaty sex. And it was fantastic, wasn't it? Oh my God! Who is he? Tell me every last detail.”

“Gross! No.”

“Well, what is it, then? Third base, at least. You don't get that kind of glow from anything less.”

“Third base? What are we, middle-schoolers?”

“Fun fact,” she says, holding up a finger. “No one ever let me in on the whole base-system lingo until college. I always thought people were playing a lot of baseball.”

I sigh. “I was playing neither literal nor metaphorical baseball last night.”

Her eyes twinkle. “Maybe you went to the batting cages alone and did some practice hits?”

“Alex!” I pick up the binder on my lap, snap it closed, and glare at her. “No baseball. Whatsoever.”

“What is it, then?”

I groan. “If Billy comes looking for his year-end report, I'm blaming you for putting me two minutes past my ETA.”

“Trust me, I can handle Billy.”

“Okay. Remember that guy I told you about, the one who shut me in his closet? I poured a drink on his crotch.”

Alex blinks and pushes her glasses back up her nose. “You go, girl!”

“Apparently, after being taught my entire life to express my feelings passive-aggressively, I've transitioned to expressing them just plain aggressively.”

“This is huge! You're so cute. Like, you lost your anger virginity. Now, listen—imagine if you put that kind of energy into other areas of your life.” She sighs, gesturing at the folders covering every square inch of my cubicle. “I feel responsible for getting you into this job. You hate it here, don't you?”

I survey the place. Behind Alex, the gray walls seem to stretch on for infinity, reminding me of the perspective drawings I used to do in middle school, where straight lines move gradually closer to create an illusion of indefinite distance. Directly behind Alex is a photograph of a man on top of what looks like Mount Kilimanjaro, sipping his coffee and typing on a laptop. I want to punch the picture into the cosmos.

I close my eyes. “Yes, God help me, yes. I hate this place. Though I'm so, so appreciative to you for helping me get a steady paycheck.” I don't want Alex to think I'm ungrateful.

“And what are you going to do about it?”

I fill her in on the
City Paper
article contest and potential job opportunity. “But I've got to get another gig. If I can put this article together, get published, get my foot in the door, it would at least feel like a tentative step in the right direction.”

She's nodding. “I'll help you get another gig. I feel horrible that I got you this job, and now it's turned into—” She gestures around us. “A binder orgy.”

I give her a probing look, wishing I had my own pair of glasses to push down the bridge of my nose. “Did
you
get some last night? There's an awful lot of erotic language flying around this cubicle.”

My phone buzzes, sending both of us on a scavenger hunt to find it underneath the binders.

“God,” Alex says, “I hope it's that guy, so you can tell him off again and I can witness it. I'm getting a contact high just hearing about it.”

I finally find my phone—underneath the binder entitled “Client Communications and Consultations, 2001–2002.”

A text message from Susan:
Where are you? I need help!

I text back:
At work. What's up?

I have a gig for you, but only if you can make it to Alfred Angelo Bridal at Tysons mall in the next 30 min.

Tysons Corner Center is not for the faint of wallet. This could be a high-profile job, or at least a lucrative one. But Billy has me hostage until five, and it's only 2:37. There are twenty-one incomplete tasks on my chart.

“Double-wide shitbag,” I mutter under my breath.

Alex claps her hands. “There's that anger! What now?”

“I'm not sure.”

Alex steps over, one of her heels piercing “Client Communications and Consultations,” and reads over my shoulder. “Who's this from?”

“My first client, aka Charlie's sister.”

“Cock-a-doodle-DAMN Charlie?” she asks. In a fit of boredom last week, I told Alex everything about Charlie. When I mentioned Lin's and my alliteration train, she was all too eager to hop aboard.

“Obviously, you should go,” Alex says.

“What about Billy?”

“What about him? I'll create a diversion.”

“Really?”

Alex nods. “I'll come up with something. Tell him I absconded with you to run some errands for me. I've got that man wrapped around my finger.” She holds up her pinkie. “Remind me to tell you about the time he propositioned me during a Web conference. In Wingdings font.”

I roll my eyes. “Who
hasn
't
propositioned you?”

“Get going, Ms. Anger Virgin, and tell me all about it.”

“Of course! I owe you a drink.”

“You owe me a double-wide margarita. Let's make it a special Hump Day lunch tomorrow at P. J. Skidoos.”

“Perfect.” I flash Alex a grateful smile and slip out from behind my cubicle, my heart beating in my throat. Billy is terrifying in a completely different way from Sal, in the sense that his repressed anger radiates out from his exfoliated skin and carefully groomed cuticles. Like one day, if I were to hand him a binder incorrectly color-coded, he'd burst forth from his Armani suit, buttons ricocheting off gray walls and any unfortunate coworkers in the general vicinity, and HULK SMASH me in the clavicle.

As I escape to the parking lot, I'm struck by the recent prevalence of sneaking around in my life: escaping from Kalil's apartment, escaping from Billy. If my life were a work of literature, Professor Quillen would lean on his desk and ask, “What themes or motifs do we see here?” And I'd raise my hand and answer, “The protagonist is in a perpetual liminal state.”

I guess that's what I've learned from college. Not any job skills—no, nothing that utilitarian—only the capability to identify my sad state with precisely the right word.

By the time
I escape to my car, a faint mustache of sweat has formed on my upper lip. The July afternoon is searing hot—as I make my way through blessedly sparse traffic, I glance down at the dash to see that the thermometer reads 101—but car air-conditioning was long ago demoted to a luxury item. I'm just glad Wulfie has been resurrected. The first stoplight I come to, I take the opportunity to pat the dashboard affectionately.

Radio stations are all playing songs like “Hot, Hot, Hot” and “Fever.” At the next stoplight, I press the “off” button and slip in an old cassette tape. I conjure Charlie in the passenger seat, turning his freckled face toward me to sing. I visualize concentrating all of my Charlie thoughts into my fist, then I stick my hand out the window and open my palm to let the hot breeze take them away. Lin suggested once that we hold “love memorials” for our exes. Maybe that's what I need—a semblance of closure.

When I walk into Alfred Angelo, the air-conditioning wraps itself around me. It takes a moment or two for my eyes to adjust (sunglasses: also a luxury item), but I finally make out a U-shaped cluster of dressing rooms, each decked with floor-length mirrors inside and out. A raised platform in the middle of the U glows subtly from within. It looks more like a fashion show runway than a chain store, but this is Tysons, after all.

Susan ambushes me, appearing from out of nowhere. “You made it! Bless you.”

Since I've mostly seen her dressed for wedding occasions, I'm struck by her quasi-bohemian appearance this afternoon: ballet-style Mary Janes, huge wooden earrings, and a paisley scarf tied around her head to hold her hair back. A few curls have slipped past the scarf to frame her head like horns. Her clothes are all black—she's come straight from rehearsal, I'm guessing—and her instrument is perched like a diligently waiting pet on a nearby chair.

“There's not much time to explain, and in a way I'm sorry to drag you into this, but there's no one else who can help.”

I blink at her. My mind, like my eyes, trying to adjust. “This is a bridesmaid gig, right? Not major surgery?”

Susan puts her hands on my shoulders. “It's both. You ready for this?”

As if on cue, at the crux of the U, a dressing room door bursts open and a bride emerges. She is, by all accounts, perfect. Tall and slender, a face that could have been airbrushed, flawless hair. Blond as blond can be.

And the dress—well, I sometimes can't tell dresses from nightgowns, but this is a Dress with a capital D. A beaded empire waist crowns her ribs with a cascade of pearls. The rest of the dress makes elegant lines to the floor, with intricate lace covering her midsection and tapering off into the silky skirt folds like a softly snowing cloud. She seems to float onto the platform. As she does, a cavalcade of beautiful brides floats behind her in the surrounding mirrors.

At once, all the women in the room—including me—stop what we're doing, tilt our heads to the right, and exhale a collective “Ahh.” The estrogen is thick in the air, a blast of intense humidity despite the roaring AC. The style of the dress makes her look like a goddess—you can envision a gold band across her temples and Roman-style sandals on her feet. Though I'm sure her footwear is actually a brand of killer heels too sharp to pass through airport security. The platform, with its soft glow, lights up the bottom of the dress like thundersnow.

And then the bride thunders: “Would someone puh-
lease
get me a drink? It's like a desert in here.”