Friends Like Us

by Lauren Fox

  “Oh, no!” I say. “But I cut off my feet and sold them so I could buy you a beautiful hat!”

  “And I cut off my head and sold it, to buy you these socks.”

  “So tragic!”

  Ben left two weeks ago. For three days I lay in my bed and I poked my fingers into the electric socket of my memory. Ben would not come back to me. Not come back. I cried and cried and cried and cried. My bed was covered in a damp blanket of crumpled white Kleenex and balled-up sheets of paper from my sketch pad, halfhearted attempts at drawings ripped out and discarded. By the end of the third day I didn’t think I could cry anymore, but I was wrong, and that night I cried some more. My stomach was sore from it. My eye sockets ached.

  On the fourth day, Seth came over with a box of Ho Hos and some Popsicles. “Willa,” he said, “I swear to God, simple carbohydrates and refined sugars will make you feel better.” He tapped his fingers on the Ho Hos, and he said it again. “They will Make You Feel Better.” He sat me down at the kitchen table and unwrapped an orange Popsicle. “Here,” he said, holding it out to me. “A little taste.”

  I didn’t want to, but my tongue touched down on the syrupy ice-cold surface of it, and I took it from him, and the delicious shock of it! Seth was right; it made me feel a little better. Then I had a Ho Ho, and I felt sick, but also slightly more like myself.

  Ben has written to me every day from Ecuador, just like he promised. His e-mails are full of the buzzy thrill of a new experience: his companions, the former priest from Detroit with the fabulously foul mouth, the middle-aged divorcée with a taste for tequila; the cloud forests, the hot springs; the roaming iguanas, the cockroaches as big as your head, the mosquitoes that can make you sterile. I think he made that last one up. His e-mails are vivid with delight and surprise, but not longing.

  Sometimes, late at night, alone in my apartment, I yank the covers up to my chin and I stare at the dark walls of my bedroom and my heart pounds like a jailed psychopath in my chest and I think, I have lost everything. Once in a while I’ll roll over and sniff Ben’s pillow or wander into Jane’s old room, and then I’m embarrassed, even at two o’clock in the morning in an apartment by myself. But it’s in those dark, jangling, self-conscious moments that I know in my bones that he’s not coming back. Not to me. “God,” I say to Seth now, taking a deep, ragged breath. “It just really sucks.”

  Seth nods sympathetically, but I catch him suppressing a tiny smile. He can’t help himself. He’s been dating a woman he met recently at a city council meeting on water quality. Her name is Judy, and she works for the Department of Public Works. They talk about combined filtration systems and hundred-year floods and microbial contamination; Seth has been smiling, off and on, for two weeks now. He also looks like he’s lost about five pounds.

  He pulls on the novelty rainbow socks I got him with the separate compartment for each toe. “Can I tell you something?” He tugs his jeans—clean and hole-free—back over his ankles. “I always thought Kern was kind of a twerp.”

  “No kidding.”

  “No, I mean, I get that he was your best friend, or whatever, and I know he had a thing for you, so that excuses some of his twerpiness … but, I don’t know. I always thought he had something up his sleeve. He had this smugness, this oozing smugness about him. Like he thought he was smarter than everyone else.”

  A flash of anger sparks in me, a match striking against flint. Are we playing it again, Seth and I, this awful game of catch and release? Reverting to our age-old script, where I let myself grow vulnerable to him, and then he attacks? What does he know about Ben and me? What does he know about our history, our mistakes, the long road we’ve traveled to get to where we are. Yeah, well, you’re a jerk, I think, hopelessly. An ass.

  Seth, reading my mind, holds out his hand to stop me before I say anything. “Listen. I just mean …” He looks up at the ceiling as if it will drop the right words into his mouth. “I just mean, yeah, people change. So, fine, Kern’s a great guy now.” He’s still holding out his hand, and I’m staring at it, stunned into silence. “But if it doesn’t work out between you, just remember, he was a twerp once, okay? He really was.”

  And there it is for the very first time, the orange Popsicle sweetness of Seth, mine for the taking: I will help you. You’ll be okay.

  I light the Hanukkah candles and then try on the pink polyblend socks he’s gotten me, thin and cheap and available at convenience stores everywhere. I’ve been stupid and selfish and vain. Okay. But not about everything. I hold up my foot in a glamorous, foot-modeling pose, point it to the left, then to the right.

  I want to say, Thank you. I want to say, Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Instead I stare at the four burning Hanukkah candles for a minute and then I look back down at my feet, and I wiggle my toes in their polyester home, and I say to my big brother, my friend, “You know, it’s true. You really can’t go wrong with socks.”

  Epilogue

  Back when we had no money, which was always, Jane and I used to go to the Art Museum on Free First Fridays. We could spend hours wandering around the permanent display; we both especially liked the collection of nineteenth-century daguerreotypes, the subjects anonymous, their faces pale and serious and ghostly, or preghostly, as if they were feeling an icy touch, in that peculiar long moment in front of the camera: the cold finger of death. And maybe they were! Or maybe they were feeling the cold finger of an empty stomach, or a full bladder. Who knew what was going on behind those impenetrable gazes? That’s what transfixed us, Jane and me; that’s what captured our attention.

  In addition to poignant and haunting, we found those photographs to be strangely hilarious. We used to narrate them, moving from picture to picture, whispering to each other.

  You know what bums me out? That I’ll be dead before they invent tampons.

  This guy next to me is not my husband, and he’s pinching my ass. That’s why I look so pissed!

  I think now that those images spoke to us more deeply than we could admit back then, that they nudged uncomfortably at our own nascent fears, reminded us in the most visceral way that someday we, too, would be reduced to that fate, to a collection of moments that don’t begin to tell who we are, that don’t represent us at all.

  Sometimes, on these excursions, I would bring my sketchbook and pick a painting to study and draw, while Jane would explore the exhibitions. Every so often she’d meander back to tell me what she’d seen and to check on my progress.

  One Friday I sat down in front of a Degas and fixed my eyes on his lines, the angles of motion. I stared and stared, until, after a while, the colors blurred and the figures began to reveal their specific shapes, and then I sketched for a while, immersed.

  I don’t know how long Jane had been sitting next to me before I noticed her; I was that engulfed in my drawing, or Jane and I were so comfortable in each other’s presence that her arrival was as unremarkable to me as my own left hand, my fingers manipulating the charcoal pencil, my skin.

  I paused. My eyes were getting tired; I thought that maybe it was time to go.

  “I love it,” she said quietly.

  “Oh, shut up.” I was secretly delighted when Jane complimented my work. I hardly ever showed it to anyone back then.

  “Keep drawing,” she said.

  “Nah, I think I’m done for today.” I turned to her, so close beside me, her face pink from the warmth of the museum, arm bent to push back her hair, her right hand resting on her knee, and I felt in that moment that we were both overcome by an unexpected wave of sadness, a strange and heavy air current passing over us, through us. I wanted to press my cheek to her shoulder; I wanted to cry. My fingers closed around my pencil, its smooth, solid presence. What was this? Jane looked down, and then she looked back up at me and smiled, and the moment was over.

  Later, after I packed up my book and my pencils and we put on our coats and left the museum and headed outside into the cool fall day, after we found our bu
s and made our way home and stood together in the kitchen fixing sandwiches for our dinner; later, much later, not that day or that night or even that year, I realized that that melancholy moment between us at the museum was nothing more than a permutation of love. I understood that the ease of knowing you will love someone forever is always shadowed by the inkling that you might not: that even such a sweetness could end.

  But by the time I understood, it was too late. It already had.

  Acknowledgments

  For their wisdom, insight, patience, and friendship, my deepest appreciation to Jennifer Jackson, Julie Barer, Carolyn Crooke, Annie Rajurkar, Mitch Teich, Jon Olson, and Deb Rosen. My thanks to Sara Eagle and Andrea Robinson for their hard work on behalf of this book, and to Bridget Windau for her tireless and loving child care. I am grateful to and inspired by my parents, Ann and Jordan Fox. And finally, my love and profound gratitude to my husband, Andrew Kincaid, and to my daughters, Molly and Tess, who ensured that a book that ought to have taken two years to write took five. I love you.

  FRIENDS LIKE US

  BY LAUREN FOX

  READING GROUP GUIDE

  ABOUT THIS READING GROUP GUIDE

  The questions, discussion topics, and reading list that follow are intended to enhance your reading group’s discussion of Friends Like Us, the hilarious and touching new novel by Lauren Fox, author of the acclaimed Still Life with Husband.

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  “Funny and bittersweet … Fox (Still Life with Husband) steers her characters toward a surprisingly realistic and complex conclusion. A thoughtful, delicate book.”—Publishers Weekly

  With her critically acclaimed debut novel, Still Life with Husband, Lauren Fox established herself as a wise and achingly funny chronicler of domestic life and was hailed as “a delightful new voice in American fiction, a voice that instantly recalls the wry, knowing prose of Lorrie Moore” (Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times). Fox’s new novel glitters with these pleasures—fearless wordplay, humor, and nuance—and asks us the question at the heart of every friendship: What would you give up for a friend’s happiness?

  For Willa Jacobs, seeing her best friend, Jane Weston, is like looking in a mirror on a really good day. Strangers assume they are sisters, a comparison Willa secretly enjoys. They share an apartment, clothing, and groceries, eking out rent with part-time jobs. Willa writes advertising copy, dreaming up inspirational messages for tea bags (“The path to enlightenment is steep” and “Oolong! Farewell!”), while Jane cleans houses and writes poetry about it, rhyming “dust” with “lust,” and “clog of hair” with “fog of despair.” Together Willa and Jane are a fortress of private jokes and shared opinions, with a friendship so close there’s hardly room for anyone else. But when Ben, Willa’s oldest friend, reappears and falls in love with Jane, Willa wonders: Can she let her two best friends find happiness with each other if it means leaving her behind?

  QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

  1. What is this novel about: love, friendship, and what else?

  2. Though the book deals with serious subjects, it’s often wildly funny. How does Fox use humor to tell the story?

  3. Who is the better friend, Jane or Willa?

  4. Much is made of how similar Willa and Jane are. How does this affect their behavior, toward each other and toward the outside world?

  5. Who does Willa love more, Jane or Ben? How can you tell?

  6. Who does Ben love more, Willa or Jane? How can you tell?

  7. Both Seth and Ben have been inconsistent presences in Willa’s life. What else do they have in common?

  8. How do Willa’s and Jane’s parents’ marriages shape their outlook?

  9. On this page, Stan says to Willa, “Love can be ruthless.” How does this prove true? Are there any relationships in the novel that are free of ruthlessness?

  10. Willa says that the one thing she’s learned from her brother is that “opportunities for forgiveness are unlimited” (this page). How does this belief influence Willa’s actions later in the novel?

  11. What might Jane and Ben have done differently, to respect Willa’s feelings? What role did their behavior have in what ultimately happens?

  12. How does Jane’s kissing Dougie affect Willa?

  13. Each character in the novel has episodes of extreme selfishness. Whose affects the others most deeply?

  14. Reread the prologue. Now that you know what’s happened, how does your interpretation change? What “other options” is Jane referring to?

  15. By the end of the novel, how has Willa grown? In what ways has she changed?

  16. What purpose does the epilogue serve? At the very end, Willa says, “I understood that the ease of knowing you will love someone forever is always shadowed by the inkling that you might not: that even such a sweetness could end.” What does she mean?

  17. Does the novel have a happy ending? How do you envision the end of Willa and Ben’s relationship?

  SUGGESTED READING

  Once Upon a Time, There Was You by Elizabeth Berg; Truth & Beauty: A Friendship by Ann Patchett; The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides; A Wedding in December by Anita Shreve; Best Friends Forever by Jennifer Weiner.

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Lauren Fox is the author of Still Life with Husband. She earned her MFA from the University of Minnesota in 1998 and her work has appeared in the New York Times, Marie Claire, Seventeen, Glamour, and Salon. She lives in Milwaukee with her husband and two daughters.

  ALSO BY LAUREN FOX

  Still Life with Husband