She Matters (23 page)

“Why, you could rent my place,” she said.

“I'll think about it,” I said. I wanted to keep her attention on the massage. “I'll come and see it.” But it was the wrong price, and it was all her viney plants, aging cats, splayed painting materials, family photos, kitchen disarray. She'd clean up and take her things, of course, but no. “I'd love to help you move,” I said, “but I don't want to rent the apartment. Thank you for thinking of me though.” I'd arranged each sentence several times. I got careful with offers, knew the nasty turn they could take right before they evaporated.

She left a message on the phone—her landlord wanted to meet me, said I could rent it. “I told him all about you,” she said, singsong. I felt adamant and annoyed. Back off, I thought, don't manage me. Your affairs and mine are not intertwined. She had the flu, Sylvia said, and I stopped by with soup and flowers, staying put
on the couch as she related symptoms for ten minutes. She asked me to refer more friends.

I did not want to take part in Flora's troubles. This distressed me. Wouldn't a friend help? Sylvia gave her rides when her car broke down. I struggled with what to offer, besides my custom and the money I paid. I cared, but I needed her to remain a grown-up, my grown-up, and she seemed to be careless with this charge. We weren't, after all, friends. We had our contract, the terms that had allowed me to be more naked than in any sex, aware of my body cradled. I had written the check for that.

When she moved, I came by the new place and, finding her not at home, left a bouquet of lavender on her windshield, no note. I'd biked and hadn't had room for pen and paper in my summer pockets. But, lavender the sort of language we used to speak together, she called to thank me. I listened to her voice mail, glad I'd avoided one of her sighing discussions.

We drifted, conversation grew parched. At a session, I tensed under her hands, drew back. She couldn't undo my stiffness. We weren't working together anymore. I was angry about this.

To my relief, Flora left town. Usually, though I tried to be supportive and amiable, I felt bereft when friends moved away. But I wanted Flora off me, my skin coated with her oils and clogged. I heard from Sylvia where she was going, without taking it in. Something to do with her dying father, a duty, but also care, a calling with her. Good: let that calling no longer be me.

• • •

A few years later, Flora moved back. Elated, Sylvia imagined the pleasures she'd share again with her friend, and how Flora's reappearance would better my life, too. I was wary. What would
be expected of me, how had I failed and what would I be held accountable for? I carried the drama around.

I meant to call her but didn't do it. After several months I ran into her in the post office, the small-town denominator, an abrupt meeting, edged by old intimacy. We'd had something, we knew that. We'd cared, respected, and shared hard, beautiful hours. We'd loved. We stood in formal parallels by the large oak doors and caught up, but without visible feeling. I felt afraid and was trying to head off accusation, if it was going to show up. I'd let Flora be my mother, and then
mother
had marshaled its alarms and savagery, and I couldn't stay whole. Our agreement had evolved, loosened, and we were well into a relationship that promised to nourish—did nourish—but had normal limitations, human complications. Someone else might have rolled with it, paid no attention to the stripped contract, but the only thing I knew how to do, no matter what I told myself, was to get up and run.

E
llen and I are formal with each other now, like people who have never met in person. She sends me short, uninflected e-mails, and I respond in a day or so with something short, too. She praises our children; I agree and thank her. We do not use exclamation points. Urgency has left us. Although our houses are across the tame Clark Fork River from each other, walking distance, and the kids are inseparable, we've secured perimeters to keep safe from contact. Our long, close friendship ended two years ago, and I'm not sure what we're starting.

• • •

If Abby had stayed, I'd have known Ellen mostly by report. They'd met in some previous city, had moved to Missoula at the same time. Abby introduced us at the All Women's Run. We stood around before the start. They talked and I listened, and Ellen listened to me and Abby. Each relationship its own container, the duos didn't blend. Ellen provided Abby with something I didn't, I thought. They used to backcountry camp, seek out remote waterfalls, adventures of self-reliance and physical strain. Abby and I liked to have long coffees in busy student cafés, make up reading lists of novels for each other. The serious runners gathered at the starting line and set off, and we followed at the walkers' increasing distance, three abreast on a windy day, which made conversation
hard to share. We pushed jog strollers, while Ellen shouldered the weight of her solemn infant in a structured backpack. Abby had described this brilliant friend, her honors and scholarly pursuits, her pure physical endurance. Maybe Ellen had heard Abby talk about me, my intellect and achievements, but I doubted it. Consumed by my boy, I didn't show ambition and aptitude anymore. Those were no longer useful.

I asked Ellen about herself, a way of showing Abby respect, and her answers were brief, polite. She did not open. She didn't seem a match for Abby, whose warmth defined our first breezy moments a year earlier at the gym. I'd come for prenatal water aerobics, and entering the locker room I saw the woman's bare back, her shirt and bra already off. A copy of
The Nation,
unusual in Missoula, showed over the top of her tote bag and beckoned, but I chose a separate bench and turned my back, too, carving the false privacy. Several inches taller than me, the woman seemed to rule her stomach, its taut skin stretched to pale, except for the
linea nigra
that ran a darkened seam down the middle of her bare belly. I looked her body over, seeking the future. I remembered a day at the start of high school; in the claustrophobic proximity of the dorm bathroom, I saw breasts of older girls for the first time, unlike the breasts of my mother or grandmother—the rude freshness of the flesh, that warning. That was when I realized, nauseated and faintly aroused, that womanhood would come for me.

The
Nation
reader and I struggled with our bathing suits, clumsy fingers and swollen feet. We were grunting, effort overriding our discretions. How wretched we were, how many tasks had become humiliating. We looked up, and a smile burst across her face. We each asked, When are you due, before we said our names, then tumbled into that gentle, competitive monomania of pregnancy, collecting the specifics of OBs, digestion and sleep,
supplement brands and yoga poses. We were preoccupied with comfort. She was four weeks away from delivery, and I still had months to go, endless and lagging. Nice to meet you, we said as we left the cocoon of the locker room for the pool, as we lowered into the weightless blessing of water.

A few days later we met for lunch, and sat on a sunny deck facing the river. I had put on the prettiest lipstick color, wanting a chance at a better first impression. We pushed our plastic chairs from the table to give our bodies room, moved our menus to the side. Tell me your story, we said, tell me all about you. Raised in New York, I told her, I felt at odds in Montana, where I'd lived for three years. The feeling wasn't going away. Briefly, my job history, as if that were salient; I only cared to talk about being pregnant. She, too, dashed off minor biography, then talked pregnancy, our headline subject, and I accrued details. I needed to cement my conviction about what I was doing, which was anyway moot. This was coming. Compelled beyond my reason, my education, my writing, I had volunteered to be pregnant, craved it. Abby seemed grounded and driven and reasonable. Yet she had also been compelled. What was happening to our bodies, to us? And what about our marriages? Would they be okay? Abby's husband wanted to stay home with the baby. Christopher had gone back to school for a counseling degree, was working new, lengthy hours as a therapist, and already I saw him less. When Abby said she was planning to start divinity school, I thought she was kidding. No:
This
is what we're doing, we're having babies. At the dawn of a friendship, which seemed like it might be remarkable for her intelligence and my candor, her placid security and easygoing generosity, it was news I didn't want to hear.

“When are you leaving?”

“Don't worry, in a year,” she said. “I still have to write my thesis.”

I was the late arrival in her Missoula life. She already had lots of friends, whom I met the next week at her boisterous shower, except for Ellen, who was out of town.

• • •

I was surprised a few years later to see Ellen at a party. Christopher and I had hired a sitter for Daniel, and I'd spent most of the evening seated and inert, my newborn sleeping in one arm, as Christopher brought me a plate of food, a glass of juice and seltzer. When Jack woke, and breathed deeper into his muscles, which I could feel against my ribs, I split open the front of my shirt and nursed him. Abby had long since moved to Palo Alto, which I struggled to keep in mind was not, of course, a personal rejection. Every time I passed her old house, those first months, I cried, empty, heartsore. It embarrassed me how acute my longing was for a miracle that would have changed her mind, made her stay. She hadn't met Jack, my new baby, which seemed all wrong because she'd been so much a part of Daniel's first year. In our rare and rarer calls Abby outlined theology courses, which I wanted to find interesting, but her busyness and excellent grades and philosophical investigation left me discouraged in my mousy accomplishments, my awareness that all aspiration had been bludgeoned by domestic repetition, by the mass of baby-boy particulars that occupied my brain. It was better to speak of the babies, pose polite questions about hers as I waited for the moment to describe my sons.

Ellen stood in the kitchen, regarding the guests as they got drunker. She had no glass, her arms folded. We seemed to be the
only two not drinking. I said hello, she said hello, and I remembered our first awkwardness, but tonight we could summon our absent friend, and Ellen's face lightened, and her talk flowed, a mix of affection and sarcasm and acute perception. It felt like a way to have Abby back, to affirm the importance of that friendship. We united in a benign mourning.

“I was watching you with the baby,” Ellen said. “You're very good with him. You're calm.” I thanked her, bloomed, asked after her son. Later I said to Christopher, “Just to be really seen. Just to be
recognized
.”

Ellen and I compared the eerie intelligence of our children, how riveted they were by the inner workings of things. Daniel was four, Thomas six months younger. “It sounds like they'd be friends,” I said. “You want to get them together?” I offered my house for the first playdate. We used them as the ruse, advancing toward each other, but not fast. I knew from Christopher that some people need to observe, take things in; they can't be rushed. “Safety sensitive,” he used the term he'd learned in his training for “introvert.” The personality that has always compelled me, why I married Christopher:
you
won't shudder and explode, you won't unseat me, you won't bite off pieces of me to feed yourself. I sought out people who promised safety. Ellen and I made a date for the next week, around her work schedule.

I watched for her car. She leaned deep into the backseat, her feet on the sidewalk. She took a long time, as I stood at the window. Then she lifted a sleeping child out, all her strength and torque in managing her way up from the bent position without jostling him. She eased the car door shut with a slow hip, opened my gate. Thomas's head lolled off her shoulder, the straps of his polar fleece hat draped in the same direction. “I'm sorry,” Ellen said. She spoke to me but looked at her son. “Just fell asleep on
the way over.” There was no question of waking him. We all knew that, not to interfere with the children's plans on our account. Some of us practiced it more diligently than others. “He'll probably wake up soon,” she said.

She settled the drowsing boy on Daniel's bed, where my son inspected him before returning to his trucks and plastic animals on the freshly vacuumed carpet. Ellen declined coffee and tea and water. We shared updates of Abby, incredulous that anyone had started divinity school—started anything!—with a new baby. I was relieved we knew the same details, that Abby didn't favor one of us with better intimacies. Ellen nudged her son, but he slept on, severe seriousness plastered over his face. She looked over at him about once a minute. Later, failing again, she said, “This is a little embarrassing.”

“Don't worry at all,” I said to be kind. I was perplexed by the tenacity of her discomfort. Hadn't motherhood taught all of us to give up formality, to relinquish the hope for plans carried through?

“I guess we should make another date. You could come to my house.”

“Great, yes.” I wanted to know her, this smart lawyer with the wry outlook, this woman who respected the heart's sobrieties. This woman who'd watched me with a newborn and told me I was doing it right. Ellen talked about the politics of motherhood, the confusions of leftover feminism, rather than the daily mess and the obvious obstacles. I loved that. She said, How about I call and we'll set something up, and I said, Sure, anytime.

Little by little, my patience rewarded, Ellen revealed herself. First the defining items, where she was raised, which law school, what her husband did, how she landed her job at the firm. I was used to deeper talk mixed with trivial musings sooner—the way
women talk, assuming we will inevitably be intimate, so we may as well get there—but I'd be cautious. Ellen needed reassurance, even if I couldn't tell why. I wouldn't beg for her confidences, which she showed sparingly, which she guarded against some unknown threat. When she was almost relaxed she mentioned she'd been a nightclub DJ through college and in her twenties; she'd get to bed at dawn. We laughed and laughed. What music did you play? Did you
dance
? She shook her head, the faraway of it all, our youthful personas assumed to broadcast what we were capable of, what we dared. I could picture a DJ—though not Ellen—elevated on the raised stage, her black T-shirt, the dark club, the frantic focus of discs and knobs, the shouted requests. A DJ, I told Christopher! Here's the Ellen you can't see, only I'm allowed to see her this way! The incongruous picture boasted too much frivolity for my subdued, introspective friend, until I realized the job provided the perch apart, her safe discretion. She could be visible, never known. Well, I would know her. “My new best friend,” I told him. He nodded, used to my loyal passions, how they flared and dimmed, serially.