Friends Like Us (24 page)

Ben points to my name tag. “Why were you pissed at Jane? Is that supposed to be some kind of performance art?”

“I don’t know. I’m sorry.”

He plucks a pink chrysanthemum from a pail and studies it for a long moment. “She’s going to apply to law school.”

I feel like I’ve been stabbed. I look down and see that the thorn of one of the roses I’m holding has actually poked my palm. “That is not …” What is he talking about? It’s impossible. Jane would have told me. “What are you …?” I close my eyes against the feeling of my life spinning out of control, careening like a car off a cliff. There is no way Jane wants to go to law school: Jane, wearer of ill-fitting T-shirts from Goodwill, gimlet-eyed cleaner of suburban houses, poet of soap scum and toilet bowl ring. Ben has obviously misheard. She must have said something else. Perhaps she got angry and then told him she regretted her lost cool. “Ben,” I say finally. “There is no way that’s true.”

He nods, and I get the fleeting impression that he’s enjoying it a little, this slow, sadistic slicing. “We’re considering the East Coast. D.C.”

The thorn prick on my hand is bleeding a little, an occupational hazard. “Was anyone ever going to tell me this?” As if that were the problem. The withholding of information.

“I’m telling you now.” And then he softens; I see it on his face, in the way his posture shifts, how he carefully slips the chrysanthemum back into its place among the other flowers, runs a finger slowly over the bridge of his nose. “I guess she’s feeling—we’re feeling—like we can’t just stay here forever. Like our lives are in a holding pattern. You know?”

“But what about you?” Ben mailed his grad school applications just last week. We celebrated by making him buy us dinner;
You’re going to be a social worker,
we said
. You’ll be rich!
“What about you?”

He shrugs and smiles, the answer obvious. “I kind of want to wait another year. Maybe I’ll work for a nonprofit for a while … find something, you know, meaningful.… Anyway, I hear there are some okay grad schools out east.”

I suppose Ben is right, and if I’m honest with myself, I know it, too: that it’s not exactly satisfying to work part-time jobs we’re nominally suited for just so we can live in crummy, thin-walled apartments that we can barely afford; how old it’s getting, eating cheap pasta or scrambled eggs every night off chipped plates; sitting on rickety, third-hand furniture and watching crappy TV because we can’t afford cable and we definitely can’t afford to go out. Pretending we like it this way. Attached to nothing but ourselves. If I could bring myself to admit it, I’d agree that we’re stuck in a pleasant limbo of our own making. But I can’t. And so all I hear from Ben is “We’re moving on.” All I hear is good-bye.

That night, Jane climbs into my bed, settles in next to me on my wrinkly purple sheets. Ben is at his apartment, packing the few things that are left there, the dishes he rarely uses, the clothes he hardly ever wears, the pots he never cooks with. He’ll live here until the wedding—he basically lives here anyway—and soon after that, they’ll get their own place. That’s the plan—a plan that now includes the East Coast, I guess.

He kissed Jane good-bye after dinner, sighed deeply, and said, “Well, I guess I should go now.”

They hugged, and Jane laughed as she pulled away from him, a rogue strand of her dark hair Velcroed onto his stubbly chin.

“You’re going off to pack,” she said, “not die.”

Now, I adjust myself in my bed, roll onto my back, fold my hair under my head like a pillow. Jane lies next to me, quiet, breathing deeply. The smell of flowers is still fragrant on my hands. Headlights from passing cars flash across the ceiling, then the wall opposite the bed. Jane rolls onto her side, toward me. “Sorry if I got on your nerves at the flower shop today.”

“God,” I say, feeling small and shabby in the shadow of my bighearted friend. “
I’m
sorry. You didn’t get on my nerves. Not at all. It’s the breakup, I guess.” I close my eyes for a moment, let that half-truth settle between us.

“Ben said he told you about law school, about us maybe moving.”

“Uh-huh.” Still on my back, I turn my face to hers. Her nose is shiny, her eyes dark in the lamplight.

“I don’t know what to say.” She furrows her eyebrows, little wrinkles trenching a familiar path, and I think about the million tiny ways Ben knows her now, how when you love someone, you take that person into your body, your fingertips predicting their angles and curves; how you smell like them in the morning.

“It’s okay,” I say, because it ought to be. There’s a smear of face cream on her cheek, pearly white against her pink skin. “Do you really want to be a lawyer?”

“Maybe.” The blanket on top of her rises and falls with her shrug. She licks her lips and sighs. Her breath is toothpaste-minty. “I’m tired of looking at blue toilet water.”

“But what will I do without you guys?” What will I do? My throat is thick, suddenly: I’m bereft.

“I know.” Her voice is high and thin. “I can’t even let myself think about that.” Outside, a motorcycle buzzes past, so loud it sounds like it’s about to barrel into our apartment. “Anyway, it’s months away. And you’ll visit. Like, a lot.”

“Yeah.” It comes over me at once that I’m bone tired. My body is sinking into a presleep lull. I close my eyes again for a second, maybe longer. When I open them, Jane is right where I left her, staring at me intently. I imagine myself visiting Ben and Jane in their cute apartment in D.C., sleeping on their pullout couch, drinking their good coffee in the morning.
We’re taking you to the best Ethiopian restaurant, right around the corner! Tomorrow, the National Gallery.… This was so great, you guys. See you soon, see you again soon.

Jane fidgets and wriggles and arranges her body, ending up a sliver closer to me; we could touch noses now if we wanted to. She exhales, her breath a warm puff. “Okay,” she says. “G’night.” She rolls away to the other side of the bed, the soft mattress bouncing gently in her wake.

Chapter Twenty-one

The dim hallway of Seth’s building is a dark and gloomy contrast to the sunny morning, and it takes my eyes a few minutes to adjust. My brother called me a couple hours ago. “Do you have any toilet paper you could loan me?” His voice was a low rumble on the other end of the line. “I ran out.”

“Um, I guess so.” Seth lives around the corner from Haber’s Drugs, and two blocks from the Shop ’n’ Save. “Sure.” I cracked my neck and looked around my room. Jane had slept in my bed for much of the night; I remembered that she’d crept away just as the first dim light was sneaking in. There was still a head-shaped indentation on the pillow. I felt weird, like an abandoned lover or a sixth grader alone at the lunch table. I rolled over onto my stomach with the phone in my hand. “Do you need, um, anything else?” I couldn’t imagine what he would say to that. A box of Cheerios? His dignity?

I got dressed and went to the grocery store for toilet paper, milk, bread, peanut butter, a bunch of bananas, and, on a whim, one pear. I thought it would be funny to hand Seth the piece of fruit and say, “I brought you
this pear,
but I see you already have it.” I changed my mind about that and ate it in the car.

I smile at him now as he takes the paper bag from me. “We need to get you out of here, Seth,” I say brightly, standing in the doorway of his apartment, trying to both exude cheer and breathe shallowly at the same time. It smells like pot and wet towels and some other things, old and greasy and unidentifiable. “Oh, Seth,” I say. “We need to open some windows and then get you out of here.”

I peer around his dingy apartment at a tableau of dissolution: empty pizza boxes and beer and soda cans strewn about the living room, a tangle of wires in the middle of the floor, a pair of socks next to the TV, a full bowl of something wet and yellowish on the futon. He actually is using an upturned cardboard box as a coffee table, the idea I suggested to him—yes, meanly, but
jokingly
—when he was moving in. He hasn’t even bothered to throw a dishcloth over it. The apartment is the physical manifestation of defeat, a glimpse into the psychic landscape of a man who can no longer be bothered.

Seth watches me looking around. He scratches his head and gives me a half smile. “Can I get you something to drink?” he asks, and we both start laughing.

“A nice dessert wine, if you have it?”

He heads toward the kitchen with the bag of groceries. “You’re a good sister,” he says quietly, so out of character that I gasp, then immediately decide that he must have said something else.
You’re a shoplifter?

“Thanks,” I mumble, and follow him into the kitchen, where he is already guzzling milk straight from the carton.

“Do you know where I want to go?” he asks, wiping his mouth with his sleeve. I shake my head. “The Domes.” The Mitchell Park Domes are a Milwaukee landmark, three huge, glass-encased botanical gardens shaped like breasts. They loom over the city, a fetishist’s gigantic fantasy. Seth shoves a handful of Cheerios into his mouth. “The Domes,” he says again, crunching, “because I like the gift shop. If you want to. I guess we could go anywhere, really.” He looks around. “I probably should go somewhere.…”

I turn my attention to a grease stain on the linoleum—luckily for me there are plenty to choose from. I see right through my brother’s forced nonchalance. Nina told me: the Domes are where they had their first date, their first kiss behind the hibiscus in the Tropical Dome, their new love hatching in the steamy heat of the climate-controlled rainforest.

“We can go there,” I say. “If you want to.” A visit to the scene of the crime seems like a very bad idea for him, but I’ll go along with it. Maybe I’ll feign an interest in cacti and guide us to the Desert Dome, where plants bloom despite their parched surroundings. It could be just the thing for us both.

“I just can’t seem to pull my shit together,” Seth says to me, as we wander down the circular path in the Tropical Dome, vanilla flowers and orchids blossoming lush and thick before us, and a damp, sweet smell wafting—an odor, like so many things, somewhere between perfume and decay. “I feel so bleak. And then these spasms of fury come over me. One minute I’m okay, the next second I want to kick a bunny.”

“Bunnies can be such assholes.”

We’re quiet for a minute as a woman and two babies in a massive double stroller roll up behind us. We have to step off the path to let them go by. The babies’ big heads are inclined toward each other, bobbing in sleep. Their mother, in a pink tank top and yoga pants, walks by quickly, her face grim and resolute.

“My office mates probably think I have a bladder problem,” Seth says. “I take so many bathroom breaks just to get myself under control. I’m a train wreck. I feel like a chick on the rag.”

I run the tips of my fingers across the feathery edge of a fern. “I have news for you, though,” I say. “That is not how
chicks on the rag
feel.” Sometimes my brother takes me by surprise, and before I know it I’m sucked into the vortex of his vileness.

“No,” he says, shaking his head. “It
is
. That’s how Nina was.”

How have I lost this argument? But I have. “Um, well … how are you going to turn it around?”

“I’ve decided,” he says. “I’m not going to.” He pushes his hand through his hair.

“Oh, Seth,” I say, any remaining annoyance consumed by a blaze of sympathy for him. “You won’t feel this bad forever!”

“No, no, no. I mean, sure, I could, I could get back on track, but I realized recently that being so in touch with my emotions is kind of a good thing. It’s left me with more to
give
.” He puts air quotes around
give,
as if, even as he’s saying it, he knows he won’t be giving anything to anyone. He keeps his hands suspended in the air for a few seconds, demarcating nothing. “So at first I was thinking I could become a monk, although then I thought I would make a crappy monk. Like I’m going to eat rice and not have sex for the rest of my life.” I’m a few steps ahead of him, murmuring
Mm hmm,
trying not to think about my brother having sex, before I realize he’s stopped to read the description of a kapok tree. “So then, Wilford, I thought, what do people do who are, like, full of their own feelings? What do they
do
?” He looks at me intently, too intently. “They create! They write, they paint, they make music.… I mean, that’s what you’ve been doing all these years, or whatever, feeling shit and then, like, drawing shit?”

“Why, Seth, I didn’t realize you were paying attention.”

“No, shut up. This is serious. I’m serious. I’m going to write a screenplay!”

“Okay, well … great!” I cringe, imagining the kind of script Seth would write: a little rom-com, where the redheaded girlfriend, Gina, is a merciless bureaucrat, or maybe a dental hygienist, someone who likes to use sharp tools and inflict pain, and Sam, our hapless hero, just can’t see what a ballbuster she is, but then, after some complications, maybe an ill-fated trip to Jamaica or a futile quest to find the winning lottery ticket he accidentally threw out, he finally
does
see, and he ends up with the incredibly hot yet selfless kindergarten teacher. Or maybe an action flick, where the nerdy math geek rescues the planet from an attack of evil freckly, redheaded aliens, gaining the love of his incredibly hot yet selfless coworker at the lab.
Jessica loosens her wavy blond hair from its bun; it cascades down her back. She takes off her glasses. Sam reaches for her. “I never noticed how incredibly hot you were before!”

“Great!” I say again.

“But, you know, all these years I’ve been exercising the other side of my brain.” He taps his head. Seth works for the city’s Department of Water Quality, analyzing data on microscopic organisms and contaminants.
Everywhere I look,
he likes to say,
I see shit.
He’s been saying it since long before he and Nina split up.

“Yeah?” I haven’t seen my brother this animated in months. So I’m trying to pretend that the bad feeling in my stomach is from too much coffee.