Friend Is Not a Verb (2 page)

Emma lives at 598 Pacific Street. I live at 596. More than my next-door neighbor, however, Emma Wood has been my sort-of sister for the past decade. She assumed that role ever since my
real
sister—biologically, if nothing more—babysat the two of us at Emma’s house after Emma moved in with her quiet mom and nut-job dad (more on him later).

This was a seminal event on many levels. Not only did Emma and I succeed in locking Sarah in the bathroom but we also ate all her dad’s Jolly Ranchers and fed raw hamburger to Emma’s cat, which grossed me out so much that I became a vegetarian, and I’ve stuck to it ever since—I swear, not a bite of meat in ten years, even at school. (The only animal product I eat are eggs; they’re just too good with cheese to forgo.) And all the while, Sarah pounded furiously on the bathroom door and begged to be let out. In addition, as vengeance Sarah swore to
destroy the Lego fort on top of my dresser and to slice to shreds Emma’s entire stuffed animal collection, which she later held hostage at knifepoint. (The threats turned out to be empty.) It was the first time I’d ever gotten the best of Sarah. Unfortunately, it would also be the last, but that wasn’t Emma’s fault.

I hunched over my cell phone and dialed, fighting to shield the tiny keypad from the rain.

“Wow, that’s so weird!” she answered.

“What is?”

“I was just going to call you,” she said. “I now have proof that there is no God. The band Journey still exists. What label would carry them? It was bad enough when Mom told me that ‘Lovin’, Touchin’, Squeezin’ ’ was ‘their’ song. You know how much the wedding video traumatized me. But now they’re actually going to pay to see the so-called reunited Journey in concert. It’s June twenty-sixth. Anyway, Dad said I could bring you, and I was wondering if you wanted to go. I mean, for comic value—”

“Emma?” I interrupted. My teeth chattered. I was wet and miserable. I was on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, far from home. She knew all this.

“Yeah, I know. You don’t remember who Journey is. I’ll give you a hint. Picture my mom, circa 1983. Then start singing, ‘Just a small town girl—’”

“No. She finally did it.”

“Your mom actually burned your socks?” Emma hooted.

“No, Petra broke up with me. Then she kicked me out of her band. In that order.”

“Oh,” she said.

I frowned, my nose dripping. “That’s all you have to say?”

“No. But it would have been a lot funnier if your mom burned your socks.”

I sighed. “I guess you have a point.”

“Hen, you can’t get too upset about this,” she warned. “Remember that ancient
Simpsons
episode, when Lisa said that the Chinese have the same word for both crisis and opportunity? This is a classic case of ‘crisi-tunity’! You should make the most of it. Just like how Ozzy made the most of it when he was kicked out of Black Sabbath. Who’s had the most lucrative solo career
ever
?” she finished rhetorically.

“Jermaine Jackson,” I said.

“Very funny.”

“Seriously, Emma, I thought you liked Petra.”

“The person or the band?” She snorted. “Listen, Hen, I say a lot of stuff. I once said that her band might have a shot at making it big or whatever. But I didn’t say the stuff you need to hear. Like how Petra always sneaks a peek at herself in any reflective surface, like an ATM screen or even a gypsy cab window.”

“That’s what I need to hear?” I asked, sloshing through a puddle.

“No, but she’s raised self-obsession to an art form. And you had something she wanted.”

I almost laughed. “What’s that?”

“You have this edgy mystique,” Emma said.

Then I did laugh. For a second, I forgot about the rain.
I even forgot about how the rain might short-circuit my cell phone and electrocute me. “You want to run that by me again? You’re not making any sense.”

“You’re the guy whose sister disappeared, remember? Petra said it herself.”

“Yeah, I remember,” I said. “I’m the guy whose sister disappeared.”

“You were even on the news.”

Yes, Emma, I remember,
I grumbled silently.
I was even on the news.

And what a fifteen minutes of fame it was. About a week before school started in the fall, a twentysomething blond reporter—a real go-getter, at least judging from the amount of hair product and makeup she wore—showed up at our door with her trusty bearded cameraman sidekick, straight out of central casting. They arrived on the heels of the police’s third and final visit, basically to ask the same question: Why would a smart, attractive, white (apparently even with our black president, America isn’t still
quite
“postracial”) twenty-two-year-old Ivy League grad vanish with four friends without any explanation? The response Mom and Dad gave to the reporter and her cameraman—which was the same response they’d given to the cops—was: “We have no idea. Yes, we are a close family. No, she doesn’t have any skeletons in her closet. Neither do we. Yes, we are worried and shocked and blindsided and praying that she’ll show up soon, safe and sound….”

The twisted part? I knew better. Mom and Dad
did
know why Sarah had run away, and moreover, why she was wanted by law
enforcement. And the
truly
criminal part? They refused to tell me. So did the cops, but for a different and much more understandable reason: They couldn’t jeopardize an ongoing investigation.

No matter how hard I had begged my parents—and I’d begged in some small, subtle way every single day—they wouldn’t budge. It was for my own good, they said. “Sarah can tell you herself, when she comes home.” In the Hall of Fame of Unfairness-Coupled-with-Lousy-Parenting, that comment deserves its own gold plaque.

Anyway, the reporter and the cameraman wouldn’t take the hint to leave. And just at the very moment Mom and Dad started screaming at “Blondie and the Beard” to “get the hell off our stoop!!!” (Mom actually addressed them in the third person as such), I strolled into camera range on my way home from the deli. There was a choice shot of me, with my jaw hanging open, looking like a lobotomy patient. It made both the six and eleven o’clock broadcasts, sandwiched right between the same two pieces about how the nightmarish economy was affecting the Chinese food delivery industry and a series of rapid-fire man-on-the-street interviews asking random people what they thought about the Steal Your Parents’ Money stickers. (Best response: “I stole my mom’s wallet this morning! Hi, Mom!”)

There you have the short-lived Sarah Birnbaum media circus, in a nutshell.

Emma sighed on the other end. “Listen, Hen, this is going to sound harsh, but Petra never saw you for who you are. To her, you’re just this guy with a runaway sister—a sister who’s rumored to be a fugitive from the law, no less—so even though
you don’t realize it yourself, you do have this semicriminal aura, which is always great for a band. Plus, on a more practical level, you have a really kick-ass bass rig—”

“Petra did say she had feelings for me,” I interrupted.

“Any dump
er
says that she still has ‘feelings’ for the dump
ee
, Hen,” Emma groaned. “It’s a perennial. It’s in a thousand cheesy songs. It ranks just below ‘It’s not you; it’s me’ and ‘I think we need a little time apart.’ Which just goes to show you, Petra is not the creative genius she makes herself out to be. And even if her band
does
make it big—which they won’t—they’re going to end up being total crap.
You
deserve better. Speaking of which: What about this Journey concert? It’s three weeks from tomorrow night. Wanna make a deal? If you come with me, I’ll do something really nice for you, okay?
I’ll
put your socks in the hamper.”

“Um…I’ll let you know,” I said. “Bye, Emma.” I closed the cell phone and shoved it back into my damp pocket.

Maybe Emma was right. Maybe the only reason Petra had gone out with me was because I was the “guy whose sister disappeared,” and I had a kick-ass bass rig. The silly irony is that the only reason my parents bought me such a rig (a Mesa Boogie speaker with a custom Acoustic head, if that means anything to you) was because they felt guilty about having spent most of last year obsessing over Sarah and keeping me in the dark about why she was gone.

As if it even merits a mention, their extravagant expenditure did not make up for their incomprehensible behavior or for the fact that I have very little musical talent.

But that’s not even the best part.

No: the sillier irony? The punch line? The wrap-up to this laugh-out-loud, million-hits-on-YouTube-worthy evening?

After a long, lonely subway ride back to Brooklyn (the train smelled), I arrived in the pouring rain to find a note dangling precariously from a piece of tape on the front door of the Birnbaum family brownstone.

I did not try not to finish the vegetable lo mein. Nor did I try
to
finish it. I did not try to clean my room. I did not try anything.

The whole entire year I’d been
trying
—trying to make sense of Sarah’s disappearing act and the peculiar, gaping hole it had left in my life; trying to make sense of why my parents wouldn’t let me in on the secret—and every time I tried, I came up short. So: No more trying.

Why try to turn on the lights?

Sarah was coming home.
She
could turn on the lights.

Sarah is coming home,
I repeated to myself, wondering if the words would carry more weight if I silently shouted them. They didn’t.

Good. Once again, I could not feel a thing. Above all, I did not
try
to feel. I sat in the dark at the kitchen table. For a while, I stared at the blank spaces on the wall where the photos of Sarah had once hung. (“I can’t bear to see her face in two dimensions,” Mom had wailed once with far too much drama, even for her.) The seconds ticked by. I knew, objectively, that each tick brought me closer to a reunion with a long-lost sister who had abandoned her family—and now, judging from the tone of the note on the door, was somehow getting off entirely scot-free. Should I be at all mad?

Maybe if she spills the beans the second she walks in the door, I shouldn’t be.

Ticktock, ticktock…

But no…maybe I
should
be mad, because she always got away with everything, even before she split. Did part of me always suspect she’d come back?

Ticktock, ticktock…

I wasn’t mad, though. At least not now. Hooray for me.

Maybe if I played the whole fiasco over in my head again…

Graduation day at Columbia…Sarah’s square cap flying up into the sunshine, the cheers, the euphoric laughter…and she was graduating with honors, no less. Everything should have been wonderful, right? The ceremony marked the first time Mom and Dad had cried real-live tears of joy, which, if you want to know the truth, was sort of disturbing. But then she broke the news: instead of sticking to the summer plan of
living at home with her spanking-new Ivy League adulthood, she was slinking off to an illegal sublet in a Chinatown tenement with Gabriel and her college roommate, Madeline…and then Mom and Dad stopped crying and got pissed. As well they should have. Not because the sublet was illegal, but mostly because Sarah still kept insisting that she and Gabriel were just “pals.”
Pals?
Please. She’d talked about Gabriel incessantly ever since freshman year. (“He’s so funny!” “He plays bass!” “He’s in this hilarious band!” No, Mom and Dad, that doesn’t sound like a pal to me, either.) Still, they let her go without a fight. What about living at home to save money?

But it wasn’t the Birnbaum family coffers I cared about. Selfishly—even though I never said as much out loud—I needed Sarah to provide that essential buffer between my lunatic parents and me.

Some examples of why it was helpful, if not crucial, to have Sarah around:

1. 1.
   The “[Hen] discovered girls!” incident.
   Three Decembers ago, Mom and Dad decided to proclaim to the world that I’d entered puberty. In print. Paragraph two of their holiday card read: “Hen asked us to buy him an electric bass. Between that and the amount of time he’s been spending alone in the bathroom, we’ve come to the obvious conclusion: He’s discovered girls!” Sarah luckily got a hold of the final draft before it went out, adding: “Irv has discovered the joys of Viagra!”
   (Untrue, but it did prevent Mom and Dad from going ahead with the mass mailing. One hundred fifty people would have seen it, including teachers at Franklin.) To this day, Mom and Dad claim they still don’t understand why I’d been so horrified.
   
2. 2.
   The time Mom and Dad attempted to sell all my vegetarian literature and snack food on eBay.
   This coincided with Mom’s slamming the door in Sarah’s face the night of my fourteenth birthday. She’d foiled their plan to use the money they’d made from the eBay sale to take the four of us to Peter Luger Steak House (difficult, anyway, as they’d netted $14.00). Sarah was outraged, because she’d guessed rightly that it was all part of a vast conspiracy to get me to eat meat. For reasons that still elude me, Mom and Dad lump vegetarianism in with “deviant behaviors”—their words—such as cross-dressing, online gambling, and porn collecting. They also believe that it’s an easy fix: Upon seeing a succulent slab of beef, I will naturally lose all control and bury my face in it. After Mom slammed the door on her, Sarah screamed at them that they were crazy and evil, grabbed me, and stormed out. We dined alone at a vegan restaurant in Chelsea. Mom and Dad later apologized, but grudgingly. Who knows? If they’d tried to take me to Peter Luger this past year, I might be gnawing on a T-bone right now.
   
3. 3.
   The reason we all have our own cell phones.
   Dad, in one of his more paranoid moments, told us to stop using our house landline. He believes that the government is spying on us. (I really, really wish I were joking.) According to him, our neighbor Mr. Aziz is on some sort of terror watch list, and anyone who shops at his deli near the Bergen Street F train stop is now under suspicion, too. All untrue, as Sarah confirmed simply by asking Mr. Aziz himself if he’d ever had any trouble with the government. (The closest he’d ever come was trying to return a tax refund that was too big.) But she’d pretended to go along, provided that Dad buy each of us our own cell phone. He’d agreed. Stooge!
   

What else? The examples could fill a book…but there you have a snapshot of Mom and Dad’s madness and some of their more colorful wrongs.

Let’s face it, though:
They
wanted Sarah around last summer as much as I did. Why hadn’t they pleaded with her to reconsider the sublet? At the time I’d chalked it up to some weird phase they were going through, a letting-go-of-their-firstborn type of thing, an unwanted rite of middle-aged passage…and Sarah kept insisting that she just wanted to “have fun” before she started the Columbia School of Social Work in the fall. But, what—she couldn’t live at home with us and still have fun on her own? No, she’d rather shaft us and be “autonomous”…And don’t forget the volunteer job
at that homeless shelter in Tribeca, New Beginnings, all to prove how noble, how thoughtful, how
grown-up
she was—as if it somehow justified shacking up with her “pal” Gabriel in a sketchy part of town that reeked of old fish.

Then she was gone. And with her, Gabriel and Madeline. Plus two more friends from Columbia, guys who were in Gabriel’s band: Rich and Tony. Without a warning. Without a good-bye. One day they were here; the next, they weren’t. They’d left zero evidence that they’d ever existed in the first place. Actually, that isn’t quite true. The cops later told us that they’d left behind a new air conditioner to replace the one they’d broken plus the rest of the money for the summer sublet.

How noble! How thoughtful! How grown-up!

Ticktock, ticktock…

The front door lock clicked.

My heart began to pound. I tried to make it stop beating so loudly. I couldn’t. The heart is an inattentive and all-around-annoying little organ. The lungs, generally obedient, are much easier to get along with. I held my breath.

Sarah is home.

The door opened. People entered.

“Hen?” Mom called. “Hello? Hen, are you home? Hen…” The door closed. “For God’s sake, Irv, why is the door unlocked?”

Three pairs of footsteps approached.

Sarah is home.

I wanted to appear relaxed, stoic. I fidgeted in my chair.

Someone flicked on the kitchen lights—

And there she was. The prodigal daughter, returned.

I was expecting her to look different somehow. I was expecting her to look filthy and scrawny, her black hair tangled and even messier than Emma’s from months of living out of Dumpsters. I was not expecting her outfit to proclaim: Life as a runaway sure was sweet! Maybe I’d just been being naïve (again). Mom and Dad had picked her up at JFK International Airport. Rock stars flew in and out of that airport. Rock stars as well dressed as she was. Rock stars as
stylishly
dressed. Just
look
at her: suited up in black pants and a black tank top: neatly pressed, hip, and matching…She had a tan, too. Her face was goofy and bug-eyed, just as it had always been.

“Hi, Hen,” she said with a smile.

A smile? I thought to myself. Really? A prisoner freed from an unjust incarceration could have smiled. A cancer patient in remission could have smiled. But Sarah? Her voice was the same, too. Entitled. Upbeat. I stared at her. I stared for a very long time.

Mom and Dad know everything, and they’re smiling, too.

A hint, anyone? Hello?

Then I remembered: I was done trying.

Without a word, I stood and marched past my newly reunited family, up the stairs to my third-floor bedroom.

“Hen?” Mom called after me. “Hen? What is it?”

Sarah is home.

I couldn’t hide forever. I could make it through the night, sure, but tomorrow Sarah would still be in this house, with her healthy tan. (Or maybe she wouldn’t.)

An hour after she’d arrived, I was still in bed, staring angrily at various parts of my room. But wait: Was it even
my room
? Everything I called my own had changed after Sarah had run away—either abruptly or in subtle increments—but, no, this was not the room that belonged to the Hen Birnbaum I’d been last July, the one with an older sister who could be counted on and sniped at and taken for granted.

First, there was the Lego fort. Until August, it had been sitting on top of my dresser, since the very day Sarah had threatened to destroy it. Maybe I was a little old to display a Lego fort on top of my bureau (though it
was
cool in an infantile sort of way, a replica of the Tower of London), but if Sarah hadn’t run away, I guarantee it still would be sitting there. I’d destroyed it myself the first time the cops had questioned Mom and Dad—the night I knew for sure that Sarah had run away for real. It hadn’t started as destruction, more of a dismantling. I’d gritted my teeth as I pulled the plastic pieces apart, but then I just went ultraviolent. Pitiful and childish, yes, but tossing the little plastic pieces everywhere felt pretty awesome; and they’d sat on my floor for days.

Then there was my erstwhile Dandy Warhols poster. Sarah had given it to me two years ago, right after I bought my bass. She’d heard that the Dandy Warhols had built some sort of huge recording studio/playland called the Odditorium, where
they hosted huge gatherings with their friends. She’d told me that they hung out and jammed and recorded new songs and made videos—whatever they felt like—and she hoped that I ended up in band like that: a freewheeling, bohemian collective of tight pals where “the act of creating was more important than the paycheck.” (She actually managed to say this without sounding ditzy or pretentious, too—how, I’m still not sure.) The poster had managed to stay up on my wall until late December. But then I’d had the bad luck of catching one of those end-of-the-year countdowns on the one decent radio station left in New York City, and they’d chosen the Dandy Warhols’ “We Used to Be Friends” as song number 387 of the top 1,000 alternative rock songs of all time…and upon hearing it, I’d ripped the poster off the wall and torn it to shreds. That had felt pretty awesome, too—

There was a knock.

“Hen?” Sarah asked. “Can I come in?”

Without waiting for an answer, she pushed the door forward. I turned to the blank spot on the wall, then back to her. She
did
look a little scrawnier than she had last summer, now that I thought about it.

“Your room looks different,” she remarked.

“So do you,” I said.

“I guess I do. Can I sit down?”

“If you want. Just don’t mess anything up on my desk.” It was an old line I’d used with her many times, and I instantly regretted it.

“It’s okay. I’ll stand.” She paused. “Hen, this is hard…. I’m not going to BS you. I can’t tell you why I ran away. Not yet. I do want you to know something, though. It had nothing to do with you. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Do you believe me? It’s important that you believe me.”

“I didn’t think it had anything to do with me,” I said.

She stared down at her expensive-looking black shoes.

“Anything else?” I asked.

“Just—You can’t tell anyone that I’m home,” she said. “I mean, you can tell Emma, because I know you’re going to tell her anyway, but you have to make her swear that she won’t tell anyone.”

“Got it. You’re not home. Is that it?”

“Hen, come on,” she murmured as if she were a victim.

“What?” I said.

“Can’t you talk to me?” she asked.

I closed my eyes. “About what? No offense, but I’m a little tired. I’ve had a pretty crappy day. In your absence, my life did manage to go on. And right now, it’s at a low point. It has nothing to do with
you
, though.”

Sarah sighed.

“I’m not BSing you, either,” I added. “My girlfriend dumped me.”

“Really?” she said. “I’m sorry, Hen. I am.”

“Like I said, it has nothing to do with you,” I repeated.

“What’s her name?” she asked.

“For Christ’s sake, Sarah!” I flipped over, briefly mashing my face into the pillow, then glared at her. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“I’m sorry. Umm…” She brushed her hair behind her ear, an old nervous gesture. “Listen, I know this probably isn’t the best time, but I want you to do me a favor.”

“A favor?”

Sarah really
was
home. And that was it. The spell was broken. I was no longer in danger of crying.

“Yeah,” she said. She laughed sadly—the way she used to laugh when she was in trouble with Mom and Dad. “This is going to sound really bad, Hen.”

I had to laugh, too. “As compared to what?”

“My friend Gabriel came back home with me. I mean, to New York.”

For a horrible instant, I wondered if that meant our house. But, no, it couldn’t. Sarah wouldn’t have pushed her luck that far.