Wedding Girl (3 page)

“Jean, you are making no fucking sense whatsoever. Spit it out, woman.” Ruth shakes her shoulders a bit.

“I was listening to the news on WGN radio on my way over. They congratulated local girl Cookie Carlisle and her new husband, hotshot sommelier Dexter Kelley, on their elopement today in St. Barths.”

All the air flies out of my lungs.

“That bastard,” Ruth mutters.

I look up and see that everyone in the room is looking over at me with shocked faces or still staring at their phones, which I presume are blowing up with the news, and my parents and Bubbles are elbowing their way purposefully through the crowd. This isn't possible. This is a night-before-the-wedding nightmare. I'm going to wake up any minute in my cozy bed and get ready to start my wedding day.

But then Bubbles holds her arms out to me and says, “Here,
shayna maidela
, here,” and I know that it is real as soon as I sink into her embrace.

My dad is rubbing my shoulders and saying all the things one would imagine a pissed-off dad would say, and my mom has joined the hug with Bubbles and me and is telling me into my hair that it is all going to be okay. Ruth and Jean are whispering behind me, and everything is soft-focus, and numb.

I stand up straight and shake them all off. “Okay, then,” I say.

“What do you need?” my dad asks.

“What do you want?” my mom asks.

“Who can I kill?” Ruth asks.

“I have this,” I say. Because if Dexter Kelley the fucking Fourth is going to steal my happiness and my future and my hopes and dreams, he sure as shit is not going to steal my dignity. I'm going to do what Rosalind Russell would do. Fake it till I make it.

I take a deep breath and try to keep the waver out of my voice as I call out, “Can I have everyone's attention, please?” The already-quiet crowd shifts immediately to dead silent.

Ruth takes my hand and squeezes. Which gives me just enough power to continue. “I take it that what I am about to say is not going to come as a surprise to many of you, but it appears that this wedding was rescheduled, unbeknownst to us all, at a different location. And apparently with a different bride. This is obviously not how we all thought things were going to go today, but I know one thing. I have some of the best chefs in the city in that kitchen making a meal that is going to knock your socks off. I have a lot of wine and liquor that has already been paid for, and a really great band warming up, and none of us are going to let any of that, or this beautiful venue, go to waste. So I'm going to ask your indulgence as I take a few moments to myself, and hope that when I return, you will all join me in having a spectacular party. We're going to think of this as my official Dodged a Bullet celebration, and I expect you all to eat and drink copiously, and dance with abandon, and please not offer me any condolences. Only happy talk tonight. If you know a joke or two, get them ready; we're going to do open mike instead of toasts. I'll be back soon, but please get the party started. My wonderful parents and
grandmother are going to show you all to the living room, where you can get cocktails, and the food will be out soon.” The crowd bursts into applause and hoots and hollers and shouts of “You go, girl!” and “You rock, Sophie!” and my parents wink at me, and Bubbles squeezes my arm, and they head over to wrangle the crowd on my behalf.

I head for the elevator, Ruth and Jean in tow, and we make our way upstairs. In the lounge, the two of them begin a long string of expletives and threats on Dexter's manhood, and I go to the safe and get my phone and turn it on. No messages from Dexter. No texts from him. No emails from him, just those offering support from people who heard the bad news. And notifications that my Facebook and Twitter feeds are going crazy. I shut it down.

“Are you . . . ?” Ruth starts, and I hold my hand up.

“Not now. I cannot do anything right now. Right now I would just like for the two of you to agree to spend the night here with me tonight after the party, when I'm reasonably sure I will be ready for a total meltdown. But for the moment, there is one quick thing I need to do, and then we are going down there, and I mean it, not one word about him or this insane situation or anything unhappy. We are going to get through this night with our best faces on, and have a slumber party, and then tomorrow we can figure it all out. Deal?”

“Deal,” Jean says. “I'm so proud of you.”

“You are the most amazing woman I know,” Ruth says.

They follow me out, and we head back downstairs, stopping at the second floor. “Hold the elevator for me, would you? I'll be right back.”

I walk up the hallway to the ballroom and open the door. The room is just as perfect as before. The band is beginning to do a sound check. A busboy is leaning against a wall, and I wave him over.

“Hi, you see that small table for two near the dance floor? Can you please make it disappear before we come back up?” He nods, heads right over, and starts removing the dishes. I cross the room and go to the cake table. Gently, so as not to mar the top surface, I remove the whimsical toppers. I look for a place to set them down or throw them away, and not finding one in my line of sight, slowly and deliberately, bit by bit, I eat them.

(1937)

No, things are the way you think I made them. I didn't make them that way at all. Things are just the same as they always were, only, you're the same as you were too, so I guess things will never be the same again.

•
IRENE DUNNE AS LUCY WARRINER
•

Today . . .

I grab the last box out of my battered Honda, lock the doors, and carry it up the wide stoop and through the front door.

“My goodness, now that is a very stinky Snatch!” I hear Bubbles in the other room, and I shake my head and suppress my giggles. A fat, elderly pug comes barreling down the hallway in my direction, in a custom sweater with black-and-yellow bumblebee stripes. Bubbles is on his heels with what looks like a dryer sheet in each hand.

“Snatch. You stop right there, young man,” she says to the dog, who halts and plops down on his wide ass. If he weren't a boy, I'd say Snatch has childbearing hips, in addition to his desperately horrible moniker. Bubbles, completely unaware of any alternate meaning, named the pup thusly because he has a habit of snatching anything in his reach and running away with it, a favorite
game. So Snatch he became, much to my amusement and my parents' mortification.

“He rolled in something dead in the backyard,” Bubbles says, by way of explanation, removing the offending garment and rubbing his rolls down with the dryer sheet in an effort to deodorize him. “Silly Snatch,” she says lovingly to him, and I head upstairs before I burst out laughing.

Straight up the narrow staircase and left at the top, into the second room on the right. Boxes are stacked floor to nearly ceiling on three of the four walls; there are piles of clothes on the bed, tote bags of all shapes and sizes on the floor and on the desk. I drop the last box on the floor in the far corner and sink into the battered blue velvet chair with shiny patches on the arms where the velvet has been rubbed away from years of use. The room, with an antique four-poster bed that had belonged to my great-grandparents, periwinkle walls, and a sparkly chandelier, had felt spacious and warm before I filled it with all my crap.

“Is that everything?” Bubbles asks from the doorway.

“That's it.” I wave my arm around the room. “The sum total of my worldly possessions.”

She crosses the space delicately, weaving around the obstacles on the floor with fluid grace. She perches on the wide arm of the chair and takes my chin in her hands. “Your worldly possessions are in here and here.” She points her finger at my heart and kisses my forehead. “Everything else is just stuff.”

“Well, here is all my stuff.”

“I forgot to ask; maybe we should have painted the room? You picked this color when you were six. I know your taste has changed.”

My room. Growing up, I spent a lot of time here at Bubbles's house. She insisted on taking me after school one day a week and one weekend a month. It gave my parents a break and gave us quality time together. I always stayed in the room that had been
my dad's when he was a boy. When I was six, I told Bubbles that I loved coming over but that the Cubs-blue walls and boyish décor were not really my style, and the next time I came for the weekend, we decorated the room. We picked out the pale color at the hardware store and painted the walls ourselves. I agonized at Vogue Fabrics, finally settling on deep-eggplant-purple linen, and Bubbles whipped up some drapes on her trusty Singer in a flash. She took me into her attic of treasures and let me pick out the bed and desk from the stash of family antiques that no one wanted but she couldn't bear to give away. We found the velvet chair at a thrift store. And the next time I came over, she had installed the chandelier over the bed, all the shiny crystals making a dance of light on the ceiling when the sunlight caught them. It was my magical princess room, and over the years the walls sported posters first of unicorns and kittens and then of boy bands and then grunge bands, and then, in college, came the ubiquitous poster of Klimt's
The Kiss
. Now they are bare, with teeny holes visible here and there where pushpins used to be. The desk where I did all sorts of homework and sticker-collection management, and wrote in little diaries with tiny locks and keys, is empty, the top clear except for a picture of my granddad in a silver frame, looking dapper in a suit and jaunty fedora, winking at the camera and, by proxy, at me, the namesake he never met.

“It's still my favorite room. I wouldn't change a thing,” I say, smiling at her as best I can.

“Well, if you change your mind, we'll redecorate. Now, all of this stuff will wait. I've got treats downstairs. We'll have some Nook time.”

In my grandmother's kitchen is a small bay window where there is a tiny café table with two chairs that she and my grandfather brought back from their honeymoon in Paris. They got the set for a song from a little bistro that was going out of business near their hotel, and then schlepped all three pieces back
with them as luggage. The story of taking it all on the Métro is a family classic. But the creamy white marble top is shot with blue green like really good Roquefort, and has been worn matte and smooth like a river rock with years of use. The chairs with their scrolled iron frames and worn wooden seats are shockingly comfortable. We have always called the charming tableau in the window “the Nook,” and all of our most important conversations have happened there, with cups of cocoa or hot tea or champagne or bourbon, and always with some sort of sweet little nibble: My decision to go to culinary school, right at that table with a mouth full of apricot coffee cake. The John Hughes–esque choice to say yes to the nervous, bespectacled boy from my English class who'd never uttered a word in my direction until he asked me to prom, and who did not become a wild romance but did become an unexpectedly good friend. The decision to legally change my name, and the equally important decision not to tell my parents.

“I'll be down in ten minutes, I promise.”

“I'll put the kettle on. You hear that whistle; you get your tushy downstairs.”

“Deal.”

Bubbles heads to the kitchen, and I take stock of my shame. I am thirty-four years old. Nine months ago, I was left at the altar by my perfect-on-paper fiancé in favor of a tanorexic new-money skeleton of a socialite, resulting in my being over fifty grand in debt on my dream wedding and one hundred percent screwed on my dream life. My wedding photographer, unbeknownst to me, did not capture my “riot grrrl” moment of announcing Dexter's departure from my life and telling my nearest and dearest that the show would go on and to drink up. But he did quite adequately capture my consumption of my own wedding-cake toppers, and my drunken rendition of Quarterflash's quintessential breakup ballad “Harden My Heart” with the band. He got great shots of my epic wipeout on the dance
floor when Jean tried to spin me, a real flattering ass-up, crinoline-over-the-head, Spanx-akimbo classic. And my personal favorite: the picture of me alone, sitting on the stairs, one Dior pump with a broken-off heel lying next to me, with an enormous piece of wedding cake that I am eating out of my hand as crumbs scatter down the front of my dress. Fat Cinderella wannabe after the ball, with no prince chasing her, just a broken shoe and a broken heart, eating her feelings. These lovely memories he sold to everyone who would buy them, and I spent the better part of a month confronted with photo arrays of my own embarrassment all over the local Chicago papers and the national online gossip magazines. The mortifying images were usually accompanied by a picture of Dexter and Cookie on a beach at sunset kissing passionately, the official wedding picture their publicist sent out. I even got a sympathetic mention from Hoda and Kathie Lee, and if I hadn't been so completely horrified, I probably would have eventually gotten around to sending them the cupcakes I meant to bake for them: Cabernet cupcakes with mascarpone frosting—wine and cheese.

I decided it was best to still take the week off after the wedding. Dexter and I had planned on a little staycation honeymoon, and so I wasn't expected at work. I spent the week in a daze, holed up in my apartment, ignoring calls and well-wishers and interview requests. The night before I was scheduled to return to work, my boss, Georg, called to see if I needed more time, but also informed me that Dexter had quit, making it safe for me to come back if I was ready. I thought that work would be my refuge. I wouldn't have to see his lying, cheating face every day or work with him. And for nearly six weeks, I just put my head down and channeled all my anger and mortification and thwarted passions into my work. I didn't even blink when a large box containing all the belongings I'd left at Dexter's apartment arrived by messenger without so much as an apology
note. The fact that when I went to do the same I was confronted with the realization that the only things of his at my place were a toothbrush and a stick of deodorant made me wonder if I had been delusional about the entire relationship, but I shook it off. His apartment had been so much more comfortable than mine and was walking distance from work, I had liked staying there as much as Dexter did, and I wasn't ever one of those girls who needed him to nest at my place just because it was mine. He had the good TV, the better wine, the bigger bed, the nicer tub.

I threw away the toothbrush and deodorant, and washed my hands of it. The mistake hadn't been mine; it had been his. And I was grateful he had shown his true colors before we made things legal. I was strong. I was tough. I was impressive.

Right up until the entire staff got invited to the soft opening of Abondance, the “new restaurant venture from Dexter and Cookie Kelley.”

They'd kept the name I had come up with, the French word for “abundance”; my concept, French-influenced comfort foods elevated to fine-dining quality; and the glorious space I had helped conceive. I looked at the invitation, everything it represented, and I officially lost my shit.

I started phoning it in at work, taking shortcuts, losing my perfectionist's edge. I sent out desserts that were overbaked, breads that were lackluster, chocolates that hadn't been properly tempered and had no shine or snap. I was short and snippy with everyone I worked with, and downright insubordinate with Georg, who had been my mentor as well as my boss since I got out of culinary school. He was patient for a couple of weeks and then terse for another month, and then he stopped giving me a break and simply gave me enough rope to hang myself. I skated by for a couple more months, my work getting shoddier by the day and my attitude getting worse. I systematically alienated every person at the restaurant from the dishwashers to the
front-of-house staff, people I had once thought of as friends, who now could barely be civil to me. Abondance opened to rave reviews and plenty of press, which caused an unfortunate resurgence in coverage of my sad little tale of romantic woe and the accompanying pictures. I drowned my feelings in food and gin until every piece of clothing I owned was tight as a tourniquet, and I only backed off my binging because I couldn't afford to buy new ones. After I came in hours late for the fourth day in a row, Georg demoted me from senior pastry sous chef to pastry assistant, and when I told him in no uncertain terms that every original idea that had come out of the pastry kitchen in the last four years had been mine, and that he had better not expect me to give up the goods if I was just a lowly assistant, he fired me.

Boy, did I ever deserve it. The news of my career fall from grace only served to flip the script on my victimhood in the whole Dexter debacle, making everyone think that he bailed on the wedding because I'm insane and difficult, and that Cookie saved him from marrying a horrible person. What few friends I had left in the local industry dried up and became Team Dexter.

Ruth and Jean abducted me to Canyon Ranch spa, where one of Ruth's clients owned a home she had always offered to Ruth, and the three of us spent a week detoxing and exercising. I had several sessions with one of the counselors where I cried a lot and mourned what was supposed to be, and I returned home somewhat more myself and with something of a plan. I would sell my condo and my engagement ring, and use the profits to pay off my credit card debt. I'd move in with Bubbles temporarily while I got my shit together, and think about my next professional move. The Chicago restaurant scene will be pretty closed to me for the foreseeable future—I now have enough of a rep as a problem-child diva to have ensured that—but I might be able to do something in catering or hotel work.

The plan started great. My folks had been toying with trying
to convince Bubbles to explore assisted-living communities—some recent bits of forgetfulness were giving them concern about her living alone—but Bubbles was having none of it, so my offer to go live with her came off as a generous granddaughter move, and everyone was delighted. But then my Realtor informed me that while we should be able to sell the condo fast, I would be lucky to break even. I had bought at close to the height of the market, put only 5 percent down, and then literally two months later, the economy tanked. The place, despite the recent bounce-back in values, needed upgrading I had never gotten around to, and there was a large special assessment in the offing to get a new roof on the building. The engagement ring turned out to have been chosen more for size than quality—leave it to Dexter to be more concerned about the surface appearance of things than the deep-down reality—so between them, I made enough money to put about twelve grand in the bank for a cushion to get me through till I find another job, but nothing at all extra to send to the credit cards. So much for wiping out my debt.