“I hate being boxed in,” Jess said. “‘Best friend,’ one person holding all my secrets. Like I’m a possession. Thinking about a ‘best friend’ creates unhealthy competition. Like us right now.” She kept talking and defending herself, but I stopped listening. What it was sounding like was that she didn’t want these girls thinking I was already her best friend.
I cut a slice of roast beef into tiny, even squares, then those squares into tinier squares. The restaurant was noisy and too many people were walking around, squeezing past tables. There were a thousand different smells. Brunch was stupid. If I didn’t get another plate, I’d be hungry later. The pizza restaurant I worked at was too slammed on Sundays to take extra time to make pizza for employees. Amazing how often I thought about food. All the time. There was so much silence at our table.
I felt these two girls and their stupid red hair feeling sorry for me.
I said, “My sister is my best friend.”
The two girls sighed and smiled. “Oh, me too,” they murmured. “Oh, yes, oh, I love my sister.” They were so relieved, they started eating again. One of them picked up a chocolate-covered strawberry and bit into it. That Third Rail thing: a strawberry—but covered in chocolate. They started talking about their sisters: one was a real-life twin, which was secretly funny to me, though she wasn’t an identical twin; her twin sister had brown hair, which was also secretly funny to me because the twin sister was at Brown University. I asked a lot of questions about their sisters, and in a few minutes I figured out that the twin was Deedee with the scarf and, yes, the theater major. Teresa’s sister was two years older, in Paris on study abroad. She sent Teresa a Chanel perfume and powder set from Paris that smelled better than Chanel at Marshall Field’s. We debated whether we liked No. 5 better or 19 or 22, and Jess wedged in to announce that her mother called Chanel too sophisticated for college girls but we said that was an old-lady thing to say. I could talk and listen and finally eat my slivers of cut-up roast beef, but what I was thinking was that I had won the conversation and beat Jess, and thinking that made me think, No wonder she didn’t call me a best friend, because what kind of friend did that?
When they asked about my sister, I explained that she was several years younger but precocious for her age, and so smart and passionate. I was describing Phoebe, Holden Caulfield’s beloved little sister from The Catcher in the Rye, but they didn’t notice. “So adorable,” they cooed, “next time bring pictures.” I kept going, telling them about watching Grace ride the merry-go-round in Central Park while it rained like a bastard, buckets of rain, how crazy blue her coat was, though all that was Holden Caulfield, even the coat; though I’d never been to New York, which Jess knew. I wanted to talk on and on about my sister, tell these girls everything, because I missed her, I realized. I loved her. I could imagine this little girl as my best friend, until I remembered that I was spinning her from a fictional character, inventing her out of lies.
Jess never mentioned her sister, letting Teresa and Deedee assume she didn’t have one, and I didn’t tell them she did, not even when Teresa said, “I know a lot of only children who say that’s best,” and Jess agreed. We filled another plate with food, and another, and then we tried every flavor of cheesecake, even Jess, and they thought caramel turtle was the best, and Jess and I preferred chocolate chip. We poured hot fudge over everything. We filled a bowl with whipped cream that we ate with spoons. Deedee dropped a handful of sugar packets in her purse.
“Let’s do this again,” we agreed as we stood out on the sidewalk afterward. “It was so much fun,” we assured one another, looping ourselves into hugs, waving good-bye as the two of them walked toward north campus. I knew they’d wait for Jess to call and she wouldn’t, or to return a call and she wouldn’t do that either. Maybe we’d run into each other at the library or at a party, and there’d be awkward chat, like about the weather. Maybe not even that. We were done with those test friends. I knew Jess wouldn’t say it that way, but I knew that’s what she was thinking. She didn’t even offer them a ride.
She and I walked down Foster, toward her car. The sun felt surprising, like it should have been night, like somehow we’d been inside forever. There was a sense of time telescoped upon itself somehow, now expanding. I was waiting for her to speak first, which she finally did, as we jaywalked across the street, our strides matching, I noticed.
She was working to be all fake casual. I could tell. She said, “You know I was kidding, right? Of course you’re my best friend.”
The next moment felt long but wasn’t, my mind flashing about what to say, how I might make her suffer, a little or a lot; the ways I could get back at her for her hurtful remark earlier. The knowledge that I had power, maybe more power than I’d imagined. “Revenge is sweet” was the cliché, but glowing brightest was this: relief is far, far sweeter, and so I said, “You’re my best friend, too.”
“Always,” she said.
“Always,” I echoed.
We would have to be. That was what being best friends meant, maybe: feeling so close, knowing so much, that you almost couldn’t stand it. Almost.
THE GATES OF HEAVEN
(fall, junior year)
“I’m going to church tomorrow,” I said to Jess. “The dead people are kind of haunting me.” The little girl barely older than my sister, the Polish man and his family, the flight attendant, the others, including the ones maybe we didn’t know about and anyone who might drop dead tomorrow because of a white plastic bottle on a shelf in their medicine cabinet, because they had bad luck or, some might say, because they were being punished. In such chaos, I wanted comfort: the familiar mumble of ancient words, that cadence, the utterly unchangeable rhythm of Catholic Mass. I wanted not false promises that all would be better or that this was God’s will, but simply the sound of order. “Church is the sound of order,” I told Jess. (And the place for guilt, I thought, though why feel guilty because my luck wasn’t as rotten as theirs?) I don’t know why I said any of it or bothered to explain why church, why now, when she would be asleep at 10:15 tomorrow morning, but I announced all this anyway in one long breath.
She said, “I’ll go with you.”
We were both so surprised that we laughed.
“You’ll reek of the pope,” I said. “One drop of our holy water will brand a crucifix onto your delicate sinner’s skin. Your mother will disown you.”
“Come on,” she said, then jumped into a bad hillbilly parody: “I gotta see what this yeer ‘hooooe-lee’ communion’s all about. I’m-a gonna get me some body a Christ.” She was reading Flannery O’Connor in her Southern Women Writers class, picking up only the worst bits.
“No,” I said sharply. “And stop with the voice. It’s not funny.”
We were in the kitchen, just home from the late show of a silly romance that made Jess teary, which meant she was thinking about her ex-fiancé, Tommy, though the point of going to a movie was to keep her from thinking about him. I was devouring forkfuls of cold Ragu spaghetti out of a Tupperware, though I’d eaten 90 percent of the popcorn she bought to share, though I wasn’t hungry either now or when the popcorn bucket was in my lap. “Americans usually don’t eat from hunger,” Jess had informed me while paying at the concession stand, “it’s boredom or anxiety. Trying to fill something that can’t be filled.”
Now she stared at me, an expectant look on her face demanding an apology for my snappishness. I gave an explanation instead: “It’s a sin for non-Catholics to take communion.”
“Well, whoop-de-do,” she said. “Keep your dumb old salvation to yourself.”
“Doesn’t work like that,” I said. “Catholics run a lifetime program. A commitment. What you want are the loons who dunk you in a river, then throw open the gates of heaven.”
She rolled her eyes. “Why is me gobbling up a little white disk horrifically offensive?”
“I know it’s dumb,” I said. “Especially since I don’t even take communion anymore.”
“The
n so what?”
I had been afraid the question would be Why not?
At the Catholic student center virtually the whole congregation went up for communion, even the hungover clot of us lurking in the back who showed up for the free, post-Mass doughnuts. Habit, peer pressure, took us up to the altar. Not me. I shuffled out of the way as they pressed up the aisles, the surge of them leaving me alone and out of place: a sinner. In Iowa, they taught us we weren’t allowed communion if a mortal sin stained our soul, which made me worry about the several random people who remained seated at each Mass: Murderers? Or merely people who hadn’t fasted the requisite hour before receiving communion? When my father whacked my shoulder, I dutifully stood and marched forward, his bulk looming half a step behind me. “Body of Christ,” the priest intoned. “Amen,” we agreed, mouths snapping wide, our outstretched tongues alert and ready.
One last dollop of spaghetti, then I burped shut the Tupperware, sliding it into the open fridge so I wouldn’t have to wash the container. This conversation irritated me. Everything irritated me tonight, even the refrigerator light, overly bright and buzzy. There was barely any food, but I stared at what there was, mesmerized: cottage cheese, a bread bag with only heels, skim milk, two eggs, a stack of loose American cheese slices, rusty-looking lettuce, half a tomato in a baggie, mustard, mayo, packets of soy sauce, peanut butter, grape jelly, three cans of Tab. Only the cheese had been bought with my money.
“What do you think Tommy’s doing right now?”
My shoulders tightened and I forced them back loose. I said what a friend must always say: “You’re too good for him.” I must have sounded convincing, because she gave me a wistful smile.
“You always know what to say.” She made a quick air-kiss for me.
Damn it. I absolutely hated tonight. I grabbed the peanut butter and closed the refrigerator and looked down, carefully unscrewing the jar’s metal lid and placing it on the counter as if that action required attention. But I had to look at her. Again: “You’re too good for him,” I mumbled.
“Can’t help who you love,” she said. Her eyebrows lifted in a question. It could be she was thinking about Tommy, or, I suppose, it could be she was thinking about me.
“Actually, I think you can,” I said. I extracted a spoon from the dish rack, teeteringly full, because why bother putting away dishes that would be used again? I scooped up an overflowing glob of peanut butter that I slid through my mouth, spinning the spoon upside down, finagling with my tongue to suck off every gluey bit, half gagging and half wishing I would gag more, harder. I wanted to think only of this hunger for peanut butter, my desire, this need. If I thought about anything more, I would tell her. I would tell her. I would confess my mortal sins.
Somewhere deep inside, I understood the day would come when she would find out about me and Tommy and what we were doing. When I would have to admit the truth, to her, to myself; I would have to say the words. It could be any day, really; she’d found out about Tommy cheating with his old girlfriend out of the blue, when we were on campus for some professional society meeting she said she should go to because she was secretary. This was right before school started, and we were in the Harris Hall first-floor bathroom, the one with the pretty mahogany stall doors from the early 1900s, when we overheard some girls talking about him and his ex-girlfriend Sydney Moore and how cute they were reunited at the Theta picnic, keeping on with their gossip even when they saw us at the mirrors, knowing what they were doing, knowing exactly who Jess was. After the girls swished through the door, and I got that we wouldn’t be going to the meeting, I looked at Jess’s eyes in the mirror and said, “You have to do something, don’t you?” and in that long minute afterward, I almost felt wrong for saying it like that, but then she nodded, and a few days later it was done. The engagement was off. No one planned for that but it happened. Maybe you could say I helped make it happen. I liked to believe that I wanted what was best for Jess.
I wondered what I would do if she found out about me and Tommy, where I would live, who would buy peanut butter for me—Jif, the good brand, not the cheap, oily Dominick’s crap. Any day could be that day when she found out. Any day. Ask the Tylenol victims. I was a bad person, a sinner. Guilty. That’s what the Catholics and the rest of them were counting on, that deep in our core each of us knew we were bad.
I jabbed the spoon deep into the peanut butter again. We did this all the time, drank from milk cartons, dug up jelly and ice cream with our fingers. Why dirty a dish? Germs didn’t scare us. They didn’t feel real. People dead from popping Tylenol weren’t real, and neither was God and neither were the secret things I did with Tommy in a certain library bathroom.
“So come to church tomorrow,” I said through a mouth of peanut butter. “Take communion. I promise you’ll be disappointed. You don’t even eat doughnuts, which is the real reason to go.” I tried to picture her standing next to me in the back in a crumpled T-shirt and tennis shoes; my mind couldn’t even get to that part, Jess sloppy.
She shook her head. “I—” and the phone burst out, louder than usual, the way the refrigerator light seemed brighter than usual, the peanut butter stickier. Everything tonight felt pushed too far. My heart beat like a bongo drum, knowing Tommy was on the other end, though there was no real reason for him to call either of us—only to confess. It had been a couple of weeks since Jess broke off the engagement. The spiral of begging and apologizing and explaining should be over. Too many people knew he was cheating with Sydney Moore, so Jess had no choice. He pushed and pushed and pushed, and the relief was that he’d been caught with Sydney, not me. We’d gotten away with it—we were both getting away with it—and that should be enough to keep us quiet. But I didn’t stop. And neither did he. Like he wanted to be caught, which was why that ringing phone terrified me. Slut. I shoved more peanut butter into my mouth. I was going to eat this whole jar if I wasn’t careful.
Jess on the phone: “You sound insane, Mother!”
I had missed something. How had her mother found out? Tommy had called her mother?
A moment later, she slammed down the phone and snatched her hand back, as if the receiver were toxic. She whirled continuously, facing me, away from me, facing me again. Her eyes were wild, like animal eyes; her mouth contorted and silent, without language for this moment. The spoon dropped from my hand and clattered onto the counter, and I grabbed hold, the laminate under my fingertips a hard, cool comfort. The words would come, the hellfire of each consonant and vowel, her hate burning into me, and I braced, ready, so ready for that hiss—Slut!—though my mind warned it didn’t make good sense that Jess’s mother would deliver this news or that Tommy would confess to Jess’s mom.
Jess said, “My dad’s on his way over and she says don’t let him in.”
“What?”
“I could barely get that with all her crying and screaming,” Jess said. “And swearing. Yeah, my mother, swearing. Like a sailor! I couldn’t listen to it, what she was saying.”
“Oh, Jess,” I said. Relief made it easy to hit the perfect sympathetic note.
“Goddamn it. She’s insane.” Jess folded her arms around her chest. The stripes on her sweater sleeves jumped into weird alignment. “How’s she know those words? I don’t want to hear my mother screaming that my dad’s a goddamn fucking cocksucker. Oh my god.” Her body folded and collapsed gently onto the floor. She leaned her back against the cupboard where we kept the pots. I slid down next to her.
“Probably just some crazy fight,” I said. “It’ll blow over. It has to.” I spoke breezily, as if talking would create a wind that could blow a fight over.
“They never fight!” Blurted out like a true fact, like proclaiming the Earth round.
I chewed my lip. Isn’t it pretty to think so? I wanted to say, but this wasn’t the right time, and she wouldn’t get it, how that line clobbered all assumptions; Hemingway wasn’t on the Southern Women Writers syllabus.
The phone rang again, and we scrambled up.
“Want me to—?” and I reached for the phone, but she slapped my hand, a big smack that stung; she hit hard, trying to hurt me, and then she shoved one shoulder against me as she went to the phone, rough enough to make me lose balance. On purpose. She snatched up the receiver and shouted, “I mean it, Mother, you’re being totally insane and don’t call again until you calm down and tell me what the deal is.”
From upstairs, the landlord thumped on the floor with a broom handle.
There went the doorbell, ring, ring, ring, six or seven times without pause.
Jess stood with the phone a foot away from her ear, screaming, “Stop it! Stop it!” maybe directed to the phone or to me or to all the world. Red blotches sprawled across her cheeks.
Maybe she would hit me again for trying to help, but the doorbell kept going, along with the bang-the-door-down knocking, and one more time with the broom handle upstairs, so I ran to the door and flung it open, ignoring every scrap of training about peepholes and late-night strangers—because something had to stop this chaos—and there was Jess’s father, an open trench coat slung crooked over his suit as if he were coming from the office at this hour, and next to him was a girl, and part of me thought, Linda? But no, because that was impossible. This girl was fourteen or so, holding a small, old-fashioned red plaid cloth suitcase. She clutched a feather pillow under one arm, and a worn baseball mitt dangled off her hand. A fringy leather purse hung at her hip, strapped diagonally across her chest, and at her feet was a larger suitcase in matching plaid. I snapped on the porch light so we all could see better, and what I saw immediately was that the girl looked like a younger version of Jess. Like Jess’s father. Hawkish nose, wide-set eyes, long forehead. Her hair was wavy, and her eyes gleamed differently from Jess’s without her fake contact lenses, more gray than blue, very pale. A lot about her felt pale, like a worksheet that had been copied too many times. Her head cocked like a robin’s.
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