She Matters (15 page)

The last visit I made to her, I'd taken the bus from New York out to the Hamptons, Daniel a toddler in my arms, board books all the way, one after the other. My lap was dark with his pee as we climbed down the bus stairs. Debra, leaning against her car across the street, laughed to notice the damp and ran over, delighted, kissed Daniel. At her house she washed my pants. She fished through a couple of deep baskets in the laundry room, plucked out a Patagonia hat that her daughter had outgrown and put it on my boy's head. “There! Perfect!” I felt his anointment. She wore sheepskin scuff slippers, so now I wanted a pair. “Where'd you get those?” I asked. She wore thin sweatpants in dark crimson, chic somehow, and when she leaned low to retrieve a bowl from a cabinet, a line of colored lace and mesh was revealed against her skin. She stirred everything in me, made me whole and happy, though I could not have said why.

“Are you wearing a
thong
?”

“I know! Thongs,
right
? But you
have
to trust me. They are fabulous, the most comfortable thing ever.”

She showed me her workspace, a desk that hadn't been there the last time, where she sat every dark morning and wrote for two hours before her daughter woke. I did that, too. She told me about the novel and the agent who'd sold it based on the proposal, what good friends they were. I didn't have an agent. She had a new fiery purpose, which made her more luscious, yet it distracted her. She listed trade details with the confidence of someone already sick of them. Her attention wasn't the same, when it had been on me, and mine was also different. My son's curls were visible in the sun as he bobbed around her backyard, and I watched him through the
open glass door as he followed her much bigger daughter. I said, “Oh, wow,” and “That's great,” and tried to offer pure support, but I was flooded with the old news from her kitchen, the old wanting of everything she liked and bought. I badly wanted her to be as I'd left her, and at the same time I wished to be home in Missoula, where I had a clock like hers on the kitchen wall, where I had thrown catalogs into a basket by the back door, because Debra did that and it made me happy to evoke her, though I didn't look at the catalogs, never ordered from them. She took me up to her room and went through her closets. She gave me an expensive V-neck she didn't wear anymore, clingy and dark green. She let me try her M•A•C lipsticks. “Viva Glam, that's it,” she said. “Everyone needs at least one Viva Glam.” We walked with the kids into town, the slow, distracted bumble, where we went inside her favorite shop and she tried to talk me into buying the thongs, exorbitant trifles. I couldn't afford them. Daniel and I slept in her daughter's bunk bed, me on the upper in whimsical sheets, patterned with the alphabet. In the morning I said, “Where do you get these?” and planned to buy them for my house, my son. Always, the two children were everywhere between us, and she threw open cabinets, made us food. It was hard to keep a thought going.

When she was stuck in her novel, she phoned and asked if I'd help her. This thrilled me, and the heavy packet appeared the next day. I read with a pen in hand and ticked and drew arrows, rallying my best thinking for her. I sent back the manuscript, and a week later another padded envelope arrived, pink and purple tissue paper festive inside, and I pulled out five pairs of the expensive underwear, Debra's glamour and élan. The next time I was in New York, I happened to pass a boutique that sold them, and I went in and bought myself two more pairs, the cost on the receipt tribute to Debra's big ways, her unchecked permissions.

One day I noticed we hadn't spoken in months, and I left a message. We needed to recalibrate an imbalance. No response. I left a few more. After several days Debra called and in a tight, odd voice that contained no echo of our intimacy, said, “I'm going through something and I have to disappear and you have to trust me.” I hadn't the faintest idea what she meant. I pondered her words, scanning for a break in her womanly code.

• • •

We arranged to meet in Sun Valley, the mutual particulars of schedule and travel coinciding for a long weekend, our two families together. We hadn't seen each other in five or six years, which didn't matter, really, in parent time. We each knew without hearing how the other spent her time, what the back of the other's car looked like, how weekends were ruled by soccer games or recitals or school fund-raisers. Her family got to the condo late. I'd waited up, and I leapt for her as they came in tired, their many bags bulked in the entry. I pressed forward to grab her, shoulders the same, the soft black sweater under my touch. “God, at last!” we were saying and rocked together, the stored excitement out. “Oh my God, I've missed you.” In the morning, we drank coffee and built a fire. Dylan—that baby—was fourteen, knees and legs, and long hair coiled up in a stretchy headband. She kept her earphones in and left uneaten bagel on the kitchen counter. I'd seen her sprawled in the center of Debra and Dean's bed. I knocked, and Debra called, “Come in!” She stood midroom, said, “We're doing this face peel!” The mask made a green plastery skin on them both, and Dylan sat with one long loose leg over the side of the bed, stroking green varnish onto her nails. The bed was a littering of vampire paperbacks, CD jewel cases. They were talking at the same time, stumbling over their amusement. Debra tapped
the cake on her face, handed her daughter a washcloth so Dylan could wipe hers off. “There's still some on your neck,” her mother said. To me she said, “You have to try this, do you know Lush?” I couldn't help making a note of it.

They jostled each other, picked sweaters out of open suitcases and threw them back, tossed shoes around. Debra went in and out of the bathroom, they didn't bother with whole sentences. “But, Mom,
Mom!
Listen,
” thoughts bursting as half phrases. “It was this
awful
—” “I told you,” and Debra looked over at me to let me into the conversation, but I didn't want in. I hovered like someone waiting for a tip. She was alight with intense love for another girl, another devotee. It's her
daughter,
I thought, but in me it surged: not fair. The bottomless wanting and no woman to answer it. I knew to get out of there, and closed the door.

We left Dylan in charge of the kids, and the two couples went to a restaurant. I'd just published an essay in a magazine, and I was telling them about assignments, the sudden splurge of an awakened identity. I was proud to share this with Debra, to follow her.

“Why can't I have that?” she asked Dean. “That's the career I want.”

“You had that,” he said. “Now you're doing something else.”

“Look at you guys,” I said. “You're so together.” My husband and I were barely interested in the other one, except in our united daily persuasion of our children.

“It comes back,” said Debra. “I know you can't believe me right now, but it really does, and
you'll have lunches
together, long talks again, when both your kids are in school.” She gave me a look: the sex. “It's so much better.”

“It's true,” Dean said.

If Debra said it, I believed it. If Debra had it, I'd wait for it.

I kept wanting to ask about her disappearance, that weird halt
in our connection, when she'd suspended our contact. Had this figured in their cozy renewal? I thought I'd wait till we had privacy, but her splendid chattering, her bubbling, never waned. There was no chance, and when I imagined what truth I might hear, I found I didn't want to learn.

The next day she and I planned to go to the thrift shop I'd told her about, for the cashmere sweaters and couture coats cast off by last season's wealthy skiers. Dylan wanted to come. “This is great,” Debra whispered. “She hardly ever wants to do things with me anymore.” In a clumsy row the three of us walked into town. The girl had been lovable strapped into her high chair, unable to join our talk, but now her silence commanded us, her mother trying to undo it with bright questions.

At the thrift shop, Debra pulled things off the rack for her daughter, and Dylan sorted through clothes for her mother. Each with an armload, they went behind a curtain, sharing the tight space and narrow mirror of the stall. I heard Debra exclaim, Dylan object, the giggling. Her ankles flashed and disappeared and reemerged as she pulled on white jeans, ski pants, velvet trousers, kicked them off again. Not those, oh, that's nice, let's get that! I waited in a wicker chair, clothes on my lap.

Debra's hand, the wedding band, appeared at the top of the curtain, grasping the rings to move it aside, and as she started to back out I saw them caught facing the mirror as one body, one in front of the other. It was over, Debra undone from me, outgrown. She had a daughter to wear her skin creams and earrings; she would not enclose me again with devoted attention, and I was worn out with forcing my ruin and longing upon woman after woman.

• • •

Debra and I never shared real life, not for a minute. In Sag Harbor, I had acted a village role, a temporary assignment. She drove into the city once, and we had an elegant lunch in midtown, but she'd come to the restaurant from somewhere, and had to be off again straight after. She never saw my apartment. We didn't even walk a block. We didn't share quite the same era, my eight-year lag part of our security. And when it came down to it I didn't care what had prompted her weird, sudden silence. Her hugeness happened not with me but inside me. For a time we used the phone, and we had the one resort weekend. At the end of that visit we told each other how much it had meant, what a good and necessary next step this was, onward, but it was not that. It showed us the way out, opened the late-night door at the end of the party for the good-byes. We didn't say the good-byes. No one would have.

Two months later, success came to me and upended normal life. I gathered my closest friends on the front lawn for impromptu champagne, then over the next few days phoned others far away, but I could not call Debra. This news, I sensed, would not fall easily into place. “She'll hear about it,” I thought. “She'll call.” She didn't. Months of a silent friend became a year, which, I realized, didn't feel exactly bad, a recognition—mutual perhaps—that Sun Valley had been our finish. I'd check in with her, I decided, when I was done writing the book, but I didn't do it, held back by nervousness and unsure which of us was waiting for whom. A year later my name appeared in the
Times
. I could picture Debra's oversize kitchen table in noble, seasoned oak, Dylan gone to school, the empty, pleasing house. I pictured the white cup, Debra with black coffee as she sat to look through the paper, and she would have turned the page and seen my picture. Maybe she didn't recognize me at first, the publicity photo a structured fake, but at the sight of my name she might have made a sound, felt glad.
Wouldn't she call? I imagined the paper spread open all day, set out for Dean to see when he got home.

• • •

So much time has gone by that for me to call her, or for her to call me, would signal a dead child or a divorce, rock-bottom emergency. It would sharpen focus on the finish of our friendship, embarrass us. Who wants to explain? Simply, we do not know each other. The friendship fluttered heartily, then diminished, then stopped. I wear her V-neck top, prize her unique crackle, prettiness, talent, breathy confidence, womanly chic and charisma and the smooth appearance that she knew what she was doing, but Debra herself only echoes. I still contemplate the gap, those cold, dropped months when I had no access to her mysteries. The friendship shines but stays put. That's different than missing her. I doubt she misses me. There's no evidence to say she does.

N
ina wrought a petite medallion out of gold, stamped with
40
in her strong, antique hand. “Wait, you made this?” I said on the phone, as I examined the minuscule perfections. She said, “I make one for each of my women friends when she turns forty.” I was touched and grateful. Her bounties came in these unexpected ways, always meticulous, her talents upon talents private until she decided to reveal them. It was hard to turn the focus to her. I thought that's what we shared, a deep certainty that someone's interest might be a trick. We both knew how to make others feel entirely special. I wore the tiny disk the whole year, proclamation on a short chain, the precious metal in the dip of my throat.

• • •

We weren't yet friends when I left New York in 1993, and it was distance that sponsored us. She had just married someone in my social crew. He'd met her beyond our bounds, and they went one afternoon to City Hall, announced it to us later. She unsettled the rest of us, her careful regard, the imperious flavor in her brisk voice. Did she like us? Would we ever know? Her fine hair angled close to the back of her neck, cut boy-short. Nina had pared herself to bare elements: shades of black against white T-shirts, square-toed black shoes, clean jewelry. She used no makeup. Absent adornment, her naked strength shone through. She had a
sleek portfolio, the flat canvas strap across the front of her plain, smooth T-shirt. You could tell the cotton was excellent.

• • •

We were immersed in the toughest sort of fairy tale, daughters in a bind. We knew the term
stepmother
was a stand-in, an excuse to prevent
mother,
aloud. That word made us shiver, teeth gritted. But Nina and I didn't back down. We said “mother,” tasted bile. When I visited New York I met Nina in small dark restaurants, midafternoon, her freelancer's schedule convenient for both of us. We had miso soup or salads of cabbage and cucumber, white vinegar. Aware of the midnight strike on our time when I'd disappear back to Montana, we sped through talk, cramming in as much as possible. We sifted the rubble of our relationships with our mothers. What we both wished of our mothers was to leave them. You have no idea how much this mattered, our solemn admission, the assured company in case we ever did it.