Pretty Things

by Janelle Brown

  “Of course!” I am unduly pleased. “You don’t have to beg.”

  She steps into the house, and there it is again, that warm penumbra that surrounds her, the life of her, the glow of her. When she enters my space it feels like an electric shock, heating me back up.

  “Michael doesn’t do yoga with you?” I putter around the kitchen, fiddling with the fussy Italian coffee machine that I haven’t quite mastered.

  She gives a low laugh. “I think that if I woke him up this early he would literally bite my head off.” She takes the coffee from me and sips it, smiling at me over the rim. “Let’s just say that yoga is my thing, not his.”

  “Ah.” I refresh my coffee and then stand there, awkwardly, trying to come up with something to say. When was the last time I attempted to befriend someone? What does one even talk about? I think back to my friends in New York—Saskia, Evangeline, Maya, and Trini, my constant companions and partners in visibility. We were together so much and discussed so little. Our conversations mostly revolved around brand names and diet trends and restaurant recommendations, which at the time felt like a relief—to just skate along the surface of things without having to think about the darkness below—but now I see as a symptom of the dreaded shallow. When my father died, they sent texts, but didn’t pick up the phone. Maybe that was the moment that I realized that my friendships were like the thin crust on a frozen lake, a barrier blocking the way to anything deeper.

  Maybe Ashley intrigues me because she is my only friend option at the moment, but there is also something about her, the way she seems to be connected to something meaningful, that I find refreshing. As she walks through the kitchen of Stonehaven, lightly touching the surfaces as if testing them for solidity, she doesn’t seem to register my curiosity about her. Does she know that I am looking at her as a buoy to cling to, one that might keep me from drowning?

  Please don’t hate me. I know there are so many things about me to hate. That I am vain and superficial and privileged; that I haven’t done more to make the world a better place; that I focus on my family’s sorrows rather than those of society at large. That instead of actually being a good person I have focused on looking like a good person. But isn’t that the best way to start? From the outside, in? Show me what else I should do.

  “Want to go sit down in the library?” I blurt. “It’s warmer in there.”

  She lights up. “Lovely!”

  I usher her into the library, perhaps the least forbidding room in the house. I’ve got a fire going, the couch is soft, all those books speak of weightiness. I sit down, leave room for her on the cushion beside me. But Ashley hesitates in the doorway, flicks her eyes across the bookshelves as if looking for something, before gingerly depositing herself on the couch. I wonder whether she is worried about transferring the sweat from her yoga pants to the velvet of the couch. I want to reassure her that I don’t care.

  She is staring across the room with an odd expression, as if riveted, and I follow her gaze and realize that she’s looking at the framed family photo on the fireplace mantel. “Oh, that’s my family,” I offer. “Mom, Dad, little brother.”

  She barks out a little nervous laugh, as if embarrassed to be caught in the act. “You look…close.”

  “We were.”

  “Were?” She is still studying the photo. Something flickers across her face again. She comes and sits down next to me.

  “My mother died when I was nineteen. She drowned. My father died earlier this year.” I realize that I haven’t said this out loud in months, and unexpectedly the grief wells up inside me and I’m sobbing. Big heaving gasps of woe. Ashley turns to look at me with wide eyes. Dear God. She’ll think I’m a basket case. “God, I’m so sorry. I didn’t realize I was still so raw about that. It’s just…I still can’t believe my family is gone.”

  She blinks. “What about your brother?”

  “He’s a mess, so he’s not much help. Jesus, I’m so sorry, bawling all over you like this.”

  “Don’t apologize.” I can see conflicting emotions flickering across her face—Is she repulsed? Have I screwed it all up?—but then they settle and smooth into something soft and reassuring. Her hand stretches across the couch to rest on top of mine. “How did your father die?”

  “Cancer. It came on very quickly.”

  I see her swallow. “Oh. How terrible.”

  “It is,” I say. “It’s got to be the most agonizing way you could die—slowly, like that, just eaten up. It was like the cancer just stole him and then left his body to die for weeks and weeks. And I had to just sit there watching this, wanting him to die so that it could all be over and he’d be out of pain, but also begging him to live for just a little while more, for me.”

  I am about to go on, but then I realize that she looks a little stricken, and so I stop myself. Her hand grips tighter onto mine. “It sounds awful,” she says hoarsely, near tears herself, and I’m surprised and touched that my father’s death is making her feel so emotional, too. She must be an empath (another thing I am not but should be).

  Tears are gathering in the folds of my nose and I need to wipe them away, but I’m unwilling to break the connection of our hands so I let them drip freely. They rest on the velvet nap, tiny puddles of woe.

  “I am very…alone…right now.” My voice is small.

  “I can’t even imagine.” She is quiet for a moment, and then: “Or, maybe I can imagine.” Something in her voice has abruptly changed, her speech more tentative, as if she doesn’t quite trust the words coming out of her mouth. “My father is gone, too. And my mother is…ailing.” Our eyes meet and there is something painful and sharp that passes between us, an unspoken understanding that can only be shared by those of us who have lost parents too young: How dreadful it is to live in a world without them.

  “How did your father die?” I ask.

  She looks away for a moment, and when she looks back there is a wistful blankness in her eyes, as if she is excavating an old memory from deep in the recesses of her brain. She slips her hand from mine. “Heart attack. It was very sudden and really devastating. He was such a…kind and gentle man. A dentist. We were really close. Even when I moved out for college he would call me every day. Other dads didn’t do that.” Her shoulders rise and fall, almost theatrically, as if shaking off a memory. “Anyway. As I like to say: Inhale the future, exhale the past.”

  I like this. I inhale, and exhale, but still feel like crying. “What about your mother?”

  “My mother?” She blinks fast, as if unprepared for the question. Her hand falls to the nap of the couch, and she rubs it, hard. “Oh, she’s lovely.”

  “What does she do?”

  “What does she do?” She hesitates. “She’s a nurse. She likes taking care of people. Or, she did, until she got sick.”

  “So you got that from her.”

  She’s leaving little scratches in the velvet but I don’t have it in me to ask her to stop. “Got what?”

  “The caretaking. Yoga—it’s a healing profession, right?”

  “Oh, yes. Right.”

  I lean in closer. “It must be terribly fulfilling, spending your life trying to help other people. You must sleep quite well at night.”

  She looks down at her hands, curved into the cushion, and laughs softly. “I sleep well enough.”

  “Yoga teaches us to cure what need not be endured and endure what cannot be cured.” It comes out before I can think twice. “I saw that on your Facebook page.”

  “Oh yes, of course. I think that was…Iyengar?” She gives me a funny look. “You looked me up online?”

  “Sorry, should I have pretended that I didn’t? I mean, you’ve got to figure these days that everyone is doing it. You found my Instagram feed, I assume?”

  Ashley’s eyes have clouded over; they are dark and inscrutable. “I don’t really do socia
l media. When you’re documenting everything you do, you stop living life for yourself and start living it as a performance for others. You’re never in the actual moment, just the response to the moment.” She hesitates. “Why? Should I look at your Instagram?”

  “Oh.” I realize I’ve made a terrible gaffe, but now I have no choice but to flounder ahead anyway. Why did I bring this up? She’s unlikely to be impressed; rather the opposite, and Oh God, she’s right. “I’m kind of an Instagram lifestyle celebrity, actually. My feed’s about being inspired by global culture. You know, manifesting dreams and creativity. Through fashion. Though I’ve pivoted lately, to be more about nature and spiritual fulfillment.” I have just served up a word salad, oily with empty meaning. She will surely see right through it and realize that there’s nothing there.

  She is back to smiling, though; bright and toothy, revealing that wonky little incisor. (I wonder why her father, the dentist, never bothered to fix it for her.) “That sounds fascinating. You’ll have to tell me more about it sometime.” I am so jaded from my years of faking it in photos that, of course, I wonder if her smile is just a front; perhaps I put her off with the tears and the social media bragging, and she is just good at hiding it. And then her smile wobbles; her nostrils flare slightly. “Oh my goodness. You’re being polite and not saying anything but I just smelled myself and I desperately need to take a shower.”

  She rises abruptly, and I want to grab her hand and drag her back down to the couch. Stay with me, don’t leave me alone again. But I obediently rise and follow her toward the door.

  As we pass the fireplace she suddenly pauses in front of the family portrait, and places a finger on the glass. Right under my father’s head, fingernail against the proud smile on his face.

  “What was he like, your father?” The way she says this makes the question sound like a test. I hesitate before answering. I think of his infidelity and his gambling and his carelessness; but also how he tried so hard to compensate for the loss of our mother, how much he loved me and Benny despite our faults. I remember the smile on his face as he proclaimed to anyone who would listen that I was a genius.

  “He was a good man,” I say. “He always tried to protect us, especially from his own mistakes. He sometimes made bad decisions in the process, but he had good intentions.”

  Her head lists slightly to the right, as if trying to see the photo from another angle. “I suppose that’s what parents do. I suppose as their children we’ll forgive anything that they do in the name of their love for us. We have to do that, so that someday we can forgive ourselves for doing the same.” She looks at me, but I look away, not liking to think about this too much.

  We bustle back through the cold halls toward the rear of the house. We’re almost to the kitchen when Ashley stops.

  “I forgot my yoga mat in the library!” she cries, and turns back, jogging down the hallway and disappearing into the depths of the house. I stand there, waiting for her, for what feels like an ungodly long time. When she returns—the mat under her arm—her face is flushed and pink with some emotion and she won’t meet my eyes. I wonder: Has she been crying? Perhaps I was prying too much, digging into wounds that were too fresh. She slides past me in the hall, moving too fast toward the door; I feel like she might be about to slip away for good.

  I grab her hand, and stop her in her tracks. “I’m so glad we talked like this,” I say. “I’m going to be honest, I haven’t really had a lot of girlfriends in my life. All this”—I make a vague gesture with my free hand, taking in Stonehaven but also the entirety of my life—“has made it difficult. And with my career and all, I’ve grown more used to public proclamations than personal confessionals. There’s less on the line, you know? It’s easier. But this is what I need, I think. Honesty. Does that make sense? Anyway, I’m sorry if I’ve overwhelmed you.”

  We’re still standing in the dim hallway, next to a marble console where a decorative clock ticks out the hour with a silvery peal of chimes. Ashley blinks at me, and in the gloom it’s hard to read her expression. “It’s fine. Really. I’m sorry that you’ve had such a…rough year.”

  Impulsively, I give her a hug; inhaling the yeasty smell of her, the tackiness of her warm skin under my hand. She stiffens, as if startled, but then I feel something give way inside her. Her hands creep around my back, gripping the bony wings of my scapulas as if looking for leverage with which to climb.

  “Thanks so much for listening,” I whisper in her ear. “I’m so happy that we’re going to be friends.”

  15.

  SHE THINKS THAT WE are friends.

  Her arms around me are like a vise; naked longing drips from every syllable of her sentence; her breath in my ear is sweet and rank. The narrow hallway, cold with stones; the metronymic claustrophobia of that ancient, ticking clock. I feel like I’m going to choke. I feel like I might choke her.

  She clutches me tighter, willing me to hug her back; and despite my loathing I remind myself that I am not Nina, I am Ashley, and of course Ashley would hug her. Ashley is full of love and understanding and forgiveness. Ashley feels pity for this sobbing, jittery, wreck of a girl, this newly orphaned basket case. Ashley is a far better person than I.

  So Ashley reaches around Vanessa’s narrow little body—she feels like naked bones swaddled in cashmere—and hugs her back.

  “Of course we’re friends,” I murmur. Something clicks at the back of my throat.

  And I smile, as I think of what I just put in her library.

  16.

  One Day Earlier

  VANESSA IS NOT QUITE what I expected.

  I realize this as soon as she comes into focus, standing there on Stonehaven’s porch, half-hidden in the gloom. She is so small. In my mind, she has always loomed much larger—of course, I’ve spent so many hours studying her that she expanded to occupy my entire imagination. But in person, she is just a slight thing, dwarfed by the great tree-trunk pillars of her family’s ancestral home. It feels as if the porch might close around her and swallow her whole, history eating her alive.

  She moves toward me as I step from our car and turn to greet her, readying a smile. And then she stops abruptly, peering at me. For a moment, I am gripped by the irrational fear that she might have somehow recognized me. But the likelihood of this is remote: Why would Vanessa remember a friend of Benny’s that she barely lifted her head to acknowledge twelve years ago? Besides, even if she did, that Nina—baby-faced, chubby, a pink-haired alterna-girl in shapeless black—bears little resemblance to the coiffed, toned Nina I’ve since grown into. And even less resemblance to Ashley, in all her athleisure glory.

  Vanessa is wearing jeans and a hoodie under a blazer, all of such a cut that the price paid for them is evident in the drape of their folds. Her sneakers are pristine white, as if someone has recently gone over them with bleach and a toothbrush. But although she is groomed to perfection—hair falling loose around her shoulders, makeup done with a precision hand—something feels off. The color of her blond highlights is a little too brassy. I can see the puffiness under her eyes. Her hip bones are like blades, the jeans hooked over them and billowing loosely around her thighs.

  “You’re sure that’s not the housekeeper?” Lachlan murmurs from behind me.

  “It’s Vanessa.”

  “Not what I expected,” he says under his breath. “What happened to V-Life?”

  “We’re in Lake Tahoe, not the Hamptons. What did you expect? Diamonds and couture dresses?”

  “Basic personal hygiene. Is that too much to ask?”

  “You’re the worst kind of snob.” I march away from the car and toward the porch, contorting my face into a rictus of surprise, as if I’ve only just now spied her standing there on the porch. “Oh! You must be Vanessa?”

  “Ashley, right? Oh wonderful. Oh thrilling! You made it!”

  Her squeal of faux excitement makes
me cringe. Good grief, I think. Nothing about this woman is sincere. I walk up the stairs and she approaches me, and suddenly we are right up against each other. There’s an awkward moment, and I can tell she’s unsure of the proper protocol: Is she supposed to shake my hand or hug me? Always take control of the situation; lead, instead of being led—a lesson Lachlan taught me when we first started at this game. So I reach in quickly, and press my cheek against hers in an affectionate embrace, squeezing the tops of her arms. Ashley the yoga instructor would be completely at home with physical contact, accustomed as she is to poking and tugging at sweaty, Lycra-clad bodies.

  “Thank you for inviting us into your home,” I say, close to her ear. I can sense her quivering in my embrace like a captive starling; a musky smell of something wild coming in waves off of her.

  As we exchange pleasantries, Lachlan comes up behind me, a suitcase in each hand. Vanessa is still close enough that I can see something change in her as she takes him in; her body going still, like a deer sensing an approaching predator. She pulls away, plucks at the cuff of her blazer, eyes fixed on him as he lopes leisurely toward us. I turn to see that Lachlan has unleashed his biggest, most laconic smile.

  So that is how it’s going to go, I think to myself.

  I remind myself that it’s all for show. Nothing is real here, not even me. We’re all just facades and fakery.

  * * *

  —

  I’ve probably spent less than an hour total inside the walls of Stonehaven in my life—my time here was mostly spent in the cottage—and yet the house has always loomed large in my imagination.

  This house was where I learned the meaning of social class and legacy, what it meant to own furniture that cost more than a car, what it meant to have portraits of your ancestors hanging over the mantel. Walking into Stonehaven, at age fifteen, I understood for the first time that family money like that is a gift of permanence—not just that you’d never have to worry about the daily scramble for basic subsistence, but that you’d exist as a link in an unbroken chain that extended far into both the past and the future. Coming from a family of two, a family without a real home (or even a real name, for that matter), I pined for that kind of anchor. I’d listen to Benny complain about his family—predatory stuck-up assholes—and seethe with jealousy even as I soberly nodded in agreement.