“I’m fine,” Shari says. “I’m at Pat’s.”
“Pat’s? Your boss? What are you doing there? You’re supposed to be here. Look, Shari, I know you and Chaz had a fight, but you can’t leave me alone with all of them like this. Tiffany is wearing a suede BODYSUIT. With a zipper that goes from her throat to her crotch. You can’t do this to me.”
Shari is laughing. “I’m sorry, Lizzie,” she says. “But you’re just going to have to fend for yourself. I’m not leaving here.”
“Come on!” I’m begging, but I don’t care. “You guys fight all the time. And you always make up.”
“It’s not a fight,” Shari says. “Listen, Lizzie, we’re right in the middle of dinner over here. I’m really sorry. I’ll call you tomorrow and explain, okay?”
“Shari, don’t be this way. What did he even do this time? I can tell he feels terrible about it. He’s already had three scotches, and he only just got here. Just—”
“Lizzie.” Shari’s voice sounds different. Not sad. Not happy. Just different. “Listen. I’m not coming over. I didn’t want to tell you, because I didn’t want you to freak out—I want you to enjoy your holiday. But Chaz and I didn’t just have a fight, okay? We’ve broken up. And I moved out.”
Finding the perfect dress for your bridesmaids…
I know what you’re thinking. You’re remembering all the hideous dresses you were forced by your sisters and friends to wear at their weddings, and you want to get revenge by choosing something similarly frightening, and forcing them to wear it.
Well, stop right now.
This is your opportunity to be the bigger person… also, to accumulate some good bride karma (and let’s face it, all of us can use a little of that).
It is impossible to find a dress that looks good on everyone—unless of course your bridesmaids are all Victoria’s Secret models (but even then there are going to be issues over the color of the material. Not even covergirls look good in every shade).
But you can significantly reduce your bridesmaids’ angst by:
Picking a dress that flatters the most figure-challenged person in the group. If it looks good on your size- eighteen niece, it will look good on your size-eight roommate. Or—and I know this is radical—give your bridesmaids a color that you know they all look good in (black is flattering to nearly everyone), and ask them to pick their own dresses. True, they won’t all match completely. But neither do their personalities. And that’s what you love them for anyway, not how they look.
If you really want them to all have the same dress, pick one that they can afford, or pay for all the dresses yourself. Yes, I know—they made you pay for yours when you were their bridesmaid, so why should you pay for theirs? But we are RISING above their level, remember? Asking your friends and family to spend three hundred bucks or more on a dress they will never wear again (DO NOT tell yourself that they will. Surrender the fantasy, they WON’T) is unreasonable. Pick one they can all easily afford—or pay for it yourself.
Alterations, alterations, alterations. A good seamstress can fix any number of problems with fit. Employ one. And make sure your bridesmaids get to her in plenty of time for her to make any necessary adjustments.
Your wedding is supposed to be a happy time. One reason some brides have a difficult time with it is because they refuse to be flexible and to think of anyone else’s feelings save their own. DO NOT BE THAT BRIDE.
Your bridesmaids will thank you for it.
LIZZIENICHOLSDESIGNS™
Chapter 16
What you don’t see with your eyes, don’t witness with your mouth.
—Jewish proverb
“It wasn’t any one thing,” Shari is telling me over a bubble tea break at a place near where she works called the Village Tea House. I wanted to meet at Honey’s. But Shari said she is over dive bars. Which I guess I can understand.
But I sort of prefer red vinyl booths to velvet throw pillows on the floor. And diet Coke to herbal tea with tapioca on the bottom. They don’t serve diet Coke at the Village Tea House. I asked. They only serve beverages with “natural” ingredients here.
Like tapioca is natural.
“We just… grew apart, I guess,” Shari goes on with a shrug.
I am still having trouble processing all of this. About Shari and Chaz breaking up, I mean, and her moving out… and missing my Thanksgiving dinner, which, not to brag, turned out pretty darn well.
Well, except for the part where Mrs. de Villiers insisted we all play charades after dinner, and her team of Luke, Tiffany, and herself creamed my team of myself, Chaz (who was so drunk he could barely move), Monsieur de Villiers (who doesn’t understand anything about how to play), and Raoul (ditto). Not that I am competitive or anything. I just hate boring party games like that.
Oh, and the part where I had to drag myself to work this morning at Pendergast, Loughlin, and Flynn, even though practically no one called and I was the only one there, except for all the junior partners, of course. And Tiffany, who showed up hungover (of course), claiming she and Raoul went out after leaving my place and “got so wasted” drinking at Butter with a bunch of other models (I don’t see how these girls can drink so many high-caloric cocktails, like mojitos and cosmos, and stay so thin).
“I don’t understand how you could grow apart,” I say to Shari, shaking my head, “when you were living with each other. I mean, Chaz’s apartment is not all that big.”
“I don’t know.” Shari shrugs again. “I guess I just fell out of love with him.”
“It was the curtains, wasn’t it?” I can’t help asking gloomily.
Shari gapes at me. “What? The curtains you made?”
I nod. “I shouldn’t have gone with Chaz’s choice of material.” Chaz had insisted I make their living room curtains out of a bolt of red satin he’d found in a Chinatown thrift shop. I wouldn’t have agreed—I was thinking a muted sage linen—except that the material was embroidered with gold Chinese characters (the clerk at the shop had said they spelled “good luck”), and had such a deliciously kitsch look to it that I agreed with Chaz that it really livened up the place, and that Shari would get a kick out of it.
But when I’d come over to hang the finished curtains, Shari had asked me pointedly if I was trying to make their apartment look like Lung Cheung, the neighborhood Chinese restaurant where we used to eat as kids back in Ann Arbor.
“No, of course it wasn’t the curtains,” Shari says with a laugh. “Although with the gold couches, they do sort of make the place look like a bordello.”
I groan. “We really thought you’d like it.”
“Listen, Lizzie. It wouldn’t have mattered what anybody did to that place. I was never going to like living there. Because I didn’t like who I was when I was living there.”
“Well, maybe this is a good thing, then,” I say. I’m trying to put a positive slant on things, I know. But Chaz was so devastated by Shari’s moving out, it’s hard not to want to see him happy again… even if Shari doesn’t look all that devastated herself. In fact, Shari looks better than I’ve seen her since we moved to New York. She’s even got on some makeup, for a change.
“Maybe some time apart will help you guys to figure out what went wrong,” I say. “And make you appreciate what you had more. Like… you two could start dating again! Maybe that’s what went wrong in the first place. When you’re living with someone, you kind of stop dating. And that can take all the romance out of the relationship.” You know what else can take all the romance out of a relationship? Sleeping on a pull-out couch with
