Friends Like Us (5 page)

And I am frozen in place, standing in the middle of the living room between Ben, sitting, and Jane at the door, and who do I think I am? But I’m holding my breath, and I’m suddenly certain, like a magician or a mental patient, that I’m the one who’ll turn it all around.

With a quick glance to the side, she sees Ben and me.

“Honey, you’re home,” I say.

She straightens and smiles, wipes her forehead with the back of her hand and says, again, “The fuck?” only this time it comes out throaty and cheerful.

“Not in front of the company,” I stage-whisper.

Ben stands up and we both walk over to her; he holds out his hand to Jane, who takes it and looks at me.

“Ben! Jane!” I shout their names like I’m directing movers:
This chair here, next to the piano.
I recognize the volume of my voice but can’t seem to control it.

“I’m sorry,” Jane says. “I don’t usually meet people this way.”

“What way?” Ben asks.

“Um, sweaty from a cleaning job and reeking of Pledge?”

“I thought I smelled something lemony fresh.”

Yellow rubber gloves poke out of the pocket of her sweatpants. “Willa has told me a lot about you,” she says.

I cringe at the way that innocuous expression exposes my secrets, cracks my attempts at a cool exterior.
No, I haven’t thought about you much over the years.
 … Ben looks down, embarrassed or pleased.

“Well, mostly just about last night,” Jane says after a beat, and we stand there, the three of us, in silence, until Ben snorts, a rhinoceros laugh, and then Jane giggles, and I grab one yellow latex glove from her pocket and swat her with it; she snatches it back.

There are moments—maybe everyone has them—when I’m outside of myself, peering sideways at my own life, telling myself to pay attention. I’m not saying, Willa, enjoy these moments, for they are fleeting and precious, or even Willa, stop eating all that cake. Just: look. See how the front of that car is dotted with dead bugs like an abstract painting? Or, watch that little kid, he’s wiping his nose on his mother’s shirt and she doesn’t notice; or, listen to the neighbor’s dog, how if you close your eyes he sounds like a wolf. This is one of these moments: the look on Jane’s face changing from weary guardedness to expectant joy, Ben leaning toward her, bouncing on the balls of his feet a little bit and not even knowing he’s doing it, the pull between them, and I’m right here, a part of it.

Jane lets her yellow gloves fall into her cleaning bucket. It looks like a bottle of Windex has suddenly grown hands, is waving to us. “Jane gets her best material from cleaning houses,” I say to Ben, eager to offer him a glimpse of Jane’s quirky brilliance.

“Well ….” Jane nods. I remember too late that she can be sensitive about how she makes her money, sometimes defensive about its honest, intrinsic value, other times insistent that every swipe of the mop is in the service of her poetry. Also, she really does smell quite bad, and I silently will her not to raise her arms. “You know, people’s lives, and the things they leave out, the things they forget to hide, and, I mean …” She does this sometimes when she’s nervous, drifts off, skidding down a slippery slope of unfinished sentences and disconnected thoughts.

“Your best material! Ha! Remember when you stole that dildo?”

Jane eyeballs me, and I know I’ve gone too far.
We were having a ball,
I’ll explain to her later
. I thought we were becoming a unit. I didn’t mean to be cocky.

“It was …” Jane allows herself a half smile. “I didn’t steal it. I liberated it. I was cleaning the house of the owner of Mr. Hump’s Sex Emporium.”

Ben is newly enthralled by the mention of this famous local sex-toy shop, the way guys are.

“The dildo was huge. I mean, epic.” She raises her hands and measures the air, then, dramatically, moves her hands apart six more inches.

“And orange!” I say, wanting in on the action.

“Bright orange,” Jane agrees. “Wide, circular base. I’d never seen anything like it. Not that I’d seen so many. They had an eight-month-old baby,” she adds. “Mr. Hump and his wife.”

“Mrs. Hump,” Ben says.

“And I thought,
No, you cannot leave a fourteen-inch-long bright orange dildo out here in the middle of the living room when you have a baby! It’s just wrong!
” Jane reaches out and touches Ben’s arm. “I thought I was performing a service.”

“So to speak,” I say, and she looks at me and rolls her eyes. I breathe in and lean toward Jane a little bit. I want her to reach over and touch me with her other hand, but she doesn’t.

“So to speak. I buried it at the bottom of my bucket of cleaning supplies. Underneath the bleach.”

“But it wasn’t a dildo!” I pipe up, glancing back and forth from Jane to Ben.

“It was a baby toy,” Jane says. “One of those … where you stack the rings on top of each other?”

“A stacking toy!” I clap my hands gleefully and then immediately feel like an idiot.

“Which Willa helpfully pointed out to me later.”

“Sometimes a stacking toy is just a stacking toy,” Ben says.

“Exactly!” Jane, I notice, has not let go of Ben’s arm this whole time. He doesn’t seem to mind.

“So Baby Hump,” I say, “is still wondering where his favorite baby toy has gone.”

“And, not surprisingly, I have never been called back to clean that house.”

“The home of Mr. and Mrs. Hump,” Ben says.

“And poor Baby Hump.”

“But she wrote an excellent poem about it,” I say.

“An okay poem,” Jane agrees. She does reach over now and picks a stray bit of lint from my sleeve.

“About toys,” I say.

“About perspective,” she says.

Ben nods slowly, his eyes on Jane, the smitten grin on his face the replica, I realize, of how he used to look at me, and with the slightest twinge I think,
This is it, this is right.
He’s like a check I have signed over.
Pay to the Order of Jane Weston.

“I’m going to shower,” Jane says. “And then I think we should all go bowling.”

And because we have nowhere to be, because there is not a single obligation among us beyond the imperative to move steadily forward through a day that is suddenly and completely ours, bowling is both a fabulous idea and as good as anything else. And it is exactly what we do.

Chapter Four

Baxter’s Basement Lanes smells of Doritos and communal footwear, beer, and the light sweat that comes from very minimal physical exertion. I breathe it in. This dark, underground room is one of my all-time favorite places. When I was growing up, it was an old-fashioned Milwaukee bowling alley, smoky and dank and serious, All League Nights and
Wednesdays! Ladies Drink Free!
Our dad used to take us here once in a while on a Saturday afternoon when our mom needed a break, and Seth had his tenth birthday party here. Over the past decade, it’s gradually been colonized by the college-aged residents of its east side neighborhood, but never completely, so that these days team tournaments and trophy dinners coexist with ironic hipster dudes in black leather jackets throwing noncommittal spares and girls in short skirts giggling over gutter balls or huddled together on the plastic bucket seats, sipping beer made by blind Belgian monks.

“This is my favorite sport!” I say, taking another deep, nostalgic breath as Jane tests out bowling balls of various weights, settling on a speckled green eleven-pounder.

“You’ve always been a very athletic bowler,” Ben agrees. He tightens the lace on one of his scuffed, red-and-blue shoes.

I nod. “It’s all about endurance.”

“And an extreme level of fitness, of course.”

Jane holds up her foot. “I don’t really understand why we have to wear these shoes that so many others have worn before. What would be so bad about letting us bowl in our socks?” There’s a sign above the entrance:
YOU MUST WEAR BOWLING SHOES AT ALL TIMES.
Someone has scrawled
DISEM
in front of the word
BOWLING
in purple marker.

“It levels the playing field,” Ben says. “For example, some people might be able to afford fancy bowling socks, which would give them an unfair advantage.”

“This way,” I say, “we are all equal in the eyes of God.”

“There’s no such thing as fancy bowling socks,” Jane says, gazing from me to Ben and then back to me. “Is there?”

“Will,” Ben says, “do you remember our senior year phys ed class?”

“Golf is not for the faint of heart!”
I announce.

“No freakin’ crumpets at this tee time!”
Ben adds. Ben and I had tried to sign up for bowling, the popular physical education elective for the sweat averse, and, failing to get in, we registered for golf instead, believing that it would be the next easiest, somewhere in the vicinity of archery but not as exacting. But Mr. Karlinsky, the golf coach, was a task master and a sadist. Strength training and three-mile runs were a regular part of the class. It was the hardest twelve weeks of my life.

“Remember how we tried to earn extra credit by writing that report on the golf courses of Scotland?” I say, “and Mr. Karlinsky told us to give it to the Loch Ness Monster?” Ben covers his face with his hands. I reach over and pretend to try to pry them off. “How is it that we were so phenomenally dorky back then, a mere few years ago, and yet we are so cool today?” Ben shakes his head, his hands still hiding his face. I hold up my bowling ball. “I mean! Nerds in high school, awesome bowling phenomenons today!”

Two lanes over, a white-haired senior bowler in a lime-green team shirt rolls her ball down the alley; I watch, mesmerized, as it slowly, slowly makes its way toward the pins. It seems, momentarily, to defy the laws of motion. It almost stops, possibly even rolls backward for an inch or two, and then, miraculously, it continues its wobbly journey to the end of the lane and knocks down every last pin. I look over at Jane to see if she’s noticed. She’s perched on the edge of one of the low plastic chairs, leaning forward slightly, and she’s drawn a vague and pleasant screen over her features, her lips pulled into an unreadable little smile, her eyes focused somewhere in the distance behind Ben and me. Ben, unaware, tugs on the lace of his other shoe and grins at me, falling back under the spell of our old friendship. I rub my eyes against the haze of cigarette smoke that hovers around us; the rumble of falling pins is a sudden, thunderous cacophony.

There’s a threesome in the lane next to ours, two girls and a guy, all in their twenties, our age, maybe a couple years younger. One of the girls has very white teeth and a long, sharp nose like a pretty rodent. The other, holes in her tights, auburn hair down to her waist, laughs like Woody Woodpecker, an annoying/charming rapid-fire machine gun. The guy, skinny and pale, is trying to teach the girl with the long hair to bowl, although he himself doesn’t know what he’s doing. They clink plastic cups, cheer each other on.

What separates us from them? We all think we’re snowflakes, but we’re Tinker Toys, held together by our interchangeable parts.

I can see myself ten years from now. This day is a fuzzy memory, a flash: Ben and Jane are two people I once knew, and time has won out over history and love. But what if this concoction we’re brewing right now will be our magical potion? Someone a few lanes away bowls a strike, and a smattering of applause erupts.
Good one, Betty!
“Hey,” I say. I take a half step away from Ben and turn toward the bar, gesture in its direction. “Should I get us something to drink? Do you two want something to drink?”

Without waiting for an answer I sprint to the grimy little counter where a bored-looking guy pours soda and beer, a toothpick dangling from the corner of his mouth, his eyes glued to a little TV next to the cash register. I linger over the menu, a collection of Gothic typos:
Died Coke, Rot Beer, Spite;
when I come back with our beverages a few minutes later, Ben and Jane are sitting together at the lighted scoring table, and Ben is telling Jane how to add up a spare. He draws a slash through one of the little boxes, then demonstrates how you calculate the numbers in the next frame. “I’m embarrassed that I know this,” he says, and Jane laughs and says, “I don’t understand scoring in tennis, either,” and Ben says, “How about Ping-Pong?” and Jane laughs again. The dirty light from under the glass casts a faint glow on their faces. I’m holding a cardboard tray of watery Cokes in my hands, watching them.

Later I’ll recall how after every gutter ball Jane threw that afternoon, Ben would say, “Try to get it just a
little
closer to the edge”; how once, after she managed to knock down four pins, he hugged her. I’ll remember how Jane nervously smoothed her purple shirt every time she got up to bowl, how she licked her lips after she took sips of her Coke. I’ll think about the way Ben stared at her, how Jane pretended not to notice. I won’t recall what was said, but I’ll remember how I sat there, subdued and watchful, happy to let them talk to each other, warmed by the glow of their ambient heat.

Chapter Five

Seth is elbow deep in an almost-empty bag of barbecue-flavored potato chips. A breeze blows in through the open window. On the sidewalk below our apartment, a woman yells something in Russian. I can’t tell if she’s angry or happy.

“It’s like everything finally fits,” I say to my brother. “It’s like I’m home!” Across the kitchen table from me, Seth nods vaguely, then crams too many chips into his mouth and crunches loudly. “I thought Ben was gone from me forever,” I tell him. “And I mourned, you know, the loss of my best friend. And then I met Jane, and she filled that hole. Even though of course I would always be sad about Ben.” The chip bag crackles, indicating Seth’s interest, although not necessarily in what I’m saying.

Ben has come to our apartment every day since the bowling adventure, self-conscious and shiny and bearing small, neutral gifts for both Jane and me. He handed us two bars of fancy chocolate the first time he stopped by.
Just thought I’d see what you two are up to!
he said, with a hearty nonchalance so obviously rehearsed I had to cough to stop myself from laughing. Yesterday, just as the cold twilight was sharpening into an icy, dark evening, he buzzed our apartment and yelled through the intercom,
Hey, I brought soup!
And we sat together, the three of us crowded around our little table, just like in my fantasy, only the soup was chicken noodle.