The Good Neighbor (10 page)

Invent him.

*   *   *

That Sunday I didn't have to invent anything. I just had to hang out with Rachel and the kids in the real world. It was Rachel's world where we'd be hanging out, and I liked it there. It reminded me of what was possible. A happy marriage, a full minivan, realized dreams.

Rachel lifted her laptop from the old-barn-wood-now-new-coffee-table and placed it on her knees so I could see the monitor. Even in the house, just waiting for me, she wore a heather-gray cotton knit dress and purple tights. Rachel could always answer the door or leave home on a whim. I, in my
good
yoga pants, had barricaded myself into the corner of her family-room sectional. My arm slid across the microfiber cushion. The sensation was light and ticklish, but unwelcome, like a spider. I pulled down my sleeve.

“So, what's it like to be famous?” Rachel asked.

“I'm not famous.”

“You're totally famous.” She clicked on a tab and the
Philly over Forty
page appeared across her monitor. And there I was. Hidden for the world to see under my pixelated cap.

Rachel's middle finger slid across the touch pad and she tapped, opening up my latest post.

“Look at all those comments! And they're from everywhere, did you notice? And the ads?” She pointed to the sidebar. “That Andrew Mann is everywhere. Did you see that new animated billboard on 95?”

I had not.

“And you're totally helping all these people figure out their own dating stuff. It's so cool. Let's read them. I can be your assistant.” She clapped her hands together. “I'll read the comments out loud and can tell you which ones you want to answer. I'm going to read every post and every comment anyway.”

Rachel looked at me and smiled, her deep dimple revealing itself in her freckled left cheek. I envied those freckles as a child. Now I was glad I didn't have to worry about covering them with foundation. Otherwise, I coveted Rachel's life. But I didn't want her not to have it.

“It's okay to be proud of yourself, you know.” She bumped me with her shoulder. “It's pretty awesome. The Internet is amazing.”

“I have to tell you something.”

“Oh, good! I have to tell you something, too.”

“You go first!” we yelled in unison, each pointing at the other. Then we burst out laughing, Rachel's head landing on my shoulder, our bellies rising and falling in time to our chuckles and heaves. We did that often as children, said the same thing at the same time. And now, like then, every time our chuckles slowed, our breathing softened, one of us started again with an eruption of overzealous squeals. My side hurt with the joyful release of stress. Every time we looked at each other we started again, the way we did during long seder dinners when we were supposed to be quiet, or even at Saturday-morning services, where the
alter kockers
gave us the evil eye.

“Tell me about Mac.”

“You know about Mac.”

“For real, tell me. Don't make me read about him. What's he like? What do you like about him? I know you don't want me to meet him yet, I understand you're being cautious, but you can tell me something, can't you?”

Surely Rachel would understand why I lied about Mac, why I kept up the deception longer than I'd intended. We could always look across her mother's dining-room table and know what the other was thinking. Just a glance and one of us would ask to be excused or distract her father while the other took extra cookies. I looked at Rachel and saw the little girl of countless sleepovers in her basement. I wanted Rachel to know what I was going through. Why couldn't she look at me and just
know
?

“You think about it—and I'll go first this time,” she said as if she'd just run a marathon.

“No, let me go first, it's really important.” I grabbed her hand to stop her from tapping on the keyboard.

“So is this.” She looked over her shoulder toward the playroom where all the kids were entrenched in LEGO. Rachel pivoted the laptop toward me. She never asked to go first. It was her turn. “I'm planning my reunion, right?”

“Riiiight.” Rachel was a year younger than me, so our milestones were always a year apart, which made it fun. Bat mitzvahs, proms, graduations. Mine always came first … until it came to weddings. But then I got back in the groove with my divorce. With that I wouldn't be first, I'd be only. “You want to talk about your reunion now?”

“Not just the reunion. Look.”

I stared at the monitor and there he was. Jeremy Goldfarb. Rachel's boyfriend from high school, college, and beyond stared back at me from his high school graduation photo, his eighteen-year-old eyes half-hidden by nineties-guy bangs.

“Everyone finds old boyfriends online, Rache. Are you going to tell me you've never looked for Jeremy before?”

“He wasn't on Facebook until a few weeks ago. I'm not online all the time like you, missy.”

Really? Then how was it that every time I looked on Facebook she had posted a new photo? “Great, he'll go to the reunion and Seth can see the boy who tormented you for ten years before you met him.”

“Seth's not going to the reunion.”

“Why?”

“I told him I'd be too busy and he'd have no one to hang out with.”

It was probably true. “So do you think
he'll
go?” I was pretty sure that Rachel's first love, Jeremy Goldfarb, had lasted until the day she met Seth. Maybe longer.

“Of course
he'll
go; he's on the committee.” She rose from the sofa in one fluid motion. “Should we give the kids lunch?”

“Wait.” I stood and grabbed Rachel's arm. I swung her around toward me as if we were competing on
Dancing with the Stars
. “You're in touch with Jeremy Goldfarb?”

She turned away and sighed. Sighed!

“Rachel, don't you turn your back on me.” I almost said
young lady
. “What is going on?”

“Nothing. We're just friends. It's nice to be in touch.”

“Since when?”

“Since we started planning the reunion.”

“I thought
you
were planning your reunion.”

“You don't think I'm doing it alone, do you? There has to be a committee and Jeremy offered to be my cochair.”

“What does Seth think of this?”

“He doesn't care.”

“He doesn't
care
or he doesn't
know
?”

“He doesn't know but he wouldn't care.”

“Rachel, you wouldn't have shown me this unless there was something you wanted me to know. You're not random or casual. You're very deliberate. You think everything through.”

Rachel scurried to the kitchen and I followed at her heels. Without talking, we gathered cold elbow noodles out of the fridge and a box of chicken nuggets from the freezer. I sliced green apples. Rachel ran cold water into the noodles in a colander and juggled plastic plates, juice boxes, and colorful silverware. She multitasked as if an octopus.

“He's married, Iz.”

“You're married, too.”

“Oh, thanks for the reminder.” She slid nuggets into the convection oven, poked straws through juice pouches, and dealt plates, napkins, and colorful kid silverware onto the kids' table. Every action seemed to punctuate her statement with sarcasm. “Because making dinner for six people every night, four of whom complain about it, and driving a van that seats eight and can turn into Disneyland with the touch of a button isn't enough of a reminder.”

“All you ever wanted was a minivan full of kids. It's all
we
ever wanted.” I stepped back, away from her, almost sitting on the kitchen table.

“No, it's what
you
wanted. A picnic table with boys on one side and girls on the other, all dressed in OshKosh overalls with you sitting at the foot of the table and your imaginary husband sitting at the head of it. How's that working out for you?”

I stopped moving, and not just at the mention of my “imaginary husband.” I stopped because she had slammed the truth over my head.

“I'm sorry, that was mean.”

That it was. But it was also true. “You're right. That was mean. I'm a daydreamer. I want things I don't have. I want people I don't have. I don't even mean Bruce. I mean the life, the kids, the plans.” The words had a bitter aftertaste. I had never before said them aloud. Now I knew why. They tasted rancid.

“I'm sorry. I'm just stressed. And it's an escape, that's all. Planning something that is just for me and has nothing to do with Seth or the kids. It's been a long time. I don't get time off from parenting, or a new, exciting relationship, like you do.”

“Noah hasn't seen Bruce in weeks! Do you know what that's like? And there's never really time off when you're a mom, no matter who you are. You know that. And as for a new, exciting anything…”

She stopped fussing with the food and turned to me, eyes wide.

“It's not all it's cracked up to be. So I'm pretty sure you don't want it.”

Rachel put her arm around my waist. “I'm sorry.”

I kissed the top of her head. I could never stay mad at her.

“I have another one of those stupid hospital black-tie things next weekend,” Rachel returned to her job of fixing lunch. “Maybe you and Mac could come. Seth could get extra tickets.”

“I don't think so.”

“Why not? You could leave Noah here with my kids and the sitter. He'd have a blast.”

“I'm just not ready to go public with Mac.”

“You're not ready to go public? Do you know how ridiculous that sounds?”

I shrugged. Fake Mac had a little social anxiety. “Next time, maybe?”

“Deal, but I'm going to hold you to it. There's something in June…”

“If I'm still with Mac, I'll put it on my calendar.”

Rachel turned back to the oven. “I know you don't want to hear me complain about getting dressed up and going out, but it's not fun like going out on dates with a new guy, when everything is exciting. This is an obligation. And if you haven't noticed, I don't have my pre-baby body back yet.” She looked down, from one hip to the other.

What Rachel didn't say was that she had never had the quintessential pre-baby body and that Arielle, her youngest, was three years old.

“Those are new.” I pointed with my chin to a small collection of plants nestled close together on the windowsill. In the middle of winter. “Are those herbs?”

“They are.”

The oven dinged and I grabbed the ketchup and honey mustard from the fridge and wiped the insides of the lids even though they were clean. Sometimes I imagined Rachel with a stockroom full of new bottles purchased just for me. It was more likely that we'd both inherited the Lane aversion to condiment crust.

“Lunchtime!”

Rachel held the doorjamb the way her mother had held on to the windowsill and called to us years ago. That moment echoed a time filled with white bread and peanut butter and inappropriate language in front of children. When the grown-ups sputtered in whispered, broken Yiddish, the language of their grandparents, just so we wouldn't understand, when in reality we didn't care what they were saying.

Our own kids gathered on the sunporch, heated for winter, and we sat in the kitchen gobbling leftover Chinese with pull-apart chopsticks. No white bread, no Yiddish.

I looked through and beyond our five offspring, out at the covered pool and wide-open, bright winter sky. When I looked out the window onto Good Street, I saw row houses. If I looked up, I saw my personal rectangle of sky. I had always wanted a bigger piece of sky, and I'd always had it at Rachel's. I never begrudged her the breadth of her view, but today it reminded me of what I didn't have. And it reminded me of what she could lose if she went down an online black hole with Jeremy.

“Jeremy is still really funny.” Rachel stood and leaned into the basil. She left her nose in the leaves, but shifted to the parsley, as if it would agree.

A swirl of panic circled my middle. “Exactly how often do you talk to him?”

“I don't talk to him. We message. Online. It's not a big deal. It's all about the reunion.” Her words were quick, strung together without a breath, yet they sounded rehearsed. Of course Rachel knew what she'd say to me. She was a planner.

“Why don't you tell him you don't need his help?”

“But I do.”

“Rache, no.”

“It's a reunion, Iz.”

Deliberate name abbreviations were always a sign of trouble between us.

“What kind of reunion?”

“Knock it off.”

My phone buzzed.

“Who's that? Is it Mac? Oh, I wish you would tell me his real name! Answer it. I want to hear his voice! He doesn't have to know!”

“No!” I grabbed my phone and walked headfirst into the corner. Head down, I scrolled through the texts and alerts. Jade/Pop Philly/Ethan/Jade again. I was never going to get anything done if they didn't leave me alone.

“What is going on with Mac?”

“Nothing is going on with Mac. I just forgot to shut off my phone. Now, where were we? Right. Jeremy. We were talking about
you
.”

“I thought you'd get a kick out of me reconnecting with Jeremy after all this time.”

Yes, a kick in the gut.

I knew how time dissolved in the moment it took to share a memory. I hit my cousin with my
Are you crazy?
stare the way I did the first time she added grape juice into the Manischewitz bottle after we drank it. “This is dangerous, Rache. You can't have a relationship with your old boyfriend.”

“Izzy. There is nothing going on.” She twirled on one foot and landed hard. “I love Seth. And, in case this scene has escaped your line of vision, I have four kids and a mortgage and a Disney vacation villa with Seth.”