Friends Like Us (6 page)

I want to describe it to Seth, to explain how it feels to be an ingredient in this happy, new friendship pie. “But all of a sudden he’s back in my life, and the three of us are hanging out together, and, Seth, it’s
perfect
!” Heat rises to my face as soon as the words are out of my mouth. Seth leans back in his chair and gazes past me. It’s a good thing that he is not, it turns out, even remotely listening to me, because along with barbecue potato chips, my brother eats sincere emotions for lunch.

“I don’t blame Fran and Stan, you know,” he says, tipping the last of the chips into his mouth. That’s what we call our parents—Fran and Stan—although our father’s name is actually Roger.

“Huh?” I say, baffled by his sudden change of gears. Powdery orange crumbs fall like nuclear snow around his mouth. Later, Jane will spot the flecks on the floor, and she’ll make them disappear. I blow on my fingernails, which I’ve just painted a bright and glittery red, from Vérité’s disastrously named I’d Nail That line of polishes. Jane is dragging me to a party tonight. I don’t like parties, but I do enjoy the occasional opportunity to shine myself up. I shaved my legs earlier, and I’m even contemplating wearing lipstick.

“I don’t blame them for how things turned out.”

“Seth, you came home from Madison after your first semester freshman year and you waved your Intro to Psych textbook in front of Mom and yelled, ‘You and Dad screwed me up! I have
proof
!’ ”

“Well, I don’t blame them anymore.”

“Really, you don’t blame Stan for the time he stormed out of the house and didn’t come back for two days? For those months before the divorce when he just stomped around and didn’t talk to any of us? For moving in with Lesley six months after he left?”

“Do you have any more chips?” Seth asks. I shake my head. “Or, um … Pop-Tarts? That’s what I want. Did I see blueberry Pop-Tarts in your pantry?”

“You don’t blame Mom for the constant stream of bitter poison that didn’t dry up until the day she married Jerry in Arizona, without us,
and called from Tucson to tell us
?”

“No,” Seth says, licking his fingers. When we were growing up, my brother refused to submit to my mother’s requirement for good table manners; his stubbornness backfired, and now he’s incapable of not being disgusting. “But
you
still do!”

“Well, whatever,” I say. “You’re the one whose girlfriend just kicked him out.” I pull my favorite pink sweater from the back of a kitchen chair, where it’s been hanging since last week, and slip it over my head.

“And that’s my point,” Seth continues. He’s up and rooting through the cupboards. Five nights ago, Nina tossed him out of the apartment they shared on the east side. I loved Seth and Nina’s place, the big living room with its sea-blue walls, deep, welcoming couches, and antique lamps glowing yellow in every room. And I loved Nina, the way she teased Seth, softened him. She’s a herpetologist who specializes in mutations. I wanted them to get married, to share in the care and feeding of Nina’s three-legged frogs and then, eventually, of Seth and Nina’s hopefully two-legged human babies; I wanted them to redeem our fractured adolescence with a happy, functioning family. They were supposed to be the template.

Seth won’t tell me why their relationship imploded, but I have my suspicions. His last relationship, with a coworker named Shelly, ended in a spectacular display of fireworks when he cheated on her with her half sister, Kelly; he broke it off with his college girlfriend, Libby, by sleeping with his high school girlfriend, Nora, whose heart he had broken, years earlier, by making out with Merry, a sad-faced girl he’d met at math camp. I don’t have Seth’s degree in statistics, but it’s not that hard to figure this one out. He’s been sleeping on his friend Pete’s sofa but spending his days here, plowing through all of my food and spouting self-help clichés whenever his mouth isn’t full. “You have to own your problems. You can’t play the blame game!”

I cut my eyes at my brother. This is the boy who caught me practicing French-kissing the mirror one day when I was fourteen, and, for a full year, whenever the mood struck him, he would make slurping, licking sounds, frequently accompanied by a passionate make-out session with his own hand. In front of my friends. At school. Worse, after he graduated from high school, the brutal mockery morphed into hard indifference. He ignored me completely, disowned us all, neglecting to come home for holidays, never phoning or returning my calls. We had adored each other growing up. The shock of losing him to the nastiness that had colonized his soul was unbearable. So I pushed him out of my mind, cultivated my own cool detachment. For a time after college, even my closest friends were surprised to learn that I had a brother.

And then, three years ago he met Nina, and she convinced him I was worth knowing. Within weeks he had invited me back into his life, and I RSVP’d with an emphatic yes. I happily resumed my role as little sister, repressing the hard feelings that had simmered for over a decade, banishing any pesky, residual resentment. I showed up at their apartment empty-handed and allowed myself to be fed. I watched movies on their couch on cold nights, toasty in Nina’s slippers and snuggled under,
yes, thank you,
their cashmere blanket, met them for Sunday brunch and took home all the leftovers. I claimed what was mine.

But how much of Seth is mine without Nina? In the absence of her domesticating goodness, will he hop away, gone? The truth is, I’ll happily keep him swimming in trans fats if that’s all it takes to make him stay.

“Finding anything good in there?” I ask. He’s still foraging in the cabinets, rustling bags and examining jars.

He holds a silver foil-wrapped package up to me, triumphant. He’s managed to locate a box of very old Pop-Tarts in the back of the cupboard. They may have been here when Jane and I moved in. He tears it open and starts gnawing at the petrified edges of the thing as if he has just emerged from the forest. A low growl of pleasure escapes from him as he chews.

“I’m fixing you a salad, Kaspar Hauser,” I say, and I resolve to call Nina tomorrow.
Your voice sounds scratchy,
I’ll tell her.
Frog in your throat?
And she’ll laugh, she’ll say,
Gee, Willa, I’ve never heard that one before,
and at my gentle prodding her anger at Seth will loosen, her chest will expand to take in oxygen, and she’ll realize that she can’t live without us.

“Hey, um, maybe you should come to this party tonight,” I say halfheartedly, and Seth rolls his eyes at me in response.

“That sounds
awesome,
” he says, which means
Hell, no.

“Or you could stay here and throw some things down the garbage disposal,” I say, pointing at him for emphasis.

“Nah,” he says. “I’m outta here. All you guys have left in this place is cottage cheese, yogurt, and sunflower seeds. And, I mean, Christ, I’m not
desperate
!” We both laugh, then, and I have the disorienting feeling, for a second, of nostalgia for something we’ve never really had: an adult friendship, a bond separate from our heavy family baggage. He grabs his jacket and pats me on the head as he leaves, which is about as close as Seth and I have ever gotten to an expression of love.

Al’s apartment is hot and crowded. The party was in full swing when we arrived, and Jane and I found refuge on the love seat, where we’re scrunched next to each other. “Sometimes I worry …” She pauses, holds up one finger, and takes a very long guzzle of a drink that looks like coolant. “Vile!” she says, delighted, and offers it to me. It tastes like liquid cough drops. My face immediately feels warm. I take another swig and hand it back to her. Al’s small apartment is filled with friends from Jane’s creative writing classes—a master’s degree most people refer to obliquely as “the program,” like it’s rehab for people addicted to clever symbolism. Jane calls it the Road to Nowhere.

In the corner, two poets Jane has introduced me to, Bridget McCarragher and Penelope Tan, are arguing passionately. I presume they’re debating the finer points of the sestina or the questionable merits of Ezra Pound, until I overhear Penelope, her high-pitched voice rising above the din: “Kylie shouldn’t have been sent home before G-Lance! His tango was a fucking travesty!” Bridget McCarragher shakes her head vigorously and smacks her forehead in distress over the latest elimination on
Celebrity Dance-Off.

We haven’t moved from this spot since we arrived an hour ago. The strum and thump of loud flamenco music fills the air, making everybody look somewhat sexier to me than they are.

“You guys,” someone yells. “I’m transferring to the Business School! I just found out that poetry’s dead!”

Jane and I met during our senior year of college, in Madison. I was majoring in drawing and painting, working on a graphic novel about two star-crossed bird-watchers, called
We’ll Always Have Parrots
. I thought that a creative writing class might broaden my skill base: this way, after graduation I could work in a restaurant
or
a bar. Most of us in the Art Department accepted our fates with weary resolve, undercut by constant neurotic fretting. We drank a lot of beer and cultivated superior attitudes about having to work retail jobs at the mall to pay the rent on our crappy off-campus apartments. There was also a plasma center off State Street that paid thirty dollars per donation and gave out cookies, and which sometimes looked like one of the wine and cheese receptions they held for fine arts students on Friday afternoons.

By the time senior year rolled around I was pretty sure I was just about finished with all of that. But I had no idea where I would go next. In addition to my book about bird-watchers, I had also devoted an enormous amount of time to a series of drawings of imaginary animal crossbreeds (hippophant, skunkey, flamenguin). I felt like I was pursuing my dream and wasting my time simultaneously. There weren’t that many jobs for people who could draw a really majestic polar beagle. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do with my life. And I had the vague sense that I ought to have already figured it out.

I was in the middle of drawing the snout on a dolphig when Jane walked in on the first day of class, silver rings and earrings sparkling, her curly hair bursting out of its ponytail holder like loose springs. Twelve of us sat at a big square table—an arrangement, I would soon learn, well suited to the process of ritually immolating one another’s work. Jane came in late and slid into the last available chair.

We started with Owen Schiff, straight spined and shiny eyed and wearing all camouflage, including, I noticed, his socks. He told us that he was writing a series of Shakespearean sonnets devoted to his passionate love of military history. He recited his poem, “Iraq: My Brains,” and seemed happy to interpret the stunned silence that followed as approval. Then Jane read hers, “The Universe Is a Vacuum Cleaner.” Her voice was clear and deep and unaffected, and when she was done, when her tongue had loosed the final, debauched
k
in “suck,” she looked across the table and smiled at me, a great beaming grin. I stared back at her, startled, smitten. It was love at first sight, and also sort of like looking in the mirror on a really, really good day. I saw that Jane was just like me but better, an observation she would later, with a laugh, firmly deny.

Jane had managed to sidestep the unearned cynicism the rest of us were afflicted with. Her poems were about the search for meaning in a sparkling kitchen sink, the persistence of mildew, dust bunnies, and stubborn love; she cleaned big suburban houses to pay her rent. She wasn’t afraid of latex gloves or of rhyming “dust” and “lust,” “clog of hair” and “fog of despair.” She seemed to have found the intersection between her life and her art. She had a purposeful glow about her, a clarity—or at least bravado—that I was drawn to, along with the lingering scent of lemon. Plus she was pretty, and tall like me. We went out for coffee after class. From that moment, like eager lovers, we were inseparable.

In the dim light of Al’s living room, Jane looks at me, blinking. She gives her hair a self-conscious flick. “Sometimes I worry,” she says again, “that men find us intimidating.” My dangly turquoise earrings swing from her ears. “Because we’re always together. Like we’re a package deal or something?”

“Maybe so,” I say, glancing around at the other partygoers, couples locked in conversation, a few women dancing, groups of friends laughing and gesturing to one another, every interaction made extra hilarious by Al’s high-octane fruit punch.

“I’m not thinking about anyone in particular,” she says, and giggles. “Really, Willa, no one in particular!”

Nearby, Rafael, one of the new poets, is standing close to Amy, a thirty-year-old blond fiction writer perennially looking for love, whose short stories are always about twenty-nine-year-old blond fiction writers looking for love. Amy, Jane has told me, has dated every grad student in their department, each relationship lasting precisely long enough for her to suggest that she’d be open to not using birth control. But Rafael doesn’t know any of this. He’s leaning against the wall, talking to her intently, and she is staring up at him, her eyes huge with need that could easily be mistaken for adoration. I can see, even from here, that this and the spiked punch would be a heady mix for an attention-craving artist.

“Remember Ed?” I say. A burst of laughter erupts from Al’s kitchen.

“Ed.” Jane snorts. He went out with her for three weeks, and then, after it fizzled, he and I met for drinks a few times, followed by beery kisses on his porch among the fireflies.

“Ed,” I say again, “who wrote the poem about us.”

“ ‘Tall Girls’!”

“Before he got kicked out of your department.” Out of the corner of my eye, I see Rafael, still talking, leaning nearer to Amy, whose eyes, I notice, are closed.

“ ‘Tall girls, Amazon hearts,’ ” Jane announces dramatically.

“ ‘Warriors,’ ” I say, clenching my fists in front of me.

“ ‘On the tender battlefield of love’!”

This is not the first time Jane and I have recited Ed’s ode to us; with each rendition we add more sweeping gestures and exaggerated emotion, and each time, by the end, we’re screaming with laughter—although lately I’ve begun to feel, despite the hilarity, that this particular joke has a specific shelf life, that it will die—not now, not yet, but eventually, like a sputtering car running out of gas.