Save the Date: The Occasional Mortifications of a Serial Wedding Guest by Jen Doll Read Free Book Online

us remember the important moments better, or both. Whose children were at which weddings was a time stamp of sorts: My cousin Vince, for instance, had been at my parents’ ceremony as a little boy, which made him privy to something I’d never be able to experience. I was somewhat envious of that, and in awe of its strange permanence. Even after he grew up, to my family he would always exist as the adorable, suit-wearing toddler present at the church that day.
    The most interesting bits of the wedding stories, though, had to do with me. Yes, it’s narcissistic, but isn’t it true? Information related to ourselves is almost
always
fascinating, no matter how mundane (my diapered presence at my uncle’s wedding was hardly the showstopper of the day), especially when that information pertains to a previous version of the self that one must rely on others to define:
You wailed during the vows and Dad had to take you outside! You were left behind at a hotel with a babysitter, and when we got home you demanded to know why you’d never gotten to have your own wedding!
Or the anecdote my mom loved to tell, particularly when I got older and began to imbibe myself, of a teenaged me chastising, “You’re drunk, Mom!” after she’d had a few too many glasses of Champagne at one celebration. Her response, which she delivered with a proud flourish in retellings, had been, “No shit.” These details felt real, but the weddings of my childhood did not: They had to dowith people I hadn’t known; people who, in most cases, I would never know aside from the stories and the pictures. I wasn’t all that concerned with how those people were getting along in their post-wedding lives, or that they weren’t, and I was equally irrelevant to them, having not been old enough to truly count as a guest at their wedding. It’s not like a two-year-old was going to eat surf and turf, or gift anyone a soup tureen. Even if I’d been there, as the photographic evidence indicated, it wasn’t like I’d
really
been there.
    By third and fourth grades, though, shifts were occurring, superficially and otherwise. I’d seen the magazines, watched the movies, become enthralled with the white dress and that formalized walk down the aisle, the dad-and-daughter dance, the special party everyone got to have at least once. We had a tape deck in the car, and sometimes, while riding shotgun, I used it to blast Pachelbel’s Canon, a piece of music I enjoyed so much I was learning to play it on the piano. My dad, confused by my new penchant for high-decibel classical music, would ask me to please turn it down. I started to listen on my Walkman, where I could hear it as loud as I wanted, and on repeat,
so totally rockin’
. This was around the time that I planned my own double wedding with my best friend, our vows to be delivered on a trampoline, with refreshments of ice cream cake and lemonade. That we had no grooms (we were considering an array of rockers and boy celebs from our
Tiger Beat
and
Bop
magazines; I’d narrowed it down to a lucky two) didn’t matter any more than the fact that a trampoline ceremony for four might present some problems—was there a trampoline that large to be found? How do you kiss without breaking each other’s teeth, or noses?
    When a distant relative’s wedding was announced in the fall of third grade, I was ready. Attending a wedding when you’re eight, when double digits are lurking around the corner, when you’ve started at least tentatively to look at boys and they’ve begun to look back at you, is hardly the same thing as attending a wedding when you’re a baby clad in a ruffled diaper, being carried by an uncle. I’d remember this one. Maybe I’d even pick up some tips. This would be the beginning of
everything
.
    •   •   •
    I wore the outfit I’d later wear in my fourth-grade school picture. It was a department store dress version of a wedding cake, layers of lavender ruffles covered in a faux