Always a Bridesmaid

On Saturday, I marched down the aisle in one of my best friends’ weddings. This year, I will march down a total of three aisles in three very different weddings, all of them to celebrate the union of two people who hadn’t even met by the time Alex and I were shacking up in our 3rd or 5th or 7th apartment in our 3rd or 5th or 7th home-base city. All of these weddings, I am in support of. All of these marriages, I have the greatest confidence in. All of these couples, I am terrifically happy for. Yet none of them are for me.

On Saturday, I watched Zoe Fitzgerald become Zoe Cauley. It seemed, indeed, to be the happiest day of her life. And I’ve known her for many days. I met Zoe the same day I met Alex, way back in 1993, in the broken-down building known as the Charlesgate in Boston’s Back Bay. It was the first day of Freshman orientation for Emerson College, and Zoe was my roommate, along with Molly and a host of mice and cockroaches who lived in the walls and vacationed in our bags and shoes and garbage cans. Destiny brought Zoe into my life; hormones were responsible for Alex’s entry. On that first day of a new life in a new city, I was getting to know these two girls who would be seeing me naked for the next 9 months, this Zoe from Manhattan who was bashful as could be, and this Molly from Maine who papered the walls in Motley Crue. We three were making nice and skirting around the issues of cohabitation which we would spend the next 9 months trying to balance (what with Molly’s sorority girls and me & Zoe’s smoking boys a fixture in room 309), when suddenly there entered into our room 2 boys on a mission. The one was clearly the leader: “Hi, I’m Alex, and this is my roommate, Jim. We’re walking around the dorm trying to meet  hot girls. How you doin’?” We three hot girls were immediately of one mind: IN YOUR DREAMS! Who did this guy think he was, with his slicked-back hair and his South Jersey accent? I had just escaped Jersey, no WAY was I gonna move to New England just to hook up with some guido-wannabe with too much confidence and not enough fashion sense! When Alex and Jim (who was dressed head-to-toe in Miller Light gear, and who managed no words but looked at the three of us as though we were a mirage) finally took their leave, we three girls laughed and wondered if this was what college was all about. It was. But on that day, we could not have dreamed that Alex would soon become a best friend to all of us, and we could not have dreamed that Zoe and I would become The Little Debbies, the two girls surrounded by a whole flock of boys who were our buddies, who perhaps fell in love with the both of us at one time or another, but who always saw us as a unit, as the two girls who could speak a boy’s language and always be one of the guys without ever losing our femininity. On that day, I could not have dreamed that Zoe would become like a sister to me, that she and I would grow so close as to no longer need language to communicate, we needed only a look or a touch or even a thought to tell each other what we were feeling at any given moment. I could not have dreamed that one day, I would find myself placed on the opposite side of a ballroom from Zoe, in a 15th century castle in a tiny Dutch town, that I would be blindfolded and spun in circles and then released with the goal of finding my girl across the way, my girl who was also blindfolded and spun in circles, my girl who was seeking me out as I was seeking her, in an exercise that we were the first to attempt on that day, in that class, in that grand room that was so silent I could hear nothing but my breath and my heartbeat and my feet sliding over the polished hardwood floors, I could not have dreamed that this exercise in apparent futility would take less than a minute for the two of us to complete, as we slowly and silently stepped one foot then the other towards that place that felt like home, towards that energy that called through the darkness and the emptiness, towards the safety and comfort and beauty that we found in each other, until we heard “STOP” and were told to stand still and remove the blindfolds, and there she was, not two inches in front of me, that bashful Manhattanite who was never bashful around me, that lovely girl with whom boys fell madly in love within minutes of knowing her, that miracle of a girl who was mine as no one had been mine before.

Now, it’s hard to have a friendship so close, so intense, so other-worldly, and not have it get confused. There was an element of ownership to our friendship, and we didn’t like to have to share each other, which made things tough, as we were pretty freaking cute, us Debbies, and we both had our admirers, and each of us was longing for love, the only kind of love that we couldn’t provide for each other. And who would have guessed that I would find that love in that guy from South Jersey, that over-confident dude who smoked too many Marlboro’s and had the fashion sense of a homeless man. Who would have guessed that within a month of knowing each other, Zoe and Alex and I would become a trio of sorts, the two Little Debbies and their favorite bad-behavior boy. Alex was the boy whom we would turn to first, the boy who always found a way of making everything seem like no-big-deal and made us laugh in the face of overdue papers and curious love affairs. Alex was never the guy I imagined falling in love with, which is probably the only way it could have happened. And it did. And on July 5th, 1996, Alex asked me to marry him. And I said yes.

Fast-forward to May 9th, 2009. There we were, Alex and I, in the wedding party of our Little Debbie and her Prince Charming, whom Alex brought into Zoe’s life way back in the Fall of 1999. Zoe Fitzgerald, that bashful Manhattanite, was now ready to say her I Do’s to William Cauley, a man so opposite her in so many ways as to be her most perfect companion. Her bashfulness was in contrast to his outgoing nature, her softness a counterpoint to his brass. And in him, she found the home she had been seeking for years. His love for her was so complete, so intense as to have been overwhelming at times to those of us who had watched Zoe try to find her voice in a crowd; his love was so powerful that it made us want to protect her, to try to find the gentleness that we felt she needed. But it turns out that his love was exactly what she needed in order to find her voice, as was never clearer than when she said her vows on that altar with more confidence than I had ever known from her. There we stood, Alex and I, along with our lady Caroline, who moved in with me and Zoe in our Chinatown flat back in ’96, Caroline who became Zoe’s roommate after Alex became mine, Caroline who has lived all over the world and yet has always managed to remain in my heart as My Lady. I watched her try to hold back her tears as Our Girl became a Wife, knowing all of the history that has passed between us three ladies, from the time we first met in that Dutch castle before the floods moved us to that German boys’ camp, to the time Caro and I drove cross-country in order to make it in time to a performance of one of Zoe’s plays. I watched her smile as Zoe’s voice rang out with her I Do’s and Forever Is Today’s, and right beside Caroline stood Alex, whose eyes rarely left me during that ceremony. I looked into his eyes as the vows of our friends were spoken, knowing that we were speaking them to each other, knowing that we have journeyed to Heaven and Hell and lots of places in between and have always managed to come out of it together. Together, forever. That is our plan. That has been the plan since that July 5th evening almost 13 years ago, when Alex got down on one knee in front of the Christian Science Center reflecting pool and asked me to be his wife. And I said yes. And on Saturday, we walked down the aisle to help our friends celebrate their love and their commitment to Forever, knowing that commitment is a bitch and Forever is an eternity and Love is a 4-letter word, and knowing that it is the most beautiful pain-in-the-ass imaginable. And I knew that Alex and I were both thinking, We should get married. Why not? We should have our friends and our families celebrate our love and our commitment and our past/present/future together. Why not? We should be able to call each other something more significant than “My boyfriend/girlfriend” or “my partner” or “the guy I’m living in sin with”. Why not?

Yet here I am, always a bridesmaid, never a bride, and it’s entirely by choice. What am I afraid of? Or what am I waiting for? Or why should I care? I mean, it’s not like Alex and I need to prove anything to anyone. We’ve survived far more than any of these couples saying their I Do’s this year, and we’ve stayed together without any legal or societal pressures to do so. We have proven our commitment again and again, so what’s the point of getting married? That is generally the way our few scattered discussions of marriage have ended. Except…

I never would have imagined back in 1993 that I would be a bridesmaid at the wedding of that Bashful Manhattanite. And I never would have imagined that I would look across the aisle at that South Jersey boy, whom I’ve loved since long before I finally told him so, with a desire to be the ones speaking those words. But here I am. And yes I was. And maybe we will. Someday. But for now, I will continue on to the next march down the aisle, this time at the wedding of my brother and the love of his life, and from there down the next aisle to celebrate my friend and the guy that almost let her get away. Perhaps someday, these people will return the favor and walk down an aisle for me. But for now, I am content to be Always a Bridesmaid, Never a Bride.