by Allie Larkin
“You’re sorting my laundry because I left?” I walked over and offered her my hand. “Come on.”
She didn’t take it. She used her heels to push herself back farther, under the few old shirts I had hanging.
“All your clothes are dirty,” she said, sobbing. “Why don’t you have clean clothes?”
“Janie! Get out of my closet,” I said, sighing. It felt too much like the fights we had when we were kids. We’d both get mad, but then Janie would fall apart. Putting her back together always took precedence over resolution. Here she was, married to Peter, mucking up my life with her party, but she was the one who needed consoling? If anyone had the right to fall apart, it was me.
She didn’t say anything. She just sat there sniffling.
“You know what? Stay there,” I said, walking out of the room and leaving her in my closet. “I’m going to go make coffee. If you want to talk, I’ll be downstairs.”
Someone had washed out all the glasses and mugs by hand, and laid them out upside down on a dish towel on the counter next to the sink. There was a plate of the new bagels on the counter. They were stacked neatly under plastic wrap pulled tightly. The coffeepot was sparkling, scrubbed clean of the rings that usually lined it. I started a pot. Then I noticed the turkeys.
All the paper turkeys were lined up on the kitchen table, watching me with their creepy printed red eyes. I had never been a fan of birds. The orange and brown streamers I hung up were folded in small piles next to them. I turned the turkeys around, because for some reason a row of turkey butts didn’t bother me as much as a row of turkey faces.
I grabbed a mug and switched it with the coffeepot, poured the coffee that was in the pot into the mug, and waited for the drip to finish filling it.
Joe stared at me longingly and licked his lips. I realized he hadn’t really eaten since I got back from Walmart. I liberated a plain bagel from the plastic wrap and handed it to him, and he ran over to the couch to tear into it.
Janie came padding into the kitchen in her stocking feet, carrying her shoes. Joe dropped his bagel and ran over to her. She raised one of her shoes up like she was going to hit him with it, so I called him over to me. He sat down on my feet.
She’d cleaned up her face so that her raccoon eyes were smoky and smudged like a Cosmo cover girl’s. Her nose was blushed red, but no longer dripping with snot. She looked like a fairy-tale character, a waif in need of rescuing. All she needed was a tear in her skirt and a strategically placed smudge of dirt on her cheek to be the perfect damsel in distress.
She put her shoes down on a chair at the kitchen table, and sat down on the other chair.
“You’ve been weird through the whole wedding,” she said.
“No, I haven’t,” I said. I was shocked that she’d noticed. I thought I’d done a decent job of phoning it in and keeping up that happy bridesmaid/ cheerleader front. I’d honestly given it everything I could have.
“Things have been weird with us for a really long time.” She flexed her fingers out and inspected her manicure. She was playing it cool, but I could see her eyes tearing up. “Why can’t you just be happy for me?”
Oh my God, I thought, it’s so much more complicated than that. I should have chosen my words more carefully, but instead, I blurted out, “Maybe it’s not all about you all the time, okay?”
Immediately, the tears went from a trickle to a deluge. I’d always thought if a chipmunk could cry, it would sound like Janie sobbing.
“I can’t believe this,” she said through a waterfall of tears. “You’re supposed to be my best friend.” She put her head in her hands. “You ruined my party and now you’re yelling at me.”
I resisted the urge to go over and hug her and apologize and reset everything back to square one again. But I wasn’t even yelling. I hadn’t yelled at all. And I was so tired of her blowing everything out of proportion all the time.
“You know what?” I said. My voice was low and shaky and quiet. It surprised me. “You know, you’re supposed to be my best friend too.” I took her shoes off the chair and put them on the floor. I sat down on the wrong side of the turkeys. They were staring at me again. I tried my best to ignore them. “You’ve never acted like it.”
“What are you talking about? I made you my maid of honor! I- You’re my best friend. You’ve always been my best friend.”
“I have always been your best friend.” I didn’t want to look at her, but I made myself. I looked her square in the eyes and said, “But you’ve never been mine.”
“I don’t understand.” She shook her head like a little kid trying to avoid a spoonful of peas.
“Have you ever been in a crowded room, like the DMV or something, and looked around and realized that every single one of those people there has a life? They have a whole complete life that has nothing to do with you. Jobs, bills, family, pets.”
“What are you talking about?” She was too distracted to keep crying.
“See, you don’t know what I’m talking about,” I said, and pointed my finger at her. “You don’t know what I’m talking about because you can’t get over the idea that someone else matters. People other than you get to have a life.”
“Van! I don’t- ”
“I get to have a life that matters.” I looked at her. Part of me felt awful for yelling, the other part of me was done with feeling awful all the time. “I get to have a life that doesn’t involve you.”
“Oh, really, Van? Really?” she said. She pulled her eyebrows in to meet each other and the wrinkle they made above her nose was not cute. She looked like a different person. “Let me get this straight, Van.” She smacked her hand down on the table.
I was fascinated.
“So, when you convinced me to have boys to my sweet sixteen, because it would be ‘fun’ and ‘cool’ ” -she was using finger quotes-“and then you spent the whole night making out with Leo Birnbaum, that was you being my best friend.”
“Janie, I-” I started to feel bad and then yanked it back to angry. “Do you remember my ‘sweet sixteen,’ Jane?” I used finger quotes right back at her. “Do you?”
“Yes,” she said. She wasn’t apologetic, and I wanted her to be.
“We had pizza in the carriage house and watched Sixteen Candles. I wasn’t a princess. I didn’t have a four-piece band. I didn’t have a special dance with my father,” I said, choking up. I looked up at the ceiling to try to get my tears to reabsorb, but it didn’t work, so I ended up using the edge of my sleeve.
“You had me! I spent the whole night with you. Remember?” She looked right at me. She was walking straight into the conflict, head-on.
“It’s not like you had anything else to do,” I said.
“Yes, I did,” she said. “Michelle Macmillan was having a sleepover, and you weren’t invited, and it was your birthday, and I chose you.” Her eyebrows softened. “And we had fun, remember? We wore our matching pajamas and slept on the floor and talked all night about how much Michael Schoeffling looked like Matt Dillon. And Mom and Nat got drunk and started singing ‘Scandal’ really loud.”
I did remember. I could still see them, in the back of my head somewhere, standing on the couch, singing at us. My mom was singing “The Warrior” into Diane’s hand like she was holding a microphone, and Diane was spilling bourbon on our couch.
“I planned my birthday party for us. They brought out a cake with both our names, and I had a crown for you too, and the band played ‘Sixteen Candles.’ But then no one could find you. You just weren’t there. You were off with some boy.” She looked away from me. She spread her left hand out in front of her and twisted her engagement ring around her finger. “And then you left my wedding, and God knows where you were. Today, you leave my party, and Mom said that was all about some guy too. And then you’re saying that you were always my friend, and I was never yours. But I was there, Savannah. And you weren’t.” She didn’t whine it or cry it. She just said it.
“It was hard for me to be there. You stole
my mother,” I said. And then I realized that if we were really having it out, we needed to get all of it. “And you stole Peter.”
“He’s still your friend, Van. It’s not like you can’t have your weirdo dinners with him anymore. It’s not like he’s gone.”
It must have been splattered all over my face, because then she just looked at me and said, “Oh.”
We didn’t talk for a really long time. I watched Joe sleeping on the floor. He was chasing rabbits again.
Janie played with one of the turkeys. She made tiny tears in the tissue paper tail with her fingernails. The whole turkey moved. The head bobbed like it was trying to talk to me.
“Stop it,” I said, reaching across the table to knock her hand away.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know you were saving them.”
“I’m not. Stop making it move.” I shuddered.
“I forgot about your bird thing,” she said, laughing. “Freak.” One by one, she took the turkeys and put them on the floor so I wouldn’t have to look at them.
“Takes one to know one,” I said, smiling. “Takes one to know one” had been our favorite comeback for all of fourth grade.
“Do you still love him?” she asked, after she put the last turkey on the floor, her smile suddenly gone.
“Peter?”
She nodded. The makings of a teardrop collected in the corner of her eye.
“You know,” I said, “I don’t think so.” It was a relief to say it, and to know that it was true. Even though I was alone, I was done lusting after someone else’s husband. I was done chasing someone who didn’t know how to love me back. I started crying. It felt clean, like I was washing out toxins or stale feelings or something.
Janie got up and put her arms around me, resting her chin on my shoulder. One of her tears ran down my neck.
“Are we going to be okay?” she asked.
I sat there for a minute and cried with her. Her arms were so skinny, but they were strong. She held me tightly. I thought about how many times I had hugged Janie and told her everything was going to be okay-all the nights she snuck over to the carriage house when Diane and Charles were fighting. My mom and I would sandwich her on the couch and hug hard.
It felt so nice to be hugged back, so I let things hang there for a minute before saying, “Diane gave me a hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars to leave you and Pete alone.” I didn’t want to keep secrets between us anymore.
She stiffened, and then stood up.
“You are so full of shit.” She picked up her shoes and slipped into them, putting each foot down with a click.
“I’m not, Jane.”
“I thought we could be grown- ups,” she said.
“When have you ever been a grown-up?”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“It means that everyone has always taken care of everything for you. My mom. Your mom. Peter. Me.” I knew I was being too mean. I knew I was going too far, but I couldn’t stop myself. “It must be nice to be able to call Mommy and Daddy every time something goes wrong in your life-to have them there to pay off anyone who might ever get in your way.”
She picked up one of the turkeys, threw it at me, and walked out. Joe got up and tried to follow her, but she slammed the door too fast.
It was the truth about how I’d been feeling. It was the anger and the resentment that had been building up for a long time, but saying it out loud to Janie made me feel awful and ugly. I watched her for a while, standing at the end of the driveway, yelling into her cell phone. I didn’t understand how it was possible to love someone so much and still be so hurt by them, to feel like they’d taken something from you, encroached on the life you could have had.
In my head there was this other Van, whose mother had waited tables to put herself through school. That Van grew up in an attic apartment in Mount Vernon, with those old-style heaters that smell like melting crayons. The floors creaked and the bathroom faucet leaked, but the rent was cheap and they were happy. Her mom graduated and became an art teacher and had summers free and they went on road trips and lived like gypsies for two months every year, visiting places like Maine and Nova Scotia, singing along to Boston in the car, and eating in crazy little dive restaurants along the way. That Van went to the U of R and met Peter, and he never met Janie, and they had this sweet, simple wedding and lived happily ever after.
Of course, that Van probably had to drop out of school when her mom got cancer. That Van was probably drowning in medical bills and funeral costs. And maybe Peter wouldn’t have done such a great job of being her rock. He was kind of a wimp when it really came down to it. And that Van wouldn’t have Joe.
I stopped watching Janie out the window and went up to bed. Joe followed me and curled up next to me, nuzzling up to my neck. I buried my head in his fur and cried.
Chapter Twenty-nine
Peter didn’t ring the doorbell. I guess I forgot to lock the door after Janie when she stormed out, and he let himself in. Joe growled long and low when Peter walked into the room.
“That is a big dog,” he said. His voice sounded shaky.
“Technically,” I said, “he’s still a puppy.”
Peter walked toward me slowly, like he was preparing himself to turn tail and run if he needed to. He eased himself down to sit on the end of my bed. Joe sat up next to me and stared at him.
“I don’t want you on my bed,” I said, pulling myself up to sitting.
Peter stood up quickly. He looked around and held his hands up in front of him like he didn’t know what to do with them.
“Janie’s waiting in the car.” He reached down and grabbed the corner of my comforter and played with the frayed ends. “Diane really did it. Didn’t she?”
“Yeah.”
“I tried to tell Janie, but she just-you know how she is. She doesn’t see what she doesn’t want to.”
“Then you better be careful, Pete. Don’t take advantage of that.”
He sat down on the end of the bed again. He looked defeated. I didn’t make him get up.
“I know,” he said, looking into his palms.
“Well, if you know, you have no excuse.”
He sat at my feet like he was about to read me a bedtime story.
“Who’s the guy?” He looked at my face, but he didn’t look me in the eye.
“Alex.”
“Who is he?”
“Joe’s vet.”
“That explains the clothes,” Pete sneered. “Diane said he looked like a lumberjack.”
“Hey, watch it,” I said, sharply. “You are two commands away from getting your balls ripped off,” I said, pointing at Joe. “Remember that.”
His eyes widened and he stared at me for so long. I tried to think of something to say to break the silence, but I couldn’t. He looked like he might not say anything again. Joe lost interest and flopped down on the bed with a big sigh.
Finally, I said, “I fucked it all up anyway.”
“You’ll get him back.”
“You don’t know that. I lied to him about the party. I told him I was sick.”
“Why?”
“Because, I didn’t want him to know about all of this. I didn’t want him to know about you, or Diane’s payoff money-all the chaos. I wanted a chance to start over. And I thought it would be easier to just put him on hold until today was over and you and Jane would start your new life and I could move on with mine.”
“So tell him that,” Peter said. He looked as uncomfortable as I felt. “What kind of guy would let you go just because you told a little white lie?”
“What kind of guy would let me go because I don’t have good breeding and a trust fund?”
“Van.”
“Well, I came into some money recently, so the joke’s on you.” I tried to laugh like it was all wordplay, but we both knew it wasn’t.
“How long was he going to be around anyway, Van?”
“What are you talking ab
out?”
“You’ve never kept a guy around for more than a month, maybe two. No sense crying over spilled milk.” He had his lawyer face on. His jaw was set.
“I’m sure it’ll be easier the next time around, since I’m not in love with you anymore.”
He looked at me for a long time. I stopped looking back. He leaned in and put his hand on my cheek. It was so thin and cold.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
I pushed his hand away from my face, but kept holding it. His eyes were shiny.
“I know,” I said.
“I wish I were”-he looked around like he was searching for the right word-“stronger.” He rubbed his palm over the back of my hand.
I grabbed his fingers and we looked at each other. He had tears running down his cheeks, and his eyes were red. I felt like it was the first time I was really seeing Peter. In my head, he had always been the larger-than-life movie star guy who rescued me from total embarrassment on my first day of school. That image of him was so ingrained in my mind that I’d failed to notice that he was a real person, that he was imperfect like me and everyone else. He wasn’t a hero. He was a coward. He didn’t have the courage to stand up for himself or for what he wanted in life and it made him hurt the people he loved. I felt an overwhelming sadness for the time I’d wasted on him, for the commitment Janie had made to him, and for him, because it couldn’t feel good to have failed yourself, your wife, and your friend. I desperately wanted him to be better than he was and come through for himself and for Janie.
“Your wife’s in the car,” I said. I was crying too.
He nodded, and looked away, dropping my hand.
“Bye, Van,” he said, standing up.
“Bye.”
He started to walk away, but then turned back to me. “Van, make sure this vet guy knows how you feel.”
“If I’d told you, would it have made any difference?”
“Probably not,” he said, turning away from me again.
“You knew anyway.”
“I did.” His back slumped and he looked at the floor. “I’m sorry.” He took a deep breath. “Bye, Van.”