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

fondant of tiny white dots, with fabric tiers encircling my body from midcalf to waist, and then again at the sleeves. In a photo from this day, my hair, which hung past my collarbone, is brown and has a wave to it without the aid of styling products or a curling iron. My bangs, cut with the assistance of a piece of Scotch tape, are jagged across my forehead. My eyes are open wide, my eyebrows raised in an expression of expectant surprise. There is the early beginning of a smile on my face. I’m waiting for something exciting to happen, holding on to the table in front of me for balance. Next to me, my mother, slim with her dark hair cut in a bob and her striped dress paired with a long necklace, smiles prettily, and my five-year-old brother, to her right, gives a purposely dour stare to the camera from underneath his bowl-cut head of hair, his tie amusingly askew.
    I assume my dad is on the other side of this photo.
    Whose wedding was it? A family member, a far-flung cousinor uncle or niece or aunt of my father, or a direct relation of my grandmother; it really didn’t matter. What mattered most immediately was the ride to the wedding, a journey in the back of the navy-colored four-door Buick sedan with the velveteen seats we called “the Blue Buick.” Then, of course, the wedding itself, but first the ride: This was a trip long enough that a grubby old car towel that usually resided on the floor had been placed on the backseat between me and my brother, Bradley, as a dividing line across which we were not allowed to tickle or pinch or pull hair. It would be several hours to our destination in Michigan, and I had a stack of books on my side of the towel. In those days, my mother’s most frequent complaint was that my nose was always in a book (this complaint would continue for much of my car-riding life with my family), and she took this drive as an occasion to reiterate that I should really look out of the window, have a conversation, do something,
anything
, other than stare at printed words on pages. “Doesn’t reading in the car make you nauseated?” she’d ask. For some reason, after that question, it always would.
    I was in a nickname phase. I had taken to calling Bradley “Zook,” short for “Bradzooka,” the name I’d used previously until I’d bored of it. Hopelessly and hilariously a step behind us, Dad was still calling Brad “Bradzooka.” I’d have to move on from Zook when he finally caught up, so I was keeping a list of options, “Bubsy Orlando,” for some reason, at the top. Zook’s wedding outfit was a dark gray suit, one tailored to his five-year-old proportions. The look was completed with a fresh haircut and a maroon tie—real, not a clip-on—atop a relatively crisp white button-down shirt. He might have been commuting from the Chicago suburbin which we lived to his office in the big city, a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, dapper young businessman, minus the fact that he was a kid and he was toting around a stuffed monkey. We called this monkey Bobo. He was small enough to hide in a lady’s purse, but since neither of us carried such a thing, my brother held him in his arms and sometimes transported him on his shoulder. It was of vital importance that we not lose track of Bobo. He was a willing subject for the photos we planned to take upon the first opportunity we had to sneak the camera away from our parents at the wedding. Plotting our camera takeover may have, in fact, been some of the reasoning behind our ceasefire across the Great Dividing Towel. Also, we’d learned that in crowds of grown-ups there was safety in kid numbers. Alliances were key.
    Along with quiet plans sprung up in the backseat, on the ride to Michigan there was much talk of weddings. Getting married was something grown-ups did when they decided they wanted to be together forever, said my mom, who clarified that this was the wedding of the daughter of cousins of my father, of the niece of my grandmother. I paid