Friendship (26 page)

“You shouldn’t.”

“I know.”

They sat on the thin ledge. It was hard not to look at themselves in the mirror opposite: red-eyed Amy in her dingy bra, looking like she hadn’t slept, and rosy Bev, groomed and pretty enough to inspire other women to buy clothes. There were fingerprint-shaped bruises on Amy’s upper arm, and her worn-out winter coat splayed next to them, the once-stylish one without sleeves, smelled like cigarette smoke. The light in Amy that had drawn people in—that had drawn Bev in—was flickering, dim.

“I came here to ask you for money, Bev. Look, I will pay you back really soon. I just need a loan. I need to be able to stay in the sublet another month and to buy food and stuff. I’ll apply for seasonal gigs at stores, like you said. I’ll get something soon. But in the meantime, if you could just give me maybe, like, three hundred dollars, I just … I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t really, really need it, Bev. You know that.”

“I really wish I could, dude, but I just can’t. I need to save every penny that I’m making for the baby. I can’t help you out.”

The first expression that crossed Amy’s face was terrible, as Bev had known it would be.
She feels sorry for me,
Bev thought,
but not as sorry as I feel for her.

“So you can’t help me because of the baby? This is exactly what I knew would happen: you’re choosing the baby over me, and it’s not even born yet.”

“Are you hearing yourself? Of course I’m choosing the baby. It’s my
baby
.”

“You’re choosing Sally over me, too. You made a bargain with this person you barely know. You’re in this situation because of Sally’s money!”

“I’ll pay back the money.” Bev said. “When I’m ready to, I’ll make money and then pay her back. She knows I will.”

“Bev, you are fucking nuts.”

“Well, thanks for being honest with me about your feelings, dude.”

Amy shook her head. “I didn’t mean it like that. I’m sorry, I’m not … I’m really sorry. But I wouldn’t be asking if I didn’t really need your help. It’s my last chance. I will pay you back! It won’t affect the baby at all!”

“Look, I have to finish closing up.”

Amy still sat there, staring at Bev in the mirror, then at herself.

“So … really, the answer is no?”

Bev just shook her head. “You need to leave, Amy.”

So Amy left. After she walked out the door, she heard the lock turn behind her: Bev must have thought there was some chance she would come back to beg some more.

Amy had always thought she was too vain and selfish to seriously contemplate suicide, also too afraid of pain. She realized now that when she’d thought that, she hadn’t understood how painful existence could get. It could get so painful, it turned out, that any other kind of pain began to seem preferable. She felt ridiculous thinking these goth-teenager thoughts, but they were real. Bev was right: she did need to leave—not just the store, but the city. Her life. Before anything else was taken from her or before she gave up anything else. Whichever was happening, she had to find a way to make it stop.

40

To her credit, Amy’s mom hadn’t said anything too underminery when Amy had called from the BoltBus (not the nice bus) and informed her that she and a heavily sedated Waffles were en route and would soon arrive at the small split-level house where Amy had grown up. Amy’s mother hadn’t even asked how long they would be staying or what had happened. She just said, “You’re bringing the cat, mmm,” not even making it into a question.

The bus ride had been fine until the third hour, when the recirculated air and its heavily disinfected smell had begun to make Amy feel sick. The bus was packed with college students coming home for Christmas. The flexible polyester cat carrier was sticking to her legs. She wished she had been able to afford the train. Well, she wished she had been able to afford not to leave New York.

But just as she started to feel that she wouldn’t be able to survive another minute on the bus ride, it was over, and she was walking from the Takoma Park Metro station toward her parents’ house, cat carrier slung over one shoulder and LeSportsac duffel over the other and a backpack with her laptop in it on her back. These bags and their contents were all her remaining possessions in the world. She opened the front door with a key her parents kept in an obviously fake rock and walked into the empty house; it would be a few hours before her parents got home from work. She felt as if she were coming home from high school. She unzipped the carrier and watched as her dazed cat sniffed and explored. Amy sniffed too, smelling the house’s familiar smells of cedar shingle and eucalyptus potpourri from the downstairs bathroom. She felt incredibly tired, as though her body had been on high alert and now was systematically shutting its alarm systems down. After she fished an old bag of cat litter out of the basement mudroom and set up a makeshift litter box for Waffles, she dragged herself upstairs and lay down on the carpeted floor of her childhood bedroom, now an office, and fell fast asleep.

When she woke, it was winter early-dark outside, and she could smell onions being sautéed downstairs. The horn fanfare announcing the beginning of
All Things Considered
floated up to her. Amy sat up and looked down at her limbs, almost surprised to find them adult size.

At dinner she was ravenous. Her parents treated her like an invalid and spared her the awkward questions she assumed they’d ask immediately. They talked about themselves: the problems her dad was having at work, the difficulty her mom was having in getting her grandmother to stop antagonizing the other women who wrote for the community newsletter of her assisted living facility. At ninety-three, Nana still insisted that she wasn’t retired; she had missed her opportunity to have a journalism career in her youth, because she’d had to raise Amy’s mom and her siblings, and now she was making up for lost time. Hearing her mom gently make fun of her own mom was hilarious, and Amy was shocked to hear herself laughing. Her life was a shambles, and she was supposed to be miserable, and her parents were supposed to be disappointed and guilt-tripping her, but somehow they didn’t seem to realize this.

“We’re happy you’re here, sweetheart,” her dad said when he came into his office—converted now via foldout couch back into her bedroom—and kissed her good night on top of her head. She watched five episodes of
Arrested Development
on her laptop, Waffles purring alongside her. She began to feel bad again only when she’d closed the laptop and tried to sleep. She reached into her backpack for her phone and flicked her fingertip once, twice. Another flick could dial Bev, but she put the phone down. She might call tomorrow, or the day after, but first she had to figure out what to say.

41

For a moment, every morning as she was waking up, Sally still thought she was in Margaretville. With her eyes closed, it still felt as if she might climb out of bed, go down the creaking stairs to her sunny kitchen, and slide the bathroom door open to pee in the resounding old toilet—her own sounds the only human sounds, it had once seemed, in the world. Now, though, as soon as she opened her eyes, she sensed the thrumming life around her, and even at the very moment of waking, she was made aware, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that she lived in New York City.

Sally’s new apartment was at the top of a glassy tower that overlooked the East River from Williamsburg’s northern edge. The apartment was huge and slightly tacky and absolutely perfect. Jason had loaned her the down payment; he’d been very reasonable about the whole thing, so far, in part because he still didn’t seem to quite believe that she was divorcing him. But soon he would: she had hired a wonderful lawyer, who’d assured her that more than half of what was Jason’s and hers would soon be all hers. Jason hated confrontation and would do anything to avoid it. It could go badly, but for the moment everything was in abeyance, and she felt rich and free.

She imagined all her hundreds of neighbors waking up too, cells in a hive thrumming with activity. All those neighbors were making coffee, ripping open the plastic on their bags of dry cleaning, plugging in their flat irons to style their hair. She imagined that she could smell their coffee, their warm, freshly straightened hair, their breakfast smoothies, the expensive, understated perfume they sprayed on their wrists. “A lot of women live by themselves in this building,” the broker had said. “I think because the neighborhood’s so safe and the commute’s so easy, it attracts professionals. That, and the gym.” It was just what Sally wanted, what she’d been owed.

Compared with the Margaretville house and all its details—all Jason’s details—her new place had no character. There were no soft nooks, no centuries-old polished doorknobs, no wainscoting or paneling or original wallpaper faded just the perfect amount. Sally had bought all-white furniture at West Elm. She had just pointed at the living room display, said “that whole set, and the table,” and told the salesperson where to have it delivered. She didn’t often feel inclined to sit on those pristine couches, or linger at the kitchen counter over coffee. She didn’t procrastinate for hours by wandering from room to room readjusting picture frames that had slid slightly out of alignment. She didn’t even make coffee at home anymore, actually. She just laced her sneakers and went for a run along the waterfront, all the way to DUMBO, aiming to arrive just in time to meet up with Bev as her prenatal yoga class was getting out.

This morning, Sally ran toward Bev with the wind at her back, loping gently past commuters in their sleek jeans and heels, past the wobbly herds of little Hasidic kids shepherded to their bus stops by chattering mothers. Sally smiled and nodded at them, and sometimes they were befuddled enough by her attention to smile back, though mostly they ignored her. She felt benevolent toward everyone, especially mothers.

Thanks to Bev’s ingenuity—well, her neediness, but also her generosity—Sally had found a way to be a mother without being one, a privilege few people got. Well, some lesbians. It was as if she were going to be a dad. A divorced dad.

They had met up recently to hash out the details of their arrangement. Sally sat on Bev’s couch in the windowless common area of her apartment, and while they talked, a roommate had walked through to the bathroom and then stayed there for a weirdly long time. Bev had offered her tea, which they drank out of stained mugs. Sally could, if she wanted—if she was interested—help take care of the child, babysitting while Bev worked and even some weekends, and could also help with stuff Bev couldn’t afford. What if she wanted to help Bev more? Sally had asked. Bev frowned and said she would think about it. She wasn’t sure she wanted help that came with strings of any kind. She suggested that it would be good for Sally to think about what she was really prepared to offer and what she really wanted in return.

And Sally had been thinking about it. She’d had time to think since then, though not the kind of endless, unlimited time she once had, because now she had a job. She worked behind the cash register of a bookstore where she’d once browsed aimlessly, feeling jealous of the authors whose books’ spines she had fondled. Now she didn’t have time to feel jealous. During the workday, at least, she didn’t have time to think about anything abstract or non-immediate. There were always people talking to her, people who needed or wanted something, coworkers or customers or her boss. Of course she was still jealous sometimes, during readings or afterward as she stood next to the signing table and flipped books open to the first title page so that the author could sign them as quickly as possible. But this new jealousy was more concrete and could be transmuted into action, and it was also finite, grounded in reality, the reality of the numbers she saw in the computer when she did orders and inventory; she knew how many of the pretty new hardcovers sold and how many got shipped back to their publishers.

It was really only on these long jogs that she had time to think about the terms of her life, and she had discovered a capacity for generosity and okayness in herself. She didn’t need to be the subject of a reverent profile in a magazine. She didn’t need to be in
Paper
or
New York
, and she definitely didn’t need to be in
Plum
, the magazine for older mothers. She would be Bev’s baby’s fun Aunt Sally, the one who took the baby to museums and plays; Aunt Sally whom you had to send thank-you notes to because she paid for summer camp or ballet or indoor soccer. “But why?” Bev had asked her on the day they sat in her dim, depressing living room, the strange, dry heat from the radiator tinged with a gross breath of damp from her roommate’s lengthy shower. “I mean, we still barely know each other. We might as well be strangers.”

“But we’re not,” Sally had said. “We’re not strangers. Now we’re friends.”

42

The room was giant, gilt and dark wood, the furniture upholstered in a tiny leopard print trimmed in red. A small brunette about Amy’s age arrived with tea in cups whose edges you wanted to bite and crack, they were so thin. The interviewer smiled at Amy over the rim of her cup. She was wearing a red St. John Knits suit that matched the furniture trim, and a big, thick golden necklace, like a piece of armor protecting her clavicles. Her hair didn’t move. She set down her teacup with one decisive sweep of her arm, without regard for its delicateness, but of course it didn’t break.

“So, Amy! Your dad says you’re interested in working in advertising. Can you tell me a little bit more about what you’d like to be doing?”

Amy tried to keep her eyes focused on the interviewer’s unwavering blue ones, but she couldn’t help but dart her gaze around the room as the sunlight caught different golden objects and set off gleaming flares. She wasn’t sure whether she was supposed to actually drink the tea.

“Well, I don’t know how much my dad told you about my background, but even though most of my work experience is editorial, I’ve mostly worked online, in social media, so I thought that might be useful.”