Claire brought me a chocolate cake one birthday, granting the day’s single moment that observed me instead of my child. How flattered and thankful I felt. She brought pumpkins over for the boys to carve at the kitchen table and showed me what to do with the knife. Each week Claire, who’d signed up for a food subsidy, received so many eggs and so much milk, she would make giant pans of flan, two at a time, and bring one to us. My husband didn’t like custard, so it was all for me, gorgeous with burnished caramel.
Once or twice, after the boys’ bedtimes, Claire and I went to the movies, but we always came straight home after, our time economized for the sake of the families we were building. We took that seriously, a reverent calling. Good night, thank you, she’d say climbing out of the car, See you tomorrow. We’d never met in a downtown bar for drinks, we’d never caroused through the jewelry displays at the mall. We had not done anything silly.
For Daniel’s second birthday, Robby was the guest, chaperoned by Claire and her husband. The six of us gathered in the living room. The parents made the usual remarks of relief that we’d escaped our original families, come all this way, lucked into one another. It was always like this with them and us, quiet anemic parties, attempts at family, but Claire and I were getting used to it. It was the best we could do, and she knew that about me, and I knew that about her. She gave Daniel a wooden stool she had painted with beautiful blues and stars. Around me, I held the love close, of my husband, child, and indispensable friend.
• • •
With the boys almost three, Claire and I talked about whether or not we’d have second children. What did the husbands want, we wondered, sort of. We debated the advantages. I began to be certain I’d do it, didn’t reveal that, and I didn’t mention to her I’d started trying. That was between me and Christopher. When I told her I was pregnant I felt her careful withdrawal. She called me less, and she mentioned another friend. They went to the fabric store. If the situation had been reversed, Claire pregnant instead, and without me, I would have felt abandoned, and maybe she felt that. I don’t know what she felt. She came to the hospital after I delivered, happy for me, and she cradled Jack, six hours old, smiling down at him. She seemed less herself, but I was blinded from labor and sudden baby, and everyone besides him was dimmer.
We went away together once, us and the boys and not the husbands. Without overseeing their paternal attempts, our unconscious surveillance, we could breathe and loosen. United in thrift, we picked a cheap cabin a couple of hours away. I almost remember us doing this, but those amnesia years swallow the particulars, and I can’t picture my friend in the morning, her hair undone, her voice still low. I cannot picture the rings on her hand or her favorite mug for coffee, or remember if she drank coffee. We knew so much, reaching into each other’s lives by the handful, but never like sisters, never for fun and cheer. The friendship existed to save the mothers.
• • •
By the time Daniel and Robby were five, our shared life had unhooked, one hook at a time. The boys attended different schools, and our schedules had changed, new routines and new jobs. Claire wore white fitted tops and crisp skirts, her time no longer spent on the kitchen floor or a basement rug. Her family went on vacations, and sometimes I wouldn’t hear from her for a week after she got back, each of us respectively busy. But I didn’t miss her. I knew I had her.
Just before Daniel’s sixth birthday party we had a lunch date, the rare two of us. Jack was at day care, Daniel was in school, and I was in a good mood, released. We met where we often had when Daniel and Robby were little, at the Catalyst, which kept high chairs and a milk crate full of dinosaurs, where the staff never protested the time we’d taken to linger, the request to replace a dropped spoon. We’d gone there when Jack was nursing, a calm place to keep the baby calm, and she’d held him so I could butter my bread, spoon up my soup while it was hot. Today I was talking about the party. I’d rented the carousel, and Daniel had chosen a few kids from first grade to come and Robby, of course, his main friend. She could drop the boy off, I said. Can you believe it, she said, that we can actually drop them off now? I couldn’t believe it. We didn’t need to monitor our sons’ experience all the time, guide their way. We watched out for less, had pardoned more of the world by then, forgiveness our slow, uneasy work. Through lunch Claire detailed ways she was reconsidering her parents, thoughts flying. She was launching into new territory, which included a fresh recognition of her strengths, which had always been obvious to me. I remember feeling excited. She had done hard work, faced so much. We were light.
We hugged good-bye. A few steps away, I remembered tickets for a play and called out the invitation. Great, she said, also walking away, pulling her keys from her bag. Pick you up Tuesday, I said.
A day later her e-mail came.
I can’t be friends with you anymore, it said.
You shit on everything important to me, it said.
I could feel the water I’d just sipped run into my gut and spin. Everything grew huge, a carnival of mistake. There was more, a litany of my faults and falseness, and that first hour I reread the note countless times, trying to build sense out of it, connect her words with the reality I had presumed we shared at lunch one day ago. Yesterday. I had to read again, because shock kept snapping the thread of a sentence. I phoned and left a message. Please call me, please. We can talk about this, I said. I left another message. What about the lunch? Why didn’t you say this at lunch?
But she wouldn’t return my calls. Another e-mail followed a few days later, declaring finality. She wiped me from her life. I felt nauseous all the time, and crazy, and doomed. How had I failed at this, at her, failed so utterly? Was I really as callous and arrogant as she said? She would have nothing to do with me.
On the afternoon of the birthday party I constantly checked the carousel entrance, looking to see if Robby had arrived, predicting she’d have her husband drop him off. But Robby didn’t come. That friendship, it seemed, was also over. Daniel didn’t register it, young enough to slide affections around. It hadn’t occurred to me that she would pull her son away, yet I allowed for relief. A few summers earlier, on a day of appalling heat, we had walked our boys down to the river, setting out towels on a spit of gravel near a shallow side channel. Naked, the boys ran into the water and climbed on the fallen logs and rocks. “My penis is bigger than yours,” Robby told Daniel, and there was a wicked streak in his voice that I wanted to shield my child from. How dare you, I thought. How dare you, you little shit. But we laughed about it, Claire and I. Hadn’t I listened to her calm, measured voice as she bade her child be nice? What had we forgotten to do?
• • •
So our friendship ended. We were severed. In the wake of her decision I couldn’t draw a deep breath. It undid me, like losing love in my twenties—when one man could pronounce his word—but worse. How could I know us and she know some other us? I reread the two letters, my only pieces of her new plan, trying to martial any hints into a reasonable argument. I cried all the time and kept saying to Christopher, “This makes no sense.” I had never liked the bearded irises that grew ominously tall in the shade of her house. We’d sit beside the plastic pool watching the babies, as the flowers bloomed looking already spent, waving their decay around. I think I’d used that word once, decay. Was that it? Had I offended her like that? Her flowers? “Susanna,” Christopher said, “It’s not the irises.” I called up other friends and demanded they describe me. I walked myself back through each memory, as many conversations as I could, searching the most recent months for the rupture she’d known was coming. The Susanna she described was not me, was not even a part of me. A few weeks before the lunch, I’d written Claire a reference letter, and now she told me I blocked her progress at every turn. I had championed her, admired her artistry, appreciated her cakes, and now she described me as competitive and condescending. Her version of me was a terrible thing, a chill slinking creature that made its way into my head and settled. I no longer had
Claire for a friend, but I had the me Claire jilted, and we kept each other mean company.
Christopher and I were in the middle of buying a house, and in the initial excitements and anxieties, I missed my good friend, missed sharing. I missed her eye as I regarded the antique mullions of the windows, I missed her kind, practical help as I scrambled for child care on the day of the closing. I wished I could show her the stove’s fanciness that overwhelmed me, confess I felt I didn’t deserve it. I missed her as I set up my desk in a sunny corner, wanted her to know where I’d be working, how perfect. I had to remind myself that we weren’t friends. It was difficult to learn.
I dreamt of Claire for months, grief’s debate, and I saw her everywhere, the popular profile of her car a small terror. Sometimes, thinking she stood a ways off on the sidewalk, my heart would lunge, and I’d fill with the hope I could put things right and guide us to our normal place. Sometimes, a cold dread sank me, and I wanted to hide, to outrun the inevitable encounter. But there was no encounter. Once, attending a concert, I glimpsed her forehead, her hairline, in a crowd. Yes, there was her husband. The lobby mass shifted, and I caught sight of the whole of Claire’s face, bright with discussion, almost unreadable: I had never seen her happy.
A few months later I received a note. “I’m finding it impossible to stay mad at you. I heard you bought a house. I’d love to come see it.” But this was too late. I had been wrenched and remade by her rejection. I couldn’t risk my reality overtaken by another whim. She couldn’t undo this. We were no more.
• • •
When Daniel was in eighth grade, I had to go to the high school with him one morning for an early orientation. Amidst a swarm of kids and parents, he and I were locking our bikes outside when a calm family sailed past us. First the father, then the mother said a warm hello, their teenager between them, taller. Hello, I said, the ready smile of small-town errands, a gracious reflex. Then, in the next empty minute, the gnaw of the forgotten in my brain, I realized that the mother was Claire. She’d moved back to town without my hearing of it, and, transformed by time or maturity or both, she was no longer someone I recognized.
Awake.
We Turn into Mothers
I know people whose social lives continue twenty years on from their senior-year dorm suites, who keep up with intimates and every lesser acquaintance, attend any wedding, people who gather with family, campmates, high school exes. They look forward to reuniting, plan summers. They depend on the traded favors of past times. I never did any of these. Either it took work when I was already taxed, or I’d abandoned the version of myself old friends expected, or I’d cultivated new interior landscapes where these people could not fit. So I have just one friend from college, Rachel. We met when I was a freshman, eager with new starts, and she was a senior. Incredible to me, we’ve lasted and lasted. We became friends who had a past together. Old friends. Also incredible—we have foundered now, our roles much changed, our grip unsteady.
The day I met Rachel I’d arrived early for the first session of a writing class. Everyone was excited and talkative, as we’d all been chosen for this workshop. One woman was already seated, hunched over her neat white paper. Her hair curtained her expression. The rest of us stood around until the teacher came and made his chair known, and then we picked the spots that advertised our characters—shy, ambitious, arrogant, self-assured, afraid. I chose a seat across from the woman with the hair—Rachel—and watched her slide her fingers over one strand after another, a nervous repeat. I was attracted to idiosyncrasy, understood it had invisible origins.
After the teacher’s credo and the introductions, Rachel, never looking up, pierced other writers’ work with self-effacing wit. Her own work was beautiful and surprising. Over the weeks, she and I came to talking, a few words, a few paces together out of the building and down the steps before we parted. She wore suede gloves and a coat with a raft of shoulder pads, hem to her ankles. She aligned the buttons and fastened them before she stepped outside. I never saw her hurry.
One day, as someone read aloud, we made eye contact, then looked away, careful not to trigger indiscretion we couldn’t take back. Class over, I suggested lunch, and she said, “Well,” a reluctance in her voice that spread nervousness in front of us, like an open newspaper. I thought she was worried about other commitments, exams, et cetera. “Come on,” I said. “Half an hour.” We went to the dining hall that served falafel. When I lifted the pita, as we assessed the good writing and the mediocre, it fell apart, sauce soaking through. I rolled up strips of bread with sprouts and chickpea crumbs, and the sauce slid down my fingers. Rachel ate in discreet bites, no mess, considerable food left behind on her plate.
Within a few weeks, she was essential. Racing around together on the T, she showed me Cambridge, poetry bookstores, shops for vintage clothes. We made up stories about strangers, about ourselves. We ventured to Boston, ordered half carafes of wine late night in the North End, brought home cannolis from Mike’s Pastries. Movies starring Barbra Streisand or Prince bred in-jokes that lasted for months. It was the happiest sort of time. I invited her to come with me to the empty house on the Cape, long in my family. My gentle grandmother had spent each summer there since the early 1950s; and for six midsummer weeks, barefoot, bathing-suited, my sister and I would live with my father in a house across the street, which my grandmother had bought for that purpose. That house was gone, my father having sold it within months of inheriting it, as if a sentimental stink might dog him. Or he just needed the money. The structure still stood but had been turned into an expensive B and B. My grandmother’s house, though, was preserved, maintained by her responsible daughter, who rarely used it. I explained all this on the drive our first time out there together.
Rachel gaped at the opulence I was used to as we entered the house, thin gray handle on the screen door a known happiness in my fingers. We came into the lemon-oiled dining room, delicately crammed with grandfather clock, nineteenth-century breakfront, Windsor chairs. Rachel touched the brass candelabras fit with white-wicked ivory tapers, turned the cut-crystal decanters my grandmother had been handed by her decorator. In silver dishes on the sideboard, mussel shells showed their mother-of-pearl and pinecones gave off their ancient air. We both loved old-fashioned beauty. We both loved the enormous pink roses woven into the black carpet. Rachel asked, What’s this, what did I think of the ornate barometer, the antique sextant, the series of oil portraits? “Are these your relatives?” They weren’t, but they fit the house.
On the dunes, wind pounding us, the gray sea stretching out, she let her voice grow loud, surprised at herself, then breathless back in the car. And she loved the late-afternoon return to the enclosure of the guest bedroom, where I’d given her the four-poster bed, the pink coverlet and pink pillowcases, silky with three decades’ care. Happiness became her, although it did not seem to come easily. We made fires, we made hot milk with nutmeg, added teaspoons of Kahlúa as if we were breaking rules. She thanked me for weeks after we got back to school.
As if flirting, I coaxed her closer, and she didn’t resist or disapprove, granting me room to behave as I liked. We couldn’t have been more different. I admired her ladylike deliberations and composure, the faux-Victorian drop earrings, the impeccable white of her blouse, and she seemed to enjoy my assault on her primness, as I flaunted a wickedness she wouldn’t allow herself. I did or did not write my papers, didn’t turn things in on time, skipped consecutive days of physics class. I was dating Jason, a happy, vigorous sort of business. We made love everywhere, in the back office of the radio station, in the basement of the library, met at lunchtime in his central-campus room, in my room after midnight. I told details to Rachel, scandalizing her, thinking vulgar delight was a tonic. She could use frankness! As we passed the library, for instance, I’d give it an exaggerated glance, and she’d stammer, crack up. “I can’t believe you, Susanna. On the floor?” I wanted a trade. Come out with your mysteries, I thought, waited. Now tell me. I told her
of the affair in high school with my married teacher. Now what about you? I wanted to know what made her go quiet, what accounted for the tics. But the more I revealed, the sharper, cruder, worse behaved I was, the more detailed her questions of me. I flourished with her interest and kept talking, as she retreated further, donning that fine invisible mesh of the attentive observer. Whatever it was I wanted of Rachel she could not release. Not every friend has to say everything, know everything, I told myself. I calmed. What we did best together was give Susanna the stage she craved. Rachel did not fight me for the spotlight.
To escape phys ed, I’d signed up for ballroom dance, and I convinced Rachel to join me. “You can be the girl,” I promised. I grabbed around her waist. She gave in, pulling back her body, also smiling at my plea. “Okay, okay.” We surprised ourselves that we were good at this, because I was not graceful and she wasn’t athletic, but in each other’s arms, crucial complement, we were terrific. The opening bars of “In the Mood” made their permanent groove in my brain, carved muscle memory, and I still feel my fingers curve around Rachel’s hand as she set it in mine. The third week the teacher told everyone else, “Watch them.” We grinned, arms lifted, and ate up the room with our fox-trot, then our waltz.
She Matters Page 13