She Matters

by Susanna Sonnenberg

  It had all developed fast, the parting from one job and familiar colleagues, a leap in salary, the unconventional setup to indulge the producer. On weekends, I shuttled my cat back to my studio on Christopher Street in the new Honda Civic the production company had staked me, moon roof open. Some acquaintance, hearing I was out in the Hamptons, told me to call Debra after I was settled. I’d need a friend, yes, a way to occupy the black lampless evenings of rural winter, when the fax machine had been turned off and the essential tasks finished. A couple of weeks in, I called the number, and Debra invited me over that night, her spontaneity an excellent indicator of a new friend. If I had a bottle of wine in the shabby kitchen, I took it with me. I followed her directions, slowing at each intersection to read the street name, as I mapped my temporary town. I pulled in behind a black Volvo wagon. This woman, I’d been told, had a baby, a career as a writer, which I wished to have, and her husband was an architect. She’d said to come to the back, the glass door that slid open on a deck. I could see in before she saw me.

  The kitchen glowed with lights at every level, recessed in the ceiling, hanging in a modern chandelier, tucked under glass cabinets above the extra-deep counters. Debra hung my coat, took my hands in hers, chatting, chatting, she never stopped. Her daughter, not yet a year, sat up in a high chair and worked at the tangerine sections Debra set in front of her. The baby flung the segments to the floor, laughing, and Debra sectioned off a few more. Babies were new to me. At once Debra was telling me local tales, as if in my first days I would have assumed my village part and accumulated pertinent questions. That man at the post office? The bartender Thursday nights at the American Hotel? “You’ve seen him, you can’t miss him! You’re working for who? Oh, God.” She didn’t know him, no, but it was a really small town, you’ll see. She loved any detail about my boss, his obscene house under construction, the woman he’d just married, she’d gone to Smith, was she nice? We speculated on his fidelity, past and future.

  Her husband, Dean, arrived and hung up his coat, kissed Debra, kissed his daughter. I saw them fit, and I tried to determine my place with them now that we were four. I took a chair next to the baby and began to hand her the fruit, wipe at her cheeks with a damp napkin. I let her play with my bracelets.

  Debra made spinach sautéed in nothing but minced garlic and a flick of oil in a cast-iron skillet. She pulled a fish from the oven, decorated it with preserved lemon, olives, bits of fresh tomato, and from a green glass decanter with a metal spout she drizzled olive oil over it. She set down a bowl of new potatoes in their skins, spotted with parsley. Her thick dark hair was held off her forehead by her constant wrist, flicking up, sweeping back, and at the same time she separated a potato from the bowl, cut it roughly with a fork, and blew on it before she gave it to the baby. I was enchanted by her gestures, the evidence of domestic longevity. They had an oversize wall clock, as regal as a train depot’s. Their giant range hulked in black and chrome, burners alight as she finished the food. Each room in the house spilled toward every other. Off the kitchen a wide pantry passageway was provisioned with Le Creuset pots and lids, tins of steel-cut oatmeal, lined-up snow boots, piled catalogs, baskets with polar fleece scarves and vests. Everything looked to me like proof of people entrenched and powerfully able.

  I went home with a piece of Debra’s almond cake, and I ate it in the morning with coffee, wishing to call. I waited till later.

  “Thank you for dinner.”

  “That was so much fun. You’re great with the baby.”

  “What are you doing?” I wanted to be invited again. She asked me for the following night, and I muffled my disappointment. It seemed to me I should be in her friendly house right now.

  • • •

  Weekends, back in the city, busy with my reverse life, I almost forgot her. I’d go to dinner at my father’s, where we talked about him; I’d meet my stepmother early Sunday at the flea market; her expert hand shuffled rose gold lockets and vintage clothes. “Now this would be good on you,” she’d say, pausing at a jacket, walking on, leaving me to retrieve it if I wanted it. I went to the movies with my sister or met my aunt for waffles at a diner. Monday mornings, I started for the Hamptons, zipped up the Long Island Expressway, heading to Debra, who waited for me, for whom I laid out the eccentricities of my family. She’d analyze everyone, explain why someone was like this, someone like that. I found this helpful.

  In Sag Harbor we saw each other a lot, daily, or nearly. When she phoned, I said yes, sneaking out on the chores my boss meant for me to do, if he wasn’t there. I jumped into her front seat when she pulled up. I didn’t want to miss a choice observation. She drove us to the beach, exotic for its chill and emptiness, and related local escapades and crises. She took me to roadside stands for the last fall produce, her car humped up on the sandy bank of the road. We went to the bakery, where the pleasure of hearing her voice as she picked out ciabatta and rye, her breathless ups and downs as she asked playful questions of the baker, was enough, better than bread. Or I waited in the car, I didn’t mind, the baby asleep in the back while she ran in. A couple of times, she came over to my house-office for a beer, chic in black turtleneck and dark jeans. With the copy machine imposing on the living room, the visits didn’t last long. Instead, she encouraged me to share her pretty life, join, and I did, feeling visible in my want. I wanted her friendship, her things, her smart talk, her tales of voluntary exile from New York City. Sometimes, arriving for an early weeknight supper, I’d find another of her friends in the kitchen. Debra introduced us, and I’d settle in my usual chair, say little, waiting for the woman to go. Once Debra had seen her out, she’d come back to me, indiscreet with backstory she had to have me know.

  In her double-sink bathroom, I inspected the labels of the Kiehl’s conditioner and Dr. Bronner’s shampoo, sniffed its strong peppermint. In the baby’s room, I touched the white wood rocker, imagining scenes I never saw. Debra nursing at midnight, diapering, Debra in the shower at 6 a.m., quickly shaving her calves before she ran downstairs with damp hair to make coffee. She was so brisk and lovely, her voice as light as a girl’s, but something rough behind it. We’d play on the rug with her daughter, the evenings growing blue then black beyond the giant, modern windows. Her mother phoned often, her “Sweetheart?” on the answering machine, and Debra would jump up and take the call in the kitchen, her voice almost the one she used for me, between us. I tried to imitate it for the baby, get breathy and sure. I could hear her congenial argument about a Times editorial or baby care, short phrases of family shorthand. “Susanna’s here,” she’d say and end the call, return to the living room describing the many fond knits of relationship that bound her, secured her. My mother kept me on the phone for hours, an evening’s commitment, and she’d drain every private thought out of me, every intention and idea. I could never recover the unwavering self as neatly as Debra did. I could never have said to my mother, “Not now, I have a friend here” without feeding her a saga, or becoming part of the outrage she would show the next person she called. “Sue hung up on me!” At my rental, when I went back at 9 or 9:30, the air was stale, the sheets cold. Every morning I’d clean up breakfast and empty the litter box and make my bed with the drab bedspread before my boss came over to land in his swivel chair and place his boots on the desk, which ran the length of the picture window. He got the view.

  At Debra’s, the house wrapped in close firs, I had my spot at the table, a slice of imported salami in my hand, talking as she produced wintry meals of Portuguese stews, chopped chard with butter, roast beef. Everything tasted wonderful, well salted. We mixed argument and affection, each insisting what went first on the washed lettuce—the kosher salt, no, the olive oil. When Dean walked in we pretended he could settle it, and he pretended to, sometimes in my favor, sometimes in hers. “I told you!” “You see!” Tipping into each other, we held eye contact like longtime friends, my hand warmed at her waist.

  “Susanna’s eight years younger than me,” she to
ld Dean at the table, pointing at my face.

  “Where were you eight years ago?” I said. How did you get here, build this?

  “In New York and married.” She smiled at her husband. “But not to you.” She’d already been in one marriage, had worked in the city, thrived but in another way. The history startled me, put in place, then discarded. I didn’t really want to hear. When my mother talked about London in the ’60s I’d feel the same: I hadn’t existed yet, so forget then. Now, now, Debra was this, what she’d always been meant for and what I counted on her to be. We’d been waiting to come together.

  • • •

  My job ended. I had to leave Sag Harbor, clearing my effects from the office where I’d slept four nights a week for most of a year. I dropped off the key at my boss’s carriage house. Across the gravel his main house loomed, the taunt of sudden money. I drove to Debra’s, where we stood in the driveway in tears, the little girl on Debra’s hip, her hands grabbing at my hair and at her mother’s. We vowed to make the effort, knowing it would be difficult. For a short while I lived on Cape Cod, where a monumental blizzard that winter affected us equally. Before phone service went out, she reeled off the news, the halted plows adrift, the streets erased under snows, and I missed those streets. Then I met Christopher and went to live in Montana, she got down to writing a novel, Dean’s practice thrived. We kept up, sometimes a frantic e-mail exchange over a whole day, sometimes a single, knowing line. I missed her with an intensity I couldn’t convey to Christopher, who’d met her twice—not enough to know Debra as I felt her, the delicious daily companion but something else, too, her competent vibration. Our calls became shorter, the time between them longer.

  The last visit I made to her, I’d taken the bus from New York out to the Hamptons, Daniel a toddler in my arms, board books all the way, one after the other. My lap was dark with his pee as we climbed down the bus stairs. Debra, leaning against her car across the street, laughed to notice the damp and ran over, delighted, kissed Daniel. At her house she washed my pants. She fished through a couple of deep baskets in the laundry room, plucked out a Patagonia hat that her daughter had outgrown and put it on my boy’s head. “There! Perfect!” I felt his anointment. She wore sheepskin scuff slippers, so now I wanted a pair. “Where’d you get those?” I asked. She wore thin sweatpants in dark crimson, chic somehow, and when she leaned low to retrieve a bowl from a cabinet, a line of colored lace and mesh was revealed against her skin. She stirred everything in me, made me whole and happy, though I could not have said why.

  “Are you wearing a thong?”

  “I know! Thongs, right? But you have to trust me. They are fabulous, the most comfortable thing ever.”

  She showed me her workspace, a desk that hadn’t been there the last time, where she sat every dark morning and wrote for two hours before her daughter woke. I did that, too. She told me about the novel and the agent who’d sold it based on the proposal, what good friends they were. I didn’t have an agent. She had a new fiery purpose, which made her more luscious, yet it distracted her. She listed trade details with the confidence of someone already sick of them. Her attention wasn’t the same, when it had been on me, and mine was also different. My son’s curls were visible in the sun as he bobbed around her backyard, and I watched him through the open glass door as he followed her much bigger daughter. I said, “Oh, wow,” and “That’s great,” and tried to offer pure support, but I was flooded with the old news from her kitchen, the old wanting of everything she liked and bought. I badly wanted her to be as I’d left her, and at the same time I wished to be home in Missoula, where I had a clock like hers on the kitchen wall, where I had thrown catalogs into a basket by the back door, because Debra did that and it made me happy to evoke her, though I didn’t look at the catalogs, never ordered from them. She took me up to her room and went through her closets. She gave me an expensive V-neck she didn’t wear anymore, clingy and dark green. She let me try her M•A•C lipsticks. “Viva Glam, that’s it,” she said. “Everyone needs at least one Viva Glam.” We walked with the kids into town, the slow, distracted bumble, where we went inside her favorite shop and she tried to talk me into buying the thongs, exorbitant trifles. I couldn’t afford them. Daniel and I slept in her daughter’s bunk bed, me on the upper in whimsical sheets, patterned with the alphabet. In the morning I said, “Where do you get these?” and planned to buy them for my house, my son. Always, the two children were everywhere between us, and she threw open cabinets, made us food. It was hard to keep a thought going.

  When she was stuck in her novel, she phoned and asked if I’d help her. This thrilled me, and the heavy packet appeared the next day. I read with a pen in hand and ticked and drew arrows, rallying my best thinking for her. I sent back the manuscript, and a week later another padded envelope arrived, pink and purple tissue paper festive inside, and I pulled out five pairs of the expensive underwear, Debra’s glamour and élan. The next time I was in New York, I happened to pass a boutique that sold them, and I went in and bought myself two more pairs, the cost on the receipt tribute to Debra’s big ways, her unchecked permissions.

  One day I noticed we hadn’t spoken in months, and I left a message. We needed to recalibrate an imbalance. No response. I left a few more. After several days Debra called and in a tight, odd voice that contained no echo of our intimacy, said, “I’m going through something and I have to disappear and you have to trust me.” I hadn’t the faintest idea what she meant. I pondered her words, scanning for a break in her womanly code.

  • • •

  We arranged to meet in Sun Valley, the mutual particulars of schedule and travel coinciding for a long weekend, our two families together. We hadn’t seen each other in five or six years, which didn’t matter, really, in parent time. We each knew without hearing how the other spent her time, what the back of the other’s car looked like, how weekends were ruled by soccer games or recitals or school fund-raisers. Her family got to the condo late. I’d waited up, and I leapt for her as they came in tired, their many bags bulked in the entry. I pressed forward to grab her, shoulders the same, the soft black sweater under my touch. “God, at last!” we were saying and rocked together, the stored excitement out. “Oh my God, I’ve missed you.” In the morning, we drank coffee and built a fire. Dylan—that baby—was fourteen, knees and legs, and long hair coiled up in a stretchy headband. She kept her earphones in and left uneaten bagel on the kitchen counter. I’d seen her sprawled in the center of Debra and Dean’s bed. I knocked, and Debra called, “Come in!” She stood midroom, said, “We’re doing this face peel!” The mask made a green plastery skin on them both, and Dylan sat with one long loose leg over the side of the bed, stroking green varnish onto her nails. The bed was a littering of vampire paperbacks, CD jewel cases. They were talking at the same time, stumbling over their amusement. Debra tapped the cake on her face, handed her daughter a washcloth so Dylan could wipe hers off. “There’s still some on your neck,” her mother said. To me she said, “You have to try this, do you know Lush?” I couldn’t help making a note of it.

  They jostled each other, picked sweaters out of open suitcases and threw them back, tossed shoes around. Debra went in and out of the bathroom, they didn’t bother with whole sentences. “But, Mom, Mom! Listen,” thoughts bursting as half phrases. “It was this awful—” “I told you,” and Debra looked over at me to let me into the conversation, but I didn’t want in. I hovered like someone waiting for a tip. She was alight with intense love for another girl, another devotee. It’s her daughter, I thought, but in me it surged: not fair. The bottomless wanting and no woman to answer it. I knew to get out of there, and closed the door.

  We left Dylan in charge of the kids, and the two couples went to a restaurant. I’d just published an essay in a magazine, and I was telling them about assignments, the sudden splurge of an awakened identity. I was proud to share this with Debra, to follow her.

  “Why can’t I have that?” she asked Dean. “That’s the career
I want.”

  “You had that,” he said. “Now you’re doing something else.”

  “Look at you guys,” I said. “You’re so together.” My husband and I were barely interested in the other one, except in our united daily persuasion of our children.

  “It comes back,” said Debra. “I know you can’t believe me right now, but it really does, and you’ll have lunches together, long talks again, when both your kids are in school.” She gave me a look: the sex. “It’s so much better.”

  “It’s true,” Dean said.

  If Debra said it, I believed it. If Debra had it, I’d wait for it.

  I kept wanting to ask about her disappearance, that weird halt in our connection, when she’d suspended our contact. Had this figured in their cozy renewal? I thought I’d wait till we had privacy, but her splendid chattering, her bubbling, never waned. There was no chance, and when I imagined what truth I might hear, I found I didn’t want to learn.

  The next day she and I planned to go to the thrift shop I’d told her about, for the cashmere sweaters and couture coats cast off by last season’s wealthy skiers. Dylan wanted to come. “This is great,” Debra whispered. “She hardly ever wants to do things with me anymore.” In a clumsy row the three of us walked into town. The girl had been lovable strapped into her high chair, unable to join our talk, but now her silence commanded us, her mother trying to undo it with bright questions.

  At the thrift shop, Debra pulled things off the rack for her daughter, and Dylan sorted through clothes for her mother. Each with an armload, they went behind a curtain, sharing the tight space and narrow mirror of the stall. I heard Debra exclaim, Dylan object, the giggling. Her ankles flashed and disappeared and reemerged as she pulled on white jeans, ski pants, velvet trousers, kicked them off again. Not those, oh, that’s nice, let’s get that! I waited in a wicker chair, clothes on my lap.