Friends Like Us (12 page)

“Your grandma’s old love seat can go in the basement,” Natalie says.

“That’s not them,” I whisper, even though it is.

Ben looks at me funny, and then, clearly making the decision to humor me, he wiggles his fingers above his head, devil horns.

“
There
you two are.” Jane is winding her way through the rows of recliners, like a giraffe among the underbrush. She stops short and plants herself in front of us, and I look up to see my friend, her face flushed, taking in the tableau of Ben and me. Her eyebrows furrow, her mouth just barely moves, and then she composes her features as I crank myself up, the chair’s footrest lowering with an incriminating
clunk.
Ben wraps his arm around Jane’s waist and kisses her cheek.

“I was up in that top bunk,” she says, “talking to you guys. I had an entire conversation before I realized nobody was there!”

“What were you talking about?” I grip the squishy arms of the chair. Warp speed!

“The time I fell out of a bunk bed when I was ten.”

“Aww,” Ben says, kissing her cheek again.

“Poor Jinxy.”

Jane rolls her eyes at me and relaxes into Ben’s hug, forgiving us for whatever it is she thought she knew. “I was talking to myself,” she says. “Up there. Like an idiot.” She laughs then, a loud
haw
, and nobody says anything for a while; the
haw
just hangs there in the air above the recliners, until Jane looks around and notices for the first time where we are. “Willapede! I would like one of these for the apartment!” With balletic grace she twists her body around and slides into the recliner next to mine, pulling Ben down with her; they land together and the chair squeaks in protest.

They’re squished, Ben and Jane, in the overstuffed armchair, laughing as Ben tries to wriggle his left leg out from under Jane’s right, and suddenly I am wide open with longing. I want to be between them again, I want to be one of them, Ben or Jane, just to be next to someone, leaning against the solid mass of someone else’s muscles and bones, a rising chest, a beating heart. Jane has finally reconfigured herself so that she is draped over Ben’s lap, their four long legs entwined, a denim sea creature of limbs, her body turned sideways in the chair. Ben glances over at me and I think with surprise that he is reading my mind as he lifts one shoulder, a fleeting acknowledgment of something we both know will never happen, or maybe just another small attempt to make himself comfortable against the soft crush of Jane’s body.

Chapter Thirteen

This morning, Jane and I stood together in the bathroom in our apartment, getting ready for Amy and Rafael’s wedding. Jane was wrapped in a fluffy yellow towel. There was a tiny red dot of blood on her shin where she’d nicked herself shaving. “I wish I had your collarbone,” she said, spreading cocoa butter lotion onto her shoulders and neck. She smelled like a cookie.

“I need mine.” I worked some useless gel into my coarse hair. “What’s wrong with yours?”

“Yours is elegant. Mine just sits there!”

“Oh, my God,” I said. “I wish I had your elbows. Mine are so pointy!”

“Eeek!” She waved her hands around. “I hate my wrists!” She stood close to me and we rifled through my container of Vérité freebies, samples they sometimes send me from failed product lines. My favorite is the ill-fated On the Town collection, a series of nonsensically labeled lip glosses whose names bear no relation to actual colors. We held up Embarrassing Night at the Karaoke Bar and examined it, then Jane dabbed a bit of Get Your Hands Off My Boyfriend, Bitch! on her little finger and smoothed it onto her lips, and I smeared some Whoops! I’m Soooo Tipsy! on mine.

Ben appeared in the doorway, munching on a banana. “You look pretty,” he said, and Jane and I both said “Thanks,” simultaneously. And then there was a confusing half beat when no one said anything, and I felt my face grow warm. I studied my reflection, pressing my shiny pink lips together.

Jane tilted her head. “We do look pretty,” she said, glancing at Ben in the mirror.

It’s June, humid June, six months since the day they met, one hundred eighty-three days since the moment I stood between them in our apartment and waved my magic wand, the good witch of setups, the problem-solving guru of complicated friendships.

Well, sure, there have been instances. Occasions. Would I relive the time I overheard them having sex, startled awake at 1:00 a.m. by a moan that I thought, at first, had come from my own throat; a loud thump against my wall, then another, and another; how—too late!—I folded my pillow over my ears to try to drown out the sound of their bodies slapping against each other, the unmistakable thwack of skin on skin? No, I would not. (Would I relive the next time I overheard them, or the time after that? Well, I suppose I’ve sort of gotten used to it.) Or the night we made lasagna, how Jane lit candles and we sat together at our little round kitchen table drinking wine, Ben turning from Jane to me to Jane, his lips a grapy purple, a grin creasing his face like he couldn’t believe his good luck. And then, after dinner, how we cleaned up together, me gathering plates at the table, Jane and Ben in the kitchen washing dishes, and when I went in with my stack of plates, midsentence, “… that’s when I realized I had accidentally hit
REPLY TO ALL!
” there they were in a clutch at the kitchen sink, lips locked, Ben’s hand cradling Jane’s head, yes, like a baby’s, the faucet on full blast, water pouring down the drain, and me, awash in the sudden awful knowledge of where, exactly, I stood.

No, I probably wouldn’t revisit that one, either.

Yes, there have been moments. But more than that, there have been days and weeks of happy ease: long mornings at Rock River, the coffee shop near our apartment, where we play a complicated drawing/guessing game that I invented and always win; late-night games of Scrabble that I always lose; muddy, early spring tromps through the woods and chilly hikes along the shore of Lake Michigan; Sunday brunches cooked by Ben; movies. I look back with very little perspective and feel like I have been dating my two best friends. What could be better than that?

Jane and I find seats in the middle row of folding chairs set up in Latvian Hall, meeting room 2, a no-frills, bare-floored space with overly good acoustics that probably usually hosts motivational speakers and rained-out church picnics but today is decorated with fresh flowers and origami birds and strings of white lights for Amy and Rafael’s very low-budget wedding.
Shabby chic,
Amy wrote in her e-mailed invitation,
or possibly just shabby!
But it all looks perfect to me, the flowers and the paper birds and the party lights, fresh and hopeful and earnest in a good way, although I probably won’t admit that to anyone.

“Oh, my God, this is
weird,
” I whisper to Jane as murmurings start at the back of the room, and the wedding guests go quiet. Jane shushes me so loudly that the elderly lady in front of us turns and shakes her head at us with a ghoulish wobble of loose skin. I poke my elbow into Jane’s rib cage. “That was your fault,” I whisper again. “Offer her a peppermint!”

Jane elbows me back and scowls a reproach, but then, Jane-like, she relents and throws her arm around my shoulder; Willa-like, I wriggle it off.

To the opening notes of “I Got You, Babe,” which is either an excellent preemptive strike or the strangest shotgun-wedding song choice of all time, we crane our necks toward the door. “Oh! Here comes the bride,” Jane says,
Oah! Here comes the br-eye-id,
her Wisconsin accent thick, the way it is when she gets emotional, as our friend appears, beaming. With a little shrug, Amy starts walking, unaccompanied, down the makeshift aisle, to Cher’s warbling alto; she’s wearing a bright yellow sleeveless dress, her hands wrapped around a small bouquet of white daisies and resting on her bulging belly as if that’s what it’s there for, a little shelf, a portable hand rest. Rafael stands at the front in black pants and a blue linen shirt, his face very pale. He looks like the flag of a tiny, neutral, Alpine country.

Jane and I chipped in on a set of pretty salad bowls that Amy and Rafael had registered for, but I can’t help but think that they’ll be spearing baby spinach and cherry tomatoes from those burnt orange glazed pottery bowls long after they’ve forgotten Jane and me. Which doesn’t distract from my enjoyment of the day, not at all; in fact, my irrelevance fixes me right here, solidly in the moment, as if I’m watching a play, or maybe
in
a play, but with no lines—other than “Offer her a peppermint,” I guess.

“I never thought I’d find myself here,” Rafael says, his hands gripping Amy’s, his voice shaky, “with you.” Jane sighs. The party lights cast an ethereal glow around the windowless room, like stars in a planetarium. A box fan rattles in the corner. “Amy,” Rafael says, “since you came into my life, everything has changed.”

“Except diapers,” I whisper to Jane. “Diapers will be changed next.” At the Yom Kippur services of my childhood, Seth and I used to try to make each other laugh with jokes about the ladies in fancy outfits
(She’s atoning for the murder of all those minks)
and the jowly-cheeked cantor
(He’s storing nuts for winter),
but now I see that Jane is wiping a tear from her eye, and the feeling of being a spectator shifts and settles in me, a dense and strange amalgam of yearning and embarrassment and full-on surprise.

“I can’t believe how lucky I am,” Amy is saying, looking up at Rafael, “to have found you.” Her blond hair is swept up in a complicated twist, pretty tendrils framing her face. Rafael nods in agreement, and then Amy sneezes, and everyone in the room laughs.

“Why was that funny?” I ask Jane. This is the first wedding I’ve ever been to. I guess it’s obvious that this is the final destination for two people in love. And soon enough it will cease to shock me—those fat envelopes addressed to Ms. Willa Jacobs and Guest; budgeting tea kettles and place settings and linen napkin sets into my monthly expenses. But right here, as the ceremony continues, I feel bewildered by it, as stunned as if I’d stepped out of my apartment building to find that I was in another country, smack dab in the middle of a busy jumble of bodies where everybody knows the language but me. Where was I when the instructions were given to pair off, to slice away from friends and re-form as a couple? What boat have I missed? “Why was that funny?” I ask again, although maybe that’s not the right question.

Jane is digging around in her bag. “I’m starving,” she whispers, and when the old lady in front of us turns, inevitably, to glare at us again, Jane leans forward and offers her a candy. To my surprise, she accepts.

Chapter Fourteen

For a time after Amy and Rafael’s wedding, I floated through my days—sleeping, drinking coffee, drawing, hanging out with Jane and Ben, who did have jobs: generally existing as if I had a trust fund. In the end maybe it was a good thing that my bank balance dipped to $74.92, because how long could I have kept it up, my princessy, jobless drift, the days piling up like pretty snow, a formless heap of pleasant hours? Probably for quite a while.

It was on one of those long, lazy afternoons that Ben brought home a job quiz from the library, a page torn from a career counseling workbook someone had left behind.
What are your goals?
the quiz asked.
Would you rather plan a wedding or build a road? Style hair or predict severe weather?
And after I filled in my answers (style the hair of people who have survived severe weather), I put down my number 2 pencil and admitted to myself that all I wanted to do, all I’ve ever wanted to do, was draw. It turned out that I didn’t have goals, only a dream: compelling, impractical, and useless as a hair stylist in a hurricane. Which left me feeling both despondent and, strangely, free.

So I went out for a walk in my bustling little neighborhood, and I gazed at the world of industrious, productive humans. A man in a brown uniform lugged a huge package from his double-parked truck while two blond women carried trays outside the Blue Roses Café, and a priest, in full regalia, hurried down the sidewalk. It was a bright children’s book out here, a scene from Busytown—the mailman, the grocer, the baker; Leo, the friendly, chain-smoking gay man who owned Spexxxy Time, the weird store that sold upscale eyeglasses and, in the back room, sex toys. Okay, Leo might have been exiled from Busytown, but still, here he was, in the real city, making his living. Did none of these people have rich inner lives, dreams of their own? Of course they did. I was waking up to it all, it seemed, for the first time.

I was also calculating the maximum number of days through which I could stretch $74.92. I got to twenty-two if I was willing to consume a lot of canned tuna when the
HELP WANTED, PART-TIME
sign in the window of Molly’s Blooms caught my eye—like a message from God:
Willa, you hate tuna!
I pushed the door open, little bells like angel’s wings tinkling after me.

The store was empty, damp, and cavernous. Buckets of flowers stood neatly along the walls, two or three deep, the colors of the petals splashy and chaotic, a shade or two brighter than what you see in nature—like genetically engineered combinations of flowers and neon signs. The glass door of one of the coolers was ajar, and I gently tapped it shut.

A woman emerged from behind the counter. She had flowing red hair and bright green eyes. Her neck was long. She looked like she was made to work with flowers, like she herself was part flower. She looked like the kind of person who might start dancing spontaneously to no music. “May I help you?” she asked.

“I’d like to apply for the job,” I said, gesturing toward the help wanted sign.

She asked me if I had any floral experience, and I pictured my grandmother’s old sofa. I tried to think:
Do I have any floral experience that I have forgotten about?
I shook my head.

“My last part-time employee called in sick on Mother’s Day.” She tilted her head and fixed her gaze on me. She was sizing me up.

“I would never do that,” I said. “I have an excellent immune system.” I was suddenly self-conscious under her gaze. She was surprisingly steely for a redheaded flower sprite. I liked her.