The False Friend

by Myla Goldberg

  Since Celia’s Midwestern migration, the pastor had retired and the church bells had fallen into disrepair, their stillness ringing in an age of stagnation. As children left for college, sluggish property values delayed the move that commonly cushioned the transition to retirement, creating a neighborhood of empty nests and muted seasons. The jingle of ice cream trucks stopped marking the arrival of spring. The lifeguard’s whistle took on purely ceremonial functions as adult and all-swim merged. Successive Halloweens passed with fewer and fewer trick-or-treaters, until Warren and Noreen no longer even bothered with a token bowl of candy. On weekends, or for brief stretches during school holidays and summer vacations, grandchildren sporadically revived small patches of neighborhood lawn and sidewalk with bikes and roller skates, but then returned to whichever more abundant town their parents had chosen, leaving a neighborhood of nostalgic Nanas and PawPaws behind.

  With the advent of Medicare and Social Security benefits, FOR SALE signs began appearing on front lawns. Aging hips and knees cashed out and traded stairs for single-floor plans in senior communities, or apartments in elevator buildings. In other places such migrations spurred rebirth, but even Jensenville University’s new hires preferred to commute from towns less terminally postindustrial. Family homes were acquired by management companies for student rental, the real estate equivalent of inviting tent caterpillars into trees. Furniture appeared in front yards, and lawns became overgrown. Paint jobs peeled and faded. Three Christmases ago, Celia had returned home to the burnt shell of Randy Blocker’s place, the result of a post-party tryst between a couch and a tenant’s lit blunt. As recently as last December, its blackened carcass had remained half standing, scabbed over with ivy and graffiti. Only now, as Warren turned onto their block, did Celia notice a FOR SALE sign finally posted in the middle of the razed lot where, if she remembered correctly, the Blockers’ downstairs bathroom had once been.

  “The neighborhood’s looking up,” she almost joked and then didn’t, thinking of the white-noise machine her mother had received last Christmas under the pretense of masking her father’s nonexistent snores at two A.M., and not the hoots of drunken students. Celia and Jeremy took turns urging their parents to sell, but Warren was too house-proud to admit that his home improvements had been outpaced by the neighborhood’s decline. When blasting stereos had nullified the pleasures of outdoor relaxation, he’d had the patio converted into an attached sunroom. Next came a seven-foot-tall privacy fence to shield the new sunroom from the sight of the barbecue pit that had replaced Mrs. Henley’s flower garden. Celia had come to accept that only her father’s death would spur change: her mother wouldn’t want to live in the house without him, and he would never agree to live anywhere else.

  “Are you tired, Celie?” Noreen asked the moment they had pulled into the driveway. “I was thinking we could go to the Chinese steakhouse for dinner.”

  “Cee Cee doesn’t want to go there,” Warren said. “It’s overpriced and the staff isn’t even Chinese. She’s a Chicago girl! That sort of thing doesn’t impress her.”

  “I could always cook,” her mother offered. “I thought it might be nice to celebrate Celie’s arrival, but we could just as easily do that tomorrow or the next day, once she’s had some time to rest.”

  “I’m not tired,” Celia said. Not since college had she visited home for more than a three-day weekend, and never without Huck.

  “Well then, let’s go out,” Noreen reasoned. “We could go to Maximo’s. Maxi always gets a kick out of seeing Celie, and they’ve still got that great fruit de mer appetizer with the octopus and the squid.”

  “Nor, why do you always insist on taking our daughter somewhere she got fired from as a waitress when she was seventeen?”

  “She didn’t get fired! Maxi just realized that she’d be better in the office—”

  “Maximo’s would be fine, Mom.”

  Celia opened her door and walked to the back of the car, hoping her father would pop the trunk, but instead he got out and used the key. She tried to beat him to the suitcase, then pretended not to hear his groan as he lifted it.

  “Warren, you really should let Celie do that,” her mother clucked. “Remember your back.”

  Warren shook his head. “Cee Cee took the effort to come all the way here. The least I can do is help her with her luggage.” The two women hung back while he wrangled the bag onto the sidewalk and wheeled it to the front door.

  Celia followed her mother up the drive, then looked across the street. The house opposite had once been a famously easy mark for Girl Scout cookies and Multiple Sclerosis Read-a-Thon sponsorships, but knocking had meant facing Mrs. Finch, who was childless and had a short leg. One year, hell-bent for a cookie merit badge, Celia had broken with tradition and accepted Mrs. Finch’s invitation to come in. Seated on a musty brown couch beside a glass of powdered lemonade, she’d been introduced to the extensive doll family filling the greater portion of the living room, and was prompted to greet each doll by name. Celia’s daring earned her an order for five boxes of Tagalongs, five Samoas, and five Thin Mints but made it impossible to deliver the goods, which she convinced her brother to leave on the doorstep. The living room window now contained an illuminated COORS sign. A gutted easy chair cultivated a dead spot on the front lawn.

  Warren and Noreen were already inside by the time Celia reached the front walk, where she was ambushed by a memory of Djuna standing beside her. “Tell me where you hide your key,” Djuna whispered, “and I’ll be able to come anytime.” Celia looked to the fake rock still beside the doormat, its putative cleverness undermined by the lack of decoy rocks or even a concealing hedge. She picked it up, flipped it over, and slid open the tab.

  “Welcome home, darling,” Noreen said, opening the door. Celia saw her mother’s outstretched arm, her father standing sentinel beside the stairs. For a moment, it seemed as if the whole town was holding its breath, waiting for her to go in.

  Warren’s interest in home improvement aside, the house had changed very little since Celia’s childhood. Inside the front entryway was the small enamel painting of a verdant field that inspired thoughts of creamed spinach. Looking at it now, Celia could practically feel her spirit shrivel to the creature she’d been at sixteen. It did not help that the family photo gallery leading to the kitchen was glaringly out-of-date. The newest picture was from Jeremy’s community college graduation nine years back: he was gaunt but clean-shaven, his smile equal parts pride and relief. This was preceded by an enlarged snapshot of Celia receiving her undergraduate degree. In the most recent family portrait, Jeremy was growing out his hair but had yet to pierce his ears, and Celia was wearing a Cornell T-shirt. The picture dated from Celia’s final high school year, a few months shy of her decision to flee west and several grade levels before her brother began snorting dope in his bedroom.

  For years there’d been talk of a photo that would include Jeremy’s burgeoning family as well as Huck, but so far the only sign of the Dursts’ survival into the twenty-first century was a framed picture of Daniel. The grandson’s photo overshadowed his parents’ wedding portrait in the living room, which eclipsed a framed poem on display since Celia had won a statewide writing contest in high school. All three objects languished on a forlorn coffee table whose charms were annulled by the discomfort of the adjacent heirloom couch. The rest of that least-lived-in room, devoted to Warren’s jazz habit, had sparked one of Celia and Djuna’s epic fights. After jointly vandalizing one of Mr. Pearson’s American Mathematical Society journals, Djuna had wanted to raid Warren’s record collection, but Celia had refused. Thanks in part to her vigilance, everything in that portion of the room had remained intact: the custom record cabinets, the audiophile turntable Celia had been born knowing not to touch, the ancient leather chair in which her father sat wearing oversized headphones, playing his recordings at volumes no one else could bear, insisting LPs delivered greater fidelity than anything invented since.

  From the kitchen, Celia h
eard the clink of stemware, followed by the shump of the refrigerator being opened. When she was small, her mother’s wine had been kept in the door, a topple-prone arrangement that resulted in sporadic compositions of Chablis and shattered glass. At about the same time that juice boxes began appearing in Celia’s lunches, a cardboard carton with a plastic tap became a permanent fixture on the fridge’s right-hand side. Djuna had been the one to observe that sneaking a sip was an undetectable crime. Noreen’s custom was a single glass at dinner, occasionally prefaced by a late afternoon tasting. This sole parental vice attested to a temperate streak Celia thought she had inherited. She had always assumed her brother was made of different stuff. She’d been halfway through college when Jeremy’s grades began to slip. During her brief visits home, when she’d caught glimpses of a silent, glaring teenager with headphones grafted onto his ears, she’d admired her brother’s precocity. Not until she’d been contemplating colleges, toward the end of her own high school career, had it occurred to her to rebel. Jeremy’s ongoing transformation had constituted a regular segment of her parents’ upbeat, long-distance telephone calls. Their cheerful insistence on his normalcy had persisted until the phone rang early one morning during Celia’s junior year. Even when they told her Jeremy was in a coma, it was not until Celia heard the word overdose that she realized drugs had been involved all along. Now she wondered if Jeremy’s addiction was a variant of what had possessed her just that once with Djuna in the woods. Their impulses had differed mainly in trajectory. Celia had aimed outward. Her brother had not.

  Warren was halfway up with his daughter’s suitcase, muffled grunts marking his slow progress. Celia dawdled with her coat, waiting until the sounds ceased before joining him upstairs. She had learned about his osteoarthritis last Christmas with her mother’s gift of a bathing suit for lap therapy at the college pool. During her brief visits home, Celia watched for unfamiliar pills at breakfast and scanned medicine cabinets for recent prescriptions in order to restock her own mental formulary of questions. Only once, when Noreen found a lump in her breast, had Celia’s parents ever volunteered medical info. Their preferred method was to wait until asked or until the danger had passed, calling Celia after a trip to the hospital for a cold that had turned into pneumonia, or after chest pains proved to be indigestion—proud each time of having spared her, impervious to the upset their deferments provoked.

  “How’s the knee?” Celia asked.

  Warren shrugged without turning around, making a show of wheeling the suitcase behind him. “It’s different on different days. It’s always worse in cold weather.”

  “It’s not cold today,” Celia said.

  “It’s not so bad today,” he replied. When they reached the guest room he leaned over as if to lift the bag onto the bed, then stopped and left it where it was.

  The bedroom was the smallest of the four. No one remembered how it came to be called the Scottish Suite, only that the tartan wallpaper had preceded their tenancy, the nickname permitting them to treat the room as a sign of family irony and not aesthetic laziness. Noreen had midwifed a bevy of Halloween costumes on the everlasting Singer that now languished in one corner gathering dust. In high school, the room’s wallpaper had come to symbolize all that was intolerable to Celia about living at home: her father’s tuneless humming; her mother’s copious bowls of snack foods; her parents’ joint enthusiasm for whatever moronic interest gripped her brother. At the first sign of guests, she would flee upstairs to make sure the door was shut, one of several small ways she’d attempted to survive her teenage mortification at being someone’s daughter. The first time Celia brought Huck home, she ran halfway up the stairs before turning back around. Pulling Huck aside, she’d described their sleeping arrangements in a grave whisper, as if the Scottish Suite might send him flying back to Chicago. Once upon a time, this sort of thing had constituted a confession.

  “You know, your mother set up your old bed down the hall,” her father offered as they gazed at the room’s foldout couch. “The one in here isn’t exactly the most comfortable thing in the world.”

  The mattress in the Scottish Suite sagged like a swayback horse and creaked at the thought of movement. After Huck’s inaugural visit, Celia had requested a better bed but Noreen had refused: they would upgrade in the event of wedding guests. Celia and Huck had adapted by ravishing one another on the floor beside the sewing table. Though Celia’s mother had long ago knit Huck his own Christmas stocking, the foldout atrocity endured, the last outward symbol of Noreen’s abiding hope for her daughter.

  “Huck will be here this weekend,” Celia said. “It seems silly to switch back and forth.”

  “Huck’s a good man,” her father said, his fingers tapping at her bag’s pull-out handle. “I suppose you talk to him about things … when things happen?”

  “I tell Huck everything.” Celia’s internal clock was confounded by the thought that at this time yesterday she had been in her bedroom in Chicago, waiting for Huck to come home.

  “That’s good.” Warren nodded, backing away. “That’s always been what your mother and I have done.”

  Celia’s father retreated to the hallway. From the neighboring bedroom she heard the creaking bedsprings that announced his daily catnap. More than at any other time, her father looked his age when asleep. Years after the advent of gray hairs and thickening waistlines, Celia continued to be shocked by the progress of her parents’ aging. In dizzying moments of delayed recognition, mental snapshots in her mind’s billfold were rendered obsolete. She would notice the loosening skin along her father’s jaw, the dark pouches beneath his eyes that sleep no longer erased. As her mother buttoned her coat, blue-gray veins would stand out from the collapsing skin of her hands, a trait exclusive to Celia’s sole memory of her grandmother, a seemingly ancient woman who had died at sixty-eight, an age that no longer seemed terribly old.

  Celia returned downstairs to the den, where Noreen filled the leftmost of the matching recliners she and Warren had purchased for their fifteenth wedding anniversary. Two decades later, each chair bore the intaglio of its habitual sitter. Celia fit within the contours of her father’s chair like a nesting doll, the imprint in its cushion foretelling the shape of things to come.

  “He feels badly, you know,” her mother said. She was holding her wineglass by its stem, her pinky held out as if she were attending tea. Noreen, always quick to offer wine at dinner, had never invited Celia to join her in the late afternoon. It was one of the sole remaining distinctions between mother and daughter, a boundary preserved by wordless, mutual consent.

  “What does Daddy have to feel bad about?” Celia asked.

  “You know how it is.” Noreen shrugged. “He blames himself even when he shouldn’t.” She sipped her wine. “When your brother started having all that trouble, your father put a lot of stock in the fact that you turned out okay, which is why I’m so grateful that when you called last night, you didn’t go into it all at once. I would have been fine, but for him, I think just hearing Djuna’s name … You were so young when it happened and it wasn’t the sort of thing we were prepared for. Not that any parent is, but we didn’t know what to do.”

  It was quiet with the two of them sitting there and Warren asleep upstairs, the neighborhood inhabiting the afternoon lull that preceded the return of those who hadn’t taken a day off work to meet their errant daughter’s incoming flight.

  “You wouldn’t talk about it,” Noreen said, “wouldn’t even mention her name. Your father got his first peptic ulcer worrying about whether we were doing the right thing. We tried being casual, tried bringing it up at different times of day. We even tried bribing you to talk, but nothing worked. After a while, your father and I decided to let you start the conversation when you were good and ready, only you never did. By the time we realized you weren’t going to, so much time had passed that we thought forcing the subject might only do more harm. And now, all these years later, here you are.”

  Late-day sun glaz
ed the bay window. The paired recliners were angled to face a wide-screen television, bought for a more recent anniversary. Reflected in the TV’s surface, Noreen and Celia looked like objects left at the bottom of a pool.

  “Mommy?” Celia took a deep breath. “I think I just want to tell you this as quickly and as simply as I can.”

  She stopped. Her mother was shaking her head.

  “Not yet,” Noreen said. “It will be better for us, I think, if we have a quiet night tonight, and then tomorrow you can visit me at school.”

  “At school? But why?” For the second time that day, Celia felt as if she’d been pulled from the high dive after finally having built up the courage to jump. “With Daddy asleep, can’t we just … I mean, don’t you think that this is the perfect time?” She was whining now, the sound of her indignation indistinguishable from the sound of having been denied another cookie, an extra bedtime story, the keys to the car.

  “I’m sorry, sweetie,” her mother said, the unfamiliar softness in Noreen’s voice breaking ties with all the older battles. “But I would much rather we waited. After what happened with Jem, I learned that when certain things are said or done in certain places, it takes a long time before …” She shook her head. “Besides, this will finally give you a chance to see my personal office! At Christmastime the building’s always closed. I think you’ll be surprised at how cozy it is. It’s a lovely place to have a chat. Very private, very comfortable.” Her smile was equal parts apology and entreaty. “You can come in the morning, whenever you happen to wake up. I think it’s best to do these things in the morning, when the day is still fresh.”

  Noreen touched the television remote and a moment later a snack food jingle flooded the room. At times like this, Celia’s teenaged self felt like an ugly shirt she had tucked into the back of her drawer but had yet to outgrow. Whenever she came back home, her mind resumed all its worst habits: the hair-trigger sensitivities, the rush to judgment, the combative reflex that dug a dividing line between herself and the rest of the world. She partly blamed the house for her regression. Her entire childhood was contained by these rooms, her adult experience here minuscule by comparison.