Friendship (28 page)

On her way out, she asked one of the old ladies whether the soup kitchen happened every day, and she was disappointed to learn that it happened only once a week. She wanted to feel that way every day. She wondered if it counted as being good if you did the good thing for purely selfish reasons. Probably not, but who cared. What was important was what you did, not how you felt.

43

Bev didn’t want to get too dressed up to meet with the dean; the point was to demand better financial aid as a condition of her return to the program, so she didn’t want to look like she had any money. Flicking through her closet, she picked a dryer-fried tunic and black leggings, plus the pretty new clogs she’d bought with her employee discount at the boutique. The dean was a dude; there was almost no chance he’d register them as expensive. Pulling the tunic over her head and then down over her giant stomach was a task. Once again, standing in profile in the mirror and feeling alternating bouts of horror and wonder at what was happening to her, she marveled at her unwieldy body.

She was already running slightly late and would be later if she spent any more time staring at herself, so she finished dressing and bolted the rest of her coffee before hustling to the C train. She could still move fast. A meaningful throat-clearing was necessary to get a seat this time, but soon she had a nice, solid perch on the hard plastic. She planted her feet wide, like a man, and took out the folder of forms she had to review before the meeting. You had to look busy all the time on the train or people fucked with you, she’d discovered. Busybodies asked when you were due, religious old men blessed you—all kinds of strangers wanted to touch you. But she had gotten to the point where she could shut it down with a cold stare. Already, motherhood had sharpened her defenses.

The dean’s office was in the university’s renovated Thirteenth Street building, where everything was so new that it smelled like paint and wet concrete. As she was no longer a student, the front desk guard made her stand there while he scrutinized her driver’s license, called up to the dean, then issued her a sticker that gave her access. It hardly seemed like New York City’s third-best private university would be number one on any terrorist’s to-do list, but she supposed she was happy for the guards that they had jobs.

It was midsemester, and no one else was waiting to see the dean. He ushered her straight into his office, a small, unwindowed space that he’d tried to render cozy via a desk lamp and a wall of African masks. He hadn’t unpacked his books yet, and the empty shelves behind his desk made him seem more like what he was: a middle manager for a smallish corporation, to whom Bev was something between an employee and a liability.

The dean steepled his hands and smiled. She smiled back from her chair on the opposite side of the desk and waited for him to speak. He was her father’s age and wore little round glasses. She could see his gaze darting down to her stomach and then correcting itself, zooming back up to the safe zone above her collarbones. Finally, no one had spoken for so long that she began to want to put him out of his misery.

“So I want to come back next semester and complete my master’s, but my financial situation makes it really difficult for me to do so. I was out of school for long enough that I started having to pay the interest on my loans. I am really committed to finishing my degree, and I hope I’ve been a worthwhile addition to the program here. I have some letters here from my teachers … they’re all very eager to have me back in class. I’ve applied for a teaching fellowship and all the available scholarships, but even if I got them all, I’d still be taking out loans for the remaining seventeen thousand. And the stipend the fellowship provides is less than I make at my retail job, so it doesn’t make a lot of sense for me to take hours away from that job to do a lower-paying one … I’m sorry if this is rude, but I’m wondering how anyone does this. And I’m hoping you can help me. I mean, like I said, I do want to finish.”

The dean chose his words carefully. “We also want that for you. You’re a great asset to the program. But we’re not … in a position of being able to offer additional financial aid at this point. The university in general has not chosen to make that a priority.”

“I know. They’ve decided to knock down giant buildings and build new ones instead. I bet you wish the money that went into designing this fancy building was in your paycheck instead—no offense.” She felt reckless and powerful, physically big and with nothing to lose. She could say whatever she wanted.

“None taken. I don’t … Beverly, you understand that I’m just speaking theoretically here, right?”

“Um, sure.”

The little round glasses seemed not to have a nosepiece; they were perpetually in danger of slipping down the dean’s nose.

“Well, I am a great fan of our program, of course, and feel that it is among the finest of its kind. But it’s hardly the only one. In fact, there are several M.F.A. programs in creative writing that give full scholarships to every student they admit. Maybe you should consider applying to one of them.”

“But none of the work I’ve done here would transfer. None of the credits, I mean. I’d have to start over from the beginning.”

“Well, that’s true.”

“And none of those programs are in New York City, which is where I live. Where my life is. Where all my friends live.” Bev suddenly thought of Amy, whom she hadn’t heard from since the day Amy asked for money. Bev had heard a rumor from a mutual friend that Amy really did move back in with her parents.

“It’s two years.” The dean pressed his hands together and slowly moved them from side to side, a gesture almost of wiping them clean.

“And would you recommend me, personally? You’d write me a letter of recommendation?”

He looked up at the corner of the room then, and Bev had the bizarre thought that he feared that the room was bugged. Maybe the room
was
bugged. He lowered his voice significantly. “I would feel like it was the least I could do. I think what we’re doing here is just as disgusting as you think it is—bilking kids who dream of being writers out of tens of thousands of dollars, with only the vague promise that they might be able to get jobs as writing instructors at the end of it. I mean, for rich kids it’s one thing. But with someone like you, it’s obscene.” He straightened up again. “Speaking theoretically, that is.”

“I wish you’d mentioned that when I was first admitted.”

He shrugged. “Would you have listened?”

“I’m listening now.”

44

Amy had found a job working at the Ben & Jerry’s in Georgetown, a job she would have considered beneath her in high school. She was hired as a manager, thanks to a recommendation from Chrissie at the soup kitchen, who’d lied when they called to check her references and said she’d been supervising meal preparation there for years. She had far more responsibilities at Ben & Jerry’s than she’d had at Yidster, a shocking number of which involved math. That was heinous, but other aspects of the job were almost fun, such as how the mostly teenage employees actually seemed, to some extent, to respect her. Maybe it was just that she was older than they were, but for whatever reason, they didn’t sass her and seemed scared enough of her not to try to get away with bullshit sick days or clocking out early. She was nice to them, but not too nice. One of them, Alicia, was pregnant, and every time Amy saw her, she was uncomfortably reminded of Bev. But Bev wasn’t pregnant anymore: she’d had her baby. Sally had called Amy during Bev’s labor, but Amy had avoided answering her phone. After that, calling Bev had become progressively less possible with each passing day, until it ceased to be thinkable at all.

At first she thought she’d live with her parents and save money until she could afford to move back to New York, but as her paychecks accumulated and her debt began to slowly subside, she began to think that she might as well accept that she was living in the D.C. area and try to have an actual life there, which entailed finding a place on her own. Looking for apartments was at least not as harrowing as it was in New York. She just went to the rental office of one of the high-rises in downtown Silver Spring after comparing prices and amenities online, and she filled out an application, listing her job as “manager, food service,” her salary, and her mother as her most recent landlord. Her application was accepted that same day, and she moved into a studio the following afternoon with help from her dad and Mike F. from the soup kitchen, who helped carry the futon she was borrowing from her parents’ basement until she could afford to buy an Ikea bed of her own. She hadn’t made the payments on the storage locker where her New York furniture was languishing, and she suspected it had all been thrown out or sold; it was mostly worn-out anyway. There had been a painting of Sam’s in there, and she hoped that whoever bought it, probably for a discount price, was aware of the deal they’d gotten.

There wasn’t a lot to unpack; too soon, she was done pulling her clothes from the suitcase, hanging them in the little closet, and figuring out where to put her folding chair in relation to the card table, where she figured she’d watch TV on her laptop. There was a view of what could charitably be called the Silver Spring skyline from floor-to-ceiling windows on one side, and she positioned the chair so that she could stare out toward the Metro station across the street below and watch the trains come and go. She thought about the first night she’d spent in her lovely brownstone apartment, how Bev had intuited that she’d been feeling lonely and had come over with sushi and wine. She couldn’t even stand to think about how much she missed Bev. She would kill for some sushi, too.

She had just counted the fifteenth train when she heard a slow, strange creak, then a deafening crash.

The futon frame she’d assembled somewhat hastily, without consulting the instructions, had collapsed, sending nuts and bolts and shards of plywood flying. Amy sighed and resigned herself to spending the next few hours figuring out what had gone wrong, but as she went to turn the frame over and figure out how to fix it, she saw something that made her blood run cold: a tabby-striped tail sticking out from underneath the frame at an awkward angle.

She screamed, of course, then realized that the walls were thin in her cheap building and that this was not the way she wanted to meet her neighbors, and she limited herself to cursing loudly. “Fucking, fuck, fuck,
fuck
!
Shit! Augh!
” Had she squashed Waffles? She could not, would not deal with the aftermath if she had. Except, what if he was still alive and just horribly maimed and in pain, or even possibly could be saved? She tried to make herself calm down. “Waffles? Buddy?” she called tentatively, approaching the edge of the futon. She heard a muffled meow.

Waffles, the last remaining thing she valued from her old life—and, more important, her companion, her last loyal friend. She could not be responsible for his death. Steeling herself to face the worst, she reached under the collapsed frame and touched soft fur. “It’s gonna be okay, buddy,” she made herself say, even though she was crying, silent tears coursing down her face.

She felt him wriggle under her hand, and then he seemed to suddenly get free from whatever had trapped him. Waffles bolted out from under the frame and ran into the bathroom. Amy ran into the bathroom too, to find a seemingly undamaged Waffles sitting on the tile, tail fluffed up to full alarm position and licking himself violently but otherwise apparently unscathed.

“Um, you’re kidding. You’re fine, really?”

Waffles looked up at her, seeming slightly annoyed by her presence. He lowered his face to his groin and licked the base of his bristling tail.

“No internal bleeding? If you die later because I didn’t take you to the vet now, I’m going to be annoyed,” she told him, hearing the tremble in her voice. She was talking to her cat. Well, who even cared. She bent to pet him and inspect him for obvious injury, which he grudgingly allowed her to do. “Oh, Waffles. I’m so sorry, Waffles.”

She sat there petting him for a long time, then went back to her laptop, where she started writing Bev an email.

45

In order to start writing, Amy had to imagine Bev reading her email. She held an image of Bev in her mind, but it was hard to figure out what Bev could be doing in this fantasy. Okay: she thought of Bev balancing the sleeping baby on her hip as she sat in front of her computer. The details of the baby were vague. All babies look similar anyway, she figured, features indistinct, not yet shaped or warped by the experiences that create personality. Maybe it’s been a long day and Bev is just getting home from work, having picked the baby up at Sally’s, and the baby’s asleep and now she’s in her silent apartment, feeling tired and satisfied but lonely. Amy tried to imagine Bev feeling happy to receive an email from her. Finally the image was vivid enough, and she could begin.

Dear Bev,

I wish I had been there for the birth. I didn’t think you would want me there. But now I feel like I should have come regardless. So, sorry about that, and about everything else.

I want to say that I always imagined that I would be at your side for the birth of your children, but that would be a lie: I never imagined that you would have a child. I must have thought we would always stay essentially the same as we were when we met. I didn’t imagine any other futures might be possible for us. Well, that’s a lie too. I imagined all kinds of possibilities for myself, but I didn’t do the same for you. And those rosy futures I imagined for myself were bullshit, anyway, which should have been obvious, because I did know that I wasn’t doing anything to make them real. And I was counting on you to be the same way, which was what made it so hard when it turned out you were going to be a mother. You were right: I was jealous! And I feel horrible about feeling jealous, especially because I know it wasn’t easy, and at first at least it wasn’t what you wanted. That part was hard to understand. I thought I was just trying to help you realize what was best for you. That was bullshit, too, though: the whole time, I was only thinking about what was best for me.