“Umm, yeah, something like that.”
“Well. Okay. As long as it doesn’t involve anymore dead goldfish.”
Claudia laughed, as if to say, Dead goldfish! Ha ha! But she really wasn’t completely sure that it wouldn’t. She sidled up close to him to empty her coffee mug in the sink. “I think I’d better get going or I’m gonna be late.”
“I’ll make you late.” He shot her a wicked grin.
“Are you kidding?” She walked away as if she’d been at the corral breaking horses all day. “After last night?” Claudia’s mock cowboy gait slowed and her walk returned to normal as she hit the end of the hall and approached the coffee table in the living room.
Claudia groaned. “What a mess.”
Dan came up behind her with his coffee mug in his hand. “Don’t worry about it. I can clean up after your Wish Club. Say, maybe next time you ladies could wish for a housekeeper.”
He was smiling, laughing at his joke, as he bent over to clear a small patch of space on the table to set his mug down.
God, I love him, she thought. The way his wavy brown hair was always a little too long. The way the dimples creased more deeply around his mouth when he was genuinely happy. When he stood back up, Claudia reached in and gave him a hug.
Dan wrapped his arms around her, squeezing her tight before loosening his grip a little and rubbing a hand over the small of her back. They started a gentle sway back and forth, moving together, dancing with no music, the way they always used to.
“It’s been a while,” she said.
“Hmm?”
Claudia regretted pulling his thoughts back from wherever they’d been. “It’s been a while, since we danced like this—with no music. You know, before we realized we were doing it.”
Dan bent his head down, nuzzled his face into her hair. “Mmm. Hmm.”
They danced for another moment before Dan leaned back, one hand still on her waist, the other reaching up to stroke her hair, brushing it with his fingertips off to one side of her face. “You’re all the music I need.”
“Awww.” Claudia closed her eyes and tilted her head down. “I love you.”
“I love you, too.” He pulled her close again.
Claudia pulled out of the hug and gave him a teasing smile. “Well, you’ve made me late now anyway.”
She looked back down at the disaster-strewn coffee table.
“Well, get going then.” He gave her a quick kiss. “And don’t worry about this. I’ve got it covered.”
Claudia put on her coat with a final glance down at the table, at the wineglasses and candles, the little black bowl. “Thanks, hon.”
“No pro-blem-o.”
Claudia hurried down the three flights of stairs and stepped out of her building into the day. She looked up at the asphalt-gray sky and wondered if today it would rain or snow.
Claudia rubbed her temples as she walked into the cafeteria, still feeling the bleary after-effects of the Book Club meeting. Of all the days to pull lunchroom duty. She’d groaned when she’d seen the reminder in her mailbox earlier in the morning. At least she was sharing the chore with Henry O'Connor, Mara’s husband. On the off chance they would actually get a moment to speak to each other, he could always make her laugh.
The cafeteria at the Arthur G. Strawn Academy of Arts and Sciences was unlike any school cafeteria Claudia had ever eaten in when she was a student, and it wasn’t just the menu selection—her high school cafeteria had never served pesto—but the sanitized newness of it all. The seating consisted of booths along the walls and tables and chairs in the center of the room. It looked like a restaurant. Her old cafeteria had all-in-one picnic-style benches, which were all the same, in that they’d been covered with graffiti and smelled faintly of sour milk.
In Claudia’s high school lunchroom, the popular girls had sat at the table in the corner by the window, across from the table of popular boys, and at Strawn the popular girls sat at the table by the door. On the days she had lunchroom duty, she could watch the complex inner workings of the popular girls’ clique, the way they subjectively dismissed and added to their circle of friends, allowing a “guest” the occasional honor of a seat at their table of eight. Invariably, when Claudia returned to lunchroom duty a few weeks later, that “guest” would either be back at her old table or, worse, shunned by her old friends for desertion and sitting at the table with the leftovers—the misfits who either had been cast off by old friends too, or had never fit in anywhere in the first place.
When Claudia’s family had moved during the second semester of her freshman year of high school, the only place she’d been allowed to sit that first day was at the leftover table. She remembered walking with her tray through the cafeteria looking for a seat. She’d gotten the lunch special—some sort of scary meatloaf with potatoes and gravy—not knowing that no one ever got the lunch special, but she’d felt pressured into making a quick choice by the bored woman behind the lunch counter and the kids behind her in line. She was embarrassed by her meatloaf as she walked past the tables, noticing all the pizza slices and grilled cheese sandwiches. No one invited her to sit down. She knew they couldn’t risk lowering their social standing by letting her sit at their table, because she was an unknown quantity. They couldn’t be sure. She wasn’t wearing terribly fashionable or expensive clothing, and she had gotten the meatloaf.
The leftover table was the only table with seats, where no one threw a hand across an empty space and said, “Sorry, that’s saved.” It was understood when the girls looked up at her from the other tables; she could see it in their eyes—some of their eyes, anyway—that they did feel sorry for her and wanted to help, but they just couldn’t take the chance. So Claudia took her seat with the leftovers. She drank her Coke and moved her mashed potatoes around her meatloaf with her fork.
Then Molly Bonner had walked over from the popular table and introduced herself. Claudia couldn’t believe her luck. She could tell from her hair and clothes and confidant demeanor that Molly was, quite possibly, the most popular girl in the freshman class; she had that certain queen-bee-like aura about her. Molly smiled and welcomed Claudia to the school and said if there was ever anything Claudia needed she should just ask her, or one of her friends, and she gestured to her table. Most of the girls at Molly’s table had turned around to watch them.
Claudia stuttered out a thank you.
“Where are you from, Claudia?” Molly asked, and Claudia told her Addison. Immediately Claudia knew it would have been better if she’d lied, made up a small town or picked someplace out of state, rather than name the working-class western suburb of Addison. Molly closed her lips, flattening her smile into a grimace.
“And where do you live now?” Molly asked, and when Claudia told her Forest Hills, Molly’s demeanor immediately became frosty.
“I’m from Forest Woods.” Molly eyed Claudia’s tray. “Tell me,” she paused, “do they eat a lot of meatloaf in Addison?”
Claudia swallowed hard. “No, not really.”
“Do you like meatloaf?”
“No, not really.” Claudia knew she was doomed.
“Then why did you get the meatloaf if you don’t like it? That doesn’t seem very smart.” She paused. “Or are you lying to me?” Molly’s demeanor had quickly changed from frosty to mean.
“You wouldn’t lie to me, would you? I think maybe you really like meatloaf.”
Molly glanced over to her table; her friends were smiling at her in encouragement. A large portion of the lunchroom was paying attention to them by now. Claudia glanced up and met the eyes of her new classmates. They looked hungry for carnage.
“I think you need to eat your meatloaf,” Molly said, “just like you did back home in Addison.”
Claudia looked down at her cold plate. The gray meat looked as menacing as Molly’s green eyes. “I guess I’m just not very hungry.”
“Oh, I think you are. I think you’d better eat your meatloaf, Cloddia.”
And
so Claudia’s new nickname was born, accompanied by a rumble of laughter from her peers, from which the word Cloddia could be heard repeated several times.
“You better eat your meatloaf, or no one here is going to be your friend.”
Claudia looked down at her plate. She could sense the room holding its breath, waiting to see if she might actually try it.
“I’m not hungry.” Claudia said it with more strength than she felt. There came a point on the downward spiral where you had nothing more left to lose.
“I think you are. I think you need to eat your meatloaf like you did in Addison.” Molly smiled and looked over at her table of friends again. “If you don’t eat your meatloaf, you won’t have any friends. You won’t have a single friend at this school.”
Claudia couldn’t imagine that eating her meatloaf would help her in any way. With more hostility this time, while simultaneously managing to stare down Molly Bonner, she said, “I’m not hungry.”
The standoff had captured the attention of the entire room and, to Claudia, there seemed to be no escape. She looked down at her plate, then up at Molly again, this time with calm defiance. “Maybe you’re the one who isn’t very smart, because I’ve had to tell you I’m not hungry three times.”
A silent yet palpable gasp permeated the room.
Claudia held Molly’s gaze. Clearly, this was not the response Molly had been expecting. She’d obviously been hoping for tears or pleas for mercy, or maybe even to see someone sample the meatloaf and gravy for the first time in the history of Forest Woods High School.
Something along those lines would have been the response Claudia would have normally expected from herself as well. Instead she continued down her newfound course. “So let me see if I’ve got this straight. If I eat this crap, then I can have a bitch like you for a friend. Hmm. What’s behind door number two—”
“I’ll be your friend,” she heard a girl’s voice say. It had come from the next table over.
The voice had belonged to Lindsay Tate.
Watching the social dramas unfold in the Strawn Academy cafeteria brought Claudia back to her adolescence every time, like a lesson in social hindsight. The students interacted in their assigned hierarchies and she wondered which friendships would last. It wasn’t predictable.
People sometimes decided you would be their friend, and it was as though you weren’t given any choice in the matter. Lindsay had chosen her that day because of the way Claudia had stood up to Molly Bonner. In both situations, Claudia felt her choice had been made for her. It hadn’t been a conscious decision to stand up to Molly. It had just happened.
And as far as Lindsay’s overture of friendship went, Claudia saw no choice there either. She saw no other possibility in a lunchroom full of people, everyone waiting to see if the two of them would unite to deflate Molly Bonner. And so, for nearly twenty years, Lindsay Tate-McDermott had been Claudia’s friend.
Later, other friends, like Gail, would comment on how odd their pairing was, what improbable friends Claudia and Lindsay seemed. Unlike most friendships between women, theirs was never warm and girly, based on a mutual affection for each other. It was a friendship that merely persevered. But, like an arranged marriage in which the man and woman eventually fall in love and become happy growing old together, time gradually softened the hard edges of their friendship. Shared experience formed a common bond. They were friends now, real friends, but occasionally Claudia could sense a cold undertow, just below the surface—that sometimes made its presence known with a vicious comment or an angry look. Claudia had never thought much about it until recently, not until she watched the trickle-down economics of social status play out in the high-school cafeteria at Strawn, seeing it through her thirty-three-year-old eyes.
At Strawn the cliques were divided along strictly fiscal lines, with the most popular girls belonging to either old money or really big-name new-money families. Fame also helped, and the scions of famous actors or sports stars could be accepted.
It had been the same at Forest Woods High School but it hadn’t been quite so apparent to Claudia at the time. Everyone had had more money than her family did, and she had known nothing about society and its striations; she had only known she fell at the bottom.
She had learned that Lindsay Tate was the granddaughter of one of the heirs to Tate Drugs and that her family was extremely wealthy—wealthier than Molly Bonner’s family and most of the families of the girls who sat at the popular table. But Lindsay had cultivated her own clique, eschewing Molly’s kind of gumball popularity—sweet on the outside, hollow on the inside, with a flavor that didn’t last for very long.
At that time, Claudia had thought Lindsay had decided to stand apart, refusing to fit into the place society had carved out for her—her own little form of rebellion, a striking out against her birthright—and that Lindsay’s independence had garnered her her own following. It wasn’t until much later, when they were grown and living in the city, that a different truth had occurred to Claudia: that maybe it hadn’t been Lindsay who’d done the eschewing after all.
The adult Lindsay seemed so hungry to be accepted by society—and not just by the other rich people who lived around her, but by real society. The big names, with mentions on the society page. Ann Gerber’s column, the Women’s Foundation annual spring fashion show. All of it. Claudia watched Lindsay visibly wince whenever someone mentioned being asked to do that fashion show—the brass ring, an invitation Lindsay had yet to receive.
Her independent clique in high school had seemed to be Lindsay’s way of making the best of her situation, and Claudia’s angry “I’m not hungry” in the cafeteria that day was what had probably made Lindsay decide Claudia would be an asset to her little group. But it had been so out of character for Claudia to behave that way and she was later able to sense Lindsay’s frustration with her every time she refused to stand up for herself.
A spit-wad fight was breaking out at Strawn’s popular boys’ table. Claudia had been watching it brew for several minutes now, waiting for it to die down. It wouldn’t. She scanned the room for Henry, but he was over on the other side of the room with the second-graders, breaking up an argument—probably over a poorly traded Twinkie.
The boys at the popular table were now starting to target other tables, namely the popular girls’ table and the leftovers, who looked ready to fight back. Claudia started walking over and she could see the boys nudging and elbowing each other. She hoped that just walking by the tables would be enough.
One of the boys at the popular boys’ table, with his back to her, was readying a spit wad in his straw. The boy directly across from him was talking to him, leaning in, without taking his eyes from Claudia, obviously telling him she was on her way. The boy fired the spit wad through the straw anyway—landing it on a backpack at the leftover table.
“Hey,” Claudia said to him. “I think you need to st—”
A spit wad fired from the leftovers hit Claudia squarely in the forehead. Laughter erupted at both tables as Claudia wiped it away.
“Just knock it off,” she said as she walked away, even though the fight had already ended. A common enemy was one way to unite would-be rivals.
Chapter Ten
The 10 duck was fighting back. The fabric was just so cumbersome and heavy. Not what she was used to, and Jill was starting to lose patience. This canvas was going to be the centerpiece, the pièce de résistance of her show. And she wanted to make it huge—literally. She’d never built a canvas this large before, and she barely had room for it on the floor of her studio. All the furniture in the room was pushed up against the walls. When the canvas was finished, Jill would have to hang it on the back wall in order to paint it.
Kneeling over the canvas, Jill gave the 10 duck one more perfunctory tug before sinking back and sitting cross-legged on the floor, the stretching pliers in her hand hanging over her thigh, still holding the edge of the heavy canvas in its grip.
She really needed someone to
help her with this. Stretching a canvas this size wasn’t a job for just one person, even though Jill would have liked it to be. I should just ask someone on the floor to help me. It would only take a few minutes—just until she could get a few main anchor points stapled in. Why was it so hard for her to ask for help? She looked down at the rumpled 10 duck. If she kept at it like this, it was going to look like a first-grader had built it. Jill let go of the pliers and stood up.
In the hall outside her studio, most of the other doors were closed. It was a luxury, she knew, for her to be here during the day. Most everyone in the building had a day job—except the husband and wife sculptors who shared the big studio on the first floor. They made their living with their art. Jill made her living with her art, too. She just lived off her trust fund. A luxury. She half-heartedly knocked on a few doors with a preconceived notion of futility, not expecting any answers.
Jill went down the back stairs to the first floor, worrying now that she might not find anyone around. She really wanted to get the canvas stretched and primed today so she could start working on it. Something this size was going to take some time to complete. It was only the first week in February and her show wasn’t opening until the third week in March, springtime, which seemed such a long way off—but in reality it was not much more than six weeks.
Greta, the owner of the Eleventh House Gallery, which represented Jill, never agreed to a show unless her artists already had a fair amount of pieces ready, which Jill did, but they both wanted more. If she could pull it off, she knew Greta would let her use the entire floor. Greta was generous that way. Jill envisioned the giant canvas hanging on the back wall of the gallery, imposing, stunning, anchoring the rest of the pieces in the show, a sun around which they could orbit.
It was cold in the hallway of the first-floor studios, a chill breeze gliding through. When Jill turned the corner, she saw boxes stacked up outside a doorway in the front hall, in front of the studio directly below hers. Someone was finally moving into 1W. Great. She’d found signs of life, but what life form would be willing to help her stretch canvas on its own moving day?
Wish Club Page 10
