Friends Like Us (19 page)

I want to say something to Ben, I’m not sure what:
Mazel tov
? Or
WAIT!
Okay, yes,
WAIT!
because all at once I see it, as clear as the peeling paint on the bench we’re sitting on: This is the time in our lives when mistakes are made. And not just
What a bummer it would be to end up at the wrong college
or
Should I pass on that interesting volunteer opportunity,
but the big mistakes, the ones where you say yes and you walk down the aisle and you become my parents or Jane’s. Or Ben’s, who have been happily married but pleasantly distant from each other for thirty years, the kind of parents who take separate vacations. But none of this seems like the right response to my best friend telling me he’s going to ask my other best friend to marry him. I edge toward him and lean in, throw my arm around his shoulder in a quick hug. “I call best man
and
maid of honor.”

A little blond boy twenty feet from us screeches suddenly, and then they’re all screeching, like an air-raid siren. “You don’t get to call it, Willa,” Ben says, over the din. He squeezes back. “It’s not like shotgun.”

“Too late,” I say. “I already called it.” I rest my head on his shoulder for a second, move away.

And then, on this perfect summer day, clouds skittering around the sky, children testing their lungs across the grass, we just sit for a while, next to each other, quietly, waiting for Jane and Declan to reappear. Ben reaches into the white paper bag and feeds me a piece of his croissant; with the back of his hand, I wipe crumbs from my mouth. I close my eyes to the shrill whistle of the children and to the image of Jane in a wedding dress and to my own psychic vertigo, a lurching befuddlement of emotions. Maybe this dizzy feeling is just my heart, adjusting to a new reality. Or maybe it’s the mad, contagious confusion of those toddlers on the grass in front of us, spinning wildly before they fall.

The next morning. My bed. A fleeting feeling, too vague to pin down. Something, somewhere, has shifted.

A trapezoid of light peeks through the blinds, captures the dust in the air, and makes it beautiful. I hear my own breathing, slow and deep; my eyes blur and focus against the day. Up close, a loose purple thread pulls away from the quilt. My elbow itches. The pillow is smooth against my cheek.

Someone is next to me, a lump under the covers, broad back, rumpled head of brown hair. A vague
yes
moves through me; I like this brown-haired lump. It mutters, moves.

If I could stay like this I would, in these pleasantly muddy seconds when I haven’t figured it out yet, when I’m not yet the sum of my parts. But even while I’m thinking it, it’s coming back to me: I’m piecing together who I am even as I’m trying to keep myself at bay. My room, my bed, Declan, me. Don’t think about elephants! It’s too late. I run my tongue across my fuzzy teeth, find a cool spot on my pillow. Declan will turn over, say good morning, say good-bye; I’ll eat breakfast with Ben and Jane and go to work. Oh, but if I could, I would live in that other, newborn space for hours, fearless and observing. Because before I’m myself, I’m not the Willa I am: desperate, hungry, plumbing the depths of my own treacherous psyche and capable of unpleasant surprises. In that blissful, disoriented blankness, I could be anyone.

I move through the next few days like a stunt double of myself. There is a proposal, an acceptance, a celebration. We all go out for dinner and splurge on wine. I drink a little bit too much and let my giddiness stand in for genuine happiness.

I make them a card, a sketch of Ben and Jane holding hands on a sun-dappled beach, beaming, only instead of writing
Congratulations!
on the inside, I write
You’re welcome!
and when they open it, they both look at me confused, like I am their strange, special little niece. I bake them a batch of celebratory chocolate chip cookies, but I forget to put in the sugar. I’m off-kilter, myself and not-myself, a simulacrum Willa with no other options than to act normal. I have the vague sense that this is life: the long, slow, doomed attempt to become the person you’re trying to be.

At the kitchen table one afternoon, I make a list of new names for myself. Could I possibly be a Maude? An April? A Debbie? Change your name, change your life. I want to do something both radical and risk-free, but nothing comes to mind. I consider a tattoo, but I’m afraid of needles, as well as alcohol, pain, and strangers with tattoos.

I decide, finally, to chop off my hair. But then Jane reminds me that my head is a funny shape. “Tell you what, conehead,” she says, raising her hand protectively to her own hair. “I’ll give you a haircut. Just a couple of inches. That’s something, but it’s not everything. And it’s free. And if you don’t like it, Debbie, you can schedule an appointment and get it all hacked off. You have nothing to lose!”

How can I argue with “nothing to lose”?

Jane drapes a towel around my shoulders and spritzes my hair with water, running her fingers through the curls. “So, doll,” she says, snapping her pretend gum. “Ya interested in a permanent wave today?”

“Bouffant,” I say. “Lots of Aqua Net.” We’re quiet for a minute. Jane tugs gently. If hair is made up of dead cells, then your scalp is a graveyard. “So,” I say, a chatty lady in a beauty shop, casual as anything, “are you thinking about the actual wedding yet?”

She tries to pull a wide-toothed comb through my hair, but it gets caught halfway down. “All I know is I want something very, very fancy, obscenely expensive. Perhaps a destination wedding.”

“Jamaica,” I say, “and eight hundred of your closest friends?”

“Hawaii, and nine hundred.”

“With an ice sculpture and seventeen bridesmaids.”

“An ice sculpture
of
seventeen bridesmaids.” She gives up on the comb, kneels down in front of me, and stares intently, first at one side of my head, then the other, pulling hunks of my hair straight. I can smell her, minty breath and apple-perfumed shampoo and, underneath that, an unmistakably Jane-ish scent, two parts carrot cake, one part wood chips. She slips a hand under my chin and tilts my head up. “I’m going to take a good two inches off,” she says.

“A good two inches.” I try to nod, but her hand holds my head still. “Okay,” I say, “and after the marriage vows are spoken, one hundred white doves will be released.”

“And then after that,” she says, “one hundred colorful balloons.”

“Pieces of which will get caught in the throats of the hungry doves, who will then, tragically, come plummeting to the earth.”

“Ah, perfect.” Jane straightens and walks slowly around me, like a bride circling her groom at a Jewish wedding. I would mention this to her, but sometimes it’s just too much effort, trying to explain these things to Jane Elizabeth Weston from Marcy, Wisconsin, whose parents never thought twice about her initials.

“The bride wore tulle,” I say instead.

“The bride
was
a tool.” She starts snipping. I close my eyes to the slicing sound of it, surrendering to Jane’s warm nearness, her knuckles occasionally brushing my cheeks, my ears.

“The dress was hand-beaded by tiny fairies,” I say. My eyes are still closed.

“The groom rode in on an elephant.”

“Shrimp!”

“The groom rode in on a shrimp?”

“No. For dinner. Nothing says classy like shrimp cocktail at a wedding.”

“Ben hates shrimp,” Jane says.

“No, he doesn’t.”

“But he does.” She’s behind me now, clipping away, and then tugging the hair straight to check for accuracy. “Whoops!”

“Whoops?” She’s silent. “Whoops?”

“Nope, it’s okay. I fixed it!”

I shrug. This is the secret of curly hair: you can’t really mess it up. “I’ve known Ben a lot longer than you have,” I say. “I think I’d know if he hated shrimp.”

“He loathes them. He can’t stand their pink, veiny, curled-up bodies.” Snip. Tug. “Says they remind him of maggots.”

“Wow. I find this very hard to believe. Maybe you’re confusing Ben with someone else who hates shrimp.”
Dougie,
I think.
Maybe Dougie hates shrimp.

She’s quiet for a while. I crane my neck. She’s behind me, motionless, scissors poised above my head. “You have.”

“I have what?”

“You’ve known him longer. But I know that he doesn’t like shrimp.” She walks around me again, her bare feet softly slapping the floor, then squats down in front of me, close. She has a freckle just above her lip, a tiny smudge of mascara underneath her right eye.

“In lieu of gifts,” I say, “the bride and groom request donations to the Anti-Crustacean-Defamation League.”

She cups my chin again, her fingers cool, her face so close her humid breath moistens my cheek. “Damn,” she whispers. “I’m sorry. I really should have put in my contact lenses before I did this.” She tilts her head and squints. “Kidding! It looks great.” She brushes off my neck, my shoulders. Curls of hair carpet the kitchen floor like tiny crescent moons—like shrimp!

I will help them plan their wedding.
We wouldn’t be here without Willa. She brought us together!
I will wear a pretty dress. I will toast their happy union, their joyful years. My rotten heart thuds a protest. I can’t meet her eyes. What about me? I take a deep breath through my nose.
What about me?
Jane is staring hard, scrutinizing, and suddenly I’m about to implode from it, from the pressure of the closeness; you can tolerate a thing for a long time before it reveals itself to be fatal, and it’s been fatal all along. Jane rocks back on her heels. “All done.” She licks her lips, smiles. “You, my friend, are ready for your close-up.”

Chapter Nineteen

A few days later, Seth calls. There is a loud whooshing noise in the background. It sounds like he’s standing on the shoulder of a highway or inside a washing machine. “So guess what, little sister? Mom’s coming!” His phone cuts in and out.
Ssswhat, ister? Mom’s ing!

“That’s hilarious,” I say. “You’re hilarious.” Seth and I manage our relationship, or lack of relationship, with Fran and Stan by visiting them just once a year, at Thanksgiving—first Mom and Jerry in the morning, for the traditional Thanksgiving bagel brunch, then Dad and Tan Lesley for dinner. Conveniently, although my parents haven’t spoken in five years, they live within ten minutes of each other, in adjacent gated communities with abutting golf courses. Once, my mom said, she thought she saw Lesley from the sixth hole and waved; it turned out to be a small dead tree.

“It’s not a joke. She’s worried about you.”
Not a oke. rried about you.
He pauses. “Okay, she’s worried about me. She’s coming to help me move into the new apartment.”

“Oh, Seth.”

“Oh, Willa.”

“Oh, kids!” A week later Fran sits in the rickety folding chair in Seth’s kitchen, which makes it, I guess, the kitchen chair.

When I left my apartment this morning, Jane and Ben were sitting in the kitchen, filling out “Save the Date” cards.
Save the date! Save the date!
—the wildest and most elusive of the endangered tree fruits. The pile of cards grew into a stack on the table as they worked.

Fran takes a sip from her Styrofoam cup of tea and waves her hand toward us. “That couch needs to be moved back three inches toward the wall, and then to the left about, oh, five feet, and then out the door and into the Dumpster.” She chuckles at her own joke. “It’s
disgusting
!”

It really is: it’s yellow, but a mustardy sort of shade that looks like it started out as something closer to ketchup on the color wheel, and threadbare in a way that makes you think of butts.

“Where did you get it, Sethie?” she asks. “Not from your old place. Nina would never have …” She shakes her head. “Oh, sweetie, I’m sorry.” She shifts her attention back to the apartment and rearranges her expression. “Let’s hit some yard sales tomorrow,” she says. “See if we can’t scare you up a nicer sofa.”

Mom loved Nina. Just like I did, she loved what Nina did for Seth, how she softened him, settled him, smoothed his rough edges. His squalid new life seems to be causing her physical pain—which is having the fun-house mirror effect of distorting Seth’s own emotions. In the face of her overwhelming sympathy, my brother is confused and defensive. He swipes a sleeve across his sweaty forehead, glances around his grimy new apartment, and lets out a little sigh. He peers down at his couch, personal failure in the form of a sofa, then looks at me like a trapped bunny. I recognize that look, and the sorry lift of his shoulders, as the secret language of two people who survived the same childhood: it’s a last-ditch apology, preemptive but meaningless, for how he’s about to hang me out to dry. “Hey, Mom! Godzwilla has something to tell you. She has a new boyfriend!”

In the bathroom, just five minutes ago, as we were rummaging through a box full of towels and, oddly, canned soup, I asked Seth not to say anything about Declan. “You know how she is,” I whispered, appealing to my brother’s empathy, that underused muscle. “You know how she’ll be.” She’d be overly invested in my personal life, I meant; she’d manage to be both eager and concerned in the same breath. It’s her talent, forged in the fires of her crappy marriage. When I was in seventh grade, she used to sit down with me after school, pass me a plate of celery and peanut butter, and fix her maternal gaze on my face. “Was anyone
not nice
to you today?” she would ask, her eyes boring into mine. “Did any of your girlfriends behave badly toward you? Because I will call their parents if you want me to.”

Now, she claps her hands in glee and scowls at me simultaneously. “A boyfriend!” she says. “Is he someone special? Is he
one of the ones
?” I sense that divorce and remarriage have made her flexible, in a strange way.

I smile at Seth and pick up the scissors we’ve been using to slice the packing tape on his cardboard boxes, brandish it at him and then stab a hole in the seam of a box labeled
PLATES, CUPS, SHOES, TWIZZLERS
.
All right,
I think, trying to rally.
This is not so bad.
I hadn’t planned on collapsing these two particular emotional tent poles, but what the hell. I’ll introduce my irreverent, used-to-be-my-boss, dumped-me-three-years-ago-for-another-girl Irish boyfriend to my mom. So what if he interprets it as a move toward serious-relationship status and runs for the hills? So what? Why not? I’ll do it! Yes!