Save the Date: The Occasional Mortifications of a Serial Wedding Guest (14 page)

We got in the Thursday night before the wedding. We’d have most of Friday to ourselves before the rehearsal dinner, for which we’d be bused to a nearby country club. Saturday would be filled with wedding preparation, from early morning (hair-call time
was nine thirty a.m.) to midday (for wedding party photos and church arrival), and then the wedding itself in the early afternoon. Jason would be mostly on his own until I could reconnect with him at the reception, after my most consuming maid-of-honor duties were done.

After we checked in, we headed to the hotel restaurant for dinner, and I texted Marjorie that we’d arrived. “Let’s meet at the hotel bar in an hour?” she suggested.

“Yes!” I wrote. I couldn’t wait to see her and hoped Jason might feel the same way, but when I told him the plan, he said he didn’t feel well. Disappointed, I went to meet her alone.

There she was at the bar, a glass of wine in hand. I suppressed my squeal of pleasure at the sight of her, and we hugged. “I have a present for you,” I said, handing her my gift, a large white bowl with a tiny bride and groom etched into the bottom atop the word
Happily
. When I’d purchased it, I’d imagined her using the bowl through old age, remembering her wedding day as the years passed by.

After she oohed and aahed, the inevitable question arose. “Where’s Jason?” she asked.

“He’s sick,” I explained, and she made worried noises, hoping it was nothing serious and that he’d recover quickly. I nodded, but I didn’t understand it myself. He’d only met Marjorie once before, when she visited New York early on in my relationship with him. Couldn’t he have made the effort for a brief hello in the hotel bar, a chance to again see this best friend of mine, the bride to whom I was maid of honor, before the wedding pitched into high gear? As she and I talked excitedly about what the
weekend would bring, the lack of his presence hovered in the background.

“Are you feeling better?” I asked him when I got back to the room.

He was busy working at his computer. “Yeah, it was just a stomachache,” he said. Well, he’d always been shy and less socially inclined than I was. I’d give him space and let him get his wedding legs, I decided. Everyone reacted to these situations differently, after all. Maybe he really
had
felt
sick.

The next morning, we woke, had coffee, and planned out our day. We’d walk around town, find a place for lunch, and see some of Nashville before returning to get ready for the rehearsal dinner. It was sunny and warm enough in November that we didn’t need more than light jackets. But even our relaxed plan to venture out and see things failed. That old indecision and incompatibility, which, to tell the truth, we’d never really combatted, rose up again in this new town. We couldn’t find a place to eat that we agreed on, and when we did, we found that it was closed. We tried again, and finally settled on a hole-in-the-wall spot near Vanderbilt’s campus. We ate bad pizza in silence, and at the end of lunch, Jason told me he had work to do. We returned to the hotel, he headed to our room, and I went to check on Marjorie. “How’s he feeling?” she asked me.

“I’m not sure,” I said. “He’s under a lot of work stress. I think he’s a little bit out of his element. I guess it’s hard to be here with so many strangers.”

“But he hasn’t been around any yet,” she said. I couldn’t deny that.

It got worse. At the rehearsal dinner, surrounded by Marjorie’s family and all of our friends, I gave a speech about how much my longest-sustaining friend meant to me, and how happy I was to see her with someone who was such a great match for her, who loved her so much, who wanted the same things she did. Marjorie cried, and Violet and Kate and I cried, too, and then we hugged in a big, warm friend circle and toasted with Jack Daniel’s shots, which Marjorie’s dad and brother delivered to us from the bar. I looked around for Jason and found him staring off into space.

Throughout dinner he continued to be distant, unapproachable, and largely silent. At one point he was offered a shot but said no, opting instead to hover in a corner and check his phone. I felt myself getting angrier. This was not just a bad mood, a stomachache, or work stress. He wasn’t even trying. Marjorie’s dad asked a group of us if we wanted to step outside for a cigarette, and though I didn’t smoke, I went and puffed on one anyway. I’d had a lot to drink by that point, and I was somewhere between thrilled for my friend and very, very pissed at my boyfriend. I confided in Marjorie’s dad, “I don’t know what’s wrong with him. I don’t know why he can’t just have a good time. What should I do?”

“Dump him,” he told me, taking a drag of his cigarette. “There’s plenty of fish in the sea. This is not the guy for you.”

Well, I’d asked.

I wonder how many weddings take place because people have gone far enough into those relationships that it’s simply too terrifying to turn back. I wonder how many of those marriages end in divorce, and how many go on to be actually pretty great. There
are so many factors going into the decision to marry. Each of us can only know what we feel, and what we want to feel, and try to figure out if what we have and what we want can be compatible. Sometimes just knowing what we feel is hard enough! Trying in the course of a relationship is honorable, but there are times when the best thing a person can do is to stop trying.

At this rehearsal dinner, something in me woke up. I knew I could be happier if Jason were different, but I didn’t think Jason
could
be different. He was only being himself. He would be happier if he wasn’t here, I realized, and I also knew in an instant that I would be happier at this wedding by myself than I was with him. It dawned on me that this was not just true about us at this wedding. It might be time to let each other go.

“I’m going to break up with him,” I told Marjorie’s dad. “I just have to figure out when.”

“Good for you,” he said. “’Atta girl.”

I put my head on his shoulder, he patted it, and we drank our Jack Daniel’s.

•   •   •

A
s the guests boarded the bus to head back to the hotel, I stumbled on the stairs in my high heels but managed to keep myself from falling outright. There in the bus seat was Jason. He looked miserable. I sat down with a thud next to him. He said nothing, I said nothing. The trip back to the hotel was just the two of us sitting next to each other, waiting for the other to apologize first. Neither of us thought we’d done anything wrong. In some way of looking at it, neither of us had. We were at a
standstill. When we got back to the hotel room, I threw myself on the bed without changing and fell asleep.

At some point in the early morning, I woke up and realized two things. First, he’d put the hotel wastebasket next to my side of the bed in fear I’d have to vomit in the middle of the night (I hadn’t). That was his way of showing he cared as much as it was an admonishment, and it was both sweet and bitter because of that. Second, I remembered in a flash: Kate, Violet, and I had said we’d go to Marjorie’s room to hang out as single girls—
one last night!
—following her rehearsal dinner. And instead of putting on my PJs and heading to her suite, I’d passed out. In one evening, I’d gone from being the best maid of honor ever to the most disliked girlfriend at the wedding to the terrible friend who left the bride alone on the night before she stepped into her newly married life. Feeling disgusted with myself and simultaneously too drunk to deal with any of it, I went back to sleep.

At nine a.m. my alarm buzzed, and my brain did the same in my skull. Oh, man. I was hungover. Hair and makeup was happening in thirty minutes. I managed to dislodge myself from bed and get in the shower, which helped a little. I left Jason still sleeping. “I have to go get ready,” I whispered.

“Okay,” he said from underneath a heap of blankets, and rolled over. In a way I was grateful I had a reason to get out of there.

Downstairs, Kate and Violet were waiting for Marjorie. “Did you go to her room last night?” asked Violet.

“No,” I admitted. “I passed out on my bed with all my clothes on. I feel so bad.”

“Me, too,” said Kate.

“Me three,” added Violet. “We’re the worst.”

“I’m unbelievably hungover,” Kate said, and we nodded gingerly. Everything, inside and out, felt bruised. “Oh, there she is.”

Marjorie was headed our way. I couldn’t tell from the expression on her face if she was angry.

“I’m sorry!” we said, too loudly and nearly in unison, our words ringing in my ears, making me consider whether I could, in fact, vomit and feel any better, because that would be better than this. “I passed out,” “I had the spins,” “I totally flaked,” we offered, our language itself as inelegant as our hangovers.

“Oh, God.” She rolled her eyes at our antics and her own. “I went back to my room, put on my pajamas, and cried myself to sleep. It was ridiculous.”

Oh, no.
What had we done to the bride?
“What happened? Why were you sad?”

“I was just being dramatic,” she said. “I felt rejected and lonely.”

“But you’re getting married!” we said.

“I know, I was drunk!”

“We were all drunk, too . . .” With renewed shame, I thought again of all the ways I’d already failed at this wedding. Some maid of honor, a puke can next to her, her duties to the bride forgotten.

“What a weird night,” she continued. “The night before the night you get married. What does it mean? Should it even matter? There’s so much pressure that’s not even real, but it also feels like you’re jumping off a cliff. I think I just needed to let out some emotions. I feel way better now! Did everyone else have fun?”

“Everyone except Jason,” I said, and she gave me a curious look.

“Are we ready for hair and makeup?” she asked.

•   •   •

I
chose an updo so I didn’t have to consider the state of my hair for the rest of the day—at least until the end of the evening brought the need to dig from my scalp the thousand pins that had been sprayed into my coif. Kate and Violet both wore their hair down, and Kate’s blond locks, flat-ironed and sprayed and back-combed, so resembled those of the caricatured songstress who’d come to Nashville to make herself a star that she dubbed her look “big country hair.” Our tresses styled and makeup applied, we sat outside the salon in the sun in our jeans and T-shirts, chugging Diet Cokes and eating sandwiches that Marjorie’s mom had brought us for strength. (Wedding Tip: Always get the French fries.) None of us could look at each other without breaking into punchy giggles, what with the hair and the hangovers. Though it still felt like my brain was pulsing angrily inside my skull, the laughing helped with just about everything.

Then I was back at the hotel, slipping into my bridesmaid attire, and Jason was talking to me, though we didn’t address what had happened the night before.

“You look nice,” he said.

“You look nice, too,” I told him.

We both did look nice, even if we didn’t feel nice together. We went to the church to see Marjorie get married, Jason with his trusty camera to take pictures from the pew. I stood at the front
of the room, facing the crowd after walking down the aisle carefully, a poised maid-of-honor smile on my face. I held Marjorie’s bouquet for her, and we all smiled big grins when the bride and groom were married and then when they kissed. Afterward, for my final maid-of-honor duty, I witnessed the signing of the marital document, and it was over. We’d done it. We’d all done it, and no one had had to vomit even once.

There was one thing more, though. At the reception, where little girls and boys ran around tapping glasses with their silverware and shimmying on the dance floor, where a cheesecake wedding cake was served, where we toasted to the happy couple from our perch high at the top of a building with windows on all sides overlooking the city, and where Jason was quiet, again, fading into the background, there was a bouquet toss. Violet and I, still unable to stomach the thought of bourbon or even beer, were both drinking small cups of hot tea when it was announced.

“Oh, no.” Violet shook her head.

“Oh, yes,” I said. I was suddenly reminded of that other bouquet fiasco, the one I’d tried to banish from my mind. Those fallen flowers had signified the beginning of the end of a friendship. I could not let that happen again, not with Marjorie. “What do we do?”

“Let’s stand and hold our tea,” she suggested. “We’ll participate. But it’s not like we’re going to make a dive for it holding teacups.”

What we didn’t know was that Marjorie had us covered, too.

We found spots at the edge of the dance floor and watched as the bride lifted her bouquet high into the air, doing her best
Statue of Liberty impression. She then turned, her back facing the crowd, before dropping her arm at the elbow and letting her cluster of bright flowers slide down her back and to the floor. The bouquet landed some six inches away from her feet. Her two little nieces, who, she told me later, she’d intended as the recipients of the toss all along, were waiting right there. Three and five, they grabbed the flowers, shouting happily. Violet and I sipped our tea, smiled, and looked at each other. Sometimes things resolved themselves, if you could only be patient and wait.

Other things you had to figure out yourself.

The next day we all flew back, into high winds in New York City. The plane stayed in the air for what seemed like hours, circling and circling, waiting for a safe opportunity to land. There was a pilot on the plane as a passenger. He’d caught a ride up to New York to see family, and he was furious that he’d made what turned out to be such a bad decision. “I should have zigged when I zagged,” he kept saying.
“I should have zigged when I zagged.”
Jason sat next to me with his headphones on, annoyed that we were still aloft when he should have long been home. With each passing moment I felt more about my relationship as the pilot did about his choice of plane. Like him, I was zagging when I should have been zigging. Or the opposite. In my case, though, it wasn’t too late to change course.

Jason and I kept dating for a few more months. When we finally ended things, we promised we’d still be friends. It seemed an unrealistic pledge even then, but I think it gave us the courage to break up. It is very hard to lose your best friend, and sometimes you need to take the severing of those relationships in small steps.
For a while we spoke on the phone every evening, but the proof that our lives had gone on without each other in those nightly reports became too difficult to endure. We stopped talking and it felt better, and after that still, when there was distance to insulate the feelings, we’d e-mail occasionally and get together for a drink to catch up. It hurt less every day and then it didn’t hurt at all, and then we stopped feeling the need to communicate with each other in any way. Humans are adaptable. What pains us deeply will eventually fade, even if it never goes away completely. Even if it doesn’t seem like it will ever stop hurting when we’re right in the middle of it.