The False Friend (15 page)

“Her eyes hadn’t changed,” Celia said.

Warren pointed to his daughter’s face. “The eyeball is the only part of the body that starts out practically full-grown.”

The meal was one of Celia’s favorites, its name having long ago been changed in her honor to Chicken à la Queen. Once she had learned from Huck that cooked vegetables could be crunchy and that meat didn’t have to be the same color all the way through, she had felt briefly obliged to consider her mother a lousy cook. This reluctant verdict—imposed by culinary self-consciousness and the discovery of haricots verts—was soon overruled by her long-standing love for string bean casserole with canned onion bits. Neither fusion cuisine nor New American could cheapen Celia’s love for her mother’s cooking, or sully the appeal of a table consecrated to the provincial Mid-Atlantic palate. She wondered if this particular meal was meant as a peace offering or as a spur to her guilt, but decided it was just as likely what they were meant to have eaten yesterday, the chicken poached ahead of time and then made to languish an extra day in the refrigerator, pining for sauce and toast.

“Did you and Becky have a lot to talk about?” her mother asked.

“Sure they did,” her father said. “It’s always nice to see an old friend.”

Celia was seduced by the simplicity of her relationship to her meal. It was too much food, really, a plate filled according to a mother’s concern and not a daughter’s appetite.

“How could you tell back then that Becky was sad?” Celia asked.

Noreen sighed. “You wouldn’t have recognized it, thank goodness. For you, sadness at that age meant missing a birthday party or not getting dessert, but Becky laughed like she knew it was temporary. She reminded me of those paintings—the ones of those children with the big, soulful eyes. You know, the more I think about it, the more it makes a sort of sense, where Becky is now. She always struck me as someone who wanted something different from what she had.”

They nodded at the same time. For a moment Celia felt as if she were gazing into a mirror. She recognized her shyness in her mother’s smile, the little lines that radiated like ripples from the corners of her upturned mouth. Celia realized why her mother’s eyes had always seemed small in photos: Noreen opened them wider for her than for any camera. Celia marveled at how long she had squandered such grace by being unprepared to receive it.

“I
t’s you,” Huck said. “What time is it there? Ten?”

“I’ve been downstairs,” she said. “Waiting until I couldn’t hear creaking floorboards or water through the pipes. I’ve been flipping through the channels and pretending you were here.” By the time she’d climbed the stairs, her parents’ bedroom was dark, their door ajar. Closing herself inside the guest room, she’d rattled the knob to check the latch, the best she could do in the absence of a button to press or a key to turn.

“What did I want to watch?” Huck asked.

“A historical something-or-other about Crispus Attucks,” she said. “I only agreed because he’s one of your favorites.”

“I’m sorry about before,” he said. “I was thinking out loud.
I should have saved the subject for when we were in the same time zone.”

Celia pressed the phone to her ear.

“Ceel?” he asked. “You still there?”

Through the receiver she heard footsteps, their tone changing as Huck left the living room.

“It’s going to be all right,” he said.

“I don’t know, Huck.” Her eyes were closed, her face buried in her hand.

“Let me demonstrate,” he said.

“I think I just want to go to bed.”

“Me too. I miss you, Ceel. Yesterday when you left, I realized that I’ve been missing you for a long, long time.”

She heard him exhale a shaky breath.

“I go away sometimes,” he said, “and it’s like I’m looking at everything through backward binoculars. When you kissed me on your way out the door on Tuesday morning, I realized I couldn’t remember the last time we had kissed in a way that wasn’t good night or good-bye. I’ve been thinking about that for three days now, and waiting for a chance to make up for it.”

Whether it was some slight alteration in the room sound over the phone or just one among the multitude of wordless certainties that their years together had built, the silence between them changed. Celia willed herself toward the shift.

“I miss you too,” she said.

“You’re in the bedroom?” he said.

“Yeah.”

“The door’s closed?”

“Of course,” she said, checking again to make sure.

“Walk to the mirror.”

“I don’t know, Huck.”

“Let’s do this, Ceel. At least let’s try.”

It was the idea that she might do something for him.

“What are you wearing?” he asked.

“Nothing good,” she said. “My green sweater with the black pants. It’s what I wore to lunch.”

“Your green V-neck?”

“Yeah.”

“The one you wear with the camisole?”

“Yeah. Look, tomorrow night, once you’re here—”

“No, no,” he said. “This is perfect. Now listen: take off your bra and your camisole—but keep the sweater on—and then tell me what you see.”

They’d only ever done this once before, years ago. Huck had been attending a teaching conference in Wisconsin. He had woken her with his call, talking low and urgent into the phone. His voice had tipped something inside her.

Celia withdrew her arms from their sleeves and shimmied each in turn down the camisole’s inside seam. She remembered her single-minded optimism as she had dressed that morning, then pushed the memory aside. She reached behind to unclasp and slipped her bra straps from her shoulders. She pulled the bra from the bottom, the camisole through the neck. She pictured Huck with the phone pressed to his ear, alive to each slight sound.

“Okay,” she said.

“Tell me.”

“I took them off just like you said.”

“Tell me. You slid your arms out—”

“I took my arms out my sleeves and then took off the camisole from inside the sweater. Then I undid my bra.”

“One hand or two?”

“One. I just reached around and—”

“That’s right, you just reached around. Now, I know you’re standing at the mirror, because I told you to, but I bet you’re too far away. Stand close. Stand so that you fill it up.”

She moved closer, stood so that her shoulders spanned the mirror’s width.

“Okay,” she said.

“Can you see your mole?”

“What mole?”

“Have we never talked about this?”

She was unaccustomed to the sweater’s weft on her shoulder blades, her nipples.

“I don’t think so,” she said.

“The red mole on the curve of your left breast. Perched above your cleavage like it’s thinking of jumping in. Perfectly round, size of a sugar bead.”

She stepped even closer, leaned her head in.

“Oh,” she said.

“I bet you can just see it along the left edge of the V-neck.”

“How do you know that?”

“It’s my job to know. Now listen: I want you to keep that sweater on.”

“Okay.”

“I want you to keep it on the whole time. And don’t think you can fool me. I’ll know if you cheat.”

“Yes,” she said, warmth spreading from the center of her chest.

“Now go back to the bed,” he said. “Shuck your pants and panties. I want you naked from the waist down, on your back, knees bent, your legs spread wide.”

She tested the guest room door one last time, and wedged a blanket in the space below the door’s bottom edge. Then she lay down on the bed and did exactly what Huck told her to do.

S
he was in the woods, the road in the distance, the silence around her punctuated by the
phwa
of passing cars. She turned her girl’s body back around, away from the road, and started back through the trees. She crossed the woods, the road behind her, the branches black slashes against the sky. Celia arrived at a dark hole in the ground the size of a soup bowl and startled awake, fear and longing pounding at her chest. A friendship like hers and Djuna’s could only ever be a child’s possession. Only a child could withstand its stranglehold.

Celia was dressed and backing the car out of the driveway before she realized she pictured Ripley Road only through school bus windows. The bus windshield view had delivered a
seam of pitted asphalt lined by trees, no dashed yellow line to marshal the cars that careened down the hill. One window seat had offered successive slivers of house, glimpsed between trees like a giant zoëtrope. Opposite was a forest from Brothers Grimm, the foliage thick and unruly, and wrapped with vines. These images were unallied to any larger, internal map. Ripley Road had been etched into her memory when destinations were still passive affairs. To get there now, Celia would have to ghost her elementary school bus route, abdicating street names for childhood landmarks: a certain house, a certain street corner, an intersection at an acute angle, a gradual uphill grade past a church and then a quick left-hand turn.

Celia drove on instinct, relying on her child’s memory to tell her when to turn. The bus had traced a fractal path through hills, to houses strung like beads along winding back roads. Along the way, Celia encountered a wider road, an expanded church building, a grocery store where once there had been an empty lot, but most of the scenery remained. When she passed the railroad tracks, the plant nursery, the rough-hewn fence that enclosed a tiny clapboard house whose shutters were as green as her memory’s claim, each rediscovered landmark resonated within her like a gently plucked string.

The five of them had walked along the road’s narrow shoulder. Cars had passed in blasts of speed that launched pebbles at their legs with slingshot force. Celia remembered a pocked speed-limit sign at the curve in the road where Djuna ran ahead. When Celia had started into the woods, the sound of her breath had been drowned out by the percussion of so much tinder underfoot.

There had once been a fire, kindled by lightning, more than a school bus rumor because it had made the local news. This was in second grade, before Djuna’s time, when getting a window seat had been the most important thing. The day after the blaze, Celia remembered cupping her hands to her eyes and pressing her face to the rattling window glass. She had pictured trees reduced to charred skeletons, the forest’s secrets finally revealed, but the view along the road had remained unchanged. The fire became another story, one more secret the woods kept to itself.

Celia’s memory proved a perfect navigator until the final turn. The last street before Ripley felt longer than it should. At the top of the hill, where Celia was expecting an abutment, there was instead a curve that brought her to an unfamiliar traffic signal. She retraced her path in search of a missed turn, but everything until that final intersection matched. She reversed herself once more, driving back toward the unfamiliar traffic light.

When Celia turned through the intersection onto the strange street, she noticed the sign. The narrow, winding road had become a four-lane highway. North- and southbound straightaways extended as far as she could see, a simple exercise in one-point perspective, asphalt lines drawn along a gigantic ruler. Celia looked out her car window to where she had hoped to retrace Djuna’s path through the woods. She gaped at the office plaza where the forest once had been.

T
he Jensenville Library inhabited the former home of the late William Jensen in what had once been the posh part of town, a street of three-story brick mansions limping into the twenty-first century in various states of subdivision and decay. Verandas and multiple chimneys, cupolas and Palladian windows adorned crumbling brick facades like heirloom jewelry on the exhausted skins of dowager aunts. Former ballrooms, dining rooms, and conservatories had been divvied up between doctors’ offices and real estate brokers, hairdressers and insurance agents. Among the subdivided was the orthodontist Celia had visited to have her braces tightened. Once every three weeks for two and a half years, Celia had walked the ten blocks
from middle school to his office, and from there to the library where Noreen would pick her up. With the abrupt intensity of an acid flashback Celia recalled the sphincter-tightening revulsion of being made to bite into the soft, thick wax for the dental mold. Preserved was the view of poorly shaved Adam’s apple from the reclining dental chair, the orthodontist leaning over to apply dull force to her molar, the sound of his ministrations conducted through the bones of her skull. Dr. Krantz. His name was Dr. Krantz. As Celia now passed through the library’s front door, her upper jaw ached like a phantom limb.

Though the town founder’s good intentions were abundantly indicated by the plaque neighboring his life-sized statue in the library vestibule—“I give this, my house, as a repository of knowledge for the city of Jensenville, so that it might become as a second home to hungry minds”—the reality was that the place felt less like a second home than an overstuffed closet. Aside from the front entry’s mullioned windows, every other aperture had come to be blocked by additional bookshelves. Post-Jensen-era fluorescent light fixtures hummed along the length and breadth of plaster ceilings. Celia made for the side room, but the reference librarian’s desk had been replaced by a row of computer stations. The face of the late William Jensen bounced sedately within the glowing rectangle of each monitor’s blue screen.

At this time on a weekday morning, the library was refuge to the retired, the unemployed, and the unemployable. At a far table, a middle-aged man in a polyester sports coat and a tie the
length and width of a cow’s tongue examined a book with malign suspicion; through a doorway, a woman held an
Us
magazine in one hand while using the other to suspend a bottle over a stroller at the level of her sleeping infant’s mouth.

“Excuse me,” called a voice behind her. “Would you like to sign up for computer time?”

Celia turned. The librarian of her childhood had been a cardiganed creature of onionskin, a pair of glasses secured to its neck by the same-caliber chain that tethered a pen to a bank service counter. This one had elaborate enamel earrings, no glasses, and a silk blouse slightly unbuttoned.