Friends Like Us

by Lauren Fox

  Dinner is early at the Westons’, and it is, conspicuously, not spaghetti—as if the spaghetti incident never happened, which makes me think that maybe it didn’t. Dinner is not actually anything I recognize, having been raised on the fractured-marriage menu of frozen pizzas, Lean Cuisine, and canned soup, but Jane has prepared me for this: it’s Bonnie Weston’s specialty, tuna casserole, with green beans and Jell-O salad on the side. The tuna casserole is sprinkled with cornflakes. Is it dinner? Is it breakfast? It doesn’t know! Mandarin orange slices float in the red Jell-O like prehistoric fish. My eyes flicker around the table, trying to find someplace neutral to land. Jane won’t meet my gaze; she’s too busy playing some kind of poking game with her father. The serving dishes are decorated with geese flying around their edges. The tablecloth is flecked with clouds, a linen wild blue yonder. Steam from the casserole wafts up, dissipates.

  “This is real midwestern cuisine!” Mrs. Weston says to me as she surveys the table and spreads her napkin on her lap, as if this is some kind of exotic locale to me—Real Tibetan delicacies here on the mountaintop, Willa!—as if I hadn’t been born and raised in Milwaukee.

  “Real midwestern cuisine!” Mr. Weston echoes. Jane laughs and jabs her father. Jane’s parents live in Marcy, Wisconsin, founded by a Christian dairy farmer with, legend goes, either poor penmanship or a very heavy German accent. Lord have marcy, they say around here, an inside joke among the 4,102 residents. Marcy me.

  “I like the geese,” I say. A curl falls in front of my eye; I swat it away from my face.

  “Aren’t you lovely?” Mrs. Weston says. “These two don’t care for my motif, do you?”

  Jane reaches for the tuna casserole and helps herself. “Makes it easy to buy you birthday presents, though,” she says through a mouthful of food. Her father beams at her as if she has just uttered her first complete sentence.

  Mrs. Weston reaches across her daughter and passes the dish to me. “Manners, Janey,” she says, but mildly, and it strikes me that although on her deathbed she will probably remind Jane to tuck in her shirt, she’s also someone who gives the people she loves the benefit of the doubt. I feel swamped, suddenly, in self-pity, trapped in a Jell-O salad of melancholy. I glance over at Jane, her elbows propped on either side of her, her body loose and hunched over her plate, confident, entitled. A person could be anything if she were raised in a family like this. What could possibly stop her?

  “Hon?” Mrs. Weston says to her husband, and he piles first my plate, then hers, with green beans. The beans look otherworldly for a blurry second, like alien pods, like mermaid hair. Then back to beans.

  I smooth my napkin over my thighs, feel my own reassuring flesh beneath the layers of cloth.

  “Yum, Mom,” Jane says, her mouth still full, but no one cares, and she really seems to mean it.

  Mr. Weston pops up. “Oh, water!” He walks around the table to the sink, fills a glass pitcher, returns with it.

  Mrs. Weston upends a slab of casserole onto her plate and looks at me carefully. “You and Janey really do resemble each other,” she says. “Even I can see it.”

  My thoughts careen past each other like eleven-year-old boys on ice skates, skidding, flailing. Family outings that turned into screaming matches between my parents. Days when they would only talk to each other through Seth and me. The time Fran sat down at the table in front of the lasagna she’d made, clearly pleased with herself, and Stan looked at the dinner, rolled his eyes at me and Seth, then turned to my mother with a grin on his face and said, “Oh, my favorite! Cold, congealed, salty lasagna! How did you know?” He was an expert at taking her down, a master of the surprise attack.

  I look down and notice suddenly that I’ve been picking the cornflakes off the surface of my tuna casserole. Quickly, I shuffle them back to their home. “We could eat the leftovers for breakfast tomorrow!” For one fleeting, hopeful breath I believe that maybe I’ve just thought this and not said it out loud. But then Mrs. Weston, Mr. Weston, and Jane all stop eating at the same time and look at me. The refrigerator motor hums. Mrs. Weston’s geese lift off from the plates, flutter their wings, and circle around my head. So long, everyone! Thanks for the Jell-O!

  After a few seconds, Jane laughs, a snort of sisterly derision, reaches across the table and pats my hand. “Sure we could, sweetie.”

  “We’re so glad Jane found such a nice roommate.” Mrs. Weston is still looking at me, kindly.

  Mr. Weston nods. On the long journey from his plate to his mouth, a bean falls off his fork.

  “So, girls, I thought we might go to the mall tomorrow. Have you finished your Christmas shopping yet?” Mrs. Weston picks up her glass and looks at me with an expectant smile, and I see that this is her hand reaching into the ocean and gently plucking me out.

  “Not really,” I say.

  “Mom, Willard is Jewish.” Jane rolls her eyes. She wants distance from her parents’ convivial small-town presumptions, and what better way than with a Jewish roommate?

  I shrug, the words I’m really not that Jewish already forming on my lips. I’m ready to convert, to sell my soul, whatever it takes; I want in.

  “You are!” Mrs. Weston says to me. “I had forgotten. That’s interesting!”

  “Did you know that the Jewish people only have nine commandments?” Mr. Weston says, and before I even fully register my shock, before I can open my mouth to correct him, I recognize an evil glint in his eyes.

  “True,” I say. I catch a glimpse of Jane’s twitching smile before she covers her mouth with her napkin.

  Mrs. Weston gazes at each of us, one after the other, her eyes narrowed skeptically. “Oh, you all are pulling my leg, and I know it!”

  “Mrs. Weston,” I say, placing my fork carefully next to my plate. “It’s not that commonly known, but it is true. We don’t have the one about adultery.”

  “Mom, Mom, Mom!” Jane says, her fourteen-year-old personality fully at the fore. “I didn’t believe it at first, either. But it’s totally true.” Mr. Weston just nods peacefully, as a wide and receptive chamber of my heart pumps to life.

  “Plus instead of ‘Thou shall not kill,’ we have, ‘Thou shall not kill, except bugs and rodents,’ ” I say.

  Mrs. Weston shakes her head and slaps her hands on her lap.

  “Ah, Willa, too far,” Mr. Weston says.

  Jane throws up her hands. “Willa, we had her!”

  “You three are awful!” Mrs. Weston says. She points an accusing finger at each of us in turn. “And it’s too bad, because I made tiramisu for dessert, and now none of you will be having any.”

  “Sorry, Mom!”

  “Sorry, Mrs. Weston.”

  “Oh, Bonnie, forgive us,” Mr. Weston says, his voice pitched low and insincere, a newscaster’s baritone.

  Jane’s mother pushes her chair back from the table and moves over to the refrigerator, pulls out a large glass bowl, and shows us its custardy contents, then hugs it dramatically to her chest, as if she alone will consume the entire dessert. She shakes her head again, then reaches for the serving spoon, unable to commit to the role of vengeful mother. I’m right here, at this table, with the Westons: I’m a part of this oddity, this entity, this group of people who love one another. I soak it in. I let it fill me up completely. Mrs. Weston begins scooping big blobs of tiramisu into dessert bowls while Jane laughs at something her father says. I know it’s not real. This is not my family. But for one brief, passing moment the idea that it could be fills me with indescribable sweetness.

  Chapter Nine

  Ben leans back against the brick wall of our apartment building. He holds two fingers up to his mouth and puffs on an imaginary cigarette; a cloud of his breath wisps away. “I don’t understand,” he says.

  Jane and I got back from Marcy last night, and now the three of us are sprawled out on a blanket in the grimy courtyard behind our building.

  “What don’t you understand?” I ask, pulling my long gray sweater out like a tent and tucking m
y knees under it. We’re bent on enjoying this midwinter thaw, but it is still January in Wisconsin.

  “For starters, why does a tea bag need to be inspirational?” He runs his palm over a small patch of weedy grass, untouched by snow or rain. Our little communal space back here manages somehow to be both overgrown and half dead at the same time. Adjacent to a row of garbage cans, one thin, moldy mattress leans against the wall; four discarded tires are arranged in a row next to it. It looks like someone was assembling parts for a garbage-powered mattress-car. All in all, this is not a place that invites outdoor lounging, and yet we spend quite a bit of time out here.

  “Because,” Jane says with a shiver. “People who drink tea are not drinking coffee.” She takes a sip of her strawberry margarita, her gloved hands cradling the glass. Actually, it’s much too cold to be out here.

  “Yep,” I say. “And that makes them sad.”

  “And wistful.” Jane is on her second margarita. “Or wishful. Are those both words?” She giggles.

  “I drank only tea when I was a nanny in England,” Ben says, and I look over at him to see whether he’s kidding, whether this is one of Ben’s weird jokes that you end up laughing at only because of the gap between how funny he finds it and how incomprehensible it is.

  “Was this before or after your year on the space station, orbiting Jupiter?” I ask, and then my brain closes the distance, and I remember that there are seven dead years in the history of this resurrected friendship, that Ben could have spent a year as a nanny in London or three years driving a taxi in Dubai for all I know. He might have wandered around England or Iceland or Auckland, he may have pursued the brief but strangely obsessive interest in Ecuador he cultivated for a few weeks senior year … and I wouldn’t have been privy to any of it, obviously. Those rambling, homesick letters on airmail paper, the overly descriptive, hyper-self-conscious e-mails from Internet cafés in foreign cities, would have been sent to some other friend, a college roommate at a desk job in New York, a pretty ex-girlfriend named Becca who teaches fourth grade in Minneapolis.

  “After,” he says, raising an eyebrow at me, and Jane, who is leaning against him, turns her face and looks straight at him and shakes her hair behind her and smiles, smiles like she’s thinking, Oh! Another interesting thing for me to learn about my shiny new boyfriend, another layer of this bright package that I will unwrap in time. Flustered, I turn to my notebook and rifle through it, even though my notes are right here, right in front of me.

  “Um,” I say, my pages whiffling in the chilly breeze. “Declan told me he wants ‘witty, encouraging phrases for the urban tea drinker.’ Nothing condescending or cute, he says, but complicated enough that it might take a moment to register with the consumer. And each one has to be under ten words.” Declan also told me that this would be the last assignment he’d have for me for a while, and that’s a fact that I don’t share right now.

  A few years ago, I had interviewed for an internship in the fledgling art department at Declan’s ad agency. Two days later, he called and told me they couldn’t afford an art department after all. He offered me a job writing copy for him instead. He was cute, and I didn’t really have any other leads, so I said yes.

  We flirted for a few months. He drew me a picture of a smiling tree with curly hair for branches and wrote Willa tree underneath it. He left a small, tinfoil-covered chocolate turkey on my desk for Thanksgiving. He wooed me with his accent, his poor posture, the way he pushed his fingers through his messy hair when he was concentrating and left it sticking up in odd places, how he walked around the office in mismatched socks. He was like a little boy who needed a mother to straighten his sock drawer and lick down his cowlick. But I didn’t want to take care of him. The more time we spent together, the more I wanted to be like him, a person who lived inside his body and his brain at the same time, a person who could forget to eat for a whole day and then delightedly inhale an entire quart of cashew chicken with peapods. He was appealingly strange. He would spend hours in his office plugged into his iPod, occasionally yelling, “I really need to be left alone in here!” when no one had bothered him.

  Whenever I came up with a good slogan, or even a promising turn of phrase, Declan would grab my shoulder or hug me or give me a peck on the cheek. We worked late some nights, just the two of us; Michael had a family to get home to. All I had to do was turn my head, and Declan’s playful kiss on the cheek turned into something better. It was that easy.

  We made out in my cubicle a few times, as furtive and frantic as teenagers. Each time he stopped it, once with his fingers poised on the hook of my bra, once as his own shirt was halfway off. His torso was long and pale and surprisingly dense. I was willing. “But I’m your boss,” he said, breathing hard, or, “We can’t. I’m too old for you.”

  I didn’t believe his dramatic protestations. And I felt my affection for him growing. My heart beat uncomfortably in his presence, like something trying hard to escape. During the day, he wandered around the office in his socks, sipping tea from the thermos he brought from home even though the office had a kitchen and a kettle and a bottomless supply of Irish tea. I would think about his mouth against mine, and I’d feel slightly displaced, as if my center of gravity had been lowered. Declan acted exactly the same as he always did, which I took as a good sign, since he was slightly odd to begin with.

  One night after everyone else had gone home, we met in the hallway near my desk. He was carrying his bike helmet in one hand, and his right pant leg was rubber banded at the ankle, as if his shin were a loaf of Wonder Bread. The fluorescent light above us flickered. Declan smiled, and I reached out to touch his face.

  He caught my hand before it made contact with his cheek, held it for a second, kissed it, then pushed it gently back toward me. He said, “You’re killin’ me, Willa.” I was tingly and hot with embarrassment. I leaned against the wall of my cubicle, the mauve nubbly carpeting of it always a surprise to me. Why was it that cubicle walls were covered in carpeting? It was insulting, as if a person could be fooled by a poly-wool blend into forgetting the flimsy, impersonal nature of her surroundings. Declan and I were still standing close enough that I could feel his breath on my face. It smelled of strong tea and spearmint gum, or maybe just spearmint tea.

  “Um, okay,” I said. “I don’t want to kill you.”

  “I really like you, you know,” he said, taking my hand in his again and squeezing it. “But … the thing is, Willa. The thing is that I’ve been seeing someone else for a couple of weeks.”

  I narrowed my eyes and stared at his face, at the dark stubble just starting to appear, his handsome gray eyes, his straight nose. He had remarkably even features. It took me a second to feel the cut, the slice was so clean. He had a girlfriend.

  “She’s not my girlfriend,” he said. “It’s nothing serious. Only … I’m starting to think I might like it if it were.”

  “Okay,” I said quickly. “I understand.” I did—he was choosing someone else over me. I contemplated taking the sting of humiliation and turning it into an invigorating hatred. It would have been easy. Those gray eyes were too small, I decided, like a rat’s. Oh, look, it was already happening! But then I saw something in the way he was looking at me through those rat eyes, something raw and real and honest. He didn’t want to hurt me. I felt like I could see inside his heart, and it was a clean, spare place, a room filled entirely with inexpensive Scandinavian furniture. I mustered up a smile, the one I’d practiced for just these sorts of occasions. “Well, I’ll see you tomorrow!” Declan exhaled, obviously relieved. You’re a great girl, Willa. That was one of his expressions.

  I had three more months of my internship left in that office, so I stayed, faking it, mostly, and acting nonchalant while underneath I felt like a human tuning fork, like my entire body was vibrating at such a high and terrible frequency that I would soon attract the neighborhood dogs. Over time, though, I was relieved to feel all that nerve-jangling hurt slowly draining out of me. My fake care
free smile eventually became authentic, exactly itself.

  The winter sunlight in the courtyard is thin and weak and almost completely defeated by the shadows cast by our apartment building. The air is getting colder by the minute. Jane holds up one finger. “The path to enlightenment is steep,” she announces.

  “Nice,” I say, jotting it down.

  Ben nudges my foot with his. “Oh, you tease,” he says. I look at him, confused; he’s staring back at me with a half smile that makes me nervous before I understand. Oh, you teas.

  “Very nice,” I say, scribbling.

  “Oolong! Farewell!” Jane says, waving, then shakes her head. “No. Sorry.”

  Nobody says anything for a few moments. The neck of a broken bottle glints on a patch of sandy soil beside us. I doodle a picture of a tea bag with a face and wearing swim trunks, sunbathing on a beach towel. Tannin is good for you, I write underneath it, then slowly ink over the whole thing. I jot down some tea-related words. Drink. Hot. Spills. Dregs. Leaves.

  Ben adjusts his sunglasses and looks up at the darkening blue sky. “Why is it that none of us has a real job?”

  I pretend to write the question down. “Wait, that’s not inspirational.”

  “I have a real job.” Jane bounces her shoulder against Ben’s.

  “I’ll get paid for this,” I say. Willa, Declan wrote, This will be it for a while, I’m afraid. Revenue’s down, budget cuts and all that. It’s the feckin’ economy. You know I’ll give you a great reference. Too bad great references don’t pay the rent.

  “You know what I mean,” Ben says. He drapes his arm around Jane, and she hunkers in. Ben took a few night courses in public health almost a year ago and has been studying for the GRE ever since. In the meantime, he slogs through his part-time library job and fantasizes about joining the Peace Corps. Together, we probably earn one decent salary. Our collective underemployment makes me anxious.