Friends Like Us (8 page)

“Nothing,” he says, smirking.

“Did you know that you’re starting to lose your hair?”

“Oh, little sister,” Seth says, and his smirk, poised between gently mocking and ugly, twists up in the direction of his narrowed eyes. “How can you not know how this is going to play out?”

I sigh. The evening ahead with my brother suddenly seems interminable. “Enlighten me.”

“One,” he says, holding up the index finger of his right hand. “Jane and the Kern dog will break up, and you’ll be caught in the middle. Two,” he continues to hold up just one finger, “and less likely, they’ll actually stay together, and you’ll be …” and he rakes that finger across his neck.

“Can I ask you a question?” I say. Seth nods. “Why do you always assume the worst?”

He looks at me, and for a second I see a glimmer of something sad and true, before his lip curls again. “Were you not raised by my parents?”

“Okay.” I push away from the table, my chair shrieking across the linoleum. “We’ll see, I guess. We’ll just see how it goes.” My voice is louder than I mean it to be, and I am filled with rage, with the sudden, trembling urge to run from my apartment, to leave Seth behind, once and for all, this slouched, beaten-down amalgam of base instincts and poor choices, this boy-man who shares my DNA but not my heart.
Yeah, well, you cheated on Nina!
I won’t let him slither under my skin. I turn away from my brother, move toward the television, and, so that he won’t be able to see that my hands are shaking just a little bit, start fumbling through the collection of DVDs he’s brought over. “I think things will turn out just fine,” I say, meaning it.

Chapter Eight

In college, my friends and I used to play a game we called Special Family. It was a competition, and sometimes a drinking game, in which, one by one, we compared the sordid details of our messed-up families. There were eight of us, and we played it over and over; we never ran out of material. There was only one rule—never embellish—and a clear winner always emerged. Sometimes it was the person whose parents were the most narcissistic and oblivious, like my friend Violet, who overheard her mom, mid-divorce, say to a friend, “Hell, if I hadn’t had kids with Tom, I would have had them with someone else.” On another night the victor might be the one whose parents had caused the most spectacular damage, had burned the broadest swath through their son or daughter’s childhood, like Ari, whose parents woke him up one night when he was six, stood together in the dark at the edge of his bed and said, “Choose!” I had my share of victories: the way my parents told Seth and me they were splitting up during Christmas Eve mu shu at our favorite Chinese restaurant; how I overheard them screaming at each other in their bedroom one night and then suddenly grow eerily silent, and when, finally, overcome with concern, I went to investigate, I found them rolling around on their bed, pale globes of flesh in the dim light. I got a special tinfoil medal for that one.

One lonely winter weekend my junior year I even drew a comic of it, twelve pages of Special Family Commemorative Moments: Evan’s mom with a glass of wine in her hand, weepily telling her eleven-year-old son that he looked just like his father but that she loved him anyway; Katie’s dad removing all of the light fixtures from their house when he moved out, insisting they belonged to him. I thought they would be funny, my black-and-white drawings, a joke to share with my friends at our next pot-and-poker night. But it turned out they were just depressing.

All of this is why, when Jane invites me to come home with her for the weekend, I assume that it will be a piece of cake, that the trickiest thing I’ll have to navigate will be Jane’s mother’s overuse of the phrase “That’s
real different
!” Every happy family, I figure.

“They’re not Ozzie and June, you know,” Jane says as we pull into her parents’ driveway, a smack of gravel against the car as it slows, then stops, the engine ticking to silence.

“Ward and Harriet, you mean, and look! Over the front door! A banner that says
WELCOME HOME, JINXY!
” There’s no banner, but Jane did admit to me as we were leaving Milwaukee three hours ago that her dad used to call her Jinxy, and I’ve been taking advantage of that information ever since. “Come, Jinxy,” I say, unbuckling my seat belt and patting my thigh. “Come!”

“Hang on,” Jane says, reaching across me to rifle through the glove compartment; she pulls out a bright yellow scrunchie and tucks her hair into a ponytail.

“Your glove compartment is a time machine to 1994!”

“My mom says she likes it when she can see my face,” she says, unembarrassed. She glances in the rearview mirror and then slides out of the car. I watch as she walks around the front of the car to my side, her long loping strides, her head bent slightly against the wind, and not for the first time today, I see my friend as the object of someone’s affection. Will Ben notice the way she rests her hands on her stomach when she’s thinking? How her hair is slightly curlier on the left side than it is on the right? Jane and I spent the first hour of our journey analyzing every detail of last night’s date. He was nervous; he spilled a glass of water. They told each other stories about past loves.
Not me, I hope, ha ha.
They kissed. “Every first kiss doesn’t have to change your life,” she said, matter-of-fact, and then, “I like him,” before I could respond, which I would have, but then I didn’t. Her eyes were fixed on the road. I imagined their faces. It was the start of something. Any idiot could see that.

“Come on,” she says, opening my car door. “Your list of ways to make fun of me is about to grow significantly longer.”

Sure enough, Jane’s mother greets us at the door with a plate of cookies. “Hi, girls!” she says, cookies aloft, and I’m thinking,
Give me a fucking break,
and also,
Maybe they’ll let me move into Jane’s old room,
when her mother slaps Jane’s hand away. “Not for you!” she says, with surprising force. Mrs. Weston is wearing a zigzag-striped sweater, a horrible, mesmerizing thing in pinks and browns that, I feel, could be used for nefarious purposes.
You’re a duck! Quack like a duck!
She’s at least six inches shorter than Jane and I, her brown wavy hair cut to just above her shoulders. She reminds me of a doll I had when I was little whose appearance you could change by snapping different hairstyles onto its head.

“Hello, dear.” She places one hand on my upper arm and squeezes; she seems like a person who understands the nuances of a good arm squeeze. “You must be Willa. We are
so pleased
that you’re here.”
Squeeze.
She juts her chin toward the plate of cookies. “I was just going to run this over to the Tylers’. Dougie’s getting divorced!”

“So you baked them cookies,” Jane says. She reaches for the plate again and takes two, offers me one. Oatmeal raisin, the Miss Congeniality of cookies.

“He’s over there now,” Jane’s mother says, her voice a sudden, conspiratorial whisper. She nudges Jane. “Go on, you take them over.”

“Oy vey, Mom,” Jane says, raising her palms dramatically. Mrs. Weston purses her lips a little and tilts her head as if she is hearing distant, complicated music. “Dougie and I grew up together,” Jane says to me. “My mom and his mom have been trying to get us together for … twenty-five years?” Her mother nods. “Since preschool. Dougie is a salesman for a sporting goods company. He still gets drunk every Saturday night with his college frat brothers. Still calls them his brothers. Last time I saw him he bragged to me that the only reading he does is the sports page while he’s in the bathroom. Except he didn’t say ‘in the bathroom.’ We’re perfect for each other!” Jane glances at me above her mother’s head, raises her eyebrows; clearly, you don’t tell a woman like this about the promising first date you had last night with a boy who works part-time at the library and plans to become a social worker.

“Scoot them on over, Janey,” Mrs. Weston says, doing a convincing impression of someone who hasn’t heard a word her daughter just said. She passes the plate to Jane and then, her hand still gripping my upper arm, leads me inside.

The door opens into the warmth of a small entryway with just enough room for two people to stand too close to each other and a living room with a shock of fluffy, salmon-colored carpeting and everything else in shades of white: cream-colored sofa, puffy beige armchair, off-white throw pillows scattered about. I have the disquieting feeling of being inside someone’s mouth. Mrs. Weston glances around, looking pleased.

“You have a
lovely
home,” I say, which is stupid, because I haven’t seen any of it beyond this humid corner, and also so unlike me that I think Mrs. Weston’s arm squeeze may have been some kind of alien personality meld. I resolve not to say anything else until Jane reappears.

“Do I hear our
city slickers
?” A voice booms from a nearby room, then a clank of pots and pans. “Oops! It’s okay! I’m fine!”

Mrs. Weston clears her throat, then guides me through the living room into the bright, cluttered kitchen, where Mr. Weston is standing over a steaming kettle of something. He’s wearing an apron, in the style of men who believe that they cook frequently. He raises the lid of the large pot and inhales deeply. “It’s water!” he yells, in what I fear is his normal decibel level. “I’m boiling water!”

Mr. Weston is tall. He’s more than tall. He’s stretched out, elongated, every limb like pulled taffy, gangly and loose, and he looks elaborately ill at ease bent over the stove.

“Charlie,” Mrs. Weston says.

“I’m making supper for our
gals about town,
if they’re not too sophisticated for Charlie Weston’s old-fashioned spaghetti and meatballs!” I look down at the kitchen floor, feeling awkward and bony, like a twelve-year-old girl who really loves horses.

“Hand over the wooden spoon, Charlie,” Mrs. Weston says, finally letting go of my arm and moving toward her husband in quick steps, heels clacking. She snatches the spoon from him and puts her hand on her husband’s upper back—she has to stand on her tiptoes to do it—and pushes him away. “Scoot,” she says, for the second time in the past minute and a half. “This is a man who does not belong in the kitchen,” she says cheerfully, her body to the stove as she dumps a package of spaghetti into the water. Mr. Weston, serene, defeated—
Who, me?
—folds himself into a kitchen chair.

I’m trying to figure out what’s unsettling about this scene, and it dawns on me that it’s the lack of rancor, the routine good nature between them. She didn’t mutter a cruel remark as she grabbed the spoon from him; he’s quiet, but clearly not freezing her out. They’re just doing their thing.

And I’m midrealization when Mr. Weston notices that I’m here, standing in the kitchen doorway, unsure where to look. I smile weakly, even more abashed in the face of their relentless normalcy. My hands are clasped in front of me so tightly that when I try to loosen them, they feel like hinges. My mind cartwheels, searches for something to say.
Hello! You have a lovely home!

“What rhymes with ‘spaghetti’?” Mr. Weston asks suddenly. Sitting, Jane’s father is almost as tall as I am.

I stare at him, a mute game-show contestant in the spotlight. “ ‘Uncle Freddy’?” I say finally. He studies me for a long few seconds, then winks.

Mrs. Weston turns, an expression of horror on her face. “Oh, Willa!” she says. “My goodness, I’m so sorry! But if you’d seen some of Mr. Weston’s more spectacular kitchen disasters, you’d forgive my rudeness.”

She lowers the heat and steps toward me again, and I’m bracing myself for another arm squeeze when Jane charges into the kitchen and drops our bags on the floor. If I squint, she’s fourteen, tossing her school backpack at her feet. Her mother wheels around.

“Did you see Dougie?” Mrs. Weston asks, as Mr. Weston stands and swoops Jane up into a hug.

“Mmmph,” Jane says.

“Little Janey Jane has a walnut for a brain!” Mr. Weston announces, letting her slide an inch away from him, but apparently only so that he can squish her again with the force of his embrace. “And almonds on her toes, and a peanut for a nose!”

“Cashew!” Jane says, muffled inside her father’s bear hug, and Mr. Weston says, “Gesundheit,” and frees her.

“Dougie?” Mrs. Weston repeats.

“Yeahyeahyeah,” Jane says. “I gave him the cookies. He says thanks.” But then, when her mother has turned back to attend to the stove and her father has carried our bags away, Jane leans in and whispers to me, “I lost my virginity to Dougie when we were sixteen!”

“I find that very hard to believe,” I say under my breath. Jane chuckles, low and lascivious. And only later, much later, will I realize that this feeling, vague and inchoate, is the shock of illumination. I thought I understood my best friend inside and out, but the truth is I knew just enough about her to think I knew everything.

Dinner is early at the Westons’, and it is, conspicuously, not spaghetti—as if the spaghetti incident never happened, which makes me think that maybe it didn’t. Dinner is not actually anything I recognize, having been raised on the fractured-marriage menu of frozen pizzas, Lean Cuisine, and canned soup, but Jane has prepared me for this: it’s Bonnie Weston’s specialty, tuna casserole, with green beans and Jell-O salad on the side. The tuna casserole is sprinkled with cornflakes. Is it dinner? Is it breakfast? It doesn’t know! Mandarin orange slices float in the red Jell-O like prehistoric fish. My eyes flicker around the table, trying to find someplace neutral to land. Jane won’t meet my gaze; she’s too busy playing some kind of poking game with her father. The serving dishes are decorated with geese flying around their edges. The tablecloth is flecked with clouds, a linen wild blue yonder. Steam from the casserole wafts up, dissipates.

“This is real midwestern cuisine!” Mrs. Weston says to me as she surveys the table and spreads her napkin on her lap, as if this is some kind of exotic locale to me—
Real Tibetan delicacies here on the mountaintop, Willa!
—as if I hadn’t been born and raised in Milwaukee.