Small Change (11 page)

Y
ou put your hand on your shoulder and touch Carol’s sweater, an intimate gesture given how angry you are. The sweater is one of several pieces of clothing she no longer wears and has given you, and several pairs of shoes she finds uncomfortable and has passed on. She has difficult feet and a weakness for shoes.

You are moving away and she has dropped you, casually, before you have moved. You are still here, but she isn’t. The friend who said she could not imagine living in this city without you never calls.

You have thought of saying to her, Do you know how hurtful you are? Do you know how your casualness cuts into me? But you are too furious to do so.

And then when you become less furious – you are less furious now – you decide to use the same weapon of casualness
against her. You will put on her shoes and walk over her with your casualness.

You can wear her almost-new shoes and say to yourself, They hurt her feet but they don’t hurt mine. Look, she spent the money, but I’ve got them on. Hah!

Her black sweater has a hole you may mend, but you haven’t mended it yet. It is a long loose sweater. You roll the sleeves above your elbows the way she used to (they roll up easily, the cuffs looser than they should be), and you see her arms, her face, her smile, and you feel lighthearted and immune. Today, after days of fury, you are in costume, part of the drama of two women leaving each other even as they merge: Carol has walked away leaving you with a bag of clothes, you are walking away wearing her, lightly, on your shoulders and feet. You even have her scarf around your neck. In wearing her clothes, you have assumed her elegance.

You get up to put on lipstick. It isn’t yours or Carol’s, but a stranger’s. You found it in the change room at the swimming pool.
Lancôme. Champagne Rose
. It suits you perfectly.

You wear Carol’s loose black sweater when you and your husband make love. Your arm moves around his back, you bend even lower, and in doing so smell the pool on your arm and think of
Champagne Rose
and the swimmer who can’t wear it, because you have it.

There are moments when friends can be honest with each other about how wounded they feel, but you don’t see a moment when this will happen. Those moments are never predictable anyway. They happen when you have given up
hope of them ever happening, and come from a certain buoyancy in the air and in you, which makes it possible to speak of hurt in a sincere but lighthearted way.

You feel these other women on you – the lipstick kissed away, the sweater sliding off – and your husband holding you: holding three women at least in his arms.

Your husband says, “I would have to be pushed hard to believe anybody had dumped me.”

“Why is that?” you ask.

“I guess it’s my own defensiveness.”

He means that he doesn’t invite trouble. You see trouble everywhere, and defend yourself by exaggerating it and doing in the source.

Are you really engaged in a backhanded way of removing yourself from the picture? Are you busy imagining Carol’s withdrawal in order to excuse, and secure, your own? Have you been manufacturing a small disaster in order to avoid a larger one? Feeling a small amount of pain acutely, hoping to avoid more? Who is trying to get away from whom? You are both, it seems, trying to get away from each other.

Carol says it’s subconscious. “Because you’re moving,” she says. “I don’t mean to pull away, but it’s subconscious.”

If it’s subconscious, why is she talking about it?

This is the friend who criticized you months ago for not taking her birthday seriously enough, even though you took it much more seriously than she took yours. And haven’t you been resentful about that ever since, along with other incidents you have never mentioned, allowing them to build up
in your mind until they slide down and bury the friendship as if by natural and inexplicable causes?

You wonder how to make the predicament more interesting than friendship turning into drudgery. More interesting than Carol demanding a certain kind of attention that you provide, then you demanding a certain kind of attention she fails to provide.

It would be more interesting if you forgot about it. (You won’t. Or you might until another incident reminds you and then the two incidents will proceed, lock-stepped, to trample over your mind.)

If you were to say, referring back to the birthday: Look. I cooked for you for three hours, I searched hard for a birthday present, I spent far more money than I normally spend, and what happens? In you walk and the first thing you say is, “I am so pissed off. It has to be on the day, my birthday has to be celebrated on the day.”

If you could speak intently and dispassionately, getting the reaction you want: sheepishness, self-awareness. That would be interesting.

If you said, “You need more friends. If you had other friends, you wouldn’t have been so disappointed when we couldn’t celebrate on the day. Where are your other friends? Why do you have so few?”

But that would be mean. Besides, you know the answer. The friendships have ended in fights generated by that sort of question.

It is so predictable. From now on you will be on your guard against jumping to please even as you jump to please, and the friendship will leave the natural give and take of its early stages and enter the ritual of observances: her birthday must be observed, and in a particular way, or she will take offence. And only if you do not care about being scolded, only if you are deliberately casual and hold to your casualness as a point of honour, will you survive.

The exaggeration is part of the predictability. You have been through this many times, backing away from someone as touchy as yourself.

In the morning you stand rooted to the spot in front of the closet with several phrases repeating themselves in your head:
had you told us it mattered – I spent three, count them, three hours cooking – Who the hell are you, anyway? –
and staring at the clothing, a blur of mostly white, you feel utterly defeated. You will either express your opinion in a way that will backfire, or you will let it go. But it still isn’t interesting because you still feel diminished.

Chewing on the same old bone. Get yourself a new one.

You rest your forehead against the cool white clothes and think that in some ways Carol is your closest friend, not in terms of time known but in the manner in which you have spent time together, and in her profession of friendship. She and Mario arrived in New York two years ago, lost and grateful souls whom you befriended. You were glad to do this because you liked them and because you were pleased
to be in demand. They filled the hole Maureen once filled.

Now you watch them get used to your absence before you have even left. And while you never wholly believed their professions of friendship, still you wanted to believe them, and your desire to believe (which never slackens despite your scepticism which increases with every year), your desire to believe pains you. It pains you to be so vulnerable, and to be such a setpiece in Carol’s display of adaptability.

Finally you stir yourself and dress. But all morning you snap at your children and your husband. He tells you not to get nervous, you tell him not to be so fucking patronizing.

You realize the next day, or perhaps the one after that, that his reaction to you when you first met is your reaction to Carol: He would be at his desk overlooking the park, he would turn to look at you as you talked on and on, he would turn away. You remember the order on his desk, and his coolness.

And yet you are still together.

There is something you haven’t said. Your friends give you their old clothes because you never buy new ones. They know you will be happy with whatever they discard. This means that you are dressed in rejection and fatigue.

You are cheap in emotional ways too. If you were generous you would enjoy Carol for who she is. Instead, mean piece of Scottish shit that you are, you weigh the number of times she has called, the way people weigh out food in times of scarcity.

One of the pairs of shoes she passed along is made of soft expensive leather. Putting them on, you feel like a million dollars, less chafed by the world, better able to think the best rather than the worst. Yesterday a friend noticed them. He couldn’t very well have missed. You stuck your foot under his nose and said, “Look!”

He asked where they came from and your answer was as natural and spontaneous as truth: “I am fortunate in my friends.”

A
deep layer of snow has turned our broken-down Chevette into a dreamy Volvo. It hasn’t moved for months and has never looked more beautiful. Carol and Mario used to borrow the car. This is part of the story – the car, and their borrowing.

I am wearing one of Carol’s jackets. It doesn’t have her smell any more, that expensive perfume whose name I can’t remember. I used to open the closet and there it was, the ghost of my old friend who always went for men much younger than herself, spending money on them extravagantly, spending her attention more extravagantly still. The jacket is beautiful and beautifully made. Of all my friends, Carol had the best taste.

I’ll begin with the borrowing. It happened one August and I remember the weather. It was a dark month during which light rain fell almost continuously. I turned on the lamp every morning and left it on all day. One morning I
received a phone call which made me remember an earlier incident. I began to remember as I looked out the window at the rain, and by the time I stepped out the door the whole thing was running through my head. I crossed the street without looking, then walked towards the corner, the memory accelerated by the walking. I didn’t think back to the phone call or my response: that he borrow the car in two hours because I was just leaving. I was already much farther along in my thoughts.

The air was mild. I opened my umbrella. At the corner I turned right, passing the fruit store, the liquor store, the shoe repair, the stationer’s. A glimpse of yellow pen sets in the window, and the image of the light-green box camera, already in my mind, sprang forward with such force that it almost took my breath away. A large old-fashioned toy camera given to Ted when he was a child. He still has the photographs, small black-and-white shots of snow, trees, his backyard, fuzzy friends in the distance. I wonder if all children stand well back when they use a camera in the belief that exactly what they see will appear in the picture. I wonder when they realize that to make something come alive you have to choose an angle, correct the distance, exaggerate.

The camera was lost for a year. I remember putting it somewhere safe – a bunch of children were coming over, was it my daughter’s birthday? – and I put it on a high shelf because I didn’t want it broken. I did this with the camera and one or two other important toys. Also the baseball bat.

Over the course of the year my daughter asked for it repeatedly. I looked everywhere, several times, but never
found it. Annie mentioned the loss to her grandmother who took the hint, but the new camera was smaller and poorly made; after an hour it was broken.

That was the year Carol, Mario and their kids were in Italy. When they got back Annie and I went over to see them. At one point the kids began to fight in the bedroom. I went to see why, and there was the camera. The two girls were sitting on a rug with a pile of toys between them, and on top of the pile was the camera. Could there be two?

“Where did it come from?” I asked them.

My five-year-old daughter said, “Emma stoled it from me.”

The rain petered out and I lowered my umbrella. I bought a dozen oranges, then milk, chicken, and bread. I turned to go home and saw Carol’s back fifty feet ahead of me: the long dark blue coat, red scarf, ankle-high soft leather boots. Her silver hair caught the light. I stopped in my tracks, then picked up my pace and caught up with her.

When I saw the old toy camera I picked it up and went into the kitchen. I said, “I’ve been looking for this for months.”

Emma was on my heels and began to scream. Her whole small body took up the effort.

Carol said, “Oh dear. You see, she’s just learned how to use it.”

I was the one who apologized. “I’m sorry,” I said over Emma’s screams, “but Annie loves this camera too and has been asking for it for months.”

“Oh dear,” said Carol, and repeated, “You see, she just figured out how to use it.” She bent down to comfort her daughter. “I’ll buy one for her,” she said. “Where do you get them?”

“It was given to Ted when he was a child. They don’t make them any more.”

“Oh. Well, that’s even more …” and she didn’t finish the sentence.

I couldn’t pursue it. I reclaimed the camera, but I couldn’t pursue it. In my head, however, I argued. Why didn’t you give it back? Why didn’t you ask if we wanted it back? Why did you assume that since it was important to your daughter, it was unimportant to mine? How could you?

In the street I caught up with her and we hugged each other.

These things coincide, genuine friendliness and genuine resentment, and for a while almost succeed in not colouring each other. Each seems pure – the friendliness, the resentment – undiluted and fresh. At a certain point the balance tips. Resentment washes over the friendliness and no attempt is made to see each other again unless one of the two friends persists, and then, with time, the balance tips the other way. Friendliness washes over the resentment, and you begin to believe the friendship has entered a new and wiser stage, and will endure.