She Matters

by Susanna Sonnenberg

  More Praise for She Matters

  “She Matters is a dark and intriguing piece of writing. . . . Rewarding . . .rich . . . [Sonnenberg’s] honesty has helped and will help me be more honest with myself within (and in regard to) friendships.”

  —Mary Pols, San Francisco Chronicle

  “Susanna Sonnenberg’s book reminds us how profoundly we’re affected by our friendships. . . . You’ll want to share this with, yes, a friend.”

  —Parade

  “Sonnenberg is a beautiful writer. . . . In this gallery of friendships, the portrait of each woman is so well drawn we grasp its significance and savor the intimacy.”

  —Sherryl Connelly, New York Daily News

  “[Sonnenberg’s] vivid prose is confessional and precise. . . . Sonnenberg’s intensity might be rough on friendships, but it makes for charged storytelling.”

  —Jenny Shank, The Dallas Morning News

  “These are the stories of real women. Sonnenberg’s hard-core honesty, sharp detail, and lovely prose make this a collection worth passing on to a friend.”

  —Rochelle Olson, Minneapolis Star Tribune

  “Susanna Sonnenberg’s She Matters is a cause for celebration. . . .The book’s honesty, eloquence, laugh-out-loud humor, finely wrought prose, and magnificent scope will keep readers eagerly turning the pages. . . . For readers who welcome a complex perspective beautifully rendered in writing, this book is not to be missed.”

  —Kelly Blewett, BookPage

  “It is one thing to talk about the value and importance of friendships between women and another thing entirely to offer up one’s own friendships—the successes, the failures, the warmth, and the wrongdoing—by way of example and exploration. To do the latter requires guts, candor, and a willingness to expose one’s own weaknesses and mistakes. Sonnenberg rises to the challenge beautifully and with remarkable grace in She Matters.”

  —Rebecca Joines Schinsky, Book Riot

  “Sonnenberg brings her considerable talent, unflinching eye, and electrifying prose to the topic of female friendship.”

  —BookTrib

  “Rarely does someone write a book about friendship between women that women can relate to the way they can relate to Sonnenberg’s She Matters.”

  —Moves magazine

  “With heartrending precision, Sonnenberg offers an eloquent narrative that not only exposes but embraces the fraught nature of women’s relationships with each other.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Sonnenberg’s strikingly honest depictions of tumultuous female alliances and confessions about friendships are both moving and relatable; her depth of reflection and incandescent prose mark this exceptional memoir as a must-read to share among friends.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “In her stunning second memoir, a collection of linked essays, Sonnenberg finds universal truths in her experiences of female friendship.”

  —Meredith Maran, People (four-star review)

  “She Matters is both a remembrance of vital friendships as well as a deeply absorbing portrait of the author herself. . . . There are beautiful moments documented here. . . . A deeply affecting ode to the ones who got away.”

  —Mythili Rao, The Daily Beast

  “She Matters lingers with you, inviting you to construct a patchwork quilt of your own life and salute the many women who helped you along the way.”

  —Susan Chira, The New York Times Book Review

  “Sonnenberg is a gifted literary stylist with a stunning ability to write sentences that read like beautiful traps. . . . She Matters artfully reveals the depth and gravity of love between women as they make sense of the changing and often treacherous emotional and logistical terrain of their forward-moving lives.”

  —Emily Rapp, The Boston Globe

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  Contents

  Chapter 1: She Matters

  Part 1: Young.

  Chapter 2: Women Are Like This

  Chapter 3: Real Friends

  Chapter 4: Facebook

  Chapter 5: Proctor Duties

  Chapter 6: The Root Cellar

  Part 2: Aware.

  Chapter 7: Roommate

  Chapter 8: Homesick

  Chapter 9: Annabelle Upstairs

  Chapter 10: Blind Date

  Chapter 11: Evidence

  Chapter 12: Within Reach

  Chapter 13: Kindling

  Part 3: Awake.

  Chapter 14: We Turn into Mothers

  Chapter 15: Orphan Girl

  Chapter 16: Naked

  Chapter 17: Boundaries

  Chapter 18: Ritual

  Chapter 19: Real Estate

  Chapter 20: The Four Seasons

  Chapter 21: As We Both Know

  Thank you

  A Scribner Reading Group Guide

  Topics and Questions for Discussion

  A Conversation with the Author

  Her Last Death Excerpt

  Famous Names

  About Susanna Sonnenberg

  for Saidee Brown

  and

  for Carole Van Wieck

  She Matters

  Patricia will be late. As I think this, with a tolerant fondness, she texts that she’ll be late. It doesn’t bother me. I’ve known her eighteen years, and she confirms herself, the deeply known friend, which reminds me of love in its greatest warmths, its common comfort. I haven’t seen her in months. After her father died a few years ago, she left Missoula with her family, took a job two hours away. Our e-mail is sporadic and bright, not more than that. We have our work, our teenagers, family health concerns, et cetera. None of these intersects anymore. She comes to town once in a while, stays with her mother, and sometimes, last minute, we squeeze in a lunch. Otherwise, our correspondence has lapsed into late-delivered major news.

  My father has died in New York where I grew up, and I’ve been dazed for months, home in Missoula, yet not home. I hunger all the time and nothing answers me. Absence the new habit, I am shedding people, no longer sure how to show interest, how to let friends care; but I need care, and Patricia’s has always been keen, persuasive. With her sweet intention she might make me visible again. Was she coming to town soon, I e-mailed. She was, and guess what! “We’re moving back!” A flicker of gladness. We made a date, but her weekend changed. We had to postpone. That used to make me crazy.

  Patricia pulls into the metered spot as I am passing it on the sidewalk, and she waves hugely before shutting off the car, as if she can’t wait to get out. The windshield frames her gathering-ups, the strap of her bag onto her shoulder, familiar motion. In a second, we’ll reunite, and she’ll shower me with enthusiastic greeting. I remember there’s a song we do. I can’t sing.

  After I arrived in Montana, twenty-seven years old, Patricia became my guiding, buoyant older sister. She jollied me along, made things regular when I found them a regional confusion. When we met—her encouraging pursuit met my ready affections—we each had one dog and one cat, one husband (well, boyfriend for me). Both of us were earning a little money as freelance writers. Our birthdays were close together. She delighted in these coincidences as if they were delicious and rare overlaps. Later, when we were interested in having babies, we wondered how it would affect our writing. We asked, Where will we find the time, not believing we had to worry. At one point I had a therapist I liked and recommended, and Patricia started to see her, too. Sometimes, our coats in our
arms, we passed in the waiting room, which always amused us because we had steady plans with each other every few days. “Hey, sweetie,” she’d cry, her greeting big no matter the room. “I didn’t know you were coming on Mondays now!” When she took a leave from her job at a magazine, she put me up for the interim position. Every morning, sitting in her chair, I logged her password into her office e-mail account for the day’s business. We had a long period of doubleness.

  Patricia embraces me, the musical surge of hello how are you, her raised voice exclaiming, “Just getting away from the kids!” Her mother’s with them, she says. I try to match her and relate, which feels nice, nudges me closer, even though to me such family reliance is peculiar.

  “I know,” I say. “Some time to ourselves.”

  But I embody strain.

  “How are you?” she repeats.

  “I’m so sick of it here,” I say. “I don’t want to look at this town anymore.”

  “Don’t say that. I’m about to move back.”

  “That’s true, I’m glad.”

  Inside the bar we debate tables. It’s afternoon. I’d texted, “Shall we drink?” She wrote back, “Hell yeah,” which made me smile. She always had the balm, gave me a glad heart. Music overhead, a call to a crowd that doesn’t mind it, we are drowned out. Close to my ear she says, “Where we can talk.” I nod. “God, it’s good to see you.”

  “It’s good to see you.” I take her in, really. She looks older; I must look older.

  We pick a corner table with a right-angled banquette. The waitress comes and Patricia treats her warmly and agrees to the suggested wine. The waitress goes away for the wine and my whiskey. At first Patricia’s absence, as brutal as her unsold house unoccupied a few blocks from mine, beat at me. I’d sent a card to her new address. “Don’t forget to write,” I wrote, meaning it both ways. Don’t forget you’re a writer. Don’t forget me. Gradually, such disorder righted itself. This was life, people moved. It wasn’t, after all, disaster. You coped with it, and, when I considered it, coping felt like a right step, maturity. We’d grown nimble with changes. Women handle the shifts, keep friendships afloat, in spite of all that other shit and demand, the being needed.

  We start our protocol, the updates of our children first. It’s been eight or ten years since her children have had an impact on me, although I remember how the corral of new motherhood contained our friendship, limited us. When our kids were babies, toddlers, then starting school, we’d shared kitchens and rooms and cluttered activities. We knew the arsenic hour, as Patricia loved to call it—not yet dinnertime, the house filled with doom and shrieks—and nothing worked, no entertainment, no fruit, no limits. We’d phone each other. I know, I know, we said back and forth, the din at our backs.

  We take turns—Does Daniel have a Facebook account, does Tasha? Has he friended you? Do you recognize her friends?—and I listen not for the information (I’ll forget most of it by evening, the family’s constant details enough, my tattered mind empty each night) but for what’s at work in her heart and surfacing. We have different styles. Patricia starts with the reports, I start with mood. I pierce, hunt for the biggest truth, restless until I’ve divined it. People—new acquaintances, old friends—tell me I’m intense, sometimes too much. “Are you never simple?” a friend once asked, just wanting a hello. Patricia, light at the outset, asks questions twice, first for the information, propping that up like a painting against the wall. Then she steps back, asks again, mulls feeling. The eddy of her repetitions used to annoy me. I just answered that, I’d think. Aren’t you paying attention to me? But deep knowledge has replaced irritation, wiped away the personal grievance: she is herself. She is like this. And I know myself—reflexively anxious that I won’t be properly heard. In the security of true knowing, these traits can be set aside. She pours out details of her return, and I spark and lift. Sun creaks back over a mutual world.

  Next month she’ll be here for good. I hear her tell me the real-estate logistics, lament the hassle of switching schools, and I offer encouragement, but I’m thinking: me, I get Patricia back. Later I note I hadn’t offered help. In crude mourning I don’t feel competent at anything.

  We darken our talk, that tough underlayer I wait for, private hopes, the kids’ real scares and questionable behavior, uncertain parenting, sex in our lives, silent humiliations, hatreds. Then we come to our fathers. Our grieving spreads over the table. She says things I’ve heard her say about her dad and the event, her frequent echoes, but now I’ve been repeating myself, too, unable to progress from the day of my father’s death, the hospital’s dull effects, how he was here but is not, and I get it: you go over and over it, you look for sense, try to place yourself, insist. Her father had been dead a few weeks when she collected all she owned, undid her kids’ bedrooms, and moved away. I never saw what grief made of her, what she did with it. I couldn’t follow. My father was alive.

  “What was I thinking, that year?” she says. “Moving then. I must have been out of my mind. I barely remember any of it.”

  “Yes, this year.” Its wash is blinding. What will I recall? How will I return to myself?

  “It’ll be great to be back. Helena’s fine, we’ve loved the house, but I don’t have friends there like this. Only you talk like this.” Her voice has settled, shed its vibrant rise and rise. She is just speaking.

  “I have to ask you something,” I say. “When Jack was born, the first few weeks, you didn’t see him.”

  “I didn’t?”

  “No, you didn’t come.”

  “Was it summer?”

  I’m briefly annoyed. “It was November.” Both my sons were born in November, Daniel first, Jack four years later. Patricia and I were very close by then.

  “I wonder why I didn’t. God, I’m sorry.” She looks a little stressed. I don’t want that for her.

  “It’s okay,” I say. “I just wondered.”

  This isn’t true. I’ve stored hurt for ten years and let it seep into the friendship. That’s what I should tell her. Come clean, Susanna, unmask and voice regret. Apologize. A decade on, together in a bar that hadn’t existed then, I can’t fathom why it’s important to bring this up, why I need her to know she hurt me. Except that grief disdains normal procedure, and my behavior keeps surprising me, as if it has snapped off from its source, broken away. I’ve been accounting for disappointments. Patricia isn’t actually one of them. It was Patricia who packed the full Thanksgiving dinner in paper bags and left them covered on our porch the night Christopher and I brought our first newborn home. Until then, she and I had been happy to be friends, glad at the sound of the other’s interested voice, but that night, when I’d been a mother for fifty-eight hours, as I dressed my baby in diaper, Onesie, fleece bunting, Patricia planned, baked, drove over, and changed our friendship. She marked what mattered between friends, what mattered in a couple, in a town. She showed me how simple: you witness and love, and you feel loved. She wasn’t asking for anything.

  Four years later, at the birth of my second son, she hadn’t come to the hospital or to the house. Other people dropped by, brought wrapped presents and bouquets. I waited for my deep-down friend. She didn’t even call. I’d been counting on her to remind me how I fit in this life, how connected I was to solid people. Patricia’s eager, easy devotion in the past few years had helped to grant me mothering skills. I didn’t have a reliable mother like she did, the experienced model and steady backup. Her mother worked polling tables on election days, where she chatted with a stream of lifelong neighbors. My mother, whom Patricia met once in a state of fascinated disbelief, was publicly fabulous and grand with a gesture but, for me, a notorious crisis. She didn’t follow through, and when together, we did her, not me. In times of critical transformation I couldn’t have her around. Before knowing me, Patricia wasn’t aware such creatures existed.

  Finally, a couple of weeks later—the time a new baby remakes everything, scrambles all intentions—Patricia appeared. I was mad, fed u
p. She sat at one end of the couch, I at the other, Jack shielded in my arms until I set him between us. She leaned over him, wowed and wondered, as others had, but there was something stiff, she was distracted. I might have asked, figured her out, led her to open up. I was good at that. But I didn’t inquire, a punishment. I didn’t let anger go, habit from the dangerous family I’d left behind, from being leery of women. I was good at that, too, the guarded disappointment.

  The moment divided the first years of our friendship from those after. We’d known each other almost a decade when I had Jack, but as I pulled myself in against hurt, I let a single oversight decide our future.

  Patricia strains to remember why, ten years ago, she hadn’t come. As she reconstructs daily history out loud, I feel dumb. For so long I’d wanted apology and explanation, but now that I’ve asked for them, I find neither matters at all.

  We move on, talk about her mother, how she’s managing, about the rearranging in a family when one person dies. We didn’t use to know. We’d been adding people, choosing people. Patricia puts down her wine. She says, “There is nothing that anyone can get past a forty-five-year-old woman.” We laugh hard, the first honest sound I make that afternoon, or in many days, each of us feeling the ravages of experience, our debt to enduring. We are not to be fucked with. We rule. Even as we age and help our children push past us, as we worry about the estimate for the roof, forget things we meant to do, regard our widening bodies, we rule. We’ve returned again and again to our original selves for another look; we have refined our purpose. Changes we thought we’d been resisting have anyway been wrought, and they have made us unbreakable. On an early-spring afternoon, in a dark bar off a sleepy Missoula sidewalk, we sing the unbreakable. We spread out the landscape and, as we’ve always done, coax narrative out of unruly change.

  • • •

  Patricia found me. I was working in a restaurant, and I’d stopped at her table to fill the water glasses. “Susanna, right?” She reminded me we’d been introduced. “Aren’t you from New York?” In Missoula a blurry month, after finding the apartment, the two jobs, I was aching for more society than my boyfriend. She invited us to a party, lots of writers, you’ll love them, the MFA students, and faculty, just come! We came, my boyfriend and I, stuck near to the door at first, and Patricia, her face flushed with glee and gin, hugged an arm around my waist as she stitched together one person she liked with another. She gestured with her plastic cup and kept me by her side.