Friends Like Us Read online

  “I wonder where she could be,” Dougie says, startling me with his human voice.

  “Who?”

  He raises his empty glass to his lips and then just pretends to swallow, clearly having decided at the last second that asking me for more water would be too much trouble for both of us. This makes me like him again and also believe that he’s real. “Jane,” he says, rubbing his thumb up and down his glass. “Jane.”

  After I got off the phone with Mrs. Weston, I tried to convince myself that I was doing something good, or if not actually good, then at least benign, or if not benign, then possibly neutral? Aside from the moment, at the gas station, when she made me promise not to tell Ben, Jane has spoken to me only once more about what happened in that smoky, polka-throbbing German bar in Marcy. “It’s water under the bridge,” she said.

  When Mrs. Weston suggested the surprise visit, I told myself that Jane would actually be happy. I told myself she would appreciate an unexpected hello from her old buddy, but I knew that I was dipping my feet into an ocean of ambiguity. (Or was I?) This would be an experiment, a test. I would be there when Jane laid eyes on him, and I would see the answer on her face, not to the question of whether she should choose Dougie over Ben—that was no question at all—but to a different one altogether. Is there a person-sized space between Jane and Ben? I look at Dougie, finally. He’s taken off his cap and has placed it, oddly, on the floor next to his feet. His blue eyes are spaced far apart, his blond hair receding just a little bit, his mouth narrow and pink. The trick to drawing faces is finding just the right balance between light and shadow. Dougie’s, I realize, is mostly light, practically no shadow at all. He clears his throat and runs his fingertip around the rim of the empty water glass, producing a low, vibrating murmur.

  “Very talented,” I say.

  “I know, hey?” He stops. “So, Janey’s getting married.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Weird, right?” He glances at me, sad and hopeful, as if I might save him.

  “No, not really.”

  A minute later, the door to the apartment bangs open. They’re laughing about something: Jane’s head is thrown back, and Ben is leaning in, as if he’s about to bite her on the neck. I can’t believe you did that! Well, he was staring at me! They take a few steps into the room, Jane with a brown paper bag in her hands; she veers toward the kitchen with it and then stops short as she sees Dougie. Her face does a twitchy thing, her nose wrinkling as if she smells something odd, and she gasps, then quickly covers her mouth with her hand. She turns bright red, fast and furious, a chameleon taking refuge on a ripe tomato.

  “What the?” she says, through her hand. “I mean, What a, what a surprise! Dougie!” She elongates the -ie, Dougeeee! She shakes her head and turns to me now, takes it all in, eyes wide, and she juts her chin toward her bedroom, the farthest in this small apartment from the living room. Follow me, she laser beams to my mind, and explain this. She’s still holding the paper bag.

  Ben, for his part, extends his hand to Dougie. Jane pivots and presses the bag into Ben’s other hand, then pulls me up and drags me behind her. “Be right back,” she mutters. “Gonna go change.” In her bedroom, she clasps her hands to the sides of her head as if to hold her brain in, then turns around in a circle, the slow dance of the utterly confused. “What is he … how, what?”

  “I know,” I say. “I mean, I didn’t know. I mean, your mom called, but you were out.” I hear myself fudging the chronology of it. Yeah, your mom called … yesterday. But once the fib jumps out of my mouth, I can’t reel it back in. Jane’s room is stifling, lacking ventilation or any kind of cross breeze. An Andy Warhol poster on her wall, a cluster of pink and red and orange lips, is curling under its cheap frame. I cross my arms in front of my chest and look down at my bare feet. “He’s on his way to a conference.” I feel like sitting, like collapsing under the weight of my own ill-considered machinations, but the only piece of furniture in the room is Jane’s unmade bed, a rumpled, cozy nest I used to crawl into with my best friend—a onetime haven that has become, since she and Ben got together, the focal point of my unhappiness, has come to exert a reverse magnetic force on me, flinging me away with its aura of grossness, of what they do there, the physical embodiment of all that is wrong with my life. The bed of my friends is my enemy. So, okay, I’ll stand.

  “Couldn’t you have called me? Warned me?”

  “You were out.”

  She looks at me as if I’m crazy. “My cell?”

  I smile weakly. “Um, whoops?”

  She rolls her eyes. “And my mom arranged this?”

  “Well, yes, but you can’t be mad at her, Janey. She doesn’t know what happened between you two.”

  “Nothing happened,” Jane hisses, with so much force that I think she almost believes it.

  The low sounds of two voices reach us from the living room, indistinct. “What do you think they’re talking about out there?”

  She turns and practically leaps out of the room, but then she pauses, her hand on the doorknob, and says, “Please help me get him out of here. Please?”

  The windowpane rattles with the slightest breeze. Someone in one of the downstairs apartments coughs—with all the windows open, we can hear everything, every detail of the lives of people we hardly know. “That’s my egg,” I heard someone say this morning, in a normal tone. “As you can see, it has my name on it.” I remember what Ben told me, in the dark of the living room, weeks ago: that whatever had happened in Marcy did not matter.

  Ben and Dougie are sitting across from each other at the table laughing like old friends when we come back into the room. “She used to give free popcorn to all of her pals.” Dougie is telling Ben about how he and Jane worked together at the Marcy Multiplex when they were in high school and for a couple of summers after college. I’ve heard these stories. I pull up a chair between them. Ben listens, rapt. “Late at night, after we closed, Jane and I would go out and change the movie titles on the marquee.” Dougie laughs, a surprisingly girlish giggle, and turns to Jane. “Remember? Planet of the Grapes? O Brother, Where Fart Thou?” His face is wide open, his blue eyes big.

  Jane, in spite of herself, laughs. “A Beautiful Behind. God, we were idiots.”

  Dougie flinches, but keeps smiling. “It was fun, though.”

  “That’s funny,” I say, for no reason. “Take your stinking paws off me, you damned dirty grape!”

  Ben stands. “Hey, we brought some dinner home. Just some sandwiches, but there’s enough for everybody. Doug, will you join us?” I can’t tell if he really wants Dougie here, or if he’s just being polite. Or if he’s offering the sandwiches as a consolation prize: I got Jane, so you can have my tuna salad on whole wheat. I can’t read him at all.

  “Sure, man. Thanks.” Dougie leans back in his chair and looks up at Ben, grateful and searching.

  “I’m just going to run out for beer,” Ben says.

  Jane fidgets, bends to scratch her shin, and makes a face at me. I try to convey powerlessness in the look I return. The truth is, I want to know how this will all play out.

  Ben leaves. Dougie crooks his arms above his head, immediately taking up more space. “Did you hear about Brad and Angelina?” I know not to laugh at this: Brad and Angelina Muellerhueber are friends of Dougie and Jane’s who got married right after college. “They just had a baby,” Dougie says. “Skye. S-k-y-e.” He shakes his head at the strangeness of it. What will they think of next?

  “I love it,” Jane says, a defiant edge in her voice: proof that she has moved far beyond Dougie’s provincial small-mindedness. She grabs the edge of Ben’s vacated chair with both hands; the five silver bracelets she’s wearing slide down her arm and jingle together at her wrist, like a Slinky.

  Dougie clears his throat. His arms are still bent awkwardly behind his head. “I’m not here to try to … convince you of anything.” He clears his throat again. “But you and I—”

  “Wait,” Jane says, suddenly st
eely. “I’m really sorry, but this is actually not a great time for a visit.” She shifts her weight, still gripping Ben’s chair. “It’s just …” Her eyes dart down and around, as if scanning the room for an excuse, then settle back on Dougie. “It’s just not.”

  Still half tipped and leaning, Dougie lets the front two legs of his chair fall back down with a bang. He pushes himself away from the table.

  This will be his defining moment, the humiliation he will return to; the pit in his stomach late at night that, years from now, he will trace back to this day, this moment, this rejection. Suddenly, and with my own hot flash of regret, I wish I could disappear.

  “Really?” Dougie says. He stands, a step too close to Jane, face to face. My body is tense, recognizing before my brain does the way some men hide their anger under the surface, bubbling so softly you don’t even know it’s there. “Because, I mean, I didn’t just drop in on you, Janey. You might even say I was invited.”

  Jane does a gangly, startled little half jump backward, wrapping her long arms around herself, an adjustment of feet and legs, a realignment of limbs. “Dougie,” she says, “I don’t know what to say.”

  “Me, neither.” He looks both disagreeable and ridiculous standing there in his red baseball cap, his pressed white shirt, his casual-Friday khakis, back straight, shoulders squared, a few inches shorter than Jane. He reaches out and lays a meaty paw on Jane’s shoulder—as a reminder or a last-ditch effort or maybe just for balance. It doesn’t matter. By the time Ben comes back home, carrying a gallon of Rocky Road and a six-pack of beer, Dougie’s gone.

  I draw in my room for hours that night, trying to make sense of things. The high school misfits from our old comic book return to me: The Overachievers plan a low-budget wedding, champions of thrift! The male Overachiever marries a beautiful princess, but first they must battle the evil villain Ex, ineffectual but persistent foe bent on ruining them. The Overachievers go their separate ways.

  Afterward, I rip up the drawings, the thick paper shredding like cloth, pencil grease smearing my fingertips.

  I feel like I’m trudging through melting slush. But underneath, there’s a river raging.

  Declan has dumped me; Jane, imperial ruler of her own life, has disposed of Dougie. Ben and Jane’s wedding is moving forward fast. As a favor, my boss, Molly, is supplying the flowers—she’s giving them a hefty discount on the stems and she’s letting me put together the arrangements at no charge. The wedding will be in three weeks, at Alewife Park, north of the city, on the lake.

  “We really don’t need much,” Jane whispers to me a few days later at the flower shop, her hand on my arm, as I lead her around the store. “Just a few nice bouquets for the tables, something for me to carry, something for you to carry.” She squeezes. “I don’t know! You’re the expert!”

  I narrow my eyes. My name tag today says SULLEN. I made it this morning. If anyone asks me, I’ll say my name is Suellen. What, you’ve never seen a fucking typo?

  “I like these,” Ben says, pointing to a bucket of garish yellow lilies.

  “Nobody likes those,” I say. “They’re for funerals.”

  Jane nods. “Funerals, not weddings.”

  Ben touches the petal of one of the lilies. “For the funeral of my bachelorhood!”

  Jane removes her hand from my arm and swats him. “This is so nice of your boss,” she says to me. “And of you! We’ll have the prettiest wholesale flower arrangements decorating the cheapest plastic fold-up tables at Alewife Park, picnic area number five, ever!”

  “And the best darn potluck reception this side of the Mississippi,” Ben says in a southern accent.

  “Is your mom making her deviled eggs?” I ask.

  “Yup, and her blue-ribbon sweet potato pie,” he says, still in a southern accent; to my knowledge, Ben’s mom does not make sweet potato pie.

  “But seriously, Willa.” Jane adjusts the bottom of her T-shirt, which is riding up. “We really do appreciate this. I mean, we’re getting your expert attention, and we can actually afford it.”

  That’s the second time she’s called me an expert—an expert flower shop worker—in the last five minutes. I pull a gladiolus from its bucket and remove a few brown petals. “You realize I’m faking it, right?”

  “Oh, I love those!” Jane says. “They’re so … happy! Wouldn’t it be awesome to carry a bouquet of bright pink and yellow gladioli down the aisle? Nobody really does that, do they? They’re such tall flowers. But I’m a tall girl!” She smiles at Ben, then at me, and then her expression changes, which is when I realize I’m scowling. “But whatever! You’re the …”

  “I’m the expert.”

  Her hand flutters to her hair. “Anyway, we also thought that people could take the centerpieces home with them if they wanted to. We thought that would be nice. That’s what we were thinking. Right, hon?”

  “We we we,” I say. “All the way home.” Ben glances at me sidelong.

  Jane tugs at her shirt again, self-conscious. “I have to go. You guys figure it out.” She heads for the exit. “I totally trust you!” she calls, with a little wave, as the door jingles and shuts behind her.

  “What a control freak,” Ben says.

  “Bridezilla.” An unexpected wave of love for Jane rushes over me, for my friend who is planning her wedding with casual happiness, with a complete lack of narcissism, with nothing but easy joy and respect for the celebration of it. She amazes me. I shiver a little in the air-conditioned chill of the shop. “I’m going to make her something beautiful,” I say to Ben. I ease three bright pink gerbera daisies from their bucket, my favorites, and vow to do better, to be better.

  The store is quiet, empty now but for Ben and me, and I busy myself with the flowers, setting a white iris against a yellow tea rose, spreading a small bunch of lavender asters around the outside. Ben follows me around, pretending to have opinions, making fun of me. Mmm, no, that one’s all wrong, yep, definitely that one instead. I pull out a fleshy, phallic anthurium and hold it up to Ben, its erect stalk bobbing lewdly against its dark pink base.

  “Would this be funny?” I ask.

  “Awesome,” he says. “Nothing like a botanical sex joke at a wedding.” He grins and shakes his head. “My wedding. That’s so fucking strange.”

  I nod.

  Ben points to my name tag. “Why were you pissed at Jane? Is that supposed to be some kind of performance art?”

  “I don’t know. I’m sorry.”

  He plucks a pink chrysanthemum from a pail and studies it for a long moment. “She’s going to apply to law school.”

  I feel like I’ve been stabbed. I look down and see that the thorn of one of the roses I’m holding has actually poked my palm. “That is not …” What is he talking about? It’s impossible. Jane would have told me. “What are you …?” I close my eyes against the feeling of my life spinning out of control, careening like a car off a cliff. There is no way Jane wants to go to law school: Jane, wearer of ill-fitting T-shirts from Goodwill, gimlet-eyed cleaner of suburban houses, poet of soap scum and toilet bowl ring. Ben has obviously misheard. She must have said something else. Perhaps she got angry and then told him she regretted her lost cool. “Ben,” I say finally. “There is no way that’s true.”

  He nods, and I get the fleeting impression that he’s enjoying it a little, this slow, sadistic slicing. “We’re considering the East Coast. D.C.”

  The thorn prick on my hand is bleeding a little, an occupational hazard. “Was anyone ever going to tell me this?” As if that were the problem. The withholding of information.

  “I’m telling you now.” And then he softens; I see it on his face, in the way his posture shifts, how he carefully slips the chrysanthemum back into its place among the other flowers, runs a finger slowly over the bridge of his nose. “I guess she’s feeling—we’re feeling—like we can’t just stay here forever. Like our lives are in a holding pattern. You know?”

  “But what about you?” Ben mailed h
is grad school applications just last week. We celebrated by making him buy us dinner; You’re going to be a social worker, we said. You’ll be rich! “What about you?”

  He shrugs and smiles, the answer obvious. “I kind of want to wait another year. Maybe I’ll work for a nonprofit for a while … find something, you know, meaningful.… Anyway, I hear there are some okay grad schools out east.”

  I suppose Ben is right, and if I’m honest with myself, I know it, too: that it’s not exactly satisfying to work part-time jobs we’re nominally suited for just so we can live in crummy, thin-walled apartments that we can barely afford; how old it’s getting, eating cheap pasta or scrambled eggs every night off chipped plates; sitting on rickety, third-hand furniture and watching crappy TV because we can’t afford cable and we definitely can’t afford to go out. Pretending we like it this way. Attached to nothing but ourselves. If I could bring myself to admit it, I’d agree that we’re stuck in a pleasant limbo of our own making. But I can’t. And so all I hear from Ben is “We’re moving on.” All I hear is good-bye.

  That night, Jane climbs into my bed, settles in next to me on my wrinkly purple sheets. Ben is at his apartment, packing the few things that are left there, the dishes he rarely uses, the clothes he hardly ever wears, the pots he never cooks with. He’ll live here until the wedding—he basically lives here anyway—and soon after that, they’ll get their own place. That’s the plan—a plan that now includes the East Coast, I guess.

  He kissed Jane good-bye after dinner, sighed deeply, and said, “Well, I guess I should go now.”

  They hugged, and Jane laughed as she pulled away from him, a rogue strand of her dark hair Velcroed onto his stubbly chin.

  “You’re going off to pack,” she said, “not die.”

  Now, I adjust myself in my bed, roll onto my back, fold my hair under my head like a pillow. Jane lies next to me, quiet, breathing deeply. The smell of flowers is still fragrant on my hands. Headlights from passing cars flash across the ceiling, then the wall opposite the bed. Jane rolls onto her side, toward me. “Sorry if I got on your nerves at the flower shop today.”