Friends Like Us Page 11

  Declan is standing in the middle of the living room with his hands stuffed into the back pockets of his khaki shorts. I idly straighten the spines of a few cocked books on the shelf. “Can we postpone our …” I won’t say date.

  “You need to take care of her.” He tilts slightly, like the books, toward Jane’s room, and I nod. “I’ll be back next week,” he says. “We’ve a new client in town. And anyway, even if we didn’t.” Years ago, Declan told me that no Irishman looks good in shorts. It’s true. On him, they look strangely both too long and too short, baggy, yet also somehow taut. He shifts his weight. “Why are you looking at me like that?” And instead of answering—Because nobody said anything, but you know Jane needs me; because your legs look like white fence posts poking out of your shorts; because you were sort of my boyfriend for about ten minutes, three years ago—I move closer to him and lean in, press my warm cheek to his: a suggestion of a possibility, a very likely maybe.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Ben comes over to our apartment late. From my bedroom, I hear them argue.

  “Because!” Jane says. “Because I would rather do this alone. Well, it’s as good as being alone when I’m with Will. It’s just easier with her.”

  Ben’s low murmur is harder to make out: … want to support you.

  “It’s not supportive to insist on coming with me when I don’t want you to!”

  … as if you don’t trust me.

  “You’re not hearing me!”

  They don’t fight often; they’re not very good at it. I lie in my bed and squeeze my eyes shut, listening hard. Long silences are punctuated by confusing outbursts. Whatever you want! It’d be nice if you meant that! Eventually, very late, Jane’s door clicks shut. I hear the soft thump of footsteps, a pause outside my door. And then the front door closes with a thud.

  It’s still dark when Jane wakes me. I squint at my clock, which glows with numbers that should only exist if they’re followed by P.M. I look up at Jane, her round face like a full moon looming over me. My eyes are bleary with sleep. “Really?” I croak.

  “Sorry, Willard,” she whispers. “Come on. I’ll drive, and I won’t say a word. You can just keep sleeping.” She pulls the sheet from my shoulders. “You won’t have to do a thing, baby. Just lie back and think of England!”

  I hoist myself out of bed and throw on a shirt and jeans, trudge behind her, zombielike, out the door, down the stairs, and across the street to the lot where she parks her car.

  But, as we drive away from Milwaukee, as we pick up speed and barrel down the vast and empty County Trunk Highway CCC toward her hometown, Jane’s calm exterior begins to crumble. The closer we get to Marcy, the more anxious she becomes. As the wheat fields blow past, she white-knuckles the steering wheel and starts talking.

  “How could he have done this?” she asks, and doesn’t wait for an answer. “Do you know, my dad had a special arrangement with our local grocery store when I was a kid, to buy their recently expired yogurt and overripe produce for cheap?” She purses her lips, remembering. “I had no idea until very recently that bananas were supposed to be yellow. I honestly can’t recall him ever buying himself new clothes or a watch or anything. He wears the same slippers he’s had since I was a kid. Blue fleecy things. Imagine how gross they are!” She smacks the edge of the steering wheel. “Like dead animals! His glasses frames are from 1985. They’re so out of style I think they might be back in. When I left for college he gave me a suitcase he bought on clearance at Macy’s, monogrammed with the name JAN.” She launches into a passing imitation of him, her voice low and jolly. “He said, ‘That e would have cost another two hundred dollars!’ So this is the guy who blows his life savings in a pyramid scheme? I mean, who is he?” She slurps from a cup of rest-stop coffee then and rattles off a list of her options for dealing with her father: mature sympathy, quiet reserve, lawyerly interrogation. “Petulance,” she says finally, with a little chuckle. “I think I’m going to go with petulance.”

  An hour later, we arrive at the Marcy Motel and House of Pancakes, where Mr. Weston has been staying. In the sunny lobby, he hugs Jane and ushers us right back out to the parking lot. “We can’t eat pancakes here!” he says cheerfully, and Jane nods, as if, No, of course we can’t eat pancakes at the House of Pancakes, as if this is the most obvious statement in the world.

  In addition to the possible typographic error that is its name, Marcy, Wisconsin, is famous for its pancakes. On the town’s seven-block main street, sandwiched between a Walmart and a massive Home Depot, you can enjoy breakfast at Pancakes-n-More (which serves only pancakes), the Flapjack Flappery, the Marcy Motel and House of Pancakes, and, according to its sign out front, the world’s only drive-through pancake restaurant, Millie McMaple’s Griddle Hut. The Flappery, Mr. Weston and Jane agree, has the fluffiest cakes.

  I pull my chair up to the table and reach across Jane for the syrup, examine my options (orange infused? apple-cinnamon?) and then remember that I don’t like syrup. I pour some on my pancakes anyway.

  Charlie Weston, in a canary yellow T-shirt, his thin hair sticking up in spots like a sparsely seeded lawn, is in a talking mood.

  “You know, and I mean no offense to your mother by what I am about to say, Janey.” He lets loose a flood of syrup onto his tall stack with a dramatic flourish. “Because I love your mother. But Bonnie has always been extremely rigid about breakfast foods. Not to be eaten for lunch or dinner!” He replaces the container in the syrup caddy and passes the whole thing across the table with his freakishly long arm. “Ms. Jacobs?”

  Jane presses her fork into the soupy pulp on her plate and glares at her father. “Fabulous,” she mutters. I guess she wasn’t kidding when she said she had settled on petulance. “Can you even afford this meal?” She points her empty fork at her father and holds it there for a second, then sets it down next to her plate and rests her forehead in her hands.

  “Oh, honey,” he says. His gaze slips from hers, drifts around the room. “Did you know,” he says to no one in particular. “Did you know that I was Chuck before I met Bonnie?” Jane shudders but doesn’t look up. A swath of curls falls across her forehead. “But she didn’t like Chuck. She said it made me sound like beef. Like meat. And I said, Well, meat! That could be good!” I look up at the ceiling. Do not tell us about your sex life. Do not tell us about your sex life. “But she didn’t like it, so she started calling me Charlie. And before I knew it, everyone was calling me Charlie. And now it’s who I am. Amazing, the ways we change each other.”

  Pam, the bottle-blond waitress from central casting, swoops in and refills our coffee cups. “You folks still working here?” she asks, and for a second I’m confused. Has Mr. Weston taken a job here? Things are even worse than I thought.

  “Not quite finished,” Mr. Weston says. He watches as Pam sashays away. “Jane.” She sighs audibly, her head still in her hands. “Look at me!” he commands, too loudly; a toddler in the next booth obeys and then starts to cry.

  Jane scowls at her father, death rays shooting from her eyes. “I’m looking,” she says. She must not have gone through a teenage rebellion. I haven’t felt this disgusted with my parents in years.

  “Well, this is me.” He shrugs, then flicks a crumb off the edge of the table. “I screwed up.”

  Jane exhales. She glances at me for moral support; craven, I stare down at my lap. I wish I were home, in bed. Not for the first time today, the thought of Declan crosses my mind. “I guess I just don’t understand how a fifty-three-year-old husband and father manages to lose everything.” She scrapes her chair away from the table and then, changing her mind, pulls it back in.

  One morning toward the end of my junior year of high school, I woke up, stumbled downstairs, and banged my shin on a stack of cardboard boxes piled at the base of the stairs. My parents were sitting together at the kitchen table, drinking coffee, talking in low voices. They saw me at the same time, turned tired faces toward me in unison. I closed my eyes, rubbed them, trie
d to remember what I’d been thinking about just seconds ago at the top of the staircase. Tengo, tienes, tiene, tenemos, tienen. When I opened my eyes, my parents were still staring at me, and the boxes hadn’t disappeared. For a full minute, nobody said a word. Then my mother got up from the table, shuffled over to the sink, and poured her coffee down the drain. “Well, it’s not as if you didn’t see this coming,” she said, and sighed. She handed me a brown bag. “I found a pudding cup in the fridge,” she said. “It might be from last summer, but those things never expire. I put it in your lunch.”

  “Remember when you and I used to make pancakes on Sunday mornings?” Mr. Weston says.

  Somewhere in the back of the restaurant, a chorus of voices launches into “Happy Birthday.” Jane takes a sip of my water. She looks at her father blankly.

  “We did,” her father says. “Don’t you remember? We used to let your mom sleep, and we’d rustle up a batch of pancakes together every Sunday. Almost every Sunday.”

  Happy birthday to yooooou.

  “You slept late on Sunday mornings. I went to church with Mom.”

  Mr. Weston opens his mouth, then closes it. He looks a little bit flustered, his confident shell cracking. “Well, maybe it was Saturdays, then.”

  Jane sits up straight, her shoulders pulled back. “Sorry, Dad. I don’t ever remember making pancakes with you.” She tilts her head at him. “Maybe it was your other family.”

  Later Jane will tell me, “Of course we cooked breakfast together, we made banana pancakes every Sunday all through my childhood.” And I will think, But we’re adults. We’re not supposed to let our parents’ mistakes turn us into children. But they do. That’s what they do.

  A waitress, not ours, careens past our table, plates balanced on her arms. Mr. Weston pours more syrup onto his pancakes, then looks at his food with regret. For a while, no one speaks. I tap the table. “Hey! Did Jane tell you about her poem?” One of Jane’s poems was recently accepted for publication in a very small literary magazine. In fact, that’s what it’s called: Very Small Literary Magazine. I know that Jane hasn’t mentioned it to her parents; she told me so just the other night.

  Jane waves her hand in front of her face. “No. I’m done with that,” she says, before Mr. Weston can respond. “There’s no money in that! I’m done writing poems.”

  “Honey!”

  “No,” she says again, and I’m reminded of Princess Jane, ruler of her pink childhood kingdom. Off with his head!

  An old lady in plaid pants gets up from the table across from ours; a crumpled brown paper napkin slides from her lap like a large dead moth. Mr. Weston looks around the restaurant. Jane blinks hard and downs her water in three fast gulps, and I squeeze her knee under the table. Soon we’ll head to her parents’ house for round two. But as far as I’m concerned, we could get in the car and drive back to Milwaukee now, because she’s learned everything she needs to know. Your parents will fail you. Lovers will fail you. In the end it’s this: your best friend in a pancake house, witness to your despair. I want to tell her it’s okay. This is what it is, and it’s okay.

  In the six minutes since we walked in the door, Jane’s mother has offered us five different snacks. “Aren’t you girls even a little bit hungry? Why don’t I whip up some popovers?” Her suggestions grow increasingly bizarre. Grapes? French onion soup? Corn casserole? Leftover Swedish meatballs? An exorcism of the marital kitchen, or the menu of the unhinged. “It’s early still,” she says, bustling about. She pulls out a whisk. “Maybe you need something more breakfasty.”

  “We’ve had breakfast, Mom,” Jane says, fiddling with her hair.

  Mrs. Weston shakes her head vigorously and flaps the hand that is not holding the whisk. She’s just gearing up. “Breakfast,” she says, a hint of suspicion tightening her voice. “Did you? On the way here? On the road?”

  “Downtown. With … um … we met Dad.” Jane tugs a curl straight and makes a mustache out of it.

  “Don’t play with your hair.” Mrs. Weston is standing with her back to her daughter, but somehow it doesn’t surprise me that she knows what Jane is doing behind her. She replaces the whisk in the drawer, stands on her tiptoes, reaches into a cabinet, and pulls out, for no apparent reason, a salad spinner. “Well.” She turns the knob on the empty spinner; it sounds like an engine revving.

  Jane shifts her weight from one foot to the other. I can see the straps of the same shirt she wore yesterday—my red tank top—underneath her pink T-shirt. I feel my customary urge to break the tension by sacrificing myself on the altar of weirdness. “I am not a big fan of pancakes!” I say, as the whir of the salad spinner dies down. “I mean, syrup! Who needs it?” Jane and her mother both turn and look at me as if I ought to be gently guided back to my room. I shrug. Mission accomplished.

  “I think I’d like to take you shopping,” Mrs. Weston says, clapping her hands once. This seems like a strange offer, given their new financial circumstances, but Jane’s mother is insistent. She surveys us, her eyes narrowed with maternal discernment; her gaze settles first on Jane’s feet, in their green flip-flops, and then on mine, in pink high-tops. “Shoe shopping!” She claps her hands again; I half expect the kitchen lights to turn on and off.

  Jane shakes her head in horror. “But you can’t … we can’t,” and I nudge her.

  “Of course,” I say. “Thank you, Mrs. Weston.” I think this is her mother’s way of reassuring her, and it feels like a kindness to accept it. Plus, new shoes!

  The doorbell rings, and Jane tears out of the kitchen to answer it. With her daughter out of earshot, Mrs. Weston quickly moves over to me, stopping an inch too close, and I stiffen in surprise. If only we’d accepted her offer of popovers. Melba toast. Chicken fingers. Anything!

  “It’s not her business,” she says to me, leaning in and looking up. “As an only child, Janey was frequently privy to more adult conversations than she ought to have heard.” Her words come fast and clipped; her breath smells strange, pungent-sweet, like sardines and cinnamon, a recipe of wrong ingredients. I nod, breathe through my mouth, force myself not to turn away. “This is between Charlie and me.” She reaches up, presumably to squeeze my shoulder, but since she is so much shorter than I am, a squatty shrub to the tree that is me, she misses, and her small, warm hand lands squarely above my left breast. “Mr. Weston and I will be fine. I mean, financially, we’ll be fine. Well, to be honest, I don’t know. And there you have it.” Mrs. Weston turns away from me purposefully, back toward the kitchen sink, grabs a sponge and starts attacking the green backsplash tiles with Jane-like fervor. There I have it? There I have what? Oh, Marcy. Marcy me.

  “Oh-em-gee,” Jane says. “That was Dougie.” She lopes back into the kitchen, flushed and smiling, her flip-flops smacking the floor. “Good old Dougie! He noticed my car in the driveway and wanted to stop over and say hi. So nice! He wants to meet up tonight. I said we would. Let’s go shopping!” She looks at me and then at her mother. She presses her lips together and plants her hands on her hips, her pointy elbows forming a rhombus of defensiveness. I won’t say a thing. I’m relieved, grateful for this distraction, and definitely not worried about the look on my friend’s face, about how excited she seems, suddenly, to see good old Dougie, or about how she hasn’t mentioned Ben once today.

  Jane’s mother tosses the sponge into the sink and dries her hands, then grabs her keys from the kitchen table and jingles them at us. “The mall awaits!” I raise my eyebrows at Jane and grin, happy to play along.

  The shopping trip is an all-afternoon marathon under fluorescent lights, an exhausting forced march from store to store in search of the existentially impossible. But it’s also kind of fun. By the time we get home and get ready to go out and meet Dougie, I feel like a pleasantly numb facsimile of myself, a person who shops all day and goes out at night, the kind of girl who is ready for anything.

  Polka music blasts into us as we walk through the doors of the Deutschland Beer Haus, the accordion provid
ing both melody and jolly, relentless backbeat. Dougie Tyler, zapped by a bolt of recognition, hops off his bar stool. He grabs Jane in a rough hug, lets go of her, then looks at me, does a comic double take. “Whoa! For a second there, I thought I was hugging the wrong girl!”

  Jane wraps her arm around my waist and leans in. Not far from where we’re standing, an older lady with a silvery helmet of hair dances by herself to the music, hopping from one foot to the other like an impatient toddler. “It’s true,” Jane says. “We have been told on occasion that we resemble each other!”

  This afternoon, a grandmotherly saleswoman at one of the shoe stores clucked about how lovely it was to see a mother and her two daughters doing a little shopping together; the pretzel girl glanced at Jane and asked me if I was going to get anything for my sister. “We look alike?” I say to Dougie. “No, I’ve never heard that.”

  Hanging in Jane’s bedroom in our apartment, above her desk, is a sketch I made a few weeks ago, a drawing of the two of us, our faces nearly identical. When I gave it to her, she knew right away. She pointed to the face on the right. “That’s me! My hair’s slightly shorter than yours,” she said, “and my eyes are just a little bit lighter. And my mouth is totally different.” She studied it for a moment. “You’re really good, Willa. You’re really talented.” The truth is I stared in the mirror as I drew the picture. I used myself as the model for both of us. I’ll think about this drawing, months from now, and wonder why I did that.

  Jane giggles now, tosses her head, flicks her hair behind her. “I know! Weird!” she says. She laughs again, a trill of notes, a high-pitched twitter. I wouldn’t be surprised if a flock of excited male birds flew toward the sound and knocked themselves out cold against the windows of this restaurant. “This is Willa!” Jane is shouting now, above the din. She squeezes my waist and plants a moist kiss on my cheek. Dougie tilts his large head, smiles at me, takes in what must be the very peculiar image of his high school girlfriend exuberantly smooching her look-alike.