Best Friends Forever

by Jennifer Weiner

  My parents moved to Pleasant Ridge, and had a baby boy, my brother, Jon, and then me, eighteen months later. Fourteen Crescent Drive was a tranquil house, with no raised voices, not even a slammed door. As I got older, I learned that this was because of my father, of what had happened to him during the four months he never talked about, the months he’d spent in the war. He was as handsome as he’d been in the camp photographs I’d seen, but pale and thoughtful, twitchy and ill at ease unless he had a hammer or a screwdriver or some kind of tool in his hand. My father would flinch if the refrigerator door shut too fast or if one of us cracked open a can of soda unexpectedly. Once when we were sitting at the table, a car on Crescent Drive had backfired, the sound like a gunshot in the still summer air, and my father had jerked in his chair, as startled as if he’d been slapped. I remember how my mother had led him into the living room, how she’d wrapped her arms around him, murmuring things I couldn’t hear, smoothing his hair from his forehead. “Mom?” I’d whispered, edging into the room.

  “Addie, bring your dad a glass of water,” she’d said without letting go of him or looking at me. I’d gone running to the kitchen, and by the time I came back they were sitting on the couch. Beads of sweat stood on my father’s forehead, but he managed a smile for me, and the hand that took the glass trembled only slightly.

  “Sorry, Pal,” he said. “I just took a bad turn there.”

  When I was grown myself, I figured out that the war had been his bad turn. My father had been a good student in college, with law school or an MBA in his future, but whatever he’d done or seen overseas had ended that somehow. He couldn’t manage a nine-to-five job, couldn’t stand being inside all day, couldn’t handle the pressures of deadlines or answering to a boss or dealing with the public. He worked as a handyman, doing small repairs, painting and shingling and plowing driveways in the winter. Every few months, I’d help him put up flyers in the grocery store and the post office—Honey Do! they would say. I will do the things your honey don’t! I would decorate them with a drawing of my father on a ladder, painting a house one year, up changing a chandelier’s lightbulbs the next, and he swore that the illustrated flyers got double the number of calls the plain ones had.

  My mother worked full-time, first writing newspaper ads, and then copy for Happy Hearts greeting cards, contributing rhyming couplets for birthday and anniversary and get-well-soon and condolence cards. As the 1980s progressed, she wrote cards for Hanukkah and Kwanzaa and Secretary’s Day. Eventually she worked exclusively on the Modern Moments line, which featured, for example, cards you could send to someone upon the occasion of entering rehab (“I’m glad to know / You’re taking this important step / Getting the help you need / For yourself and everyone who loves you”).

  Our house was a split-level ranch, brick on the bottom and pale yellow paint on top, with three bedrooms on the top floor (two of them tiny and one just small) and a kitchen and dining/living room downstairs, and a basement underneath that. The basement was my favorite part of the house. One side was a playroom—there was a piece of red-and-blue carpet left over from Jon’s bedroom covering the concrete, a wooden toy chest with chipped green paint. On the other side of the basement was my father’s workshop. He’d put a bright braided wool rug on the floor, an old black leather couch against one wall, and an ancient television set on a coffee table in front of it. His tools—the awls and hammers, the levels and chisels and saws—hung in neat rows on a pegboard, and he had a long work-table set on top of sawhorses next to a miter saw. There were plastic bins of fabric scraps, yarn, beads, tubes of paint, and coils of wire along the edge of the table, along with a record player, in a pebbly plastic carrying case with a bright orange handle, so my dad could listen to his comedy albums: Bill Cosby, George Carlin, Richard Pryor, Steve Martin, Bob Newhart, and Monty Python, while he built puppets, intricate marionettes with articulated joints and hinged jaws and painted faces.

  Jon and I were the recipients of the bulk of his handiwork. My brother had a complete set of Viking puppets (they rowed a carved wooden boat), and a dozen wooden soldiers in miniature red felt coats, and a Superman that actually seemed to fly, suspended from fishing line above his bed. I had Flora, Fauna, and Merriweather, plus Aurora herself, from Sleeping Beauty, and a pair of puppets that looked like my parents (the mother’s hair was fluff that I’d gotten from pulling apart and combing cotton balls, and the father wore a miniature cardigan, just like Mr. Rogers). For my birthday, my father was already working on a miniature me, with hair made from golden-brown thread, and a tiny copy of Anne of Green Gables glued to its hands. In addition to making puppets for Jon and me, my father made them for my mother’s nieces and nephews, and dozens more that he’d pack into cardboard boxes and take to shelters in Chicago every December. “You could sell them,” I’d suggested once, and he’d thought about it, then shaken his head. “They’re not fancy enough for people to pay for,” he’d told me. Maybe they weren’t fancy, but I thought they were wonderful.

  While my mother wrote on the sunporch, my father would straighten up around the house—“policing the area,” he called it. He’d change the station wagon’s oil, fix a leaky faucet or a squeaky hinge. He’d clean out the refrigerator, scrubbing the shelves, spraying them with Windex and wiping them down with paper towels before putting them all back. He would sweep and mop the garage floor, sift through our closets to pile up the clothes we’d outgrown, and pick up groceries twice a week. In the afternoons he’d return to the basement. The gooseneck lamp he’d picked up from someone’s curb on trash day would be angled so that it shone a bright circle of light on whatever he was working on—cutting out a puppet-sized coat or a dress, or painting a pair of shoes on a puppet’s wooden feet. One of his albums would be playing, and sometimes there’d be an open can of beer on the table. “Hey, Pal,” he’d say, handing me the broom so that I could sweep wood shavings into a fragrant pile before he headed upstairs to join the family.

  In the summer, Jon spent his afternoons at the swimming pool. In the winter, he’d go ice-skating in Kresse Park, dropping his backpack in the closet and dashing out of the house minutes after he’d entered it, with his skates laced together and slung over his shoulder. Jon played soccer in the fall and T-ball and, later, baseball in the spring. I wasn’t on any teams—the combination of being shy and uncoordinated had proved fatal deterrents early on. My ankles wobbled when I skated, and when I swam, I stayed in the shallow end, where my feet could touch the bottom, one hand hovering by the pool’s ledge, ready to grab on for support. Most afternoons I’d stay in my dad’s workshop, sitting on the couch doing my homework, then sketching and painting while my father sawed and sanded and laughed along with Monty Python. “That, sir,” we’d say together, “is an ex-parrot!” There was a half-sized refrigerator down where he kept his beer and grape soda for me and sometimes a candy bar that we’d share. On top of the fridge was a plug-in kettle where he’d heat water for instant coffee or hot chocolate in the winter.

  I knew, from the other families on Crescent Drive and the kids at school, that nobody else’s father stayed home while their mother worked. Most of the dads took the 7:44 train into Chicago. My school bus would roll past them every morning, lined up on the platform, wearing suits, carrying briefcases, reading newspapers folded into thirds. The truth was, I liked having my father around; I was never happier than when I was down in the basement, snug on the couch, working on long division or fractions or spelling words, and he’d call me by a private name, Pal. I loved that name. At school, I was nobody’s pal. Even though I’d known most of my classmates since nursery school, it felt like they’d made a complex set of secret alliances when I wasn’t looking; like every girl was paired off and spoken for by a best friend, and I was on my own, unless one of the teachers took pity and let me eat my lunch at my desk or work on my paintings during recess. Later, I would realize that my early exposure to all of that comedy hadn’t helped. Word-for-word recitations of Bill Cosby’s trip to the denti
st or George Carlin’s routine about there being no blue food were not the way to attract other little girls.

  Jon and I watched as a faded red VW Bug pulled up behind the moving van. The woman who got out of the driver’s seat was tall and tanned, with an ankle-length Indian-print skirt wrapped low around her hips, and blond hair piled on top of her head. She wore movie-star sunglasses, huge and opaque, leather thong sandals, and a stack of turquoise-and-silver bracelets piled on one wrist.

  “Hippies,” said my father. He’d tucked the pancake-batter bowl under his arm and come to the window to see. He was freshly shaved. His hair was neatly combed back from his high white forehead. My guess was that he’d slept on the couch in the basement last night. He has bad dreams, my mother told me when I asked. Jon had another theory: he said that my father slept in the basement because they didn’t love each other anymore. Mom’s a cow, he’d said, and I’d punched him on the arm as hard as I could, then started crying. He’d stared at me for a minute, then hugged me roughly around my shoulders with his un-punched arm. Don’t cry, he’d said. It’s not your fault. Which was not the same as telling me that it wasn’t true.

  “Hippies on Crescent Drive?” my mother called from the kitchen. Jon pursed his lips in a soundless whistle as the woman with the bracelets stretched her arms over her head, exposing a sliver of midriff. Then the passenger’s-side door of the Bug opened and a girl about my age got out. She wore droopy cutoff denim shorts and a dingy white T-shirt. There were ratty white high-top sneakers on her feet (boy’s sneakers, I thought, and felt myself blushing on the girl’s behalf). She was tall and gangly, with knobby elbows and narrow wrists.

  “They’ve got a little girl, Pal,” my father reported.

  “Isn’t that nice!” called my mom. “Addie, maybe you can go over and say hello.”

  I shook my head. There were people—my brother was one of them—for whom talking to strangers came easily. Then there were people like me, who had to plan out what they’d say in advance and rehearse the words in their heads, and still wound up dry-mouthed and stammering, or blurting out lengthy passages of Bill Cosby, when the moment arrived.

  “Come on,” my mother cajoled. “We can bake them cookies!”

  The cookies were tempting, but not tempting enough. I shook my head again. My mom came back to the living room. She took my hand in hers and squeezed. I could smell her: Ivory soap and vanilla mixed with hair spray and her perfume that came in a white bottle with flowers painted on the sides and was called Anaïs Anaïs. “Addie,” she said, bending down to look at me. “Imagine if you were that girl. You just moved to a new town, you don’t know a soul… wouldn’t you like it if someone came over to welcome you to the neighborhood?”

  I didn’t answer. I wasn’t sure about this new girl, who seemed utterly at ease, in a way I never was, like she had no idea that her clothes and shoes and hair were all wrong. Jon peered out the window again. “She’s looking at us,” he said. I held my breath, watching, as the girl stood in the street with her hands in her pockets, checking out our house. There was a hopscotch grid chalked on our driveway, next to my bike, with a banana seat and purple-and-silver streamers hanging from the handlebars, which added up to the equivalent of a billboard stuck in our yard: Nine-year-old girl here!

  The girl squinted toward the window, and it seemed for a minute that she was looking right at me. Then she crossed the street, walking decisively across our lawn. We heard a knock, and I turned to my mother. “Answer it!” I whispered.

  She shook her head, bemused. “Adelaide, you can answer the door by yourself.”

  I shook my head, wondering if I had time to dash back to the kitchen and gobble a fast half pancake. Jon sighed, then got to his feet. “Come on,” he said. He took my hand, not unkindly, marched me to the door, and pulled it open. The girl was standing there. “Hello,” she said. Her voice was husky and low, a memorable voice. “I’m Valerie Violet Adler. Who are you?”

  “I’m Jon, and this is Addie. It’s nice to meet you.” My brother gave me a pat on the back that was almost a shove and left me there. For a minute, the girl and I just looked at each other. She had freckles, big splotchy ones dotting her cheeks, and buck teeth that were jagged along the bottom. Around one of her ankles was fastened a loop of colorful beads on blue thread, an item it had never occurred to me to want, a thing I was now certain I couldn’t live another day without.

  “We just moved here from California,” she told me, pushing the hair that had escaped from the ponytail behind one ear.

  “Hi,” I said. My own voice was so soft I could barely hear it.

  “I like your bike,” said the girl.

  “Do you want to ride it?” Oh, no, I thought as the tips of my ears got hot. That was wrong. I should have asked if she had a bike, should have said, Maybe we can go for a ride together…

  The girl shook her head. “Mine’s in there.” She cocked her thumb toward the van. “Maybe we can go for a ride later. You can show me around.”

  I looked at the new girl, ready to offer her the most valuable thing I had, the secret that probably nobody else would tell her. “The lady who used to live in your house died there.”

  The other girl’s eyes widened. “Really? She died in the house?”

  “Uh-huh. It was the middle of the night, and the ambulance came and woke everyone up.” I didn’t tell her how Mr. DiMeo had walked outside alongside the body, holding his wife’s hand, weeping, and how a week later he’d moved into the Presbyterian Home, where he’d eventually died. I’d save that for later.

  “Huh,” said Valerie. “That was my grandmother.”

  “Really?” I stared, wondering why I’d never seen her before.

  The girl ran her tongue along the jagged ridges of her front teeth. “Do you know which room it happened in?”

  “The big bedroom, probably,” I said. I was already plotting when I’d ask her if she’d be my bosom friend, and whether “bosom” was a word I was prepared to say out loud. “Don’t worry. Your parents will probably sleep there.”

  “My mom,” she said. “It’s just me and my mom. My parents are divorced.”

  “Oh.” I didn’t know anyone whose parents were divorced. It seemed both tragic and glamorous. Mostly tragic, I decided, thinking about my father singing in the basement, using his pocketknife to cut a Snickers bar in two pieces and offering me half.

  “That’s why we moved. My dad’s a stuntman, so he had to stay in California. That’s where the movies are.”

  “Oh,” I said again. “Wow.”

  We stood there for a minute, Valerie on the threshold, all freckles and scabs and tangled hair, me with my hand on the doorknob, my starched skirt rustling around my knees. I can remember the dirt-edged Band-Aid on her elbow, the smell of syrup and bacon, the polleny, green-grass haze in the humid air. I can remember, even then, the feeling of my life balanced on top of a triangle—a fulcrum, it was called; my father had told me that—getting ready to tilt one way or the other.

  Across the street, the beautiful woman raised her hand. Her silver bracelets clinked as they slid down her arm. I lifted my arm to wave back as Valerie looked unhappily over her shoulder. “Hey,” she said, “can I come in? She probably wants to start unpacking.” She yawned enormously. “We drove…” She paused, yawning again. “… all night.” She flipped her ponytail over her shoulder. “Actually, not quite all night. We stopped at a rest stop. We camped out in the car. Did you ever do that?”

  I shook my head. When my family went on car trips, we set out armed with an AAA TripTik and reservations at Days Inns along the way. My mother would pack picnic lunches: turkey sandwiches, hard-boiled eggs, carrot sticks, and a thermos full of milk.

  “You can camp outside,” Valerie said. “In your backyard. I’ll show you how to make a tent. All you need is an old sheet.” I nodded. I could picture it: a crisp white sheet forming a perfect triangle, Valerie and I, our faces lit by flashlights, side by side beneath it. Valerie lifted her
head and sniffed. “Are you having breakfast?”

  “Are you hungry?” I asked.

  Her stomach growled before she could say anything. I swung the door open wide and made a little bow, a sweeping gesture with my arm, something I’d probably seen on TV. “Come in,” I said, and she did.

  SIX

  In the kitchen, the kettle whistled. I turned the flame down and studied my old friend. Underneath her coat she wore a tight red dress that clung to her chest and hips and dipped low in the back. There was a belt of wide gold links around her waist and, on her feet, high-heeled pumps with pointed toes. Diamonds winked at her earlobes and on her right hand, and she carried a capacious handbag made of soft red leather over one shoulder. “Are you alone?” she asked.

  No, I’ve got a bunch of Chippendale dancers back in the bedroom! Wearing nothing but baby oil and teeny little togas! “Yes, Valerie. I’m alone. What do you want?” I asked in a not entirely friendly tone of voice.

  “I can’t believe you’re still here,” she said, surveying the kitchen, which was much improved since she’d been there last. I’d taken up the linoleum and put in glazed terra-cotta tiles. I’d ripped out the mirrored backsplash, a living shrine to the 1970s, and banished the harvest-gold Formica and avocado-green appliances, replacing them with softer, richer shades: cream and butter and rich rusty red on the walls. A farmhouse sink with a gorgeously curved, ruinously expensive faucet sat beneath the window that looked out at the backyard. There was a round oak table, crisp cream-colored curtains framing the new windows, cabinets that I’d painted myself… but the liquor, that collection of dusty bottles of Chivas and Ronrico rum, some of them given to me as gifts and some dating from my parents’ marriage, was still in the same place, in the cabinet over the refrigerator.