She Matters (24 page)

One hot night, several months into the slow unwrapping, I invited Ellen for dinner. Her husband, Laurence, was away, and she brought her boy. Our sons, if not true friends, accepted being together. Christopher and I sat under the canvas umbrella with Ellen, the table laid with food and plates, cool taking over the air, darkness deepening the backyard. Thomas and Daniel started to chase our cats, who ran up against the fence and darted away, the children after them, their limbs in all directions. “We're herding cats!” they chanted, screaming with laughter. We hadn't noticed the boys loosening, having fun, and it unnerved but pleased us, the sign that they were normal as well as exceptional. I'd made penne with garlic and cauliflower and a tart of nectarines and
blueberries, cookbooks still open on the counter. Ellen didn't eat. She dished spoonfuls of food onto her son's plate, but the boy didn't eat either. “Can I get you something else?” I said. “Would he like macaroni and cheese?”

All that evening, looking at the still life on her plate, the roasted scallions and seasoned beets and arugula untouched, I went back and forth between insult and frustration. I'll have her over again, I resolved, entice her. I tried to make myself indispensable to my friends, a tactic I'd learned chasing down the gazes of my self-absorbed parents: need me. How necessary it was for me to offer and provide, to establish that I would attend to her. I felt unaccusable that way; I didn't like that such safety had to be the prominent compass, but it was me.

In the next months, I invited Ellen, and the conversation was rich, the observations pointed yet nuanced, the recognition of motherhood challenges mutual, and she never ate. I made my best dishes: sausage with black-eyed peas, grilled salmon marinated in grated ginger and soy sauce, cucumber salad. She ate none of it. I gave up. She was not comfortable with offerings, a fact I finally accepted. She was teaching me to look away from her, yet she'd chosen me, a woman intensely conscious, ready to pull apart each gesture, detail, mood, and ask what it meant. When she came over with Thomas, I'd leave her a glass of water on the counter. I had learned not to hold it out to her.

A couple of years later, she and I were at the farmers' market, the kids beside us. In my bag I had lettuce and garlic, fresh cheeses, local honey. She wasn't shopping, but entertained me with her commentary on the scene and people around us. We came to a stand with wide-leafed chard and exceptional cauliflower in white and purple. “I just hate cauliflower,” she said. She sounded ready, a disclosure that had been needing to escape. Was she thinking of
that first dinner at my house, the offending dish on the table?
Why didn't you say?
I thought, wishing to relive the evening.
I would have made something you liked.

• • •

By age six, Daniel and Thomas were devoted and entwined, and Ellen and I were connected in the most dire way: for them. We praised them for finding each other, quietly praising ourselves. In our numerous daily phone calls we checked our opinions: Those big kids who commandeer the slides? They're
too
big! Those bulk bins at the health food store? There's corn meal on the floor, someone should clean up the raisins. We found elite security in agreement. And we both had our second sons. Jack was two, her son just a few months old. We applied to the private school with the solar panels and the prize-winning math team. The doors would open, of course they would, our brilliant children bound together for their academic careers, and we would car-pool and sit next to each other at school plays and know each other for decades. As we filled out the applications, we phoned back and forth. What did you put for his interests? Do you see how many “volunteer” hours they require! When the rejection letter came, I phoned Ellen, not my husband. I felt scared Thomas had been accepted. If she sent him out of our orbit, would I lose her, too? But he'd also been rejected, and our momentary joint wrath turned to fun we could have at the expense of ourselves—
How much we'd thought it mattered!
This was our merry joke, meant to distract us from our real dread, unaccountable disappointment.

• • •

The phone rang after we'd gone to sleep. Ellen was at the ER with Thomas, who'd broken his leg. She asked me to come and get
her infant son, so she and Laurence could concentrate. I dressed, got there, found them through the admitting doors. Her face was tight and pale, her natural beauty invisible behind worry. Laurence didn't even make eye contact, pulled down deep. I looked for Thomas, but he'd been taken away, the family stranded in a gaping room. She offered the baby. I think he was about four months old then. “Can you bring him back in the morning?” she said. “He'll need to nurse.” I carried him outside, uneasy with his smallness, and adjusted the lanky straps of Jack's car seat to fit him. I brought him home like a prize, a found kitten, waking Christopher as I settled him into the crib near our bed. I fell asleep listening to my best friend's infant make his noises, the sounds she must have documented every night, as if I had finally entered her sequestered heart.

In the morning I brought him to the hospital room, where Thomas's face was turned from the door, his expression dim and blank, not with pain, but with the spooky absence of pain. Ellen took the baby, asked after his night. We consulted over how many hours he'd slept, his mood on waking and on the ride over. I didn't say I wished I could have nursed him for her, saved her the trouble this particular morning. Or maybe I did say that. We would have laughed, our conspiracy of crude truths. We always pushed deeply into the inane and the grotesque of motherhood, into the dictates and phobias of our culture, gave each other permission to have really bad days and say so. Her face assumed more of its character as she found her baby's gaze. Finally, I had done something for her. She had trusted me, letting me drive away with her baby into the unpredictable night, and when the midnight came that I brought a son to the ER, she'd be there for me, too.

• • •

A few years later, I sprained my foot, biking in flip-flops. Pain stealthy while it traveled to the bone, I walked the bike out of the intersection to a gas station, where I asked for ice, ignoring how bad the foot felt, or not feeling it yet. As I applied the ice, propped outside against a white wall in the shade, the pain screamed forward. I couldn't get the bike home or get myself home. My family was out of town, so I called Ellen. Our friendship was reliable ballast in my daily life, Ellen the one I called when I felt my bitchiest and sharpest, when I felt depleted and overwhelmed, who groaned and laughed with me at how all our time and talent were enslaved to our children.

“I fell off my bike,” I said, needing to be that little again.

“Do you want me to come get you?” Her voice was flat patience, consideration.

“No, I'll be okay.” We hung up. I sensed that this involved politics between us we'd never used. I tried to think of another friend but then called Ellen back. “Please come and get me, I need you, please.” Something in me always made it hard to ask for complete attention, afraid I'd be accused of selfishness or, worse, ignored. And something in her made it hard for me to ask her.

She left her kids with a sitter and drove to me. I climbed into the front, mostly by arm strength, while she lifted the bike into the back of the SUV. Absent our precious and encompassing focus of the children, we were not talkative. She monitored the road. I was embarrassed to have pulled her away from other things and glad she didn't look at me, examine my naked need.

“Do you want to go to the doctor?” she said.

“No, that's okay.”

“I'll drop your bike at your house,” she said, “if you want to go.”

“Okay.”

She drove me to the clinic, where I made my slow way through the glass doors and across marble to the elevators, and I was glad, as I guarded the ghastly pain, that I had let myself ask her. Yes, this will take us further in, tighten us. As promised, she left the bike on my lawn.

• • •

As the boys grew and enrolled in separate schools and Thomas had dance class and Daniel started Aikido, I realized I'd never seen Ellen without the kids, save for that short drive. I had other friends for not-mothering time, women without children who met spontaneously for late drinks or a quick river float, who said yes to a last-minute movie. Spontaneity—always a little risky for me—was not part of this friendship. We provided each other with an antidote to the long, long loving boredoms of parenthood. We provided each other with good company. I counted on Ellen's solemnity, her structured beams and mortar. She liked my mischief and sense of play. Settled, shoes off in her living room, we would watch our sons, unknot their laces, sweep up their abandoned LEGO pieces with our arms, and converse in surreptitious undertones, vocabulary chosen to elude them. Did we talk of our hearts' desires, our ruinous disappointments? No. We talked, albeit smartly and with absolute candor, even splendid vulgarity, about the thorny demands in raising our kids, our resentments and frustrations, our terrifying moments of uncertainty, the traps of masculinity we hoped to teach our boys to avoid. We felt stronger. Everything deserved comment, their dreams, whether or not they liked bacon, if they'd learned how to lie, which mittens they preferred. How badly we wanted to go to the bathroom without talking through the closed door, just once. So, without them, we would have no need for the hushed aside and sideways affection, more assumed
than demonstrated. We would have had to talk directly to each other and confront a troubling truth of our friendship: something blocked further intimacy, real knowing. She barely mentioned her work, and I didn't ask, because confidentiality in a small town was hard enough. Anything she said about her marriage concerned only parenting decisions (on the other hand, I told her the details of my marriage; inspecting me and Christopher, seeking her reactions—our history, our tensions, our time in bed, our happiest privacies). When she mentioned law-firm politics, glancingly, I couldn't picture
my
Ellen involved. A busy stride down a hallway, depositions? I thought of it like this: let the world have the lesser Ellen in her temporary assignment. Her real work—devotion to her sons, her other masks dropped—she chose to share with me. But, lacking a complete picture, I wondered at who she was, the whole of her.

• • •

Once, Ellen cried. I sat curled with the phone on our basement steps, away from the family activity in the kitchen, and at first I didn't recognize the sound. A sputter, an extended sigh, and then it was clear what sound it was. We had long before agreed without acknowledgment that she was the grounded listener and I was the explosive confessor. For ethical quandaries I went to Ellen, where I found refuge in her serious, procedural thinking. Her order, her rules; they helped me keep myself together. I remember what she disclosed that day, what prompted her uncharacteristic tears (Ellen crying! Ellen unguarded!) and that she said, “Please don't talk about this to anyone,” and that in her pain she became clear and supple and visible, which was lovely. I remember the satisfaction of having her recognize my empathy. She let me in.

• • •

It was the anniversary of my mother's accident. A few years earlier, she had suffered a car wreck, spent time in a coma, and nearly died. Our impossible relationship already in tatters, I had chosen not to go to her but to stay nested in the protections of my town, my home, my children's regard. I chose—as I had over years of Thanksgivings and boarding-school Christmases—my friends. Ellen, compassionate, sensitive listener, had accompanied me through the galling puzzle of that decision, witnessed the wrenching problem and irreconcilable pain, always with her steady, neutral gaze. I couldn't track exact dates with my mother, one of the effects of her lifetime of lying, so I hadn't been preparing for this date, but my body felt anniversary unease, reminding me,
You chose this isolation.
That spring day I felt dangerously unloved. I needed to be included anywhere, at some table.

Christopher was away and I was alone with the boys, who were out of school on break. A lot of my friends were out of town. Ellen was around but overseeing a big conference. I knew she had public-speaking anxiety, that even in her established legal brilliance, scrutiny and exposure were hard for her. Being her friend, I wanted to ease things. I called and asked, could the boys and I come for dinner (that unspoken law between two families—the smaller crowd travels), could we spend the evening with her and Laurence and Thomas and the baby? I'd bring a couple of dishes, a salad, I said, a baguette. But I didn't say, “I'm thinking of my broken daughterhood.” I needed a loneliness cure, a way to escape for a day, for a night, the reverberations of family damage; also I wanted Ellen to feel her friend's support, my desire to help move her through the big work weekend. Both were true; the first a little truer.

“Let me think about it and call you back,” she said. I felt irritated.

“Of course,” I said, polite. Call me back. She always had to call me back, on her schedule, her terms. I didn't want to wait, I wanted a
yes,
a
now,
a
come in
. But Ellen never said those things. I knew that.

She called. “I would love to have you and the boys over,” she said, conscious precision. “But not today. I have a lot to handle.”

Ellen was calm and clear, with textbook boundaries. I knew I was supposed to respect them, find comfort in the cool accuracy, which, when the friendship hummed along its chosen track, usually I did. But today I was distraught, vulnerable beyond reason, and at her definitive no, I felt defeated: she heard me ask for one particular thing, and she denied me. Why, when I needed a cure for the deprivation lapping at me, did I look to the restrained friend? That was my problem. Why did my good friend step away as I showed need? That, I felt, was hers. I was, at the time, endangered by depression, increasingly isolated in a terrible state, but I didn't know how to confess I was sinking. I wanted to cry,
Please come and get me
.