Save the Date: The Occasional Mortifications of a Serial Wedding Guest by Jen Doll

Author:Jen Doll [Doll, Jen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2014-05-01T00:00:00+00:00

11.

Rock-Bottom Wedding

I am standing in the middle of the dark, rain-dampened Main Street of a small Connecticut town. In front of me is a bar, which I have just been dragged from, kicking and screaming, by friends, possible former friends, and the mother of the bride. I am wearing a purple dress with a ruffle down the front that I bought in Paris. It has held up surprisingly well given the circumstances. Despite the fact that muddy rivulets trace the road, which is littered with debris from the day’s near-hurricane conditions, I am wearing only one shoe. The other, a black leather faux-crocodile platform pump that cost $450 as a pair, is in my recently manicured, now grimy hand. I throw it down the road with all of the strength I can muster. And then that second shoe is gone, too, discarded right along with my dignity. Those items—left pump, right pump, any remaining semblance of grace, elegance, or decorum—are now so far down the street that I couldn’t see them even if it weren’t pitch-black and I weren’t seven sheets to the wind. The good news is, I’m so drunk I have no idea what a complete and total ass I’m being. That part comes later.

I am barefoot when I am finally coerced into the car with my friend Josh, who has been given the thankless duty of returning me to the hotel where we are staying, in separate rooms, post-wedding. I drum my feet against the dashboard like a child mid-tantrum, alternating between yelling at him—“How dare you?”—and begging him to return me to the bar where I’d found a man—not a wedding guest, but a man who was, rumor had it, at his own bachelor party, though that wasn’t in my bleary eyes a problem, not at the time. If anything, it meant we had something in common; we had both been clasped in the omnipotent embrace of so many interminable weddings. This man might be the love of my life, I reason unreasonably to Josh, a moment of false calm, a moment to breathe, before I start kicking again: “Please-please-please-take-me-back-I-am-a-grown-woman-don’t-tell-me-what-to-do!”

I am a grown woman. Someone has seen fit to return my shoes to me for the ride, and when Josh drops me off in front of the hotel, I discard them again, aiming this time for him, or at least for his rented Lincoln Town Car, which makes him look like one of the many limo drivers waiting out their next fares in the hotel parking lot. These other drivers cluster around him and cluck over what a bitch I must be, having assumed I am a drunken passenger on the way home from a wedding. They’re not far off.

I don’t know this, this story about the limo drivers, or even who drove me home that night, until Josh himself tells me about it over spaghetti at an Italian restaurant in Manhattan’s East Village several years later. “I dropped you off at the front of the

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