by Melissa Ford
“How’s everything with Beckett?” I ask, determined to avoid mentioning my brother.
“Great!” she tells me a little too brightly. She takes out a box of straight pins and begins marking some places on the bodice carefully. “He’s saying more words now. ‘Meeeee’ for milk. You have to hear him say it; it sounds so pathetic. ‘Meeeeeeeeeee. Meeeeeeeeeeeee.’ And you know how his lower lip sort of curls over his upper one?”
Arianna’s voice gets more and more natural as she fills me in on Beckettisms. She tells me about a Park Avenue society woman’s pants that she’s hemming—fourteen pairs, all in camel, all priced at $4000 apiece. She tells me about a restaurant she ate at recently—Moroccan—though doesn’t mention her dining partner, so I don’t ask either. She shakes her hair away from her face and secures it into a bun with a pen she grabs off the table. Her phone buzzes, and she looks at the message, taking a moment to shoot back a response. I try to look at the screen, but she tilts the phone away from me, either unconsciously or deliberately.
“How are the wedding plans going?” she asks. I get the sense that she’s only asking to be polite, so I shrug, but she looks at me as if waiting for more, so I start reeling off all the to-do list items jostling around inside my brain, which is safer than confiding my ambivalence.
“I have to figure out flowers. I don’t know if I even want flowers. And we still don’t have a photographer.”
“I suppose you can’t really ask Gael, can you?” Arianna jokes. I roll my eyes in response. I dated Gael, coincidentally enough a wedding photographer, during the year following my divorce from Adam. I sort of wouldn’t be with Adam if it weren’t for Gael and my fears that he was reading my blog. In adding a web traffic tool to see if Gael was reading, I discovered that someone from Adam’s law office was on the blog several times a day and assumed it was my ex-husband pining after me. And thinking that he wanted me made me fall back in love with him, even though it turned out to be a completely different lawyer in the firm. Adam at that point was long gone from law work and following his heart in teaching English. Adam and I have spoken casually about the people we dated while we were apart, though we both sort of skirt around the details for one another, much in the same way you don’t really want to know how marshmallows are made.
“Okay, so obviously Gael is out,” Arianna continues, “but didn’t he work for his brother-in-law or something?”
“Ari, I’m not going to contact his brother-in-law.”
She smiles and slides another pin in place, giving me a quick, old-Arianna-like kiss on my cheek. “Okay, so photographer has to be the easiest part of all of this. Ethan must know someone. And at absolute worst, he could serve as the photographer.”
“How would he be in the pictures then?”
“He’d hand the camera off to someone. Okay, throw another problem my way. I like planning other people’s weddings.”
We’re skating dangerously close to awkward territory with this statement, and it makes me want to hold my breath, listening for the figurative ice crack. It feels so good to be talking again, to be peeking over the wall that’s been between us for months, that I don’t want to do anything that could make Arianna shut the door again, even while at the same time wondering if she’s trying to get me to ask why she doesn’t want to plan her own wedding.
“Bridesmaid dresses?”
“Easy. Go blue to match the sash,” Arianna says easily. She goes over to the laptop nearby and brings up the screen, quickly shutting down her email program. She Googles “cerulean blue bridesmaid dresses,” and I lean over her shoulder to look at the results. “I look good in blue.”
“It’s just you and Lisbeth and Sarah, so the three of you should decide what you like.”
“This is sort of cool,” Arianna says, cocking her head to the side. “It’s three different shades of blue in three different styles, but they’re all clearly bridesmaids. What do you think of that? It sort of visually adds depth.”
“I’m kind of more concerned with getting the dresses to the people within the time frame we have than visual depth,” I say dryly.
“Don’t worry your pretty little head,” Arianna tells me. “Leave me everyone’s email address, and I’ll coordinate with them to grab something off-the-rack that looks good.”
“Thank you,” I say, spontaneously grabbing her in a hug. Her body stiffens for a moment, and then she hugs me back, a deep, tight hug that feels like coming home after a long semester at college. I breathe in the smell of her soap, the light scent of citrus left on her hands, expensive shampoo.
Arianna watches me as I scrawl out the two email addresses from memory on the back of a receipt. “You know, I meant to ask you. What did you think of Noah? He’s funny, right? The Nightly staff has this big pre-Thanksgiving dinner out at a restaurant the Thursday before they go on break. I think I’m going to get to go to it.”
“Yeah, he’s funny,” I echo.
“Did you know that he makes these short videos? They’re hysterical. Do you want to see one of them? He emailed me the one they’re working on now. It hasn’t aired yet.”
She doesn’t wait for me to answer. She opens back up her email program, not even self-conscious about the fact that Noah’s name pops up in her inbox several dozen times, with my brother’s name peppered in between long email exchanges with another man. I look down at the floor, noting a pile of animal cracker crumbs that Beckett has left under the chair like a crumbling ant mountain.
A video comes up on the screen, a blank black box that is soon filled with A-list celebrities all acting out this ridiculous Thanksgiving song. I snicker despite myself, feeling like a traitor to my brother to laugh at Noah’s video, as one of my favorite singers appears in a turkey costume and humps a famous Silicon Valley site creator as he surfs profiles of past high school classmates on his own site. I glance away from the screen to Arianna’s face and note the way her eyes are shining, even though Noah isn’t even visible on the screen. She pinches the skin on her neck while she watches, half-smiling as if she’s trying to contain herself.
Many years ago, back when we were in college, Arianna fell in love with a writer for our school’s satirical underground newspaper, the Devil’s Advocate. The administration had been trying to catch the creators of the newspaper for years, and the writers on the staff were a well-guarded secret. Xeroxed copies would show up at irregular intervals at random spots around campus, and when someone spotted a pile, the figurative alarm would be sounded, people rushing to grab a copy before they were all gone. Old issues were passed from person to person, never hitting the garbage can. People were dying to work for them, but not knowing who was actually running the newspaper made it impossible for people to send in a writing sample. Still, people tacked their best snarky writing to the student union bulletin boards, begging for the unseen writers to bring them into the fold, their phone number scrawled in Sharpie at the bottom of the page. It became a favorite prank to call those people in the middle of the night and pretend to be from the Devil’s Advocate.
We met Pete during our junior year. He was clean-cut, very smart, and had the highest grade in our anthropology class going into the final exam. “I can write,” Pete told us when we asked how he had scored a coveted “A” from our notoriously grade-stingy professor. He was the polar opposite of Arianna’s current boyfriend, Ben, a perfectly nice though perfectly average actuarial science major from upstate New York. Where Ben had the sort of ruddy healthiness one associated with Thanksgiving Day games of touch football and a deep love of the campus dive bar which offered $2 beers on Thursday nights, Pete was from a prominent Washingtonian family, private-school educated, expensively clothed, and sporting the pallor one associates with too many hours in the library.
It was clear that Ben was the more down-to-earth boy, but he was edged out of the picture by Pete, especially once Pete left a floppy disc
in Arianna’s room, and she discovered the latest, unpublished issue of the Devil’s Advocate in its entirety, bringing both of us into the closely guarded secret world of the underground paper. It was exciting to be part of something clandestine, to pretend with the rest of the student population to be excited to find a new issue even though we usually got to read it days before it was copied.
To this day, I believe Arianna when she tells me that she was just friends with Pete, nothing more. But whether or not their relationship became physical is sort of beside the point. In the moment, I even encouraged Arianna to give up meat-and-potatoes Ben, gave her my support in canceling dates with him in order to hang out with Pete. I told her that she should skip going out with Ben’s parents one night while they were visiting the campus in order to help Pete write an expose on the crew team. In and of himself, Ben was a nice guy, but he just couldn’t compete in holding her attention when he was compared to intriguing, well-connected Pete.
But now my brother is the Ben, and I am seeing the situation in an entirely different light. Ben had been nothing but loyal to Arianna, and what had it gotten him? He had not only taken care of her during her freshman year stint with mono, but he had patiently waited to have sex for four extra months until she felt better. Maybe he wasn’t the cleverest guy on campus, but he listened to every clue Arianna dropped, always choosing thoughtful presents that revealed how closely he paid attention to her. And I was guilty too because I had encouraged her not to settle for Ben knowing that guys like Pete existed out there. I had steered her away from stable and caring toward someone who was exciting and a bit dangerous, not just giving her my blessing to move on from someone we both deemed vanilla pudding, but rolling my eyes with Arianna whenever Ben opened his mouth to speak.
I’ve seen this play out before. First the hours spent talking about the other person; the way she weaved Pete’s name into every story, even when talking with Ben. And worse still, I did it too, pointing out to Ben how funny, smart, and interesting Pete was in comparison. Then she started finding fault with Ben over every small transgression. He chewed his food too loudly. He didn’t call her back when he said he would. She didn’t like his clothes, his haircut, the dive bar, his parents. She said his room smelled, was cramped, his bed uncomfortable. And after a period of time of snapping at him every time he opened his mouth, pointing out how everything he said and did was wrong, she moved to rolling her eyes, her face a mask of exasperation. Poor Ben was beyond confused; he had no idea how things had gone so wrong. By the summer between junior and senior year, they broke up, but Arianna never ended up with Pete. They slowly drifted apart over summer, and by the time we returned for our senior year, we were hanging out with a new set of people Arianna met by being a stagehand for a campus play, and we were no longer reading the Devil’s Advocate.
Pete’s sole purpose seemed to be to serve as the nail in Arianna and Ben’s coffin.
“Ari, what’s happening here? Do you have a crush on Noah?”
She quickly turns away from the screen, as if I’ve caught the two of them in bed, post-coital and sharing a cigarette. The video continues to play, the singing turkey stripping to reveal a duck costume underneath. In the moments it takes for her to speak, I can almost see the two Ariannas struggling with each other—the friend who has always told me everything and the friend who has been holding me at arm’s length for months. “Crush? Are we thirteen? Don’t be ridiculous,” Arianna finally tells me. “I’m dating your brother.”
Not in love with my brother. Not living with my brother. She is dating my brother. She clicks on the pause button, freezing the stripping Turducken and neatly placing back the figurative wall between us that I verbally hop over, figuring I have nothing left to lose except free adjustments to my wedding gown and a bridesmaid.
“Arianna, I’ve known you longer than I haven’t known you, and I can tell when you have a crush.”
“Can you stop with the word ‘crush?’ There’s no crush here. We’re not in middle school.”
“Then what is it? What would you call it?”
“It’s really complicated,” Arianna says, brushing me off. “I’m not having an affair.”
She snaps the laptop case shut, as if slamming a door.
“This feels like Pete and Ben redux,” I try again.
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Remember Ben from college? You dated him for three years. Totally nice guy, and then you dumped him after you started spending time with Pete.”
“God, I barely even remember Pete, Rachel. Why the hell are you bringing him up? He had nothing to do with Ben.”
“Yes, he did,” I say stubbornly. “You thought Ben was the greatest guy in the world, and then you met Pete and suddenly found everything Ben did annoying.”
“I think you have a very different memory of Ben. He was a sweet guy, but we had absolutely nothing in common. Anyway, you’re the one who called him BB for Boring Ben if I remember correctly. You were so negative about him that you made me lose interest in him.”
I am angry that she is rewriting history, as much as I imagine Russians feel reading our old recollections of the Cold War, even though I know part of what she’s saying is true. I played my part too. Still, I am not the one at blame here. She is the one who started us down that road of critiquing all of Ben’s imperfections. I have a crazy urge to look up Ben on Facebook and make him corroborate my story—the nights she complained about his taste in movies or how she mocked the fact that he had never been out of the United States. Arianna purses her lips and picks at a spot of glue that has dried on her desk.
“You know, you’ve been saying for the last few years that you don’t want to get married, and I thought it was because you were scared that you’d never find a great relationship. But now you have one, and you’re treating it like crap. Which makes me think that you’re the type of person that will never be happy. That you’ll always get bored with whatever you have.”
The moment the words are out of my mouth, the anger blows out of me like a balloon releasing air, and I realize that I have stepped over a line.
I can feel an actual physical coldness settle between Arianna and myself, an ice wall like the forts Ethan and I used to build out of snow when we were little. Her phone buzzes, but she doesn’t move to answer it. She just stares at me coolly, her nails still working on the patch of glue until she finishes flaking it off the surface and rubs her index finger over the now smooth surface.
“I didn’t mean that,” I tell her. “I’m worried about you.”
“That is a really crappy way to turn around the truth,” Arianna says. “This is exactly what I was afraid of when I started dating Ethan. That you’d always side with him, and I’d lose the ability to talk to you. If I’m spending a lot of time talking to Noah, it’s because I can’t talk with you.”
“You can talk to me,” I say, knowing full well that my words sound fake even to me, like an actress who is clearly unthrilled with the role she’s gotten in the play.
“No, I can’t. That’s the point, Rachel. I haven’t been able to talk to you for months. Not since you got engaged and became little Miss Marriage.”
We both look down at the wedding dress that I’m wearing—actually suffocating in, both due to tightness and the fact that I am having a fight with my best friend—and I turn around, trying to take in a breath and ask her to unzip me.
“Don’t do it on my account,” Arianna says sarcastically. “I know how excited you are to march down the aisle again.”
I don’t bother fighting back tears as I scoop up my clothes, slipping back on my jeans and bra and sweater, my fingers shaking as I pluck off all the pills of wool sticking to my bra’s lace. Crying in front of my best friend is another thing I always took for granted, assumed was okay, expected her to wipe away and comfort and at the very least provide the tissues. S
he has never been the cause of my tears before, not in the many years I have known her—now half my life. We’ve had snippy conversations, period-induced snarking at each other. But never an outright fight, a fact that is not lost on Arianna, who neither comforts me nor treats my tears cruelly. There is nothing worse than crying and having no one say anything about it.
“I am not little Miss Marriage,” I counter. “I am trying to plan a wedding, so I have to talk about it.”
“And I have a son,” Arianna says, “and I have to think about his well-being too. I don’t want to rush into marriage. I don’t know if marriage will ever be in the cards now that I have Beckett. You and I had an agreement that we wouldn’t speak about my relationship with Ethan—that we didn’t want that awkwardness between us. But in doing so, you’ve essentially taken away talking about the biggest thing in my life right now. The biggest, most confusing thing in my life. So if I’ve spent a lot of time with Noah, it is because I’ve needed to talk about that big, confusing thing, and I haven’t had anyone else to process this with. Since you are certainly off the table.”
“Try me,” I urge. “I can listen without judgment.”
She stares at me, coolly, letting her eyes say all the obvious statements that don’t really need to be articulated. That I’m never partial when it comes to Ethan, my brother who always has my back. Who always takes my side. I would feel disloyal hearing my friend say anything hurtful about my brother. But at the same time, in order to protect my brother, I’ve ignored the needs of my best friend, who has always had my back as well. Who has been with me in a more personal way through all the ups and downs of life. Best friend. Brother. My fictive kin and sister-by-choice. My actual kin and brother-by-birth.