Friends Like Us (20 page)

“Uh,
no
!” I say. “I do not have a boyfriend. Seth! What a weird thing to say!”

Seth mouths
Sorry.
He lifts his shirt to rub his pale, hairy, newly chubby belly.

“Why are you still single?” I say.

“If you have a beau,” my mom says, “I would like to meet him.”

I fold back the box flaps and start pulling out badly wrapped, mismatched plates and bags of red licorice. “Seth, seeing as all the furniture belonged to Nina, why don’t we just keep a few of these boxes so you can turn them over and use them as cute, portable end tables. Martha Stewart Living in Squalor!”

“We could go to Will’s apartment right now,” Seth says. He squats down next to
BATHROOM & CANDLESTICKS & SOME SOCKS
, rips the tape off with a
phhhlrrtt.
“See if he’s there.”

“And, hey, maybe Mom has an old coat in storage,” I say, “that you could use for a bedspread. It’s a
good thing
!” I wave air quotes at him.

“Oh, and your roommate’s probably there, too, with her fiancé, right? We can say hello to them, see how they’re doing, your roommate and her fiancé.”

“Because Nina kept the bedspread, right? Along with the sheets and the pillows and the bed? When she kicked you out?”

Seth gives me the finger, and I think,
We’ve gone too far;
and I think,
Why do we even pretend to be friends?
And then he laughs.

“Kids,” Fran says. She takes another sip of tea. “Why don’t we get out of this apartment, hop in my car, and hit those rummage sales right now?”

Fran’s shiny silver rental car smells like secondhand smoke, which probably comes with the contract: choose a midsize sedan for its extra legroom and the lingering odor of tobacco.

“I never cared for Milwaukee,” Mom says, honking at the car in front of us as it sits at the green light, unmoving. “Scene of the crime.”

“Scene of our childhood, too,” I say from the backseat, surprisingly offended. “Scene of that time when we were little and we tried to make you a birthday cake out of pancake mix and you pretended you loved it. Scene of your daughter winning the regional spelling bee when she was in fifth grade. Scene of practically our entire lives.” I pull on the seat belt’s shoulder strap, which is digging into my neck.

“You’re so sensitive, honey.” My parents moved from Chicago to Milwaukee in the seventies for my father’s job, just after they got married: ninety-two miles, but a continent of culture shock for my mother and, apparently, light-years of regret. “I love you and Seth, I just don’t like this one-horse town.” She lays on the horn again as the old lady in the car in front of us, her gray head barely visible above the seat back, finally guns it through the light just as it turns yellow.

“The feelings associated with a place can become an emotional crutch,” Seth says, “a habit that, sometimes, can only be broken by physically moving away. Paralysis can come in many forms.”

“The self-help section at Barnes and Noble is still working for you,” I say. Seth nods.

“Look!” Fran says. “A sale!” We’ve been cruising up and down Lake Drive and its side streets, trawling the city’s tony east side for good rummage sales, most of which have closed down for the day. But one or two football field–;sized front lawns are still strewn with the flotsam of the wealthy—last year’s chrome-and-steel espresso machines; racks of brightly colored Ingrid Sédersstrém children’s clothes; once-pricey, roughed-up Woodley end tables; and Ashford and Holt chairs in need of reupholstering. My mother is the queen of spotting diamonds in the rough. (Jerry, she likes to tell us, had a comb-over when she met him and was wearing Transitions lenses.) She’ll end up in the headlines someday for buying that funny-looking, paint-splattered canvas that had been stashed for sixty years in someone’s garage.
(Gosh, we didn’t know Grandma’s old friend Jackson was famous!)

Now, she swings a left turn from the right lane and pulls onto Kenwood. “I see a love seat,” she says, peering out the window. “Looks spendy. Let’s see if we can’t Lutheran them down.” Fran wasn’t kidding about not liking it here, and she’s sharpened her blade since the last time I saw her.

Seth gets out of the car slowly. A cloud of melancholy and regret has been hanging over him for months now as he’s been embarking on this crummy new chapter of his life. It’s so heavy I can practically see it, can almost smell it. In fact, if melancholy and regret smell like hummus and a sweaty T-shirt and some kind of unfortunate masculine body spray, I
can
smell it. He slouches against the car. “Great,” he says, his voice vaulting toward cynicism but landing on surrender. “A love seat.”

Our mother is already furiously negotiating by the time Seth and I make our way over to her; we stand back and elbow each other, let her do her thing. “I understand that this piece has been well maintained,” she says to a woman in a linen pantsuit, “but I also see a small rip in the fabric here and several scratches near the base. I’ll give you two hundred dollars for it.” She plants her hands on her hips and waits for the inevitable nod.

The expansive lawn is crowded with bargain hunters. A pregnant lady is lugging a high chair to her waiting minivan, leaving a long trail in the grass: the tracks of the nesting human in her native habitat. A little way across the lawn, a couple examines a table stacked with china and kitchenware. I notice the woman with her back to us, her red hair twisted up in a messy, pretty ponytail, her small frame in a flowy green sundress. Thin, freckled arms; canvas sneakers. And then I register who she is. The man she’s with is tall, dark haired, in a crisp purple shirt and jeans that say
I’m a young lawyer and it’s the weekend.
They’re leaning into each other, his arm around her resting just above her hip. I gasp before my brain catches up with itself, before I can tamp down my surprise, and I hop in front of Seth, trying to position myself in his sight line. “Bamboo!” I yelp, heaving an umbrella stand up toward my brother. “Look, Seth, it’s
bamboo
!”

Sure as I’m not actually a connoisseur of home furnishings and gardenware, Seth can tell something’s up. He taps my shoulder, shoves me gently to the side. “Oh, shit,” he says, craning his neck, as Nina’s companion—boyfriend, obviously—turns to her and whispers something in her ear. “Shit. I need to leave. Tell Mom we need to leave. We need to leave right now. I need to get out of here.”

Fran walks toward us with a triumphant smile, high stepping across the long grass in her pink espadrilles. “Mission accomplished!” she says, tipping an imaginary hat at us. Sometimes that’s all it takes: a new expression or funny little quirk to remind me that, emotionally, Fran checked out of our lives ten years ago. And, sure, I’ve spent plenty of time with her since then. But in the deep and fundamental way daughters are supposed to know their mothers, I hardly know mine. And then I feel it all over again. The loss of it.

“Mom,” I say. Seth is standing still next to me, staring straight ahead. A giant wasp buzzes past, close to his face; he doesn’t flinch. “Great job on the love seat. We’ll come back for it later. Let’s go.”

She shakes her head. “But I’m just getting started!”

“Nina’s here,” Seth says, his voice a dull, defeated monotone.

Fran lifts her face, pricks up her ears like a hungry cat who’s just heard the whir of the can opener. Our mother wants so much for Seth and me to be happy, to find our footing where she lost hers. But to her, our happiness is a home improvement project, only she’s never had the right tools for it. Before either of us can stop her, she’s beelining over to a table stacked with small appliances, toward the petite redhead with the boyfriend at her side and, now, the blender cradled in her arms. Seth slumps even slouchier and covers his eyes with his hands.

“Nina!” Fran calls.

“Oh, crap,” Seth mutters. “Oh, Christ.”

I jog over to Fran, my sneakers smacking the grass, the thighs of my cotton shorts shooshing. “Mom! Fran! Mom!” I call again, louder, outrage bubbling up in my voice:
“Mother!”

And then, just then, Fran stops short, a few feet from Nina, tiny redheaded rummage sale shopper who has finally turned to us, who has pivoted, still holding on to her handsome man, and now he turns his body to us, too, both of them curious, anxious to see what all the commotion is about, Nina’s wide face a question,
Who are these people, Josh? Oh, Brad, honey, what are they doing, what do they want? Tim, why is the older one calling me Nina,
and my mother puts out her hand to stop herself and she shakes her head, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” because, good God it’s not, thank heavens it’s not, it’s not Nina after all.

And then, with a swiftness of purpose and a clarity of mind that will shock me later, I hustle us all out of there, away from the rummage sale of quality furniture and mistaken identity and over to Braun’s Bagels and Lunch, home of the worst deli food in the Great Lakes region, and the place that Seth and I have referred to, for as long as I can remember, as Eva Braun’s Bagels.

We make our way with our food to a small round table in the corner of the empty restaurant. Seth chomps down on a big, pale, puffy bagel—more of a bread doughnut, really, than a bagel.

“Oh, Sethie,” Fran says, squeezing a tube of dressing onto her salad. “I just wish I could fix this for you.”

“We are the masters of our own destinies,” he says, chewing and nodding, and I can’t figure out why he’s not more annoyed with Fran, why he’s suddenly cheerfully spouting his personal-improvement aphorisms. Maybe it’s the carbs, lulling him into submission.

“I can’t eat this,” I say, gnawing on a doorstop slathered with strawberry cream cheese—inexplicably, the only kind they have. Eva Braun’s Bagels is where we used to come for lunch on the weekends, the three of us, after Stan left, and so it holds a certain place in our hearts, a room in the house of our collective memories—if not the cozy living room of nostalgia, then maybe the foyer of endurance.

Fran nibbles on a wilted piece of lettuce and nods. “Your father told me just the other day that he misses this place. Unbelievable!”

“Just the other day,” Seth says. “Good one!”

“Right!” I slide my bagel over to Seth, who begins to demolish it. As far as I know, our parents haven’t spoken in years.

Fran looks at us. “Well, isn’t it funny the way things work out, but Jerry and I have gone out for dinner a few times recently with your father and Lesley.” She dabs at her pink lips with a napkin and nods to herself. “I really like that Lesley.”

This is the part in the movie where the main character—restless, drifting, sensitive girl trying to find herself, a coming-of-age story for our time!—does a double take and spits out her water all over her mother. Unfortunately, the only thing in my mouth is the aftertaste of strawberry cream cheese.

Our mother locked herself in her darkened room and didn’t get out of bed for three months after the divorce. For six months after that, she didn’t go grocery shopping, cook dinner, pick me up after school, or drive me to my piano lessons. So I made my own way. The day before I left for college, a
FOR SALE
sign freshly planted in the lawn in front of our house, my mother looked me up and down, patted my head, told me that I needed a haircut and never to get married. She is the source of my primal knowledge: that the death of love is a small black hole that sucks your soul right out of you. I narrow my eyes at her.

“Your hair looks nice,” she says. “It could use a trim.”

“This is … fucking crazy,” Seth says, laughing.

“I know,” I say. “I just got it cut!”

“Well, what can I tell you?” Fran plants her hands flat on the table, blue veins mapping the terrain to coral-tipped nails. “Your father had some tax questions a few months ago, and he made an appointment with Jerry. They hit it off. Jerry suggested the four of us go out, and I thought,
Why not?
Why not?”

Just last year, Fran sent me a thick brown envelope filled with photographs and love letters my parents had sent to each other before they were married.
You can throw these out if you want to,
she scrawled on her note to me.
I HAVE NO NEED FOR THEM.

“I mean,” she continues, “life is too short to be so angry. To hold grudges.”

Darling,
my dad had written in one of those long-ago letters, blue ink on a scrap of white paper.
We’re out of milk.
She had saved this note.

I heard them arguing once, late at night, in their bedroom. I’d had a bad dream and was about to push open their door. I must have been about nine or ten; I remember the pajamas I was wearing, soft pink fleece with a poodle on the front.

You were supposed to take care of me,
my mother was wailing,
but you … you’re a thief. You are the thief of my happiness!

Somehow I knew even then that it was a melodramatic thing to say, and I snickered to myself. The thief of her happiness!

And then, from behind their closed door, I heard my father laugh, too, a loud, mocking, derisive hoot. And suddenly we were allies, the two of us, in our cruelty. Immediately I felt the stirrings of a complicated remorse, a clattering misalignment of my affections. I turned and went back to bed.

Seth stares at our mother. His mouth is hanging open, a bit of chewed bagel visible. “Would you please close your mouth,” I whisper; he winks at me and opens it wider. What is Fran offering us, with this new information? What is she hoping to give us? Maybe just this: evidence that your mistakes may not be the end of you. I feel a surge of forgiveness—for my parents and Seth, for Ben and Jane, saving the date without me, for us all.

Fran tips the last of her water into her mouth. She chews an ice cube and looks from me to Seth and back again. “We tried Thai last time. Cajun the time before that.” The ice crunches against her teeth. “Turns out we all get along quite well.”

Chapter Twenty

It’s Ben’s idea to go camping. “Because who can say when any of us will ever be able to afford a real vacation?” he argues from his perch on our sofa.