"Wedding Salad"

“Wedding Salad”

Call me crazy. I am a woman who doesn’t find weddings a cause for squealing and jumping up and down in the all-girl group hug when a girlfriend announces her engagement. I have never cooed over cheesecake samples nor have I lost sleep over which font she should have used on her “Save-the-Date” cards. Call me a killjoy, but you won’t find me weeping baby doll tears while sipping champagne in a boutique waiting room while the bride-to-be steps up onto the carpeted pedestal wearing “the one.” Weddings scare me and I am content to being the only brassiered buzz-kill in the group. Who said just because you’re a girl you have to get all daffy about weddings?

It’s 1989. The VFW is rented for the next four hours and the folding chairs are neatly placed at card tables along the wall as to not encroach upon the linoleum dance floor. The bride, velvety and frosted to fluffy perfection, looks like a cupcake but bigger; perhaps a cupcake that was baked in a giant muffin tin instead of a cupcake pan. The bridesmaids, frosted heavily in a rainbow of colors, dash about in their billowy get-ups fussing over the bride, cautious to not let her three-tiered hairdo topple. God-forbid a carefully crafted wiener-curl comes unglued! The bride leans up against the wood-paneled wall by the payphone and closes her eyes while all six candy-coated members of her personal Hazmat crew douse her with a sticky aerosol; she bows forward as if leaning into sheets of sleet. Female relatives of both the bride and groom busy themselves in the rented kitchen peeling off the lids of ice cream buckets that shelter all 213 pounds of cold salads that aunts and grandmas have prepared for the potluck reception. There are many variations to the macaroni salads here today; corkscrew versus elbow, Miracle Whip versus mayonnaise. Here comes the bride and her cupcake entourage. Her dress dragging through the tuna salad Aunt Judy has flipped off her spoon and onto the floor in the macaroni mêlée.

This wedding is anything but funny. I am a coming-of-age teen-queen who was not asked to be in the “fun” part of the wedding party. I am stuffed into my mom’s too-small pantyhose and I feel like a baked potato smooshed into a nylon casing. Instead, I am tasked with spooning plops of macaroni salad onto the paper plates of party-goers from the window of the kitchen as they line up obediently in single-filed lines. I take on the savor of the sloppy joes and coffee that simmer in the crock pots I have wedged my breasts between on the counter. I am the 15 year-old niece of the groom and despite my folded-arm protests, grandma thumps me in the forehead with a rubber spatula and tells me to give a mulleted young man another plop of ham salad. He winks at me from behind the curtain of achy-breaky hair that is draped in front of his eye. Seriously. Who wears a muscle shirt to a wedding?



The young men at the wedding are not impressed by my position as frumpy lunch lady-girl. By the time we get to the bouquet toss, the groom’s tuxedo t-shirt smells like the relish tray and he has been PBR’d one too many times. This DJ sucks. I try screaming into the DJ’s ear, “How bout playing The Safety Dance?” He bellers back, “I’ll play that next!” He spins "Time After Time” by Cyndi Lauper and the cupcake entourage shuffle their sore, bare feet out onto the dance floor to slow dance with the leftover keg tenders. Tonight I decide weddings suck.

Grandma thumps me on my forehead and tells me to go unplug the crockpots and start spooning-up the salads so people can take them home. I divvy them up in my disgusted teenager druthers. “Some for you.” Plop. “Some for you.” Plop. I hope you all choke on this crappy salad.

My mom takes home her bucket of mish-mash mayonnaise and noodle hash that Grandma has scrawled “Jan and kids” on. It finds a home on the bottom shelf of our fridge above the crisper drawer where she sits until the start of the school year. When the cupcake and her new husband return from their honeymoon in Bismarck, Jan invites them over to have wedding salad and share their honeymoon photos. They never come and promise they will bring them over when they see us at Thanksgiving.

I stare her down every time I go in for a pudding cup or a slice of bologna. I shiver when I think of how the mayonnaise has got to be more watery than creamy now. The wedding salad sits in the dark and waits for the honeymoon update dinner; or to bite someone.

I am now scared of the bucket of wedding salad that heaves and belches from under the lid that was once secured. It was my cousin’s job to make sure all of the buckets had tight-lipped lids for the ride home on the wedding night. It hisses and hiccups when I open the door to take out the chilled dough that will become Christmas cookies. I am failing Chemistry, but at some point, matter goes from solid to a liquid to a gas or something like that, right? That wedding salad should be pure hydrogen by now. I am afraid to put my hand on the bucket to escort it into the trash can outside. I will need to call the cupcake crew so they can don their Hazmat gear once more to dispose of the wedding salad that is now too chemically unstable for me to spray kitchen cleaner next to. She’s capable of blowing the doors of the clunky Amana that has entombed the pasta powder keg since June. I need to get the hell outta here!

You’d hate weddings too if you were me.