“It sounds fascinating.”
“You should come next time. Us geezers would get a real kick out of having some young blood in the mix.”
“Sure,” Sam said. “I’d love to.”
“Our next meeting is a week from tomorrow,” George said. “I’ll pick you up.”
* * *
—
In the car on the way home, Elisabeth said the wedding had been a disaster. They didn’t have enough chairs. They didn’t think to buy ice; the drinks were lukewarm. During his toast, the groom’s father forgot the bride’s name.
“And oh my God, Sam, Andrew didn’t think it was worth warning me beforehand that they are goths.”
“They’re not goths,” he said. “They just wear black all the time.”
“To their wedding?” Elisabeth said.
“Okay, the fishnet tights and the bride’s headpiece were a surprise,” he said. “Was that supposed to be—a dead bird?”
Elisabeth and Andrew laughed.
“Was that supposed to be a dead bird?” Elisabeth repeated. “File under: questions no one should have to ask on your wedding day.”
“Fair point,” Andrew said.
“When their marriage ends in two years, do you think we get that serving platter back?” she said.
“That’s kind of a shitty thing to say,” Andrew said, a slight edge in his voice.
“I was kidding.”
Sam exchanged a wide-eyed look with the baby.
“Anyway, at least the cake was good,” Elisabeth said. “I had two pieces. I’ll be going for a run as soon as we get home.”
Sam told them about the conversation she’d had with George, and how he invited her to his discussion group.
“Oh my God, that’s insane,” Elisabeth said. “Obviously, you do not have to go. Andrew, tell her.”
“I’ll tell my dad you’re not going,” he said. “I’m sorry he tried to suck you in.”
“I want to go,” Sam said. “I thought all the Hollow Tree stuff was interesting.”
Elisabeth swiveled her head to look at her. “You did?”
“Yeah. You two don’t agree with him?”
“Of course I agree—the Man is bad, the little guy gets screwed over,” Elisabeth said. She sounded bored. “That’s kind of a tale as old as time.”
That wasn’t what George had said exactly. Sam thought there was more to it than that.
“It’s just that he’s suddenly realized something about injustice and he wants everyone, all of us, to care as much as he does. If you’re not taking to the streets or going to his discussion group, you’re complicit,” Elisabeth said. “When actually, it’s a lot more complicated than that.”
They fell silent. Sam thought about George. She thought again of how the Hollow Tree applied to all the stories Gaby had told her about Barney Reardon.
She was about to raise this with Elisabeth and Andrew when, with sickening clarity, she remembered: today was the second Saturday in November. She had forgotten about the birthday party for Gaby’s daughter.
How could she have forgotten, when these past few weeks, it seemed to be all that Gaby and Maria talked about? Should they hire a clown, or were clowns, as Gaby argued, just too creepy? Homemade cake or bakery cake? Pink balloons or purple? (In the end, they went with both.)
Maria showed everyone a picture on her phone of the pink dress she bought for Josie to wear, and a pink party hat with the number 2 on it in glitter.
Sam went to text Gaby right away, and realized as she did so that the last three messages in the thread had been sent by Gaby, with no response from her.
The first said You around? The second must have arrived right after Gaby invited her to the party. It contained Gaby’s address. The third was a long story about some guy Gaby had gone on two dates with. Sam vaguely recalled seeing the text come in late at night and skimming it while she was talking to Clive, reminding herself to respond in the morning. But she had been so busy. Lately, a thought like that just came and went.
Now she typed: OMG, just realized today was Josie’s party. I had to work. I am SO sorry I missed it. How did it go? Send pics!
Sam could tell Gaby had read the text. She kept looking down at her phone to see if she had replied. No response. No response. Sam turned the ringer up.
Elisabeth and Andrew thanked her over and over when they dropped her in front of the dorm.
“You’re the greatest,” Elisabeth said. “I don’t know what we’d do without you.”
Sam wanted to say, No, I’m not, I’m an asshole, but she just smiled and said, “Anytime.”
She had planned to get in bed and watch the Judy Garland movie marathon on Turner Classics. She told Isabella about it before leaving that morning, and Isabella replied, “You rebel, you. I hate to miss it, but Lexi and I have that concert at State.”
They had invited Sam, but the tickets were seventy bucks.
“I’ll cover yours. It will be an early Christmas present,” Isabella said.
Sam wished it was acceptable to say yes to an offer like that. Instead, she took comfort in the thought of having their room to herself for the night.
But when she opened the door, three guys with gelled hair sat on her bed, and there was Isabella at her desk, in the lap of a fourth, whom she’d met the week before.
The stripper’s assistant.
They had only referred to him that way since. Sam could not remember his real name. He worked as a bouncer at a bar near State. On Thursday night, he showed up at a birthday party in the living room of their dorm, along with a male stripper, who was covered in camouflage body paint. Twenty of them sat in a circle, drinking vodka and screaming when the stripper got too close. He stood in the middle, gyrating to “Born in the U.S.A.,” pulling off articles of clothing until all that remained was a G-string printed with the American flag. Despite this spectacle, many of the women in the room were watching the hot guy who stood in the doorway, arms crossed, wearing a gray T-shirt and jeans.
Isabella ended up inviting him to their room for a drink after. He said he didn’t drink on the job, but he’d love a cup of tea. She made him one in her hot pot, and for the next two hours, he sat there sipping chamomile and telling them his life story.
His friend the stripper, he said, had recently been beaten up by some customer’s angry boyfriend, and now he didn’t want to go anywhere without backup. He couldn’t stop stripping. He needed the money to get his online degree in criminal justice.
“Aren’t those degrees like a fraud?” Isabella said.
The stripper’s assistant shrugged in such a way that Sam wondered if he knew what fraud meant.
She and Isabella continued drinking vodka. When Isabella started licking the guy’s ear, Sam took a pillow and went to sleep across the hall in Ramona and Lexi’s room.
The stripper’s assistant wasn’t someone she had expected to see again. But here he was, with, Sam saw now, a huge bottle of beer duct-taped to each of his hands. They all had bottles taped to them like that.
“Sam,” Isabella said. “Have you ever played Edward Fortyhands? Play with us!”
Sam stood still in the doorway.
“Can you not sit on my bed, please?” she said.
“She seems fun,” one of the guys said.
“Shut up,” Isabella said. “It’s her room.”
Sam missed Clive. She wanted to be in their flat in London, curled up on the couch beside him, watching TV.
“I thought you were going to that concert,” she said.
“Lexi’s too hungover,” Isabella said. “And I don’t feel like a crowd. Oh shit. Your movie marathon. I forgot. Can you watch it downstairs in the living room? We ordered pizza.”
Sam stepped backward into the hall, then slammed the door. She stood there for a few moments, he
art thudding in her chest. Inside her room, someone whispered something and they all laughed. For an instant, she despised Isabella.
It wasn’t Isabella’s fault, though. Their living situation was unnatural. Sam couldn’t stand it anymore. She thought of George, with his piles of paper, his discussion group. She couldn’t wait to go and be among people who lived beyond this bubble.
A text message from Gaby arrived then.
Don’t worry about it.
Sam stared at the screen, hoping Gaby would say more. But she didn’t.
Sam felt horrible. She typed out a long, rambling excuse and then deleted it. She responded instead with just a heart.
She went outside and walked down Main, to Laurel. She stood there for twenty minutes, until she saw Elisabeth’s porch light go on, and then her small frame, in shadow, coming down the stairs, breaking into a run.
It was maybe forty-five seconds until she got to the corner. Elisabeth passed Sam at first, then turned right back.
“Hey!” she called. “Where are you off to?”
“Hi,” Sam said, attempting nonchalance. “I decided to take a walk.”
Then, for no good reason, she started to cry.
“Sam!” Elisabeth said, hugging her. “What happened?”
“Nothing. It’s silly.”
“Stay here,” Elisabeth said. “I’ll be right back. Let me take you to dinner.”
“No,” Sam said. “You were going for a run. I don’t want to disrupt your plans.”
Though Elisabeth’s offer was precisely what she wanted.
“We can try that Italian place, Casa Roma,” Elisabeth said. “It’s supposed to be good, right? Have you been?”
“Never.”
Casa Roma was the kind of restaurant one only went to with visiting parents.
“This is so nice of you,” Sam said. “Are you sure?”
“Yes. Andrew could use a little alone time with Gil. And I could stand to go out for once.”
An hour later, they had finished a bottle of wine and decided to order two more glasses to have with their entrées.
“Much more responsible than a second bottle,” Elisabeth said.
“When I was a kid, we were never allowed to order a drink in a restaurant,” Sam said. “I still feel so indulgent whenever I do it, even if it’s just a Coke. I expect my mother to pop out from behind a curtain and yell, ‘You’re having water!’ ”
Elisabeth smiled. “Oh yes, I remember that too.”
Sam got chicken Parmesan. It was the most delicious thing she had ever tasted.
She took a giant bite, just as Elisabeth asked, “Is Clive your first love?”
Sam shook her head, mouth full. After she swallowed, she said, “Sanjeev. My high school boyfriend. When he broke it off with me I thought I would die. I mean that literally. I lay on the floor in a ball. I didn’t eat for days. No other life event has ever made me not eat.”
The last time she saw him was right before she visited Isabella in London. Sam had only recently stopped thinking of him every day then, and there he was, emailing to see if she’d like to meet for dinner. She found that she didn’t like him as much as she used to—he bragged a lot, and his hair had gotten too shaggy. But at the end of the night, he hugged her. He smelled the same. She got into her car and cried. Meeting Clive had released her from all that.
“I almost envy that feeling now,” Elisabeth said. “I’ve been through it. I know it’s the worst. But there is something kind of great about the extremity of the despair. Feeling that strongly about love.”
“So I guess Andrew wasn’t your first love?” Sam said.
She twirled spaghetti around her fork, then wondered if it was childish to do so. She felt happy, sophisticated, having this conversation at a candlelit table covered in white linen.
“No, no, no,” Elisabeth said. “The first was Jacob. I was wild about him. I thought we’d spend the rest of our lives together.”
“What happened?” Sam said.
“My father slept with his mother.”
Sam was stunned. She might have had a hundred guesses and never come up with that.
“Jacob left me over it. The whole thing ended his parents’ marriage. It was dark.”
“Oh God,” Sam said.
“His mother thought my father was going to marry her. That’s why she confessed everything to her husband. When my father dropped her, she tried to kill herself. Jacob didn’t want anything to do with me after that.”
“How awful.”
“It was. We were living together by then.”
“Did your mom find out about the affair?”
“She knew. Just part of my parents’ sick games. When I stopped speaking to my father because of it, my mother told me not to be selfish, that it had nothing to do with me.”
“That is horrible,” Sam said. “I’m so sorry.”
“He’d always been a philanderer. But that one, I have to believe, was just for the purpose of breaking us up. My father hated Jacob. He wanted him gone. And my father has to get his way.”
“Why did he hate him?”
“Jacob was a musician. Covered in tattoos. Long hair, the works. Not up to my parents’ standards. That’s the kind of guy I used to go for.”
“When you met Andrew, were your parents elated? He seems like the type parents love.”
Sam wondered if this was why Elisabeth had chosen him, but Elisabeth shook her head.
“It wasn’t until after Andrew and I eloped that I even told them about him. If anything, them liking him might have worked against him. But I was ready. For a nice, stable guy who treated me well and was smart and kind and steady. You’ll see. Your friends will lose their taste for bad boys in a few years. It gets old.”
“Did your father ever apologize?”
“God no, he’s incapable. My sister, Charlotte, is the one family member who fully understood and acknowledged how screwed up it was. She didn’t speak to our father either, during those three years we weren’t talking. Then he had a heart attack. That ended the standoff. But Charlotte and I still keep our parents at arm’s length, even now. There are ways my father would love to use to get back in our good graces, but neither of us will let him.”
So this was what she meant by semi-estranged.
“I don’t think my parents like Clive very much,” Sam said. “They don’t believe we’ll be able to live, with my being just out of school and him doing what he does.”
“Andrew and I were in the same boat when we met,” Elisabeth said. “Totally on our own. But we made it work. You will too, Sam, if it’s what you want.”
Sam took such comfort in her advice, coming, as it did, from experience. It was like she was in the presence of an older, wiser version of herself. She could tell Elisabeth liked giving her advice too, being the voice of reason.
When the bill came, Elisabeth wouldn’t let Sam near it.
“I can’t believe how cheap this place is,” she said. “Compared to restaurants in the city, it’s like nothing.”
* * *
—
George’s discussion group met in the quiet commercial center of the town where he and Faye lived. Every third storefront was boarded up. A veterinarian’s office was gone, and a bookstore. A hot pink poster board was taped to a plate-glass window under a sign that read DONAHUE’S SHOES.
Thank you for six wonderful decades, someone had written by hand. It was our pleasure to serve you.
“We fought hard for that one,” George said as they passed. “We got a group together to protest online shopping. There was even a one-day boycott. We got over fifty signatures from people agreeing to take part. But poor Hal, eventually he had no choice but to close.”
Next door to where the shoe store had been was Lindy’s Bakery. George pushed the d
oor open. A bell jingled overhead.
Inside, there were four small tables, three of which were empty.
Three old guys and a heavyset woman in an apron sat at the fourth table, white coffee cups in front of them.
“I’d like to introduce a special guest,” George said. “Everyone, meet Sam—she’s here to bring our average age down to a hundred and two. Sam, this is Herbert Benson, Diego Ramirez, Jim Brewer, and Miss Lindy Rose, proprietor of this fine establishment.”
Sam had pictured a crowd of fifteen or twenty people. A podium and rows of chairs. But these three men were it. Plus, maybe, Lindy. Sam couldn’t tell if she was part of the group or taking a load off because business was slow.
They had passed a Starbucks on the way here, and George said, “I’ll never understand how a place so devoid of charm got to be so popular.”
Lindy’s Bakery was not at all charming. It had Styrofoam ceiling tiles, a linoleum floor, and a small glass case beside the register that contained exactly one sticky bun, one jelly doughnut, and three rolls.
“Coffee, you two?” Lindy said, rising from her seat.
“Sure, thank you,” Sam said.
“Decaf for me,” George said.
They sat with the others and exchanged pleasantries for a few minutes. Diego read the schedule of discussion topics for the day: Herbert was to give a report on teacher salaries in the local public schools. Then they would talk about two articles Jim had photocopied from the newspaper.
“And before we go, let’s talk about the demonstration at City Hall the week after next,” Diego said. “I finally got that youngster from the Gazette on the phone. He said he’ll try to be there.”
The rest of them nodded in appreciation.
“He’ll try,” Diego continued. “Because he’s so important. Two years out of State and the kid thinks he’s Jimmy Breslin.”
“Sam, you should know, we never get many people at our demonstrations,” Herbert said. “Us, a couple of the wives, and a handful of friends and neighbors, if we’re lucky. But still, it’s a contribution.”
Friends and Strangers Page 21