I could have been invisible, so I slipped my phone out of my bag. Save me from my mother and sister, I texted Megan. My mom printed out my sister’s ENTIRE Pinterest board and laminated the sheets in a binder.
Stop it, Megan replied immediately. She did not. I snapped a stealthy shot of the binder and sent it to her. So wait, she’s actually pretending Amy is getting married? And they let Amy bring her pet Chihuahua into the store?
I stifled a laugh. Megan had dated Ashlee’s older brother briefly in high school and was merciless. And the resemblance to a Chihuahua was somewhat striking.
Amy also said mermaid dresses are for older brides and it’d be perfect for me if I was getting married.
She’s dead, Megan said. DEAD. Megan had taken an extremely targeted approach to dress shopping, in true Megan fashion. She found the handful of dresses that she wanted to try on in a single store, called them in advance, told them which dresses to have in a fitting room for her when she arrived, then went with just me and her mom, tried on four dresses and bought one. The saleslady told her she couldn’t take a picture of it, but Megan told her she was buying it so she could do what she wanted, snapped a pic over her protests, and sent it to all of the bridesmaids with the caption, “Said yes to the dress, now what are you gonna wear?” It was a strapless mermaid gown with intricate beadwork on the bodice and hips. Please tell me you told her it was okay because she could wear a mermaid dress in ten years when she gets married for real?
My mom would have murdered me with her binder.
Megan sent an eye-roll emoji. Joan needs to get over it. She has two daughters, not just the teenager.
I set the phone down as Amy emerged in a dress that would require she enlist several octopi as additional bridesmaids to hold it if she planned to pee on her wedding day.
The next seven that she tried on were almost identical. My mother cried and declared her the most beautiful girl she had ever seen in each one. I debated reminding her that I was sitting there too, but I would have just gotten another reproach. So I said she looked gorgeous in all of them and tried to keep my actual opinions to a minimum.
My grandmother, on the other hand, had no such filter.
“You look like a powdered donut,” she told Amy as she emerged in a dress with a colored sash. “How are you going to dance in that?”
I stifled a laugh as my mother turned on her. “Mom! I told you if you came with us you had to behave!”
“I’m just supposed to lie to my granddaughter about her wedding dress?”
“Yes!”
Amy’s face fell and I felt the first real sympathy I had ever felt for her. I still didn’t think for a minute this wedding was actually happening, but she clearly did. And my grandmother referring to her as a pastry wasn’t how she envisioned dress shopping, even before my mother’s impassioned, utterly unconvincing argument.
I rose and went to Amy. I was a pro at wedding dress shopping by now. “How do you feel in the dress, Ames?” She shook her head and I lowered mine closer to hers and spoke quietly. Not that it mattered, because my mother and grandmother were arguing too loudly to hear us. “She can’t see anything anyway and she won’t wear her glasses because she says they make her look old.” Amy’s lips turned up in a hint of a smile. Our grandmother was eighty-eight, but she was also an incorrigible flirt and the vanity was real. “How did you feel before she said that?”
“This one wasn’t my favorite.”
“Then who cares what she says? Go try on another.” Amy nodded and went back to the dressing room, and I turned to my mother and grandmother. “You two cut it out.”
My grandmother sat back in her chair and crossed her arms, a bemused smile on her face. “You hear that, Joan?” she asked my mother. “Cut it out.” I wondered suddenly how much of my grandmother’s hearing loss was an affectation, because I hadn’t spoken loudly.
“Don’t you start,” my mother said to me wearily, sinking onto the sofa. “I told Amy it should be just me and her doing this. No offense, Ashlee.”
I felt my hackles rising, but I bit the inside of my lip to keep from arguing with her. My mother knew how to push all of my buttons, whether she was doing it intentionally or not. Besides, I had four other weddings to deal with and would have felt no compunction whatsoever at missing this particular outing.
And I knew for a fact that she was the one who had insisted my grandmother be there for dress shopping, because she turned it into a dig against me during a three-way phone call. My cousins lived out of state and my mother insisted that my grandmother should be able to go wedding dress shopping for at least one of her granddaughters, and who knew if she would still be alive when Lily got married?