by Laura Hankin
“Um, yeah. Her mom bought her a plane ticket, sort of impulsively, I think, and she didn’t want to miss her flight.” She could see on Grandma Stella’s face how lame her excuses sounded. Grandma Stella sat down next to her at the table.
“Darling,” she said, and reached for Beth’s hand. “You can talk to me. What’s really going on? Are you and Ally all right?”
Beth shook her head.
“What happened?”
“We got in a fight. A massive one.”
“Oh, darling. About what?”
“It doesn’t matter. I don’t really want to talk about it, if that’s okay. I’m sorry.”
“Well, you’ll patch it up. I know you will. The two of you mean too much to each other to let a little thing come between you.”
Beth was so tired of people thinking that they knew more about her and Ally than they actually did. Why was it that everyone who talked to her about this assumed friendship existed in a frozen state? If you once mattered to a person, it didn’t mean you’d matter forever. She and Ally hadn’t been trapped in ice at age seventeen. No one had shut them up and cocooned them together from the influence of the outside world. “I don’t think it is a little thing!” she said, more harshly than she’d meant to. “And I don’t know if I do want to patch it up.”
“Of course you do,” Grandma Stella said.
“No! I honestly don’t know if it’s worth it for me and Ally to be friends anymore.”
“Darling, you’re just feeling that way now, but soon you’ll realize that what you and Ally have is stronger than whatever fight you had last night. She’s too important to you. I mean, just look at how you’ve been going around this week, two peas in a—”
Beth stared at her grandmother. “Are you seriously lecturing me about friendship right now?”
“Yes, I suppose I am,” Grandma Stella said. She chuckled a bit, missing the warning tone in Beth’s voice.
“I don’t think you should be giving advice on this subject.”
Grandma Stella stopped laughing. “Excuse me?”
“You have all the answers about friendship? Then why did you and Penny Joan Munson fall apart? I don’t want to take advice about saving my friendship from someone who ruined hers. Stop telling me to do things you won’t do yourself.”
Grandma Stella gaped at her. Beth felt as though she’d reached over and torn off the Grandma Glasses her grandmother normally wore, the lenses through which Beth appeared to be perfect. Surprise! she felt like saying. I’ve actually been a rotten person all along. The teapot began to whistle. Louder and louder, its birdcall punctuated the silence until Grandma Stella went to the stove and turned it off. Without saying anything, she poured the hot water into a cup for Beth, who sat motionless at the table, trying to figure out how to apologize. Then, her body shrinking into itself, Grandma Stella shuffled back into her bedroom and shut the door.
Beth prickled. The brambles grew out of her skin and poked anyone who tried to get too close to her. She felt dangerous, hurtful. She spent so much time trying to make people feel better, and now she’d hurt three people she cared about in the span of twelve hours. And she couldn’t seem to stop. She wanted to warn people to stay away from her, to steer clear, because who knew how they’d be wounded if they tried to love her? Somehow, she’d been transformed into a kind of Frankenstein’s monster, leaving destruction wherever she went, and it hadn’t just started twelve hours ago. It had started in Haiti.
The only way to make it stop, she decided, was to work harder. She had to go back to the source and try more fully. Be better. She would go away again, back to Haiti. But in the meantime, she would clean. She would make sure Grandma Stella had the best going-away party she could give her.
So she made a list. She got out the bleach and the Windex. She organized everything that the party guests would see if they came in from the lawn and into the house, and the stuff that they wouldn’t see too. She scrubbed the toilet in the guest bathroom and vacuumed up strands of Ally’s fine brown hair from the floor. She even rearranged the fruit in the fruit bowl into the most aesthetically pleasing arrangement she could manage—bananas on the bottom, peaches in the middle, kiwis on the top.
She went into town and checked with the caterers. She walked from store to store with reminders about the party. She gave Mulberry’s a wide berth, still worried the entire time she was in town that she’d run into Owen. Thinking about the way she’d left him the night before actually physically caused her body to hurt.
And then she came back and went into her bedroom.
It was a disaster zone. Ally, in her hasty, drunken exit last night, had left stuff scattered about. And Beth, uncharacteristically, had just tossed her own crap on the floor when she’d gotten in after the debacle with Owen. She picked up all her clothes and folded them, putting them back into the bureau. Then she picked up Ally’s remnants, the stuff that must have fallen out of her bag. A couple of dirty socks, mismatched, clearly from different pairs. Ally wasn’t going to come back and get them, so she threw them out. Tossing them in the trash can gave her a strange satisfaction, so she did the same with some crumpled receipts. If she could remove all evidence that Ally had been here, maybe it would be like none of this had happened at all.
She tucked the sheets on the bed tightly and smoothed out the comforter, then surveyed the results of her work. Pretty good. And the rest of the house sparkled. The smell of cleaning solution pervaded the air. She’d done everything on her list for the party, at least everything that she could take care of today. There was nothing left for her to do, so she stood, feeling useless, uneasiness still running through her.
Then she left the bedroom and looked at Grandma Stella’s closed door, which had stayed shut, to the best of her knowledge, since she’d yelled at her this morning. She thought, No. I haven’t done everything I can do today.
She knocked on the door, and when she heard the soft “Come in,” from the other side, she opened it. She walked straight to her grandmother, who was still in bed, sitting propped up, looking defeated, her eyes red. Her heart ached to see Grandma Stella like that. She climbed onto the bed and curled into her.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I was so mean to you. I don’t know what happened with you and Penny Joan, and you don’t have to tell me because it’s none of my business. I made stupid judgments about you and that was unfair of me.” She held on to her grandmother, her heart rattling around in her chest. “And I love you so much, and feel terrible that I hurt you.”
“Oh, darling,” Grandma Stella said, returning the hug, her arms trembling with how tightly she was trying to squeeze Beth, “I know.”
“Sometimes I’m not a good person, but that’s all I want to be. I try so hard, but badness leaks out.”
“It leaks out of me too. It does with all of us. And that’s why I haven’t told you about Penny Joan, because when it comes to her, I let enough badness out of me to fill up the whole Atlantic Ocean. I don’t want you to think of me differently, to think that I’m a bad person, and I’ve been scared that if I tell you about it, that’s exactly what will happen.”
“Do you think that I’m a bad person, after how I treated you this morning?”
“No, I think that you’re just a person who has her faults and her snippy moods like we all do. But darling, this is much more than being mean to someone once at breakfast and then apologizing a few hours later.” Grandma Stella twisted her hands together, fiddling with her ring.
“It’s okay,” Beth said. “You don’t have to tell me.”
“No,” Grandma Stella said. She sighed. “I do.”
TWENTY-ONE
Ally lugged her suitcase up the last of four flights of stairs and bent over in front of her apartment doorway, panting. The hard metal chair at the airport had not been conducive to sleep. On the plane, she’d meant to nap, but instead she’d taken
out Valerie’s romance novel, about a small-town girl on vacation in Boston for the week and her unexpectedly magnetic tour guide. She’d read it straight through until the plane descended at LaGuardia. It distracted her, like she wanted, and left her strangely titillated. All in all, she’d gotten about three hours of sleep, and her body shook a little bit whenever she moved.
But now she was home, about to walk into an apartment where Beth had never been, and she could start the process of forgetting all about her week in Maine. In her bedroom, resting on top of her bedside table, her computer would still be sitting there, with all the Netflix she could watch until the problems of Robin and Ted or Liz and Jack felt more real to her than her own. That had gotten her through the immediate aftermath of Tom (well, that and copious amounts of drinking). It could definitely get her through Beth.
It felt fitting to think of this as a breakup. Someone who had been very important to her was not going to be important to her anymore. Beth would no longer exist in Ally’s world, because she’d turned up her nose and said that Ally’s world wasn’t good enough for her. Ally didn’t want Beth in her world anyway. It might sting for a little while, but ultimately she’d be fine. There were plenty of other fish in the friendship sea.
She unlocked the apartment’s front door and pushed it open. Gabby jumped up from the couch and greeted her with a hug, and she thought, Ah, here it is. Here is the easy love I’ve been looking for.
“Oh my God oh my God, how are you?” Gabby was saying. “I missed you so much! I saw a cockroach the other day, and I was like, ‘Ah! I liked my old roommate so much better! You can’t live here with me, bug!’ So I killed it! Aren’t you proud of me?” As Gabby jabbered on, Ally smiled to herself and felt the warm glow of being loved.
Then she went into her bedroom and took a long, disorienting nap.
• • •
WHEN Ally woke up, she immediately checked her phone, certain that something would be there. Nothing from either Nick or Beth. Nothing from her mom either, so she called her.
“Sweetheart!” her mother yelled into the phone when she picked up. “We’re in Chelsea. We made friends with gay men! They told us about the best restaurant, that we just have to go to, as soon as we can. Come join us.”
“Um, okay. I can do that. Or do you want to come see my apartment?”
“Oh but you’re in Queens. Isn’t that far? It’s much easier if you just meet us in the city. We’ll get dinner.”
So she got on the 7 train. The subway jerked her like a roller coaster. She rattled in her seat as a man walked down the aisle of the train, barefoot, asking for change. He kept his balance improbably, not holding on to anything as the train lurched from side to side, and then he lay down on the train’s dirty floor, which was speckled like an egg with discarded gum and other shit. He rested at Ally’s feet. Everyone ignored him. The woman across from Ally pursed her lips and gave her a sympathetic look, as if to say, Too bad he didn’t choose a different car. Ally pulled out her phone and reread old text messages until he left, a couple of stops later.
She didn’t want to be selfish, but sometimes she couldn’t help feeling that shutting out the world was the only possible way to keep your wits about you. If you kept giving and giving, eventually there’d be nothing of you left. Beth always chose to give, to the point where she’d handed away every recognizable bit of herself to strangers.
Blasts of hot summer air roasted Ally as she walked from the train to the restaurant. She was glad to be back in the hustle and bustle of New York, the city crowds jostling her as she walked, so that she couldn’t just think her own thoughts. She had to pay attention to where she put her feet. In New York, people didn’t love her the way that people did in Britton Hills. She couldn’t pick a shop at random and be reasonably sure that the storeowner not only knew her name but would want to give her a hug. But that was okay, because when people loved you, really loved you, they expected certain things from you. They expected you to act in certain ways, and do things for them when it was inconvenient for you, and sometimes that was exhausting. Better to be anonymous, to be able to have a conversation with a stranger on a train that made you feel good, get a compliment from a man in a bar, have sex with a guy you wouldn’t have to worry about running into on the street. So maybe being temporary to people was a good thing. Here she had friends like Gabby, friends who knew the way things worked. They both understood in an unspoken way that although they spent lots of time together and had a lot of fun in each other’s presence, they wouldn’t stay that way forever. Other things would come up. They wouldn’t be roommates for the rest of their lives. One or the other would move away at some point. They’d likely both get married and then drift apart, and that was fine. They’d still be able to meet up for lunch and have a great time, without all the weird tension and bitterness she’d felt with Beth.
She pushed open the door to the restaurant, a trendy, loud Japanese place, and scanned the interior. In the center of the room, on a raised platform, a smattering of tables skimmed low to the ground, chairs replaced by pillows. On one of those pillows she saw a woman with her back to her, wearing chunky earrings and a pashmina, her hair held in a messy bun by way of two decorative chopsticks, gesticulating wildly at a waiter while the man across the table stared at her in awe. Yes, that was Marsha. Ally walked toward her mother, climbing the platform stairs and feeling like a giant among all these customers sitting so low to the ground.
“And that’s the problem with our healthcare system, I think, when artists are limited in their self-expression because they have to commercialize themselves to make money so they can afford insurance, well you know, I’m sure, you’re an actor—”
She tapped her mom on the shoulder twice before Marsha looked up, clearly annoyed at being interrupted when she was about to solve the healthcare crisis.
“Oh, it’s you! Horatio,” she said to the waiter, reaching out to hold his hand familiarly, “here she is, my long-lost daughter!”
The waiter, reed-thin with poofed-up hair, smiled and said, “Daughter? You look like sisters.”
“Oh, Horatio, stop it! Or keep going, I don’t mind. I was only in my early twenties when I had her—bit of a surprise, you know. Another round of sake for us all, please, darling.” Marsha extended her arm and gave Ally a side hug that landed somewhere around her butt. “Sit,” she said. “You look tired.”
“Thank you,” Ally said, sitting down next to her.
“Ally, this is Glen!” She pointed to the man across the table.
“Hello!” he said, struggling up from his floor pillow to give her an awkward hug. She stood back up too, and they reached over the table. He stiffly patted her back, then released her, and they both sat back down. He must have been at least ten years older than her mother. Delicate beads of sweat dotted his face, and he picked up a napkin to blot his forehead, then his jowly chin.
“Nice to meet you,” she said.
“Glen has been just so excited for this, haven’t you, Glen?”
“Yup!”
“I’ve told him all about you, how he’s getting the most amazing new daughter. Your beautiful voice, how pretty you are, how intelligent, and now he can see it all for himself. Right, Glen?”
“Yup!”
“Aw, thanks,” Ally said, accepting a cup of steaming sake from Horatio as he flitted back to the table. She took a tentative sip and let her mom put her arm around her, drawing her close, into her steady patter.
“Oh, we have had the most exciting day so far. New York just has this incredible pulsing energy. Don’t you agree? As though everywhere you go people are really living, having the real extremes of all human experience, lovers quarreling and uniting, people dying tragically and living wildly, great art being made, great money being made. Not like in Delaware, or I’m sure in Britton Hills, right? Oh, and there’s so much to do, and I know you are just taking advantage of it all,
you are a resident of this city and therefore you will always be interesting . . .”
As Marsha talked, Glen nodded. They made an odd pair, Glen so quiet and deferential, Marsha pouring words out of her mouth in a steady rush, Glen so ordinary-looking, so clearly starting the descent into old age, Marsha all boho-chic glamorous. But as Ally drank her sake and felt her mother building a castle of approval and warmth around the three of them at their little table, a fondness for Glen was kindled inside her. She liked the narrative Marsha spun out about her and about this new family unit they were making together, and the night slipped away as they ate soft raw fish and filled up their bellies with hot liquid.
When Glen went to the bathroom, Marsha turned to Ally and clasped her hand. So many tendrils of her hair had fallen from her bun that the chopsticks in her hair were listing dangerously, close to clattering on the floor. “I know you cut your vacation short,” she said, her eyes squinty from drinking. “And I’m so grateful you did. I don’t want to be like your father about these sorts of things and just disappear from your life. I want you to be my maid of honor.”
Ally’s father hadn’t invited her to his second wedding. He and his new wife had gone to their local courthouse, and he’d only told her when they’d talked at Christmas that year, three months after the fact. She couldn’t believe that her father had been walking around married for three entire months without her knowledge. She’d thought about how, perhaps at a barbecue in the California sunshine, he’d introduced Carol as his wife to some stranger he’d just met, and that stranger had learned this essential fact about him before his own daughter did. Realizing that, she’d slid down to the cool tan tiles of the kitchen floor and sobbed. When Marsha had walked into the kitchen, she’d silently gotten down on the floor with her, stretching out alongside Ally even though the floor was dirty and she had been wearing a nice new dress. They’d stayed there for half an hour while Christmas carols played on the radio in the background. Marsha had rubbed Ally’s back, for once not saying anything, knowing exactly what Ally had needed.