Bad Bridesmaid (19 page)

Judith Martin, author of the syndicated “Miss Manners” column, receives so many letters from bridesmaids asking her about their recourse that she joked about founding a “labor union for bridesmaids to ensure them decent working conditions, proper uniforms and limited financial liability.”

This is actually not a bad idea. Brides get prenups, hotels get damage deposits, and even the mentally ill get some nice soothing medication. Yes, bridesmaids get the earrings or the bracelet, and they’re lovely—thank you. But while the bride and groom head off on their honeymoon (paid for, no doubt, through a bridesmaid-organized shower), the bridesmaids go back to being
slightly less financially secure versions of themselves, with one more outfit they won’t wear and the beginnings of a serious alcohol-dependency problem.

We are not asking for a lot in exchange, just a little respect. We want more than a toast from the groom’s less attractive brother; we want to stop being the whipping girls of weddings and the butt of jokes penned by Hollywood screenwriters who use the bridesmaid as shorthand for desperate spinster or psycho singleton.

When a wedding is complete, few people sit back and say, “She made a beautiful bridesmaid,” or flip through the wedding album cooing over shots of the bridal party. No one adds “bridesmaid” to their resume under “Education and Experience” or wears a special piece of jewelry to indicate their acceptance into the Bridesmaid Fold. But imagine if they did. Who knows, maybe
The New York Times
Vows section would start giving as much ink to the qualifications of the attendants as they do the betrothed:

I
t was not the first time I had found myself with a Bad reputation.

And, as it was with my teenage rep, the designation was not entirely undeserved. But I had been asked to stand as a bridesmaid a second time that summer, in the wedding party of my best friend, and I was terrified that she, too, would kick me out after learning of my Bad behavior.

Maybe I would be issued a lifetime ban, I worried, a Bridesmaid Red Card retiring me from professional play and forcing me back to the minor leagues of wedding attendance, where I would be greeted as just another tipsy guest and nothing more. I was unbondable as a bridesmaid now, a liability, a flight risk, and damaged goods.

Thankfully, my best friend had laughed when I mustered up the nerve to describe to her my attendant shame. In the wisdom gained through years of friendship, she told me that my big mouth had once again landed me in trouble and that I should have seen the whole disaster coming a mile away. She noted that if she had wanted a bridesmaid who was helpful and attentive she would have made another choice from the start. It seems it was not news to her that my respect for tradition and ability to behave like an adult left something to be desired.

I sighed with relief and silently vowed to be the Best Bridesmaid the world had ever seen.

They say that opposites attract, but this is not the case when it comes to a successful union of bride and bridesmaid. I believe that things went smoothly in my best friends wedding because she was as stunned by the process as I was, amazed that she would be wearing white and dedicating her life to a single man. She, too, was shocked that a cake could have a three-digit price tag and that a venue must be booked fourteen months in advance. Each step toward the aisle was a novel form of entertainment for both of us, as odd and unexpected as if she had decided to join the circus. When it came to doing what was expected, she was something of a Bad Bride herself.

It had been this way since the beginning. When she came home from a New Zealand vacation engaged, she and her fiance had listened to me blab on for an hour over drinks before they mentioned their own exciting news. She did her best to maintain her taste and tact throughout her engagement, which was—mercifully—just eight months long. She wanted to be married, not mired in wedding planning, and refused to drag the whole thing
out. She was excited, yes, but wanted to throw the ultimate party—not a pristine event—and for her, this meant killer food, good music, and the rental of a large lakefront home where the bridal party, her siblings, and other friends could stay to prolong the festivities into the wee hours.

As she prepared to get hitched in her own particular style, she accepted my contributions—however minimal—with grace and humor, even when I appeared at her engagement party with a gift-wrapped copy of
The Meaning of Wife,
a book that examines the misogyny and materialism of marriage. I was not scolded and told that feminism has no place at a wedding celebration. Instead, the bride and groom laughed, and guests took turns reading sections of the tome aloud as we stood around the bar.

When we went dress shopping with her mother and the other bridesmaids, she was clear that she didn’t care what we wore, as long as we were happy and comfortable. She had our backs when we entered one bridal store and found rack after rack of awful dresses, their shiny fabrics glowing under the sallow lighting, their seams already showing signs of distress from the weekends of women who had reluctantly pulled them on. We gamely retired to the changing room and when we reemerged, the MOB did her best to be supportive, politely commenting on flattering aspects of our looks while diplomatically suggesting that perhaps hot pink floor-length was not the way to go. The Bride, however, was nowhere to be seen. I walked outside in my Vegas showgirl number and found her sitting on a bench, head in hands. “That place is horrible,” she said. “We’re leaving right now.”

For her bachelorettc party we adopted what we were told was a French bridal tradition called
enterrement de jeune fille
—funeral
of a young woman—placing photographs and mementoes of our friendship into a small casket another friend had found at a neighborhood Goth store. The Bride loved the tribute, and carried the black box under one arm as we bar-hopped and danced the night away, even proudly displaying it on the plastic tablecloth of a Chinese restaurant where we went for late-night greasy food to soak up all the booze.

There were many pre-wedding events, but she went out of her way to make them unimposing and optional. She told me that I didn’t have to come to the linen party thrown in her honor, probably because she knew I would say something inappropriate about what she was going to do on her new seven-hundred-thread-count sheets.

Because she maintained her perspective and her sense of humor about the endeavor, I actually found myself wanting to do more to help. I pored through books of poetry when she mentioned her desire to have a work of literature included in her ceremony, marveling at how sexually explicit Margaret Atwood could be and wondering if Tupac’s verse had ever been read aloud in a Protestant church. I transcribed Maya Angelou and memorized Shakespeare sonnets before she settled on “Dance Me to the End of Love” by Leonard Cohen, a perfect last-minute find.

When my bridesmaid dress was finished, I rushed it home before she could have a change of heart, and was so determined to look halfway decent in it that I even bought a pair of Spanx to wear underneath. The tiny tube of stretch material looked like a bandage you would be given for a sprained ankle or wrist, and I seriously doubted that I would be able to pull it over one foot, let alone the length of my body from chest to knee.

As anyone who has had the misfortune to wear a pair of Spanx knows, putting the thing on is as traumatic—if not more so—as just letting it all hang out. The elasticized material is supposed to smooth out all your bumps, but that means you have to cram them in there first. I had imagined the Spanx molding my figure into an entirely different formation, that my thighs would be pushed backward into a Jennifer Lopez—like butt, my belly flattened in a nonsurgical tuck, and all excess flesh miraculously relocated to my chest. In the end, it didn’t make any difference at all. When the wedding day came, I looked exactly the same as I had without the full-body suction device, other than the fact that the Spanx peeked out from under my cocktail-length dress like a pair of ribbed beige leggings. But you can’t say I didn’t try.

This is not to say there weren’t moments when I silently cursed my luck or marveled at the things that can trip a girl up on her way down the aisle.

On the beautiful September afternoon before the wedding, I made my way out of town for the rehearsal dinner, only to find myself stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic. Somehow, a man had managed to drive his car underneath a tractor trailer, wedging it there and stopping traffic on four lanes of busy rush-hour highway.

As my companion and I waited for emergency services to pull the driver (who survived) and his car (which did not) out from under the truck, the traffic jam turned into a makeshift tailgate party. Men and their sons tossed footballs around, women read magazines in the front seat and filed their nails to pass the time, and everyone tried to deal with the inconvenience as calmly as
possible. Except for me. I drank warm beer out of a case in the trunk and momentarily considered hitching a ride with a lecherous long-haul driver who yelled filthy pickup lines at me from the collector lane, which was still slowly inching forward on the other side of the highway median.

I could not be late for this rehearsal, I told myself over and over again, and I would risk abduction at the hands of a mesh hat—wearing redneck before I allowed myself to add to my permanent record as a Bad Bridesmaid. I was not going to miss my shot at redemption because some idiot had mistaken a moving truck for a fast-food drive-through window.

Four hours later, having rejected the offer of a ride from Mr.
HOW’s MY DRIVING? CALL
1-800-SCREW-YOU, we pulled into the parking lot of a picturesque country church and I leapt from the passenger seat, spilling out along with crumpled cigarette packages and empty beer bottles. I sprinted from the car and slammed through the doors of the church, expecting to see the rehearsal in full swing, the officiant rolling his eyes at my tardiness and a basin of holy water sizzling at my very presence. Instead, there was no one there. I had been phoning my friend The Bride almost constantly, but she was sitting calmly on a lakeside dock with her family, and returned my call just minutes after I dashed into the empty church. She informed me that I must have confused the time of the rehearsal with the hour the ceremony would begin the next day.

I was an hour early.

There were other disasters narrowly averted. On the morning of the ceremony, The Bride realized that she had left time for everything except writing her own vows, and we spent some time
in a tearful huddle before I convinced her that no one can really hear that stuff anyway.

The wedding photographer came equipped with canisters of film, unaware that even blind grandmothers are now shooting digital. When it appeared The Bride was going to shove a roll of film up his slow-winding ass, I ran to the martini bar and fetched her a drink, helping calm her nerves between motorized clicks.

When the newlyweds realized they had forgotten the CD with her first-dance song on it at their cottage, I pried her younger brother away from the attractive female guests long enough to make him drive back and get it.

And during the speeches, one of the flower girls climbed onto my lap for a better view. She was four and adorable, and I enjoyed the fact that she somehow sensed we were in this together. When she offered me a stick of lip gloss, I slid it across my mouth, thinking how cute it was that she had brought her own makeup kit to participate in the grown-up event.

“I found it on the floor,” she told me when I had smacked my lips together.

For a moment, I contemplated tossing her off my lap and gargling with champagne, but instead I laughed and chalked it up to karma.