The False Friend (11 page)

“Your club.”

Celia was surprised by the word, but Djuna rolled her eyes as if this were a tedious question. “Give one reason we should let you,” she demanded, as if the club were not something Leanne had just called into being.

Leanne shrugged and looked away. “Because you took my stuff?”

“So?” Djuna made a gesture that encompassed Leanne’s lank hair, her button-down shirt with the frayed collar, the bell-bottom corduroys that should have been straight-leg, their ridges worn away at the knees. “You’re not like us.”

“Could you teach me?” Leanne’s voice had gone small.

With that, they ceased to be girls who happened to swap desserts from their lunch boxes, or who casually maintained tandem perches atop the parallel bars at recess. Leanne’s desire required them to determine what made them desirable. One week they wore colored shoelaces; the next, only white would do. Each day became a new opportunity to demonstrate the value of their company, to prove their facility for cool. If Leanne was tested most often, it was only because she was so willing. Leanne showed them just how far they could go.

Celia reread the e-mail, and pictured Leanne’s solemn face.
When she reached Becky’s name, she stopped. She had imagined Djuna’s disappearance as a scattering explosion. That Leanne had stayed in touch with anyone was surprising enough, but a friendship with Becky seemed as unlikely as the Scranton telephone number. Where Celia had been accustomed to A’s, Becky had expected perfect scores, the freak occurrence of a B-plus once reducing her to tears. Celia would have put Becky Miller somewhere with an identifiable skyline and an international airport. If Leanne’s information was good, Becky was only an hour away. Celia was dizzied by the prospect of two of her quarry within such close reach. She replied to Leanne first to give Becky enough time to get to work, preferring to dial when it seemed most likely she’d reach a machine. She wanted to temper the surprise of her reappearance to guard against scaring her old friend away. A woman’s voice answered on the third ring.

“Shalom?”

“Hi, um, I think I have the wrong number.” Celia thought of all the times she picked up the phone in Chicago to be met by a torrent of Spanish. “I’m looking for Rivka Rosentraub?” She began crossing out the number she had written down.

“Speaking.”

Celia dropped her pen. “Oh! I’m sorry, is this Becky? I mean are you—were you—Rebecca Miller?”

There was a pause.

“Who is this?”

“Celia Durst? I knew Becky when she was a girl.”

They had known each other since first grade, when Becky skipped kindergarten and was placed in Celia’s class, but they
had not become friends right away. Becky’s friends were ones she chose for herself, their acquisition as deliberate as the cuffs on her pants and the part in her hair. She had tapped Celia in third grade.

“Celia? Is it really you?”

Celia heard footsteps through the receiver. Music that had been audible ceased. She remembered an afternoon spent in Becky’s living room, moving unselfconsciously to the more danceable tracks of
Free to Be You and Me
.

“Is this Becky Miller?” Celia asked again.

“Yes, of course! Hello, Celia! Forgive me if I sound startled. This is a bit unexpected.”

“I’m sorry,” Celia said. “I got your number from Leanne.”

There was a pause and a sharp inhalation of breath, followed by a long exhale.

“Did you really?” The voice chuckled.
“Yasher ko’ach
. How is she? How is Leanne?” It was a matter-of-fact voice, good for relaying driving instructions or bad news.

“Good!” Celia chirped. “Actually, we didn’t talk or anything. I found her online. She was kind enough to give me your number.”

“You were looking for me in particular?”

“No,” Celia said. “I was looking for all of us. I mean—”

“I know what you mean.”

Another exhale. The sound of a cigarette being smoked. “How have you been, Celia? It’s been, what—twenty years?”

Celia detected a rasp, wondered if it came from the cigarettes. It was a sound that bore no relation to her mental image of Becky, a picture hopelessly out-of-date.

“That’s right,” Celia said. “I live in Chicago now.”

“So far away. Are you married?”

“I’m not.”

“So, no children.” It was not a question. “I have seven. Chaya, my oldest, turned eleven last summer. Seeing her at that age made me think of things I hadn’t thought of in a long time. And now the phone rings.”

Becky was spared the sight of Celia gaping into the phone.

“Celia? Are you still there?”

“Yes. Sorry, Becky. Rivka—”

“You can call me Becky. Rivka, Rebecca. It’s the same name.”

“Becky.”

Seven. Celia was consumed by mental images of
The Waltons
, a cigarette inserted between Olivia Walton’s fingers. “Um, I know it’s odd hearing from me like this, but I was wondering if we could meet.”

In the pause that followed, Celia cursed her eagerness, half expected to hear a click followed by silence.

“Is this some sort of alumni thing?” Becky said. “I’m not really the class reunion type.”

“No, that’s not it. I’m … I happen to have business in Scranton”—it was too late for Celia to begin again—“and it’d be great … Is there any chance that we could have lunch?”

“You’re going to be in Scranton?” Becky’s laugh—a low stutter like a child’s imitation of a car engine—was unchanged. Celia’s non-phone hand reflexively rose in greeting, as if she had just spotted her friend across the room.

“Bashert
is
bashert:
it must be fate. Of course we can meet,”
Becky agreed. “Any time is good so long as we can meet after eleven and before one thirty.”

Celia checked her watch. If she left immediately, she could be there by noon.

“I can be there anytime after twelve fifteen.”

“Then let’s meet at Blum’s at one. Do you know the area?”

“No.”

“I’ll give you directions.”

Celia had a fleeting memory of a younger but equally concise voice playing at choreographer inside a living room with green shag carpeting. She remembered a gray velour armchair beside a spindly-legged side table holding a plate of carrots and American cheese singles that the two of them raided in between performances.

She had just enough time to shower and dress. Her mind was blank as she got herself ready, quieted by the shock of her imminent meeting. As she left the house, her footsteps echoed on the front walk, the street empty, the neighborhood still. Any small delay risked annulling Becky’s substantiation. Noreen’s car had always been the only one Celia and Jeremy were permitted to drive. Warren’s was off-limits even to his wife, their sole unshared possession. During Celia’s junior year at Chicago, Jeremy had totaled the Japanese compact in which Celia had earned her license, a car the color of a ripe banana that Celia had christened the Monkeymobile. The loss of that car, Celia’s first and only stick shift, had affected her more than the death of the family cat. She had never adapted to her mother’s subsequent string of sedate sedans, still found her foot pining for a clutch that wasn’t there.

Jensenville lay along the shim of land that kept I-81 from the Chenango, the highway wooing the river into Pennsylvania before abandoning the chase. Scranton was a straight shot south. Celia associated the interstate with the fireworks sold across state lines, remembered high school parties that had featured bottle rockets or Roman candles purchased in Great Bend and smuggled seventeen miles back north. She ignored a recumbent gas gauge to speed her departure. While breathing the fumes at the first self-service station across the Pennsylvania border, she was gripped by the idea of heading east and making for one of the oddly named towns nestled within the wooded bends along the river. She briefly imagined calling Huck from Cahoonzie or Equinunk and asking what he thought of starting over in a place that held no history for either of them.

For fifty-three miles, it didn’t occur to her to turn on the radio, the thrum of her own thoughts carrying her from exit 230 to exit 191. Blum’s Dairy Restaurant was located in Scranton’s northern outskirts, tucked inside a strip mall between a maternity outlet and a bakery that announced itself in English and Hebrew. Between judicious speeding and light traffic, Celia had arrived with forty minutes to spare. She dialed Huck, but hung up when she reached his voice mail. Chicago seemed like the other side of the world. She decided she might as well be seated when Becky arrived, sensed her old friend might have a better chance of recognizing her than the other way around.

A crowded deli counter stretched away from the door, the wall behind it a periodic table of bagels.

“Number Fifty-one!” a broad-shouldered voice bellowed from inside a fraying apron.

The woman who held up a ticket and gestured toward the counter was indistinguishable from the others placing orders or awaiting their turns, all of them wearing full-length skirts and precisely modeled hair. The studious way they avoided looking at Celia was proof she had been noticed, proof it wasn’t her imagination that clothes unremarkable everywhere else here looked risqué.

She must have been standing inside the door for some time because the spindle-fingered man behind the register, who had not spoken a word while ringing up the steady stream of customers, finally glanced in Celia’s direction.

“You’ve got to take a number,” he said in a way that showed he couldn’t tell whether she was hard of hearing or mentally impaired.

“I’m sorry, I’m not—” she began.

He gestured to the left. “Dine-in over there.”

Celia turned, and for the first time noticed a door leading to a small dining room. The room was plain but clean, with plastic checkered tablecloths covering the tables, each anchored by a small vase containing a single artificial flower. Aside from a few men in dark fedoras and dark suit jackets, the tables were occupied by the same kind of women crowding the deli counter. Celia was unmistakable, a jay among puddle ducks.

The waitress seated Celia at a small table along the inside wall, hidden from the door and away from the front window. Celia explained that she was waiting for someone, and ordered matzoh ball soup. She owed the sum of her Jewish expertise to
a single bar mitzvah attended in middle school. She and David Lupinsky had been in Olympics of the Mind together. She hadn’t known he liked her until she’d accepted his invitation, and then learned he hadn’t asked anyone else from their team. She’d bitten the inside of her cheek to avoid falling asleep during the service, and then danced with David for two slow songs before spending the rest of the party hiding in the bathroom. When David’s mom had come to check on her, Celia had accepted two Advil for cramps she didn’t have, along with a mini-pad she was certain she had misapplied to her underwear in a way that would broadcast her bluff to every woman in the Howard Johnson’s banquet hall. In a panic, she had torn the thing in half and divided it between the cups of her training bra, the only place she felt assured it would evade discovery, and went home two hours later with itchy breasts.

Celia focused on filling her spoon with broth and raising it to her mouth without spilling. Her soup was half gone when she felt a tap on her shoulder.

“Hello, Celia.”

Becky’s eyes were trapped in the face of a middle-aged woman with visible pores and crow’s feet, her temples freckled from sun. That Celia recognized the decline of her own face in Becky’s grown-up features did nothing to soften the shock of having to swap her childhood Becky for this dilapidated model. The grown-up Becky was dressed more stylishly than the other restaurant clientele, in clothes that might not have seemed prescribed outside the company of so many skirts and shirtsleeves of identical length. Celia couldn’t tell whether she was meant to kiss, clasp hands, or merely smile at this person,
the question of their lapsed friendship further complicated by possible religious bans. Celia stood.

“Becky!” she said. “Thanks so much for coming!”

When Becky grazed the side of Celia’s face with her cheek, her head was close enough to reveal her wig. Celia briefly wondered if, on top of everything else, Becky had cancer, before it occurred to Celia that she was the only woman in the restaurant not wearing one.

“It’s not every day an old friend comes to Scranton,” Becky demurred. “It was no trouble.” She looked at Celia’s soup bowl. “I’m sorry, did I keep you waiting?”

“Not at all. I was early.”

“Smooth sailing on I-81? I wondered if maybe you were coming from Jensenville.”

Celia nodded. “My parents are still there.”

“How wonderful! Do you see them often?”

“Not really. It’s hard to get away.”

When the waiter arrived, Becky ordered for them both. “I imagine this is a cultural experience for you, so I want to be a good guide. Blum’s gets their Nova from Zabar’s, and Zabar’s is the best there is. Have you had lox before?”

“Sure,” Celia said. “It’s delicious.”

“It must be nice,” Becky continued, “coming here like this. To Jensenville, I mean. To your childhood home. I haven’t been back in I don’t know how long.” Her eyes lit up. “You haven’t been by my old street, have you?”

Celia shook her head.

“I’d love to know if our tree is still there,” Becky said. “The one we used to spy from.”

Friedrich Street. Becky had lived on Friedrich Street. “It was on the corner!” Celia said. “In front of that old man’s house—”

“Mr. Luff,” Becky said. “He
hated
us.”

Celia bared her teeth. “Get out of my tree!” she growled. “And you would always explain that it wasn’t his tree, that the first five feet of lawn actually belonged to the township.”

“Public right of way,” Becky confirmed.

“How did you
know
that?”

Becky shrugged. “My brain was a sponge back then. I’m not sure right-of-way applied to tree climbing, but I sure did like saying it to Mr. Luff.”

“I loved that tree,” Celia said. “And your room.”

“Oh, Celia, so did I.” Becky sighed. “The rainbow wall. My mom painted it. When we moved, I knew I was too old to ask for another one.”