Friends and Strangers

by J. Courtney Sullivan

  “Millions of cans were recalled,” George shouted, getting worked up. “Imagine if that was Duke. The tenth recall of its kind in six months, and no one’s gonna do anything. Corporate greed wins again.”

  Corporate greed was his favorite catch-all term. He wrote Elisabeth a long email about it, including a link to a story about developers who were buying up farmland in the area and building cheap houses no one wanted.

  Elisabeth always felt guilty by association when George mentioned corporate greed. Andrew had spent close to twenty years working in corporate America. And though she rarely felt protective of her father, there was something innate, not chosen, about the way in which she recoiled from the reminder that he was in real estate; he was precisely the sort of person George considered responsible for the downfall of America.

  No, she would say none of this to Sam.

  Elisabeth tried to think up some other story to tell about her in-laws.

  “Faye, my mother-in-law, wanted Gilbert to be named for her father. Norman. She just went ahead and called him Normy for a month after he was born. When I told Andrew to tell her to quit it, she said, ‘What? It’s a nickname.’ So. That’s what we’re dealing with there.”

  “Clive’s sister-in-law wanted to name her daughter Trinket,” Sam said.

  Elisabeth wrinkled her nose. “No. Did she do it?”

  “They went with Sophie in the end.”

  Elisabeth circled back around then to something Sam’s roommate had said at the bar.

  “Wait a second. You and Clive are engaged?”

  “Sort of,” Sam said. “I mean, yes. But technically, no.”

  “Sounds complicated.”

  “I agreed to marry him, but sometimes I have my doubts. Not about Clive, just…” She trailed off. “I can’t believe I said that. But it’s normal, isn’t it? Everyone gets cold feet.”

  Elisabeth nodded. She could tell already, without knowing the details, that Sam would never marry the guy. But she would wrestle with the decision as if it was a decision that required wrestling for some untold amount of time. The only question was how long Sam would torture herself trying to make up her mind.

  “Sorry,” Sam said. “I don’t mean to bore you with this.”

  “It’s not boring,” Elisabeth said. “What’s he like? Does he make you happy?”

  “Yes. I’ve never been so happy as when we’re together. He’s the best man I’ve ever met.”

  That word, man. It made Elisabeth wonder.

  “How old is Clive?” she said.

  “Thirty-three.”

  “And you’re what? Twenty-one?”

  “I know it sounds like a big age difference. But our relationship is the furthest thing from the typical slimy-older-guy, dumb-younger-girl scenario. I pursued him, for one thing. When we met, I thought he was much younger than he is; he thought I was older. It’s not like either of us was seeking out—”

  Elisabeth put up her hands. “Not judging. I’ve dated older guys. Just don’t rush yourself. You’ll know what’s right when you know.”

  “Thanks,” Sam said. She looked grateful, even though Elisabeth hadn’t said anything profound. It felt good to ignore her own problems and focus on someone else’s. Especially someone this young, for whom bromides could pass as wisdom.

  “What does he do for a living?” Elisabeth said.

  “He gives walking tours,” Sam said. “Well, actually, he runs the business. He has this idea for an app he’s working on.”

  “Sounds great.”

  “I do love him,” Sam said, but she sounded defeated. “I think things will be better when we’re settled. Like you.”

  Elisabeth both envied and felt sorry for her that she was naïve enough to see marriage as an ending, an achievement, instead of the start of something so much harder and more complicated than what came before.

  “The big secret of adulthood is that you never feel settled,” Elisabeth said. “Just unsettled in new ways. Your twenties are about getting the things you want—the career, the man. Your thirties are about figuring out what to do with that stuff once you’ve got it.”

  Ten years ago, all the women she knew dreamed of meeting someone and getting married. Now Elisabeth didn’t have a friend who hadn’t fantasized about divorce. One spoke of moving uptown, living alone, getting a small dog. Another clung to the idea of marrying someone better looking the second time around, a man who earned more and never farted in bed. They agreed that shared custody would be hard, but it would also mean entire days and nights without children to care for. These notions got them through the reality of being partnered, just as thoughts of being partnered had once buoyed them through singlehood.

  A young girl who looked sixteen, but had to be older, ran past them in tears. Another girl followed, yelling, “Lily! Please! He’s an asshole. His tattoo isn’t even spelled right.”

  Elisabeth and Sam locked eyes and laughed.

  “I don’t belong here anymore,” Sam said.

  “I know the feeling,” Elisabeth replied before she had time to think better of it.

  “I used to,” Sam said. “But this past summer, I lived with Clive, I worked in London. Not to be the clichéd girl who went abroad and feels like she came back a different person, but—that’s basically what happened. It’s so juvenile here. I’ve outgrown it. What about you? Why don’t you belong?”

  Elisabeth shook her head. “I guess I need to get used to it. Where we lived before, I had friends. Every weekend was something to look forward to. Now I only get excited about new episodes of The Dividers on Sunday nights.”

  “I love that show,” Sam said. “We don’t have cable in the dorms, but my mom records it for me and I binge-watch whenever I’m home. My friend Maddie, my best friend from high school, she’s in med school in Manhattan. She got me into it.”

  “Do you think about going to the city after graduation?” Elisabeth said.

  “I used to, kind of. Maddie and I always talked about it. But I don’t know. It’s cool, but I get overwhelmed there.”

  “You’d get used to that. There’s no better place for a young creative person.”

  Sam nodded. “But it’s so expensive. I’d probably have to live in a cardboard box.”

  “Everyone feels that way in the beginning,” Elisabeth said. “Believe me, if I could figure it out, you can. You’re ten times smarter than I was at your age.” She paused. “I hate thinking about money, don’t you? I prefer to pretend it doesn’t exist.”

  “But how did you figure it out?” Sam said.

  “I had four roommates at first,” Elisabeth said. “In a two-bedroom across from a fire station. All our furniture was stuff we dragged in from the curb. This was before bed bugs. It was the best.”

  “My mom thinks I should go there too, and live with Maddie and work at a museum,” Sam said. “She has no clue how competitive those jobs are. It’s like she believes I could walk in off the street and they’d hire me.”

  “I might be able to help you,” Elisabeth said. “I know some people in the art world.”

  “Thank you. That’s so nice. But. I know it sounds dumb, but there’s also Clive to consider.”

  Elisabeth nodded. “Right. So then, you’d move to London?”

  “He’d like me to.”

  “What about you? Are you into the idea?”

  “In some ways, yes.”

  “What would you do over there?”

  “My absolute dream job that I’ll never get would be to work at the Matilda Grey gallery.”

  “Why do you think you can’t get it?”

  “Because I applied and they said no.”

  Elisabeth smiled. “How is that possible? How could they not want you?”

  “I’m not a UK citizen and I don’t have any special abilities. They were nice
about it. The woman said she’d hire me in a minute if it wasn’t for that. But if I want to work in London, it will have to be off the books, as a nanny or something. Unless Clive and I get married.” This last part she said in an almost embarrassed way. “I do hear what you’re saying about New York City. I’m sure it’s great.”

  Elisabeth sighed. “Maybe I’m romanticizing. I miss it. I didn’t think I would.”

  She was Sam’s age, a college senior, when she first visited Manhattan on her own, without her parents dragging her to Tavern on the Green and Radio City Music Hall. A girl from her dorm, Siobhan something, invited Elisabeth when they ran into each other early one Sunday morning. Siobhan’s art class was taking a three-hour bus ride to the Met and back. There were plenty of empty seats. Elisabeth went along. She and Siobhan ditched the group and spent the afternoon roaming around the Upper East Side. They ended up at a coffee shop on Third Avenue stuffed full of faded couches and antique chairs. People sat reading the paper, chatting across tables. The two girls watched them, finding it all extraordinary.

  “Imagine if this was your life,” Siobhan said.

  A year later, taking a stroll from her new apartment on Eighty-sixth Street, Elisabeth realized that coffee shop was three blocks from where she lived. It made the city seem intimate, familiar.

  She hadn’t thought of Siobhan in years. As you made your way through life, there were people who stuck, the ones who stayed around forever and whom you came to need as much as you needed water or air. Others were meant to keep you company for a time. In the moment, you rarely knew which would be which.

  She didn’t want Sam to miss out on the city. But then, the city had changed. When Elisabeth started as an editorial assistant, the world of her bosses was one of expensed lunches and clothes; hired drivers who waited outside the building all day in case an editor should want to go somewhere. Now there was none of that. What would have once been a five-thousand-word article was assigned at eight hundred words. Elisabeth got paid the same per word as she did when she started in the business fifteen years ago. Meanwhile, the cost of living in the city had exploded.

  When she was six months pregnant with Gil, she went to see Patti Smith give a reading in Brooklyn Bridge Park. The sun was setting behind her, a stunning backdrop of rippling dark water, glass buildings, and pink sky, the bridge lit up for the night.

  During the question-and-answer period at the end, a boy raised his hand and asked what advice Patti had for young artists starting out in New York.

  “Move to Detroit,” she said.

  * * *

  —

  They parted ways outside Sam’s dorm. Elisabeth felt light. She was happy that she didn’t have to go in there, that she was on her way home to her lovely house, her family. She could remember what it felt like to have nothing figured out. Life was better on this side of things. Settled, as Sam had put it.

  At home, she stepped into the front hall and looked up to see the crack in the wall. Melody was right; it was indeed huge. Elisabeth had never noticed, but now she would, and every time she would wonder if it was a sign that the entire house might one day fall down on top of them.

  She shut off the light, tiptoed upstairs and into their room. Andrew was sitting up in bed in the dark, looking at his phone. He gave her a wave.

  She peered down at the baby asleep in the bassinet.

  His face was a kaleidoscope. Turn him this way and he resembled her grandmother; that way and she swore he was her father-in-law. When he smiled, he looked like Andrew. Elisabeth caught her reflection in the mirror once and thought, I see my son in that woman. His face somehow more familiar than her own.

  She changed into sweats and climbed into bed.

  “How was it?” Andrew whispered.

  “Ridiculous.”

  Her phone lit up with an incoming text.

  Thanks for the walk and the chat. See you tomorrow morning!

  On a whim, Elisabeth typed back, Do you want to come over and watch The Dividers with me on Sunday? Join us for dinner beforehand?

  Sure! Sam replied.

  “Nomi?” Andrew said.

  “No. Sam.”

  “Sam who?”

  “Sam the babysitter. We ran into each other tonight. Turns out she loves The Dividers. I was asking if she wants to come over and watch it this weekend.”

  “Hmm,” he said. “Is that weird?”

  “She doesn’t have cable.”

  Elisabeth paused, thinking over what he’d said. “Is it weird?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  There was a moment of silence, a look in Andrew’s eye that she thought she could read.

  They had not yet attempted sex since the baby was born. Elisabeth’s doctor gave her the all clear at her six-week postnatal appointment, but it seemed too soon. A survey of her friends revealed that none of them had done it until their babies were somewhere between four and six months old. Elisabeth took this as permission to not even think about sex until the five-month mark, which was now, but it could wait a bit longer.

  “Someone died in this house,” she said.

  Andrew’s face was blank.

  “Does that not freak you out?”

  “The house is ninety years old. I’d assume someone died in most houses that age.”

  “But this was recent. It was a horrible death.”

  “What happened?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He smiled at her, bemused, then looked back at his phone. She glanced at the screen, something sports related.

  Out of habit, Elisabeth looked at her own phone.

  The first thing that appeared when she clicked on the BK Mamas page was a close-up picture of a toddler’s cheek, covered in oozing red bumps.

  Is this eczema or ringworm??? the poster had asked. Forty-nine people replied.

  Elisabeth clicked away, wishing to rid her mind of the image.

  Elsewhere on Facebook, several of her writer friends had posted photos from a book party in Brooklyn the night before. All the usual smiling faces. Elisabeth had slipped out of that world without making a ripple.

  She went to her sister’s Instagram, hoping to see the words that could solve her biggest problem: Sponsored post.

  But the latest was just another photograph of Charlotte lying on a surfboard in a green bikini, paddling out to sea, head held high, hair hanging in damp waves over her impossibly toned upper arms.

  “IF…If I never danced until dawn. If I had never tasted my true love’s kiss—or the sting of his betrayal. If I did not greet my fears with freedom…then I would never have known such abundance. The lustre of it all. My lustrous hair is a roadmap of where I’ve been and who I’m becoming. Not a straight line, but an exquisite tangle. Lustre hair care products with SPF 35 are my new go-to, guys. Highly recommend. Sending love and lustre from the shores of Bathsheba Beach.”

  Elisabeth sighed.

  Lustre. There was no such word.

  Even more irritating was Charlotte’s insistence on putting quotation marks around half the things she wrote. Elisabeth had tried to explain that this made it look like she was quoting herself.

  Charlotte said, “But I am quoting myself. Someday I might do a book of my quotations.”

  Had a diet pill company Elisabeth had never heard of really offered her sister half a million dollars to promote their product? Had there ever even been a sponsorship deal? As recently as a month ago, Charlotte had said her lawyer was ironing out final details on the contract. But what if the whole thing had been a lie?

  Elisabeth shook her head, as if to empty it of the thought. That wasn’t a path she could go down tonight.

  She closed the tab. A moment later, she opened a new one.

  She googled Sun Bun and then Bun Sun and finally solar powered, Sun Bun.

  Th
ere it was—the Sun Fun 5000 by Solar Tech.

  TURNS OUT THERE IS SOMETHING NEW UNDER THE SUN! Our solar-powered cooker heats up five times faster than charcoal! As featured on Shark Tank.

  Elisabeth felt a heaviness sink from her chest down into her gut.

  There was a photograph of a smiling young woman at the bottom of the page.

  Dr. Noreen Brigham invented the Sun Fun while on a Fulbright scholarship in the Himalayas, working with nomads on solutions for energy poverty. She received her doctorate from Harvard University and was named to the Forbes 40 Under 40 innovators list in 2011.

  Andrew had once said an invention was only as good as the story behind it. She thought of the night he came up with his idea. How did drunk guys at a wedding compare to nomads in the Himalayas?

  Elisabeth looked over at him. She felt like she was about to tell him someone he loved had died.

  “Honey. Do you know about this?”

  She handed him the phone.

  Andrew glanced at the screen.

  “I think I’ve seen it,” he said.

  “And it’s not a problem?”

  “No. See? It says right there. That’s a solar-powered cooker. Mine’s a grill.”

  “Sure. But aren’t they the same thing? A device for cooking outside, using solar?”

  “That folds up. It’s portable. You can take it camping or whatever. Mine is meant to replace the family grill. It’s a more solid piece of equipment.”

  So the Sun Fun was the same as his invention, but portable. And where his heated up three times faster than a charcoal grill, this one worked five times faster. And unlike his, it already existed.

  “It’s fine,” Andrew said. “The R-and-D guys I’ve talked to know all about the competition. They’re not concerned. Trust me.”

  Elisabeth didn’t trust him, not on this. That was the problem.

  She was about to put the phone down when Nomi replied to her text from earlier.

  Book club was a bust?

  It had been hours since Elisabeth reached out, lonely in the bathroom at Stephanie’s house. She knew her frustration was about Andrew and the Laurels, but she suddenly felt irrationally angry about Nomi’s silence. Nomi wouldn’t set a date to come visit. She never asked about the house.