Almost Royalty: A Romantic Comedy...of Sorts (14 page)

How could I forget.

Unfortunately, this wasn’t just about Marcie becoming a bride. That would have been fine and I could have played along, doing those fake bride-friend type things like telling her that her butt didn’t look too big in the dress and pretending to like the groom. For Marcie, this was about her finally reaching her life-long goal: Marrying into L.A.’s Civilian Class Royalty and becoming part of that unique group of L.A. women who: (1) married well, (2) never again had to work, and (3) staffed the volunteer committees of L.A.’s most exclusive private schools.

But there was a problem. Marcie, like every socially ambitious resident of Los Angeles, wanted to have “The L.A. Wedding.” This meant: (1) a wedding at the Bel Air Hotel with those damn swans that always managed to swim in formation, on cue; (2) a designer dress, maybe a Vera Wang; (3) a sit-down dinner for more people than you could remember; (4) a string quartet to play at the wedding and the reception; (5) $100,000 for flowers (at least); (6) the $15,000 wedding cake; (7) hand-engraved invitations; and, (7) high-end photographers and videographers. The price tag for this event could get to the upper-six figures quite quickly. For a five-hour party.

Well, it wasn’t just that Marcie wanted this. Marcie thought that if she was going to become part of L.A.’s Civilian Class Royalty she
needed
the L.A. Wedding. And Marcie and her parents couldn’t afford it.

Not long after my conversation with Bettina came the call I had seen coming from the moment I heard she was engaged.

As it was, I had spent years trying to play down my first career, that of a classical violinist. The way I looked at it, my experience as a musician had been a long journey in the wrong direction for someone from my profoundly non-musical background.

It had started when I was in fourth grade, when my elementary school offered violin. I decided that this would be fun. I quickly discovered that practicing equaled improving. One day I was a kid who couldn’t open her violin case. Not long after that, people were paying me to play at their weddings and parties. When I was twelve this was fun and I thought that I was special. When I was 22, after countless hours of practice, years of very expensive music lessons, and thousands spent for music programs in Aspen and Banff, I had a revelation: The thousands which my mother had paid for my musical education had trained me for a career in the serving class.

I had grown used to wearing a uniform that consisted of a black skirt with a white blouse. It no longer bothered me that I was to enter through the back door or that I was to be unseen, like the rest of the serving crew. But then some mother put her diapered two-year-old in front of us so that he would dance, and then clapped while we played a mid-Beethoven String Quartet while he jumped up and down. And then the bride asked us to play their special song and I suddenly realized that we, with our combined 80 years of musical training, were going to play The Pachelbel Canon for the 67th time that wedding season.

And then I knew: I couldn’t do this anymore. I realized that I could slip into middle-age and despite years of training and effort I would merely be part of the background noise, something which you know is there but try to ignore, like the clean-up crew or housekeepers. And my 20 years of very expensive professional training had prepared me to be a member of the unseen serving class.

So when I took the Law School Entrance Exam and got a pretty decent score I thought it was better to become an attorney and join a profession where you’re despised rather than pitied. I stopped playing at weddings, even when asked by friends, because I discovered that weddings were a lot more fun to attend than to work.

But that wasn’t going to stop Marcie. As it was, Marcie’s call came two weeks after I expected it.

“I was wondering if you had any other thoughts about your wedding dress,” said Marcie.

“No, I haven’t,” I said.

“Well, it’s really important to me that you’re somehow represented in my wedding.”

“That’s so touching.”

“Greg and I were wondering if maybe you would like to play at our wedding.”

“I haven’t played at a wedding in almost ten years.”

“I’m sure if you practiced no one would notice.”

“What makes you think your friends and family would know the difference?”

“They would notice. I’m sure you know that my family is very proper,” she said.

Properly Nuevo Dinero.

“Absolutely,” I said.

“Well, think about it, maybe you could start playing at weddings again,” she said.

I sighed. “I’m an attorney, Marcie. Why would I want to play at weddings?”

“I’m getting another call so…”

My line went dead.

And five minutes later on my cell, “You won’t even play at her wedding?” said Bettina. “What’s wrong with you? You played at mine.”

“I don’t do that anymore. It’s degrading.”

“What are you talking about? No one would even notice you,” said Bettina.

“That’s right,” I said. “They wouldn’t notice me until I tried to walk in the front door and then the wedding coordinator would yell, ‘The musicians come in the back door!’ When I try to sit down with you, the caterer will grab me by the elbow and escort me to a table in the garage.”

“Look,” said Bettina, “I’ll be honest with you. Marcie is way over-budget.”

“Really,” I said. “Why doesn’t she just elope?”

“Why should Marcie have anything less than the wedding she’s always dreamed of?”

“Because she can’t afford it?”

“Why should that stop her?” said Bettina.

Why, indeed.

Marcie, Bettina, and I had a unique relationship which congealed the day that Marcie met Bettina in our dorm room at art school. I was making lunch for Marcie, who had come to visit, when Bettina walked into the room while I was cutting Velveeta to put into an omelet for our lunch. Bettina saw the Velveeta and then eyed Marcie.

“You’re not going to give her that, are you?” said Bettina.

“Oh my God,” said Marcie, “that’s not even cheese.”

“That’s what I tell her all the time,” said Bettina.

“Thank God you’re here,” said Marcie, “and what about her dishes? They don’t even match!”

“I know,” said Bettina, “the first thing I did when I got here was buy a matching set.”

“For what,” I said, “so you could smash them in some feminist performance piece?”

They both looked at me, then looked at each other.

“You just need to show her what to do,” said Marcie.

“That’s what I’ve been doing,” said Bettina.

I rolled my eyes.

“Me too,” said Marcie, “since we were in elementary school.”

It was at that moment that I began to understand that Marcie was beginning her personal revisionist history, a transformation which would change her, Marcie (short for Marsha), a middle-class girl from Northridge who liked Shaun Cassidy, Hostess Ding-Dongs, and pink leggings, to Mar-cee (pronounced Mar-SEE), a preppie from South Pasadena who liked dressage, gin, and nothing but 100 percent cotton. She also became a self-appointed expert—on everything. There was nothing preppie, or to be honest, remotely upper class, about the Marcie I knew. I first met her at age 11 when her family moved to our extremely non-preppie neighborhood from Northridge, California. She, like me, went to public schools from kindergarten through high school and lived in a 3-bedroom, 1.5-bathroom, 1300-square-foot house, with a sister, a mother, and a father who worked as an accountant and drove a late model Ford.

But somewhere around the time that she graduated from high school a relative died and left her family some money. That’s when her parents packed everything and moved to South Pasadena. Marcie, however, never actually lived in South Pasadena, but around the time she met Bettina, Marcie had decided that South Pasadena was much more impressive than Northridge or our town. Thus the transformation to a proper South Pasadena preppie had begun, and all mention of her previous middle-class life was expunged from her official bio.

I was a little surprised that Marcie and Bettina got along so well, as Marcie represented the antithesis of everything that Bettina’s Lesbian Collective believed. But there was something about that meeting which was like watching two halves find a unified whole, as if Marcie had been separated at birth from her long lost twin, Bettina, and had finally found her.

They were both five foot one, brown-eyed, frizzy-haired, and about 35 pounds overweight. I was not part of that club.

“Small furry vicious things,” said my friend, Stefan, after meeting Bettina and Marcie at a party, “yeeech.”

“What are you talking about?” I said. “They’re nice girls.”

“Oh, Blanche,” said Stefan, “you’re not even from the same planet. In fact, I don’t think you’re from the same galaxy as those two.”

“But they’re nice girls—right?”

Stefan just looked at me, shook his head, and rolled his eyes.

Perhaps there was something comforting in seeing what was familiar to themselves. But I remembered that day as significant, as the moment when Marcie, self-appointed expert on everything, met Bettina, her long lost twin. Their bonding point: How they should reform their problem child—me.

From that day on and over the next decade they kept in constant touch through daily emails and phone calls. Marcie would give Bettina advice for me. Bettina would report my activities to Marcie. They visited each other, shopped together, and joined the same gym, which they both mutually failed to visit. Marcie would throw Bettina a yearly surprise birthday party. Bettina, who knew Marcie hated surprises, would consult with Marcie for six weeks regarding the proper arrangements prior to the yearly formal birthday dinner that Bettina held for Marcie.

Over time they began to look like each other. One day I returned to my room to find Bettina, who never wore a bra, in a push-up bra. Her face was covered in foundation, rouge, mascara, and bright red lipstick. Her hair had been rinsed with red and cut to her chin. Her oversized men’s T-shirt and painter pants had been replaced with a tight red knit sweater and black Capri pants. Her hiking boots were gone. She was wearing heels.

This was an unusual look for a lesbian feminist who created performance art on the topic of oppressed women.

Clearly, Marcie had done one of her legendary makeovers.

“You look like Marcie,” I said.

“Oh, thank you,” said Bettina.

Both Marcie and Bettina shared the same tendency to gain weight. This caused them to vacation together, usually to the same spa boot camp—which they could not afford—where I saw the same seven pounds tortured off their bodies on a yearly basis during the last week of June. By July 15 they had usually gained back those seven pounds, as once they returned from their “vacation” half starved, a feeding frenzy of Mexican and Italian food would ensue.

By choosing to marry Greg, her boyfriend of five months, Marcie had put herself in a precarious position. She, herself, tried to pretend that she had the kind of upbringing which allowed her to think of money as an endless natural resource which she could dispose of like tap water. It was there for her to use, and such things as a credit limit—hers, her parents’, her boyfriend’s—never entered into her consciousness.

It was not that she was 18, idiotic, and just beginning to understand the world: She was 35, maxed to the limit on all fronts, and still wondering why the world treated her differently now than it did when she was ten.

But she had learned her urban survival skills a long time ago. She was an operator, someone who knew or had discovered how to use everyone who came into her universe. And like any operator she was a deflector, a girl who somehow pretended that negative things about herself did not exist. And that deflector trait gave her the confidence to be, or in fact, to insist on being the most popular girl in her school in every grade.

Marcie had best friends, and second best friends, and friends in waiting. Given the basic insecurity of all pre-teen girls it was easy for her to pretend to be an authority—none of her friends did anything without her approval. She told them what to wear, whom to date, and how to cut their hair, given their particular facial flaws.

I was told to cut my mid-back-length hair and dye it black.

“That Malibu blond hair makes you look so… so… common,” she said.

She, of course, had no flaws.

“I have a classical look,” she said.

I never knew what that meant.

Like any urban operator she wasn’t good at anything, but invented arbitrary categories of importance. At ten, it was the proper music to be “cool.” At twelve, it was the “must have” things—shoes, purses, hairstyles—for all occasions. At fourteen, it was the basics of finding your Proper Boyfriend on the School Eco-Chain of Dating and your correct level on it. At sixteen, it was the “must have” resume items to get into the college of your choice. At eighteen, it was absolute “must” colleges to apply to and receive acceptances. At twenty, it was the “must haves” for a complete and proper china collection.

Now, in our 30s, it was the basics of finding your Proper Mate (and correct gene pool) on the L.A. Eco-Chain of Dating. And as dating in L.A. was completely mystifying, some of us found ourselves listening to her, overlooking the fact that she was not exactly successful in finding boyfriends.

Like many of her friends, Marcie had become an attorney after graduating from a lower rated UC and stumbling through a law school of a Catholic persuasion. She thought “law” would be a cool thing to do after watching TV lawyers on popular dramas and seeing the neat suits that Ann Taylor was making for women. She even managed to get an offer from a medium-sized downtown firm, because one of her sorority sisters was the head of the recruiting committee.

But working came as a shock. She had assignments with deadlines. Many nights she was there beyond 7:00 p.m. Every other weekend she had to work. And her assistant laughed when she asked her to get her coffee or even pick up her calls.

Her first review at her law firm was not good: the partners thought she was a nice person but found her work to be sloppy. She was going to have to work much harder, just to make a passing grade. Unfortunately, her training as an urban operator and her skills of deflection did not work within the law firm environment. And it just killed her that Bettina had become a wife and SAHM, a Stay-At-Home Mom.