by Nathan Holic
*
The next day, during the lazy hours of an early Thursday afternoon at Purdue, rain crashing against the roof of the fraternity house and turning the tall windows of the chapter library into dark smears, I’m again scrolling through Jenn’s Facebook page to examine each change she’s made in the last few weeks.
Her profile picture is new, it seems, a photo taken late at night, Jenn standing in a parking lot with her friend Tina, both of them wearing sparkling black shirts with low neck-lines, matching white skirts, ready to head inside some bar. Jenn smiles at the camera, her body turned at such an angle that much of her face is in shadow, one arm hidden behind Tina; over her other shoulder she carries a golden Louis Vuitton purse, has it pushed out toward the camera as if displaying it. It’s an accessory I’ve never seen her carry before, this purse, a designer label she never seemed to care about. In fact, when I suggested buying her an LV purse for her birthday, she scoffed. “Don’t spend that kind of money, Charles. That’s such a waste. People who buy that crap are insecure.” But here it is. Here she is. Not wearing the same thrift-store vintage t-shirts she used to wear, not the same tight gray jeans and black cloth headband, the contrast to the super-serious Princess look of her sorority sisters. There’s no longer any corniness in her clothes, no longer a feeling that she will not be absorbed or consumed by the cynical world around her. And the smile. Shadowed, dark, mischievous, happy but not “Jenn Outlook” happy.
There are three new photo albums uploaded, also: “Homecoming,” “Out with the Girls,” and “Single and Mingling!” We haven’t spoken in weeks, so Jenn is long past the days of an “It’s complicated” relationship status. She is “Single,” and she wants the world to know.
Outside, the rain slashes at the windows with greater violence.
I click on the “Single and Mingling!” album.
I expect the worst, don’t know why I’m even doing this, and so I’m rightfully rewarded with punishment. Pictures of Jenn with college guys of all shapes and sizes: sitting on barstools with a spiky-haired blonde boy, taking shots with a kid in a Boston Red Sox hat, smooching the cheek of a Kappa Sigma fraternity brother, on the dance floor in a purple dress at some fraternity formal. Some of the guys are easily recognizable for me, faces glimpsed in hallways and classrooms and intramural baseball diamonds in a past life that no longer feels like it really happened. Others are strangers. These are the ones that hurt; these are the ones that show me how little I know about her.
In one photo, she holds a box of SQWorms, the sickeningly sweet gummy candy that would always surface from the depths of her purse late at night when we were drunk. She is holding the box, but she is not eating them. She is alone, also. This is the sort of photo in which I used to appear, nuclear-green SQWorm in my own hand, and the sugary strands would be hanging from both our mouths and our faces would be crackling with laughter.
I smooth my pants, search for an older photo album—“House Party with Charles”—and hope that it will make me feel different. But even this isn’t what I expected. It’s an album full of photos taken at my Senior Send-Off.
The first photos seem innocent enough, Jenn with her arm around my waist, a picture of my parents standing together in the fraternity house living room, a few pictures of the barbecue, the cake. Innocent, ordinary. But on the weekend before I left for Indianapolis, when Jenn was uploading the photos to Facebook, we had a long conversation about which to upload, which to exclude. “I don’t want anyone seeing that,” I said, pointing to one of the more harmless photographs.
“Which one?”
“The one where I’m trying to cut the cake.”
“That’s cute, Charles,” she said.
It wasn’t. The picture was taken around 10 PM, shortly after we’d sorted out the barbecue fiasco, and I’d unveiled the giant Publix cake, a rich castle-like construction with frosting spires and the iced message of “Welcome, Best Parents in the World!” By this time, the fraternity house smelled of pulled pork and spilled rum, and in the first picture that Jenn had loaded on her computer, I was holding a mixed drink at an angle, the alcohol spilling out from the top. “I look like a sloppy drunk in that picture,” I said. “I don’t want anyone seeing that.”
“You were a sloppy drunk at the party.”
“Jenn, please.”
“We’ll mark it as a ‘maybe.’”
The next picture was of the cake itself, whole, as yet unspoiled by knife or human hand. Jenn had been our official photographer at the Senior Send-Off, gathering parents with their sons, making mothers hug fathers or stand next to their sons’ thumb-sized photos on the large composites hanging in the hallway. She’d slipped in three photos with my parents, as well, all of which she’d made me take.
Later, the two of us clicking through the photos on the computer, it was strange to see these images, the authority with which I’d taken the photographs, the authority with which Jenn had stood between my mother and father, as if perhaps she was already their daughter. I said, “Those look nice” even though she knew nothing about what was happening between them, and Jenn uploaded them to Facebook, tagged them, waited for the obligatory “You’re so cute!” comments from friends. And I remember thinking that—as horrified as I’d been to see myself so drunk in all the other photos—I’d also been eager to upload and immortalize any picture that could continue to tie me to Jenn. What girl would cheat on her boyfriend, leave him while the relationship was long-distance, if the Facebook photo albums were full of pictures of her with his parents? It was like moving in together, buying a car together; it was all I had, all I could think to keep her, as I planned my inevitable trip to Indianapolis for a year of consulting.
But yet, even now, after she has changed to “single,” here they remain on Facebook.
Even after my parents have divorced, they stand together with my ex-girlfriend.
“A lot of pictures of the cake,” Jenn told me as we scrolled through all of the possible pictures to upload: a photo where I was holding the cake at this angle, at that angle, flash, no flash, close-up, the sort of pictures that no one would have taken in such quantity before the advent of 4 GB photo drives and digital cameras. And then, suddenly, the cake pictures ended, and there I was, attempting to cut the thing with a plastic knife.
“Not this one,” I told her. “Don’t upload this picture.”
“Why not?”
“My finger is in the frosting. That’s disgusting.”
“Charles, only you would notice that.”
“Don’t you remember?” I asked. “It was a big deal.”
“I don’t remember, no. Your finger in the frosting was a big deal?”
“We didn’t have large utensils. The caterer didn’t give us any, remember? So I had to cut the cake with one of those little plastic knives. But the cake was, like, too tall, too thick.”
“Okay?”
“So when I made the first cut, my entire hand smashed against the frosting.”
“We’d all been drinking, Charles. Nobody will even notice. Or care.”
But I cared. Because it wasn’t simply that I’d destroyed those spires of frosting on the cake’s southernmost wall…it was how it had happened, and what came afterward, the things Jenn hadn’t seen but which were still raw and painful for me.
And it is only after I view the final photo in this “House Party with Charles” album that I notice a button at the top of Jenn’s Facebook page. “+1,” it says. “Add as friend.”
We’re no longer friends. At some point, she deleted me as her friend.
“Really?” I say aloud, and maybe this shouldn’t bother me. It’s just Facebook, after all. Jenn has moved on, and it’s just Facebook, and what am I?, some it’s-the-end-of-the-world-because-I-can’t-go-to-the-party-on-Friday-night high schooler?, but it feels like something very wrong has happened, is happening, and I can’t control myself and it’s irrational but I’m nevertheless fumbling for my phone and I’m dialing and there is a click
and suddenly—for the first time in who knows how long—I’m on the phone with Jenn.
“I see that we’re no longer friends,” I say.
“Well, hello,” she says, voice light as if she thinks I’m just joking. “Good to hear from you, stranger.”
“Good to hear from me?”
“It’s been a little while.” Are these the same happy high-lows that I remember? Or is this a new woman, one who will chirp with happiness on the phone just to placate me, all the while rolling her eyes and making “gag me” motions for anyone watching? This was a girl who ate GORP and yogurt for her lunches, who shopped the organic Greenwise section of Publix, whose iPod was filled with Wilson Phillips and the Bangles and Soul for Real; this was a girl who never apologized for her tastes, for her opinions, who valued honesty above all else, breezing through the pretension of private-school EU on scholarships rather than on her parent’s cash; this was a girl who cringed when we drove past Wal-Mart, as if the big-box corporate stores might grow gigantic concrete legs and chase her down the highway like some prehistoric creature from The Mist; this was a girl who never needed an excuse to go shopping for a new dress, but who preferred second-hand to department store uniformity, who loved her conformist sorority sisters mostly because they were so different from her, a girl whose own eccentricity and distinctiveness should somehow have prevented her from ever joining a sorority to begin with. And yet the profile picture: Louis Vuitton. Do I know her?
“Good to hear from me?” I ask. “Are you just fucking with me?”
“What?”
Outside the chapter library window, a strong wind gust. A pelleting of hard rain producing a sound like crushed ice falling into a plastic cup. A branch smacking into the glass.
“No, I’m not fucking with you, Charles.”
I’m pacing the chapter library, now have one hand on the outdated window drapes. Fabric tight in my fist. “You’re sure?” I ask. “You’re sure you’re not…I get the distinct impression that everyone has been…I don’t know how much more of this I can take, Jenn.”
“Sensitive today? Wow,” she says. “Listen, I wasn’t sure if I’d hear from you again.”
“Wasn’t sure if you’d…? You didn’t think we’d ever speak again?”
“I don’t know, Charles. God, calm down. It was just a comment.”
“Ever?”
“It was just a comment! I’m graduating in a month. There’s a lot of people I might never see again if I take the job in Atlanta. It’s just been on my mind. I didn’t mean—”
“A job in Atlanta? You never told me about this.”
“Well. We haven’t talked. You shut me out.”
“Trying to start over, then? Some new life? Jettison your old friends?”
“Jettison?” she asks. “Who says that? Why are you—”
“You’re single, I get it. But we’re not even friends anymore?”
Jenn is silent for a moment. When she speaks again her voice has lost the light and happy tone with which she answered, has lost the momentary sadness with which she mentioned her own future, has lost the confusion that weighed down her questions. When she speaks, it is in a tone that no longer drifts between notes, but instead slices uncompromisingly. “Oka-aaa-aayy,” she says, drawn out in a way that I’ve never heard from her before, the pampered sorority girl tone that can take the simplest word (“okay”) and make it sound cutting, that can pump four simple letters full of are you serious? and that was the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard and you don’t deserve to be talking to me. “This is about Facebook, is it?” she asks.
“I’m all the way out in Indiana, and you want to forget that we ever happened,” I say. “Don’t you remember that you encouraged me to take this fucking job?”
“You’re upset that I deleted you as my friend. Is that it? You want to know why.”
“Yes,” I say. “Yes. You’re quick today, Jenn.”
“You don’t need to be nasty.”
“I get deleted as your friend, and I’m the one who’s nasty? Facebook is the story of our lives. You can’t delete someone.”
“Really, Charles? I thought it was a web site. And I think I did delete someone.”
One of the Purdue chapter brothers enters the room, perhaps because we have a meeting scheduled, but I wave him away angrily and mouth “not now.” He backs up as if I’ve swung at him, then shrugs and says “Whatever, dude,” and he’s out the door and it’s just me and the cell phone again, a new wave of hard rain against the window. I finally loosen my grip on the drape, let it hang limp against the dusty windowsill, and I exhale to fill the silence.
“Who are you?” I ask. “Really. Who are you?”
“Who am I?”
“A fucking Louis Vuitton purse?”
“What does that have to do with anything? It was a gift.”
“The Jenn that I know. She wouldn’t act this way.”
“What way?” She pauses. “Wait, why do I even have to explain anything to you? What does it matter to you what I wear? Who the fuck are you to say anything to me?”
“Hey, just remember. People can change in bad ways, too. That’s what you told me, Miss Single-and-Mingling.”
“You’re absolutely right, Charles. People can change in bad ways. And that’s why we aren’t together anymore. That’s why I deleted you. Satisfied?”
“Oh,” I say, “you’re the same girl, but I’ve changed?” And it’s a stupid response, I know that as soon as it’s out of mouth, and so now it’s her turn to exhale into the phone, and I grab the drape again to steady myself, to stop from pacing the library, and I know now that nearly everything I’ve said so far has been stupid, that this entire conversation, if transcribed and read aloud by a semi-reasonable individual, is stupefyingly juvenile. But that doesn’t change the way things happen in real time.
“You wanted to be the man, Charles,” she says. “That’s what you said. Way back when we were packing your car.”
“So what?”
“You wanted to be the man. Same thing my father said, but you said you that if you were going to do a relationship, you were going to do it right. All sorts of proclamations, Charles.”
I see the faintest possibility of reconciliation beneath this all. The faintest glimmer of the future I wanted, then forsook. To be with Jenn again is to be the Diamond Candidate again, to have no fear and to have done nothing wrong. To step out into the world and to save it, not to be halfway through with the job and to have failed. “Maybe a long-distance relationship wasn’t realistic?” I say. “Maybe we got ahead of ourselves. Maybe we’re both to blame?”
“Both to blame, Charles?” Jenn asks. “I told you I was ready. But I don’t give myself to someone who talks a big game and then doesn’t deliver.”
“Fine,” I say. “Fine. A thousand times. Fine. I’m sorry that I—”
“Don’t start with the apologies,” she says. “I get it. You’re feeling guilty.”
“I’m not. I’m just trying to do what’s right.”
“What’s right? I’ve heard you talk about doing what’s right for the past six months,” she says. “The noble hero out to change the world? Making socially responsible citizens? Save it for someone else. I’ve read your Facebook updates. I know what you’re doing.”
“Please, Jenn. That’s nothing. I’ve gone out a few times, but—”
“Ha! First you delete your profile, then you use it to brag about waking up at noon.”
“Hey, listen”—anger now—“I’ve seen your profile, too. The shit you’re doing—”
“Don’t play that card. I never made a big production of trying to be some crazy-intense role model. I am who I am, and I never made any claims otherwise.”
“Come on. Single and mingling? Come on.”
“I didn’t think it could be true, honestly,” Jenn says. “I saw your name on my Caller ID, and I thought…I know Charles Washington. This is him. He’ll prove me wrong. All this other stuff I’ve seen and h
eard: it’s got to be a mistake, it’s got to be wrong.”
“All this other stuff?”
“And now, after this conversation, I know,” Jenn says. “She wasn’t lying.”
“Wasn’t lying? Who?”
“You really did, didn’t you?”
“I really did what? What are you talking about?”
But I know, don’t I? I know where she’s going next.
“I don’t want to fight,” I try. “This is not what I wanted.”
“You called because you were angry at me about the Facebook thing, but really you’re mad at yourself, aren’t you?” she says. “Guilty conscience. So tell me. Maria? Is it true?”
No defense. No response. “What,” I say. “Maria.”
“I didn’t believe her email,” she says. “A freshman girl in New Mexico? But if it’s really true, then you know why we aren’t friends, why I want nothing to do with you. You’re not the man I thought I knew. You’re my worst nightmare come true.”
Outside, a thin tree shakes and bends in the wind, one of its long bare branches reaching almost to the muddy ground in a blast of wind, then stretching back skyward as the trunk straightens and strengthens, then reaching down again in another gust…reaching, almost touching the ground. And I wonder if there’s a point at which the branch—or the tree trunk—will snap. Which will snap first.
*
Later in the night, while the rain continues, I sit with a scattered group of Purdue fraternity brothers in the type of warm wooden living room that one would expect from a typical Hollywood “frat house” movie: deep brown leather couches; a pool table at one end of the room; wooden floors that, as you cross them, creak and smack like the sound of fingers flipping through stacks of cash, ghosts in the walls and in the spaces between; composite photos dating back to 1955 lining the hallways and leading to a long fireplace, above which hangs a painting of (what else) the house itself, the limestone castle illuminated by summer sunshine; a spiral staircase at the far end of the room, leading to the next two floors; a coat rack, too…a fucking carved, wooden coat rack! Everything you’d expect of a fraternity house that’s stood since 1948.