Home Is Where My People Are: The Roads That Lead Us to Where We Belong (14 page)

We decided to go with the second option because, well, FLAT BROKE.

Marion and I shrugged our shoulders and threw our stuff on the same twin bed before I checked the mirror to see if I looked even remotely presentable for our night on the town. The short answer to that question was no. No, I did not, but since my hair and makeup didn’t stand a chance against the humidity, I decided that I was as good as I was gonna get. My hair had frizzed into a modified version of Roseanne Rosannadanna’s bob, but thanks to our efficient window unit, my shirt was no longer sticking to my back.

Progress!

Bring on the night on the town!

The insincere enthusiasm was in full force!

However, despite the heat, the humidity, and the uniquely noxious smell that is New Orleans in the summertime (I’m guessing I will not be asked to serve on a NOLA tourism committee at any point in the near or not-so-near future. I have made my peace with that; however, should they ever decide to do a campaign about traveling to New Orleans in the dead of winter, I can support that endeavor with my whole heart), we had the best time that night. We laughed our way down Canal Street, ate dinner at the Riverwalk, walked around in the French Quarter, sat and listened to some jazz music, and practically earned gold medals in the People-Watching Olympics of 1990.

When we finally started walking from the French Quarter to our hotel, it was technically early the next morning. Our late-night stroll through the Crescent City was at odds with the safety-first aspect of my personality, but I took comfort in the fact that I was sober as a judge and fully capable of screaming loudly for the authorities in the event of unforeseen danger.

And seriously, everybody else was just as clearheaded as I was. The point of our trip to New Orleans wasn’t any sort of crazy debauchery; we just wanted to be together for a girls’ night one last time before Elise became an old married woman. We recapped different stories from our night as we crossed streets with funny-sounding names
 
—Toulouse, Conti, Bienville
 
—and we broke into a light jog when we reached an abandoned
parking lot that looked like the place where the word
sketchy
was coined. I hadn’t necessarily counted on having to exercise, but I picked up the pace and took another opportunity to remind everybody that I’D NEVER EXPERIENCED HOTTER WEATHER IN MY LIFE.

I am nothing if not consistent in my feelings about the heat.

Once the hotel was in sight, we slowed down. One of Tracey’s shoes had broken, so she hopped on Elise’s back as we approached Canal, and I deliberately fell behind the pack and watched the other girls cross the street. Yes, I was hot (did I mention that?), but I was also awash in sentimentality (you can count on ole English major here to get all tenderhearted and reflective at the most inopportune times). I couldn’t have pinpointed the moment when it happened, but during our time at State, the hearts of those girls had become so inextricably connected to mine that it was hard to know where one stopped and the next one began. We weren’t unhealthy or codependent; heaven knows we tended to be straight shooters and quick to share our opinions. But we knew each other’s hang-ups and struggles, and there was no enabling
 
—oh, no ma’am. Even now I can hear Elise saying, “I get that you have some questions about the faith stuff, but at some point you’ve got to stop worrying about the parts you don’t understand and just hop back on the dadgum train. ALL ABOARD, sister
 
—the next stop is the CHURCH HOUSE, and it’ll do you some good to pay a visit.”

The Lord is mighty sweet to give us people who have no interest in attending our personal pity parties, you know?

It was equally as comforting that we knew the little stuff about each other too: who liked to twist her hair into loops when she was in deep thought, who had a pinky finger that didn’t necessarily like to cooperate with all the other fingers, who put on her makeup like she was going to win a prize for finishing first, who memorized the previous year’s Top 10 Miss Mississippi contestants’ talents and could perform them on demand, who pointed the toes on her right foot when she was trying to decide what to wear in the mornings.

In so many ways, we were the first family we had ever gotten to choose. And now that Elise was getting married, it felt like the beginning of the end of an era.

In my humble opinion, that era was flying by way too fast.

I caught up with the other girls as they walked into the hotel lobby, and together
 
—a bride and her tired, merry band of bridesmaids
 
—we made our way to the elevator. We yawned and stretched and rested our heads on one another’s shoulders, and I don’t think any of us could shake the awareness that all we had waiting for us upstairs was half a twin bed. The elevator was obviously in no hurry to transport us to our cramped sleeping arrangements; we must have waited ten minutes for those doors to open.

When the elevator finally arrived, we
 
—along with a few folks who had been standing behind us
 
—shuffled our way inside and crammed ourselves shoulder to shoulder so we could fit. Elise, who was standing by the elevator panel, diligently looked from person to person and asked for his or her floor number. She was about to question a man who was standing in the center of the elevator when she paused for a second
 
—and then a huge grin spread across her face. I turned to see what had caught her attention.

The man looked vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t place his face for anything. He was wearing a tracksuit and more gold jewelry than I’d ever seen in one place, and I was just starting to hone in on his most noticeable piece of jewelry when Elise spoke up. Her smile let me know that she knew exactly who he was.

“Hey!” she said. “Why do you wear that big ole clock on a chain around your neck?”

The man’s shoulders started to shake from laughter, and before he could answer, Elise said, “What floor, baby? You and that clock probably need to get on home.”

His smile seemed to spread from one side of the elevator to the other, and his gold teeth glistened under the lights.

That’s when it dawned on me: Elise had just made friends with Flavor Flav. On an elevator. At two o’clock in the morning.

Ladies and gentlemen, that right there is New Orleans in a nutshell.

Since being part of a wedding celebration was somewhat new to our group of college friends, Elise and Paul’s wedding weekend was extra special. It
seemed mighty grown-up to stay in a hotel, go to the country club for a rehearsal dinner, nibble on dainty chicken salad sandwiches at the bridesmaids’ luncheon, and gather in the church foyer for prewedding pictures with Elise. We’d spent the better part of three years living next to each other, crying on each other’s shoulders, getting to know each other’s families, and cementing our friendships over concerts and football games and late nights and fried chicken.

But then we blinked
 
—and there was an actual bride among us.

The wedding was in the sanctuary of First Baptist Church, and between Elise’s south Mississippi folks and Paul’s people from the Mississippi Delta, you couldn’t have squeezed two pennies onto any of the pews. That place was packed.

I didn’t expect to be nervous as I walked down the aisle holding my arm bouquet of alstroemeria lilies, but I was surprisingly shaky and quivery and just the tiniest bit weepy. One look at Paul’s face let me know that he was going to be an emotional wreck by the time Elise’s sister, Christy
 
—the maid of honor
 
—walked down the aisle, so I took my place on the far-right side of the sanctuary, made sure my flowers were at the precise angle the wedding director had specified the day before, and waited for Elise to make her entrance.

To be honest, it wasn’t a quick process. Between the bridesmaids, the flower girls, the groomsmen, and the clergy, there were about forty of us at the front of the church. There have been Mardi Gras parades with smaller processionals.

Finally, though, the back doors of the sanctuary opened, and Elise, holding tightly to her daddy’s arm, walked down the aisle. Paul’s chin quivered so much that I wondered for a split second if he might break it, and thanks to that funny way the brain tends to work at random moments, I ran through a four-second list of hypothetical questions:
Can a chin actually break? Would that require a cast? What if it needed a sling? Would an injured chin hurt every time it was about to rain?

You can always count on me to hone in on the most important details.

Once Elise took her place in front of her groom and the pastor, however,
I was dialed in. And twenty minutes later, she and Paul were husband and wife. Pledged, promised, vowed, and sealed with a kiss.

Paul bawled his eyes out through every single bit of it.

Elise pretty much smiled nonstop as she wiped away his tears.

For the next three or four years, that scene repeated itself over and over again. Sure, the churches were different, the bachelorette parties were different, and the ceremonies were different (nobody ever topped Paul Watson in the crying department; we should have given him a commemorative plaque), but the idea was the same: Wendi married Dave, Marion married Spence, Daph married Jimmy, Emma Kate married Brad, Tracey married Kirk.

(I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that the heat
totally
overachieved at Tracey and Kirk’s outdoor reception
 
—so much so that Marion and I took it upon ourselves to go inside the house on the property and find a bedroom where we proceeded to hike up the skirts of our bridesmaid’s dresses and stand over the air-conditioning vents for the better part of a half hour.)

(You might say that’s ridiculous. But I say that it’s resourceful.)

We seemed to move as a pack from one wedding to another to another to another, and I was increasingly aware that whether I liked it or not, we were heading into a new phase of our lives. Every time I watched another friend hop into a car with “Just Married” written in white shoe polish on the rear window, I felt an unavoidable pang of bittersweetness. I knew that it was right and good and normal for everybody to move into the next season, and I reminded myself that I was beyond fortunate to have spent four years with dear friends who had honest to goodness made me a better person. At the risk of sounding like a Hallmark card or, heaven forbid, someone on
The Bachelor
, they really had influenced my life in amazing, positive ways, and while I may not have had all my theology ironed out, I could still recognize that those sweet girls were living, breathing examples of God’s faithfulness. They loved me unconditionally, they made me laugh, and they were a surefire guarantee that anything would be fun as long as we were together.

I was so grateful for that.

I was so grateful for them.

And even though change wasn’t my favorite, it thrilled me to see my friends fall in love, especially since I adored all their husbands (I still do, mind you). An added blessing was that I didn’t feel like I was just sitting around and biding my time until I could get married. I very much liked the perks of living by myself, chief among them being able to hibernate in my apartment on a wide-open weekend with an assortment of crackers, a couple of two liters of Diet Coke, and an entire season of
The Real World
on a VHS tape.

I don’t mean to imply that Wheat Thins compare to marriage, of course. I’m just pointing out that my needs were relatively simple.

But still, there was one part of the “moving on” equation that I just could not reconcile.

I missed my people like crazy.

The fact that the whole equestrian-print skirt/Adrienne Vittadini sweaters/Olive Garden scenario wasn’t going to work out was insult to injury, really. Granted, I wanted more for my friends than for them to be like Billy in
St. Elmo’s Fire
and get stuck in a college-life mentality that leads to getting thrown out of bars and then leaving a family to go to New York and pursue a career as a saxophonist.