The False Friend

by Myla Goldberg

  Jensenville lay along the shim of land that kept I-81 from the Chenango, the highway wooing the river into Pennsylvania before abandoning the chase. Scranton was a straight shot south. Celia associated the interstate with the fireworks sold across state lines, remembered high school parties that had featured bottle rockets or Roman candles purchased in Great Bend and smuggled seventeen miles back north. She ignored a recumbent gas gauge to speed her departure. While breathing the fumes at the first self-service station across the Pennsylvania border, she was gripped by the idea of heading east and making for one of the oddly named towns nestled within the wooded bends along the river. She briefly imagined calling Huck from Cahoonzie or Equinunk and asking what he thought of starting over in a place that held no history for either of them.

  For fifty-three miles, it didn’t occur to her to turn on the radio, the thrum of her own thoughts carrying her from exit 230 to exit 191. Blum’s Dairy Restaurant was located in Scranton’s northern outskirts, tucked inside a strip mall between a maternity outlet and a bakery that announced itself in English and Hebrew. Between judicious speeding and light traffic, Celia had arrived with forty minutes to spare. She dialed Huck, but hung up when she reached his voice mail. Chicago seemed like the other side of the world. She decided she might as well be seated when Becky arrived, sensed her old friend might have a better chance of recognizing her than the other way around.

  A crowded deli counter stretched away from the door, the wall behind it a periodic table of bagels.

  “Number Fifty-one!” a broad-shouldered voice bellowed from inside a fraying apron.

  The woman who held up a ticket and gestured toward the counter was indistinguishable from the others placing orders or awaiting their turns, all of them wearing full-length skirts and precisely modeled hair. The studious way they avoided looking at Celia was proof she had been noticed, proof it wasn’t her imagination that clothes unremarkable everywhere else here looked risqué.

  She must have been standing inside the door for some time because the spindle-fingered man behind the register, who had not spoken a word while ringing up the steady stream of customers, finally glanced in Celia’s direction.

  “You’ve got to take a number,” he said in a way that showed he couldn’t tell whether she was hard of hearing or mentally impaired.

  “I’m sorry, I’m not—” she began.

  He gestured to the left. “Dine-in over there.”

  Celia turned, and for the first time noticed a door leading to a small dining room. The room was plain but clean, with plastic checkered tablecloths covering the tables, each anchored by a small vase containing a single artificial flower. Aside from a few men in dark fedoras and dark suit jackets, the tables were occupied by the same kind of women crowding the deli counter. Celia was unmistakable, a jay among puddle ducks.

  The waitress seated Celia at a small table along the inside wall, hidden from the door and away from the front window. Celia explained that she was waiting for someone, and ordered matzoh ball soup. She owed the sum of her Jewish expertise to a single bar mitzvah attended in middle school. She and David Lupinsky had been in Olympics of the Mind together. She hadn’t known he liked her until she’d accepted his invitation, and then learned he hadn’t asked anyone else from their team. She’d bitten the inside of her cheek to avoid falling asleep during the service, and then danced with David for two slow songs before spending the rest of the party hiding in the bathroom. When David’s mom had come to check on her, Celia had accepted two Advil for cramps she didn’t have, along with a mini-pad she was certain she had misapplied to her underwear in a way that would broadcast her bluff to every woman in the Howard Johnson’s banquet hall. In a panic, she had torn the thing in half and divided it between the cups of her training bra, the only place she felt assured it would evade discovery, and went home two hours later with itchy breasts.

  Celia focused on filling her spoon with broth and raising it to her mouth without spilling. Her soup was half gone when she felt a tap on her shoulder.

  “Hello, Celia.”

  Becky’s eyes were trapped in the face of a middle-aged woman with visible pores and crow’s feet, her temples freckled from sun. That Celia recognized the decline of her own face in Becky’s grown-up features did nothing to soften the shock of having to swap her childhood Becky for this dilapidated model. The grown-up Becky was dressed more stylishly than the other restaurant clientele, in clothes that might not have seemed prescribed outside the company of so many skirts and shirtsleeves of identical length. Celia couldn’t tell whether she was meant to kiss, clasp hands, or merely smile at this person, the question of their lapsed friendship further complicated by possible religious bans. Celia stood.

  “Becky!” she said. “Thanks so much for coming!”

  When Becky grazed the side of Celia’s face with her cheek, her head was close enough to reveal her wig. Celia briefly wondered if, on top of everything else, Becky had cancer, before it occurred to Celia that she was the only woman in the restaurant not wearing one.

  “It’s not every day an old friend comes to Scranton,” Becky demurred. “It was no trouble.” She looked at Celia’s soup bowl. “I’m sorry, did I keep you waiting?”

  “Not at all. I was early.”

  “Smooth sailing on I-81? I wondered if maybe you were coming from Jensenville.”

  Celia nodded. “My parents are still there.”

  “How wonderful! Do you see them often?”

  “Not really. It’s hard to get away.”

  When the waiter arrived, Becky ordered for them both. “I imagine this is a cultural experience for you, so I want to be a good guide. Blum’s gets their Nova from Zabar’s, and Zabar’s is the best there is. Have you had lox before?”

  “Sure,” Celia said. “It’s delicious.”

  “It must be nice,” Becky continued, “coming here like this. To Jensenville, I mean. To your childhood home. I haven’t been back in I don’t know how long.” Her eyes lit up. “You haven’t been by my old street, have you?”

  Celia shook her head.

  “I’d love to know if our tree is still there,” Becky said. “The one we used to spy from.”

  Friedrich Street. Becky had lived on Friedrich Street. “It was on the corner!” Celia said. “In front of that old man’s house—”

  “Mr. Luff,” Becky said. “He hated us.”

  Celia bared her teeth. “Get out of my tree!” she growled. “And you would always explain that it wasn’t his tree, that the first five feet of lawn actually belonged to the township.”

  “Public right of way,” Becky confirmed.

  “How did you know that?”

  Becky shrugged. “My brain was a sponge back then. I’m not sure right-of-way applied to tree climbing, but I sure did like saying it to Mr. Luff.”

  “I loved that tree,” Celia said. “And your room.”

  “Oh, Celia, so did I.” Becky sighed. “The rainbow wall. My mom painted it. When we moved, I knew I was too old to ask for another one.”

  Becky’s smile was the same strange amalgam it had always been, half happy/half distracted as if her brain, while relaying the command to her mouth, had been called away on more pressing business. An intervening lifetime had not changed Celia’s impression that Becky was one of the smartest people she would ever know.

  “So,” Celia said. “How long have you—” She groped for a word.

  “—been religious?” Becky offered.

  Celia sipped her water. With her spoon she nudged her matzoh ball to the center of its bowl. “Actually,” she stalled, “I was going to ask how long you had been living in Scranton.”

  “Then you’re trying to be polite,” Becky replied. “Which is nice, but unnecessary. After today we won’t see each other again, so let’s only bother to ask exactly what we want to know.”

  Celia nodded. It was all coming back—the forthrightness, the showy preference for straight talk. Celia remembered a tour received within minutes
of her first visit to Becky’s home at some irreclaimable point in third grade, highlighted by Becky’s pride in her unmade sheets (“It’s my room, I’m the only one who has to see them”) and the Penthouse magazine Mr. Miller kept under his side of the box frame (“Kind of obvious, isn’t it?”). Becky was becoming familiar again, the mantle of middle age displaced by the girl inside.

  “I discovered Chabad toward the end of high school,” Becky said. “Everyone was talking about college except for me and Leanne—don’t look so surprised.”

  “I’m not,” Celia attempted.

  “You are,” Becky corrected.

  “You were such a good student.”

  “Not by then,” Becky said. “By the time Leanne and I were sixteen … Let’s just say that among our many common interests Leanne had a car, I wanted to get away, and we both liked to sneak off to find college students who would get us high.” She shook her head. “Anyway, I was deep into a dedicated career of delinquency when I met a Jewish boy who had been going to the Chabad on campus. I started going there with him and it was the first thing to make sense in a long, long time. That was where I met Shimon—and the rest, as they say, is history.” She shrugged. “It’s not as crazy as you think. How old were we when we knew each other? Ten? Eleven?”

  Celia nodded.

  “I was so incredibly anxious back then. The night before a spelling test, I wouldn’t be able to sleep. On days I brought home perfect scores, my parents didn’t seem to fight as much.” She glanced at Celia. “You’re so easily shocked. It’s probably a good thing you’re only seeing me again now that I’m an old-fashioned Jewish housewife.” Becky smiled, her face a map of happy lines. “Hey, do you remember the time we decided to be archaeologists and dig for prehistoric bones in your backyard? We found a piece of a broken plate beneath a bush and decided it was from Colonial times. You said I could have it if I would be your best friend.”

  Celia nodded. She wasn’t sure.

  Becky sighed. “I kept that plate for a long, long time.”

  Celia wanted to ask if the wig itched, if Becky was ever allowed to show off her knees, if she remembered their third-grade teacher saying she could become the country’s first female president.

  “So,” Celia offered. “Your husband’s name is Shimon?”

  Becky nodded. “He teaches at the yeshiva. Plus he writes poetry. Not as good as yours”—she smiled—“but not bad. Do you still write?”

  Celia shrugged. “Not really. I kept it up through college, but then—”

  “Oh Celia,” Becky chided. “You could have been a contender.”

  Celia laughed. “I was never that serious.”

  Becky shook her head. “You were! You had us all convinced. Mrs. Hogue was always putting your poems on the bulletin board. My desk was right next to that board, and I read them over and over again, but creativity isn’t something you can study for. I was sure you were going to be the next Longfellow.” She glanced at Celia’s hands. “One of several surprises, I suppose. I thought you’d be married.”

  Celia remembered admiring Becky for using the word urinate instead of tinkle, for pointing out when their teacher had food stuck between her teeth. Until now, Celia had never considered the origins of her own attraction to directness, Huck’s desirability partly based on a seed sown in third grade.

  “I have a boyfriend,” Celia said. “We live in Chicago. He’s a high school teacher—”

  “Just like Shimon!”

  Celia nodded. “And I work for the city.”

  “And you come back to Jensenville to visit,” Becky said, her eyes far away. “Tell your mother I say hello. She was always so nice to me. Now tell me about Leanne. The last time she and I were in touch she wasn’t doing so well. Is she better these days?”

  “I don’t know,” Celia said. “I’ve just had the one e-mail.”

  “I choose to take that as a promising sign,” Becky said. “I’m not sure I can say we were good for each other, but we were certainly good to each other. Completely loyal—we’d learned the importance of that.” Becky shook her head. “So please tell her that the number she has for me still works. Tell her that she’s welcome to call me anytime.” The waiter brought a platter layered with slices of dark pink fish. “Okay,” Becky continued. “Now tell me why we’re here.”

  For the third time since Becky had arrived, Celia tried not to look surprised.

  “Not that I’m not happy to see you,” Becky continued. “I didn’t have to agree to come, after all. But I am curious. You didn’t sound like someone calling on a whim. And you don’t actually have business here. This is Scranton, after all. Now tell me, what can I do for you?”

  Celia paled. “I’m sorry. It’s just, I was afraid if I told you over the phone, I’d scare you away.” She looked at the food on her plate, the soup in her bowl, the face of the person she had once sworn to like best of all. “I’d like to talk about what happened,” she began.

  Becky nodded. “I used to wonder if it haunted you.” Her eyes searched Celia’s face. “Do you know I actually wrote a speech? An eloquent denunciation and exculpation I planned to deliver when you asked to be my friend again. I made a minor career out of avoiding you in middle school, waiting for you to seek me out and plead for my forgiveness. But you never did.”

  “I managed to block it out for a long, long time,” Celia said.

  “Really?” Becky said. “That’s a neat trick. I’m still ashamed by our cruelty, and that’s after having apologized to Leanne twenty years ago!”

  Two women gazed at each other from across a chasm, each waiting for the other to recognize what lay on the other side.

  “I’m sorry,” Celia said, “but I’m not sure I know what you mean.”

  Becky looked at Celia, her mouth hanging open. “I mean all the ways you and Djuna tortured that poor girl! The daily ratings, the dress code.” She shook her head. “When Leanne and I were first becoming friends, real friends, you were one of the main things we talked about. For what it’s worth, I defended you. I told Leanne you were different before Djuna came along, that Djuna was a bad influence. Of course, you weren’t the only one at fault. Josie and I let it happen. We never tried to stop you.”

  Celia remembered giggling in the bathroom; she remembered notes passed between desks. She had a vague sense of something, a familiar strain from a forgotten tune.

  “I thought I was protecting myself,” Becky continued. “I was afraid that if I tried to defend Leanne, I would be next. The day I knew I had to say something, the day you really took things too far, it was over. And do you know that part of me was secretly glad? I thought it served her right, getting into that car. A terrible thing to think, I know. When I look at Chaya, my oldest, and realize how young we all were—no one deserves what happened to Djuna … not even Djuna.”

  For a moment, neither spoke.

  “What do you remember about that day?” Celia began.

  “No,” Becky countered. “You tell me what you remember. After all these years of wondering, I think I deserve to know. You saw more than any of us except Djuna herself, and I have a feeling she won’t be looking me up.”

  At a table across the room, two younger versions of Becky—both pregnant, both with children impatient to be fed—dealt out bagels with the sangfroid of blackjack dealers. The older children passed out napkins, their faces mirroring the mothers’ bored efficiency.

  Celia closed her eyes and took a breath.

  “I remember it was a pretty day,” she began. “The kind where it was hard to focus on anything except being outside. When the five of us started walking—”

  “I was so terrified,” Becky said. “I mean, we were not supposed to be there. It was like a highway, that road. No sidewalks. All those cars. Going there was the sort of thing a bad kid did. And at that point I was not a bad kid.”

  “Djuna and I were ahead of the rest of you,” Celia continued. “We were arguing about I don’t know what, and right when we were abou
t to round a curve, Djuna ran ahead—”

  “You were fighting about Leanne,” Becky interrupted. “I’d never seen Djuna angrier, which, given your fights, is saying a lot. We were at one of the bigger curves in the road, though there wasn’t any railing anywhere … just the road, then gravel, and then trees. You told the rest of us to wait while you went after her, and you had us so well trained that for a while we actually did it.”

  “Djuna went into the woods after we came around the curve,” Celia said. “I followed her in, but before I could get to her, she fell. I watched it happen, and when Djuna didn’t get right back up, I went back out the way we’d come. I just left her there.”

  Becky had a look on her face that Celia couldn’t read.

  “Becky,” Celia said. “I lied to you that day. I told you that Djuna got into a car, but she didn’t. She never came out of those woods.”

  Becky exhaled a long, tired breath, the fraternal twin of the sound Celia had heard over the phone. Celia realized that smoking was the habit Becky indulged when she was alone.

  “I wish I could be more specific,” Celia continued, “but I can’t. All I know is that she must have fallen into a hole of some sort. Because of the way it happened. She was there one moment, and then the next, she was gone and I didn’t—”

  “Celia.”

  Celia felt as if she’d been yanked from a dream.

  “You remember my father?” Becky asked. She studied Celia from across the table. “Stupid question. Of course you remember him. Well, somehow, he doesn’t seem to remember ever hitting my mother.”