Friends Like Us

by Lauren Fox

  “I didn’t have that many boyfriends in college,” Ben says, and Jane laughs.

  There are days when I feel like every step I take outside my apartment is an opportunity, every trip to the grocery store, every walk to the corner mailbox, are chances to reinvent myself, to embrace the possibility that I might meet someone, see something, catch someone’s eye, that in a split second, everything could change. Then there are the days when I feel like everything I’ve done has brought me here, to where I am and will always be: right here, lying trapped between my two best friends on a bed that hundreds of other couples have lain on in search of the best place to have hot sex and then sleep comfortably for the next eight hours. I turn from Ben to Jane and back again. The problem is, some days I can’t tell the difference.

  A young couple on the bed five feet from ours has been whispering urgently for a few minutes, and their voices are gaining volume. I prop myself up on my elbow and look over.

  “But when you yelled at him this morning, you shamed him,” the woman says. She has huge blinking blue eyes and long blond hair fanned out on the pillow behind her head.

  “Well, he took my book and ripped it. Maybe a little shame is a good thing.” The man is her photographic negative, dark and scruffy. They’re attractive, almost disturbingly good-looking. They look like a magazine ad, but a weird, unhappy one, maybe an ad for couples therapy or rained-out vacations.

  “Jesus, Jeffrey, what’s wrong with you?”

  “Nothing. Natalie.” He says her name as if it’s a small insult, a suggestion of things gone to seed. “I just don’t want him disrespecting my things, my personal things. It starts with a book. Where does it end?”

  “I don’t know where it ends. Maybe with you in therapy dealing with the legacy of your abusive father?”

  I’m starting to feel very sorry for their child, the little miscreant. Given the genetic windfall, though, he’s probably beautiful enough to overcome his dueling parents.

  I elbow Ben, whose eyes are closed. “They remind me of Fran and Stan,” I whisper, “but prettier.”

  Jane sits up, too. She twists a long curl of her hair around her finger. “Let’s go look at another bed,” she says sternly, as if Jeffrey and Natalie will overhear her mildly scolding tone and promptly change their ways.

  “I think we should just sign him up!” Jeffrey says. They’re not even attempting to whisper any longer. Natalie snorts her derision. Jeffrey bangs his hand down onto the mattress. “You didn’t even know what I was going to say!” he growls.

  Ben rolls over and stares at them; we’re watching this spectacle unfold. I want to tell them that they haven’t actually bought this mattress yet, haven’t shipped it to their house and set it up in their bedroom. We can hear you.

  “You want to take him to obedience school!” Natalie starts to cry, and then Ben laughs so loudly, such an explosive exhalation, a true guffaw, that we all roll off the bed in a tangle and hurry over to another section of the store.

  Jane grabs my hand and pulls me along. “Oh, my God,” she says.

  “Oh, my dog,” Ben says, catching up to us in the children’s furniture department, a bright enclave of red and blue bunk beds, superheroes, fussy canopies, and pink princess comforters.

  “Hey!” Jane hoists herself up a ladder to the top of a race-car bunk bed, her legs flailing behind her as she disappears behind a tower of pillows. “Maybe I’ll just get myself one of these!” Ben flicks a Spider-Man lamp on; it plays the theme music from the cartoon, and Ben starts singing along. I know he won’t stop singing until he’s gotten through the entire tune, because he knows all the words and is compelled to display his knowledge, and suddenly I just have to get away from them.

  The truth about two people who don’t like each other much is that their fights can be small, gnawing things. I know something about this. I know that this is how people destroy each other, in ugly increments, slivers of their lives falling away until, all at once, they topple. I imagine Jeffrey and Natalie as furry, sharp-toothed beavers. I want to go find them, wherever they are in this vast furniture warehouse, maybe chewing on a table leg somewhere, and tell them: Handsome rodents! Stop nibbling away at your own happiness!

  In flight from Ben and Jane, I wander into the recliners section of the store, rows and rows of big empty armchairs in a sad rainbow of earth tones, a shipwreck of abandoned Barcaloungers. I run my hand along the top of a dark green suede behemoth with what looks like a sidecar attached to it. Upon closer examination, it turns out to be a cooler.

  “This would look good in your living room,” Ben says, from behind me. He pats my shoulder, and I turn to face him.

  “I would be willing to get rid of all of our other furniture,” I say, “and just have one of these in every room.”

  “The kitchen?” Ben says.

  “Yes.”

  “The bathroom?”

  “Obviously.”

  He points to the cooler. “For storing toilet tissue.”

  “ ‘Tissue’ is one of my favorite words,” I say. “It makes everything sound fancier.” I plop myself into one of the chairs, a dark, mannish thing that immediately flings my body backward, hoisting my legs up higher than my head; I feel like a beetle, a strangely comfortable beetle.

  Ben places his hands on an armrest to steady himself and hovers over me. “Are you okay?”

  I look up at him, his face squinched with concern. “Ach,” I say, with a wave of my hand. “Natalie and Jeffrey!”

  “And Spot!”

  “Poor Spot.”

  Ben just keeps staring, leaning over me, and I can’t help it, I think about him and Jane, about what it must be like to lie beneath him, his body close, features gathered in concentration. I remember the bumbling kiss in Ben’s humid car, the sound of our teeth clacking against each other like tiny tap dancers. I see that his lips are a little bit chapped, and I turn my face away and pretend sudden fascination with the dark maroon leather of the cushion.

  He touches my forehead gently. I force myself to stay still. “For someone who’s in her twenties and hardly ever even talks to her parents,” he says, “don’t you think it’s about time to get over their divorce?”

  He’s right, of course. But nobody likes her blindingly obvious failings pointed out to her by her best friend when she’s belly-up on a Barcalounger.

  “I talk to them!” I say.

  In fact, just last week Fran called me from her car, driving down a Tucson highway, on her way to meet Jerry for an early dinner. Seth can’t maintain a relationship, she said, and you never seem to have them. Did your father and I do this to you? Is this your father’s fault? I held the phone at some distance from my ear; if it came too close, I thought, it might burn a hole in my brain. Are you on your cell? I yelled. I can barely hear you! I’ll call you again soon!

  “We talk all the time!” I insist.

  “Which is not exactly my point.” Ben leans down closer, so close that for a second I think he really is going to kiss me, and my stomach squeezes with the thought of Jane. It’s so easy in the moment to know what you’re going to do, as if life were a pointillist painting of moments. “Look over there,” he whispers, tilting his head toward Sofas and Sectionals. Natalie and Jeffrey are wandering around, heads together, holding hands.

  “… perfect for the living room,” Natalie is saying, and Jeffrey murmurs something about getting rid of his grandmother, who is old and loves beets.

  “Your grandma’s old love seat can go in the basement,” Natalie says.

  “That’s not them,” I whisper, even though it is.

  Ben looks at me funny, and then, clearly making the decision to humor me, he wiggles his fingers above his head, devil horns.

  “There you two are.” Jane is winding her way through the rows of recliners, like a giraffe among the underbrush. She stops short and plants herself in front of us, and I look up to see my friend, her face flushed, taking in the tableau of Ben and me. Her eyebrows furrow, her mouth
just barely moves, and then she composes her features as I crank myself up, the chair’s footrest lowering with an incriminating clunk. Ben wraps his arm around Jane’s waist and kisses her cheek.

  “I was up in that top bunk,” she says, “talking to you guys. I had an entire conversation before I realized nobody was there!”

  “What were you talking about?” I grip the squishy arms of the chair. Warp speed!

  “The time I fell out of a bunk bed when I was ten.”

  “Aww,” Ben says, kissing her cheek again.

  “Poor Jinxy.”

  Jane rolls her eyes at me and relaxes into Ben’s hug, forgiving us for whatever it is she thought she knew. “I was talking to myself,” she says. “Up there. Like an idiot.” She laughs then, a loud haw, and nobody says anything for a while; the haw just hangs there in the air above the recliners, until Jane looks around and notices for the first time where we are. “Willapede! I would like one of these for the apartment!” With balletic grace she twists her body around and slides into the recliner next to mine, pulling Ben down with her; they land together and the chair squeaks in protest.

  They’re squished, Ben and Jane, in the overstuffed armchair, laughing as Ben tries to wriggle his left leg out from under Jane’s right, and suddenly I am wide open with longing. I want to be between them again, I want to be one of them, Ben or Jane, just to be next to someone, leaning against the solid mass of someone else’s muscles and bones, a rising chest, a beating heart. Jane has finally reconfigured herself so that she is draped over Ben’s lap, their four long legs entwined, a denim sea creature of limbs, her body turned sideways in the chair. Ben glances over at me and I think with surprise that he is reading my mind as he lifts one shoulder, a fleeting acknowledgment of something we both know will never happen, or maybe just another small attempt to make himself comfortable against the soft crush of Jane’s body.

  Chapter Thirteen

  This morning, Jane and I stood together in the bathroom in our apartment, getting ready for Amy and Rafael’s wedding. Jane was wrapped in a fluffy yellow towel. There was a tiny red dot of blood on her shin where she’d nicked herself shaving. “I wish I had your collarbone,” she said, spreading cocoa butter lotion onto her shoulders and neck. She smelled like a cookie.

  “I need mine.” I worked some useless gel into my coarse hair. “What’s wrong with yours?”

  “Yours is elegant. Mine just sits there!”

  “Oh, my God,” I said. “I wish I had your elbows. Mine are so pointy!”

  “Eeek!” She waved her hands around. “I hate my wrists!” She stood close to me and we rifled through my container of Vérité freebies, samples they sometimes send me from failed product lines. My favorite is the ill-fated On the Town collection, a series of nonsensically labeled lip glosses whose names bear no relation to actual colors. We held up Embarrassing Night at the Karaoke Bar and examined it, then Jane dabbed a bit of Get Your Hands Off My Boyfriend, Bitch! on her little finger and smoothed it onto her lips, and I smeared some Whoops! I’m Soooo Tipsy! on mine.

  Ben appeared in the doorway, munching on a banana. “You look pretty,” he said, and Jane and I both said “Thanks,” simultaneously. And then there was a confusing half beat when no one said anything, and I felt my face grow warm. I studied my reflection, pressing my shiny pink lips together.

  Jane tilted her head. “We do look pretty,” she said, glancing at Ben in the mirror.

  It’s June, humid June, six months since the day they met, one hundred eighty-three days since the moment I stood between them in our apartment and waved my magic wand, the good witch of setups, the problem-solving guru of complicated friendships.

  Well, sure, there have been instances. Occasions. Would I relive the time I overheard them having sex, startled awake at 1:00 a.m. by a moan that I thought, at first, had come from my own throat; a loud thump against my wall, then another, and another; how—too late!—I folded my pillow over my ears to try to drown out the sound of their bodies slapping against each other, the unmistakable thwack of skin on skin? No, I would not. (Would I relive the next time I overheard them, or the time after that? Well, I suppose I’ve sort of gotten used to it.) Or the night we made lasagna, how Jane lit candles and we sat together at our little round kitchen table drinking wine, Ben turning from Jane to me to Jane, his lips a grapy purple, a grin creasing his face like he couldn’t believe his good luck. And then, after dinner, how we cleaned up together, me gathering plates at the table, Jane and Ben in the kitchen washing dishes, and when I went in with my stack of plates, midsentence, “… that’s when I realized I had accidentally hit REPLY TO ALL!” there they were in a clutch at the kitchen sink, lips locked, Ben’s hand cradling Jane’s head, yes, like a baby’s, the faucet on full blast, water pouring down the drain, and me, awash in the sudden awful knowledge of where, exactly, I stood.

  No, I probably wouldn’t revisit that one, either.

  Yes, there have been moments. But more than that, there have been days and weeks of happy ease: long mornings at Rock River, the coffee shop near our apartment, where we play a complicated drawing/guessing game that I invented and always win; late-night games of Scrabble that I always lose; muddy, early spring tromps through the woods and chilly hikes along the shore of Lake Michigan; Sunday brunches cooked by Ben; movies. I look back with very little perspective and feel like I have been dating my two best friends. What could be better than that?

  Jane and I find seats in the middle row of folding chairs set up in Latvian Hall, meeting room 2, a no-frills, bare-floored space with overly good acoustics that probably usually hosts motivational speakers and rained-out church picnics but today is decorated with fresh flowers and origami birds and strings of white lights for Amy and Rafael’s very low-budget wedding. Shabby chic, Amy wrote in her e-mailed invitation, or possibly just shabby! But it all looks perfect to me, the flowers and the paper birds and the party lights, fresh and hopeful and earnest in a good way, although I probably won’t admit that to anyone.

  “Oh, my God, this is weird,” I whisper to Jane as murmurings start at the back of the room, and the wedding guests go quiet. Jane shushes me so loudly that the elderly lady in front of us turns and shakes her head at us with a ghoulish wobble of loose skin. I poke my elbow into Jane’s rib cage. “That was your fault,” I whisper again. “Offer her a peppermint!”

  Jane elbows me back and scowls a reproach, but then, Jane-like, she relents and throws her arm around my shoulder; Willa-like, I wriggle it off.

  To the opening notes of “I Got You, Babe,” which is either an excellent preemptive strike or the strangest shotgun-wedding song choice of all time, we crane our necks toward the door. “Oh! Here comes the bride,” Jane says, Oah! Here comes the br-eye-id, her Wisconsin accent thick, the way it is when she gets emotional, as our friend appears, beaming. With a little shrug, Amy starts walking, unaccompanied, down the makeshift aisle, to Cher’s warbling alto; she’s wearing a bright yellow sleeveless dress, her hands wrapped around a small bouquet of white daisies and resting on her bulging belly as if that’s what it’s there for, a little shelf, a portable hand rest. Rafael stands at the front in black pants and a blue linen shirt, his face very pale. He looks like the flag of a tiny, neutral, Alpine country.

  Jane and I chipped in on a set of pretty salad bowls that Amy and Rafael had registered for, but I can’t help but think that they’ll be spearing baby spinach and cherry tomatoes from those burnt orange glazed pottery bowls long after they’ve forgotten Jane and me. Which doesn’t distract from my enjoyment of the day, not at all; in fact, my irrelevance fixes me right here, solidly in the moment, as if I’m watching a play, or maybe in a play, but with no lines—other than “Offer her a peppermint,” I guess.

  “I never thought I’d find myself here,” Rafael says, his hands gripping Amy’s, his voice shaky, “with you.” Jane sighs. The party lights cast an ethereal glow around the windowless room, like stars in a planetarium. A box fan rattles in the corner. “Am
y,” Rafael says, “since you came into my life, everything has changed.”

  “Except diapers,” I whisper to Jane. “Diapers will be changed next.” At the Yom Kippur services of my childhood, Seth and I used to try to make each other laugh with jokes about the ladies in fancy outfits (She’s atoning for the murder of all those minks) and the jowly-cheeked cantor (He’s storing nuts for winter), but now I see that Jane is wiping a tear from her eye, and the feeling of being a spectator shifts and settles in me, a dense and strange amalgam of yearning and embarrassment and full-on surprise.

  “I can’t believe how lucky I am,” Amy is saying, looking up at Rafael, “to have found you.” Her blond hair is swept up in a complicated twist, pretty tendrils framing her face. Rafael nods in agreement, and then Amy sneezes, and everyone in the room laughs.

  “Why was that funny?” I ask Jane. This is the first wedding I’ve ever been to. I guess it’s obvious that this is the final destination for two people in love. And soon enough it will cease to shock me—those fat envelopes addressed to Ms. Willa Jacobs and Guest; budgeting tea kettles and place settings and linen napkin sets into my monthly expenses. But right here, as the ceremony continues, I feel bewildered by it, as stunned as if I’d stepped out of my apartment building to find that I was in another country, smack dab in the middle of a busy jumble of bodies where everybody knows the language but me. Where was I when the instructions were given to pair off, to slice away from friends and re-form as a couple? What boat have I missed? “Why was that funny?” I ask again, although maybe that’s not the right question.

  Jane is digging around in her bag. “I’m starving,” she whispers, and when the old lady in front of us turns, inevitably, to glare at us again, Jane leans forward and offers her a candy. To my surprise, she accepts.