She Matters

by Susanna Sonnenberg

  Debra’s hand, the wedding band, appeared at the top of the curtain, grasping the rings to move it aside, and as she started to back out I saw them caught facing the mirror as one body, one in front of the other. It was over, Debra undone from me, outgrown. She had a daughter to wear her skin creams and earrings; she would not enclose me again with devoted attention, and I was worn out with forcing my ruin and longing upon woman after woman.

  • • •

  Debra and I never shared real life, not for a minute. In Sag Harbor, I had acted a village role, a temporary assignment. She drove into the city once, and we had an elegant lunch in midtown, but she’d come to the restaurant from somewhere, and had to be off again straight after. She never saw my apartment. We didn’t even walk a block. We didn’t share quite the same era, my eight-year lag part of our security. And when it came down to it I didn’t care what had prompted her weird, sudden silence. Her hugeness happened not with me but inside me. For a time we used the phone, and we had the one resort weekend. At the end of that visit we told each other how much it had meant, what a good and necessary next step this was, onward, but it was not that. It showed us the way out, opened the late-night door at the end of the party for the good-byes. We didn’t say the good-byes. No one would have.

  Two months later, success came to me and upended normal life. I gathered my closest friends on the front lawn for impromptu champagne, then over the next few days phoned others far away, but I could not call Debra. This news, I sensed, would not fall easily into place. “She’ll hear about it,” I thought. “She’ll call.” She didn’t. Months of a silent friend became a year, which, I realized, didn’t feel exactly bad, a recognition—mutual perhaps—that Sun Valley had been our finish. I’d check in with her, I decided, when I was done writing the book, but I didn’t do it, held back by nervousness and unsure which of us was waiting for whom. A year later my name appeared in the Times. I could picture Debra’s oversize kitchen table in noble, seasoned oak, Dylan gone to school, the empty, pleasing house. I pictured the white cup, Debra with black coffee as she sat to look through the paper, and she would have turned the page and seen my picture. Maybe she didn’t recognize me at first, the publicity photo a structured fake, but at the sight of my name she might have made a sound, felt glad. Wouldn’t she call? I imagined the paper spread open all day, set out for Dean to see when he got home.

  • • •

  So much time has gone by that for me to call her, or for her to call me, would signal a dead child or a divorce, rock-bottom emergency. It would sharpen focus on the finish of our friendship, embarrass us. Who wants to explain? Simply, we do not know each other. The friendship fluttered heartily, then diminished, then stopped. I wear her V-neck top, prize her unique crackle, prettiness, talent, breathy confidence, womanly chic and charisma and the smooth appearance that she knew what she was doing, but Debra herself only echoes. I still contemplate the gap, those cold, dropped months when I had no access to her mysteries. The friendship shines but stays put. That’s different than missing her. I doubt she misses me. There’s no evidence to say she does.

  Within Reach

  Nina wrought a petite medallion out of gold, stamped with 40 in her strong, antique hand. “Wait, you made this?” I said on the phone, as I examined the minuscule perfections. She said, “I make one for each of my women friends when she turns forty.” I was touched and grateful. Her bounties came in these unexpected ways, always meticulous, her talents upon talents private until she decided to reveal them. It was hard to turn the focus to her. I thought that’s what we shared, a deep certainty that someone’s interest might be a trick. We both knew how to make others feel entirely special. I wore the tiny disk the whole year, proclamation on a short chain, the precious metal in the dip of my throat.

  • • •

  We weren’t yet friends when I left New York in 1993, and it was distance that sponsored us. She had just married someone in my social crew. He’d met her beyond our bounds, and they went one afternoon to City Hall, announced it to us later. She unsettled the rest of us, her careful regard, the imperious flavor in her brisk voice. Did she like us? Would we ever know? Her fine hair angled close to the back of her neck, cut boy-short. Nina had pared herself to bare elements: shades of black against white T-shirts, square-toed black shoes, clean jewelry. She used no makeup. Absent adornment, her naked strength shone through. She had a sleek portfolio, the flat canvas strap across the front of her plain, smooth T-shirt. You could tell the cotton was excellent.

  • • •

  We were immersed in the toughest sort of fairy tale, daughters in a bind. We knew the term stepmother was a stand-in, an excuse to prevent mother, aloud. That word made us shiver, teeth gritted. But Nina and I didn’t back down. We said “mother,” tasted bile. When I visited New York I met Nina in small dark restaurants, midafternoon, her freelancer’s schedule convenient for both of us. We had miso soup or salads of cabbage and cucumber, white vinegar. Aware of the midnight strike on our time when I’d disappear back to Montana, we sped through talk, cramming in as much as possible. We sifted the rubble of our relationships with our mothers. What we both wished of our mothers was to leave them. You have no idea how much this mattered, our solemn admission, the assured company in case we ever did it.

  • • •

  We noticed the parallels in our marriages—the forceful and decided women in charge, our quiet husbands, gentler than we were, gentler than most people we knew. We needed them, and they really needed us. It was nice to find a woman who felt burdened as I did by her own extroverted behavior and vivid personality, by her own compulsion to manage. We congratulated each other on how we made life work for the husbands. We chose the off-white paint (Benjamin Moore, Nina advised), we took the sick animal in, our relationship with the vet already secure, cultivated with care. We sent back steaks that were overdone.

  • • •

  She and her husband came to Missoula. It meant a lot. Few of my New York friends had bothered. They arrived by car, goofy and happy with the time they’d granted themselves for a cross-country trip. It was delightful to see her like this, a bit of the urban carapace abandoned. Or, rather, intentionally set aside. We made them dinner, showed them into the guest room, took them out the next day to the one Indian restaurant, at last in the company of someone who could say with me, But it’s not really Indian food.

  • • •

  She lived in Chinatown, adroit at navigating the sloppy fish markets, ice loose on the pavement. She hurried, chin forward, her fast stride fixed. She organized us all when I was defeated by fatigue, picked Pho Viet Huong on Mulberry Street, told us what time. Her husband would come from work, our old friend Rob from Brooklyn, sometimes with his wife. I arrived from the Upper West Side with Daniel, three years old, whom Nina adored. She ordered from the large pages taped to the wall-size mirrors, tremulous hand-written English beneath Vietnamese characters, seasonal fish, seasonal pea vines I’d never heard of. We ate the exquisite salt-and-pepper soft-shell crab. She knew to move the water glass out of Daniel’s realm, and she played with his little plastic panda on the table. Daniel explained himself to her, and she looked over to beam at me. Nina was my smart, close, calm family, as if we could erase the true histories and organize elements as we wanted them. We conspired in reinvention.

  • • •

  Nina trusted herself but not others. I knew the burden of impossible standards, also felt narcotic relief at being the expert organizer, the self-reliant worker, the responsible one. I imagined we had turned that similarity into intimacy, and into an affectionate in-joke. Once we were talking about sheets. They have to match, they have to, we both said, and recognized perfectionist allegiance. When I make the bed, the white tones in the quality cotton pleasing me, the corners secured under the weight of the mattress, and the turn-down snapped, I always want to call her to share the satisfactions.

  • • •

  Nina and I broke up once, before we did finally. The first
time, we laid it all out, swept the record clean, promised. We were professional about it. She inspired this in me. When I’d needed order in the most desperate way, from the slump of new motherhood and baby shit, rank trash, she was a clean corner. Although I couldn’t find my clothes and hadn’t had a haircut in months, I could dress up my voice on the phone for her, sharpen my delivery.

  Then, while I was writing my book, we’d had a long quiet. Almost finished, I felt the return to regular life nearing, and I called, hungry for one of our hourlong talks, wanting to say, “I’m back.” Able to cover vast ground, Nina and I could never talk briefly.

  She was cool, strained exchange. Terms had altered, but I couldn’t tell why.

  “What’s going on?” I said.

  She sighed. “You’re the one who benefits from the friendship.” She said she was tired of it. This news scared me.

  “I try to pay attention to you, you don’t let me.” I sounded like a baby. “You deflect,” I said. She agreed. Nina was very good at turning the eye from herself, our joint focus on me, and she’d always known, gently, that this made me nervous. She knew as well as I did the fearsome power in the word selfish, had lived a childhood in its cold shadow, but she used to reassure me that she liked our fast-talking energy on me and my life.

  I said, “Nina, you must know you’re incredibly important to me.” A voice in my head demanded, prove it. “You know that, don’t you know that?” I wrote her a letter, wanted to make it up to her. Just tell me how. I steadied my hand on the paper, trying to keep my inked lines as elegant as hers. Things were okay for a while.

  • • •

  She was pleased to provide and laid out my former city in well-chosen strokes to feed my homesick longing. She sent surprising presents. A PalmPilot, still with its casings and plastics and immaculate box, although she’d used it for a year. Her stylish wrapping jobs, the confidence of understatement, were legendary, butcher paper and a vintage-looking label she’d designed herself. When Jack was born I asked her to design his birth announcement, and she made a card of superb beauty—strong flourishes, clean lines, gravity and simplicity, conscious she addressed a holy task. She Fed-Exed the art to me with instructions for the printer, recommendations for the card stock color and weight. Once she sent a huge package for Chinese New Year, a dragon-head mask to delight the boys, tiny firecrackers, weird candies, red envelopes with money. She brushed off thanks.

  • • •

  In her loft I admired the sculpted brushed-chrome magnets from MoMA and the silver chairs from Design Within Reach. She’d had her dresser made—she knew what she wanted it to look like, sketched it precisely, had it constructed and installed in the bedroom. She brought the vision into being. Shape beauty, she dared me, whatever you want.

  • • •

  We had unused French in common, excellent accents. For work Nina traveled to Russia, Holland, Iceland. I drank up details of her travel. We said we’d go to Paris when the boys were bigger. Let’s wait till Jack is three. She wanted to be with my children, and I was grateful, as I felt trapped, the world closing down. She was kind to me then, considerate and patient. She sent me a book about visiting Paris with children, wrapped with her precisions. We had that conversation when Jack was six months old, and three felt impossible. It was a spring day in 2001, which I remember because by October travel seemed never-again. We never did go.

  • • •

  On the morning of September 11, Nina went up on her roof, for some other reason, and was standing there. Then from her distance of eight or ten blocks away, she kept watching, standing. I imagine her stone-still, her designing, elegant mind stilled. I reached her that night, going through the frantic list, finding every New York friend. “Are you okay? Where were you? Are you okay?” I had monitored a dozen strange temperatures. In our brief talk I felt ice in our exchange, trauma’s slur. I couldn’t grasp what she needed to convey. This was the beginning, I think, where we started to break down. Bigger than us, of course I see that, but I failed her. After that, she was less and less a part of her neighborhood, until she’d had enough of the acrid air and the snapped phone service, the chemical tang, and the central, inescapable toxic memory; and they moved to Brooklyn.

  • • •

  I guess the end of us is marked—40. The tiny gold medal I wore the whole year we were at our closest is in with my other jewelry. I’m forty-seven. That’s a long time to not be friends, to be unsure of the mistakes and what I failed to fix, to wish I knew. I left my mother, broke our bond. Nina grew polite with me, didn’t want the details, and after I published the book about it I never heard from her. I try to sort through the pieces. In her strength and command I didn’t see fragility, thought that was only mine. It never occurred to me the elegant friendship could end in shards.

  Kindling

  It isn’t easy, in a small town, to not know people anymore. You must rely on external forces or drastic change. Christopher was the one to tell me that Claire was moving away. He’d seen her at Food Farm. “Somewhere in Oregon, I don’t remember,” he said, as relief softened the hurt I still felt at the sound of her name. I was glad—no more vigilance in certain neighborhoods, no more heartsickness at certain cross streets. I felt freed.

  Claire’s reasons for ending us made no sense to me. They mattered hugely, but I was unaware. At the start we had shopped for groceries together, exchanged baby clothes, shared late-night calls, her voice a smooth and constant comfort. We went for walks with the strollers when neither of us could stand our babies’ faces another instant. Our husbands disappointed us, our sons filled us with the deepest awe. We shared tales of the ravaging parents we’d fled, and we lived six blocks apart. Everything a friendship needed for kindling and fuel was there.

  I met Claire at a playgroup. I hadn’t felt like going, but forced myself and the baby out of the house, anxious to escape the tedium. The group met in the daylight basement of a nonprofit that helped struggling parents, teaching life skills, providing phone numbers for social assistance agencies, poison control, day care facilities. I came in and then found myself on the floor on my knees, unzipping my son’s coat, unlacing his boots. I never got my own coat off, disrupted by his wants—another toy, another cracker, another easing through life’s strange currents. All the currents were new to him, and he made them new to me.

  Aware of the other mothers as unique piles of fatigue, I settled against the wall. We made a ring around our babies, who grabbed and lurched and startled each other. It was almost funny, but we were all too watchful to laugh. A woman managed her toddler with an extended hand as her other arm cradled a newborn. I was horrified to see a fresh baby, then grateful. How far I’d come in a year. One boy was dressed in striped overalls and work boots, just like Daniel, but his step was surer, his grasp more refined. I looked around to pick out the mother who had chosen for her boy the same clothes I had that morning. Such awareness provided solace in the otherwise numb endeavor of slaving for someone else. Her thick ponytail sat low on her neck, her face long and pinched with sleeplessness. She kept her eyes on her boy, spoke to him in short intervals, “Robby. What do you have, Robby? Do you need me to undo that?” I sensed her competence. Well, that’s not true. Everyone seemed better at this than I felt, and I credited each woman with proficiency. I hated them all, fought the club, and needed them desperately.

  At the group the following week, choosing the spot beside her, I learned Claire’s name. She’d lived here a year. I could smell aggressive laundry soap, proper care. We discovered we lived not far apart, and, one day soon after, we took our boys and a picnic to Rose Park, where hardly anybody went. It was always windy there, and as we sat face-to-face on the bench, we had to speak up and push hair back from our eyes and mouths. We weren’t comfortable, but we stayed. A few yards from us the boys found things to do. Usually, when I said I was sick of my difficult mother, friends wanted to talk me out of it, but Claire told me she’d severed contact with her family, that was the way, to p
reserve herself, to forge her life, to save her son. I think you’ll understand, she said. She told me her secret, something only her husband knew and that I was never to tell. I promised, solemn with the gift of confidence. I’d found a way in with this strained, sober young woman. We’d made a sacred bond, if scarred.

  She came to my house, or I went to hers, establishing the easy exchange that would define our friendship, our lives as mothers. We still regarded the word mother as outside of ourselves, a dubious costume. Her house was tidy and tucked, like an unopened file cabinet. Clothes hung on hangers, compared to my baskets of ignored T-shirts, towels, and pajamas. The wall showed a series of trains Claire had painted, very nicely, and I wished I’d painted something for Daniel, although I didn’t paint. We sat on the floor. Daniel seemed to like Robby, so I would like Robby. The boys batted pieces of train track around, sometimes linking up, more often not. Parallel play. One of those terms, we agreed, we never used to know. We described our husbands, joking without mirth at the mess our marriages had become. We were coming to understand how helpless we were in this new age.

  We both worked, and we both split parenting duties with the husbands, the child always with one parent or the other. Claire and I were not able to relinquish our sons to the peculiar influences of other children or to the hidden histories of unknown adults, their oblivious violations. We hardly saw the men, felt married to each other. It’s odd I can’t remember Claire’s exact schedule, as if some once crucial information of my own has been erased, my middle name, my childhood address. I still feel her, remember her thereness and necessity, and how much I liked her for her woe and frankness, and then loved her. Obviously, she would have other things to say about the friendship. In the slow afternoons we’d relate the tiny dramas of vaccinations and rough nurses, or speculate on those rotten mothers who ignored the explicit instructions about car seats. We went to Target for diapers and cereal, one cart, the babies strapped in side by side, making us laugh as their phrases and random expressions interlaced. At the fabric store, we sorted through the discount flannels to sew into baby quilts. We took the boys to China Buffet, grateful for the foods under the heat lamps. The babies could toss rice on the carpet, handle sticky dumplings. So tired, we didn’t care about additives and too much sugar; we wouldn’t have to clean it up, expend our waning strength. She knew Daniel had to avoid eggs and corn, and I worried on our outings about the dogs that scared Robby. We measured daytimes in minutes, nap durations, radio schedules. If Daniel woke at 2:30, it was too early to call Claire for a walk and I’d have to wait. At 3:00 we met, our soft hellos, our automatic, repeated walking circle of the neighborhood, the shared minutiae all that distinguished that day from the mess of days before. At five-ish, one of us might say, “What’s in your fridge? Want to come over with the boy? I’ve got salad, I’ve got some ham.” She called both of our sons “the boy,” and I loved that and did the same.