Elizabeth Crane - The History of Great Things

— I think this might be true, but I might be conflating your worldview with mine.

— There’s some overlap, Mom. Or there is at this time, anyway.

Unfortunately, it’s difficult to have this conversation with the person you most want to have it with. It’s obviously not reasonable to suggest to Nina that she’s doing this to hurt you, getting married, but what you can’t quite work out for yourself is how she can’t anticipate your needs about the whole thing. It doesn’t help right now that Nina’s worldview is, in essence, the opposite of yours. She believes deeply in prevailing goodness. So when you propose to her that these events are being designed with nefarious, Betsy-sabotaging purposes, and she asks who it is that might be designing them, your response is a simple one. God , you tell her. I didn’t know you believed in god , she says. I don’t, really , you say. You both can’t help but giggle, but you’re going to stick with it. That makes no sense , Nina says. It makes perfect sense! How does that make any sense? I don’t know exactly, it’s just what I think. Maybe something happened in a past life where I did believe in god, and then something shitty happened and I stopped believing in god, and even though I don’t remember any of this now, the god I once believed in is punishing me now. Nina laughs. Don’t laugh! You both laugh. Don’t laugh, I’m not kidding! Okay, I believe you, I believe you, but it still doesn’t make sense. Don’t tell me what makes sense! God isn’t about what makes sense, everyone knows that. Betsy, come on. Listen to what you’re saying. It’s what I think. It is what you think. It is really what you think, and you’re going to stick with it for a while.

At this point, you’ve been to a whole lot of weddings. You’ve been to weddings at the Plaza and the Pierre, outdoor weddings overlooking the Hudson, backyard weddings on Long Island, church weddings in the Bronx and temple weddings in Queens, Buddhist weddings in Vermont, interfaith weddings in people’s living rooms, and weddings at City Hall. The obvious and logical conclusion is that it’s not all that hard to find a partner, for everyone in the world besides you, and the sub-conclusion is that there is something deeply and irreversibly wrong with you. This is further evidenced by the fact that you are almost never invited with a date. It doesn’t occur to you that this is largely because you almost never have a boyfriend. What does occur to you is that everyone who knows you probably thinks you can’t even get a date. This is on the growing list of Things Being Done to You. You believe that you should be invited with a date either way, whether you can get one or have one or don’t want one at all. You have no idea who you would even bring, but every single time a fat white envelope arrives in the mailbox (and it’s hard not to notice that they’re getting bigger and fatter and more in-your-face than ever; undoubtedly the wedding industry is on the board of the Betsy-sabotaging conspiracy) without “and Guest” after “Betsy Crane,” you can read the invisible calligraphy that reads instead “Who Has No One.” What’s crazy is that you like weddings, in theory, but lately the main thing on your mind, as one bride after another walks down the aisle, is that it isn’t you.

You come in with no idea of what being a maid of honor entails. Nina’s not really sure either. The wedding is mostly being planned by her future mother-in-law, who gives you a list: wedding-day duties include keeping track of Nina’s wedding-related appointments, helping Nina get dressed the day of, and making sure she’s calm and happy. But your primary task is to arrange and host the bridal shower. All of this turns out to cost about infinity more money than you have. You’ve been waiting tables on the Upper West Side since your summer on Fire Island. The dress Nina has picked out for you (from among the choices her mother-in-law has presented from Bloomingdale’s) is absolutely gorgeous, a full-skirted Ralph Lauren, which Nina insists on paying for, which seems like it might be a good thing, because you have a few thousand dollars of credit card debt as it is. But this kind of generosity, where you are concerned, anyway, only leads to weirdness and misunderstanding. You are relieved for about a minute not to have to generate more debt, only to move directly into resentment. She has more money than you. She didn’t even do anything to get that money, and now she’s marrying more of it. She has no idea how hard it is for you, it being everything. You’ve been waiting tables for a couple of years now. She doesn’t understand that gifts like this make you feel uneven, like she doesn’t really know you, or worse, that she feels sorry for you. (You have no issue with feeling sorry for yourself, but the idea that others might pity you is an unbearable conundrum.) You don’t want to understand that maybe she does understand and just doesn’t have any better ideas about how to make you happy. So you try to pick a fight, which you regret almost immediately, because you can hear, as it comes out of your mouth, what it sounds like when you say I appreciate it, I really do, but I don’t think you get how shitty this makes me feel. Nina, bless her heart, is inclined to try to understand, where it might serve you both better if she just told you to fuck off.

You insist on hosting the shower at your apartment, asking Nina to politely relay to her mother-in-law that she’d prefer a more intimate setting than the River Café. You still live in, and owe back rent on, your brownstone duplex, but it’s always been a good place for a party. (That one time that guy almost fell backward off the front of the building trying to catch the beer he knocked off the roof, the one that accelerated like a missile and just missed hitting a pedestrian who turned out to be your downstairs neighbor: Classic .) Unfortunately, the mother-in-law insists on coming by to scope it out before the big event and gives you a list of things for the party that you didn’t know you needed, like outdoor rugs for the roof garden and phone numbers for a desirable caterer and chair-and-table rental company. You should probably carpet these stairs, too , she says. Your indignation is growing, and as soon as she leaves, these numbers go right into the trash. You decorate the roof with your own Christmas lights and flowers from the deli and enlist me to help cook. I’ll make a pasta salad and a salmon mousse and you’ll bake cupcakes. But the whole shebang still costs about four hundred dollars that you don’t have. Nina has boots that cost more than that.

All things considered, the shower is ostensibly a success. Nina’s guests compliment you on the party, and the only one grumbling is the mother-in-law, who does not care one bit for the spiral staircase that leads to the roof ( Weren’t you going to do something about this? ), nor the tattered AstroTurf she’d been hoping to cover with her fancy rugs ( What is this? ), nor the rusty folding chairs that were up there when you moved in ( Someone could cut themselves on this and get tetanus! ). Fortunately, one displeased person in a room is more than enough to confirm your inadequacy as a human, and even if the mother-in-law’s face weren’t betraying her at every turn, you have a sonar for that person, and a memory for nothing else.

That said, it turns out that sitting next to a bride-to-be, making a stupid-ass hat out of bows, and writing down a list of the thousand-dollar vases she’s received and who gave them is the worst imaginable torture, an opportunity to review all the things you don’t have, will probably never have. Right now you’d be happy with a toaster oven that doesn’t give off sparks when you plug it in. If you could register for a list of things like that, you would. A Walkman that doesn’t merely play but also rewinds. A typewriter that doesn’t turn commas into apostrophes. Any one, single, properly functioning household item. In this moment, though, you would be satisfied with no less than the lifelong misery of everyone at this party. You would totally register for that.