Friends Like Us Page 5

  But how much of Seth is mine without Nina? In the absence of her domesticating goodness, will he hop away, gone? The truth is, I’ll happily keep him swimming in trans fats if that’s all it takes to make him stay.

  “Finding anything good in there?” I ask. He’s still foraging in the cabinets, rustling bags and examining jars.

  He holds a silver foil-wrapped package up to me, triumphant. He’s managed to locate a box of very old Pop-Tarts in the back of the cupboard. They may have been here when Jane and I moved in. He tears it open and starts gnawing at the petrified edges of the thing as if he has just emerged from the forest. A low growl of pleasure escapes from him as he chews.

  “I’m fixing you a salad, Kaspar Hauser,” I say, and I resolve to call Nina tomorrow. Your voice sounds scratchy, I’ll tell her. Frog in your throat? And she’ll laugh, she’ll say, Gee, Willa, I’ve never heard that one before, and at my gentle prodding her anger at Seth will loosen, her chest will expand to take in oxygen, and she’ll realize that she can’t live without us.

  “Hey, um, maybe you should come to this party tonight,” I say halfheartedly, and Seth rolls his eyes at me in response.

  “That sounds awesome,” he says, which means Hell, no.

  “Or you could stay here and throw some things down the garbage disposal,” I say, pointing at him for emphasis.

  “Nah,” he says. “I’m outta here. All you guys have left in this place is cottage cheese, yogurt, and sunflower seeds. And, I mean, Christ, I’m not desperate!” We both laugh, then, and I have the disorienting feeling, for a second, of nostalgia for something we’ve never really had: an adult friendship, a bond separate from our heavy family baggage. He grabs his jacket and pats me on the head as he leaves, which is about as close as Seth and I have ever gotten to an expression of love.

  Al’s apartment is hot and crowded. The party was in full swing when we arrived, and Jane and I found refuge on the love seat, where we’re scrunched next to each other. “Sometimes I worry …” She pauses, holds up one finger, and takes a very long guzzle of a drink that looks like coolant. “Vile!” she says, delighted, and offers it to me. It tastes like liquid cough drops. My face immediately feels warm. I take another swig and hand it back to her. Al’s small apartment is filled with friends from Jane’s creative writing classes—a master’s degree most people refer to obliquely as “the program,” like it’s rehab for people addicted to clever symbolism. Jane calls it the Road to Nowhere.

  In the corner, two poets Jane has introduced me to, Bridget McCarragher and Penelope Tan, are arguing passionately. I presume they’re debating the finer points of the sestina or the questionable merits of Ezra Pound, until I overhear Penelope, her high-pitched voice rising above the din: “Kylie shouldn’t have been sent home before G-Lance! His tango was a fucking travesty!” Bridget McCarragher shakes her head vigorously and smacks her forehead in distress over the latest elimination on Celebrity Dance-Off.

  We haven’t moved from this spot since we arrived an hour ago. The strum and thump of loud flamenco music fills the air, making everybody look somewhat sexier to me than they are.

  “You guys,” someone yells. “I’m transferring to the Business School! I just found out that poetry’s dead!”

  Jane and I met during our senior year of college, in Madison. I was majoring in drawing and painting, working on a graphic novel about two star-crossed bird-watchers, called We’ll Always Have Parrots. I thought that a creative writing class might broaden my skill base: this way, after graduation I could work in a restaurant or a bar. Most of us in the Art Department accepted our fates with weary resolve, undercut by constant neurotic fretting. We drank a lot of beer and cultivated superior attitudes about having to work retail jobs at the mall to pay the rent on our crappy off-campus apartments. There was also a plasma center off State Street that paid thirty dollars per donation and gave out cookies, and which sometimes looked like one of the wine and cheese receptions they held for fine arts students on Friday afternoons.

  By the time senior year rolled around I was pretty sure I was just about finished with all of that. But I had no idea where I would go next. In addition to my book about bird-watchers, I had also devoted an enormous amount of time to a series of drawings of imaginary animal crossbreeds (hippophant, skunkey, flamenguin). I felt like I was pursuing my dream and wasting my time simultaneously. There weren’t that many jobs for people who could draw a really majestic polar beagle. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do with my life. And I had the vague sense that I ought to have already figured it out.

  I was in the middle of drawing the snout on a dolphig when Jane walked in on the first day of class, silver rings and earrings sparkling, her curly hair bursting out of its ponytail holder like loose springs. Twelve of us sat at a big square table—an arrangement, I would soon learn, well suited to the process of ritually immolating one another’s work. Jane came in late and slid into the last available chair.

  We started with Owen Schiff, straight spined and shiny eyed and wearing all camouflage, including, I noticed, his socks. He told us that he was writing a series of Shakespearean sonnets devoted to his passionate love of military history. He recited his poem, “Iraq: My Brains,” and seemed happy to interpret the stunned silence that followed as approval. Then Jane read hers, “The Universe Is a Vacuum Cleaner.” Her voice was clear and deep and unaffected, and when she was done, when her tongue had loosed the final, debauched k in “suck,” she looked across the table and smiled at me, a great beaming grin. I stared back at her, startled, smitten. It was love at first sight, and also sort of like looking in the mirror on a really, really good day. I saw that Jane was just like me but better, an observation she would later, with a laugh, firmly deny.

  Jane had managed to sidestep the unearned cynicism the rest of us were afflicted with. Her poems were about the search for meaning in a sparkling kitchen sink, the persistence of mildew, dust bunnies, and stubborn love; she cleaned big suburban houses to pay her rent. She wasn’t afraid of latex gloves or of rhyming “dust” and “lust,” “clog of hair” and “fog of despair.” She seemed to have found the intersection between her life and her art. She had a purposeful glow about her, a clarity—or at least bravado—that I was drawn to, along with the lingering scent of lemon. Plus she was pretty, and tall like me. We went out for coffee after class. From that moment, like eager lovers, we were inseparable.

  In the dim light of Al’s living room, Jane looks at me, blinking. She gives her hair a self-conscious flick. “Sometimes I worry,” she says again, “that men find us intimidating.” My dangly turquoise earrings swing from her ears. “Because we’re always together. Like we’re a package deal or something?”

  “Maybe so,” I say, glancing around at the other partygoers, couples locked in conversation, a few women dancing, groups of friends laughing and gesturing to one another, every interaction made extra hilarious by Al’s high-octane fruit punch.

  “I’m not thinking about anyone in particular,” she says, and giggles. “Really, Willa, no one in particular!”

  Nearby, Rafael, one of the new poets, is standing close to Amy, a thirty-year-old blond fiction writer perennially looking for love, whose short stories are always about twenty-nine-year-old blond fiction writers looking for love. Amy, Jane has told me, has dated every grad student in their department, each relationship lasting precisely long enough for her to suggest that she’d be open to not using birth control. But Rafael doesn’t know any of this. He’s leaning against the wall, talking to her intently, and she is staring up at him, her eyes huge with need that could easily be mistaken for adoration. I can see, even from here, that this and the spiked punch would be a heady mix for an attention-craving artist.

  “Remember Ed?” I say. A burst of laughter erupts from Al’s kitchen.

  “Ed.” Jane snorts. He went out with her for three weeks, and then, after it fizzled, he and I met for drinks a few times, followed by beery kisses on his porch among the fireflies.<
br />
  “Ed,” I say again, “who wrote the poem about us.”

  “ ‘Tall Girls’!”

  “Before he got kicked out of your department.” Out of the corner of my eye, I see Rafael, still talking, leaning nearer to Amy, whose eyes, I notice, are closed.

  “ ‘Tall girls, Amazon hearts,’ ” Jane announces dramatically.

  “ ‘Warriors,’ ” I say, clenching my fists in front of me.

  “ ‘On the tender battlefield of love’!”

  This is not the first time Jane and I have recited Ed’s ode to us; with each rendition we add more sweeping gestures and exaggerated emotion, and each time, by the end, we’re screaming with laughter—although lately I’ve begun to feel, despite the hilarity, that this particular joke has a specific shelf life, that it will die—not now, not yet, but eventually, like a sputtering car running out of gas.

  Jane takes a deep breath and another sip of her noxious drink. I reach my hand up to smooth my hair. A man and a woman I don’t recognize seat themselves on the very sunken, 1970s plaid sofa across the room, and then seem to disappear into the dip in the cushions.

  “I think guys see us,” she says, “they see our friendship, and they know they don’t have a chance.”

  “Remember Josh?” I absently run my palm along the worn nub of the love seat’s arm. Last year, Josh the city planner broke up with Jane because he said he felt like he was the third wheel. Josh’s area of expertise was bus and bicycle lanes. He used a lot of vehicle metaphors.

  “I did not prefer him,” Jane says. “He was needy.”

  “I know. He was a third wheel!” One time we went to a movie with Josh, and it wasn’t until after the closing credits that Jane and I realized that, while he’d been in the bathroom, we’d changed our minds and gone to a different film.

  Al walks out of the kitchen carrying a huge, steaming vat of chili. Behind Jane, Rafael bends awkwardly toward Amy. She strains on her tiptoes, her blond head tipped back. He looks like he’s in imminent danger of toppling onto her. They kiss, finally, and Jane, noticing that my gaze has drifted, cranes her neck to see what I’m looking at. She laughs. The music has grown louder; the guitar comes to a throbbing crescendo, an ache that reaches inside me, takes me by surprise.

  “Well,” Jane says softly, below the din, “those two probably won’t last the week, but in fifty years, when we’re in the home, we’ll still have each other.”

  “You’ll have to pluck my chin hairs,” I say.

  “I will,” she says. “I promise.” She squints at me, stage-whispers, “You have one now.”

  The song ends abruptly. The apartment is warm and smells like beans. “Come and get it,” Al calls cheerfully from the dining room table, where he is beginning to scoop the chili into deep blue bowls.

  Jane leans her head back onto the edge of the love seat. Her long neck is birdlike, suddenly vulnerable, and I have the urge to pet it. “Let’s go,” she says, but neither of us gets up. Rafael and Amy unclench and quickly separate. Dozens of party guests begin to move en masse toward the food. They drift past us, and it seems for one dreamy moment as if they are under water, or I am.

  Chapter Six

  In May of my sophomore year of college, my dad drove up to Madison for a visit. It was his fiftieth birthday, so I baked him a cake. I used a Duncan Hines mix and slathered the finished product with frosting from a can, but for me it was a Herculean effort. It was my first year living off campus, and it had taken me a long time to get the hang of things: it was the year my roommates and I didn’t realize our oven was broken until one day in early April when our landlords were being stingy with the heat, and we tried to turn it on to warm the apartment. Even though I put the frosting on when the cake was still too hot and most of the top layer crumbled up into the thick, gloppy icing, and one side of the cake ended up about two inches higher than the other, it still looked and smelled remarkably edible.

  We met at A Tale of Two Zitis, the bookstore/Italian restaurant on State Street frequented by students and their visiting parents. At every other table there was a version of us. Dad had brought his girlfriend, a pleasant, petite, leather-skinned woman Seth and I called Tan Lesley. Lesley’s presence neither delighted nor disappointed me. She’d been a part of the scenery since a few months after our parents divorced, and Stan and Lesley had recently gotten engaged. Lesley didn’t speak much. At any given moment you could tell if she agreed or disagreed with my father by whether she placed her tan hand on his upper arm, or rolled her eyes and clucked her tongue at him. Whenever she talked to me, she announced my name first. Willa! It’s lovely to see you. Willa! How are your classes this term?

  “Willa! Do you know where the little girls’ room is?” I pointed her in the right direction, and she tottered off on her very high heels.

  “Stan!” I said. “Will you guys come back to the apartment after dinner?” I wanted to surprise him with my cake.

  My dad nodded happily and took another bite of his fettuccine alfredo. When Lesley came back from the bathroom, he jammed another forkful in, and Lesley said, “This place reminds me of that cute little café in Florence we went to a few years ago. The one with the chairs.” She touched my dad’s shoulder and smiled, then popped a cherry tomato into her mouth.

  But my dad returned her sunny gaze with a look of distress. His mouth was still full of pasta, his eyes bugged with alarm. It took me all of five seconds to catch on: Lesley. Florence. She was referring to a trip our family had been planning when I was fourteen, about two years before my parents split up. We had been talking about it for ages. Fran and Stan had always wanted to take us to Europe—when we would be old enough to appreciate it, they said, but before Seth went away to college, before we were too grown up to enjoy a family vacation. This was going to be the big one, the big splurge: Austria, where Stan’s grandparents had come from; France; Italy. We had already gotten our passports. I’d spent my babysitting money on travel guides and sketch pads and a leather-bound European trip diary. But one night, a few weeks before we would have left, Stan and Fran called us into the living room and told us that the vacation was off. Just like that. Stan clasped his hands behind his back and told us that an important business trip had come up for him during the exact same two-week period, that he had to go to Albany and couldn’t get out of it, that he was terribly, terribly sorry to disappoint us. Fran sat on the edge of the ottoman looking ashen.

  “Willa,” she said. “Seth. We’ll reschedule the trip. I promise we will.” She covered her face with her hands, and we knew not to ask any questions.

  In the restaurant, a waiter rushed past our table; glasses and silverware clinked. “Dad,” I said. I pushed my plate away. My appetite had died, had been crowded out by the tidal wave of disappointment and disgust that was washing over me. “God, Dad.”

  Lesley looked at me, her pretty, lined face a relief map of confusion. “What’s wrong, honey?”

  I shook my head. Nothing was her fault. Still, I wanted to stab her with my fork.

  “Will,” my father said, and I turned to him. I thought about how this could go; I thought about how if he apologized, after all this time, I might never talk to him again: I would look back in thirty years and say, That was the day I stopped talking to my father. He kept his small brown eyes fixed on me as he reached for Lesley’s hand. “You know that things have turned out for the best for all of us. I think you do know that.” He leaned over to Lesley and kissed her on the cheek, and she turned her face to him, surprised and pleased. “Well, it’s not always easy to do the right thing,” he said. “We take so many wrong turns.”

  Lesley, still smiling to herself, still a bit bemused, turned her attention back to her garden salad.

  “Love can be ruthless,” he said. He ran his hand through his hair, which was full and curly and only just starting to go gray. “But we do what we have to do. We make our choices.”

  “I have to go,” I said.

  “Willa.”

  I got u
p from the table and thanked them for dinner and said I had to get back to study. The restaurant went blurry for a second, and I gripped the edge of my chair.

  Stan stood up and walked around the table and put his arm over my shoulders like a man who would not, in fact, apologize for his own happiness, not even to his daughter. And what could I do about that? How could I argue with it? I leaned into his embrace, but only for a second. “Okay,” I said. “See you.”

  When I got home I took one look at the birthday cake I had baked, and I wanted to stuff it down the drain, but I also wanted to call Stan and tell him to come over after all. I stared at that lopsided chocolate cake for a full five minutes, and then I carved myself a huge, crumbly slice of it. I called out for my roommates, who were studying; I called out, “Guys, cake break!” and they came, and slice by slice, we ate the whole thing.

  But what seems jagged and wrong at nineteen can change, over the years, and seven years is a long time to think about a thing, to turn it over and over in your mind. My dad and Lesley are happy. My mom and Jerry are happy. Seven years is long enough to turn an excuse for the worst kind of behavior into a flawed nugget of wisdom. Take it or leave it. It had always been up to me.

  Chapter Seven

  “You have to acknowledge your inner truths,” Seth says to me. It’s been a week since he was here last, and he’s slumped at my kitchen table again; he’s unshaven and wearing the same frayed blue T-shirt and sweatpants he wore last week. For a moment it seems possible that he has never left. Right now he’s methodically dipping his index finger into a container of powdered hot cocoa mix and then licking it.

  “My inner truth is that that jar of Nesquik is yours,” I say. “You can take it home with you.” I regret instantly my use of the word “home,” because Seth still doesn’t have one. He’s still camped out on his friend Pete’s sofa.