Friends Like Us (15 page)

The doorbell rings, and Jane tears out of the kitchen to answer it. With her daughter out of earshot, Mrs. Weston quickly moves over to me, stopping an inch too close, and I stiffen in surprise. If only we’d accepted her offer of popovers. Melba toast. Chicken fingers. Anything!

“It’s not her business,” she says to me, leaning in and looking up. “As an only child, Janey was frequently privy to more adult conversations than she ought to have heard.” Her words come fast and clipped; her breath smells strange, pungent-sweet, like sardines and cinnamon, a recipe of wrong ingredients. I nod, breathe through my mouth, force myself not to turn away. “This is between Charlie and me.” She reaches up, presumably to squeeze my shoulder, but since she is so much shorter than I am, a squatty shrub to the tree that is me, she misses, and her small, warm hand lands squarely above my left breast. “Mr. Weston and I will be fine. I mean, financially, we’ll be fine. Well, to be honest, I don’t know. And there you have it.” Mrs. Weston turns away from me purposefully, back toward the kitchen sink, grabs a sponge and starts attacking the green backsplash tiles with Jane-like fervor. There I have it?
There I have what?
Oh, Marcy. Marcy me.

“Oh-em-gee,” Jane says. “That was Dougie.” She lopes back into the kitchen, flushed and smiling, her flip-flops smacking the floor. “Good old Dougie! He noticed my car in the driveway and wanted to stop over and say hi. So nice! He wants to meet up tonight. I said we would. Let’s go shopping!” She looks at me and then at her mother. She presses her lips together and plants her hands on her hips, her pointy elbows forming a rhombus of defensiveness. I won’t say a thing. I’m relieved, grateful for this distraction, and definitely not worried about the look on my friend’s face, about how excited she seems, suddenly, to see good old Dougie, or about how she hasn’t mentioned Ben once today.

Jane’s mother tosses the sponge into the sink and dries her hands, then grabs her keys from the kitchen table and jingles them at us. “The mall awaits!” I raise my eyebrows at Jane and grin, happy to play along.

The shopping trip is an all-afternoon marathon under fluorescent lights, an exhausting forced march from store to store in search of the existentially impossible. But it’s also kind of fun. By the time we get home and get ready to go out and meet Dougie, I feel like a pleasantly numb facsimile of myself, a person who shops all day and goes out at night, the kind of girl who is ready for anything.

Polka music blasts into us as we walk through the doors of the Deutschland Beer Haus, the accordion providing both melody and jolly, relentless backbeat. Dougie Tyler, zapped by a bolt of recognition, hops off his bar stool. He grabs Jane in a rough hug, lets go of her, then looks at me, does a comic double take. “Whoa! For a second there, I thought I was hugging the wrong girl!”

Jane wraps her arm around my waist and leans in. Not far from where we’re standing, an older lady with a silvery helmet of hair dances by herself to the music, hopping from one foot to the other like an impatient toddler. “It’s true,” Jane says. “We have been told on occasion that we resemble each other!”

This afternoon, a grandmotherly saleswoman at one of the shoe stores clucked about how lovely it was to see a mother and her two daughters doing a little shopping together; the pretzel girl glanced at Jane and asked me if I was going to get anything for my sister. “We look alike?” I say to Dougie. “No, I’ve never heard that.”

Hanging in Jane’s bedroom in our apartment, above her desk, is a sketch I made a few weeks ago, a drawing of the two of us, our faces nearly identical. When I gave it to her, she knew right away. She pointed to the face on the right. “That’s me! My hair’s slightly shorter than yours,” she said, “and my eyes are just a little bit lighter. And my mouth is totally different.” She studied it for a moment. “You’re really good, Willa. You’re really talented.” The truth is I stared in the mirror as I drew the picture. I used myself as the model for both of us. I’ll think about this drawing, months from now, and wonder why I did that.

Jane giggles now, tosses her head, flicks her hair behind her. “I know! Weird!” she says. She laughs again, a trill of notes, a high-pitched twitter. I wouldn’t be surprised if a flock of excited male birds flew toward the sound and knocked themselves out cold against the windows of this restaurant. “This is Willa!” Jane is shouting now, above the din. She squeezes my waist and plants a moist kiss on my cheek. Dougie tilts his large head, smiles at me, takes in what must be the very peculiar image of his high school girlfriend exuberantly smooching her look-alike.

Jane is using me to flirt with Dougie, although amid the confusion of the crowded bar, I can’t wrap my mind around exactly how it’s happening. She kisses my cheek again and grabs my hand. Maybe I’m her stand-in, her stunt double. Maybe I’m like one of those mannequins we learned CPR on in seventh grade. Place your open mouth on the doll’s lips, press your hands onto her still chest, and bring her mechanical heart back to life.
Willa, Willa, are you okay?

“I need a beer,” Jane says.

Dougie leans across the bar and flags down the bartender, holds up three fingers. The refreshment choices here are regular and lite, but it’s okay: the crowd and the noise and the feathery skim of Jane’s hair against my shoulder are starting to get to me, to stir up the sediment inside me. “Dougie’s cute,” I whisper-shout to Jane as he’s paying the bartender. “Oddly.”

We stand for a while, the three of us sipping self-consciously, smiling, smiling, then make our way to a booth in the back, where there are fewer people and it’s slightly quieter. A middle-aged waitress in a red-and-white dirndl stands over us and asks if we’re interested in the special.

“Sorry, I missed that,” Dougie says, wiping foam from his lip.

The waitress bends toward us. “Schnitzel,” she says, her voice low and tired, her right thigh braced against our table. “Tonight’s special is schnitzel!” The pronouncement sends Jane into a sudden convulsion of laughter.

Dougie shakes his head at the waitress, and she turns and walks away. With nothing but a few bites of pancake, this afternoon’s pretzel, and half of a beer in her, Jane is loose—her arms and legs a little wobbly, gestures imprecise, her conversation unfiltered. “Oh, God, I don’t know why that was so funny,” she says. “Schnitzel.” She wipes tears from her face with the back of her hand, and Dougie looks at her, concern furrowing his low-hanging eyebrows.

“So, Willa,” he says quickly. “I got divorced recently.” His face immediately goes pink. “I don’t know if you knew that.”

I cringe. I recognize this galumphing attempt to redirect the conversation, but that doesn’t make it any more graceful. I know the feeling of trying to play the piano with a sledgehammer. “That must have been rough,” I say, and he raises his beer stein to me.

“Divorce! Betrayal!” Jane guzzles her beer and plonks the glass down on the table. “Love’s in disrepair!” she sings.

“Are you still in touch with your ex?” I ask.

“Erin. Her name’s Erin. And, nah.” And then Dougie Tyler, former frat boy who is indeed wearing an Alpha Sigma Sigma sweatshirt, baseball cap sticking out of his back pocket, holes in his jeans, divorced Dougie Tyler who sells sports equipment and lives in his parents’ basement and lifts weights for fun and says
I know, hey
when he agrees with someone, Dougie Tyler laughs: at himself, at the mundane misfortune of being a divorced twenty-six-year-old man who’s still pining for his ex-wife, at the incongruity of sitting at a booth in a small-town bar with his crumbling mess of a former girlfriend and her best friend.

Her intriguing best friend? Something passes between us, and I revel in it, in the surprising, off-beat thud-
thud
of my heart.
Hello.
“Erin,” I say. “What a bitch.”

“I know, hey.” Dougie nods.

Jane fiddles with the edge of a paper coaster. “Did I ever meet her?”

“You did, you met her at Fisk’s graduation party. She wore a back brace in high school?”

“Oo, sexy!” Jane says, and Dougie laughs again.

“Yeah, but it was good for a while. It worked.” He looks at me and finishes the last of his beer.

“You know, you should come visit us in Milwaukee sometime,” Jane says dreamily. “You should!”

“I’ll go get us another round,” I say, a little wobbly now myself.

I stop in the bathroom first, then make my way to the bar, where I wait for a while, sandwiched between bodies, brushed by the occasional, accidental sweep of fabric or skin. It feels good to be in the thick of things, even if it’s hard to breathe in here, even if polka music makes me nervous—
Enjoy it! Or there will be consequences!
—even if the small flame inside me has been ignited by the unlikeliest of sparks.

The bartender slides three mugs to me, and I arrange them carefully. Right now I’m here to take care of Jane; she needs me. And Dougie sees me. Although he may see me as a new yet familiar country, although I may just be, to Dougie, Canada, still, he sees me. I’m walking back to our table, three cold glasses of beer balanced in my hands, and I’m thinking about upping my game, about letting him know that the interest is mutual. This is how it all comes together. I get it; I’m late to the party, but I get it. I may be semiemployed and single and directionless, but I can be good at this. I feel the vibration of this place, the low and pleasant thrum of hope, fleeting and fine.

And then I see them. Jane’s long, white arms draped around Dougie’s neck, his big, blond head tipped down toward her dark one, the two of them, their faces pressed together; I can actually see the wet pink flick of someone’s tongue, Dougie and Jane locked in a sloppy kiss,
Oh, of course,
and me, nine feet tall and thick as a tree, lowering three glasses onto the table with a slosh of beer.

They part, faces flushed with what may or may not be guilt. I stare as Dougie removes his hand from inside the front of Jane’s shirt. His hair is sticking up on one side. They must have gotten right to it, as soon as I left. Slowly, and without looking at me, Jane rebuttons the three top buttons of her shirt and adjusts her bra strap. Dougie looks down and tugs at his sweatshirt.

The inside of my mouth is suddenly pasty and dry. “Hey, you two. Hey, now.” I slide into my seat across from them. Dougie slings his arm over Jane’s shoulder. Jane runs her tongue over her teeth and blinks slowly, like a lizard. I grab one of the beers. “So, what were you two talking about?”

Jane laughs a little and then turns her focus to the skin underneath her right thumbnail. “I could go for some potato salad,” she says, licking her lips. “Is what I could go for.”

Dougie, recovered, leaps up from the booth. They dish out sides of German potato salad and sauerkraut here, pale little dumplings, and an array of tiny sausages in rolls—greasy little men in sleeping bags—straight from the bar. He scurries off to fulfill Jane’s request.

I watch my friend tending to her cuticles. “Seriously? Did I really just see what I think I saw?”

She turns to me slowly, eyes narrowed, thumb resting on the ledge of her lower lip. “I don’t know. Yes. I thought …” With her teeth, she rips off a shred of skin from the side of her nail; a bright red flower of blood blossoms there. “You were flirting with him. With Dougie! I got … I felt … proprietary.”

My heart thumps hard and then takes off at a sprint. I fill my mouth with beer and swallow it in a huge, bitter gulp. I look at my friend’s face, and in this charged, tipsy moment I see her as she must once have been, a smooth, pink, fuzzy-headed baby with round eyes and wet, red lips, and as she will be, cheeks like deflated balloons, wrinkles creasing down from the sides of her nose to the edges of her mouth, the cartilaginous tip of her straight nose sagging. What is the weight of conflict with my best friend? How do I balance these scales? She and Dougie kissed—made out, pawed each other, in a bar, cleared at least a couple of bases—and she’s blaming me for it. She has a boyfriend. Ben! Ben is her boyfriend! She could have given this one to me, if it was hers to give. But is it worth leveling an angry accusation at her when she’s vulnerable? My heart pounds faster, my engine floods; I’m stalled out.

Before I can figure out the answer to my own question, Jane extends her hand, bleeding thumb and all, across the dark wood of the table. “Oh, Willa, oh, shit, I fucked up.” At the table behind us, someone laughs, low and bleating, like a goat. I shake my head to try to clear it, a gesture that probably looks to Jane like I’m disagreeing with her.

Dougie, stocky and bowlegged—I hadn’t noticed it before, his cowboy swagger—returns to the table and displays his treasure: a plate of things, unidentifiable objects, red, pickled slices of vegetables, dollops of cream, meats, and a low, gelatinous mountain of potato salad. He smiles at Jane proudly and deposits the dish on the table. I swallow the urge to slap the grin off his wide face.

Jane unfolds herself from the booth. “I’m so sorry, Dougie. We have to go.” I stand up quickly and slide away from the table, smiling, nodding. “We have to go,” Jane says again, tucking her hair behind her ears, “because Willa’s not feeling well.” On cue, I squeeze my smile into a grimace of pain, clutch my stomach and moan softly. We’re back in cahoots, where we belong. She waves her hand toward the plate of food. “Can I give you some money for that?” She asks the question like a person who probably doesn’t have five dollars in her wallet, who maybe doesn’t have a wallet at all, who knows she doesn’t need one.

Dougie, crestfallen, shakes his head. He slides his hands into the pockets of his jeans and tilts toward Jane as, with an elegant arch, she backs quickly away.

In the car on the way home to Milwaukee the next day, I drive and Jane is quiet. An hour in, we stop for gas. It’s drizzling, a light mist that keeps promising to swell into something more but then doesn’t, the kind of rain that evaporates before it hits the pavement, too weak and unsure of itself to cool the humid air.

I’m filling the tank as Jane walks toward me from the convenience store, waving two packages of Twinkies. “It’s not a road trip without junk food,” she says happily.