We Are Not Like Them

by Christine Pride

  “That’s why I love you.” A long sip sends the cool liquid flooding into my stomach, reminding me that, once again, I’ve gone the whole day without finding time to eat.

  “I’m jealous.” Jenny raises her glass. “Ginger ale for me.”

  “Oh, come on, have a glass of wine with me,” I beg her, because it’s not as much fun to drink alone. Now that I’m here, all I want is to get buzzed with my oldest friend.

  Jenny looks down and clutches her belly protectively. I feel like I’m intruding on something private.

  “I don’t want to chance it, Rye.”

  I shouldn’t have suggested the wine. Not after all those years of trying, then the miscarriages, and all those rounds of IVF. Jen shakes her head. “I just can’t.”

  “I understand.” It’s true, I do, but the role reversal is ironic given that it’s been Jen’s mission all these years to loosen me up, to get me to “live a little.”

  I make a show of downing another gulp. “Then I’ll have to drink for the both of us.”

  “I’m so glad you’re here. God, I’ve missed you so much!” Jen grabs my hands as soon as I set down my drink.

  I don’t know why I’m suddenly self-conscious in the face of her effusive affection—and guilty too. “I’m sorry I’ve been so MIA. Work’s been brutal.”

  Even with a top-of-the-line “miracle” concealer, I can see the dark circles and deep lines around my eyes in the long beveled mirror above the bar making me look closer to forty than thirty. So much for Black don’t crack. Clearly, the twelve-hour days, the six to ten packages I’m producing a week, and the almost nightly live shots are taking their toll. It’s the work of three people, but I’m used to that by now. You gotta work twice as hard to get half as far as them, baby girl. It was a mantra most Black kids were all too familiar with, as ubiquitous as reminders to lotion up ashy knees.

  “No worries, I get it. And you’re totally killing it. I loved your story last night on how the city needs to invest more money in the West Philly school lunch program. I had no idea how many kids went without lunch every day because they couldn’t afford it.”

  “You caught that?” It had taken several weeks to convince my boss, Scotty, the news director, to let me do the piece, and then when all the positive emails started rolling in, he’d conveniently forgotten that he’d said, “Not sure anyone’s going to care, Wilson.”

  “Are you kidding me? Of course I did. I always catch your broadcasts, Rye! You’re the only reason I watch the crappy local news. And soon you’re gonna be anchor!” Jen raises her soda and clinks my glass so hard I’m worried she cracked it.

  “We’ll see.” I half-heartedly toast, scared that I’m going to jinx it somehow. Don’t go counting your chickens before they hatch. Jen was the first and only person I’d told when I heard Candace might be retiring soon. I always assumed Candace was the type to be carried out of the studio in a coffin, but sure enough, when Scotty took me to lunch last month, he confirmed the rumors that she may “soon be exploring other opportunities,” and that he’d probably be looking for someone “internal” to replace her. It was clear from the way he said it that she, a woman just past sixty, was being pushed out after more than two decades at the station. I should have been outraged by that, but I was too focused on what it could mean for me—a chance at the anchor desk. Given that I’ve only been at the station a few months, it’s a long shot, but ever since Scotty dangled it as a possibility, it’s a shiny prize that I’m reaching for, greedy as a grubby-handed toddler grabbing for candy. The more Jen acts like it’s a done deal though, the more anxious I feel about the fact that it might not happen.

  “Trust me, it’ll happen,” Jen continues. “I know it. Anchor by forty! Right? You always said that was the goal. You’re gonna get the job, and your bangs are gonna be a mile high on that billboard. You’ll be so famous, and then I can tell everyone that I knew you when you used to practice French kissing on a pillowcase with Taye Diggs’s face on it.” She looks down and rubs both hands over her belly again. “It’s all happening for us, Rye. All the things.”

  “God, remember how many games of MASH we used to play? I feel like I was somehow always living in a shack with Cole Bryant from algebra.”

  “OMG, you would have been thrilled to live in a shack with Cole. You loved his dirty drawers!”

  It’s funny to think of just how many hours—endless—that Jen and I devoted to imagining our future lives: where we would live, what we would do, who we would love, how many kids we would have. All we wanted was for our lives to hurry up and happen already. And now here we are. It was supposed to be the happily-ever-after part; what we didn’t understand is that adulthood would be a relentless series of beginnings—new cities, new jobs, new relationships, new babies, new worries. Which is probably why I can’t escape the feeling of always being on the cusp of the next thing.

  “Here’s to us, all growed up.” This time, I clink my glass to Jen’s more enthusiastically. My head spins from downing my drink too fast and my stomach growls. “I really need some food.”

  “Me too, we’re starving.” It takes me a second to figure out what Jen means by “we.”

  The menu is a long strip of parchment affixed to a piece of leather and printed with the day’s date on top like a newspaper. Each dish has a gag-worthy “origin story.” Steak tartare from Bucks County, farm-fresh burrata from Haverford described as “barnyardy,” and honey procured from hives on the restaurant’s roof. It’s a long way from the Kool-Aid, Stouffer’s pizza, and boxed mac and cheese we grew up on.

  “Everything is crazy expensive,” Jenny says, staring at the menu as if it’s a problem to solve.

  It’s true, the prices for “the array of small plates” are as absurd as their descriptions. I should have picked a cheaper place, considering how much Jenny and Kevin are struggling. But the subject of money is something I try to avoid with her entirely, so she won’t be reminded of the reason it looms between us, the loan I know she’ll never be able to pay back. I didn’t have a choice though. I had to give her the money. When I was home for the holidays last year, and she stopped by my parents’ place as usual on Christmas Eve, she was a desperate wreck. It had been more than six weeks since her final round of IVF, her third try, didn’t work.

  “What can I do?” I’d asked, as we passed a bottle of warm red wine between us, and then wondered what I would say if Jen wanted me to carry her baby in some sort of Lifetime-movie-of-the-week scenario.

  “Nothing.” Jen lay down on my childhood bed. I stretched out beside her, wrapped my arms around her bony frame, and buried my face in her hair. It smelled like it hadn’t been washed for days, not a trace of lavender.

  “You can try again, right?”

  “No. We can’t.” Jen sighed.

  “You can. You will,” I insisted. “What will it take for you to try again?”

  There was a long stretch before she spoke.

  “Money. We’re already, like, thirty grand in debt.”

  “Thirty grand,” I repeated, taking in the staggering number. It was more than my annual salary in my first job out of college, working as a scrub reporter in Joplin, Missouri. And it was an insane amount of money to spend on something that didn’t seem to be working at all. They still didn’t have a baby. But I made up my mind not to judge. Besides, I’d never seen Jen like this. It was painful to witness someone you love want something so desperately, and to watch as each miscarriage fundamentally altered her—made her more fragile and bitter. Gigi said it was like Jen’s spirit itself was withering like forgotten fruit. There was only one thing to do.

  “How much do you need?” I braced myself for the answer.

  Jen didn’t respond right away, which made me think she might say no, and maybe that’s what I wanted. Finally, she said, in as small a voice as I’d ever heard her use, “Maybe five thousand? That could help us… if it’s not too much.”

  Again, I tried not to react to the number and just wrote
her a check, instantly wiping out more than half my hard-earned savings. The way she couldn’t stop saying, “Thank you, thank you,” as she hugged me and wouldn’t let go made it all worth it. So did her scream—so loud I had to hold the phone away from my ear—when she’d called to tell me the next round of IVF had worked. Still, sometimes the money feels like a little pebble caught in a shoe; you’re not going to stop walking, but you always know it’s there. We both look down at her belly now and silently come to the same conclusion—any awkwardness between us is a small price to pay.

  “Don’t worry. I can expense dinner. We might do a story on this place.” I lie again to make us both feel better. “Order whatever you want. It’s on me… on the station.”

  Jenny’s visibly relieved as she turns back to the menu. “Well, in that case let’s get it all. We fancy. We’ve come a long way from Chef Boyardee, huh?”

  The bartender finally tears himself away from a gaggle of blondes who barely look of drinking age and pays us some attention. I can tell when he does a double take that he recognizes me. It’s embarrassing how much I like this, how it never gets old. I offer him a sheepish smile, but he’s all business, with a brisk “What can I get you?” and even then, he only addresses Jen, as if she’s the one footing the bill. I order $100 of overpriced small plates to prove a point, though what exactly that point is, I have no idea. The bartender walks away before I can even set down the menu.

  “We’re gonna feast! Kevin’s been picking up all the shifts he can until the baby comes and doing overtime working the Eagles games on Sundays, so I’ve been eating a lot of cereal alone on the couch bingeing Fixer Upper.”

  “The glam life of a cop’s wife.”

  Jen bites the edge of her bottom lip, a lifelong nervous habit that’s left her with a tiny white scar. “I wish. It’s been hard. The holidays are such a shit time to be a cop. Thanksgiving and Christmas are supposed to be, like, the happiest time of year for most people, but there are way more calls, more domestics, and a lot more suicides. Kevin had to go to one last week—day after Thanksgiving, guy hung himself in the backyard from his daughter’s swing set. So awful, right? He left a note taped to the swings that said he couldn’t fight the demons. It messed Kevin up for days. He doesn’t say anything, but I can tell. It’s too much for the cops… to be the social workers, the therapists…. Anyway, enough about that. God, so depressing. How’s Gigi?”

  For as long as Jen has known her, she has called my grandmother by the same nickname my brother, Shaun, and I use, the one I gave Gigi when I was first learning to talk and couldn’t say “Grandma.” Of course, Gigi loves this, since Jen is basically her granddaughter too. I tease her that she loves Jen more than me and vice versa. Ever since the very first day Jenny came to the day care that Gigi ran out of our house, the one she started when she moved in with us after Grandpa died and she retired from thirty years at Bell Atlantic, she took a special shine to Jenny, calling her “my little firecracker.”

  I always rib Gigi about this. “But can we trust her, you know, her being white and all?”

  To which Gigi responds with the utmost sincerity: “Oh, baby, you know Jenny is different. She isn’t like the rest of them.” It was too funny since I can bet on the number of times people have said that about me.

  “I overheard my mom talking to Pastor Price about needing to think about ‘the arrangements’ for Gigi and I got so angry. Like Mom was acting like she was already gone.”

  Jen puts her hand on my arm. “Gigi’s a fighter, Rye. She’s still got a lot of life in her.”

  “I don’t know…. The dialysis isn’t cutting it anymore, and there’s just not much else the doctors can do.” I pause for a moment, worried I’m going to sound crazy, but then I tell her anyway. “Gigi’s been haunting me. I hear her voice everywhere, Jenny, and it makes me feel like I’m losing my mind.”

  “Is she reminding you that nice girls wear pantyhose?” Jen scrunches up her face and cackles, so loudly people look over again. She’s clearly thinking about the time Gigi insisted Jenny borrow a pair of her stockings to wear to church one Sunday after she’d slept over, even though the Hanes Her Way were two shades too brown for Jenny’s pale legs.

  “It’s not funny!” I say. “Maybe I’m losing it.”

  “Shut your mouth. You’re not crazy. You’re worried about her. You love her. And you got a lot going on.” Jen rubs the knot between my shoulder blades. “I should go see her.”

  “Yeah, she’d love that. She was asking about you, and I told her I was seeing you tonight. She’ll want to rub your tummy and tell you the baby’s future. Who they’re gonna marry, when they’ll be elected president…”

  “You know because of Gigi I grew up thinking all Black people were psychic.”

  “It’s not psychic. It’s the tingles.”

  Gigi always claimed that the women in the Wilson family had a touch of the “tingles,” a sense of knowing the future.

  I’m about to remind Jen of the time we tried to convince Gigi to let us charge the kids at school for her psychic readings when I see the moment has taken a turn. Jen is staring off into space, brows knitted. “Don’t you wish you really could see the future, Rye? I just want to know everything’s going to be okay. He, she… it’s all going to be okay, right?”

  Jenny and I were always making wishes together as kids—for our crushes to notice us, for Juicy sweat suits our parents couldn’t afford, for boobs. She’d offer a fallen eyelash on the tip of her finger and tell me to blow. She would get annoyed when I wouldn’t tell her my wishes, the ones I was too embarrassed about or most wanted to come true; I didn’t want to risk ruining my chances.

  I grab Jen’s hand to reassure us both.

  “Is this the hormones? A second ago we were toasting to all our dreams coming true. Of course the baby’s fine. Little Bird is healthy and happy and can’t wait to make fun of their mama with me.”

  When Jenny first starting calling the baby “Little Bird” after the Philadelphia Eagles mascot, it sounded like the corniest thing I’d ever heard, but over time I’ve decided it’s sort of cute. I even found these adorable onesies on Etsy with baby birds and bought twenty of them that I’m planning to string up at her baby shower. Also, a shirt for her that reads, “Momma Bird.” So I have done something for the shower, even if it was without Cookie’s approval, which I suspect isn’t going to go over too well.

  “I’m just freaked out, you know. The closer I get…” Jen stops and looks down at her stomach again. “The scarier it is. There are so many things that can go wrong. You know what I mean?”

  I know exactly what she means—the biting fear that everything you’ve worked for can disappear in a second, that you can bust your butt, do everything right, and it won’t matter one bit. I know it all too well.

  “It’s going to be fine, Jenny. Better than fine. I’m so, so happy for you.” Granted, it’s a complicated happiness. I want to love this new part of Jenny’s life, but there have been times when I’ve secretly indulged a stupid, petty, and selfish line of thinking: What does all this mean for me? How will this change everything? But in this moment none of that matters. It all gives way to a pure and bone-deep joy that Jen is about to get the thing she’s always wanted, her version of the anchor chair.

  I wrap my arms around my friend and hug her tightly and hope the physical reassurance will penetrate more than words. When she pulls back to look at me, she’s so close I can count the constellation of freckles that dot her nose. I still don’t say anything. Instead, I touch my index finger to the middle of my left eyebrow, and this does the trick—the memory chases the worry from Jen’s face.

  We were twelve when I decided to experiment with plucking my bushy brows for the first time. I wanted to give them a fierce arch like Posh Spice. But I was too excited and overplucked and then overplucked some more until half my left eyebrow was gone. No one could make me come out of my room, not Gigi, not Momma. I had finally opened the door for Jen, who promptly
fell on the floor laughing, which only made me howl even louder. Then, while I stood there blubbering, Jenny marched right into the bathroom, grabbed a pink Bic, and shaved off half of her own left eyebrow. On the rare occasions I get annoyed with her, this is what I think of to calm myself down, the time Jenny shaved off half an eyebrow for me.

  “You’re right, you’re right. I’m sure everything is gonna be fine. And guess what? I have some news.” Jen brightens, her dark mood passing as quickly as it arrived. “I officially gave notice on Monday!”

  “Oh, really?” I’m so caught off guard, it’s hard to keep my voice neutral. It’s not like Jen loves being a receptionist for a dentist on the Main Line, but given their money situation, I didn’t think quitting was an option.

  “What?” Jenny asks, clearly expecting a happier reaction.

  “Nothing. I’m just surprised. I guess I didn’t see you as the stay-at-home-mom type.”

  “It’s not forever. Kevin’s schedule is nuts. It changes all the time. He’s four days on, then four nights, and that’s when he doesn’t pick up the overtime. One of us needs the flexibility. It’s best for me to stay home. He’s on track to make sergeant soon, and that’ll mean more money coming in. And I’m going to throw myself into raising this little one and making French toast every morning, and packing healthy lunches every day just like Lou.”

  There’s a beat before we crack up at how far this is from the truth. The only thing Jen’s mom, Louise, has ever been good for are dirty jokes, dirty martinis, and dirty looks. Her idea of a home-cooked meal is a Lean Cuisine.

  As if on cue, our food arrives, and we turn our attention to appetizers that live up to their description of small plates. The farm-raised-beef sliders are no bigger than a half-dollar. Jenny pops two into her mouth back-to-back like popcorn, errant globs of mustard dribbling down onto her belly. I dip the corner of my napkin into my water glass and reach over to dab at the stain. There’s a reason I stopped sharing clothes with her.

  “God. I was starving,” Jenny says, scooping up a bacon-wrapped date. “So listen. More big news. Kevin has a man for you.”