by Susan Choi
Karen stands outside the Skylight bookstore in Los Angeles, waiting for her old friend, the author. Karen is thirty years old, the same age as her old friend the author. She hasn’t seen her old friend the author since both were eighteen. In the dozen years since, much has happened to Karen. Much of what has happened has been therapy, and the rest of what has happened tends to be described in terms drawn from therapy. This is a tendency of which Karen is aware and about which she isn’t apologetic. At least she knows where her language comes from. If, however, Sarah—for example—were to ask what she’s been up to the past dozen years, Karen would avoid therapy-speak in her answer as carefully as she used to avoid Jesus-speak. She would do this to be taken seriously by a person devoid of belief. Despite Karen’s not just disliking but disrespecting this person devoid of belief, that ancient shame would creep over her belief, her need for belief—her belief in belief—like a stain and Karen would, now as in the past, pass herself off as a person who didn’t believe. That much hasn’t changed. Oh, this and that, she would say. I’ve mostly worked as an office manager, personal assistant, personal organizer, stuff like that—you probably never knew it in high school but I’m highly organized [laughter]. It’s kind of a curse, I can’t see something without making it more efficient. I think it’s a reaction to my mother [laughter]. But it’s nice, in terms of making a living. People hire me to organize their stuff, I can pick and choose my clients, I can set my own hours. It pays well. It leaves me lots of time to travel. My brother and I—I don’t know if you remember, I have a brother—just took a trip to Vietnam and Laos. Yeah, it was amazing. Beautiful.
Saying these things, if she says them, Karen will be aware of the deceptively offhand way she puts the most enviable aspects of her life in the foreground. She will be so aware of this effort to cultivate envy, and the effort to conceal the effort, that it’s going to be hard to believe Sarah isn’t equally aware, despite the ample evidence of Sarah’s inability to grasp her, Karen’s, feelings. Synonyms for “ample” include “bounteous,” “copious,” and “plenteous” but not, according to this particular thesaurus, “voluminous,” which in its entry lists synonyms including “big,” “huge,” “roomy,” “capacious,” and … “ample.” Sometimes synonymousness only travels one way. The dictionary tells us that “voluminous” travels out of the past from the Latin word voluminosus, meaning “having many coils,” which travels from the Latin word volumen, a roll, which, reversing direction again, travels to the Middle Ages to become a word in English, “volume,” which means a roll of parchment that’s been written on. Anybody can look these things up. A given person’s facility with words is not in fact their knack, gift, or talent; it only means they own a thesaurus and a dictionary. The way we were raised—by “we” I mean me and Sarah; by “raised” I mean given the ideas that most mattered to us, and it wasn’t our parents who did this but our teachers and friends—talent was the only religion, the only basis for belief that wasn’t mocked. Talent was a divine thing embodied in humans and you either had it or you didn’t, you were blessed or you weren’t. Either way, you worshipped it. If you were blessed with talent, you worshipped it by using it, and no sin was worse than letting talent go to waste. If you weren’t blessed with it, you worshipped it by serving the people who had it. You had better be joyful, not jealous. Karen and Sarah, you girls know without you we could never do mainstage, you girls are a pair of wardrobe wizards, lucky us that you’ll run costume crew! Did Sarah audition for mainstage every year despite having the range of a toad when she sang? Yes, she did. Did Karen audition for mainstage every year, she who soloed with her church choir? Yes, she did. Was either of them ever cast, even in a bit part, even once in four years? No, never. They were permanent members of that mysterious majority, the talented enough to get into the school but not talented enough to serve as its stars. They must serve as the background against which the stars shined. They must feel joyful to do this and never resent it, although admission to the school had seemed like a promise that each passing year was remade and then broken again. Every year one of the seemingly permanent losers was unexpectedly cast in a lead, which both kept hope alive and increased the humiliation. Senior year it was the guy we’ll call Norbert. Norbert. By then, Karen had returned to her childhood world of dance with a vengeance, though instead of ballet she took modern and pretended to look down her nose at acting. She’d chosen acting as a fourteen-year-old: a mere child, she had chosen an art meant for children. Senior year she was gracious about it, happy to lend a hand with the costumes so that all the Theatre children could have a good time. Of course they should know she’d be studying modern in college. Sarah struck much the same pose, but with writing. Scribble, scribble, scribble went Sad Sarah in her Solemn Notebook. The only difference being that Sarah succeeded, having aimed lower and chosen a talent anybody could fake with the right kind of tools. Try and fake dance: you can’t do it. True arts require discipline, they require that you sculpt muscle and bind it to bone. I haven’t danced since college because I’m a realist and I understood early enough that I wasn’t going to be a professional dancer any more than I was going to be a professional actor, because although I’m really lean I’m too short and too wide. I maybe should have been a swimmer but anyway. Anyway, Karen hasn’t danced in a decade, but strangers still see at a glance that she used to dance seriously, they see it in her posture, that’s how ingrained she made it, how much work she put in.
The hard work of herself, on the hard muscle and bone of herself. Nobody else’s stuff dragged in to make something seem ample, bounteous, copious, plenteous, or voluminous.
I’d come to the bookstore fully intending to sit down in the audience. I imagined Sarah seeing me, maybe as soon as she stepped to the mic or maybe after she’d already started to read. Either way, I imagined her recognition of me would have the same sort of effect on her voice that bumping into the turntable had when we used to play records. Her needle would jump and then fall back again and she’d pretend to keep going, but there would have been that little break, that flaw in the smoothness. Maybe only she and I would notice, but I didn’t need other people to notice, in fact I didn’t want other people to notice. I wasn’t after some public moment, with the crowd as my tool. When we were children, or students, or whatever we were at the place we’ll refer to as CAPA, we were taught that a moment of intimacy had no meaning unless it was part of a show. The ways we liked and hated and envied and bullied and punished each other never seemed satisfyingly real unless Mr. Kingsley put them onstage during Trust Exercises, and he chose very few of our moments. Sarah and David, it should be obvious to anyone, were envied by all of us for the attention they got. In fact, that was their stardom, a different kind of stardom than being cast in a lead but in the long run more potent. Being a legit star at CAPA was a Pollyanna enterprise requiring that you have straight white teeth and be able to sing and to fit a whole set of ideas about life that we were too young at that point to recognize as ideas or as you might say a belief system. Unlike most of us I’d been raised in a religious belief system but even I didn’t recognize at that age that CAPA stardom was also a belief system, and not just the way that life was. David and Sarah’s different stardom gave the clue to some alternate universe where everything was reversed, and instead of discovery and love and success were distortion, disconnection, and failure. That was the show they starred in. The exercises Mr. Kingsley made them do, it occurred to me many years later, were a kind of pornography. I only meant to say that I decided to not surprise Sarah in front of an audience. I didn’t decide this out of kindness to her. I just didn’t want to give her the moral high ground.
One more thing, before Karen and Sarah’s reunion. In her story, Sarah takes the actual friendship between Sarah and Karen, and turns it into a friendship between Sarah and Joelle. She also takes the actual end of that friendship, and turns it into a show that was watched by their classmates, a Trust Exercise. But it wasn’t. The death of our friendship was
private. The dying took place at a distance, but at the instant of death we were face-to-face without anyone else. It was my first day back at school after a break. I’d spent the fall and winter of my junior year at a Bible school and I hadn’t seen Sarah since early that summer. Sarah had spent the summer in England with her much older lover. She had gotten to do this by driving her mother’s car, without her mother’s permission, away from a fight with her mother over her mother’s refusal to give her permission to travel to England, through a red light and into an oncoming truck, totaling the car and receiving nonfatal but impressive-enough injuries. As soon as she was discharged from the hospital and her passport was ready, she left for England and didn’t come back until the day before school started. I knew these details because my mother had given rides to Sarah’s mother all summer, to the grocery store and the doctor, because Sarah had totaled the car and Sarah’s mother couldn’t afford to replace it. Sarah’s mother was disabled, which for some reason Sarah’s story doesn’t mention.
I had gotten to school early my first day back so I could park in the front lot, where there weren’t many spaces, because I wanted to avoid everyone I knew and they parked in the back. It was January and the air was actually cold, its dampness was cold, and the cold damp made a haze that in my memory softened the light so that I felt hidden and somehow alone, as if I was actually going to succeed, and get through the first day of school without having to see anybody I knew although it was a small school and all the same people every year and there was no way I’d even get through an hour without seeing them all. But even a few minutes without seeing them all would have made a difference. There were teachers’ cars in the front lot but it wasn’t half full. My plan was to sit in the smokers’ courtyard, which opened off the cafeteria through a set of glass doors, so it wasn’t a good place to hide but at least you could see people coming. I knew there was nowhere to hide and the best I could do was to see people coming, but then I pulled open the heavy front door of our school and there was Sarah. She seemed to be coming out. It was seven forty-five in the morning, forty-five minutes before the first bell. There was no one else, no other sound; all the adults were in the main office or locked in their classrooms.
Sarah was wearing some kind of punk outfit that was supposed to look uncaring—punk—but instead shouted effort. The effort of all those months working her bakery job to earn money, the effort of totaling her mother’s car to make her mother too frightened to try and control what she did, the effort of crossing the ocean to spend the summer with a much older man, the effort of navigating Carnaby Street and choosing just the right clothes without knowing what any choice meant. The outfit was Doc Martens boots and shredded black fishnets and bleached cutoff jeans and a white, black, and red T-shirt with a spiky-haired guy sneering “Oi!” Her hair was short and she’d drawn thick lines around her eyes. Inside the lines her eyes didn’t look larger, as she probably hoped, but sunk in from the rest of her face, like she’d put on a mask. From under her eyeliner mask she saw me, the person she’d most hoped to avoid, just as she was the person I’d most hoped to avoid, so that, thinking and acting the same way, our efforts canceled each other. And right away her gaze went hard with the anger we always feel at the person who spoils our idea of ourself.
I don’t know what she saw in my gaze. Her story doesn’t show my gaze, or depict it through somebody else, or maybe it does and I’m so self-deluded I don’t recognize it. That’s possible. What she should have seen was pure accusation, which doesn’t take long to transmit. We looked at each other for just long enough. I don’t think we stopped walking, me in, and her out, the same door. Everything we’d felt for each other, which had been dying down throughout the summer almost naturally, how a candle’s flame slowly dies out when you cut off its air, flared and changed all at once into something else, instead of expiring. But our friendship was over.
* * *
KAREN STOOD OUTSIDE the Skylight bookstore in Los Angeles, waiting for her old friend, the author. Her old friend the author had arrived at the bookstore by car about fifteen minutes before, and had stood outside the store in the same spot where Karen was now standing. Her old friend the author had glanced into the store and then glanced at her watch, as if waiting for someone or something, or as if concealing a hesitation by pretending to be waiting for someone or something. Then, as if the someone or something had arrived or the hesitation ended, she went into the store. During this time, Karen watched from a café across the street. At the café, Karen had also been waiting for someone and something, and also hesitating. She had been waiting for her old friend the author, and for whatever sensation it would give her to see her old friend the author again. The sensation had been precise and satisfying. It had been a sudden pressure on the sternum, a pressure that meant excitement, and dread, and anticipation, and reluctance, all rolled together, but with an emphasis on excitement and anticipation. Karen was very good at parsing and naming her feelings. She’d been practicing this skill for many years. The sternum-pressure sensation had also been like hunger, a demand for action, unlike other similar sensations which despite being similar were completely different, not demands for action but warnings against it. Karen’s hesitation had been waiting for this signal and once she had it her hesitation was over and she got up and paid for her coffee and crossed the street to go into the bookstore but before she had done this a new hesitation came up, the hesitation about sitting in the audience. As already discussed, Karen had intended to sit in the audience if she went to the reading at all, but standing in front of the bookstore, looking through the big windows at the other early arrivals milling around browsing the shelves, Karen had all those thoughts mentioned above about audiences and power trips and moral high grounds and decided not to sit in the audience but to stay outside on the sidewalk where she wouldn’t seem out of place because it was lively for an LA sidewalk as this was one of those rare “walkable” neighborhoods LA is so proud of. Karen had lived in Los Angeles for a period of several years which had ended several years ago, but her brother still lived here, she still wound up here a couple times a year, she still felt at home here. She was still on her own turf, you might say. Karen had browsed in this bookstore before but she hadn’t bought anything. She leaned casually against the plate-glass window, cupping her palms around her eyes to make the inside of the store visible. The sun was setting, its fiery light pouring from the café side of the street, painting the solid parts of Skylight Books’s storefront gold while turning the window into a blinding mirror and throwing huge golden rectangles into the store, across the concrete floor and up the bookshelves standing all over the place at artsy angles to each other to form a sort of maze. Karen knew that because of the light behind her she could press her face to the window and be just a dark shape to a person inside. That was an advantage she hadn’t expected. She could see, through the maze of bookshelves, to the part of the store where the readings were held. A lectern faced several rows of folding chairs. Some people were starting to sit in the chairs, while others continued to wander. Some of the wanderers pensively held stacks of books they’d already discovered, while others pensively gazed at the slender signs hung on the walls, describing the books that were shelved underneath. Art. Humor. Essays. Reference. Fiction. The words on the signs formed a system implying that people who shopped in the store all agreed what the different words meant. The day before, the day she’d arrived in LA, Karen had gone to a drugstore and among the signs on the aisles describing what each aisle contained—“Hair Care”; “Cough and Cold”; “Cosmetics”—was a sign that read “Personal Intimacy.” “Personal Intimacy” was the way certain items were categorized in that drugstore. “Art,” “Humor,” “Essays,” “Reference,” and “Fiction” were the ways certain books had been categorized in the bookstore. “An author of fiction” is the way Karen’s old friend the author categorizes herself. A category is a way to define, while a definition, according to the dictionary, is a statement of the exact meani
ng of a word. The dictionary tells us that fiction is literature in the form of prose that describes imaginary events and people, is invention or fabrication, as opposed to fact. The dictionary tells us that the imaginary exists only in the imagination. Logic tells us that what exists only in the imagination does not exist in reality, or actuality, which the thesaurus tells us are the same thing.
After the sun had dipped under the opposite buildings, the inside of the store looked brighter, and Karen could see all the way to the lectern and chairs without standing too close to the glass. Now she stood leaning on the streetlight, again knowing that this way she couldn’t be seen from inside, where, finally, a pale thin man with a curtain of hair in his face came to the lectern, spoke briefly, and slumped out of view. Then Sarah came to the lectern. A curtain of hair fell in her face also; her hair was smooth and dark like an expensive piece of furniture. In high school, Karen and Sarah had done everything to their hair they could think of except take care of it. They had bleached it, shaved it, permed it, dyed it, as girls do when vandalizing themselves seems the best way of proving their bodies are theirs. Sarah seemed to have learned that expensive self-care also proved that her body was hers. Every inch of her surface was polished. It couldn’t be an accident that her side-parted hair was just slightly too short to remain anchored out of her face every time her right hand, in a demure little movement, tucked it behind her right ear. She tucked; and it fell out, eclipsing her face. She tucked; it fell out. Karen wondered if this tic was as conspicuous to the people inside, who could hear Sarah reading, or if the sound of her voice made the gesture less noticeable.