Friends Like Us Page 4

  I cringe at the way that innocuous expression exposes my secrets, cracks my attempts at a cool exterior. No, I haven’t thought about you much over the years. … Ben looks down, embarrassed or pleased.

  “Well, mostly just about last night,” Jane says after a beat, and we stand there, the three of us, in silence, until Ben snorts, a rhinoceros laugh, and then Jane giggles, and I grab one yellow latex glove from her pocket and swat her with it; she snatches it back.

  There are moments—maybe everyone has them—when I’m outside of myself, peering sideways at my own life, telling myself to pay attention. I’m not saying, Willa, enjoy these moments, for they are fleeting and precious, or even Willa, stop eating all that cake. Just: look. See how the front of that car is dotted with dead bugs like an abstract painting? Or, watch that little kid, he’s wiping his nose on his mother’s shirt and she doesn’t notice; or, listen to the neighbor’s dog, how if you close your eyes he sounds like a wolf. This is one of these moments: the look on Jane’s face changing from weary guardedness to expectant joy, Ben leaning toward her, bouncing on the balls of his feet a little bit and not even knowing he’s doing it, the pull between them, and I’m right here, a part of it.

  Jane lets her yellow gloves fall into her cleaning bucket. It looks like a bottle of Windex has suddenly grown hands, is waving to us. “Jane gets her best material from cleaning houses,” I say to Ben, eager to offer him a glimpse of Jane’s quirky brilliance.

  “Well ….” Jane nods. I remember too late that she can be sensitive about how she makes her money, sometimes defensive about its honest, intrinsic value, other times insistent that every swipe of the mop is in the service of her poetry. Also, she really does smell quite bad, and I silently will her not to raise her arms. “You know, people’s lives, and the things they leave out, the things they forget to hide, and, I mean …” She does this sometimes when she’s nervous, drifts off, skidding down a slippery slope of unfinished sentences and disconnected thoughts.

  “Your best material! Ha! Remember when you stole that dildo?”

  Jane eyeballs me, and I know I’ve gone too far. We were having a ball, I’ll explain to her later. I thought we were becoming a unit. I didn’t mean to be cocky.

  “It was …” Jane allows herself a half smile. “I didn’t steal it. I liberated it. I was cleaning the house of the owner of Mr. Hump’s Sex Emporium.”

  Ben is newly enthralled by the mention of this famous local sex-toy shop, the way guys are.

  “The dildo was huge. I mean, epic.” She raises her hands and measures the air, then, dramatically, moves her hands apart six more inches.

  “And orange!” I say, wanting in on the action.

  “Bright orange,” Jane agrees. “Wide, circular base. I’d never seen anything like it. Not that I’d seen so many. They had an eight-month-old baby,” she adds. “Mr. Hump and his wife.”

  “Mrs. Hump,” Ben says.

  “And I thought, No, you cannot leave a fourteen-inch-long bright orange dildo out here in the middle of the living room when you have a baby! It’s just wrong!” Jane reaches out and touches Ben’s arm. “I thought I was performing a service.”

  “So to speak,” I say, and she looks at me and rolls her eyes. I breathe in and lean toward Jane a little bit. I want her to reach over and touch me with her other hand, but she doesn’t.

  “So to speak. I buried it at the bottom of my bucket of cleaning supplies. Underneath the bleach.”

  “But it wasn’t a dildo!” I pipe up, glancing back and forth from Jane to Ben.

  “It was a baby toy,” Jane says. “One of those … where you stack the rings on top of each other?”

  “A stacking toy!” I clap my hands gleefully and then immediately feel like an idiot.

  “Which Willa helpfully pointed out to me later.”

  “Sometimes a stacking toy is just a stacking toy,” Ben says.

  “Exactly!” Jane, I notice, has not let go of Ben’s arm this whole time. He doesn’t seem to mind.

  “So Baby Hump,” I say, “is still wondering where his favorite baby toy has gone.”

  “And, not surprisingly, I have never been called back to clean that house.”

  “The home of Mr. and Mrs. Hump,” Ben says.

  “And poor Baby Hump.”

  “But she wrote an excellent poem about it,” I say.

  “An okay poem,” Jane agrees. She does reach over now and picks a stray bit of lint from my sleeve.

  “About toys,” I say.

  “About perspective,” she says.

  Ben nods slowly, his eyes on Jane, the smitten grin on his face the replica, I realize, of how he used to look at me, and with the slightest twinge I think, This is it, this is right. He’s like a check I have signed over. Pay to the Order of Jane Weston.

  “I’m going to shower,” Jane says. “And then I think we should all go bowling.”

  And because we have nowhere to be, because there is not a single obligation among us beyond the imperative to move steadily forward through a day that is suddenly and completely ours, bowling is both a fabulous idea and as good as anything else. And it is exactly what we do.

  Chapter Four

  Baxter’s Basement Lanes smells of Doritos and communal footwear, beer, and the light sweat that comes from very minimal physical exertion. I breathe it in. This dark, underground room is one of my all-time favorite places. When I was growing up, it was an old-fashioned Milwaukee bowling alley, smoky and dank and serious, All League Nights and Wednesdays! Ladies Drink Free! Our dad used to take us here once in a while on a Saturday afternoon when our mom needed a break, and Seth had his tenth birthday party here. Over the past decade, it’s gradually been colonized by the college-aged residents of its east side neighborhood, but never completely, so that these days team tournaments and trophy dinners coexist with ironic hipster dudes in black leather jackets throwing noncommittal spares and girls in short skirts giggling over gutter balls or huddled together on the plastic bucket seats, sipping beer made by blind Belgian monks.

  “This is my favorite sport!” I say, taking another deep, nostalgic breath as Jane tests out bowling balls of various weights, settling on a speckled green eleven-pounder.

  “You’ve always been a very athletic bowler,” Ben agrees. He tightens the lace on one of his scuffed, red-and-blue shoes.

  I nod. “It’s all about endurance.”

  “And an extreme level of fitness, of course.”

  Jane holds up her foot. “I don’t really understand why we have to wear these shoes that so many others have worn before. What would be so bad about letting us bowl in our socks?” There’s a sign above the entrance: YOU MUST WEAR BOWLING SHOES AT ALL TIMES. Someone has scrawled DISEM in front of the word BOWLING in purple marker.

  “It levels the playing field,” Ben says. “For example, some people might be able to afford fancy bowling socks, which would give them an unfair advantage.”

  “This way,” I say, “we are all equal in the eyes of God.”

  “There’s no such thing as fancy bowling socks,” Jane says, gazing from me to Ben and then back to me. “Is there?”

  “Will,” Ben says, “do you remember our senior year phys ed class?”

  “Golf is not for the faint of heart!” I announce.

  “No freakin’ crumpets at this tee time!” Ben adds. Ben and I had tried to sign up for bowling, the popular physical education elective for the sweat averse, and, failing to get in, we registered for golf instead, believing that it would be the next easiest, somewhere in the vicinity of archery but not as exacting. But Mr. Karlinsky, the golf coach, was a task master and a sadist. Strength training and three-mile runs were a regular part of the class. It was the hardest twelve weeks of my life.

  “Remember how we tried to earn extra credit by writing that report on the golf courses of Scotland?” I say, “and Mr. Karlinsky told us to give it to the Loch Ness Monster?” Ben covers his face with his hands. I reach over and pretend to try to p
ry them off. “How is it that we were so phenomenally dorky back then, a mere few years ago, and yet we are so cool today?” Ben shakes his head, his hands still hiding his face. I hold up my bowling ball. “I mean! Nerds in high school, awesome bowling phenomenons today!”

  Two lanes over, a white-haired senior bowler in a lime-green team shirt rolls her ball down the alley; I watch, mesmerized, as it slowly, slowly makes its way toward the pins. It seems, momentarily, to defy the laws of motion. It almost stops, possibly even rolls backward for an inch or two, and then, miraculously, it continues its wobbly journey to the end of the lane and knocks down every last pin. I look over at Jane to see if she’s noticed. She’s perched on the edge of one of the low plastic chairs, leaning forward slightly, and she’s drawn a vague and pleasant screen over her features, her lips pulled into an unreadable little smile, her eyes focused somewhere in the distance behind Ben and me. Ben, unaware, tugs on the lace of his other shoe and grins at me, falling back under the spell of our old friendship. I rub my eyes against the haze of cigarette smoke that hovers around us; the rumble of falling pins is a sudden, thunderous cacophony.

  There’s a threesome in the lane next to ours, two girls and a guy, all in their twenties, our age, maybe a couple years younger. One of the girls has very white teeth and a long, sharp nose like a pretty rodent. The other, holes in her tights, auburn hair down to her waist, laughs like Woody Woodpecker, an annoying/charming rapid-fire machine gun. The guy, skinny and pale, is trying to teach the girl with the long hair to bowl, although he himself doesn’t know what he’s doing. They clink plastic cups, cheer each other on.

  What separates us from them? We all think we’re snowflakes, but we’re Tinker Toys, held together by our interchangeable parts.

  I can see myself ten years from now. This day is a fuzzy memory, a flash: Ben and Jane are two people I once knew, and time has won out over history and love. But what if this concoction we’re brewing right now will be our magical potion? Someone a few lanes away bowls a strike, and a smattering of applause erupts. Good one, Betty! “Hey,” I say. I take a half step away from Ben and turn toward the bar, gesture in its direction. “Should I get us something to drink? Do you two want something to drink?”

  Without waiting for an answer I sprint to the grimy little counter where a bored-looking guy pours soda and beer, a toothpick dangling from the corner of his mouth, his eyes glued to a little TV next to the cash register. I linger over the menu, a collection of Gothic typos: Died Coke, Rot Beer, Spite; when I come back with our beverages a few minutes later, Ben and Jane are sitting together at the lighted scoring table, and Ben is telling Jane how to add up a spare. He draws a slash through one of the little boxes, then demonstrates how you calculate the numbers in the next frame. “I’m embarrassed that I know this,” he says, and Jane laughs and says, “I don’t understand scoring in tennis, either,” and Ben says, “How about Ping-Pong?” and Jane laughs again. The dirty light from under the glass casts a faint glow on their faces. I’m holding a cardboard tray of watery Cokes in my hands, watching them.

  Later I’ll recall how after every gutter ball Jane threw that afternoon, Ben would say, “Try to get it just a little closer to the edge”; how once, after she managed to knock down four pins, he hugged her. I’ll remember how Jane nervously smoothed her purple shirt every time she got up to bowl, how she licked her lips after she took sips of her Coke. I’ll think about the way Ben stared at her, how Jane pretended not to notice. I won’t recall what was said, but I’ll remember how I sat there, subdued and watchful, happy to let them talk to each other, warmed by the glow of their ambient heat.

  Chapter Five

  Seth is elbow deep in an almost-empty bag of barbecue-flavored potato chips. A breeze blows in through the open window. On the sidewalk below our apartment, a woman yells something in Russian. I can’t tell if she’s angry or happy.

  “It’s like everything finally fits,” I say to my brother. “It’s like I’m home!” Across the kitchen table from me, Seth nods vaguely, then crams too many chips into his mouth and crunches loudly. “I thought Ben was gone from me forever,” I tell him. “And I mourned, you know, the loss of my best friend. And then I met Jane, and she filled that hole. Even though of course I would always be sad about Ben.” The chip bag crackles, indicating Seth’s interest, although not necessarily in what I’m saying.

  Ben has come to our apartment every day since the bowling adventure, self-conscious and shiny and bearing small, neutral gifts for both Jane and me. He handed us two bars of fancy chocolate the first time he stopped by. Just thought I’d see what you two are up to! he said, with a hearty nonchalance so obviously rehearsed I had to cough to stop myself from laughing. Yesterday, just as the cold twilight was sharpening into an icy, dark evening, he buzzed our apartment and yelled through the intercom, Hey, I brought soup! And we sat together, the three of us crowded around our little table, just like in my fantasy, only the soup was chicken noodle.

  I want to describe it to Seth, to explain how it feels to be an ingredient in this happy, new friendship pie. “But all of a sudden he’s back in my life, and the three of us are hanging out together, and, Seth, it’s perfect!” Heat rises to my face as soon as the words are out of my mouth. Seth leans back in his chair and gazes past me. It’s a good thing that he is not, it turns out, even remotely listening to me, because along with barbecue potato chips, my brother eats sincere emotions for lunch.

  “I don’t blame Fran and Stan, you know,” he says, tipping the last of the chips into his mouth. That’s what we call our parents—Fran and Stan—although our father’s name is actually Roger.

  “Huh?” I say, baffled by his sudden change of gears. Powdery orange crumbs fall like nuclear snow around his mouth. Later, Jane will spot the flecks on the floor, and she’ll make them disappear. I blow on my fingernails, which I’ve just painted a bright and glittery red, from Vérité’s disastrously named I’d Nail That line of polishes. Jane is dragging me to a party tonight. I don’t like parties, but I do enjoy the occasional opportunity to shine myself up. I shaved my legs earlier, and I’m even contemplating wearing lipstick.

  “I don’t blame them for how things turned out.”

  “Seth, you came home from Madison after your first semester freshman year and you waved your Intro to Psych textbook in front of Mom and yelled, ‘You and Dad screwed me up! I have proof!’ ”

  “Well, I don’t blame them anymore.”

  “Really, you don’t blame Stan for the time he stormed out of the house and didn’t come back for two days? For those months before the divorce when he just stomped around and didn’t talk to any of us? For moving in with Lesley six months after he left?”

  “Do you have any more chips?” Seth asks. I shake my head. “Or, um … Pop-Tarts? That’s what I want. Did I see blueberry Pop-Tarts in your pantry?”

  “You don’t blame Mom for the constant stream of bitter poison that didn’t dry up until the day she married Jerry in Arizona, without us, and called from Tucson to tell us?”

  “No,” Seth says, licking his fingers. When we were growing up, my brother refused to submit to my mother’s requirement for good table manners; his stubbornness backfired, and now he’s incapable of not being disgusting. “But you still do!”

  “Well, whatever,” I say. “You’re the one whose girlfriend just kicked him out.” I pull my favorite pink sweater from the back of a kitchen chair, where it’s been hanging since last week, and slip it over my head.

  “And that’s my point,” Seth continues. He’s up and rooting through the cupboards. Five nights ago, Nina tossed him out of the apartment they shared on the east side. I loved Seth and Nina’s place, the big living room with its sea-blue walls, deep, welcoming couches, and antique lamps glowing yellow in every room. And I loved Nina, the way she teased Seth, softened him. She’s a herpetologist who specializes in mutations. I wanted them to get married, to share in the care and feeding of Nina’s three-legged frogs and then, eve
ntually, of Seth and Nina’s hopefully two-legged human babies; I wanted them to redeem our fractured adolescence with a happy, functioning family. They were supposed to be the template.

  Seth won’t tell me why their relationship imploded, but I have my suspicions. His last relationship, with a coworker named Shelly, ended in a spectacular display of fireworks when he cheated on her with her half sister, Kelly; he broke it off with his college girlfriend, Libby, by sleeping with his high school girlfriend, Nora, whose heart he had broken, years earlier, by making out with Merry, a sad-faced girl he’d met at math camp. I don’t have Seth’s degree in statistics, but it’s not that hard to figure this one out. He’s been sleeping on his friend Pete’s sofa but spending his days here, plowing through all of my food and spouting self-help clichés whenever his mouth isn’t full. “You have to own your problems. You can’t play the blame game!”

  I cut my eyes at my brother. This is the boy who caught me practicing French-kissing the mirror one day when I was fourteen, and, for a full year, whenever the mood struck him, he would make slurping, licking sounds, frequently accompanied by a passionate make-out session with his own hand. In front of my friends. At school. Worse, after he graduated from high school, the brutal mockery morphed into hard indifference. He ignored me completely, disowned us all, neglecting to come home for holidays, never phoning or returning my calls. We had adored each other growing up. The shock of losing him to the nastiness that had colonized his soul was unbearable. So I pushed him out of my mind, cultivated my own cool detachment. For a time after college, even my closest friends were surprised to learn that I had a brother.

  And then, three years ago he met Nina, and she convinced him I was worth knowing. Within weeks he had invited me back into his life, and I RSVP’d with an emphatic yes. I happily resumed my role as little sister, repressing the hard feelings that had simmered for over a decade, banishing any pesky, residual resentment. I showed up at their apartment empty-handed and allowed myself to be fed. I watched movies on their couch on cold nights, toasty in Nina’s slippers and snuggled under, yes, thank you, their cashmere blanket, met them for Sunday brunch and took home all the leftovers. I claimed what was mine.