Friends from Home

by Lauryn Chamberlain

But it wasn’t just about a $400 dress to wear for only one night, I thought, unable to quell my frustration. It was the idea that Michelle actually believed that her wedding merited her six closest friends dropping a combined thousands of dollars at the bridal shop alone. I worked through a range of emotions as I walked out of my office and then descended into the subway at Union Square. It stung in a strange way every time Michelle seemed to be oblivious about money, but perhaps part of the fault was mine; we had had this fight once before.

  For Michelle’s twenty-first birthday, she had planned a trip to New Orleans with her sorority sisters and invited me along. The invite came in an e-mail with a list of costs, including three dinners out and a five-star hotel. I begged off with a finals-related excuse, not telling her until much later that the issue was money. I thought she had been oblivious and presumptuous. But when I finally brought it up she argued that if I had told her the price tag was the only problem, she could have helped me or worked out something else, suggesting that I had been evasive and hurt her feelings.

  I started off indignant, then softened. Considering how generous her family had always been with me, I knew she was telling the truth, and they would have helped. Even if I thought she had approached the subject the wrong way, she had a point: The Davises had taken me to their country club, paid for me to take gymnastics lessons with Michelle, given me dresses to wear to high school dances. Was I making the same mistake again now? I could appeal to Michelle, or even Marcia, for help with the dress cost.

  But I didn’t want to feel like a charity case anymore. I didn’t want to have to be sponsored, I told myself. I wanted to make my own way.

  And yet, I suspected the hidden underbelly of my resistance was something else. I had learned that accepting money from someone grants them a certain degree of influence and power in your life. When Marcia paid for my gymnastics classes, I started wearing the more modest leotards she deemed appropriate. When we went to the country club, it was suggested that I needed etiquette classes. I had no doubt that Michelle and her family had given to me purely because they loved me, and I loved them in return. But I didn’t know how to reconcile love and independence, the girl I had been in Langham under the Davises’ roof with the woman I wanted to be on my own, a person whose life they might not understand. It was better to pay for the dress myself, I decided, than to invite the complications of financial dependence back into my life. But I still felt uneasy. Roiling somewhere deep in my stomach, anger felt so much like embarrassment, and embarrassment felt so much like guilt.

  I texted Dana after I got off the train at Grand Street. “Bridesmaid dresses for Michelle’s wedding cost $395. Is this normal?”

  “No,” she wrote back. “Protest. Show up in your underwear.”

  “Haha. I guess I’m ordering it, but no more oysters until next year.”

  Dana could more than afford a $395 outfit and routinely argued her cases in sheath dresses and power suits that cost three times that amount. That never bothers me, I reasoned. It’s the fact that Michelle didn’t even ask.

  My phone buzzed again, but it wasn’t Dana. It was Michelle.

  “Sooo glad we found the dresses today!” the text read. “You’re going to look better than everyone—but don’t tell them I said so.”

  “And you’ll be the most beautiful bride,” I shot back. Over text, I couldn’t seem to make myself say anything else.

  I swallowed the uncomfortable thought that maybe Michelle had known I would balk at the price, and that’s why she had picked the dress and sent everyone else to the register before showing it to me. Surely that wasn’t true, I told myself. But I knew there would be plenty more unexpected expenses I’d face over the next six months.

  March couldn’t come soon enough.

  CHAPTER 8

  If I had been waiting for a financial reprieve after the bridesmaid dress debacle, it quickly became clear that I wasn’t going to get it. The floodgates had opened, and the invitation to Michelle’s bridal shower arrived from Marcia only a week later, enclosed in an oversize lilac envelope with extra postage. I opened it carefully on my way up the stairs to my apartment, and with its floral appliqués and engraved script it looked like a wedding invitation itself. Marcia requested the pleasure of my company in four weeks’ time.

  I dialed Michelle as I opened the door to my apartment. This time, she picked up right away.

  “Just got your shower invite, Miche,” I said, sandwiching the phone between my ear and my shoulder to continue examining it with both hands. “Very classy. Should I come into town for the whole weekend?”

  “Well, yes, of course,” she said, a tone of warning high in her voice, as subtle and yet crisp as the top notes of her expensive perfume. “And don’t feel too bad about not helping to plan the shower. All my friends are around here anyway, and it was just so much easier for Mama to do it.”

  I recognized the slight dig for what it was, but I registered it as fair. All the other bridesmaids would be bringing baked goods and coordinating party favors with Marcia—and more than one of them likely had complete Pinterest boards dedicated to the occasion.

  “Let me know what else I can bring. I can pick up flowers, or anything you need day of, too. It’ll be great to see everyone.” Except Darcy, I omitted. “By the way, I need some advice about something, too,” I said, thinking about the group of interns I had started to manage. “Since the promotion, I’m overseeing this intern group. I’m just not sure how to give them the best advice; I don’t know if they relate to me.”

  As I started to tell her about their latest project, their endless questions, and the fact that I didn’t understand how I could simultaneously feel so young and yet so old in the presence of nineteen-year-olds, I realized I didn’t want to stop talking to her. It reminded me of when I would call her on my mom’s old home phone back in elementary school, lying on my bed and talking for hours even though we had been at school together all day. I couldn’t remember what we had talked about then, what thoughts and problems an eight-year-old could possibly have had to express, but I knew the feeling of never wanting to hang up had been much like the one I was experiencing now.

  “I think you should see it as a compliment that they’re giving you more to do,” Michelle said, and I smiled. “Remember when they made you head of the mentor program in high school? You can totally handle it. Listen, we’ll have a glass of wine and talk about it more after the shower if you want. I’ll take you to this great place, Jacques’.”

  “That sounds—”

  “Actually,” she said, raising her voice a bit, “it’s where Jake wants to have the rehearsal dinner, so we need to see it anyway. It’s not cliché to have it at a French bistro, is it?”

  “No. I don’t . . . think so?” I listened as she launched back into her latest wedding plans, and I felt a strange sort of sadness inside me. The call lasted only another minute, Michelle breaking off midsentence to take a call from her florist.

  I wasn’t looking forward to making awkward small talk with Michelle’s sorority sisters at the shower, but the bigger issue with the trip to Alabama was that it meant seeing my mom. Family drama in my tiny family of two suddenly seemed inevitable.

  Marcia had sent Judy a shower invitation, Michelle warned me before we got off the phone. She hadn’t exactly sent it out of friendship; the last time the four of us had tried to have lunch together, my mom had interrupted Marcia in the middle of a conversation, then actually patted her head before launching into a long rant about picking up something “strange” in her aura. Michelle looked like she wanted to crawl under the table, but Marcia remained stiffly polite. Still, I overheard Marcia in the bathroom later, complaining that she had just set her hair and now it was flattened. I wanted to apologize for my mom’s frequently tone-deaf outbursts, but I wasn’t thrilled with Marcia at the moment, either—couldn’t she have just laughed it off? That was the week before I moved
to New York.

  Even if Marcia might have been baffled by Judy, she treated me as an entity apart, as if I had more to do with her and her family than the northern transplant single mother who had brought me to Langham in the first place. Still, she had invited my mom to the shower as a courtesy. She was the mother of the maid of honor, after all. This meant that my mom and I would be seeing each other, whether she ended up actually attending the shower or not. A phone call was definitely in order.

  The frequency with which my mother and I talked on the phone depended on whether she had a boyfriend at the time. It went in cycles: When she hadn’t been dating anyone, calls came semifrequently. When she was in a more serious relationship, they all but disappeared. But when she was going on casual dates with someone new, she would sometimes call multiple times in a week, gushing about a potential future with the latest Match.com bachelor, peppering me with questions and prodding me to analyze his behavior and whether or not it was problematic that their astrological signs foreshadowed potential conflict. I couldn’t tell if she intended for me to respond like a daughter, a friend, a therapist, or a fortune-teller. And so I always answered that question in the same way: “Your sign was compatible with Dad’s, and look how that turned out. It doesn’t mean anything.”

  Mom was a Cancer, Dad a Scorpio. This had been repeated to me many times throughout my childhood, at first as if it were a prescription for happiness, and then as if something in the universe were at fault for the relationship’s ultimate failure. Dad hadn’t believed in her “mumbo jumbo,” as he once called it. But she had certainly been correct in predicting that something about their relationship was off.

  When I got up to my apartment, I slapped the shower invitation on the fridge with a takeout magnet, walked into the bedroom with my phone, and closed the door behind me, even though Terry and Demi weren’t home.

  Calling my mom in Alabama felt somehow like time travel. Or maybe it was more like dialing into another dimension. Either way, it was an act that required solitude. I sometimes dissolved into an earlier version of myself when I spoke to her, and I felt acutely the dissonance between the person I had been when I lived at home with her eight years ago and the person I had started to become. Being here, alone in a New York apartment that she had never seen and probably never would see, jarred me every time. She had never met Dana or Ritchie or Alan; she had no concept of the people or places that comprised my New York life. I didn’t know if that made me feel independent and hopeful, or sad. Maybe both.

  I sat down on the edge of the bed, facing toward the exposed brick wall. She picked up on the third ring, which I expected. If I was remembering correctly, we were currently between boyfriends.

  “Jule, hi,” she exclaimed. Cheery this time, a pleasant surprise. “I’m glad you called. I wanted to tell you, I just finished a shift and I was thinking of starting back up on that adult coloring book! Maybe you could help me get it published. You know, the one I started sketching a few months ago after I saw that gardening coloring book at the bookstore, which really wasn’t all that well done, so I thought that if a gardener can do it . . .”

  In one of her energetic moods, my mom never declaratively finished her sentences, so it was usually necessary to just jump in. “Yeah, I remember. Sounds like fun. Anyway, I was just calling to see if you got Marcia’s invite to Michelle’s bridal shower. I’ll be in town Friday and Saturday, since the shower is Saturday morning.”

  I could hear her teakettle whistling in the background, unattended, and then her crashing across the small living room to turn off the stove. “Oh good. Do you want to stay here?”

  She had turned the smaller of the ranch home’s two bedrooms into an “office”—a graveyard for her unfinished personal projects, like the adult coloring book and her attempt at a romance novel—after I left for college. That meant I spent the annual Christmas visit on the living room futon. Given the size of the living room, part of the futon was actually positioned underneath the Christmas tree while it was up, and I would wake up every morning covered in fallen needles from the ankles down. I would not be staying there.

  “No, I’m going to stay in Michelle’s guest room,” I told her. “But let’s get dinner after I come in on Friday?” Michelle would be busy with party preparations out at the Davis house anyway, I assumed. “I land at around two thirty.”

  “Okay, that’s probably good. I might have a date later that night anyway. Did I tell you I’ve found all kinds of new matches lately? You know, I thought I had burned through all the divorcés in Birmingham, but it turns out they were all camping out on eharmony! You’ll have to help me look when you’re here. I always thought eharmony was for old people, but, well, I’m you-know-how-many years now, so I guess I can consider the occasional sixty-year-old. Don’t tell anyone.”

  “I won’t. So, uh, everything’s good?” It was a delicate balance, checking in on her enough during our catch-up calls but not inviting a full-on gossip session about, say, the sex lives of her friends Mindy and Eleanor, who made beeswax candles and sold them at the local farmers’ market. My mom had once told me about some tantric uses for that candle wax that I would probably never be able to unvisualize.

  “Good enough? Oh, I guess.” I heard her sigh. “But work is still less than ideal. And the water heater went out last month, and the bill on that thing, well. That’s a struggle.”

  This was always hard for me to hear. In the right mood, it made me sympathetic, and I ached to tell her that I could help, even though I barely made enough money to cover my own expenses. Other times, it simply frustrated me; I didn’t want her finances to be my responsibility. I hadn’t asked her for money since I was a teenager, and I resented the frequent inclusion in her financial affairs. I swallowed. “I’m sorry to hear that. Anything I can do?” Please say no.

  “Oh no, of course not,” she said, sounding upbeat again, and so I merely felt guilty. She just wanted me to empathize, and instead I had leapt to thinking about myself. For good reason, the voice in my mind hissed. I scrambled for something else to say.

  “Okay, well, Mark is coming over soon,” I told her. “Sorry, I have to go. But I’ll see you soon.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Tell Mark hi from me! Bye-bye.” And the line went dead.

  Mom was absolutely infatuated with the idea of Mark, even though they had never met in person. At the very least, this had given us more fodder for phone conversations than we had had for several years. My mom was by no means a traditional homemaker of the Marcia variety, but twenty years of the single life had clearly worn her down on the concept, and I knew she not so privately held the belief that it would be comforting if I eventually “settled down” with someone.

  I tossed the phone across the bed onto my pillow. The conversation had ostensibly gone well, and I would see her in person soon. But my body felt heavy with discontent as I sat there on the edge of the bed, staring at the wall, wondering what it might be like to have a mother whose counsel encouraged me or gave me energy, rather than draining it. Before I could move to get up, I heard Mark rapping on the door.

  “Jules? You here?”

  “How’d you get in?” I called back.

  “Door was open.”

  “I’m in the bedroom.”

  He opened the door slowly. He had figured out that the living room was my preferred spot when none of my roommates were home, and apart from at night, I closed myself in the bedroom only if something was wrong.

  “Are you okay?” I could hear him trying to subtly determine the degree of upset.

  “Yes.” I swallowed. “I was just talking to my mom about going home for Michelle’s shower. She says hi, by the way.”

  “Tell her hi, too.” He sat down beside me. “Are you worried about going back home?”

  I didn’t answer Mark’s unspoken question—was I worried about seeing my mom—because I honestly wasn’t sure how I felt, and
I didn’t want to have to explain it. Things were different for him. He loved taking the Metro-North up to Connecticut one Sunday a month, passing lazy days with his parents and his brothers when they were around. Instead, I laid my head in his lap, sprawling across the bed, and I asked a random question. “I need a subject change. What did you want to be when you grew up? Like, when you were a little kid. Sorry if I’ve asked you before and I don’t remember.”

  He thought for a minute. “No, I don’t think we’ve talked about it.” Mark had a reliably encyclopedic memory, so I trusted him on this. My memory was a sieve, he liked to say. Probably true. I remembered intense moments of emotion, expressions on people’s faces, snippets of conversation—little tidbits coming into focus like a Polaroid—but day-to-day details weren’t my strong point. I was always plotting my next move, he said. I rarely remembered my last one.

  “I wanted to be a research zoologist. Like a Jane Goodall type,” I told him. “To travel the world on my own.”

  “Hence the publishing job?” he teased.

  I was surprised that it stung a little bit, but I knew he meant it to be funny. “Shut up. Okay, now you.”

  He shrugged. “This, I guess.”

  “Bullshit. No one under the age of eighteen knows what McKinsey is.”

  “Hey!”

  “Well, it’s true. It’s something you find out about the second you get to college. Ivy League colleges, that is. They stand in those little booths at the career fair, telling you about this great field called ‘consulting’ that you can do if you’re suddenly panicking about having an English degree . . .”

  Now it was his turn to tell me to shut up. “No, I mean, I wanted to be in the business world. Eventually get my MBA.” He paused and then pulled me into a sitting position. “Actually, that’s something I wanted to talk about. When I was flying back from Omaha this week, just bored as hell, I realized I think I’m ready for a change. I’m really going to start studying for the GMAT and take it in a few months. I think it’s time.”