Friendship (3 page)

Amy’s mom had set up Amy’s bank account to be linked to hers ten years earlier, and Amy hadn’t ever figured out how to unlink it, even though obviously this was a little bit like not being able to figure out how to snip a bedraggled, half-rotten umbilical cord that had somehow snaked its way up I-95 all the way from the D.C. suburbs to New York. But the moments when it occurred to Amy to unlink the accounts never seemed to coincide with moments when it seemed as if it would be okay to give up the hundred-percent overdraft protection that the link offered, probably because the latter kind of moments had never occurred. Her decent salary was no match for her tendency to spend every penny she earned and then some. But in spite of her profligacy, she never seemed to have anything to show for her debt: she lost cashmere sweaters, wore down the heels of designer boots and left them in the closet unrepaired, threw away bank statements unopened, lazily paid the ATM fee rather than walking the extra few blocks to her own bank, and consistently paid only the minimum balance on the credit card she’d used to purchase the lost sweaters and ruined boots. Without any of the fun of having a gambling problem or a drug habit, she’d still managed to find a way to keep herself living paycheck to paycheck. Being reminded of this made her uncomfortable, and feeling uncomfortable made her want to stop on the way home from work at a gourmet grocery store and spend eleven dollars on a two-ounce jar of pine nuts.

“I really couldn’t accept help from you guys. You know how I feel about that,” Amy said, smiling as she talked so there would be a smile in her voice, aware that anyone who happened to glance at the resulting rictus would think she was insane.

“You didn’t always feel that way! But okay, if that’s how you feel now. Just please know that it’s not a big deal for us. We’d like to help.”

Then why did you offer to pay for only
part of
the ticket?
“What would happen if you were authentically yourself with your mother?” the therapist Amy couldn’t really afford had once asked her. Amy had been tempted to tell her therapist that she couldn’t risk being any more “authentically herself” than she already was in any context of her life, but she hadn’t felt like going down that road, so she’d just said “I don’t know” and stopped seeing the therapist soon afterward, mostly because she’d bounced a check to her and didn’t want to spend another two hundred dollars in order to have a protracted therapeutic conversation about why she’d bounced a check.

“And I’m grateful, but it’s not necessary, because … and I’m sorry, I was going to call today to tell you I just really can’t get away from work. I don’t have any more vacation days left this year, and I’d be taking unpaid leave. I can’t afford to do that right now. Well, as you can see! I’m sorry. I should have planned it better, but all those weddings this summer…”

Silence on the line. Amy’s noodles arrived. The waitress beamed proudly as she set the bowl down in front of Amy and handed her chopsticks, miming a sweet, protective “eat it fast before it gets cold” gesture in a way that someone, probably not Amy, might have described as “maternal.”

“Amy, this is very disappointing.”

Amy forced herself to finish her mouthful before responding. “You know, I’m also disappointed! But this is what I have to do. I hope you can understand.”

“Of course
I
understand, but you know how hard it is to explain this kind of thing to your grandmother. I hope you’ll give her a call and tell her you’ll miss seeing her. And don’t mention that your work won’t give you the time off—I don’t think she’ll understand why a supposedly Jewish workplace wouldn’t let you miss work on a Jewish holiday.”

“Is it really so hard to understand?” Amy said, finally—inevitably—losing her patience. “If I ran a business, I also wouldn’t give my employees endless unpaid time off! I was out basically all of June, depleting the last of the ozone layer by flying to the stupidly lavish celebrations that my least ambitious friends arranged to try to convince themselves and their families that their lives have meaning! That’s not
my fault.
I don’t have
any control
over that!”

“I’m sure you have more control than you think,” said Amy’s mother, using the tone of voice she probably took with difficult teenagers in her social work practice.

The noodles were cold when Amy finally managed to end the call. When the waitress came to take away the half-eaten bowl a few minutes later, she gave Amy a look of disappointment.

Amy paid her bill, overtipping as usual, then gathered her things and started walking back to the office. On the way, she passed the homeless man who begged all day outside Peas and Pickles, the twenty-four-hour Korean greengrocer with gourmet pretensions that had sprung up to cater to the employees of businesses like Yidster. She passed him several times a day and never made eye contact; he was the pushy and unpredictable type of panhandler who’d take any attention as an excuse to follow someone partway down the block, repeating his request in a singsong voice while all the pedestrians who’d eluded him tried not to stare at the person who’d been singled out. Just saying “Sorry, I can’t” was sometimes enough to provoke him, so Amy didn’t. But for whatever reason he chose her anyway, walking alongside her as she pretended to ignore him.

“Girl, I know you got money. Help me get something to eat,” he said, shaking a stained coffee cup in her direction. In situations like this, Amy had seen her mom stop and have a twenty-minute conversation, inquiring about shelters and halfway houses, asking the right questions, the ones that revealed the heartbreaking truth underneath someone’s practiced sob story. Amy did not have twenty minutes, or one minute, or even one more second. She wanted to check her email, badly. She reached for her phone but then stopped herself, not wanting to look like or to be a horrible person.

Halfway down the block the man seemed to hit some sort of invisible barrier that tethered him to the territory around Peas and Pickles, and he turned back. Amy picked up her pace but was still within earshot as he shouted to his next target, who’d apparently ponied up: “Oh, thank you, ma’am, God bless you, you’re so generous, not like some stuck-up bitches who think they’re the only person in the world.”

3

The most disgusting of all the many disgusting things associated with fertility and conception, Sally reflected, was how totally vile all the euphemisms were. It had been bad enough when she was in the beginning stages of telling people that she and Jason were “trying.” What could be more antithetical to the effortless dissolution of self that sex had always promised than “trying”? The word inevitably called up images of grunting, effortful slog-fucks, like the scene in
Election
when Ferris Bueller has to imagine his sexy pupil goading him on in order to ejaculate inside of his pathetic wife. Their “trying” wasn’t like that, though it was true that it sometimes took more coaxing to get Jason’s dick hard than it used to. But that was to be expected. Sally’s private parts also felt a little psyched out by this point. After decades of having joyously consequenceless sex—well, it had been mostly joyous, and never, ultimately, consequential—she couldn’t ever quite shake the creepy awareness that this perfunctory three-minute ritual before sleep or that unexpectedly rough and exciting surprise in the shower might be the moment that would change her life forever. Or might not. It was just weird. Everything
meant
something now. What had once been stains on the sheets were now transformed into zillions of little part-babies. How had she never noticed before how bizarre that was? All that jizz over the years. Gallons of it. She felt like a mass murderer. A cannibal.

Anyway, “trying.” But trying was only the tip of the iceberg.

She leafed through the magazines on the glass-topped cube next to the fancy UES gyno’s waiting room couch. They weren’t bad—
Surface
,
V
,
W
,
Town & Country
(which still existed, oddly. But rich people would always want to read about other rich people’s horses, she supposed). And then there it was, on the bottom of the pile, the inevitable issue of
Plum
, the magazine for mature mothers. “
Plum
, something highly prized,” was the cover line. It was a reminder of how many women were in her exact same leaky boat—enough women to sustain a magazine, even in the post-print era—which wasn’t exactly reassuring.
Plum
always had a celebrity mom on the cover, typically the star of a TV show Sally had never seen. This month’s mom looked way old, though very botoxed—a redhead, they never aged well. Her toddler twins had red hair, too. If they’d been conceived with donor eggs, the donor had been well chosen. God, she’d probably
auditioned
.

Plum
had plenty of ads to keep it thick, a sign of stubborn health, increasingly rare in the print magazine world. Sally’s husband was a magazine person, so she was sensitized to this stuff. They still had friends who worked at these places, or what was left of them, producing
con
tent for their websites and tablet apps. She’d been jealous of them once, but now she wasn’t, really. She had left that world of competitive consumption and networking and status jockeying behind when she moved upstate.

*   *   *

“SALLY KATZEN?”

“Yes!” she almost shouted, as if this were the counter of Veniero’s bakery and they’d called her number and they’d move on to the next customer if she didn’t make her presence known right away. She smiled vaguely in the beckoning nurse’s direction and followed her down the hallway to be weighed and blood pressured, then took the little cup into the bathroom and peed in it. Crouching over the bowl, she felt creaky, undignified. Her aim was off, and warm pee trickled over her fingertips. For a moment, rage flickered through her tensed body. How often in the average man’s life was he asked to pee into a cup, not counting road trips? Probably fewer times than she’d done it just in the last year.

She barely bothered to glance in the mirror as she screwed the cap onto her pee jar and washed her hands with the smelly antibacterial soap. She’d been told often enough that she looked sad, even when she wasn’t. Catcallers had always tended to yell “Smile!”; there was just something gloomy about the downturn of her mouth and the size of her eyes. And today it was worse because she actually
was
sad. She looked distraught. The doctor would probably offer her tissues.

She left the warm cup on the ledge and followed the nurse down the hallway to the examination room, where she disrobed quickly, again not really looking in the mirror, not bothering to assess her own nakedness before tying on the plastic-and-paper gown. If today didn’t bring good news, Jason would probably try to talk her into some form of pseudo-medical intervention she hadn’t tried yet: acupuncture, hydrotherapy, giving up some delicious type of food or beverage. Jason was committed to the idea of having a baby. He talked about the baby all the time, as though the baby existed somewhere already and was just waiting for them to claim it as their rightful property: a prize in a machine, the kind you reach for over and over again with a mechanical claw. Sally wanted a baby too, but more than a boring
baby
she wanted a
child
: she wanted to see the world fresh through a new person’s eyes. It was a pretty standard reason for wanting a kid, but who cared: it was her reason. Jason’s reasons, though they’d never actually talked about them, were probably slightly different. In those weird conversations about “the baby,” he slipped sometimes and called the baby “he.” No matter how much he professed his distance from his parents’ culture and values, she still suspected that he wanted a son. It was not PC, but it was kind of cute. Like a king wanting an heir.

Lite FM was blaring over the office PA system, an overproduced song about heartbreak and loss. “I’ll die without you … my life means nothing without you,” a woman’s voice keened, endowing each word with ten extra syllables to show off her vocal range. For no specific reason, and for every reason, Sally decided at that moment that no matter what the doctor said today, she was done with this place and all the places like it that she’d been to over the last two years. She would smile and nod through one last examination, one last lightning-speed lecture about the state of her insides, and then she would be free forever. She never wanted to see an issue of
Plum
again, even on a newsstand. If having biological children was so important to Jason, he could donate sperm. Sally would meanwhile try to convince him that there were other ways to become parents, or something like parents: adoptive parents, foster parents, some innovative variation on the theme of parenting that she’d invent herself, the way she’d invented everything else about her life. She just didn’t care enough about perpetuating her genes to keep putting herself in this pathetic, clichéd situation. She had better things to do, she suspected, and she needed to busy herself figuring out what they were.

4

The placement the temp agency had found for Bev was in the East Sixties. She sat at the reception desk and stared at the phone, willing it not to ring, and for the most part it obeyed her. Once in a while, though, it rebelled.

Bev had been trained hurriedly in how to operate the multiline phone’s giant keypad, and even though the woman who’d explained it to her had made it seem easy to put people on hold and then redirect their calls, it somehow wasn’t proving easy at all. “You just hung up on me,” said a grown-up frat boy in a tone of bored irritation, and Bev apologized sincerely. She
was
sorry. Boy, was she ever sorry. She was filled to the brim with regret, and even though this regret wasn’t specific to the dropped call, it was kind of nice to be able to tell someone how very sorry she felt.

After the morning flurry of phone calls died down, it was time for Bev to start collating, which meant standing in the break room and spiral-binding packets of information about different buildings that were for sale. This was pleasant, repetitive work, and once she got the hang of it, Bev began to almost enjoy it. Certainly she was enjoying being away from the phone, with its aura of menace.