Friendship (19 page)

Amy glanced over at Bev to make sure she hadn’t fallen asleep, but her eyes were still open. She was staring up at the ceiling fan; the only sound in the room was the gentle swoop of its blades cutting the air.

“I guess I’m talking about this weird vapidity that women seem to aspire to,” Amy said. “This kind of
Us
magazine editorial voice that infects people’s actual conversations and lives. Just fetishizing …
children
and
domesticity
and making it seem like they are the goals of women’s lives, the only legitimate goals women’s lives can have.”

“I am the furthest thing in the world from being in any way like those women,” Bev said, yawning.

“I know, I know. But no matter what, if you decide to have this baby, you’re going to, like,
have a baby
. That’s going to mean something. Just because … like, it’s a baby. No matter what, it’s your baby. Your child. Doesn’t that fuck with your head? I’m just worried now about all the things that could go wrong. I just want things to go back to how they were before you got pregnant.” Amy was getting too tired to think straight.

“I want that too, but there’s no point in wanting something impossible. I also feel like this might be my chance to change the direction of my life,” said Bev. “If you had one of those, you would take it, right?”

“I don’t know,” Amy said. After a while, when it seemed that Bev had drifted off, she went back to her own room to sleep.

27

It was weird how long it took to get anywhere in Margaretville, considering how little of it there was. As Amy walked down the hill away from Sally and Jason’s house, she felt as if she were breaching some veil between postcard scenery and reality with every step. The town was totally surrounded by mountains but somehow not in their shadow. The sky was full of bright, pale autumn sunlight. There wasn’t another human being in sight, and Amy imagined that all the houses were empty, that the whole picturesque thing was a show put on for her benefit.

For the minutes it took Amy to hike to the main street, she tried to occupy her mind with something besides Bev’s situation. She purposely stepped over the lines of weeds sprouting out of the cracks in the sidewalk. She tried to make herself think about her apartment search, her job prospects.
Please, God, let me get a new job soon,
she thought.

Amy’s impression of God was more or less that God was a reasonable guy/gal, a very wise yoga instructor type, who knew that you had done and thought some heinous stuff but didn’t take it personally. Or maybe there was no God, no personified intelligence, but it was still important to have some internal moral code that you would be rewarded for sticking to. Doing unto others. Not fucking other people over. It was weird that in all their years of best friendship, Amy and Bev had never discussed morality, or whatever you wanted to call the rules they, respectively, lived by. When Bev had talked about feeling that she would faint if she went back to the gynecologist’s office, Amy had been shocked to realize that there was a vestige of Bev’s extremely religious upbringing left in her. Or—well, that wasn’t quite true. Before, Amy had thought that Bev’s evangelical childhood resulted in what sometimes seemed like amorality, as if instead of rules, Bev had a lacuna where rules had been and where there was now something slightly too vague—something that made Bev vulnerable to impulses because there was nothing inside her telling her “no” except something she didn’t trust, something she fought with in order to live.

But now Amy thought that maybe Bev—despite not believing in a devil who would punish her or a hell she was doomed to go to after she died—did believe there were things you simply could not do, and having an abortion was one of them. And if that was the case, it wouldn’t be possible to talk her out of having the baby.

Amy wandered up and down the main street, peering into the windows of businesses that seemed mostly closed. Idiosyncratic hours of operation were posted in their windows: 11:30 to 4:15; noon to 6:00 on Thursdays. She finally wandered over to the block behind the main street, where the quaintness ended and was replaced with bland suburban utilitarianism. She walked into the supermarket. Its wide aisles, made to accommodate two carts side by side, filled her with hunger and nostalgia, and she was struck by an impulse to call Sam, just to hear his voice, an impulse she quickly gave in to.

He picked up on the second ring, but his voice was tinny, and wherever he was sounded windy. “I’m on my way to soccer, baby, so I only have a couple of minutes. Where are you? I miss you.”

“I’m in a grocery store in upstate New York, near the cheese island. They have samples. I just ate some local chèvre; it was okay. Super salty. I’m glad you got out of the studio, baby. How is your soccer career going?”

“We won last night, but today I think we’re going to lose. Are you and Bev having fun on your vacation, baby?”

Amy hesitated. She actually had no idea why she was hesitating to tell Sam about Bev’s pregnancy. In the past, she’d told him gross and revealing details about her best friend’s romantic life all the time, the way people in relationships always gossip about their single friends to compensate for the lack of sexy scandal in their own lives, in between watching episodes of
The Wire
. But this felt different, more private and serious than Bev’s usual indiscretions and debilitating crushes. And besides, she wasn’t sure what was going on with her and Sam’s relationship.

“Yeah, we actually ran into those people we house-sat for before, and now we’re, like, visiting them.”

Sam’s end of the line grew windier. “Sorry, baby, I have to catch this bus or else I’m going to be late to soccer. I don’t want to be that annoying guy talking on his cell phone on the bus. Will you send me one of your beautiful emails later?”

“Okay. But I would rather talk, I mean … I have all this stuff I want to tell you, and you’re never around. And you could send me an email too?”

“I’m sorry, baby, I’ve just been trapped in the studio. There’s so much amazing light this time of year. Okay, I’m on the bus, baby. Wish me luck in the game!”

Coming out of her telephonic fugue state, Amy realized that she’d been standing there by the cheese island, fondling the same piece of string cheese for a long time, squeezing the firm knot from one end of its plastic package to the other. An aproned supermarket staffer was eyeing her from the other side of a row of bagged yellow onions. She shoved the phone to the bottom of her pocket and smiled at the guy, who stopped stacking the onion bags and gave her a halfhearted wave.

It was really getting old, this business of Sam being the only person besides Bev whom she most cared about and wanted to confide in and Sam’s perhaps not feeling the same way. She needed to break up with him, but she needed some other arena of her life to improve before she relinquished the support, however minimal, she was getting from him. For example, she needed a new job. Or a new apartment. Or a new boyfriend. She bought a can of organic fruit juice soda with her credit card and began trudging back up the hill.

When Amy got to the house, Bev was lying on the couch in the living room, nursing a ginger ale and flipping idly through an issue of Jason’s magazine. Sally was plopped down in the wing chair opposite Bev, busily scribbling some kind of list.

Amy stood in the vestibule, one hand reflexively teasing the screen of the phone in the depths of her coat pocket, as though she might be about to call someone who’d be able to come and rescue her. They’d done what they came here to do. Couldn’t they now, non-awkwardly, say their goodbyes and get back to Brooklyn? She suddenly felt frantic about her job search, her apartment search, her broke-ness. The first chance she got, she’d talk to Bev about leaving. Meanwhile, she forced a smile, took off her shoes and coat, then retreated to the guest bathroom upstairs, where she self-consciously ran water during her entire toilette.

When she came back downstairs, Bev had pried herself up off the couch and was in the process of tying her ratty high-top Converses. “I’m feeling a little cabin-fevered, dude. And the nausea seems to have subsided for the moment, knock wood. Want to go on a bike ride? They have like ten bikes; Sally is going to show me her favorite trail.”

Amy knew that she should force herself to go on the bike ride, that she would feel much better if she got exercise. She looked at Sally, who was reaching down to lace up sneakers that had no overt brand insignia on them but still managed to look incredibly expensive. Amy knew she should go, and just as clearly, she knew she wasn’t going to.

She told Bev and Sally that she would hold down the fort and that she was glad Bev was feeling better. As an afterthought, she asked what Jason was up to.

“Oh, he’s down in the basement,” Sally said. “He’s working on one of his little projects.”

Half an hour later, without quite knowing how she’d ended up there, Amy found herself knocking on the door of Jason’s basement workroom.

He was straddling a bench, wearing protective goggles and holding some kind of tool. His ratty T-shirt was a little bit tighter than it needed to be, but otherwise this was the butchest Amy had ever seen him look. When he glanced up at Amy, she understood him to actually be heterosexual in a way she hadn’t before.

“What are you working on?”

He pushed his protective goggles up and wiped his brow with an exaggerated Diet Coke commercial-ish gesture, and Amy giggled, as he’d intended her to. “Come over here and take a peek,” he said.

She stood behind him and looked at the object on the bench. It was a tiny replica of the couch Bev had been lying on earlier, the one in the living room upstairs. Jason was using a Dremel tool to create a tiny version of the intricate pattern on the real couch’s wooden frame.

“Whoa. That’s amazing! And sort of bizarre,” said Amy.

Jason stroked the mini couch, looking at it as though it had appeared suddenly in his hand via magic. “Yeah. It’s so nerdy, I never tell anyone about it. I don’t have a dollhouse for them or anything. I just learned how to make scale replicas of stuff by building architectural models in design school and sort of fell in love with it. Now I do it sometimes when I’m feeling stressed-out.”

“It’s good to have a project,” Amy said. She was reaching.

“Do you have a project?”

It was the first time they’d made eye contact. It was a basic question, and he’d asked it only to make conversation, but it caught Amy off guard.

“Um … no, not right now.”

“What do you do, again?”

“Oh, stuff with the Internet. Editing stuff, mostly, like blog posts. And sometimes I write stuff. I immerse myself in each little project completely while it’s in progress, but then the moment it’s finished, I don’t want to have anything to do with it. I mean, I want to cash the check and that’s it.”

“Huh! You have one-night stands with your work.”

Amy wrinkled her nose to show that she thought he was being slightly inappropriate, but the allusion to sex gave her a tiny, queasy thrill, and a secret underlayer of her mind started doing math about how much longer Bev and Sally could reasonably be expected to ride bikes.

“Not quite. It’s just like, once something’s done, it’s no longer a part of me. I would sooner keep, like, a box full of my old fingernail clippings than read an old blog post. Don’t you ever feel like that about old issues of your magazine?”

Jason was looking at her now with total engagement. “I don’t. At all. When I do a layout for the magazine, I want to look at it again and again. I’ll wake up in the middle of the night and flip through back issues to lull myself to sleep. It’s like: I exist, I exist, I exist.”

Amy grinned. “I do that too, compulsively, but all I ever feel is disgust. Like, I exist, I exist … ugh.”

Jason turned his gaze back to the tiny couch in his hands. “Sally’s more like you, I think. She’s always revising; it’s why she’s taking so long to finish her book. She doesn’t ever want to get to the part of the process where something stops being, like, still potentially perfect.”

He had mentioned Sally at the exact point in the conversation at which it would have become weird if he hadn’t acknowledged the existence of Sally; at the same time, he’d known, on some level, that their being alone in the basement together required him to mention her.

“Uh, well, maybe I’ll become more like you as I age. You know, I’ll grow up,” said Amy lamely.

Jason smiled. “Yeah, you’ve got time. How old are you, anyway, early thirties?”

“Thirty,” said Amy. “So, yeah. Early thirties. Wow, when you put it that way, it sounds old.”

“You seem very youthful, actually.”

“What do you mean? Like, that I’m immature?”

“Kind of. Not in a bad way. There’s something about you that seems … unformed. Like, impressionable.”

“Uh, thanks?” Amy frowned. “I don’t know, that seems like an insult to me.”

“No. It’s not,” Jason said. He looked up at Amy, really scrutinizing her, and for a strange moment she thought he might stand up and kiss her. She wasn’t even attracted to him, not really, but the basement and the specter of his wife gave the situation an adrenalized zing. But then he turned his attention back to the miniature couch and she decided she had imagined the entire thing.

28

Sally was in the middle of telling Bev that she had been a stripper when she’d lived in the East Village. Looking at Sally now—flushed from the ride up the steep hills behind Margaretville, wearing spandex bike tights, a portrait of athletic suburban wholesomeness—it was almost impossible for Bev to imagine this. But it had been a different time, when breast implants and fake tans were not yet de rigueur accessories for the professionally attractive. They were sitting in a clearing and eating the picnic Sally had packed: little crusts-off cucumber sandwiches, dill from the garden, homemade bread.

“Um,” said Bev. “Why were you … I mean, were you on drugs or something?”

“No! I mean, a little, but not more than anyone else. It wasn’t a problem.”