Save the Date: The Occasional Mortifications of a Serial Wedding Guest (7 page)

Around that time I took to wearing my mom’s engagement ring, the one that her ex-husband had given her, an emerald-cut diamond that looked like what I imagined an engagement ring should be. Given what I knew of my mom’s marital history, it may have been odd that I chose this ring as my preferred accessory, but somehow its wearing seemed an important thing to practice. Plus, it was a diamond, and from what I had heard, diamonds should be seen, not hidden away in jewelry boxes and forgotten. For some reason my mom let me appropriate it, and because it fit there, I wore the ring on the fourth finger of my left hand, not knowing there was any presumed marital karma in that decision. I worked for a while in a grocery store in town, and people would see it and ask if I was married, and I’d give them dirty looks because I was still in high school.
Marriage?
I was far too young for marriage or, for that matter, even a permanent
declaration of love. I’d only just gotten my driver’s license, for heaven’s sake.

That didn’t mean romance wasn’t something I longed for. As sophomores, Marjorie and I had noticed two senior guys who did a funny thing in our yearbook. In all the photos in which they appeared, they were always the tallest boys, and they tilted their heads and gave knowing, goofy looks to the camera, gesticulating with pointed fingers at each other. One of them had loose, floppy skater hair, an overgrown brunet bowl cut. He became my new crush, but he had graduated from high school, and there was little chance of my ever meeting him. Until, suddenly, there was. He was staying in town and going to community college. Over the summer before junior year, I was in a car with a friend one day. We went by his house, and she pointed it out, a landmark: “That’s where Nathaniel lives.”

“Oh,” I said, nonchalant, but after that day, I drove by again and again. Sometimes I was alone, sometimes I had friends with me, sometimes I was in another friend’s car. It was a shortcut on the way to a drugstore, I reasoned; this was entirely acceptable behavior, not creepy
at all
.

He was rarely outside, though, and the little blue house sat quietly and low on its haunches, unassuming. Sometimes his Volkswagen Golf would be parked in the carport, and I’d think,
He must be home
, and try to imagine what he might be doing. All of the drive-bys did not go unnoticed. Sooner or later it got back to him that there was a high school girl with long brown hair who wouldn’t stop driving by his house. We met, awkwardly. We met again, less so. And then we were a couple. It had all been so
simple, but for the gas money and, later, the breakup. As the conclusion to my senior year approached, I tried to tell him we needed to end things. He couldn’t understand why, and I couldn’t, really, either, only that I knew it was something that I had to do. I needed to go on to the next stage of my life on my own, without him. It didn’t make sense—
How do you love someone so much, and then abruptly change how you feel?
—but it was the only thing that made sense.

On graduation night at a party in a cornfield I kissed another boy, and though it meant nothing, it was freeing. I was done, I told Nathaniel, it was over. He did not take it well, nor did my own family, to whom he was very nearly one of us. “How could you?” I remember my brother saying. “Oh, Jennifer,” my mom had groaned. My dad had been silently disappointed, feeling sorry for the nice young man he’d gotten to know. Of course, they’d forgiven me, and in the years that passed, it seemed that Nathaniel had, too. He’d sent postcards, and word would occasionally come about his whereabouts from friends. I was glad he was doing well, glad in the way that you can be glad for someone you used to know while also feeling that pang of
What if
. What if I’d done things differently, where might I be now? You can’t go back, and it wasn’t that I wanted to. But a person couldn’t help wondering.

•   •   •

L
ike romantic relationships, high school friendships don’t always make it through college separations, but Marjorie’s and mine did. We’d made a commitment, promising each other
that after we graduated from our respective universities we’d move to New York City. We’d rent an apartment together and be successful career women and have the best lives ever, although Marjorie planned to stay for a few years only, after which she’d move back to the South, get married, and start a family. I planned to stay as long as I felt like. I had a feeling New York could be my new home, the permanent home I’d been looking for. I needed one, because my dad’s job had taken my parents to London the summer I graduated, and then to Singapore and Indonesia, farther and farther away from that Alabama town in which I’d spent eight years.

Marjorie and I did what we said we’d do: We moved to New York, and we got a place on the Upper East Side with another high school friend, Violet. It was a three-bedroom apartment insomuch as there were three bedrooms side by side, with thin walls between them and their doors connected to a narrow communal living space. Not one but two brothels were busted in the building in the time we lived there, and at one point, a cop knocked on our door, thinking one of those apartments was ours. Marjorie let him in and insisted, “We’re not prostitutes!” and he nodded and said, “Three girls living together? Sure.” We didn’t know if we should be horribly offended or proud of ourselves. It was awesome, this grown-up life. Mostly.

Together, we got our first and second jobs and learned the ropes of our newly adopted city. We had bad dates and hookups and breakups, got dumped and dumped others, dealt with boys who called repeatedly and those who never spoke to us again after the first or sixth night. We even stayed friends through the
one time a man peed in our refrigerator. Then, just like she’d warned us she would, Marjorie moved back to the South, to Nashville, a few hours from our hometown—close enough, not too close—but not before she met Brian. From the beginning there was a seriousness to their relationship, and it threw me for a loop. That you could identify the person with whom you wanted to make a life, nail it down, and do it, seemed so inexplicable, so incredibly slippery. Did you just know? Did you close your eyes and turn and point and hope for the best? Perhaps choosing had the power of making that choice the one you wanted. The only person in my life who seemed remotely worth choosing, in retrospect, was Nathaniel, and yet that didn’t feel right, either. If it was true that someone was better than no one, what was the deadline for picking that person?
Why did no one tell you this stuff?

With Marjorie leaving town for good, and Violet enrolling in an out-of-state graduate program, our three-person unit was broken. There was nothing keeping me in New York, so I decided to make some changes. Like my parents, I would move, if only to prove for certain that New York was the place I wanted to be. I chose Boston, where a close college friend was living, and where, when I visited, things had seemed rather pleasant. Though once I got there I began to strategize my move back nearly immediately, just knowing I could get up and start a life somewhere else was confidence-inspiring. My excessively mobile parents had been on to something after all.

In the midst of plotting my return to New York, the invitation came. Claire, a fellow high school sorority sister, was marrying a man from Louisiana. They’d gone on a date to a concert,
and that had been it. We didn’t know much about him, and I hadn’t kept in close touch with her, either, in the years since we’d graduated, but this was a milestone. It seemed important to be there, as much for ourselves as for her.

Marjorie called me. “I think we should go,” she said. “Fly to Nashville, and we’ll drive down together. We’ll stay with my parents. Brian will come, too.”

I imagined my old house, the trees in the front yard, the parties we’d thrown back in high school. I could see the football stadium, the old make-out parking lot, the gas station where we’d bought Marlboro Reds and Boone’s Farm. I pictured the country club, where we’d thrown so many formals, and now the adult version that comes after. I didn’t know what I might find—baldness, weight gain, station wagons, babies?—but it was guaranteed to be at the very least interesting, worth the several hundred dollars I couldn’t afford on a plane ticket to delve again into my youth. And it was about looking forward, too. This was where so many things had happened. It might be time to consider what those things meant about who I was now, and who and where I wanted to be.

“I’m in,” I told Marjorie. “Can we do a drive-by of my old house?”

“Of course.”

•   •   •

I
wore a wrap dress from J.Crew, small paisley patterns on black, paired with a wrist bangle and some cheap, blingy earrings. This was one of the few wedding-appropriate dresses I owned,
though I’d frequently worn it to work, too. We spritzed and powdered and lipsticked and mascaraed and rolled our hair, sipping from little cups of booze, flagrantly breaking Marjorie’s mom’s No Drinks Upstairs rule. After a final check in the mirror, we grabbed our clutches and headed downstairs. Brian was waiting on the couch, watching a football game with Marjorie’s dad, who was reclining in his La-Z-Boy.

“Oh, you look so beautiful and grown-up,” said Marjorie’s mom. “I might cry!”

Marjorie’s dad tore his eyes from the TV. “Lookin’ good!” he said, giving a thumbs-up before a touchdown pulled him back in. I glanced at my friend. We did look beautiful and grown-up. As we should. We were on our way to see someone we’d known in high school get married.

The majority of weddings I’ve been to in my lifetime have not been in churches, but this one was, a church with a choir and organ music and people seated neatly in mahogany pews. We filed in, the group of us in East Coast black. In contrast, the bridesmaids were dressed in a peachy, poufy pink satin, the color of a bride’s blush. The Southern ladies wore bright floral dresses while the men leaned toward navy and khaki, with preppy, colorful ties. Scriptures and stained glass filled the room, and there was a pastor in front of a cross. Before him were hands clasped in a promise, and after that came the pronunciation of man and wife. Violet, a bridesmaid, stood at the front of the room, holding a bouquet of flowers against the bouquet of material formed by the voluminous folds of her dress. I remember a feeling of surprise when the minister uttered a line about a woman’s role being
to honor and obey her husband, though I’ve been told since that was another wedding entirely. That’s the trouble with weddings. As real as they feel in the moment, the memories, blurred by what you drank and how late you stayed up and how many people you spoke to or saw, but most of all by what you brought to the wedding yourself, can end up pretty cloudy. My recollections of this one are particularly so, it having been more than a decade ago, and attended by someone who in certain ways was more different from the person I am now than even the eight-year-old girl was.

We arrived at the country club and made our way to a banquet room where silver buffet trays were lined up on tables covered in starched white tablecloths, Sterno burners underneath to keep things hot. The scent in the air was heavy hors d’oeuvres—melt-in-your-mouth fatty things, like baked brie and cheese straws and fried chicken fingers and Swedish meatballs. There they were, being carried about on plates, fragrant little gravy vehicles. There was no fear of butter here. Food was supposed to taste good. The walls were dark and woody, and the room felt akin to being in a high-end cave, or some wealthy person’s basement outfitted with all the bells and whistles so that if you didn’t want to, you’d never have to leave. The open bar was just opening. In the excitement of getting ready for the wedding, we’d barely eaten. I realized I was hungry and got in line.

“Jennifer Doll,” I heard, and there was Nathaniel’s old best friend, Buddy, grinning at me and shoveling meatballs onto his plate. I had liked him a lot, until, in typical rumor-mill high school form, another friend had revealed he’d mocked my relationship with Nathaniel, saying he doubted we’d even kissed,
much less “done it,” and that poor Nathaniel probably had blue balls worse than anyone in the whole damn town. That statement had brought more mortification to me than if someone had said the opposite. To be prudish, or to be considered that way, had made me feel I was forever uncool, the Coke-bottle-lens-wearing girl nearly getting pantsed in the playground all over again. There was also the fact that his statement wasn’t entirely false. Nathaniel and I had kissed, but we hadn’t slept together. I guess by the point we might have gotten around to it, I was already preparing myself for the future.

We know this from class reunions, but it’s true at weddings, too: Just because you get older doesn’t mean you’re different inside. Feelings long past can pop right back up again when you’re confronted with something that wounded the previous you, especially when you revisit high school feeling only marginally confident about your adulthood. At twenty-five, I was sure of very little. Yet my former classmates were getting married. It was hard not to think about where I measured up, and I was afraid that when it came down to it, I hadn’t done much at all, not in my eyes, and not in anyone else’s, either. I desperately wanted to be something beyond misfit fifth-grade Jennifer, or high-school-debate-captain Jennifer, or throwing-parties-when-her-parents-were-out-of-town-and-getting-grounded sophomore Jennifer. Or Nathaniel’s-girlfriend Jennifer. And I was, I was! I was an adult, I had a job, I had a new town and an old town, too, I reassured myself. I had nothing to be afraid of. Also, Buddy might have information.

“Hey, you,” I said. “It’s been a while.”

He swallowed a meatball and nodded. “Sure has. How’s life?”

“Great!” I said. “I moved to Boston, but I’m probably headed back to New York soon. I don’t know if you knew I was living in New York? Boston is great, too! Busy, you know, working, going out a lot . . .” As I rambled, I looked around the room. “How’s stuff here? Have you seen Nathaniel lately?” My ex didn’t seem to be in attendance.

Buddy followed my eyes and inspected the crowd as well. “Last I heard he was living in Birmingham, dating some girl.”