Friends Like Us

by Lauren Fox

  “God,” I say, feeling small and shabby in the shadow of my bighearted friend. “I’m sorry. You didn’t get on my nerves. Not at all. It’s the breakup, I guess.” I close my eyes for a moment, let that half-truth settle between us.

  “Ben said he told you about law school, about us maybe moving.”

  “Uh-huh.” Still on my back, I turn my face to hers. Her nose is shiny, her eyes dark in the lamplight.

  “I don’t know what to say.” She furrows her eyebrows, little wrinkles trenching a familiar path, and I think about the million tiny ways Ben knows her now, how when you love someone, you take that person into your body, your fingertips predicting their angles and curves; how you smell like them in the morning.

  “It’s okay,” I say, because it ought to be. There’s a smear of face cream on her cheek, pearly white against her pink skin. “Do you really want to be a lawyer?”

  “Maybe.” The blanket on top of her rises and falls with her shrug. She licks her lips and sighs. Her breath is toothpaste-minty. “I’m tired of looking at blue toilet water.”

  “But what will I do without you guys?” What will I do? My throat is thick, suddenly: I’m bereft.

  “I know.” Her voice is high and thin. “I can’t even let myself think about that.” Outside, a motorcycle buzzes past, so loud it sounds like it’s about to barrel into our apartment. “Anyway, it’s months away. And you’ll visit. Like, a lot.”

  “Yeah.” It comes over me at once that I’m bone tired. My body is sinking into a presleep lull. I close my eyes again for a second, maybe longer. When I open them, Jane is right where I left her, staring at me intently. I imagine myself visiting Ben and Jane in their cute apartment in D.C., sleeping on their pullout couch, drinking their good coffee in the morning. We’re taking you to the best Ethiopian restaurant, right around the corner! Tomorrow, the National Gallery.… This was so great, you guys. See you soon, see you again soon.

  Jane fidgets and wriggles and arranges her body, ending up a sliver closer to me; we could touch noses now if we wanted to. She exhales, her breath a warm puff. “Okay,” she says. “G’night.” She rolls away to the other side of the bed, the soft mattress bouncing gently in her wake.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  The dim hallway of Seth’s building is a dark and gloomy contrast to the sunny morning, and it takes my eyes a few minutes to adjust. My brother called me a couple hours ago. “Do you have any toilet paper you could loan me?” His voice was a low rumble on the other end of the line. “I ran out.”

  “Um, I guess so.” Seth lives around the corner from Haber’s Drugs, and two blocks from the Shop ’n’ Save. “Sure.” I cracked my neck and looked around my room. Jane had slept in my bed for much of the night; I remembered that she’d crept away just as the first dim light was sneaking in. There was still a head-shaped indentation on the pillow. I felt weird, like an abandoned lover or a sixth grader alone at the lunch table. I rolled over onto my stomach with the phone in my hand. “Do you need, um, anything else?” I couldn’t imagine what he would say to that. A box of Cheerios? His dignity?

  I got dressed and went to the grocery store for toilet paper, milk, bread, peanut butter, a bunch of bananas, and, on a whim, one pear. I thought it would be funny to hand Seth the piece of fruit and say, “I brought you this pear, but I see you already have it.” I changed my mind about that and ate it in the car.

  I smile at him now as he takes the paper bag from me. “We need to get you out of here, Seth,” I say brightly, standing in the doorway of his apartment, trying to both exude cheer and breathe shallowly at the same time. It smells like pot and wet towels and some other things, old and greasy and unidentifiable. “Oh, Seth,” I say. “We need to open some windows and then get you out of here.”

  I peer around his dingy apartment at a tableau of dissolution: empty pizza boxes and beer and soda cans strewn about the living room, a tangle of wires in the middle of the floor, a pair of socks next to the TV, a full bowl of something wet and yellowish on the futon. He actually is using an upturned cardboard box as a coffee table, the idea I suggested to him—yes, meanly, but jokingly—when he was moving in. He hasn’t even bothered to throw a dishcloth over it. The apartment is the physical manifestation of defeat, a glimpse into the psychic landscape of a man who can no longer be bothered.

  Seth watches me looking around. He scratches his head and gives me a half smile. “Can I get you something to drink?” he asks, and we both start laughing.

  “A nice dessert wine, if you have it?”

  He heads toward the kitchen with the bag of groceries. “You’re a good sister,” he says quietly, so out of character that I gasp, then immediately decide that he must have said something else. You’re a shoplifter?

  “Thanks,” I mumble, and follow him into the kitchen, where he is already guzzling milk straight from the carton.

  “Do you know where I want to go?” he asks, wiping his mouth with his sleeve. I shake my head. “The Domes.” The Mitchell Park Domes are a Milwaukee landmark, three huge, glass-encased botanical gardens shaped like breasts. They loom over the city, a fetishist’s gigantic fantasy. Seth shoves a handful of Cheerios into his mouth. “The Domes,” he says again, crunching, “because I like the gift shop. If you want to. I guess we could go anywhere, really.” He looks around. “I probably should go somewhere.…”

  I turn my attention to a grease stain on the linoleum—luckily for me there are plenty to choose from. I see right through my brother’s forced nonchalance. Nina told me: the Domes are where they had their first date, their first kiss behind the hibiscus in the Tropical Dome, their new love hatching in the steamy heat of the climate-controlled rainforest.

  “We can go there,” I say. “If you want to.” A visit to the scene of the crime seems like a very bad idea for him, but I’ll go along with it. Maybe I’ll feign an interest in cacti and guide us to the Desert Dome, where plants bloom despite their parched surroundings. It could be just the thing for us both.

  “I just can’t seem to pull my shit together,” Seth says to me, as we wander down the circular path in the Tropical Dome, vanilla flowers and orchids blossoming lush and thick before us, and a damp, sweet smell wafting—an odor, like so many things, somewhere between perfume and decay. “I feel so bleak. And then these spasms of fury come over me. One minute I’m okay, the next second I want to kick a bunny.”

  “Bunnies can be such assholes.”

  We’re quiet for a minute as a woman and two babies in a massive double stroller roll up behind us. We have to step off the path to let them go by. The babies’ big heads are inclined toward each other, bobbing in sleep. Their mother, in a pink tank top and yoga pants, walks by quickly, her face grim and resolute.

  “My office mates probably think I have a bladder problem,” Seth says. “I take so many bathroom breaks just to get myself under control. I’m a train wreck. I feel like a chick on the rag.”

  I run the tips of my fingers across the feathery edge of a fern. “I have news for you, though,” I say. “That is not how chicks on the rag feel.” Sometimes my brother takes me by surprise, and before I know it I’m sucked into the vortex of his vileness.

  “No,” he says, shaking his head. “It is. That’s how Nina was.”

  How have I lost this argument? But I have. “Um, well … how are you going to turn it around?”

  “I’ve decided,” he says. “I’m not going to.” He pushes his hand through his hair.

  “Oh, Seth,” I say, any remaining annoyance consumed by a blaze of sympathy for him. “You won’t feel this bad forever!”

  “No, no, no. I mean, sure, I could, I could get back on track, but I realized recently that being so in touch with my emotions is kind of a good thing. It’s left me with more to give.” He puts air quotes around give, as if, even as he’s saying it, he knows he won’t be giving anything to anyone. He keeps his hands suspended in the air for a few seconds, demarcating nothing. “So at first I was thinking I could becom
e a monk, although then I thought I would make a crappy monk. Like I’m going to eat rice and not have sex for the rest of my life.” I’m a few steps ahead of him, murmuring Mm hmm, trying not to think about my brother having sex, before I realize he’s stopped to read the description of a kapok tree. “So then, Wilford, I thought, what do people do who are, like, full of their own feelings? What do they do?” He looks at me intently, too intently. “They create! They write, they paint, they make music.… I mean, that’s what you’ve been doing all these years, or whatever, feeling shit and then, like, drawing shit?”

  “Why, Seth, I didn’t realize you were paying attention.”

  “No, shut up. This is serious. I’m serious. I’m going to write a screenplay!”

  “Okay, well … great!” I cringe, imagining the kind of script Seth would write: a little rom-com, where the redheaded girlfriend, Gina, is a merciless bureaucrat, or maybe a dental hygienist, someone who likes to use sharp tools and inflict pain, and Sam, our hapless hero, just can’t see what a ballbuster she is, but then, after some complications, maybe an ill-fated trip to Jamaica or a futile quest to find the winning lottery ticket he accidentally threw out, he finally does see, and he ends up with the incredibly hot yet selfless kindergarten teacher. Or maybe an action flick, where the nerdy math geek rescues the planet from an attack of evil freckly, redheaded aliens, gaining the love of his incredibly hot yet selfless coworker at the lab. Jessica loosens her wavy blond hair from its bun; it cascades down her back. She takes off her glasses. Sam reaches for her. “I never noticed how incredibly hot you were before!”

  “Great!” I say again.

  “But, you know, all these years I’ve been exercising the other side of my brain.” He taps his head. Seth works for the city’s Department of Water Quality, analyzing data on microscopic organisms and contaminants. Everywhere I look, he likes to say, I see shit. He’s been saying it since long before he and Nina split up.

  “Yeah?” I haven’t seen my brother this animated in months. So I’m trying to pretend that the bad feeling in my stomach is from too much coffee.

  “And this is where you come in!”

  “Ah.”

  “Will, seriously, listen. You can help me write it! You can, I don’t know, cut your hours at the flower shop, that’ll give you some extra time, and I’ll give you an outline, a really detailed outline of what I want to happen, and we’ll write it together! I mean, you could do most of the writing, and I’ll have, like, creative control!” He looks at me with so much sincerity that I am, for a moment, tempted to say yes.

  “No.”

  “Just like that?”

  When I was fourteen, Seth told me that his best friend, Eric Ackerman, captain of the swim team, had a crush on me. Write him a note, Seth said. Tell him you’re interested! I was already five-eleven then, my boobs as big as my head, my center of gravity treacherously high. I hadn’t met Ben yet. I had glasses and braces and hair that grew out instead of down, and I had not yet discovered the magic of a silicone-based antifrizz product. My limbs were too long for my body, like a marionette’s, and I was in the habit of apologizing to the inanimate objects I bumped into—lockers, desks, lunchroom tables. Sorry! Oh, whoops, sorry about that! Still, I wrote that note. So, yes, there was a time Seth could convince me of anything. “Yep,” I say now, bonking my hip against a bench at the side of the path. “Just like that.”

  Seth is quiet again, sulky. We’ve rounded half of the perimeter of the rainforest and are slowly making our way back to the entrance. I’m starting to feel sticky and overwhelmed by the humidity of this enormous greenhouse, a misplaced succulent, a cactus trapped in the wrong dome. I suck in a deep breath that doesn’t quite do the trick, that gets caught somewhere partway down. The woman with the dozing twins is coming up behind us again, the stroller clacking as it gains on us.

  “Hey!” Seth turns as she nears us, trying to edge past. “Hey, do you mind?”

  She looks up, a little confused. “Sorry,” she mutters, slowing slightly.

  “Yeah, well, we’re trying to walk here,” he says, jamming his hands into the pockets of his jeans. “Why don’t you get off the path with that double-wide of yours?”

  “Jeez,” she says. One of the babies stirs, squeaks, then settles. Their mother shrugs. “Guess they’re not the only ones who need a nap today.” She maneuvers her stroller off the paved walkway, crushing a few tiny purple flowers as she does.

  “Seth!” I say, when she’s out of earshot.

  “Well, we had the right of way!”

  “Oh, yeah. I forgot about that sign, BABIES IN STROLLERS MUST YIELD TO GRUMPY PEDESTRIANS.”

  He lets out a little huff and sulks some more, shoulders slumped, head down. “Hey,” he says, after a few minutes, looking up and glaring at me. “I bet you’re getting excited for Jane and Ben’s wedding. That’s coming up real soon now, isn’t it? I bet that’ll be fun for you.” He takes his right hand out of his pocket and flicks the leaf of a flowering philodendron. “You brought them together, and now off they go without you. Happily ever after.” He breaks the leaf off the plant, then tosses it onto the ground. “Must suck.”

  “Um, well.…” The wheels in my brain spin furiously before I realize that no answer is required. Seth will say whatever Seth will say. I understand with a sudden, sharp stab that I’m here to take it.

  “No, seriously, Willa, you’re so judgmental. You think I’m the loser and you’re this … this … holier-than-thou princess good-girl martyr. It’s pathetic. You think your life looks any better than mine? You think that by not actively fucking up you’re not a fuckup?”

  He stops to catch his breath and I turn and look at him, this grown man, my brother, who ruined his relationship with Nina and seems hell-bent on destroying ours now, too. A trickle of sweat runs down the side of his face. The earth tilts off its axis. Admiration and pity cannot coexist.

  Two bright yellow birds swoop and squawk overhead and land in a rustle of leaves, startling me. I had forgotten about that, that there are tropical birds living in the trees here. They probably think they’re in Borneo or Java or Botswana, somewhere hot and wet and real. But they’re living out their entire tropical-bird lives in the Mitchell Park Domes in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Idiots. Bird brains!

  “Hey,” I say. “I think I’m ready to leave now.” Seth is still staring straight ahead, and for a second I’m not sure if he heard me. I pick up my pace as we near the exit. I drove us here; he has no choice but to follow.

  When I get back from the Domes, a big package is sitting in the middle of the kitchen table, wrapped in shiny silver paper and tied with a red bow. Ben and Jane are scrunched together on the couch, reading the same book.

  “Who’s this one from?” For the past three weeks the UPS truck has been stopping in front of our apartment. I’ve gotten to know the driver. His name is Don. His daughter, Kate, is a freshman at the University of Iowa. His son, Evan, has been in and out of rehab. But he’s doing much better now.

  “Us,” Ben says, smiling.

  Jane nods. “Us!”

  “Oh, cute,” I say. They’ve gotten a present for each other. Maybe I’ll get myself a present. Congratulations on losing your boyfriend and your best friends and your brother! You’re really alone now! Maybe a tablecloth or a nice assortment of jellies. Or an egg spoon. Declan was always going on about egg spoons. You can’t get an egg spoon in this bloody country. I really want to go into my room and lie down. I start down the hall with a backward wave. “Gotta get ready for work,” I mumble.

  “No,” Jane says. “It’s from us to you!”

  I bounce back into the kitchen, excited in spite of myself. A present! “Why?”

  “Just open it,” Ben says, dog-earing their book.

  I shove the bow aside and rip into the paper. I’ve never understood people who unwrap presents as if they’re performing surgery, carefully peeling back the tape, delaying gratification until the last possible second. I tear the silver paper o
ff with one satisfying yank.

  END UP, it says on the side, and I wonder, for one fleeting second, if this box is trying to tell me something. See, dumb ass? Here is where you END UP.

  “Oh!” I say. Kaffeeautomaten. A coffeemaker. But we already have one, a serviceable hand-me-down from Bonnie Weston. I look at Ben and Jane on the couch, Jane cross-legged, her left knee resting on Ben’s right, both of them gazing at me hopefully. They’re starting to resemble each other, like dogs and their owners. Ben’s hair is longer than it was in high school, and Jane often wears his shirts; their expressions, I’ve noticed, mirror each other’s more and more, those eager half smiles, the way they purse their lips when they’re confused, forming the silent wh? of a question.

  I get it, of course: this fancy coffeemaker, with its built-in water filter and its integrated bean grinder, this German brand my parents always made a point of not buying. It’s for me, this Kaffeeautomaten, because they’ll be taking the old one with them.

  “It’s programmable!” Jane says.

  “For when you’re just too tired in the morning to push a button!”

  “Wow,” I say. “This is amazing. Thanks.” Tears push up against the backs of my eyes, the pressure building. “This is really … amazing.” I’m imagining this state-of-the-art chrome-and-steel machine in the Dumpster out back, picturing myself dropping it off at Goodwill, unopened—auf Wiedersehen! What a deal for someone else, what a find. “Thank you so much.”

  Gratefully, I feel the tears recede, floodwaters that at the last minute do not breach the banks. In a flash, I see myself drinking coffee alone at the kitchen table before work. Someone else has moved into Jane’s old room. Her name is Andrea. She hates coffee. She cooks with Hamburger Helper most nights and there is the pervasive smell of beef in the apartment. She gives herself pedicures on the couch; she uses those little Styrofoam toe sandwiches to keep the bright pink polish from smearing.