Catapult

by Emily Fridlund

  HERE, STILL

  I do not like her much, Lora, my best friend. She is freckled daintily on her arms and chest, and wears low-cut blouses so you can see the bones of her clavicles. She has never been ashamed of her little breasts. She once held me under water, her hands on my head, and when I shoved her off, gasping, she kissed me. Her hair was long and wet, and it draped like a cape over her shoulders.

  “There, Amanda,” she said. Lora’s smile was ferocious: her lips thin, her teeth barely showing. “Now don’t you feel better?” I held my fingers to the burn in my nose, and she waded back to the shore. The bow that held her bikini was a pair of turquoise wings.

  That was when we were sixteen. Since then, we’ve established the terms of our friendship over the phone, long conversations intensified by infrequency. Once, we didn’t speak for more than a year, and Lora left occasional caustic messages on my voicemail: “Are you busy or dead?” When I finally called her back, she wouldn’t speak after hello.

  “Lora.” I remember pressing the phone into my head. I could feel my ear squished up, like a mollusk, inside the receiver. “I know you’re there. Please say something back.”

  She grumbled a few words, quietly at first, so I had to ask her to repeat herself.

  “What? What?”

  “I said something back.”

  I cleared my throat. I imagined her across all those miles, Lora, with her lavish red nails, fingering the dry skin on her elbows.

  This is how you keep a best friend: you talk out of guilt, you live in separate states. Again and again, you vow fidelity to her in fits of absurd hopefulness. It is the same as being in love.

  I finally went to visit her the summer I left Tom. She was living in her parents’ house, a pretty rambler in an old part of town, shaded by pines like a forest cabin. No one had mown the lawn for weeks, since late spring perhaps, when her parents had moved one by one into the nursing home. Grass stalks bristled with seed in the flower gardens.

  Inside the shades were pulled. The air was sweet, air freshener covering an odor with an edge, maybe urine. Lora took my bag and brushed my bangs back with her hand, as if checking for a fever.

  “You should grow those out.”

  “Hello, Lora.” I tried to give her a hug, but she was taller than I remembered. I settled for propping my chin on the bone of her shoulder. She was barefoot in a beige pantsuit.

  “Don’t look at me like that.” She raised one manicured eyebrow. “Try working at Kohl’s in fishnets.”

  It had been three years since I’d seen her last. In all that time I had never once pictured her face. It struck me now as symmetrical, but prematurely aged, as if she had smiled too extravagantly in her thirty-four years. Though she wasn’t quite smiling now, I could see exactly how her face would crease if she were. Her freckles were beginning to merge into a brown smudge on her nose.

  “Cookie?” She held out a box of Thin Mints. I took one, but the softened cookie made me feel vaguely obscene, and I held it without taking a bite.

  I asked, “Didn’t you get a dog?”

  “Oh, him! There’s this lady down the street who wooed him away with sausage links. He started visiting her when I was at work, and now he’s taken to her bed. I prefer to think he’s been run over by a truck.”

  “Do you miss him?” I was trying for pleasantness. In Lora’s presence, pleasantries were a defeat.

  “Not really. Men are better, and he was always making me choose. Nimrod didn’t like human males over four feet tall.”

  She dropped onto the couch, putting her feet on the coffee table and closing her eyes. The cookie had melted a hat around my thumb, and I put the slippery lump in my mouth to be rid of it.

  “And what about Tom?”

  I didn’t answer right away because I was busy arranging my body on the couch. I licked my fingers, uneasily. I told myself: don’t be sick. Always, well-lived-in houses like this made me feel swallowed up, forced by inevitable processes through someone else’s gut. There were fecal-looking statuettes on the mantel.

  I decided to cross my legs. “Well. He took this new job downtown—”

  “Who did he fall in love with?”

  “No one!”

  “Just say he’s dead, like Nimrod. Run over on the street. It’ll make you feel better.”

  “It’s not like that.” I propped a pillow behind my back. I put another on my lap and smoothed its fringe with my sticky fingers. I tried to focus on Tom, but I could only come up with a mental outline of him, his face cut out like one of those cardboard cowboys at the carnival. The thing was, I was happy with him for years. I remembered being happy as if it were a trick someone played, the universe setting me up on a blind date with good fortune. I thought of how Tom combed his hair before he came to bed, the way he once wore swimming goggles in a snowstorm. I made a list of his traits—long eyelashes, droopy earlobes—then grew tired of the task and stood up.

  “He’s dead.”

  “Really?” Lora said. “I never liked him much anyway.”

  “He’s dead,” I told her again, because it was so nice to say and so absolutely right. When had he ever been truly alive to me? Nearly every night for two years, we’d eaten dinner on a tiny mounted table that swung on a hinge from his kitchen wall. I left him not long after the hinge on the table broke, when I started to seriously worry that what I really wanted was the nightly routine of unlatching the top, lowering the wooden panel so I could set out two plates side by side.

  It wasn’t that Lora couldn’t sleep, but she chose to avoid her dreams, which she said were better than life. “I don’t need the disappointment in the morning,” she told me, scooping coffee grounds into the paper filter. She poured us shots of whisky while we waited for our frozen pizza to cook and the coffee to percolate. Lora never changed her clothes after work, and late in the evenings she started to remind me of a tent: damp in the summer heat and wrinkling on the couch. She’d wave the remote control at the TV, making a fuss, her skirt a khaki twist around her hips. Sometimes she’d shed the skirt and ride the exercise bike in just her panty hose.

  “Sleep, if you want,” she told me when it got late. But it was an accusation.

  We decided to learn Greek. I sat with her on the back deck in the dark, drinking tepid coffee with whisky from a flowered mug. The pines above us were so thick, so confused with branches and trunks, I couldn’t see the stars.

  “I feel dizzy,” I read. “Esthanomai zaladha. I’ve been bitten by a snake.” The phrasebook was from our trip to Europe some years back, when we slept on trains and saw most countries in the dark. It had been December then, the cities draped in Christmas lights, so every country looked the same. We had phrase books for French and Italian too.

  “Did we ever speak Greek when we were there?” Lora had a hole in the toe of her pantyhose, and one yellowy nail poked through. She worked at the hole, making room for more toes.

  “I remember alithos anesti. He is risen, indeed.”

  “Right, all those hunchbacked monks. There was that monastery with the goats, what was it called?”

  I could not remember any goats. But I did recall the motherly monks, swooshing about in their death-black robes. One had given me a piece of Juicy Fruit for taking a picture of him with his hockey stick. I glanced at Lora and saw her grinning in the dark. I hoped I was smiling too, so we could be happy together.

  After a while, Lora said, “I’m bored.”

  Carefully, I squeezed my thighs together. I considered commenting on the fireflies, which I’d been saving for a silence like this. All my life, I was saving fireflies for her, tidbits of conversation, or funny, witnessed scenes. Even when I hadn’t spoken to her in months, I’d see a child licking his dog and think: Lora might close her eyes and laugh out loud.

  To offset her growing restlessness, I pointed at the dark. “They’re beetles!” I announced.

  Lora had her face in her mug, sipping. “What?”

  “Fireflies are. I think.”


  “Fireflies? I’ve heard the males choreograph their blinking and voila! The females go crazy.” She sneered. “Look how they’ve mesmerized you, Manda. You’re a beetle at heart.”

  She was right. I drew up my knees to my chest and let my body be round and hard. I tried to think of something else to say, something better, but before I could, Lora was standing and stretching. She was gathering up the open phrase books from the deck planks.

  “God, this is so exhausting.”

  I took in a sharp breath—unduly wounded.

  She added, “Isn’t it exhausting getting drunk like this every night?”

  I exhaled, slowly, keeping my eyes on the woods as if I couldn’t bear to look away. Really, I was afraid of the look I might catch on Lora’s face: her frank, inevitable disappointment.

  Lora claimed she didn’t dream with less than four hours of sleep. Though she’d idle away the night on the deck or in front of the TV, she finally went to bed in a great rush, barely pausing in the bathroom to pee. I’d be the one awake when the birds started up—caffeinated and woozy both—lying flat on my back on the living room couch. Birds in the dark are the dreariest things. Sometimes, irritated, I’d try to will my way to Lora’s dreams, which I felt she had no right to, having given them up. At first I thought of them as books on a shelf, books piled up and untouched, but that seemed too academic, so I made them animals instead. Lora’s dreams should be hairy and hoofed. I imagined scrambling past the monks, tracking the beasts across the rocks, across Greece, which I transformed into Six Flags with ruins. After that, I could not think what was better than life so I didn’t dream any further. Probably I wasn’t really dreaming anyway, because I could hear a dog barking down the street. I could hear Lora breathing loudly in her sleep, far beyond dreams.

  When Tom called on Saturday, Lora was at the nursing home. I knew she had wanted me to go with her by the way she draped herself over furniture on her way out the door. She flopped on the couch in her sunglasses; she lay belly-down on the bureau to reach her keys. Lora knew how to make her body slow down so you’d pay attention to her.

  “It smells, it smells!” She twisted up her face. “They have an old-people stink, like babies, but sweeter. They’re too sweet, that’s their problem.” She stood in the doorway now, her face suddenly solemn. “If my mother asks me to powder her face, I’ll refuse.”

  She lingered in her car, rolling down the passenger window so she could wave out at me. She looked like someone on her way across the world.

  Back inside the house, I straightened the magazines and watered the dead plants. I kept at these domestic tasks because, after four days, I was still unnerved by so many used-up objects in one place: yellowing curtains, sticky countertops. There was a stain on the living room carpet where I could not bring myself to step. Sometimes when I was alone there, I was surprised at how little of Lora was left, and I half expected to come across her parents on the stairway. I’d never liked the Martins much—when we were girls and they played pinochle on the deck—but they did seem unaccountably durable.

  I was cleaning out the Martins’ ice trays when the telephone rang.

  “Amanda? Is that you?”

  I knew it was unkind to laugh, but he sounded so painfully earnest, like Oliver Twist with his empty bowl.

  I swallowed hard. “Hello.”

  “You said you might visit Lora, and your cell’s been disconnected, and—” Tom tended to pour his sentences out. “—Mandie, how are you? How have you been since—”

  “I’m fine. It’s nice spending time with Lora.”

  He checked himself. “How is Lora doing?”

  “Lora’s herself.” I thought of her as she was last night, clipping her toenails on the counter while I cut the broccoli. “She’s not here,” I said, gratuitously.

  He told me how much he’d always liked Lora. She has an interesting face, he said, she reminded him of a president. He hoped we were enjoying ourselves. “Have fun!” he said, so cheerlessly that I knew the time had come for me to ask about him.

  “Tom,” I started. There must be some rule about being nice to harmless things. “Everything. Okay?”

  “Well. Actually, things are—”

  I didn’t want to know. I resented his street-urchin voice, begging through the phone.

  “—not so good. There’s something I need to tell you.”

  I remembered then what I’d said about him when I first arrived at Lora’s. He’s dead. For an instant, it seemed like something I’d actually done to him: Tom had always been so literal and obedient. I wondered, fleetingly, if his end would come slowly or fast, whether he was, even now, pale and drawn as a queen from the eighteenth century. He seemed to be breathing strangely.

  “Tom—” Guilt made me whiny. I tried again, now with a secretary’s voice, efficient, I hoped, but kind. “Tom. I’m glad to hear from you, but now’s not a good time to get into things. I hear Lora’s car in the driveway, and she’s been with her parents, who are, I don’t know if you know, dying.” I winced as I said the word to him.

  “Oh. I’m sorry.” I could almost hear his fingers in his hair. “Does she know there are support groups for things like that? Does she have the legal issues figured out?”

  My heart’s a prune, I thought, and yours is a gigantic mouth.

  “I’ve got to go, Tom.”

  “Right. Okay.”

  When Lora came in, she bounced her palm off the top of my head as she walked by. “So, there are you are.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “My dad kept asking about you, so I told him you were just waiting out in the hall. He said, tell her to come in! But when I went to get you, lo and behold, you weren’t there!”

  My eyebrows felt damp. “Now he’ll think I’m rude.”

  “Does it matter?”

  She went out the back door to the deck and down the stairs. I followed her out, my socks on the wet wood making me cringe. At the bottom of the deck stairs I stopped, watching Lora wade into the grass.

  “You know—” She didn’t turn back. “—I never really saw my father in bed before all this. Is that weird? When I was little, it seemed like he never slept, and when he did, he did it behind closed doors.” She was across the lawn now, almost to the woods.

  I was hesitating on the bottom step; she was pulling something out of the grass. I couldn’t see what it was at first, something covered in a plastic tarp. The tarp flashed as it came off, making me think of a magician’s trick, a white scarf whisked back to reveal a red-eyed bird. “Fuck,” Lora muttered, wiping at her shirt. She dragged the lawnmower with one hand across the grass.

  “What are you doing?” I felt contemptible in my socks, as if a person needed shoes to be intelligent.

  “Mowing.” She never looked up. She paused to push back her hair.

  “Why now?”

  “Because my father wants me to, and it kills me, because it doesn’t matter what he wants. He’s a person who, like, gets dressed every other day. He eats popcorn, for Christ’s sake. For dinner.” She had her hands on her hips and she glared at the mower. “I don’t even know how to turn this thing on.”

  I had seen her this way before. She possessed a special fury for machinery. When we were teenagers she stole her father’s car, then left it at the gas station because she couldn’t unscrew the gas cap. Back then, her indignation felt dangerous: she walked the sixteen blocks home, but it was like she had flown. She was frightening.

  I was not sorry to see her shudder at the rust on her palms. Or clench her face and stamp at the ground. I wanted to be impressed by her, again.

  But then she looked up, surprising me. Her eyes, impossibly, were red. “Amanda, can you help me with this?”

  I was bewildered. “I’m in my socks.”

  “Gimme a break.”

  I moved off the stair. It was a hot day, and everything was wet—with the end of the morning’s dew and the beginning of the humidity. I broke into a sweat, and Lora, I saw,
had damp crescents at her armpits. We fiddled with gauges and unscrewed caps. Lora snapped impatient commands, and all the while I looked forward to the memory of this, the time when we would enjoy what we resented now.

  “This is perfect,” Lora snorted. “We are two perfectly useless people.”

  For a few seconds, she watched me tug at a strangled-looking pipe. Then she said, “Stop it, Amanda. I’m serious.” She squinted her craggy face into the sun. “Just stop.”

  With most people in my life, I come to the end of myself pretty fast. I walk to my borders—where there’s dinner on a dropleaf table, maybe small talk or sex—then wave politely and turn back. Lora made me sorry there wasn’t anywhere better to go.

  “We could hire someone to do the lawn.” I knew I was trying too hard.

  She threw up her hands at me, walked away. “Forget it. It doesn’t matter. I’ll tell him the lawn’s mowed, and he’ll have what he wants.”

  I did not sleep that night, not until almost morning. I lay unmoving on the couch for hours after Lora had gone to bed. With terrible slowness, the deep darkness in the room eventually began to change around me. At some indistinct point I noticed the grey-black shadows had taken on definite shapes and become furniture. Coat rack, exercise bike, coffee table. But where was the neighbor’s barking dog? I wondered. The desolate predawn birds? It felt like paralysis, the way the night still went on and on, withholding details like birds and dogs till I wondered whether it could withhold me too. I slid one hand into my underpants. Leaned back. All anyone ever wants, I thought—feeling wretched and invisible at once—is someone to verify you’re still here.

  I woke the next morning with something in my mouth. I pulled a single dog hair from my tongue, shiny with spit, gray on one end and black on the other. I guessed it was midmorning at least. I lay and listened to the Sunday sounds, which made the house feel, suddenly, sad and dear: a talk show radio host in the kitchen, church bells down the street. Lora came in with a Styrofoam box, picking at last night’s salad. “Morning.” She waved a few glistening fingers.