I should have stopped right there, but I couldn’t help myself. Sometimes our make-believe drove me nuts. “Everyone cares about money!”
“I care about him.”
“You can care about both!”
“Casey, enough.”
I let out a whuffing sound and put the car in reverse.
* * *
—
Susan and I were both flyover-country girls selected randomly to room together at our fancy East Coast liberal arts college, where students often confused Iowa with Idaho. I’d chosen the school because everyone in the brochure was preppy and good-looking. The previous summer I’d read a novel about a girl from St. Louis who attends a famous prep school on scholarship, and while it was meant to be a satire of the upper class, I’d read it more like an instruction manual. Nothing’s more Midwestern than plotting escape from one’s origins, and I planned on a full reinvention of myself upon arrival.
I didn’t talk to Susan until move-in day, though not for want of trying. Susan heard phone messages not as an invitation to call back but as something to wait out like a mosquito in your bedroom: irritating, sure, but it’ll die eventually. The prospect of college dorm life held no promise for her; she would endure our tiny sixth-floor double, she solemnly informed me after our parents left, as Solzhenitsyn endured the gulags: for the sake of novelistic material.
“Okayyyyy,” I’d said uncertainly. “So the mini-fridge should go—”
“Please don’t ask me about stuff like that.”
She’d been wearing a big John Lennon T-shirt and clompy boots and looked not so much like a girl as a wild creature. She dug a crumpled pack of cigarettes out of the back pocket of her black jeans and offered me one. I shook my head, affronted by her dismissal and gall. Shrugging, she went over to a window and pushed it open, stuck her head out, struck her lighter.
“You’re not allowed to smoke in here,” I said. My hands were on my hips. I sounded like my mother.
Susan said nothing, just exhaled and looked out the window, her complexion rosy against the gray sky.
“Fine,” I said, motioning to the refrigerator and the space beneath my lofted bed. “I’m just going to put it here then.”
“Go ahead,” she said without turning around.
“Fine,” I said. I felt defensive. She seemed to be asking me to account for myself, why I was a person who thought it important to discuss mini-fridges, and I realized I did not know.
At the tone in my voice, Susan turned around. She looked at me, and I held her gaze, even though I was nervous. I felt her eyes go inside me, settle right upon my heart. After a moment, she motioned to the space beside her.
I shook my head. “I don’t smoke.”
“Do you breathe?”
I’d learned to be a person from other people and TV, but Susan wasn’t like other people or TV. Where I came from, girls talked about clothes and boys and each other. I didn’t know what else people talked about, so I defaulted to the banal pitter-patter of college freshmen everywhere: where were you from, what did you want to study. When I asked her the latter, she took a deep drag of her cigarette then exhaled. “I want to be a writer,” she said. Then she corrected herself. “I will be a writer.”
I had never heard anyone my age speak with conviction before. Conviction wasn’t cool then, irony was. “How do you know?” I said.
She shook her head. “I’ve always known.”
“I like to read,” I said. “I’ll read your books. I read all the time.”
Susan turned to me, and I saw her take in my mall clothes and Valley girl lilt and highlighted hair a little differently than the first time around. She smiled. One of her front teeth was crooked, which mysteriously made me want to hug her. “What do you read?” she said.
It turned into an all-night conversation, one aided by a bottle of peach schnapps Susan’d smuggled from home and burritos we got at the campus convenience store. Susan and I had loved a lot of the same books growing up: A Wrinkle in Time, Bridge to Terabithia, the Narnia series, Judy Blume, Lois Lowry. We’d devoured them, cried over them, stuffed our backpacks to overflowing on trips to the library, got chastised by our mothers for staying up too late and ruining our eyes with flashlights. Our tastes had veered come adolescence, with me diving headfirst into The Baby-sitters Club and Sweet Valley High, and Susan embracing Tolkien and other fantasy, but we both loved Agatha Christie, and our reasons for reading were the same.
See, I’d never told anyone about the antenna in my brain before, how I felt like an alien because of the static I heard around other people. How the sound of the static changed depending on their mood; how I could hear, amidst the static, their thoughts and feelings, even when they tried hard to hide them. But for some reason that night, I told Susan. Susan said, “I know what you mean.” I told her that when I read books the air around me sounded clear and sweet, and she nodded, like, yes exactly. I told her that deep down I thought books might be better than people because people were always pretending, but right as I said it a little voice in my head added but not anymore.
I felt shy around her, but a different shyness than I felt around boys, more tangly. I’d never met anyone so alive before. We went everywhere together that first year, Susan and I, arms linked like paper chains, so inseparable everyone thought we were either lesbians or had grown up together. “No,” one of us would explain in a singsongy voice. “We just got lucky.”
* * *
—
That night we went to our “weekday place,” which was different from our “weekend place,” because on the weekdays we didn’t want to tire ourselves out by trying to appear more civilized than we really were. Our weekday place was a pho restaurant in Susan’s neighborhood, which was my neighborhood, too, except the part where Susan lived wasn’t as filled with, well, white people—people who looked like her and me. My half had gentrified, hers hadn’t yet. The restaurant had fluorescent lights and tan booths that wheezed and sank whenever you moved. Most of the time it was empty. But the bowls of soup were like barrels, just ten bucks, and we loved the mango bubble tea. Susan and I hadn’t lived together in a few years—different income brackets and whatnot—but we still ate like roommates, like hyenas around a wildebeest carcass. In the midst of our chewing and slurping we made our way through a mile-a-minute conversation on everything that had happened since we saw each other. Because so much had happened! Even though it’d only been three days.
I told her about meeting Ellen and how well the pitch had gone; she told me about the trans girl who had come in for her senior pictures and stood proudly below a wooden gable in a prom dress she’d made herself. “I helped her with the boobs and everything,” Susan said. “She can’t get the hormones and stuff till she’s eighteen, so she has these silicone gel things. The nipples you buy additionally I guess, but they’re self-adhesive. I just kept thinking about how when we were in high school, no one had even heard of, like, gender identities or gender fluidity or whatever.” Susan rolled her eyes. “So if this is where we’re headed”—she lifted up her bubble tea—“cheers, America, maybe you’re not completely screwed.”
“Yeah, true.” I’d taken a sip of my own bubble tea, and I felt the tapioca squish uncomfortably around my mouth. “But remember last week, when you went out to shoot that soccer team and all they talked about was Internet porn and the girls they were banging?”
“Yeah.” Susan paused and dropped her chin so that her hair created that familiar wavy curtain. She was quiet for a moment. “I forgot about that.”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah.”
“People are stupid,” I said, “but not all people.” Then I shoved a bunch of noodles in my mouth, chewed, and pushed the sludge out through the crevices of my front teeth. “Jush look a’ me!”
Susan laughed. I was good at making Susan laugh. Physical comedy was her weakn
ess.
Eventually she said, “So Ellen. You really liked her.”
“You would too.” When she raised her eyebrows I added, “She wasn’t fake at all. At ALL. She was—I mean, sure, she’s a reality star. She’s kind of self-obsessed and her proportions are—well, she looks like a bobblehead—but she was totally on the level.” I finished chewing my noodles, swallowed. “Just because she does reality TV doesn’t mean she’s a garbage person, you know.”
“I never said it did,” said Susan.
It was her tone, God, that tone, the slight uptick on the did that reminded me we were in contested territory. “Advertising is a tumor,” she’d said when I’d come home, elated, after Celeste had hired me at my interview. It was the summer after college; we’d moved to Minneapolis together right after graduation to do the whole urban twentysomething thing. Susan was dead set on remaining unemployed for as long as possible, living on a small inheritance from her grandmother while writing full time, whereas I was hoping to make a nice bourgeois living while remaining bohemian on the inside. “A bulging, cancerous mass on the human condition. You haven’t even gone to any auditions yet. Why are you giving up already?”
I’d promised Susan that after we moved to the city, I was going to sign up for an acting class, try out improv, audition for a small theater, do something related to what she insisted on calling my “artistic life.” I had done little with my “artistic life” in college because, I told her, I was busy living. But the real reason I avoided most of that stuff was because I didn’t know how, and I was too scared to try. I’d been bred only to meet or exceed expectations others came up with.
Not to mention the fact that being seen was humiliating. You learn that, as a girl, over time. “Casey Pendergast, she’s so annoying,” I’d overheard a girl saying in the middle school bathroom while I peed and changed one of my first tampons. “She’s so loud…about everything.” I know it was a long time ago, but I’ve never forgotten that moment: the humiliation that leaked pungently from the deepest crevasses of my body. Girls are mean. Wild animals, really, stuck in tight zoo-y confines. What I’d learned in school—way more important than the subjects—was that it was okay to stand out, but only if you stood out in the right way, with looks and body and stuff. Not too much though, and the less you talked, the better. Even then a lot of girls would probably hate you.
Susan wasn’t like that. She’s the one who taught me the words misogyny and patriarchy. Not even my teachers had used words like that.
Susan and I had fought the day of my hire at PR. I needed creature comforts, my champagne tastes had me up against the wall. Two-hundred-dollar shearling boots couldn’t buy themselves, and I’d rather burn in hell than ask Louise for money. Susan had stood her ground. The argument turned arty and high-concept, but in the end what we were really saying to each other was I’m afraid we’re not as similar as I thought we were, and that scares me.
We eventually called a cease-fire that had endured now for almost six years. As I’d moved up the ranks at PR, trading my time for money and, I guess, my own ambitions for someone else’s, I could tell Susan still disapproved. But Susan disapproved of everything, most of all herself. The world was not as it should be. We were not what we should be. What that meant on the daily was that Susan worked at a job she didn’t really care about and spent most of her time and energy working on a novel I feared she’d never finish. She’d get on a roll, stop herself, berate the path she’d chosen, start over, celebrate the breakthrough she’d made, then the whole thing would start all over again. There were piles of stories and poems in her apartment that were finished, or seemed finished to me, but Susan refused to do anything with them. “They’re not done yet,” she’d say when I needled her to send them out. “I can feel when things are done, and these aren’t.”
You can’t change people, even your best friend. Most of the time you can’t even offer suggestions, they’ll just bounce off the surface like asteroids glancing off the moon.
“Let’s not talk about work,” I said, putting down my chopsticks. “Did you finish the book?” I’d lent her the first novel in a four-part series by an Italian woman about an intense female friendship spanning fifty years. Usually Susan was the one giving me recommendations, but I’d seen this one blurbed in Entertainment Weekly and gobbled it up while Susan worked her way through some depressed Norwegian guy’s journal.
“I devoured it. I didn’t even want to wait for you to finish the second, so I went to Wendys’s and bought it myself.”
“What part are you at?”
“They just got to Capri.”
“That’s where I am too! Do you think she’s going to have an affair with that student?”
“Yeah, unless her husband kills her first.”
And we were off to Italy, where we spent the rest of dinner, on an island neither of us had visited but could envision so clearly I could even taste the ocean salt on my lips.
When I grabbed the check and insisted on paying, as I usually did, Susan winced. “I feel like your ward, or something.”
“You’re not my ward,” I told her. “You’re my broke-ass friend.”
Her face twisted up, like her features no longer worked together properly, which happened when she got ashamed.
“Listen, when you get your book deal you can buy me like, a hundred dinners. I’ll keep tally in my journal and we’ll make sure it’s even in forty years. Deal?”
She sighed. I could tell she didn’t like it, but she knew me. There was no getting around it when I was hell-bent on something. “Deal.”
Susan was going to walk home, her apartment was only a few blocks away. It was easier to do those blocks in the cold months, when winter garments made our bodies impossible to distinguish. Come summer, that same walk guaranteed the kind of catcalls that could make your hair stand on end. “Girl, I want to RIP that ass up!” one guy had shouted at me the previous June from the back of an SUV. I had shouted something equally obscene back at him, along the lines of fuck you, then he and his friends’d laughed, then I’d roared they’d better not be laughing at me, and then they’d laughed again, and then I’d cried when I got home.
“Text me when you’re back in your apartment,” I said. “ ’Kay?”
She nodded. We put on our bulky coats—it was still freezing. Outside Susan twisted up her long hair then stuck her beanie on top and pulled it down low over her head.
I said, “I yove yoo,” and gave her a hug.
“I muff moo,” she said into my hair.
Somewhere in the distance a horn honked. A siren began its sad twirling. As I got into my car I could see Susan crossing the intersection. A guy in front of the corner store was watching her, arms crossed over his chest. He was going to say something to her, I just knew it. I clenched my keys in one fist and felt for the pepper spray at the bottom of my purse. I’d only used it once, when I’d been out till closing time and the cab I’d ordered to take me home was late. A guy had approached, said some things. I didn’t spray him till he touched me. I’ll never forget the sound of his screams as he doubled over and staggered. How for a moment, just a moment, I’d believed I was the bad guy as he kept screaming “What the fuck, what the fuck, what is wrong with you?”
Across the street I could tell that Susan saw this guy too: a change in her gait said so. She crossed to the other side of the street to avoid him, my beautiful friend, shoulders shrugged forward and hatted skull bowed deferentially. I’m sorry, I’d said to the guy while he cupped his hands over his eyes in prayer, in agony. Boy, oh boy, did the world break my heart some days.
* * *
—
My apartment was on the top floor of one of those charming old mansions they’d converted into condos once developers figured out people would pay a whole lot more for old buildings than new buildings, so long as the old buildings were basically like new but kept t
he crown moldings and high ceilings. I’d kept my illusions of bohemia about as long as I’d kept my promise to take acting classes. Now I was as bohemian as a Restoration Hardware catalog. I vacuumed for fun—thank you, Louise—and thought a lot about bowls and fussed when I noticed a spot on a chair I’d purchased after it’d come recommended on a blog that believed apartments could be designed as therapy. I came from enough money that I took it for granted that objects should be more than functional, they should be beautiful. Though I’d been broke in college and right after, this was different from being poor. Poor was an abstraction to me, but unfortunately so was privilege. What I mean is: I knew I had privilege, but I couldn’t feel privilege, the way a fish can’t feel water.
I did try, though. I watched documentaries. About once a year I’d volunteer for something, and every couple months haphazardly contribute money to a Kickstarter campaign.
I settled into my evening routine, which, since I’d lived alone for a few years, had been perfected through many nights of solitude and reading self-improvement websites. I made a cup of hot water and lemon, which was supposed to detoxify me, poured a very civilized amount of M&M’S into a teacup, which was supposed to satisfy my sugar cravings, hung up my palazzo pants and silk blouse into a color-coded closet, which was supposed to cure my anxiety, put on a chemise and matching shorts, which were supposed to make me feel cozy, yet sexy, and sank into the gray mid-century sofa I’d spent a small fortune on and secretly wished was more comfortable. I opened my laptop, which was still there from the previous night, unlocked my phone, and spent a good half hour just “liking” things and responding to messages. Sure, I’d have brunch after spin class with Emily. Yes, Uncle, the article you sent is very interesting. Everyone was talking to each other all day, every day. Sometimes even I, who Susan once described as “a human geyser,” got a little exhausted by it.
A Lady's Guide to Selling Out Page 4