Friends Like Us (7 page)

Jane takes a deep breath and another sip of her noxious drink. I reach my hand up to smooth my hair. A man and a woman I don’t recognize seat themselves on the very sunken, 1970s plaid sofa across the room, and then seem to disappear into the dip in the cushions.

“I think guys see us,” she says, “they see our friendship, and they know they don’t have a chance.”

“Remember Josh?” I absently run my palm along the worn nub of the love seat’s arm. Last year, Josh the city planner broke up with Jane because he said he felt like he was the third wheel. Josh’s area of expertise was bus and bicycle lanes. He used a lot of vehicle metaphors.

“I did not prefer him,” Jane says. “He was needy.”

“I know. He was a third wheel!” One time we went to a movie with Josh, and it wasn’t until after the closing credits that Jane and I realized that, while he’d been in the bathroom, we’d changed our minds and gone to a different film.

Al walks out of the kitchen carrying a huge, steaming vat of chili. Behind Jane, Rafael bends awkwardly toward Amy. She strains on her tiptoes, her blond head tipped back. He looks like he’s in imminent danger of toppling onto her. They kiss, finally, and Jane, noticing that my gaze has drifted, cranes her neck to see what I’m looking at. She laughs. The music has grown louder; the guitar comes to a throbbing crescendo, an ache that reaches inside me, takes me by surprise.

“Well,” Jane says softly, below the din, “those two probably won’t last the week, but in fifty years, when we’re in the home, we’ll still have each other.”

“You’ll have to pluck my chin hairs,” I say.

“I will,” she says. “I promise.” She squints at me, stage-whispers, “You have one now.”

The song ends abruptly. The apartment is warm and smells like beans. “Come and get it,” Al calls cheerfully from the dining room table, where he is beginning to scoop the chili into deep blue bowls.

Jane leans her head back onto the edge of the love seat. Her long neck is birdlike, suddenly vulnerable, and I have the urge to pet it. “Let’s go,” she says, but neither of us gets up. Rafael and Amy unclench and quickly separate. Dozens of party guests begin to move en masse toward the food. They drift past us, and it seems for one dreamy moment as if they are under water, or I am.

Chapter Six

In May of my sophomore year of college, my dad drove up to Madison for a visit. It was his fiftieth birthday, so I baked him a cake. I used a Duncan Hines mix and slathered the finished product with frosting from a can, but for me it was a Herculean effort. It was my first year living off campus, and it had taken me a long time to get the hang of things: it was the year my roommates and I didn’t realize our oven was broken until one day in early April when our landlords were being stingy with the heat, and we tried to turn it on to warm the apartment. Even though I put the frosting on when the cake was still too hot and most of the top layer crumbled up into the thick, gloppy icing, and one side of the cake ended up about two inches higher than the other, it still looked and smelled remarkably edible.

We met at A Tale of Two Zitis, the bookstore/Italian restaurant on State Street frequented by students and their visiting parents. At every other table there was a version of us. Dad had brought his girlfriend, a pleasant, petite, leather-skinned woman Seth and I called Tan Lesley. Lesley’s presence neither delighted nor disappointed me. She’d been a part of the scenery since a few months after our parents divorced, and Stan and Lesley had recently gotten engaged. Lesley didn’t speak much. At any given moment you could tell if she agreed or disagreed with my father by whether she placed her tan hand on his upper arm, or rolled her eyes and clucked her tongue at him. Whenever she talked to me, she announced my name first.
Willa! It’s lovely to see you. Willa! How are your classes this term?

“Willa! Do you know where the little girls’ room is?” I pointed her in the right direction, and she tottered off on her very high heels.

“Stan!” I said. “Will you guys come back to the apartment after dinner?” I wanted to surprise him with my cake.

My dad nodded happily and took another bite of his fettuccine alfredo. When Lesley came back from the bathroom, he jammed another forkful in, and Lesley said, “This place reminds me of that cute little café in Florence we went to a few years ago. The one with the chairs.” She touched my dad’s shoulder and smiled, then popped a cherry tomato into her mouth.

But my dad returned her sunny gaze with a look of distress. His mouth was still full of pasta, his eyes bugged with alarm. It took me all of five seconds to catch on: Lesley. Florence. She was referring to a trip our family had been planning when I was fourteen, about two years before my parents split up. We had been talking about it for ages. Fran and Stan had always wanted to take us to Europe—when we would be old enough to appreciate it, they said, but before Seth went away to college, before we were too grown up to enjoy a family vacation. This was going to be the big one, the big splurge: Austria, where Stan’s grandparents had come from; France; Italy. We had already gotten our passports. I’d spent my babysitting money on travel guides and sketch pads and a leather-bound European trip diary. But one night, a few weeks before we would have left, Stan and Fran called us into the living room and told us that the vacation was off. Just like that. Stan clasped his hands behind his back and told us that an important business
trip had come up for him during the exact same two-week period, that he had to go to Albany and couldn’t get out of it, that he was terribly, terribly sorry to disappoint us. Fran sat on the edge of the ottoman looking ashen.

“Willa,” she said. “Seth. We’ll reschedule the trip. I promise we will.” She covered her face with her hands, and we knew not to ask any questions.

In the restaurant, a waiter rushed past our table; glasses and silverware clinked. “Dad,” I said. I pushed my plate away. My appetite had died, had been crowded out by the tidal wave of disappointment and disgust that was washing over me. “God, Dad.”

Lesley looked at me, her pretty, lined face a relief map of confusion. “What’s wrong, honey?”

I shook my head. Nothing was her fault. Still, I wanted to stab her with my fork.

“Will,” my father said, and I turned to him. I thought about how this could go; I thought about how if he apologized, after all this time, I might never talk to him again: I would look back in thirty years and say,
That was the day I stopped talking to my father.
He kept his small brown eyes fixed on me as he reached for Lesley’s hand. “You know that things have turned out for the best for all of us. I think you do know that.” He leaned over to Lesley and kissed her on the cheek, and she turned her face to him, surprised and pleased. “Well, it’s not always easy to do the right thing,” he said. “We take so many wrong turns.”

Lesley, still smiling to herself, still a bit bemused, turned her attention back to her garden salad.

“Love can be ruthless,” he said. He ran his hand through his hair, which was full and curly and only just starting to go gray. “But we do what we have to do. We make our choices.”

“I have to go,” I said.

“Willa.”

I got up from the table and thanked them for dinner and said I had to get back to study. The restaurant went blurry for a second, and I gripped the edge of my chair.

Stan stood up and walked around the table and put his arm over my shoulders like a man who would not, in fact, apologize for his own happiness, not even to his daughter. And what could I do about that? How could I argue with it? I leaned into his embrace, but only for a second. “Okay,” I said. “See you.”

When I got home I took one look at the birthday cake I had baked, and I wanted to stuff it down the drain, but I also wanted to call Stan and tell him to come over after all. I stared at that lopsided chocolate cake for a full five minutes, and then I carved myself a huge, crumbly slice of it. I called out for my roommates, who were studying; I called out, “Guys, cake break!” and they came, and slice by slice, we ate the whole thing.

But what seems jagged and wrong at nineteen can change, over the years, and seven years is a long time to think about a thing, to turn it over and over in your mind. My dad and Lesley are happy. My mom and Jerry are happy. Seven years is long enough to turn an excuse for the worst kind of behavior into a flawed nugget of wisdom. Take it or leave it. It had always been up to me.

Chapter Seven

“You have to acknowledge your inner truths,” Seth says to me. It’s been a week since he was here last, and he’s slumped at my kitchen table again; he’s unshaven and wearing the same frayed blue T-shirt and sweatpants he wore last week. For a moment it seems possible that he has never left. Right now he’s methodically dipping his index finger into a container of powdered hot cocoa mix and then licking it.

“My inner truth is that that jar of Nesquik is yours,” I say. “You can take it home with you.” I regret instantly my use of the word “home,” because Seth still doesn’t have one. He’s still camped out on his friend Pete’s sofa.

“That’s your outer truth.”

“Okay,” I say lightly, “but I’m not interested in your cooties becoming a part of my inner truth.”

“Oh, my cooties?” Seth glares at me, his voice suddenly serrated, his features twitchy with disdain; immediately I curl up inside myself like a roly-poly bug. This is the thing about Seth, how when I’m with him, time will sometimes whirl backward in a dizzying spin, and without warning I’m the scorned fourteen-year-old little sister, the embarrassed blob of developing flesh, the trash bin for his misplaced anger. I finish drying a mug and,
still stunned, carefully place it right back in the dish rack. When I notice what I’ve done, I leave it there, too proud to move it to the cupboard, to let Seth see he’s rattled me.

I hang the dish towel on the oven door and glare back at my brother, who of course is no longer looking at me. But the fact is, I am just as much Willa-then as Willa-now, just as much fourteen-year-old kid as twenty-six-year-old adult, and although Seth may have the power to flatten me, it helps to remember that I’m not the one who got himself kicked out of his own apartment, I’m not the one spouting self-help platitudes while nursing an endless, insatiable sugar jones, currently licking powered cocoa mix from one wet, wrinkly finger. I’m not the one who, I am just noticing for the first time, has a brand-new silver dollar-sized bald spot on the top of his head.

“So how’s it going at Pete’s?” I say, restraining the urge to plant my hands on my hips. “How’s that couch treating you?”
Baldy.

Seth pauses, considering. “Lumpy,” he says. “And lonely. It’s the perfect combination.”

“Right,” I say, loosening. “How psychically unbalanced would it be if you were sleeping in someone’s well-appointed guest room, on six-hundred-thread-count Egyptian cotton sheets?”

Seth nods. We’re back to normal. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from my brother—and there may be only one thing I’ve learned from my brother—it’s that
opportunities for forgiveness are unlimited. “I know!” he says. “One of the great things about getting dumped by Nina is that all of my friends are pathetic losers like me.”

Seth’s best friend is Pete Moss, a chubby computer genius who sometimes confuses his online avatar—star soccer player for an Italian club—with his real-world self.

“Pete Moss,” I say. I just like to say it.

“Pete Moss,” Seth agrees. “Hey, where’s
your
loser roommate?” He looks around the apartment in an exaggerated way, craning his neck as if he’s just noticing that Jane isn’t here, which obviously is not the case, because he’s had a crush on Jane since he met her. But that’s an uncomfortable fact we don’t acknowledge, given both Seth’s former relationship with Nina, and also Jane’s startling resemblance to me.

“She’s out.”

“Out?”

“Jane is out for dinner with Ben. On a date.” I straighten the dish towel, which is suddenly in dire need of my attention. The corners are really uneven.
ESCAPE TO WISCONSIN!
is emblazoned in bright red on the white cloth. Depending on how you fold it, you can also make it say
ESCAPE WISCONSIN!
or
SPEW SIN!
I pluck at one side, then the other. “They’re on their first date, technically, although the three of us have hung out. But this is just the two of them.”

Seth is silent, except for an unpleasant wet suction slurp. Other than that, he’s quiet for a long time. I crumple the dish towel and look around for something to wipe off, tension inexplicably balling up in my chest. As usual, except for whatever damage I’ve just inflicted on it, the entire kitchen is spotless, sparkling.

“Huh,” Seth says finally.

“Huh?”

“She’s out with Kern?”

“Yes!” I say, slapping my hand on the ancient yellow Formica countertop.
It’s from the Plasticine Era,
Jane says. “What is the big deal?”

“Nothing! Just … dude always had a thing for you.”

“You knew?”

“You didn’t?”

“Noooo,” I say, contemplating whether to tell my brother everything. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“What, back in high school?” Another fact we barely acknowledge: the entire history of our strained relationship. Seth wouldn’t have let me in on his observation about Ben in high school; he was too busy smoking pot, running track, and conducting his lengthy campaign to bulldoze my self-esteem.

“Actually,” I say, “I arranged it. Their date.” It was predictably simple, the time-honored technique of eighth graders everywhere. I told Ben; I pretended Jane had no idea I was spilling the beans: a little tug on his arm,
She likes you.
And Ben, with the easy confidence of a customer whose new toaster comes with a money-back guarantee, asked Jane out.

“Wow,” Seth says. And then he doesn’t say anything else. Outside, a siren screams past our building.

“I think it’s great,” I say. “I think they might make a really good couple.” A thick, savory smell wafts through the apartment: our neighbors’ Friday night dinner. We have never actually met Mr. and Mrs. J. Smith of apartment 7, but we know a lot about them. Garlic, Italian opera, dramatic arguments. It’s too obvious, the generic name, the old-world odors and sounds: witness protection program. “What?” I say finally. I sit down across from Seth and, in spite of myself, reach for the cocoa powder and dip my finger into it.