I Never Promised You a Goodie Bag Read online

  I Never Promised You a Goodie Bag

  A Memoir of a Life Through Events—the Ones You Plan and the Ones You Don’t

  Jennifer Gilbert

  Dedication

  IN MEMORY OF JULIE SISKIND

  There are stars whose radiance is visible on earth though they have been extinct. There are people whose brilliance continues to light up the world though they are no longer among the living. These lights are particularly bright when the night is dark. They light the way for mankind.

  Hannah Senesh

  Contents

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  Prologue

  PART I | The Jen Suit

  Chapter One: At Least

  Chapter Two: Turn the Channel

  Chapter Three: This Is Not My Fabulous Life

  PART II | Red Lipstick

  Chapter Four: Putting My Face On

  Chapter Five: Running as Fast as I Can

  Chapter Six: Chaos Theory

  Chapter Seven: Miss Gilbert, This Is Going to Be Very Hard for You

  PART III | Figure Eight

  Chapter Eight: Pins and Needles

  Chapter Nine: Bicycle Pants

  Chapter Ten: The Scary Mask

  Chapter Eleven: I Never Promised You a Goodie Bag

  PART IV | The Best Man

  Chapter Twelve: Best Friends

  Chapter Thirteen: After All These Years

  Chapter Fourteen: Something Is Happening

  PART V | Faith

  Chapter Fifteen: Class Parent

  Chapter Sixteen: All Clear

  Chapter Seventeen: Illumination

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Author’s Note

  This is a work of nonfiction. I have changed the names and identifying details of some individuals, companies, and organizations in order to protect their privacy. For the same reason, some events in the book are composites. I’ll leave it to you, the reader, to figure out which ex-boyfriends, brides, and others with reason to fear have been granted anonymity.

  Prologue

  Keep calm and carry on.

  “So, we have a little situation.”

  I was holding the bride’s hand, looking up into her big brown eyes. She was standing on a stool so that her wedding dress could extend down to the floor, awaiting the massive tulle petticoat that would inflate all that satin to full-on princess proportions.

  The bride knew something was wrong, and I could feel her fingernails digging into my palm. I smiled. “The first thing you need to know is that I will fix everything,” I said to her.

  The bride nodded. I had explained this to her before, just like I did with all my brides: things went wrong with weddings sometimes, and when they did, it was my job as the event planner to make everything right again. I always feel like I should wear a T-shirt that reads, “Chief Damage Control Officer.”

  I continued. “The second thing you need to know is that your tulle petticoat got caught in the trunk of the groomsmen’s limo.” The bride kept nodding, and then I added the kicker: “The limo drove away.”

  The bride was nodding more fiercely now, and there was a strangled sound in the back of her throat. The truth was, the last time I’d seen the bride’s tulle, I was running down the streets of Miami, screaming at the limo driver while I watched the tulle being dragged and torn like the last sad piece of tissue in the bottom of my purse. But I didn’t think painting that particular picture for the bride would be very productive at the moment.

  Now the bridesmaids were getting in on the action. There was a collective gasp in the room, and one of them shrieked. The mother of the groom gripped my arm. Mrs. Lopez had survived Castro, but she looked like this might kill her. “Where is it? Are they bringing it back?”

  Once again I recalled that tulle, dragged and ripped beyond repair through the streets of Miami. “Oh, honey.” I sighed. “The tulle’s not coming back.”

  Looking back on that day when I’d frantically chased down the doomed petticoat, I had an epiphany: while I was fixing things for other people, I didn’t have to think twice about myself. Obsessing over every tiny detail of other people’s most important events was what I did best. It was the perfect way to avoid thinking about the dark, scary void inside me.

  I’d done a pretty good job of paving over that void with numbness, but every once in a while, on one of my bad days, the sorrow crept in, and I’d have to run and run to get away from it. So I welcomed other people’s situations—their crises small and large. In fact no problem was too small for me to throw myself into fixing it. Like when the bride at another wedding insisted that we individually wrap hundreds of Sweet’N Low packets in their own little white envelopes because she didn’t want to see any pink on her all-white tables. Or when we spent $50,000 on centerpieces for a corporate event—tall, gorgeous tree branches—only to find out an hour before the event that our speaker was less than five feet tall, and the audience would never be able to see him over all those branches. So we cut down every one of them using whatever knives we could swipe from the kitchen. Or when five hundred more people showed up for an event than the client had calculated, so I became a coat-check girl for the night. I did whatever it took to make a perfect event.

  I was a master of the small stuff, but I really shone in the face of true disaster. That’s when I got calm. When the party boat crashed into the dock, or the venue burned down two days before the event, I became the definition of grace under pressure. And when the bride’s wedding dress was hanging a little (a lot) low, because her underskirt was currently taking a ride down South Dixie Highway? Whatever. It was all in a day’s work.

  When I woke up the morning of the tulle bride’s wedding, it was one of my bad days. I could feel it even before my eyes opened—it was a familiar sense of dread, a physical ache of anxiety and fear coupled with a suffocating heaviness that filled the spot where my soul used to be. On a day like that, a runaway petticoat was just the jolt I needed. As I was skittering down the streets of Miami after the limo, I was the closest to happy that I could feel at that point in my life. I was in high-gear emergency mode, and all I thought about—all I cared about—was fixing this problem so beautifully that no one would ever know the wedding was anything but perfect. And a brilliant side benefit was that if I could hold this event together, then I could also hold myself together, at least for another day.

  It was one of the first events that I had handled completely on my own, back when I was working at a small firm that specialized in wedding planning. The bride was a friend of a friend, and I’d become close to her. She was a little younger than I was, barely twenty-two. Her mother had died of cancer when the bride was just a child, and her father was now very ill. As a wedding planner you get used to acting in the role of family counselor without even thinking about it, and I could tell how unmoored the bride felt, as if she were already an orphan. A redheaded WASP from a non-religious Protestant family, she’d fallen in love with the son of a devoutly Roman Catholic Cuban-American family, and she was embracing her new life with open arms. This was her fresh start, her new family—and they were all there to watch her walk down the aisle of the biggest Catholic church in downtown Miami. The
bride wanted everything about the wedding to be perfect, as if it might be a sign or a promise that her life would be perfect forever after as well.

  Meanwhile, the dress. I remember walking into the room in the church where the bride was getting ready before the wedding. She’d already had her makeup and hair done, all curled in crimson ringlets. The Vera Wang dress she’d chosen had such full skirts that we lowered it over her head like an art installation while she perched on the stool. Then we did up the hundreds of tiny buttons that ran down the back of her dress. That was when we looked around for the petticoat. In the seconds during which eight pairs of eyes scanned the room for a pile of tulle, I could sense a rising communal panic. Murmurs started to bubble up. (Whose job was it to look after the petticoat? What do you mean she left it in the trunk of the groom’s car?) Then there were louder hisses and the start of accusations, the kind that ruin relationships for years after.

  The bride’s older sister and I ran through the church out to the front, where the limos had been parked. Gone. Then we both caught sight of the retreating limo with the godforsaken tulle. I shook off my heels and did a barefoot sprint after the limo, screaming and yelling and waving my hands, but it was no use. The driver didn’t see me, the limo was gone, and the tulle was in shreds—unusable even if we’d been able to get it back.

  I hobbled back into the church with the older sister, who was already sweating in the Miami heat, hair sticking to her forehead and foundation starting to run. I gave her strict instructions: after I broke the news, it was her job to calm down the bride and keep her from crying all her makeup off.

  My brain had already started to work, the wheels clicking and spinning as they always did when disaster struck. The tulle wasn’t coming back, I knew that. But the bride couldn’t wear the dress without a petticoat. Ergo, I needed to construct a petticoat.

  I’d been (briefly) a fashion merchandising major in college, and I’d taken one sewing class—who knew it would come in handy? Still, I don’t remember taking any lessons on how to make a tulle petticoat that would hold up a $5,000 dress for a long walk down an aisle. Luckily it was a Saturday and stores were open, and we were in downtown Miami, where you can find pretty much anything. By that point I was sweating, blistered, and feeling a bit nauseated. Miraculously, within minutes I found a fabric store where I bought yards and yards of tulle, sewing needles, and white thread.

  When I got back to the church, the bride was still standing on the stool. She hadn’t dared step off and wrinkle the skirt, and there wasn’t time to undo the hundreds of buttons and then do them up again. Now slick with perspiration, I got under the bride’s dress. Swallowed under billows of satin skirt, eye-to-lace with the bride’s Brazilian, I hand-stitched every inch of tulle to her garters, crinkling and bunching it up as I went so it would be dense enough to hold up the dress. It wasn’t the most professional job in the world, but I knew it would work, and she could walk down the aisle with her chin up, and her dress floating around her exactly the way it was supposed to. Luckily, she also had an enormous veil that could camouflage any of the bumpier bits.

  Vera Wang might have been horrified at the havoc I’d wrought on her design, but when I watched the bride glide through the church to her groom, a smile on her face and her eyes glistening with happiness—that’s all that mattered. She was beautiful, and she was looking to the future with joy and optimism.

  None of those things was true for me, and at that point in my life I believed they never could be. So instead of chasing the impossible, my mission became to surround myself with other people’s joy, happiness, and hopes—that would have to be enough to sustain me. My clients—dreamy brides, loving anniversary couples, proud bar mitzvah parents, and demanding titans of industry—all helped me to carefully conceal the gaping hole inside. It’s not supposed to be good for you to hide your fear and sadness. You’re supposed to confront your problems. But I wouldn’t have known where to begin, and I was terrified of going back to that dark place—the moment when I lost my joy. So for years and years, I survived event to event by burying my secret six feet under and dancing on its grave. For me, there was no other way.

  Back then I had no conscious plan—it’s only now, looking back, that I can see the wisdom in the road I took. As broken and shattered as I was on the inside, I polished up my outside and became an event planner. I surrounded myself with other people’s beauty, happiness, and gratitude for life’s milestones. Then something happened to me while I was planning all those happy experiences for other people. It started as a glimmer of longing inside me. Eventually it grew to a tingling, like pins and needles in sleepy limbs. I wouldn’t call it hope, because that would have meant that I believed on some level that happiness could actually happen for me. No, it wasn’t hope. The hope came later. The happiness came after that.

  PART I

  The Jen Suit

  The greatest discovery of any generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitude.

  —WILLIAM JAMES

  Chapter One

  At Least

  My childhood living room was an exotic landscape of bizarre and beautiful treasures from around the world—regal Chinese chairs, antique vases, hand-embroidered screens, and stunning cloisonné bowls. The walls were decorated with my mother’s collection of framed antique kimonos, and the centerpiece of the room was a real tiger-skin rug with fantastically sharp teeth. My younger sister Rachel and I would dare each other to stick our hands inside the tiger’s gaping mouth, and I still remember the breathless thrill I felt, as if absolutely anything could happen when our soft little fingers were in there.

  My parents were both adventurers, and they passed the gene along to me. My father was in the import business back when you needed to actually go to the Far East to make your deals. Rather than leave his wife behind, as many husbands of that generation might have done, my dad always wanted my mother with him. And she didn’t just shop or sit on a beach while my dad was in his buying meetings. She learned to speak Mandarin fluently so that she could translate for him and talk to the Chinese businessmen’s wives.

  My mother grew up in Brooklyn, sharing a bedroom with her older sister and younger brother, children of struggling shop owners who both worked in their store from 6:00 a.m. till 9:00 p.m. The only Jewish family in the neighborhood, my mother remembers kids throwing pennies at her when she walked to school. And there was no point complaining or vying for her parents’ attention, because it was never effective. Her parents had enough else to worry about, so she stopped trying. The running joke about my grandmother is that my mother could have walked into the kitchen bleeding, with several fingers missing, and her mother would have said, “Let me make you a sandwich.” From a very young age my mother knew she was on her own, and she wanted out. Even though her education was the least of her parents’ concerns, she graduated valedictorian from high school, cum laude from Brooklyn College, and then paid for her own teaching degree. My mother then shocked her family by breaking off her longtime engagement to a college professor to travel around the world with a girlfriend, teaching English to diplomats’ kids. The only member of her family even to have a passport, she wandered around Asia and lived on a boat around the corner from the Blue Mosque in Istanbul.

  When she met my father, he’d recently taken over the family’s import business and had broken off an engagement of his own with a girl from South Africa whose family wouldn’t let her leave home. He saw my mother—beautiful, with a rocking body and long hair down her back—across the room at a singles weekend in New Hampshire. Six foot four and handsome (we call him the Jewish John Wayne), my father tried to impress my mother by telling her he’d just gotten back from Burma. She said, “Oh, yeah, I just got back from Turkey.” He knew in that moment that he’d found his future wife. She was the adventurous spirit he’d been looking for, and he was offering my mother, a poor kid from Brooklyn, the riches of the world. They were engage
d three months later, and married two months after that. There were two reasons things moved along so quickly: one, there was a cancellation at the banquet hall, so, as they’ve said ever since, “We got steak for the price of chicken” (words to live by). And two, my dad was scheduled to go on a buying trip, and he was determined to take my mother with him.

  My parents’ meeting and marriage set the tone for my whole childhood. We were a family that loved our travels. My dad was the only Jewish kid in Washington Heights who swam and sailed—he taught himself how in Boy Scout camp—and on family vacations he chartered a boat for two weeks at a time in the Bahamas or the British Virgin Islands. We’d go with another family with daughters—no captain or crew—and sail around the Out Islands like castaways. The adults would toss an inner tube off the back of the boat, and we’d take turns riding. I learned to snorkel before most kids learn to swim, and by age six I’d dive for sea urchins and knew how to wear gloves to peel away the outside with a knife. By the end of a trip I’d have decorated the entire boat with sea-urchin shells and silver dollars. Eventually my dad bought his own boat, and we spent three weeks at the end of every summer living onboard off Nantucket.

  In the winter, it was skiing every weekend in Vermont (a four-hour drive each way from our home in Westchester)—until I got to be a teenager and started to rebel against leaving my friends. My parents felt incredibly strongly about those weekends and our vacations together. It was sacred family time, and to this day some of my most precious memories are of scampering around islands and racing down slopes with my sister Rachel. Those were the feast times.