Best Friends Forever (2 page)

“How about you?”

Matthew told me he’d had dinner with his parents, his sister, and her husband and kids.

He’d cooked the turkey, rubbing butter and sage under the skin and slow-roasting it over a bed of onions. He said he loved to cook, and I said I did, too. I told him about my adventures in guacamole. He told me about the shows he watched on the Food Network and the hot new restaurant in Chicago he was dying to try.

The waiter slid our plates in front of us. Matthew tucked a tentacle into his mouth.

“How’s your salad?” he asked. A bit of fried breading was stuck in his mustache, and I had to fight an impulse to reach over and brush it away.

“It’s great.” It was overdressed, each leaf oily and dripping, but that was okay—a bad salad was a perfectly reasonable tradeoff for, final y, thank you God, a decent date. I chewed a mouthful into lettuce-flavored paste, and we smiled at each other.

“Tel me about your job,” Matthew said.

“I paint il ustrations for greeting cards.”

He actual y seemed interested, which was a pleasant change from my previous dates.

How had I gotten into that line of work? (Through my mother, who’d written copy for the same line of cards and had submitted one of my watercolors without tel ing me years ago.) Did I work from home? (Yes, I’d set up a studio in the dining room, with my easel by the window, where the light was best.) He asked about the hours, about my training, about whether I got lonely working al by myself, instead of in an office. I could have given him a soliloquy, an es-say, could have sung an entire libretto on the topic of loneliness, but instead I’d just said, “I don’t mind being by myself.”

He told me about his job running a chain of self-storage warehouses in Il inois and Wisconsin. I asked about where he’d grown up and where he lived now, lifting a soggy crouton to my lips, then setting it back on the plate, untasted, waiting for the moment that had come during each of my other dates, when he’d start trashing his ex-wife. Of the five men I’d gone out with, four of them had proclaimed that their exes were crazy (one had upped his diagnosis to

“certifiably insane”). The fifth was a widower. His wife had been a saint, which sounded even worse than crazy when you were the potential fol ow-up act.

He was nice, I thought, as Matthew expounded enthusiastical y on the hike he’d taken just last weekend with the Sierra Club.

“I go out with them a few times a month,” he volunteered. “Maybe you could join me?”

My first thought was that he was kidding

—me, hike? Where, from the Cinnabon to the Ben & Jerry’s? I stil had to remind myself that I was now more or less normal-sized, and that Matthew had never seen me in my previous incarnation. “Sure. That sounds like fun.” A hike in the woods. I let myself picture it: a red fleece pul over, a hat that matched my mittens, the thermos ful of hot coffee that I’d bring.

We’d sit side by side on a blanket in the leaves and watch as a stream burbled by.

Our entrees arrived. My fish was mealy at the edges, translucent in the center, tasting as dead as if it had never been alive. I managed two bites while Matthew told the story of how his col eague, a middle-aged middle manager named Fred, had suddenly taken it into his head to get his eyes done.

“He came into the office and he looked

—Wel , one of the secretaries said he looked like a squirrel with something jammed up his…” He paused. A dimple flashed in his cheek. “Like a startled squirrel. Like his eyes were trying to jump right out of his head, and I heard that when his granddaughter saw him for the first time she started crying.” He chuckled. I smiled. Love me, I thought, and sipped my wine and trailed one manicured thumbnail delicately along the edge of my blouse, beneath which my breasts swel ed, clad in itchy lace, helped along by heavy-duty under-wire. Matthew leaned across the table, with his tie dangling dangerously close to the puddle of beef blood on his plate. “You’re a real y of beef blood on his plate.

“You’re a real y unique person,” he said.

I smiled, shoving my doubts about the syntax of “real y unique” to the back of my mind.

“I feel so comfortable with you. Like I could tel you anything,” he continued.

I kept smiling as he gazed at me. He had nice eyes behind the glasses. Kind eyes.

Maybe I could talk him into shaving the mustache. I could see us together, on a slope covered with fal en leaves, my mittened hands around a cup, the coffeescented steam curling in the air. Please stop

talking, I begged him telepathical y. Every

time you open your mouth, you are

jeopardizing our beautiful life together. Sadly, Matthew didn’t get the message.

“Six months ago,” he began, with his eyes locked on mine, “I woke up with a bright light shining through my bedroom windows. I looked up and saw an enormous green disc hovering above my home.”

“Ha!” I laughed. “Ha ha ha!” I laughed until I realized he wasn’t laughing…which meant that he wasn’t kidding.

“I have reason to believe,” he continued, and then paused, lips parted beneath his mustache, “that I was abducted by aliens that night.” He was so close that I could feel his beefy breath on my face. “That I was probed. ”

“Dessert?” asked the waiter, sliding menus in front of us.

I managed to shake my head no. I couldn’t speak. I was single, true. I was desperate, also true. I had slept with only one man at the shameful y advanced age of thirty-three. I’d never heard the words “I love you” from someone who wasn’t a parent. But stil , I was not going home with a guy who claimed to have been violated by space aliens. A girl has her limits.

When the check came, Matthew slipped a credit card into the leather folder and looked at me rueful y. “I guess I shouldn’t talk about the alien abduction on first dates.”

I adjusted my neckline. “Probably not. I usual y wait until the third date to talk about my tail.”

“You have a tail?” Now he was the one who couldn’t tel if I was kidding.

“A smal one.”

“You’re

funny,”

he’d

said.

There

was

a

kind

of drowning desperation in his voice, a tone I knew wel . Help me, he was saying. Throw me a rope, give me a smile, let me know it’s

okay. I got to my feet while Matthew searched his pockets for a few bucks to tip the coat-check girl, then fol owed him through the restaurant, waiting as he held the door. “You seem like a good person,”

Matthew said in the parking lot, reaching for my hand. I moved sideways, just enough so that I was out of his reach. You’re wrong, I thought. I’m not.

Outside, the predinner mist had thickened into a chil y fog. Streetlamps glowed beneath golden halos of light. Matthew ran his hand through his hair. Even in the cold, he was sweating. I could see droplets glimmering through his mustache. “Can I cal you?” he asked.

“Sure.” Of course, I wouldn’t answer, but that didn’t seem smart to mention. “You’ve stil got my number, right?”

“Stil got it.” He smiled, pathetical y grateful, and leaned forward. It took me a second to realize that he intended to kiss me, and another second to realize that I was going to let him.

His mustache brushed my upper lip and cheek. I felt absolutely nothing. He could have pressed a bottle brush or a Bril o pad against my face; I could have been kissing his lapel or the hood of my Honda.

By the time I got home, he’d already left a message, long, meandering, and apologetic.

He was sorry if he’d freaked me out. He thought that I was great. He was looking forward to seeing me again, maybe on Sunday? There was a movie that had gotten a good write-up in the Trib, or a hot-airbal oon festival. We could drive out, pack a picnic…his voice trailed off hopeful y. “Wel ,”

he said. “I’l talk to you soon.” He recited his telephone number. I thumbed number three for “erase,” kicked off my boots, twisted my bright new hair into a plastic clip, then sat on the edge of my bed with my face in my hands and al owed myself one brief, dry, spinsterish sob.

Don’t get your hopes up. The website didn’t say that. It was what I told myself as inoculation against the fantasy, persistent as a weed, that one of these guys could be the one: that I could fal in love, get married, have babies, be normal. Don’t get your hopes up. I’d chant it like a mantra on my drive to the Starbucks or the Applebee’s or, with Date Number Four, the bowling al ey, where, it turned out, the fel ow had had the ingeni-ous notion of combining a first date with a fifth birthday party for his son (his exwife had not been glad to meet me; neither, for that matter, had his five-year-old). Don’t get your hopes up…but every time I did, and every time I got my stupid heart crushed.

“Oh, wel ,” I said out loud. Funny. That had been nice to hear. But it was so unfair! To get a date on the Internet, a woman had to be many things, starting with thin and proceeding re-lentlessly to attractive and pleasant and a good listener and good company. Young, of course. Stil fertile, stil cute, with a good body and a decent job and a supportive (but not intrusive) family. The men didn’t even have to be sane.

I looked at the clock, the antique pinkand-green enameled clock on chubby gold legs that I’d bought myself for my birthday. It was just after ten. The reunion would be in ful swing.

Merry Armbruster had cal ed me that afternoon, making one more last-ditch plea for my attendance. “You look fantastic now! And I’m sure everyone’s forgotten about…wel , you know.

We’ve al grown up. There’s other things people wil want to talk about.”

Thanks but no thanks. I swal owed my vitamins with a glass of water and chased them with a shot of wheatgrass (I’d been drinking the stuff for two years, and it stil tasted exactly like pureed lawnmower clippings). I hung up my date uniform, replaced the lace bra with a comfortable cotton one, pul ed on my favorite flannel pajamas and a pair of socks, then sat back down on the edge of my bed, suddenly exhausted. Just lately, I’d been thinking a lot about the girl I’d been, and what she would have made of the woman I’d become. I imagined the little me standing at the doorway of my bedroom, once my parents’, in a neat cotton sweater and a pleated skirt, dark-brown hair caught in a ponytail and tied with a ribbon that matched her kneesocks. At first she’d be pleased by the rich color of the paint on the bedroom wal s, the oil painting that I’d done of a lighthouse casting its beam of gold over the water, hanging above the window. She would like the enameled vase on the bedside table, the crisp linen bedskirt and the trel ised iron headboard, but then she’d realize that it was my parents’ bedroom. Stil here? she’d think, and I’d have to explain how I hadn’t meant to stay, how I’d tried to go away to col ege, how I’d planned to live in a big city, to have boyfriends and an interesting job, to make friends and take trips and have an apartment that I’d decorate with souvenirs and statues and photographs I’d have taken on my travels around the world, how I’d planned on al of that, but somehow…

I rol ed onto my side. My blood buzzed, and my thoughts were darting wildly, jumping from my date who’d looked so promising, to the website where I’d found him, to my exboyfriend Vijay, who’d been “ex” for four months, and who’d never exactly been a boyfriend. You couldn’t cal him a boyfriend, I guess, if we’d been out together in public only once, but I’d loved him with an intensity that I thought—or at least hoped—was reserved for the first man you’d wanted who’d broken your heart.

I squeezed my eyes shut and let my hand rest briefly on my bel y, holding my breath as I pressed. Stil there. The lump—it was actual y more of a stiffness than a lump

—was stil there, between the ridge of my pubic bone and my bel y button. I pushed at it, prodding with my fingertips. It didn’t hurt, exactly, but it didn’t feel normal, either. I didn’t know how long it had been there—for years I’d been so fat I could have been gestating twins and probably not noticed

—but I was sure that I knew what it was. Hadn’t I watched my own mother die of the same thing? First her breasts, then her liver, then her lungs and her bones, then everything, everywhere.

I’d scheduled an appointment with my doctor for next week, the soonest they could take me. The receptionist’s chirpy voice had cooled noticeably at my name, and I knew why. Last year I’d cal ed in a panic after my fingers

had

found

an

odd-shaped

protuberance on the side of my abdomen

…which had turned out to be my hipbone. Wel , how was I supposed to know? I thought, as sul en as I’d been when the nurse delivered the verdict, then stepped outside the exam room to laugh her stupid highlighted head off. You spend ten years in the neighborhood of three hundred and fifty pounds and see how wel you recognize your own bones when you find them again. your own bones when you find them again. Besides, this time it felt different.

Big, strangely

stiff,

growing

each

day.

I

knew

what

it was, and deep down, I’d known that it was coming. Bad luck always found me. I was a bad-luck kind of girl. The cancer had eaten my mother and found her sweet, and now it had returned to Crescent Drive, hoping I’d taste the same. And maybe that wouldn’t be so awful, I thought, as I lay on my fancy bedding, staring up at the crown moldings I’d hot-glued in place with my birthday clock ticking quietly beside me. I could just give up on everything, starting with Internet dating. No more freaks and geeks and unexpected mustaches; no more regular-looking guys who turned out to be from the Twilight Zone. I could just read, stay in bed eating shortbread cookies and gelato, and wait for the end…and with that, I heard the knock at the door, and I went downstairs to find my best friend standing there, just like old times.

FOUR

By the time Jordan Novick, Pleasant Ridge police chief, arrived at the parking lot of the twenty-four-hour drugstore, the woman was almost in tears. “I can’t figure out what’s wrong,”

she said, brandishing her key fob and raising her voice as the infant in her arms howled. “It’s a brand-new car. You’re just supposed to walk up to it with your key fob, you don’t even have to press anything, and I keep trying, but the door stil won’t open.”