Friends Like Us (11 page)

“I don’t want a damn sandwich.”

I’ll have a ham sandwich,
I wanted to say. But I kept quiet and stared out the window.

We made it to Cleveland by early evening and pulled into the E-Zzzz Rest Inn, a cut-rate motel off the highway where my father had, absurdly, made a reservation. “We’re the Jacobses, and we have reserved two rooms for tonight,” my dad announced, and the girl behind the desk pulled a wad of gum out of her mouth and laughed.

“I’m going to go swimming,” Seth said to me, pointing to a small, steamy pool behind a wall of glass, and I nodded. It wasn’t an invitation, but it was as close as I would get.

“All righty,” Fran said, lugging her big suitcase, dragging it awkwardly behind her. “Let’s go find our rooms.” My father came up behind her with his smaller, lighter duffel bag slung easily over his shoulder. “Oh, that’s all right,” Fran said, huffing. “I’ve got it,” although Stan hadn’t offered.

We headed down the chlorine-scented hallway, and when we got to rooms 16 and 17, Fran and Stan inserted their separate key cards into separate doors. Seth glanced at me and dropped his backpack on the floor. “Wait, no.” He shook his head, horrified. “Dad,
no.
”

Stan tilted his big head toward Seth. “You’re bunking with me, son.”

Seth crossed his arms over his chest. “Dad, no,” he said again. “I can’t!” Our father’s snoring was legendary. His rumbling shook the rafters. There were several states in which he was not welcome. I looked down at the cabbage-rose-strewn, industrial carpeting and tried not to smile. Seth wanted to share a room with me. Yes, he was trying to avoid sleeping next to Mount St. Stan. And, no, it wasn’t as if he wanted the two of us to eat M&M’s at midnight and giggle at bad romantic comedies together. Still. I was used to taking what I could get from my brother, and I would take this.

“Mom,” I said, fingering the sleeve of my worn jean jacket, “can’t you sleep with Dad?” My face flushed hard. “I mean, can’t you guys, like, sleep in the same room?”

Our parents looked at each other. My mother sighed, my father shrugged, and everyone seemed to soften; even the cabbage roses looked hazy and pretty for a moment. “Well …”

“You’re with me, Seth,” Stan said abruptly.

My mom bristled. “Come on, sweetie,” she said to me. Fran and her big suitcase disappeared into our room; I caught the door just as it was about to close.

I changed into my swimsuit while my mom showered. The rush of water against the plastic tub sounded like thunderous applause:
Congratulations, Jacobs family, on remaining intact for another day!
As I was adjusting the straps of my old Speedo and tugging it out of various cracks, Fran stepped out of the bathroom, naked and dripping, a towel twisted into a turban around her head. I saw my future in her large, sagging breasts, her bulgy middle, the fleshy tops of her thighs, and I felt a hot, tender shame for both of us.

“Oh, don’t look at me,” she said, laughing, as she stepped back into the underwear she had been wearing.

“Ugh, Mom, gross,” I said. I grabbed a towel, tucked it around my waist, and went to get Seth. Their door was ajar. My dad was already conked out on one of the beds. Seth was sitting on the edge of the other one, staring at the TV. There was a pillow over my dad’s face like a scene from
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,
but I could hear his snoring—had heard it from the hallway—so I knew there had been no mercy suffocation. “Hey, come on,” I said to Seth. “Let’s go.”

He looked at me, then turned quickly back to the television—he was watching a European soccer game, but on mute, so it looked surreal, the enormous stadium packed with silent fans in bright shirts, people on their feet, arms waving, mouths open. Seth turned to me again and sneered. “I’m not going swimming with you,” he said.
Not with you.
My brother could break my heart a thousand times a day. He could tear me in two. He could burn a hole in me with his eyes. He was a superhero of scorn.

“Okay,” I said, my eyes stinging. I thought about my mother in the next room, bent over naked, stomach pocked, breasts swaying, pulling her light pink underwear up over her legs. Little blue veins decorated her calves, her thighs. She was one of the slimmer, more-well-kept moms, among the middle-aged mothers I knew. Still, she was ravaged. “Fine,” I said to Seth. “Whatever.” I wished I had wrapped another thin motel towel around my shoulders. I braced myself for what he would say next. It might have been anything.

He leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees, his chin in his hands. “Maybe later,” he said to the TV. “Maybe I’ll go swimming with you later.”

In the car, on our way back home, after our walking tour of Philadelphia, after our visit to the campus and my parents’ meeting with the financial aid officer, my father would tell Seth not to get his hopes up. “Lower your expectations,” he would say, and Seth, headphones still clamped to his head, would act like he hadn’t heard.

We could have rescued one another—the four of us, together, or any combination. But we didn’t. We left each other alone, and for a long time after we stayed that way.

Chapter Twelve

I spend my days watching Ben and Jane become a couple, and I will myself to happiness. I make myself a scientist of them, an expert in my narrow field, a Ben-and-Jane-ologist. How close can I get without compromising my subject?
Move closer, a little closer.

One Saturday in the middle of March, we go bed shopping. We try out the extra-firm mattresses at the Box Springs Eternal Bed and Furniture Warehouse, roll around like little kids in a bouncy castle on the double-plush pillow top, lie shoulder to shoulder to shoulder on the king-size Super Sleep Superluxe. The three of us.

“Hon,” Ben says, from his prone perch on the Superluxe. He reaches across my chest to rest his hand on Jane’s elbow. “If you bought this one, I bet we’d never fall off again, like we did the other night.”

So that was the crash I heard. I clear my throat and move Ben’s arm. Okay, maybe this is a little strange.

“Benjamin!”

Lately Jane has taken to calling Ben by his full name, claim staking and maternal, and every time she does, a small, evil creature that lurks inside my brain crawls along the edges of my skull, hissing.

“This bed would not fit in our apartment, much less my bedroom,” she says.

I flex my calves. I can extend my legs completely on the Superluxe, and my toes still don’t dangle off the edge—a rare luxury for a tall girl. “Remember in college, how you would sleep on a twin bed all night with your boyfriend, and you didn’t care?” My lying-down voice sounds funny to me, as if someone else is talking.

“I didn’t have that many boyfriends in college,” Ben says, and Jane laughs.

There are days when I feel like every step I take outside my apartment is an opportunity, every trip to the grocery store, every walk to the corner mailbox, are chances to reinvent myself, to embrace the possibility that I might meet someone, see something, catch someone’s eye, that in a split second, everything could change. Then there are the days when I feel like everything I’ve done has brought me here, to where I am and will always be: right here, lying trapped between my two best friends on a bed that hundreds of other couples have lain on in search of the best place to have hot sex and then sleep comfortably for the next eight hours. I turn from Ben to Jane and back again. The problem is, some days I can’t tell the difference.

A young couple on the bed five feet from ours has been whispering urgently for a few minutes, and their voices are gaining volume. I prop myself up on my elbow and look over.

“But when you yelled at him this morning, you
shamed
him,” the woman says. She has huge blinking blue eyes and long blond hair fanned out on the pillow behind her head.

“Well, he took my book and ripped it. Maybe a little shame is a good thing.” The man is her photographic negative, dark and scruffy. They’re attractive, almost disturbingly good-looking. They look like a magazine ad, but a weird, unhappy one, maybe an ad for couples therapy or rained-out vacations.

“Jesus, Jeffrey, what’s
wrong with you
?”

“Nothing. Natalie.” He says her name as if it’s a small insult, a suggestion of things gone to seed. “I just don’t want him disrespecting my things, my personal things. It starts with a book. Where does it end?”

“I don’t know where it ends. Maybe with you in therapy dealing with the legacy of your abusive father?”

I’m starting to feel very sorry for their child, the little miscreant. Given the genetic windfall, though, he’s probably beautiful enough to overcome his dueling parents.

I elbow Ben, whose eyes are closed. “They remind me of Fran and Stan,” I whisper, “but prettier.”

Jane sits up, too. She twists a long curl of her hair around her finger. “Let’s go look at another bed,” she says sternly, as if Jeffrey and Natalie will overhear her mildly scolding tone and promptly change their ways.

“I think we should just
sign him up
!” Jeffrey says. They’re not even attempting to whisper any longer. Natalie snorts her derision. Jeffrey bangs his hand down onto the mattress. “You didn’t even know what I was going to say!” he growls.

Ben rolls over and stares at them; we’re watching this spectacle unfold. I want to tell them that they haven’t actually bought this mattress yet, haven’t shipped it to their house and set it up in their bedroom.
We can hear you.

“You want to take him to obedience school!” Natalie starts to cry, and then Ben laughs so loudly, such an explosive exhalation, a true guffaw, that we all roll off the bed in a tangle and hurry over to another section of the store.

Jane grabs my hand and pulls me along. “Oh, my God,” she says.

“Oh, my dog,” Ben says, catching up to us in the children’s furniture department, a bright enclave of red and blue bunk beds, superheroes, fussy canopies, and pink princess comforters.

“Hey!” Jane hoists herself up a ladder to the top of a race-car bunk bed, her legs flailing behind her as she disappears behind a tower of pillows. “Maybe I’ll just get myself one of these!” Ben flicks a Spider-Man lamp on; it plays the theme music from the cartoon, and Ben starts singing along. I know he won’t stop singing until he’s gotten through the entire tune, because he knows all the words and is compelled to display his knowledge, and suddenly I just have to get away from them.

The truth about two people who don’t like each other much is that their fights can be small, gnawing things. I know something about this. I know that this is how people destroy each other, in ugly increments, slivers of their lives falling away until, all at once, they topple. I imagine Jeffrey and Natalie as furry, sharp-toothed beavers. I want to go find them, wherever they are in this vast furniture warehouse, maybe chewing on a table leg somewhere, and tell them:
Handsome rodents! Stop nibbling away at your own happiness!

In flight from Ben and Jane, I wander into the recliners section of the store, rows and rows of big empty armchairs in a sad rainbow of earth tones, a shipwreck of abandoned Barcaloungers. I run my hand along the top of a dark green suede behemoth with what looks like a sidecar attached to it. Upon closer examination, it turns out to be a cooler.

“This would look good in your living room,” Ben says, from behind me. He pats my shoulder, and I turn to face him.

“I would be willing to get rid of all of our other furniture,” I say, “and just have one of these in every room.”

“The kitchen?” Ben says.

“Yes.”

“The bathroom?”

“Obviously.”

He points to the cooler. “For storing toilet tissue.”

“ ‘Tissue’ is one of my favorite words,” I say. “It makes everything sound fancier.” I plop myself into one of the chairs, a dark, mannish thing that immediately flings my body backward, hoisting my legs up higher than my head; I feel like a beetle, a strangely comfortable beetle.

Ben places his hands on an armrest to steady himself and hovers over me. “Are you okay?”

I look up at him, his face squinched with concern. “Ach,” I say, with a wave of my hand. “Natalie and Jeffrey!”

“And Spot!”

“Poor Spot.”

Ben just keeps staring, leaning over me, and I can’t help it, I think about him and Jane, about what it must be like to lie beneath him, his body close, features gathered in concentration. I remember the bumbling kiss in Ben’s humid car, the sound of our teeth clacking against each other like tiny tap dancers. I see that his lips are a little bit chapped, and I turn my face away and pretend sudden fascination with the dark maroon leather of the cushion.

He touches my forehead gently. I force myself to stay still. “For someone who’s in her twenties and hardly ever even talks to her parents,” he says, “don’t you think it’s about time to get over their divorce?”

He’s right, of course. But nobody likes her blindingly obvious failings pointed out to her by her best friend when she’s belly-up on a Barcalounger.

“I talk to them!” I say.

In fact, just last week Fran called me from her car, driving down a Tucson highway, on her way to meet Jerry for an early dinner.
Seth can’t maintain a relationship,
she said,
and you never seem to have them. Did your father and I do this to you? Is this your father’s fault?
I held the phone at some distance from my ear; if it came too close, I thought, it might burn a hole in my brain.
Are you on your cell?
I yelled.
I can barely hear you! I’ll call you again soon!

“We talk all the time!” I insist.

“Which is not exactly my point.” Ben leans down closer, so close that for a second I think he really is going to kiss me, and my stomach squeezes with the thought of Jane. It’s so easy in the moment to know what you’re going to do, as if life were a pointillist painting of moments. “Look over there,” he whispers, tilting his head toward Sofas and Sectionals. Natalie and Jeffrey are wandering around, heads together, holding hands.

“… perfect for the living room,” Natalie is saying, and Jeffrey murmurs something about getting rid of his grandmother, who is old and loves beets.