Friends Like Us Read online

  “Well, if we had real jobs, we wouldn’t be sitting here at three-forty-five on a Thursday afternoon,” Jane says.

  “Brooding,” I say. “Brew-ding.”

  Ben rolls his eyes. Jane offers him a sip of her margarita, and he lowers his mouth to the glass. Their intimacy is light and new but not exactly tentative; they look like a couple who has been together for a long time. The energy between them is surprising, not the electric buzz I’ve felt with every guy I’ve been with, the giddy question with one inevitable (frequently wrong, but inevitable) answer; between Jane and Ben it’s gentle, expansive, roomy.

  I imagine us years from now, sitting on a real deck behind a small white house somewhere, and the configuration is almost the same, although in my mind there are four of us, Ben and Jane and someone for me, someone hazy, unformed … faceless (but attractively faceless!). He sits next to me in a cushioned lawn chair, close but not too close, his long legs extended. And there are a few kids running around in the yard, cheerful little children who don’t demand much attention. But mostly in my imagination it’s this feeling, adjusted for practical considerations: the happy ease of the family you’ve created, the one that doesn’t fall short, the one that doesn’t disappoint.

  “I can’t think anymore,” Ben says. “I’m too cold. My ass is too cold.”

  “You know,” I say, “that I am contractually obligated to make a joke about where your brain is.”

  Jane pats Ben’s shoulder and nods. “She is.”

  He ignores us, starts packing up the supplies of our little Arctic picnic. “How about, ‘When your friends force you to sit outside on a blanket in the middle of winter and your extremities freeze, hot tea will at least raise your body temperature to the point where you might not die immediately.’ ”

  “Good,” I tell him. “But more than ten words.” I’ll need to find a real job soon, that’s for sure.

  Jane laughs and hoists herself up; she wobbles a little, steadies herself against Ben. “Because you can’t drink R or S,” she says, and he looks at her, confused.

  I’m sitting on this blue wool blanket, craning my neck at the afternoon sky and at my friends who are suddenly towering, shadowless, above me. Ben and Jane each extend an arm for me, two cold hands to pull me up, and Ben mutters, “Shit, I’m freezing,” and for a passing second I wish we could actually freeze, the three of us, just like this.

  Chapter Ten

  Early in my friendship with Jane, when our favorite thing to do was to compare notes, to establish and reestablish the specific degree of our astounding similarities, Jane asked me about my parents’ marriage. “How was it between them?” She scooped a handful of our favorite nuts (Pistachios? Me, too!) and passed the bowl to me across the table. “What was your parents’ marriage like?”

  And I thought: Like? There was no like, as far as I could tell, only dislike, and that was on a good day; on a bad day, it was much worse. Fran and Roger Jacobs were two people who had probably once thought they were alike but discovered—oops, too late, they’d heedlessly created two hapless, helpless children—that they were deeply unalike and did not like each other at all, not one bit.

  I didn’t say this to Jane. Instead I told her about the time when I was ten years old, alone in our basement playroom. I was moving a family of tiny, colorful, wooden dolls around a dollhouse that I was much too old for, but it gave me a comfort I couldn’t explain. It eased me sometimes just to be down there, to take refuge in the faux-wood-paneled room whose shelves were still stacked with Candy Land and Chutes and Ladders, floor cluttered with train sets missing tracks, chunky foam balls and bright yellow nets, games and toys that implied, if not exactly recalled, happier family times.

  Kristina, the blond-haired little girl doll, was performing a Christmas ballet for her doll family. My fantasies always involved Christmas and little girls named Kristina or sometimes Heidi and once in a while Heidi-Kristina. The mother, father, and brother dolls (nameless) were arranged in a row, watching, rapt and supportive. I heard my dad come downstairs and begin to rummage through the pantry in the laundry room where we kept extra cans of soup, rolls of paper towels and toilet paper, boxes of cereal and macaroni and cheese.

  “Where is the oatmeal?” he muttered. He was on a sort-of health kick back then, as much as someone with an insatiable appetite could be, and he liked to have a huge bowl of oatmeal for a snack, drizzled with honey and sprinkled with wheat germ and raisins and sometimes chocolate chips or M&M’s if he thought no one was paying attention. My mom bought boxes of Quaker Instant in bulk for him at the Food Warehouse. “Fran, where’s the oatmeal?” he called. He still hadn’t seen me. I was in the corner of the playroom, crouched behind the dollhouse.

  My mother’s voice came from the kitchen at the top of the stairs. “There’s some up here!” Her tone was neutral, pleasant.

  But then my dad ramped it up, the way one of them always did, the way one of my parents would without fail glance around and say, Hmm, yes, the low road is the better option here. “There is no oatmeal upstairs, Francine! If there were any goddamn oatmeal upstairs, I wouldn’t be down here looking for it!” I could see from my perch my father’s face pinking up, like a baby’s, the color spreading from his neck to his cheeks to his forehead, until his entire face was a flushed red orb, like the bike lights he made me and Seth use even though he forbade us from riding at night. “There is no goddamn oatmeal in this house!” His voice was suddenly a carnival of meanness, a rip-roaring circus of blame.

  “I am holding in my hands a fucking box of oatmeal!” my mother screamed. They had long ago given up many things; appropriate language in the home was among the first to go.

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” my father muttered, still angry but also, all of a sudden, deflated and pouty.

  That’s what it was like, I told Jane. Anything—a phone call, a birthday party, oatmeal—could turn into hatred between them and then, without warning, into defeat so palpable it made your heart stop. Until they finally ended it, their marriage was another planet, a harsh, extraterrestrial climate—scalding mornings followed by blue-black evenings so frigid no life could possibly be sustained there.

  Jane crunched on another handful of pistachios. “Huh,” she said. Sometimes, in those early days, we didn’t know what to say when one of our experiences so obviously didn’t match the other’s. Later, with relief, we would figure out that it was okay to say nothing. “That’s a bummer,” she said; through her mouthful of nuts it sounded like There’s my thumb, or … “My parents are not like that,” she added, stating the obvious, because although I hadn’t met them yet, I knew that the Westons were, if nothing else, still together. “They’re boring.” She looked at me as if for permission to go on with her story of lesser angst. “They’re boring and utterly predictable except that they never mastered the art of parental alignment. So whenever I wanted something, some toy or sugary treat or something, and one of them said no, I could go to the other and that one would probably say yes.” Her eyes widened at the insanity of it.

  “So then what?” I asked. I was holding a pistachio shell. I tucked it into my curls, like a barrette.

  “Then what what?”

  “If one of them said yes, did you always get what you wanted?” I imagined Jane a spoiled princess in a pink-carpeted room, ruler of the kingdom of whatever-the-hell-she-wanted.

  She looked at the blue bowl of nuts, mostly empty, and at the second bowl into which we had been depositing the shells. With a little shudder, she pushed both of them away. “No!” she said, indignant. She thought for a moment, then shrugged. “But actually, pretty often.”

  I pointed to the pistachio shell in my hair, secured there by the spirally strands, and then I fluffed my hair showily, like a movie star, a slightly mentally ill movie star.

  “Very gorgeous,” Jane said, and she plucked a shell from the bowl and wriggled it into her own curls, and then we were the same again, two girls with pistachio-shell barrettes suspended in ou
r curly hair.

  Chapter Eleven

  Even in your closest friendships, you’re alone. Maybe it’s your best friend who, in fact, reminds you, just by making it her business to try to know your heart, that no one can—that our fate is to suffer in isolation and then die. But it’s our collective fate! So I guess I’m an optimist.

  There are plenty of things I don’t tell Jane, bits of information I edit out, stories I don’t share—so that the picture she has of me is incomplete, a self-portrait I present to her, and if she sees light where there should be shadow, well, she can choose to be dazzled, or she can fill in the darkness herself.

  When Seth was a senior in high school, Stan decided that we would take a family road trip to Philadelphia. Seth had just been accepted to the University of Pennsylvania, along with a slew of other top-tier colleges my parents couldn’t afford. “The Ivy League,” my dad kept saying, the week Seth got the fat envelope from Penn and then, after that, the one from Dartmouth. “I’ll be damned.” He would say that and scowl and rub his fingers hard across his eyebrows, as if trying to pay for an expensive private college really would consign my father to hell.

  This was months after he had canceled our trip to Europe, and we were suspicious and raw. Fran took to referring to our impending journey with a vaguely Italian accent: Pheeladelphia, she would say; I cannot wait to see the sights of Pheeladelphia, to enjoy its fine cuisine, just subtle enough so that Stan might or might not notice. I noticed.

  On the first day of spring break, we piled into the car and headed east. The night before, Fran had made egg salad sandwiches for us—dozens of egg salad sandwiches. Every time we stopped for gas or coffee, whenever someone had to use the bathroom or my dad needed to get out and stretch his legs, she would offer up the sandwiches, like a sacrifice to the gods of family harmony. After an hour, the car smelled like swamp gas and candy; our mother had also come prepared with an endless supply of red licorice, which was one thing we all agreed on.

  I took my cues from my brother and pretended to be deeply unattached to the fact that we were trekking across the country on a mission of familial unity and support. Whatever, I said to my parents when one of them asked me a question: Would you like a Sprite? Whatever. Did you and Ben finish the issue of Prose Shop you were working on last weekend? Yeah, I don’t know. Whatever. Secretly I was thrilled, thrilled that we were all together, my grumpy, muttering father; my mood-swinging mother; my brooding, gimlet-eyed brother; and me. I propped my bare feet against the back of the seat and read the Brontés for hours. (What are you reading, Willa Gorilla? Nothing. Whatever.) Seth spent the entire trip plugged in to his portable CD player, staring out the window or at the calculus textbook open on his lap. My parents argued. But they had been arguing for so long that it seemed almost pleasant, an off-key tune, the jangling notes playing so frequently you don’t even realize they have caused you to rearrange your entire definition of “music.”

  “Fran, did you write down the mileage at that rest stop?”

  “Oh. No.”

  “I asked you to write down the mileage.”

  “Well, I’m sorry, but I forgot.”

  “How could you forget? What else are you thinking about that you could forget something as simple as writing down the mileage?”

  “Oh, Roger, back off. Here, have a damn sandwich.”

  “I don’t want a damn sandwich.”

  I’ll have a ham sandwich, I wanted to say. But I kept quiet and stared out the window.

  We made it to Cleveland by early evening and pulled into the E-Zzzz Rest Inn, a cut-rate motel off the highway where my father had, absurdly, made a reservation. “We’re the Jacobses, and we have reserved two rooms for tonight,” my dad announced, and the girl behind the desk pulled a wad of gum out of her mouth and laughed.

  “I’m going to go swimming,” Seth said to me, pointing to a small, steamy pool behind a wall of glass, and I nodded. It wasn’t an invitation, but it was as close as I would get.

  “All righty,” Fran said, lugging her big suitcase, dragging it awkwardly behind her. “Let’s go find our rooms.” My father came up behind her with his smaller, lighter duffel bag slung easily over his shoulder. “Oh, that’s all right,” Fran said, huffing. “I’ve got it,” although Stan hadn’t offered.

  We headed down the chlorine-scented hallway, and when we got to rooms 16 and 17, Fran and Stan inserted their separate key cards into separate doors. Seth glanced at me and dropped his backpack on the floor. “Wait, no.” He shook his head, horrified. “Dad, no.”

  Stan tilted his big head toward Seth. “You’re bunking with me, son.”

  Seth crossed his arms over his chest. “Dad, no,” he said again. “I can’t!” Our father’s snoring was legendary. His rumbling shook the rafters. There were several states in which he was not welcome. I looked down at the cabbage-rose-strewn, industrial carpeting and tried not to smile. Seth wanted to share a room with me. Yes, he was trying to avoid sleeping next to Mount St. Stan. And, no, it wasn’t as if he wanted the two of us to eat M&M’s at midnight and giggle at bad romantic comedies together. Still. I was used to taking what I could get from my brother, and I would take this.

  “Mom,” I said, fingering the sleeve of my worn jean jacket, “can’t you sleep with Dad?” My face flushed hard. “I mean, can’t you guys, like, sleep in the same room?”

  Our parents looked at each other. My mother sighed, my father shrugged, and everyone seemed to soften; even the cabbage roses looked hazy and pretty for a moment. “Well …”

  “You’re with me, Seth,” Stan said abruptly.

  My mom bristled. “Come on, sweetie,” she said to me. Fran and her big suitcase disappeared into our room; I caught the door just as it was about to close.

  I changed into my swimsuit while my mom showered. The rush of water against the plastic tub sounded like thunderous applause: Congratulations, Jacobs family, on remaining intact for another day! As I was adjusting the straps of my old Speedo and tugging it out of various cracks, Fran stepped out of the bathroom, naked and dripping, a towel twisted into a turban around her head. I saw my future in her large, sagging breasts, her bulgy middle, the fleshy tops of her thighs, and I felt a hot, tender shame for both of us.

  “Oh, don’t look at me,” she said, laughing, as she stepped back into the underwear she had been wearing.

  “Ugh, Mom, gross,” I said. I grabbed a towel, tucked it around my waist, and went to get Seth. Their door was ajar. My dad was already conked out on one of the beds. Seth was sitting on the edge of the other one, staring at the TV. There was a pillow over my dad’s face like a scene from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, but I could hear his snoring—had heard it from the hallway—so I knew there had been no mercy suffocation. “Hey, come on,” I said to Seth. “Let’s go.”

  He looked at me, then turned quickly back to the television—he was watching a European soccer game, but on mute, so it looked surreal, the enormous stadium packed with silent fans in bright shirts, people on their feet, arms waving, mouths open. Seth turned to me again and sneered. “I’m not going swimming with you,” he said. Not with you. My brother could break my heart a thousand times a day. He could tear me in two. He could burn a hole in me with his eyes. He was a superhero of scorn.

  “Okay,” I said, my eyes stinging. I thought about my mother in the next room, bent over naked, stomach pocked, breasts swaying, pulling her light pink underwear up over her legs. Little blue veins decorated her calves, her thighs. She was one of the slimmer, more-well-kept moms, among the middle-aged mothers I knew. Still, she was ravaged. “Fine,” I said to Seth. “Whatever.” I wished I had wrapped another thin motel towel around my shoulders. I braced myself for what he would say next. It might have been anything.

  He leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees, his chin in his hands. “Maybe later,” he said to the TV. “Maybe I’ll go swimming with you later.”

  In the car, on our way back home, after our walking tour of Philad
elphia, after our visit to the campus and my parents’ meeting with the financial aid officer, my father would tell Seth not to get his hopes up. “Lower your expectations,” he would say, and Seth, headphones still clamped to his head, would act like he hadn’t heard.

  We could have rescued one another—the four of us, together, or any combination. But we didn’t. We left each other alone, and for a long time after we stayed that way.

  Chapter Twelve

  I spend my days watching Ben and Jane become a couple, and I will myself to happiness. I make myself a scientist of them, an expert in my narrow field, a Ben-and-Jane-ologist. How close can I get without compromising my subject? Move closer, a little closer.

  One Saturday in the middle of March, we go bed shopping. We try out the extra-firm mattresses at the Box Springs Eternal Bed and Furniture Warehouse, roll around like little kids in a bouncy castle on the double-plush pillow top, lie shoulder to shoulder to shoulder on the king-size Super Sleep Superluxe. The three of us.

  “Hon,” Ben says, from his prone perch on the Superluxe. He reaches across my chest to rest his hand on Jane’s elbow. “If you bought this one, I bet we’d never fall off again, like we did the other night.”

  So that was the crash I heard. I clear my throat and move Ben’s arm. Okay, maybe this is a little strange.

  “Benjamin!”

  Lately Jane has taken to calling Ben by his full name, claim staking and maternal, and every time she does, a small, evil creature that lurks inside my brain crawls along the edges of my skull, hissing.

  “This bed would not fit in our apartment, much less my bedroom,” she says.

  I flex my calves. I can extend my legs completely on the Superluxe, and my toes still don’t dangle off the edge—a rare luxury for a tall girl. “Remember in college, how you would sleep on a twin bed all night with your boyfriend, and you didn’t care?” My lying-down voice sounds funny to me, as if someone else is talking.