We spend the afternoon together on the front stoop with Josslyn. They chalk the sidewalk and she brings out coffee, touching me three times, the elbow twice and then the shoulder, and she yells at the twenty-something boy who lets his dog pee in the planter that she’s set out front.
How were they? my husband asks when he gets home and I’ve managed to give them food and get them bathed and read to them until they fell asleep.
Great, I say.
He kisses me and we order Thai food on the magic credit card—I sit on the phone as the man on the other end goes to run it. I wait for him to tell me that it doesn’t work, but he comes back twenty seconds later; Twenty minutes, he says, although it always takes over an hour.
Congrats on the wedding, I text Sasha, after we’ve gone to bed and I’m reading again but also scrolling through Twitter. Sad we missed it, I say. Which is as aggressive as I can be, which is still couched in the passive, which is usually more artful, but it’s a text message, and also, I’m not sure I care if my aggression is not pacified.
I spend an hour as my husband sleeps, rescrolling through the Facebook pictures of her California destination wedding. I reclick through the profiles of the four women who stood next to her as she smiled in her lace strapless dress and held the hand of a tall, dashing man. One of these women is her sister, who landed just shy of Sasha and her mother’s perfect features. She holds her shoulders back, though, and grins straight at the camera, willing it, it seems, to find her just right as she is.
I WAS THIRTEEN and she was fourteen and we were high school freshmen. A boy I thought I loved loved her, and I stayed on the phone with him sometimes late at night discussing her. I think I thought that if I listened hard or well or long enough that he’d love me instead. Instead, they broke up, and he stopped calling. And then there she was. I knew everything about her that any breathing person would love, the way she felt and talked as if she were a grown-up; the way she was smart but also pretty but also didn’t care enough about being cool to use the power that she should have had to have more friends. Whether I wanted to love or have or just to be her never felt as easily discernible as this or that, one or the other—more like all of it, and then more, at once.
We had a class together and our teacher was sick for half the year and the sub sat at the desk reading a book and we sat in the back of the room and talked. “Talked” does not begin to hold inside it what we did together. We sat in the school-issue chairs attached to desks, my knees up to my chest. She wore her hair down, curly, with product in it that made her smell grown-up. I don’t remember the words we said but that sometimes they felt so alive they had to be whispered; we had to lean close to each other, bottoms of our desk-chairs screeching. Sometimes one of us got so loud that other kids, or whatever sub we had that week, would turn from their desks and look.
You know, says Sasha, looking at me. I’m fourteen and she’s fifteen. She goes to touch me, then thinks better of it. We’re always close but don’t often embrace. Her family is a touching, hugging unit; when people reach for me, I never know what to do with all my limbs. You might—she’s scrutinizing. I know I’m turning red. She reaches down and touches my ponytail. You might be prettier—she wouldn’t say just “pretty.” It’s important she gives me that, no matter what. It’s a word she’s always had a right to, a world she will always, easily, possess. I mean, you’re pretty, naturally. She smiles. I can’t stand this kind of looking. But if we let your hair down—she takes out the rubber band. My hair is nearly black and thick, and though I always wear it up, when loose, it reaches to the middle of my back. I feel my spine rounding, my shoulders closing in. Do a little something, not too much, but something to accentuate your eyes.
She teaches me things mothers are supposed to teach: how to use a tampon, apply mascara, find a bra that fits. How to talk out loud about ideas I’ve only let form in my head.
Sometimes, after school, we go to her house and hang out with her mom. Her family has less money than my family. The concept of money is sufficiently safe for me at this age, available without acting as a hindrance, that both its presence and its lack feel equally abstract. My mother’s ostentatious car, vacations twice a year, our massive house; the too-big boxes of cereal and jars of peanut butter stored in Sasha’s pantry from the Costco half an hour away, their biggish house passed down and things breaking all the time and nothing getting fixed. My mom works sixty-hour weeks and when we sit down for dinner at nine or ten—because that’s when she’s gotten home, but also, she wants to make my sister and me dinner—she and my father ask us the grades we got on tests, my times on the track. There is always too much food, so much food, made with cheese and milk
