by Mandy Berman
“Where are you from?” Fiona asked, hoping to piece aspects of her story together.
“D.C. area,” Liv said. “You?”
“Westchester. So your parents work in politics?”
“Sort of. My mom’s a translator at the Japanese embassy. And my dad’s a lobbyist. What about yours?” Somehow, Liv was lobbing Fiona’s questions just as quickly back at her, as if Fiona were even half as interesting.
“My dad’s a lawyer. My mom…well, my mom is a mom, I guess. Kind of lame.”
“I don’t think that’s lame at all,” Liv said, shaking her head emphatically. “It’s the most important job there is.” This sounded like a line, but Fiona was grateful for Liv’s generosity.
“So where does the French come in?”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re French, right? Is your dad French?”
Liv shook her head. “He’s American.”
“So your mom’s a polyglot.”
“Just Japanese and English.”
“You mean you’re not a native speaker?”
Liv shook her head again.
“You had me fooled,” Fiona said, and Liv appeared to be blushing, genuinely flattered by Fiona’s mistake.
When they were done brainstorming for the project, Liv said, “I’m supposed to go to this soccer party tonight. There’s this guy I’ve been…And my roommate just told me before I got here that she has to study for a chemistry exam. Like she hasn’t already known about this test for weeks.” Liv rolled her eyes. “Anyway. You wanna come?”
Fiona was surprised that Liv deemed Fiona interesting enough to spend more time with. Most of Fiona’s friends at Buchanan so far were potheads from her hall—funny, goofy girls who ordered a lot of delivery pizza and didn’t leave the dorm too often. She agreed at once.
* * *
—
They’d gotten an A on the project, Liv delivering a presentation on Vaste est la prison, focusing on the subordination of women in Arab society. Fiona felt immensely, somewhat inexplicably, proud of her new friend.
They went out a few more times together before the semester ended, and then Fiona left to work as a counselor at Camp Marigold. They promised to write letters to each other, but they fell out of touch during the summer months. It was that August, when Helen died, that Liv came back into the picture.
She called Fiona often at the house in Larchmont—sometimes simply to tell her about her day, when Fiona didn’t want to talk—and sent care packages filled with nail polish and magazines and face masks and Reese’s cups. There were always handwritten notes in the packages, too, often about nothing important, but the sentiment in them felt genuine and heartfelt and gave Fiona a small amount of comfort.
When she returned in the spring of sophomore year, Fiona felt sheltered by Liv. She emerged as the kind of person one needed in a crisis: steadfast and unceasingly generous, becoming Fiona’s tutor, therapist, and drinking buddy rolled into one Dr. Frankenstein creation of a selfless friend. Liv insisted they live together, and used her charms and Fiona’s particular circumstances to get them an apartment off-campus in the spring, normally a perk only available to juniors and seniors. There wasn’t a meal that semester that Fiona ate alone, whether it was Liv’s home-cooked pasta primavera on a Tuesday night or bagels picked up on a Sunday morning. Liv also seemed to have an endless reserve of booze for Fiona’s grieving purposes, and she offered it up constantly, supporting Fiona’s drinking habits wholeheartedly and engaging in them herself. They drank so much pinot noir that year and smoked so much pot, and stayed in and played gin rummy, or went to parties arm-in-arm, Liv ferociously protective of her friend, leaving when it was lame, or dancing until the morning, or going home with fraternity brothers, hooking up with the boys in adjacent rooms and meeting at the bathroom at dawn, hardly having slept, bursting into hysterics. They were both English majors and French minors at the small college, and they had three out of four classes together that sophomore spring, so Liv helped Fiona with schoolwork and often briefed her on readings, knowing that Fiona was too bogged down by grief and anxiety to do much herself.
Liv seemed to have an uncanny knowledge of how to be with someone who was in mourning. The times when Fiona broke down—try as she might to keep it all in, sometimes it felt like the tears had an agenda of their own—Liv rubbed her back and shushed her until she calmed, like a mother would a child, sometimes even putting her to bed and staying there until Fiona fell asleep. When Fiona threw up from drinking too much, Liv held her hair back. When Fiona wanted to be alone, Liv busied herself with other things, managing to seem totally independent and not at all smothering until the exact moment that Fiona wanted to be with her friend again, at which point Liv would become instantly available. Fiona knew that friends like these were rare, although a part of her was scared that Liv had drawn closer to Fiona because Helen had died—because there was some strange novelty and celebrity attached to being the person whose sister died unexpectedly at the age of thirteen. Sometimes Fiona had to wonder why Liv had chosen, in the first place, to be friends with her. Did she invite Fiona to that soccer party that night, back at the end of freshman year, only because Fiona had complimented Liv on her French skills? Or because her roommate had dropped out at the last minute and she needed a new wingwoman? And would they have even remained friends after that semester had it not been for Helen’s death? After all, they hadn’t been in touch at all that summer. Why else would she return with such full force?
Fiona then cast these thoughts aside, feeling immediately ungrateful and guilty for even having them. The point was that Liv was there with more gusto than anyone else at Buchanan had been. And that was what she’d needed—someone to be there.
In the spring of junior year, after Liv got back from her semester abroad, they moved into the house with Marley and Lula, a pair of girls from Liv’s freshman hall. It was fun to have more roommates for their card games and movie nights and weekend outings. Marley and Lula, too, were sensitive to Fiona’s needs, though perhaps never so much as Liv was. Liv was a particularly loyal brand of friend, the likes of which Fiona had had tastes of before, but never to this extent. Fiona was used to being the loyal one, not the one who called the shots.
This year, that all seemed to change. Liv, Fiona, and Lula had done internships in New York that summer, where they fell in with a group of other incoming seniors from Buchanan also in the city, many of whom they didn’t know well. It was then that Liv started spending time with Brandon, a preppy, pre-law, kind of cute, kind of boring fellow senior. Their ramp-up to dating was quick, and Liv simply became less available to her friends. These first few weeks of senior year, Fiona had to ask Liv for help with the few assignments they’d been given, when her anxiety was acting up too much for her to be able to focus on a reading; Liv no longer took the initiative. She also wasn’t around as much; she slept at the Zeta house about half the nights of the week. Fiona tried to recalibrate what she needed from her friendship with Liv and accept that things necessarily had to be different, that a year and a half was long enough to be babied, that she would have to be better now, get back to being a fully functional college student. But then her needs bled out to others, to Marley and to Lula. Maybe, she was starting to realize, she needed too much from people. Maybe she needed to do a better job at relying on herself.
* * *
—
That evening, with both of them eager to move on from the day’s earlier conversation, Fiona agreed to accompany Liv to the annual English department Welcome Back party, which was set up in the hallway on the fourth floor of Leviathan Hall, an area far too small for the occasion. They got to the top of the stairs, winded. Shiny plastic tablecloths were draped over the folding tables that lined the hallways, punch bowls and platters of store-bought cookies atop them. Seventies-era folk music played faintly from someone’s office. Fiona’s class
mates, predominantly female, wore flowing embroidered blouses, boot-cut jeans, heeled boots, feather earrings. The professors were in their usual drab attire: wool, tweed, moth-eaten cable-knits. Fiona felt boring in her V-neck sweater and skinny jeans, while Liv looked pretty, as she always did; she’d changed into a sweaterdress since the afternoon, wore her long shiny hair down her back, and had applied a fresh coat of lip gloss, her full lips gleaming.
They waved to a few people they had classes with as they pushed through the crowd to the drinks table, where most everyone had congregated.
“Hi, Fiona.” Her Shakespeare professor from sophomore year, a chubby and pink-cheeked British woman, was pouring white wine into plastic cups. The woman extended a cup across the table, and Fiona accepted it with a close-mouthed smile.
“How’s your semester going so far?” the woman asked. Because Fiona had taken a leave of absence her fall semester of sophomore year, and then missed several deadlines upon her return in the spring, this professor—like so many of them at this point—knew the intimate details of Fiona’s particular situation. Eventually Liv had caught Fiona up to speed in classes, though Fiona guiltily knew she could have ridden the wave of sympathy as long as she needed. Because it was a small school, nearly everyone in the department knew everyone else, and even though none of them had ever known Helen, the way she had died, so young and unexpectedly, was enough to soften even the most hardened hearts. (This was true of everyone but the Larkins themselves, of course, whose hearts contracted and chilled in tandem as if drawn as the inverse correlatives on the same chart.)
Now the woman was looking at Fiona with those pity eyes she knew so well at this point, all droopy and puppylike. Even older adults who had lost parents or friends didn’t know how to deal with a loss like Fiona’s, such a young woman having to experience the unexpected death of her even younger sister. It was novel, almost. It was the kind of thing one only heard of in movies or on the news. And for two years now Fiona had been able to discern the difference between those who cared for her grief and those who were putting on a show—those who perversely thrived on the novelty of it, for it made them feel so much better about the fortunes of their own lives. This professor would go home to her husband and say, “I saw that poor girl from the department whose thirteen-year-old sister died a few years back. Remember her? She looks so thin.”
“It’s fine,” Fiona said humorlessly, and turned away from the table. Liv was holding a glass of red wine and already engaged in a conversation with Professor Roiphe.
Joan Roiphe was both Liv’s and Fiona’s advisor. Two courses in pre-nineteenth-century literature were required for the major; they were far less popular than the more modern offerings, but Professor Roiphe’s animated nature and cross-references between the subject matter and contemporary pop culture made her early American lit class palatable, even interesting. Her love of the English language was contagious, and anyone who had grown up staying up past bedtime to read novels in bed—as Liv and Fiona both had—felt an instinctual kinship with her.
“How are you two ladies liking the seminar?” she asked, a cookie lodged in one cheek. Joan Roiphe was in her midfifties; she wore slacks and sweater-vests and kept her gray hair cut close to her scalp. There were rumors that she’d slept with female students over the years, though none that Liv and Fiona definitively knew of.
“It’s amazing,” Liv gushed. “Actually…” she started, the wheels turning. Liv had this weird thing around authority figures, always had to be so on around them. “I’ve been thinking a lot about George Eliot in the context of the class, her having to hide behind the pen name in order to be taken more seriously. I was wondering if it’s absolutely necessary that the woman we write about be American? There’s so much there with Eliot, especially in comparison to her female contemporaries who were writing lighthearted novels about the marriage plot. I think I could really make a case for the fact that the male name was not a personal choice but a political necessity.”
“Well,” Professor Roiphe said, and Fiona was suddenly embarrassed for Liv. “I’m not so sure, considering we’re only reading from the American canon.” Liv’s face was blank. “We can explore it in one of our meetings,” Professor Roiphe offered, perhaps to save the rejection of Liv’s misguided overzealousness for another, less festive occasion.
“Great.” Liv beamed, taking this as encouragement.
“Hi, Joan.” A hand clapped Professor Roiphe on the shoulder, and she turned.
“Oliver,” Professor Roiphe said brightly.
Liv straightened as if in the presence of a celebrity. Around these parts, he was. He was the department’s prize catch this year, having signed on at the last minute after Professor Bernstein’s sudden death (well, not that sudden—the man had been old and overweight). When Liv had learned that Oliver Ash was coming to Buchanan this year, she immediately tried to switch into the Holocaust literature seminar, but it was, of course, already filled to capacity.
Fiona thought she had heard his name before, but didn’t know anything about him or his writing. As Liv reported to Fiona on their walk to the party, Oliver Ash’s first book, published when he was a mere twenty-six years old, simply titled Adolf, was a dystopian novel about the second coming of a Hitler-esque leader—an American man by the name of Adolf Kinder—growing up and rising to power in early-1990s America. It was published to acclaim, won him a few prestigious awards. Gus Van Sant had made it into a film, Nirvana soundtrack and all, a critical favorite and a moderate box office success.
Fiona had first seen Oliver Ash’s face on a poster outside one of her classrooms, advertising an upcoming reading of his on campus. She’d stopped to look at the headshot: early forties, all seriousness and fury, gray-blue eyes pointed at the camera with sexual intensity. A thinning head of salt-and-pepper hair. In the picture, he’d looked as she’d expected him to look: like an ex-wunderkind who had aged into a smoothly predatory professor.
He was taller in person than Fiona expected, broader. He wore a tweed blazer and a wool tie, overdressed for the warm September night. He looked around the room as if checking for approval. He held his plastic cup of wine uneasily as he brought it to his lips, which were surrounded by gray scruff, and took a long sip. The word that came to mind was “self-hating,” but that might have been too harsh. He had good posture, which Fiona could sense was a front; she imagined him actively practicing standing tall for public-facing occasions like this one. He was not smooth at all, but rather awkward, as if the wunderkind had woken up that morning in a body much larger and older than the one he was accustomed to.
“These are two of my brightest advisees,” Professor Roiphe told Oliver Ash. “Olivia Langley and Fiona Larkin.”
“Liv is fine,” she said eagerly, shaking the man’s hand.
“Liv, then,” he said. “Hi,” he said to Fiona, stretching his hand out to her now.
“Hi,” she said, taking it.
Oliver Ash had an odd accent; Fiona wanted to call it British but it wasn’t, quite. It was a gentle mélange of European accents, or something. Pan-European, if that was a thing. And now he was looking directly at her and he was saying something else.
“What?” she asked, having missed his question altogether.
He smiled. His teeth were small.
“I said, Are you enjoying yourself?”
“Oh,” she said. “Yeah. We just got here.”
“Where are you from?” Liv asked, cutting off any possibility of organic conversation as if she were tasked with interviewing him. Though she of course probably already knew the answer. Fiona saw the way Liv was looking at him, wide-eyed, chin tilting up in adoration.
“Oh, all over,” he said. “Not far from here, originally, actually. I grew up in the suburbs of Philadelphia. Now I’m based in Berlin.”
“I love Berlin,” Liv said. Fiona knew that she’d been once, for a weekend,
during the semester she was studying abroad in Paris.
“It’s a pretty special place,” he agreed. “What brought you there?”
“Oh, just visiting,” Liv said, as if casually ticking off European cities were a hobby of hers. “Quite the scene.”
“Did you do the whole clubbing thing?”
“A little,” she said. Fiona knew that Liv and her friends had waited on line for two hours, in the dead of November, outside the biggest club in the city, only to be turned away at the door. Fiona wondered then if her derision of Liv was too cruel. She was, after all, just trying to impress someone.
“I certainly haven’t.” He smiled. His little teeth reminded Fiona of Chiclets gum. “I’m about twenty years too old for it.”
He asked Liv and Fiona if he would have the pleasure of teaching either of them the following semester.
“Maybe!” Liv said. Fiona knew that Liv would register for his fiction writing workshop the minute spring registration opened. “Are you enjoying your time at Buchanan?” she then asked, so eager with the follow-ups.
“I am,” he said. “Though I thought I’d be taking more advantage of being in the Northeast. I had all of these plans to enjoy the fall foliage and take the train to Philadelphia or New York on the weekends and visit museums and see plays. Instead I mostly watch baseball in bars by myself. It’s been so long since I’ve been able to watch a sport I care about in a bar.”
Everyone politely laughed, as if that had been a joke. Liv was rapt as he went on about his classes this semester. Fiona drained the mini plastic cup and felt her cheeks warm. It was at this moment that she felt the telltale signs of rising anxiety, which still plagued her these days. It was as if there was not enough oxygen to go around for everyone. The answer was, usually, more alcohol, but the number of people surrounding the wine table added an additional lurch in her stomach.