Friends Like Us Read online

  “That’s your outer truth.”

  “Okay,” I say lightly, “but I’m not interested in your cooties becoming a part of my inner truth.”

  “Oh, my cooties?” Seth glares at me, his voice suddenly serrated, his features twitchy with disdain; immediately I curl up inside myself like a roly-poly bug. This is the thing about Seth, how when I’m with him, time will sometimes whirl backward in a dizzying spin, and without warning I’m the scorned fourteen-year-old little sister, the embarrassed blob of developing flesh, the trash bin for his misplaced anger. I finish drying a mug and, still stunned, carefully place it right back in the dish rack. When I notice what I’ve done, I leave it there, too proud to move it to the cupboard, to let Seth see he’s rattled me.

  I hang the dish towel on the oven door and glare back at my brother, who of course is no longer looking at me. But the fact is, I am just as much Willa-then as Willa-now, just as much fourteen-year-old kid as twenty-six-year-old adult, and although Seth may have the power to flatten me, it helps to remember that I’m not the one who got himself kicked out of his own apartment, I’m not the one spouting self-help platitudes while nursing an endless, insatiable sugar jones, currently licking powered cocoa mix from one wet, wrinkly finger. I’m not the one who, I am just noticing for the first time, has a brand-new silver dollar-sized bald spot on the top of his head.

  “So how’s it going at Pete’s?” I say, restraining the urge to plant my hands on my hips. “How’s that couch treating you?” Baldy.

  Seth pauses, considering. “Lumpy,” he says. “And lonely. It’s the perfect combination.”

  “Right,” I say, loosening. “How psychically unbalanced would it be if you were sleeping in someone’s well-appointed guest room, on six-hundred-thread-count Egyptian cotton sheets?”

  Seth nods. We’re back to normal. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from my brother—and there may be only one thing I’ve learned from my brother—it’s that opportunities for forgiveness are unlimited. “I know!” he says. “One of the great things about getting dumped by Nina is that all of my friends are pathetic losers like me.”

  Seth’s best friend is Pete Moss, a chubby computer genius who sometimes confuses his online avatar—star soccer player for an Italian club—with his real-world self.

  “Pete Moss,” I say. I just like to say it.

  “Pete Moss,” Seth agrees. “Hey, where’s your loser roommate?” He looks around the apartment in an exaggerated way, craning his neck as if he’s just noticing that Jane isn’t here, which obviously is not the case, because he’s had a crush on Jane since he met her. But that’s an uncomfortable fact we don’t acknowledge, given both Seth’s former relationship with Nina, and also Jane’s startling resemblance to me.

  “She’s out.”

  “Out?”

  “Jane is out for dinner with Ben. On a date.” I straighten the dish towel, which is suddenly in dire need of my attention. The corners are really uneven. ESCAPE TO WISCONSIN! is emblazoned in bright red on the white cloth. Depending on how you fold it, you can also make it say ESCAPE WISCONSIN! or SPEW SIN! I pluck at one side, then the other. “They’re on their first date, technically, although the three of us have hung out. But this is just the two of them.”

  Seth is silent, except for an unpleasant wet suction slurp. Other than that, he’s quiet for a long time. I crumple the dish towel and look around for something to wipe off, tension inexplicably balling up in my chest. As usual, except for whatever damage I’ve just inflicted on it, the entire kitchen is spotless, sparkling.

  “Huh,” Seth says finally.

  “Huh?”

  “She’s out with Kern?”

  “Yes!” I say, slapping my hand on the ancient yellow Formica countertop. It’s from the Plasticine Era, Jane says. “What is the big deal?”

  “Nothing! Just … dude always had a thing for you.”

  “You knew?”

  “You didn’t?”

  “Noooo,” I say, contemplating whether to tell my brother everything. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “What, back in high school?” Another fact we barely acknowledge: the entire history of our strained relationship. Seth wouldn’t have let me in on his observation about Ben in high school; he was too busy smoking pot, running track, and conducting his lengthy campaign to bulldoze my self-esteem.

  “Actually,” I say, “I arranged it. Their date.” It was predictably simple, the time-honored technique of eighth graders everywhere. I told Ben; I pretended Jane had no idea I was spilling the beans: a little tug on his arm, She likes you. And Ben, with the easy confidence of a customer whose new toaster comes with a money-back guarantee, asked Jane out.

  “Wow,” Seth says. And then he doesn’t say anything else. Outside, a siren screams past our building.

  “I think it’s great,” I say. “I think they might make a really good couple.” A thick, savory smell wafts through the apartment: our neighbors’ Friday night dinner. We have never actually met Mr. and Mrs. J. Smith of apartment 7, but we know a lot about them. Garlic, Italian opera, dramatic arguments. It’s too obvious, the generic name, the old-world odors and sounds: witness protection program. “What?” I say finally. I sit down across from Seth and, in spite of myself, reach for the cocoa powder and dip my finger into it.

  “Nothing,” he says, smirking.

  “Did you know that you’re starting to lose your hair?”

  “Oh, little sister,” Seth says, and his smirk, poised between gently mocking and ugly, twists up in the direction of his narrowed eyes. “How can you not know how this is going to play out?”

  I sigh. The evening ahead with my brother suddenly seems interminable. “Enlighten me.”

  “One,” he says, holding up the index finger of his right hand. “Jane and the Kern dog will break up, and you’ll be caught in the middle. Two,” he continues to hold up just one finger, “and less likely, they’ll actually stay together, and you’ll be …” and he rakes that finger across his neck.

  “Can I ask you a question?” I say. Seth nods. “Why do you always assume the worst?”

  He looks at me, and for a second I see a glimmer of something sad and true, before his lip curls again. “Were you not raised by my parents?”

  “Okay.” I push away from the table, my chair shrieking across the linoleum. “We’ll see, I guess. We’ll just see how it goes.” My voice is louder than I mean it to be, and I am filled with rage, with the sudden, trembling urge to run from my apartment, to leave Seth behind, once and for all, this slouched, beaten-down amalgam of base instincts and poor choices, this boy-man who shares my DNA but not my heart. Yeah, well, you cheated on Nina! I won’t let him slither under my skin. I turn away from my brother, move toward the television, and, so that he won’t be able to see that my hands are shaking just a little bit, start fumbling through the collection of DVDs he’s brought over. “I think things will turn out just fine,” I say, meaning it.

  Chapter Eight

  In college, my friends and I used to play a game we called Special Family. It was a competition, and sometimes a drinking game, in which, one by one, we compared the sordid details of our messed-up families. There were eight of us, and we played it over and over; we never ran out of material. There was only one rule—never embellish—and a clear winner always emerged. Sometimes it was the person whose parents were the most narcissistic and oblivious, like my friend Violet, who overheard her mom, mid-divorce, say to a friend, “Hell, if I hadn’t had kids with Tom, I would have had them with someone else.” On another night the victor might be the one whose parents had caused the most spectacular damage, had burned the broadest swath through their son or daughter’s childhood, like Ari, whose parents woke him up one night when he was six, stood together in the dark at the edge of his bed and said, “Choose!” I had my share of victories: the way my parents told Seth and me they were splitting up during Christmas Eve mu shu at our favorite Chinese restaurant; how I overheard them screaming at e
ach other in their bedroom one night and then suddenly grow eerily silent, and when, finally, overcome with concern, I went to investigate, I found them rolling around on their bed, pale globes of flesh in the dim light. I got a special tinfoil medal for that one.

  One lonely winter weekend my junior year I even drew a comic of it, twelve pages of Special Family Commemorative Moments: Evan’s mom with a glass of wine in her hand, weepily telling her eleven-year-old son that he looked just like his father but that she loved him anyway; Katie’s dad removing all of the light fixtures from their house when he moved out, insisting they belonged to him. I thought they would be funny, my black-and-white drawings, a joke to share with my friends at our next pot-and-poker night. But it turned out they were just depressing.

  All of this is why, when Jane invites me to come home with her for the weekend, I assume that it will be a piece of cake, that the trickiest thing I’ll have to navigate will be Jane’s mother’s overuse of the phrase “That’s real different!” Every happy family, I figure.

  “They’re not Ozzie and June, you know,” Jane says as we pull into her parents’ driveway, a smack of gravel against the car as it slows, then stops, the engine ticking to silence.

  “Ward and Harriet, you mean, and look! Over the front door! A banner that says WELCOME HOME, JINXY!” There’s no banner, but Jane did admit to me as we were leaving Milwaukee three hours ago that her dad used to call her Jinxy, and I’ve been taking advantage of that information ever since. “Come, Jinxy,” I say, unbuckling my seat belt and patting my thigh. “Come!”

  “Hang on,” Jane says, reaching across me to rifle through the glove compartment; she pulls out a bright yellow scrunchie and tucks her hair into a ponytail.

  “Your glove compartment is a time machine to 1994!”

  “My mom says she likes it when she can see my face,” she says, unembarrassed. She glances in the rearview mirror and then slides out of the car. I watch as she walks around the front of the car to my side, her long loping strides, her head bent slightly against the wind, and not for the first time today, I see my friend as the object of someone’s affection. Will Ben notice the way she rests her hands on her stomach when she’s thinking? How her hair is slightly curlier on the left side than it is on the right? Jane and I spent the first hour of our journey analyzing every detail of last night’s date. He was nervous; he spilled a glass of water. They told each other stories about past loves. Not me, I hope, ha ha. They kissed. “Every first kiss doesn’t have to change your life,” she said, matter-of-fact, and then, “I like him,” before I could respond, which I would have, but then I didn’t. Her eyes were fixed on the road. I imagined their faces. It was the start of something. Any idiot could see that.

  “Come on,” she says, opening my car door. “Your list of ways to make fun of me is about to grow significantly longer.”

  Sure enough, Jane’s mother greets us at the door with a plate of cookies. “Hi, girls!” she says, cookies aloft, and I’m thinking, Give me a fucking break, and also, Maybe they’ll let me move into Jane’s old room, when her mother slaps Jane’s hand away. “Not for you!” she says, with surprising force. Mrs. Weston is wearing a zigzag-striped sweater, a horrible, mesmerizing thing in pinks and browns that, I feel, could be used for nefarious purposes. You’re a duck! Quack like a duck! She’s at least six inches shorter than Jane and I, her brown wavy hair cut to just above her shoulders. She reminds me of a doll I had when I was little whose appearance you could change by snapping different hairstyles onto its head.

  “Hello, dear.” She places one hand on my upper arm and squeezes; she seems like a person who understands the nuances of a good arm squeeze. “You must be Willa. We are so pleased that you’re here.” Squeeze. She juts her chin toward the plate of cookies. “I was just going to run this over to the Tylers’. Dougie’s getting divorced!”

  “So you baked them cookies,” Jane says. She reaches for the plate again and takes two, offers me one. Oatmeal raisin, the Miss Congeniality of cookies.

  “He’s over there now,” Jane’s mother says, her voice a sudden, conspiratorial whisper. She nudges Jane. “Go on, you take them over.”

  “Oy vey, Mom,” Jane says, raising her palms dramatically. Mrs. Weston purses her lips a little and tilts her head as if she is hearing distant, complicated music. “Dougie and I grew up together,” Jane says to me. “My mom and his mom have been trying to get us together for … twenty-five years?” Her mother nods. “Since preschool. Dougie is a salesman for a sporting goods company. He still gets drunk every Saturday night with his college frat brothers. Still calls them his brothers. Last time I saw him he bragged to me that the only reading he does is the sports page while he’s in the bathroom. Except he didn’t say ‘in the bathroom.’ We’re perfect for each other!” Jane glances at me above her mother’s head, raises her eyebrows; clearly, you don’t tell a woman like this about the promising first date you had last night with a boy who works part-time at the library and plans to become a social worker.

  “Scoot them on over, Janey,” Mrs. Weston says, doing a convincing impression of someone who hasn’t heard a word her daughter just said. She passes the plate to Jane and then, her hand still gripping my upper arm, leads me inside.

  The door opens into the warmth of a small entryway with just enough room for two people to stand too close to each other and a living room with a shock of fluffy, salmon-colored carpeting and everything else in shades of white: cream-colored sofa, puffy beige armchair, off-white throw pillows scattered about. I have the disquieting feeling of being inside someone’s mouth. Mrs. Weston glances around, looking pleased.

  “You have a lovely home,” I say, which is stupid, because I haven’t seen any of it beyond this humid corner, and also so unlike me that I think Mrs. Weston’s arm squeeze may have been some kind of alien personality meld. I resolve not to say anything else until Jane reappears.

  “Do I hear our city slickers?” A voice booms from a nearby room, then a clank of pots and pans. “Oops! It’s okay! I’m fine!”

  Mrs. Weston clears her throat, then guides me through the living room into the bright, cluttered kitchen, where Mr. Weston is standing over a steaming kettle of something. He’s wearing an apron, in the style of men who believe that they cook frequently. He raises the lid of the large pot and inhales deeply. “It’s water!” he yells, in what I fear is his normal decibel level. “I’m boiling water!”

  Mr. Weston is tall. He’s more than tall. He’s stretched out, elongated, every limb like pulled taffy, gangly and loose, and he looks elaborately ill at ease bent over the stove.

  “Charlie,” Mrs. Weston says.

  “I’m making supper for our gals about town, if they’re not too sophisticated for Charlie Weston’s old-fashioned spaghetti and meatballs!” I look down at the kitchen floor, feeling awkward and bony, like a twelve-year-old girl who really loves horses.

  “Hand over the wooden spoon, Charlie,” Mrs. Weston says, finally letting go of my arm and moving toward her husband in quick steps, heels clacking. She snatches the spoon from him and puts her hand on her husband’s upper back—she has to stand on her tiptoes to do it—and pushes him away. “Scoot,” she says, for the second time in the past minute and a half. “This is a man who does not belong in the kitchen,” she says cheerfully, her body to the stove as she dumps a package of spaghetti into the water. Mr. Weston, serene, defeated—Who, me?—folds himself into a kitchen chair.

  I’m trying to figure out what’s unsettling about this scene, and it dawns on me that it’s the lack of rancor, the routine good nature between them. She didn’t mutter a cruel remark as she grabbed the spoon from him; he’s quiet, but clearly not freezing her out. They’re just doing their thing.

  And I’m midrealization when Mr. Weston notices that I’m here, standing in the kitchen doorway, unsure where to look. I smile weakly, even more abashed in the face of their relentless normalcy. My hands are clasped in front of me so tightly that when I try to loosen th
em, they feel like hinges. My mind cartwheels, searches for something to say. Hello! You have a lovely home!

  “What rhymes with ‘spaghetti’?” Mr. Weston asks suddenly. Sitting, Jane’s father is almost as tall as I am.

  I stare at him, a mute game-show contestant in the spotlight. “ ‘Uncle Freddy’?” I say finally. He studies me for a long few seconds, then winks.

  Mrs. Weston turns, an expression of horror on her face. “Oh, Willa!” she says. “My goodness, I’m so sorry! But if you’d seen some of Mr. Weston’s more spectacular kitchen disasters, you’d forgive my rudeness.”

  She lowers the heat and steps toward me again, and I’m bracing myself for another arm squeeze when Jane charges into the kitchen and drops our bags on the floor. If I squint, she’s fourteen, tossing her school backpack at her feet. Her mother wheels around.

  “Did you see Dougie?” Mrs. Weston asks, as Mr. Weston stands and swoops Jane up into a hug.

  “Mmmph,” Jane says.

  “Little Janey Jane has a walnut for a brain!” Mr. Weston announces, letting her slide an inch away from him, but apparently only so that he can squish her again with the force of his embrace. “And almonds on her toes, and a peanut for a nose!”

  “Cashew!” Jane says, muffled inside her father’s bear hug, and Mr. Weston says, “Gesundheit,” and frees her.

  “Dougie?” Mrs. Weston repeats.

  “Yeahyeahyeah,” Jane says. “I gave him the cookies. He says thanks.” But then, when her mother has turned back to attend to the stove and her father has carried our bags away, Jane leans in and whispers to me, “I lost my virginity to Dougie when we were sixteen!”

  “I find that very hard to believe,” I say under my breath. Jane chuckles, low and lascivious. And only later, much later, will I realize that this feeling, vague and inchoate, is the shock of illumination. I thought I understood my best friend inside and out, but the truth is I knew just enough about her to think I knew everything.