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

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.