Friends Like Us

by Lauren Fox

  Jane is using me to flirt with Dougie, although amid the confusion of the crowded bar, I can’t wrap my mind around exactly how it’s happening. She kisses my cheek again and grabs my hand. Maybe I’m her stand-in, her stunt double. Maybe I’m like one of those mannequins we learned CPR on in seventh grade. Place your open mouth on the doll’s lips, press your hands onto her still chest, and bring her mechanical heart back to life. Willa, Willa, are you okay?

  “I need a beer,” Jane says.

  Dougie leans across the bar and flags down the bartender, holds up three fingers. The refreshment choices here are regular and lite, but it’s okay: the crowd and the noise and the feathery skim of Jane’s hair against my shoulder are starting to get to me, to stir up the sediment inside me. “Dougie’s cute,” I whisper-shout to Jane as he’s paying the bartender. “Oddly.”

  We stand for a while, the three of us sipping self-consciously, smiling, smiling, then make our way to a booth in the back, where there are fewer people and it’s slightly quieter. A middle-aged waitress in a red-and-white dirndl stands over us and asks if we’re interested in the special.

  “Sorry, I missed that,” Dougie says, wiping foam from his lip.

  The waitress bends toward us. “Schnitzel,” she says, her voice low and tired, her right thigh braced against our table. “Tonight’s special is schnitzel!” The pronouncement sends Jane into a sudden convulsion of laughter.

  Dougie shakes his head at the waitress, and she turns and walks away. With nothing but a few bites of pancake, this afternoon’s pretzel, and half of a beer in her, Jane is loose—her arms and legs a little wobbly, gestures imprecise, her conversation unfiltered. “Oh, God, I don’t know why that was so funny,” she says. “Schnitzel.” She wipes tears from her face with the back of her hand, and Dougie looks at her, concern furrowing his low-hanging eyebrows.

  “So, Willa,” he says quickly. “I got divorced recently.” His face immediately goes pink. “I don’t know if you knew that.”

  I cringe. I recognize this galumphing attempt to redirect the conversation, but that doesn’t make it any more graceful. I know the feeling of trying to play the piano with a sledgehammer. “That must have been rough,” I say, and he raises his beer stein to me.

  “Divorce! Betrayal!” Jane guzzles her beer and plonks the glass down on the table. “Love’s in disrepair!” she sings.

  “Are you still in touch with your ex?” I ask.

  “Erin. Her name’s Erin. And, nah.” And then Dougie Tyler, former frat boy who is indeed wearing an Alpha Sigma Sigma sweatshirt, baseball cap sticking out of his back pocket, holes in his jeans, divorced Dougie Tyler who sells sports equipment and lives in his parents’ basement and lifts weights for fun and says I know, hey when he agrees with someone, Dougie Tyler laughs: at himself, at the mundane misfortune of being a divorced twenty-six-year-old man who’s still pining for his ex-wife, at the incongruity of sitting at a booth in a small-town bar with his crumbling mess of a former girlfriend and her best friend.

  Her intriguing best friend? Something passes between us, and I revel in it, in the surprising, off-beat thud-thud of my heart. Hello. “Erin,” I say. “What a bitch.”

  “I know, hey.” Dougie nods.

  Jane fiddles with the edge of a paper coaster. “Did I ever meet her?”

  “You did, you met her at Fisk’s graduation party. She wore a back brace in high school?”

  “Oo, sexy!” Jane says, and Dougie laughs again.

  “Yeah, but it was good for a while. It worked.” He looks at me and finishes the last of his beer.

  “You know, you should come visit us in Milwaukee sometime,” Jane says dreamily. “You should!”

  “I’ll go get us another round,” I say, a little wobbly now myself.

  I stop in the bathroom first, then make my way to the bar, where I wait for a while, sandwiched between bodies, brushed by the occasional, accidental sweep of fabric or skin. It feels good to be in the thick of things, even if it’s hard to breathe in here, even if polka music makes me nervous—Enjoy it! Or there will be consequences!—even if the small flame inside me has been ignited by the unlikeliest of sparks.

  The bartender slides three mugs to me, and I arrange them carefully. Right now I’m here to take care of Jane; she needs me. And Dougie sees me. Although he may see me as a new yet familiar country, although I may just be, to Dougie, Canada, still, he sees me. I’m walking back to our table, three cold glasses of beer balanced in my hands, and I’m thinking about upping my game, about letting him know that the interest is mutual. This is how it all comes together. I get it; I’m late to the party, but I get it. I may be semiemployed and single and directionless, but I can be good at this. I feel the vibration of this place, the low and pleasant thrum of hope, fleeting and fine.

  And then I see them. Jane’s long, white arms draped around Dougie’s neck, his big, blond head tipped down toward her dark one, the two of them, their faces pressed together; I can actually see the wet pink flick of someone’s tongue, Dougie and Jane locked in a sloppy kiss, Oh, of course, and me, nine feet tall and thick as a tree, lowering three glasses onto the table with a slosh of beer.

  They part, faces flushed with what may or may not be guilt. I stare as Dougie removes his hand from inside the front of Jane’s shirt. His hair is sticking up on one side. They must have gotten right to it, as soon as I left. Slowly, and without looking at me, Jane rebuttons the three top buttons of her shirt and adjusts her bra strap. Dougie looks down and tugs at his sweatshirt.

  The inside of my mouth is suddenly pasty and dry. “Hey, you two. Hey, now.” I slide into my seat across from them. Dougie slings his arm over Jane’s shoulder. Jane runs her tongue over her teeth and blinks slowly, like a lizard. I grab one of the beers. “So, what were you two talking about?”

  Jane laughs a little and then turns her focus to the skin underneath her right thumbnail. “I could go for some potato salad,” she says, licking her lips. “Is what I could go for.”

  Dougie, recovered, leaps up from the booth. They dish out sides of German potato salad and sauerkraut here, pale little dumplings, and an array of tiny sausages in rolls—greasy little men in sleeping bags—straight from the bar. He scurries off to fulfill Jane’s request.

  I watch my friend tending to her cuticles. “Seriously? Did I really just see what I think I saw?”

  She turns to me slowly, eyes narrowed, thumb resting on the ledge of her lower lip. “I don’t know. Yes. I thought …” With her teeth, she rips off a shred of skin from the side of her nail; a bright red flower of blood blossoms there. “You were flirting with him. With Dougie! I got … I felt … proprietary.”

  My heart thumps hard and then takes off at a sprint. I fill my mouth with beer and swallow it in a huge, bitter gulp. I look at my friend’s face, and in this charged, tipsy moment I see her as she must once have been, a smooth, pink, fuzzy-headed baby with round eyes and wet, red lips, and as she will be, cheeks like deflated balloons, wrinkles creasing down from the sides of her nose to the edges of her mouth, the cartilaginous tip of her straight nose sagging. What is the weight of conflict with my best friend? How do I balance these scales? She and Dougie kissed—made out, pawed each other, in a bar, cleared at least a couple of bases—and she’s blaming me for it. She has a boyfriend. Ben! Ben is her boyfriend! She could have given this one to me, if it was hers to give. But is it worth leveling an angry accusation at her when she’s vulnerable? My heart pounds faster, my engine floods; I’m stalled out.

  Before I can figure out the answer to my own question, Jane extends her hand, bleeding thumb and all, across the dark wood of the table. “Oh, Willa, oh, shit, I fucked up.” At the table behind us, someone laughs, low and bleating, like a goat. I shake my head to try to clear it, a gesture that probably looks to Jane like I’m disagreeing with her.

  Dougie, stocky and bowlegged—I hadn’t noticed it before, his cowboy swagger—returns to the table and displays his treasure: a plate of things, un
identifiable objects, red, pickled slices of vegetables, dollops of cream, meats, and a low, gelatinous mountain of potato salad. He smiles at Jane proudly and deposits the dish on the table. I swallow the urge to slap the grin off his wide face.

  Jane unfolds herself from the booth. “I’m so sorry, Dougie. We have to go.” I stand up quickly and slide away from the table, smiling, nodding. “We have to go,” Jane says again, tucking her hair behind her ears, “because Willa’s not feeling well.” On cue, I squeeze my smile into a grimace of pain, clutch my stomach and moan softly. We’re back in cahoots, where we belong. She waves her hand toward the plate of food. “Can I give you some money for that?” She asks the question like a person who probably doesn’t have five dollars in her wallet, who maybe doesn’t have a wallet at all, who knows she doesn’t need one.

  Dougie, crestfallen, shakes his head. He slides his hands into the pockets of his jeans and tilts toward Jane as, with an elegant arch, she backs quickly away.

  In the car on the way home to Milwaukee the next day, I drive and Jane is quiet. An hour in, we stop for gas. It’s drizzling, a light mist that keeps promising to swell into something more but then doesn’t, the kind of rain that evaporates before it hits the pavement, too weak and unsure of itself to cool the humid air.

  I’m filling the tank as Jane walks toward me from the convenience store, waving two packages of Twinkies. “It’s not a road trip without junk food,” she says happily.

  “It’s ten a.m.,” I say, shaking my head in disgust. “Way too early for Twinkies. You should have gotten Ding Dongs.”

  She leans against the car, eases one foot out of its flip-flop, and scratches her calf with her toe. “Willa, I need to say … I want to ask you …” She taps the plastic Twinkies package against her bare leg. “Please promise me that you won’t tell Ben what happened last night? With Dougie? Please?” She inches away from the car and rolls her shoulders, straightens her back, revealing the flesh above the low waistband of her shorts. She meets my gaze. For a second Jane looks lost and miserable, her eyes huge and glassy.

  I feel the sudden need to protect my friend, to keep her safe from her bad choices and her worst instincts. I grip the handle of the gas pump, sense the vibration under my palm. It’s perverse, really: the hose, the pump, the coursing fluid. I almost laugh. Who is responsible for this? How is it that I’ve never, in all my years of filling cars with gas, realized it before?

  The tank is full; the pump clicks off. I replace the gas cap, wipe sweat from my forehead, and reach for the Twinkies, take them from Jane’s thin fingers, her loose grip. We get back into the car, doors slamming shut simultaneously.

  Is it as simple as this, then? Is this love? “I won’t tell,” I say to Jane, certain as anything, unwrapping the indestructible yellow pastry and biting off a hunk of it. “Don’t worry.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Seth is waiting for me outside our apartment building when we get home from Marcy, lurking in the small lobby like someone you should probably call the police to report.

  “Will,” he says, hoisting himself up and nodding hello to Jane. “I need you.” Seth is like the semi-tame deer that hangs around shyly in the backyard, and you want to feed it because you think that without you it will starve, even though it won’t. But still, you approach slowly with your hands full of organic alfalfa sprouts. Even though I’m due at the flower shop in a half hour and all I want is a shower and a bagel, my answer is yes; it’s always yes.

  It’s eighty-eight degrees out, and Seth lugs a big cardboard box as we walk, shifting it from arm to arm. His face is dripping, his breathing labored. Nina has asked Seth to meet her at the Bay Bluff School playground, near my apartment. It’s equidistant from her lab and Seth’s new place, and also, I think, she probably wants to see him on neutral territory.

  “I can’t do this alone,” he whispers to me as we stand together on the edge of the grass, and I know that this is as close as I’ll get to a thank-you. He cradles the cardboard box and squints, looking around at the throngs of happy, screeching children. “Do you know what all these little kids and babies make me think of?”

  A swarm of gnats circles in the air close to my own dripping face; I swat them away, and they return like thugs to harass me. “What do they make you think of?” I ask gently. We wander over to a bench and sit down, and immediately the painted wooden slats adhere to my thighs.

  “Sex.”

  “Um, Seth, guys who say things like that probably shouldn’t be hanging out at playgrounds.”

  “Ha.” He fidgets, moves his hands from the box and clasps them around the back of his neck. Two full moons of sweat darken the armpits of his gray T-shirt. “I just mean, sex. All these women chasing after their kids, they all had sex and made babies and now they’re here, yelling, ‘Good job, Isabella!’ and ‘Aidan, I said no biting!’ ”

  I laugh. “You know, that’s just … that’s a weird thing to say.”

  “Well, this is a weird place to be.”

  “I guess.”

  “You have no idea.” He turns to me. The past half year of his life is stamped onto his unshaven face: puffy bags under his eyes, a marshmallow jowliness rounding his jaw, a spray of pimples dotting his shiny forehead, and another small zit nestled at the corner of his mouth. He adjusts his baseball cap, pushes it back past his hairline, then forward again to shade his eyes.

  I still don’t know why he and Nina broke up, and Seth is a fortress against questions. Whatever it was, a drunken one-night stand with a waitress at Rags or a drawn-out, angst-ridden tryst with a friend’s almost ex, who knows? But I’m pretty sure Seth sabotaged his own happiness.

  A hot, moist breath of wind stirs the trees. It feels like we’re in a sauna. In the sandbox in front of us, without warning, a blond girl in a pink gingham sundress dumps a bucket of sand over a small boy’s head. He presses his fat hands to his face and screams. The boy’s mother, who had been sitting on the edge of the sandbox in a droopy daze, stands, scoops him up, and glares at the little girl. “Where is your mother?” she hisses, then shoots a lightning bolt at me and storms away with the little boy. The girl in gingham immediately starts wailing—loud, wretched moans, the anguished yowls of a dying animal—and then, a few seconds later, just as abruptly, she stops. She surveys the now-empty sandbox as if she has just witnessed a natural disaster, then looks over at Seth and me, eyes wet and blinking, face somber.

  I nudge Seth. Am I supposed to do something, to fill in for her absent mother like a substitute teacher? I spot a cluster of women across the park, absorbed in conversation. One of them looks over toward us and waves. “Hi, Caiiiitlinnnn, hi, sweeeetie!” she calls.

  Well, okay. Caitlin waves back slowly. Then she turns her attention to her bare feet, poking at her toes with a small stick.

  I watch her for a little while. She seems to straddle a very fine line between self-sufficient and neglected. Or maybe there is no line, only the long, tricky road to adulthood that starts sooner for some than for others, and way too early for us all. “I like your dress,” I say.

  Seth, next to me, startles. He lets out a little whimper, and I follow his gaze: it’s Nina, jogging toward us, impervious to the lethargy that grips everyone else. She’s wearing a green T-shirt, cutoffs, and waders; they thwap against the blacktop as she nears us. She’s carrying a cardboard box, too, and she looks both determined and slightly crazy.

  “Hey,” she says. “Oh, hey.”

  She drops her box on the bench next to Seth and leans in for quick hugs, one for Seth, not returned, then one for me. She’s bony against my body, slight as a bird. She smells a little swampy, but she looks pretty, her hair pulled away from her face in a messy ponytail, wispy strands softening her features; her skin, which is prone to the blotchiness of the redhead, is perfect. On a good day, Nina looks like sunshine, like dew, like the angels gathered at her conception and danced on her mother’s womb. Too bad for Seth, this is a good day.

  “Hey, you,” I say
softly, aware that any expression of affection is a betrayal of Seth, but I miss my brother’s ex-girlfriend, not the kind of missing you do late at night, alone in your bed, aching, but the kind you forget about, the kind that only hits you when you see a person you have loved, her physical self a reminder. The way she laughed so hard at your dumb joke about a talking snail that tears streamed down her freckly cheeks; how she once spent a full day without realizing that she had a speck of arugula trapped between her two charmingly crooked front teeth until her boss actually reached over and plucked it out. Lettuce agree never to speak of this again, I said that night, over dinner at the apartment, and she nodded solemnly in agreement.

  “How are you?” I ask now. I can’t help myself.

  “Good, I’m good,” she says briskly. She nods at Seth. “I brought your stuff.” She stands above us in her ridiculous getup. “And you have mine. Obviously.” She crosses her arms over her chest. The sun shines behind her. Even with my sunglasses on, I have to shade my eyes to look at her.

  “Hey, Nina,” Seth says, a fake, tense cheeriness knifing through his voice. He’s sitting up very straight. “Look at that. That old beach ball.” He points to a deflated red, green, and yellow plastic ball lying in the box Nina has brought for him. “I didn’t know that was mine. I thought that was ours. I thought we bought that together, last summer. But hey, hey, Nina, that’s cool, that’s, like, a great metaphor right there.”

  “Oh,” Nina says, surprised by Seth’s icy rage, flustered, her face blushing fast and dark. “Okay. I’m sorry.” She looks around, anywhere but at Seth. “Well, I have to go. Back to the river. Back to work.” Her voice catches on “work.”

  Seth doesn’t say anything for a minute, and Nina doesn’t move. “Wow, this must be really good frog weather!” I say. I have no idea what I’m talking about. After all this time apart, they are still this raw with each other, unable to act normal together for even three minutes, to pretend that their hearts, their beating frog hearts, haven’t been removed and dissected and left for scraps. I find that I am, perversely, envious. Envious! Of their ungovernable connection.