Love Lettering

by Kate Clayborn

  “Are you okay?” I ask her, arrested in my spot outside my bedroom door, the small square of floor that Sibby and I always joked led to the “sleeping wing” of our place, which had seemed huge to us when we first moved in, a luxurious comparison to our previous apartments in the city.

  “Yeah, I’m good.” She sets down her coffee, settles herself on one end of the couch, laptop in the cradle of the legs she crosses underneath her. No further explanation forthcoming, I guess, but even so—it’s too rare these days, having time alone here with Sibby where she doesn’t seem so determined to be in a different room than me. She doesn’t even make a move to put earbuds in.

  I feel the familiar stir of hope I’ve felt so many times over the past few months, since this plane of distance between us opened. This is it, I’m thinking. This is when we’ll work it out, whatever’s gone wrong between us. This is when it’ll go back to normal. I walk the length of the living space, make a stop at the refrigerator that’s to the right of our front door—it’s bigger here, sure, but it’s still got one-quarter of a kitchen in the living room—and reach in for a cup of yogurt. We keep our stuff separate these days, as if there’s a chalk line down the middle of all the shelves. It is thoroughly inane, especially because we still shop at the same bodega, buy almost all the same foods.

  “Aren’t you late?” I lob casually.

  “I asked for the morning off. Tilda’s getting the kids ready for school.”

  “That’ll be a disaster,” I say, and it’s a slow pitch I’m sending her way, an easy hit for once-familiar unloading about Sibby’s boss, who doesn’t work but who manages to stay out for twelve to fifteen hours a day and who seems startlingly unfamiliar with both of her children’s routines. The last time Sibby was sick, Tilda forgot about the youngest’s lactose intolerance and the results of an impulsive, tantrum-preventing ice-cream cone were felt for days and days.

  But Sibby only says, “She’s good with them,” and there’s a thread of censure to it, as though she needs to defend a woman who once made her stay overnight and sleep in the bathtub closest to Spencer’s room in case he had another nightmare about Frozen. Another way I’ve been shut out: not even worthy of a good, old-fashioned “my job sucks” diatribe.

  “Yeah, of course,” I say, because I basically agree with anything now when she deigns to talk to me.

  I went along, I think, Reid’s voice so clear in my mind that I speed my pace gathering my breakfast, trying to flush it out with the tinkle of silverware in the drawer, the clink of a glass on the countertop, an unnecessary shake of a box of granola. My face feels flushed, and at this moment I’m grateful that she avoids me so thoroughly. Whatever it is she’s doing now, hanging out in the same space as me, she’ll probably soon enough go back to her room or take a shower.

  But she doesn’t leave. She says, “Meg,” and it almost, almost sounds the way it used to. It almost sounds everyday, the sound of your name in your best friend’s voice, surely one of the best sounds there is. I’m so glad I wasn’t pouring the granola when she said it.

  “Yeah?”

  “I wanted to talk to you about something.”

  Finally, I’m thinking, that stir of hope something closer to a swirl now, and I wish I was more prepared. For the first couple of months after Sibby had started pulling away—not home as frequently, answering my texts with friendly but bland, noncommittal replies, passing on offers to watch a favorite show or visit a neighborhood bar or restaurant—I’d tried so hard to connect. Lightly, at first, with jokes about how busy she always was, or once a clever, hand-drawn ransom note on her bedroom door: The Bachelorette season finale tonight or your cashmere sweater gets the dryer. Later, more serious efforts to talk it through, efforts that made me feel sweaty and sick with nerves, Sibby always brushing me off with a laughing reply, “I’m just busy, Meg! You worry too much.” A quick hug or promise to find some time soon would always have me feeling both vaguely better and vaguely unsatisfied, a disquieting familiarity in her brush-offs. I knew Sibby too well to think we’d gotten to the root of whatever the problem is, but after so many months I’ve become passive about it, locked in an old, painful fear of what pressing her might lead to.

  “What’s up?” I lean back against the counter so I face where she’s sitting on the couch, the whole width of our apartment between us, but I’m sure this is the right move—not too eager, not too pressured.

  “You know Elijah, right?”

  This is an absurd question. He sleeps here three nights a week and has for the last three months; of course I know him. I know what kind of razor he uses. Frankly, in a thin-walled apartment, I am way too familiar with some of his most not-for-public-consumption noises.

  “Sure.” It’s casual, but inside I’m steeling myself. The three-nights-a-week stuff has already been a concession, particularly since when he’s here I always worry I’m interrupting by breathing, and because I know—from one of my few longer-than-five-minute conversations with him—he prefers our place to the studio he’s got in Bed-Stuy, I’m expecting a big ask. Probably his lease is up, probably he wants to crash here for a while—

  “He and I are moving in together.”

  I almost drop the yogurt.

  “We got a place in the Village. Not far from that oyster bar you used to like . . .”

  What. The. Fuck.

  Sibby keeps talking, something about tiny square footage but an updated kitchen, but I’m stuck on the essentials: she’s moving in with a guy she’s been dating for a few months, she’s moving out of here, she’s moving out of Brooklyn, she’s had the gall to reference an oyster bar I did not in fact like but did go to for a date awkward enough to deserve an entire Cosmo article.

  “But don’t worry, I’m here until the end of summer, so you’ve got plenty of notice.”

  I can’t seem to do anything but stare.

  “I don’t figure you’ll bring in another roommate,” she continues, “but I wanted to give you lead time in case. You can take my room when I go, make yours an office. Run your business out of here, you know?”

  Run my business? Sibby barely knows the half of it with my business, knows nothing about how many regulars I’ve picked up since the Times article, and she certainly knows nothing about the massive potential of the contract I’m trying out for, which now I absolutely have to get if I have any real hope of affording this place alone, even temporarily. Sure, I’m doing well with clients, have a couple of regular sponsors for my social media—but I’m a twenty-six-year-old artist living in one of the most expensive cities in the world.

  What is she thinking?

  I can hardly process what we’re talking about here, can hardly process that this conversation is so transactional, that we’re not going to talk about the fact that we’ve lived together in this city since we were nineteen, that every big move we made here—apartments, jobs, changing our regular laundromat—we’ve made them as a unit. That there’ll be a whole body of water separating us now.

  My hold on the yogurt container now feels less a drop risk and more a smash risk. I breathe through my nose, try to settle down.

  “What about your job?”

  Sibby waves a hand. “I’m going to start with a new family in the city after Labor Day. It’s all set.”

  “You love the Whalens, though,” I protest weakly. Not Tilda, but those kids—Sibby’s poured her whole heart into those kids for the last four years she’s worked for the Whalens.

  Sibby looks down, rubs her thumb against the outer edge of her laptop. “They’ll be okay. Spence’ll be in school full time soon. And anyway, I’ve probably only got a year or two left in me for nannying. Besides, that was never the dream.”

  “Will you start auditioning again?”

  She purses her lips, shifts her eyes toward the front window. It’s sunny out, a slant of light passing through the thick pane of glass, and I see the crinkles at the corners of Sibby’s eyes. Tiny, cheerful lines from a big, honking laugh I haven’t he
ard in months.

  “No, Eli got a producing gig at NBC, a pretty good one. I may not even have to work forever.”

  “Sib,” I say. That nickname, it’s always felt special. Sib, short for Sibby, short for Sibyl. But to me, it always felt—short for sibling. Short for the sister I never had. But this isn’t the sister I know. “I don’t understand this.”

  This is such a profound understatement that it’s almost funny. It isn’t that I thought Sibby and I would live together forever; it isn’t even that we haven’t considered separate places before. After all, when she took the job here, it was me who thought of staying behind in Manhattan, where I was getting steady work even without the benefit of a home shop like Cecelia’s, in demand enough to be able to dodge noncompetes for the shops I did work with. But how did we get to this place, a place where we haven’t even talked about this massive change? How is it simply an announcement, and not the culmination of hours of conversation, including at least a few hours devoted to my ambitious, determined friend saying she may not even have to work anymore? How did this happen?

  She led, and I followed. Reid’s deep voice again, and all I can think is: I wish I had a code for this. I wish I had a sign.

  “It’s a big change, I know,” Sibby says lightly, opening her laptop and tapping a few keys. “Here, I’ll pull up the listing for you so you can—”

  “No. No, that’s all right.” I’ve only taken two bites of my yogurt, but I hastily put it back in the fridge, spoon and all. Let’s face it, I’m definitely not going to eat that later. It’s going to get that weird yogurt skin that makes you wonder why yogurt exists, period. But right now, I don’t care about anything but getting out of here before Sibby can see I’ve got frustrated tears pricking behind my eyes. “I’m actually filling in at the shop again today, so I’d better get going.”

  “Meg, listen, it’ll be fine! I’ll come visit, and you’ll come visit.”

  I pause, briefly, feeling another inconvenient spike of anger toward her. That’s it, I think. That small, casual “It’ll be fine.” That’s the way she’s managed it, this distance between us. She’s kept it so friendly. She’s never let on she notices that anything at all has changed.

  She knows, more than anyone, why this would work on me so well. Why I wouldn’t want to press too hard about what has, without a doubt, changed.

  “Yeah, of course.” My voice sounds the same as it always does, but I feel as if I’m speaking through clenched teeth. “I’m happy for you, Sib.” I’m an I-went-along broken record.

  For a split second we look at each other, and to me it feels like a mountain of letters between us, all jumbled up and unmatched, a thousand things I need to say to her but can’t figure out how to say. Not without starting some kind of terrible avalanche. Not without getting buried beneath them.

  So I blink first, right before Sibby’s quiet “Thanks,” and after that I decide it’s my turn to do the avoiding for a while.

  Here’s the thing: I used to hate New York, too.

  When I was thirteen years old, my eighth-grade class got split into two groups: in the spring, only three weeks before the last day of middle school, half of us would take a four-day trip to Washington, D.C., and half of us would take a four-day trip to New York City. In the days leading up to the October announcement about the trip rosters, I would lie in my twin-size bed and make promises to a god I wasn’t even quite sure I believed in, swearing to do all my chores early for a whole year, to lay off my parents about finally letting me get a cell phone. Anything, anything so I wouldn’t get picked for the New York trip.

  I got picked for the New York trip.

  I was scared; that’s the long and short of it. I’d never traveled outside the state of Ohio, and even inside of Ohio I’d only really ever left home to visit Cincinnati, which is where my dad’s parents lived. Both trips seemed overwhelming, but in pictures D.C. seemed mostly comprised of clean, white, official-looking buildings surrounded by evenly cut, extremely green grass, and since I grew up in the suburbs, evenly cut, extremely green grass was basically my understanding of nature in general.

  But in pictures—not to mention in TV shows and movies—New York seemed huge, unpredictable, gray and crowded and noisy and mismatching. There was Central Park, sure, but in the aerial photographs our social studies teacher showed us, even that seemed overwhelming—thick-topped trees hiding what, I didn’t know, but probably not a bunch of suburban-looking grass, and all of it surrounded by that gray maze of buildings.

  When I’d come home and told my parents, neither of them seemed to register the wobble in my voice, instead almost immediately—as was their tradition—taking up diametrically opposed positions on the whole thing. My mother was appalled that a place as “unsafe” as New York was even an option, and my father rolled his eyes and complained about how sheltered I was. By the time they were done, a few slammed cabinet doors later, the wobble had been out of my voice. I’d told my mom all about how many chaperones would be with us; I’d told my dad how excited I was.

  A few months later, I’d taken my seat on that spring day with a sketchpad clutched to my chest and two full bottles of Pepto-Bismol in my backpack, remembering my dad’s advice to “stay tough” and my mom’s to keep all my money in the flat fanny pack she’d bought me to wear beneath my pants.

  And then Sibyl Michelucci sat down next to me.

  She was new, had moved to our school from Chicago, and basically she was one hundred times cooler than anyone in our class. By extension, she was also obviously one million times cooler than the person with two bottles of Pepto-Bismol in her backpack. She’d been to New York “uh, a lot” of times, because her dad was an architect and also because the entire dream of her life was to be on Broadway, and her parents were “like, so supportive” and took her to see a show at least twice a year. On the bus ride she started sing-a-longs that no one hated (magic!) and a game of truth or dare where no one got embarrassed (sorcery!).

  I’d had friends before Sibby, of course—kids I’d been in school with for years, kids who knew me to be polite, upbeat, always drawing or coloring something. But as soon as I was old enough to recognize them, I’d been cautious about cliques, about the rivalries and conflicts that always seemed to brew beneath the surface of them, and I suppose I’d kept my distance. But there was nothing cautious about Sibby, no one—including me—she kept her distance from. She was easygoing and fun-loving and curious, and she had a way of bringing me into the fold without making me feel overexposed.

  And on the New York trip, she became my best friend.

  But even having Sibby by my side didn’t change my mind about the city, not really. I was still overwhelmed; I still wore that flat fanny pack as if it was a medical device keeping me alive; I still drank two tablespoons of Pepto every morning before we left the hotel for the heavily scheduled and chaperoned days of sightseeing we had; I still thought I was in imminent danger of being mugged every time I was in the open air. I managed to enjoy parts of it (the park did, after all, have a lot of nice grass), but I didn’t own it.

  I went along.

  When Sibby decided to move here right after graduation, we’d hugged and cried and made promises never ever to lose touch, but there was really no question I’d ever go with her. I had a partial scholarship to the Columbus College of Art and Design, and planned to grin and bear it at home with my parents until I could save up enough for a small apartment. I was going to graduate and get a job doing graphic design, first for my dad’s business and then, I hoped, for others. New York would be a place I visited, for Sibby, but not—not ever—a place I lived.

  But when everything fell apart, it was Sibby who I needed, Sibby who gave me a fresh start. That I hated the city was irrelevant. I didn’t hate it as much as what had happened at home—that final, terrible fight between me and my parents. The one where for once, they’d been on the same side. The one where I’d finally, finally pushed them into telling me the truth—about them, about me,
about all of the things they’d kept from me for years.

  Talk about an avalanche. Some days I think I’m still shaking off the snow and rocks.

  So at first—numb and sad and scared—I followed her lead. She offered me a spot on her small, uncomfortable couch; I took it. The catering company where she worked at night needed more servers; I signed up. She needed to go to auditions; I rode the subway with her, helping her carry extra clothes and waiting in hallways and lobbies while she anxiously read sides. She made plans with the friends she’d met since her arrival; I tagged along.

  When I was ready, though—when I finally went out on my own—it was signs and letters that taught me how to love the city for myself.

  To make it my new home.

  So maybe that’s why, after my awful, stomach-churning conversation with Sibby, I take the extra-long way to the shop, so extra-long that it’s not really the way at all. It’s just a big, zigzaggy detour that kills time before I really have to be there for the shift that doesn’t start for another hour and that lets me see more of what I want to see: letters making sense.

  There’s not much at first, or at least not much most people would notice. The signs on my street are about how to function in a space, reminders of how to be a resident: . They’re mostly all caps, mostly sans serif, sizes varying depending on the seriousness of the problem you’ll have if you don’t pay attention to them. Then west toward Fifth, a left to take me past where I sat with Reid Sutherland last night, more of his words ringing in my ears.

  There haven’t been many signs for me here.

  I go down Union, where it’s all about to change, where it’s not so much about functioning in a space as it is about figuring out what to visit or eat or buy once you’re in it. There’s a red awning marking out a restaurant known for using almost all local ingredients; their sign looks carelessly, charmingly handwritten, a heavy, uneven tittle over an i, an all-lowercase web address that looks scribbled out as an afterthought, a messy accommodation to modernity. Union and Sixth, a good corner for signage—a veterinary clinic with a slim sans serif, clean and safe-looking. A market with a lime-green star to replace the A, a standout against the black background—it’s hip, it’s expensive, it’s probably got a bunch of food you’ve never heard of but you’d definitely be hip, too, if you tried it.