“This one’s all about foraging,” she was telling me. “After all, it’s how our ancestors lived for ages. Ice ages, Gus, and frankly I just can’t imagine why we’ve rejected the hunter-gatherer lifestyle. There were no fat cavemen racing around the steppes, now were there?”
As if she had personally spent time on the prehistoric steppes, instead of reading? Jean Auel novels like everyone else.
She was nothing if not frighteningly logical when you least expected it, if somewhat hazy on the details of the rise of agriculture. She was also obsessed with dieting. The fact that she remained a perfectly reasonable size ten on a five-six body, no matter how intense her exertions, never seemed to appease her. Once upon a time, when she was a slip of a girl (I’d heard the story too many times to repeat it without snideness), she’d dreamt of being a dancer, and she’d been a size six. That this had occurred when she was fifteen and largely without breasts never seemed to penetrate her diet-muddled brain.
“Minerva,” I said then, because I had to stop her before she started raving about glycemic indexes and the importance of hydration. “You and Dorcas have been friends since you were kids, right?”
“Oh yes,” she said, fastening her gaze on me. “It was practically preordained. You can’t imagine what it was like to be so creatively named in the midst of all the Brendas and the Barbaras.”
Until that moment, I don’t think it had ever occurred to me that “Minerva” was a name that had been foisted upon a poor, defenseless child—that Minerva’s parents were as much to blame (if there needed to be blame) for the odd duck of a woman before me as she was herself. Because what could anyone do, when thirteen and gawky and tragically named something like Minerva, but choose to be Minerva. It was sort of touching, when I thought about it.
“I can’t imagine you as a Brenda,” I told her.
She preened, pleased. “I wanted so terribly to change my name,” she confessed. “I was jealous of the other girls, but in time, I grew into my name and now, of course . . .” She waved a languid hand. “Why did you ask?”
“Oh.” I had to think about how to phrase the question I wanted to ask. I settled on: “How have you been friends with Dorcas for so long? How do you keep from fighting?”
“We don’t do anything of the kind,” Minerva said with a small laugh. “We fight all the time. She claims I’m attention-seeking and really, she’s dreadfully immature behind all that ranting about responsibility. I expect we’ll argue about it all the way to the grave.”
“But do you ever have real fights?” I pressed her. “The kind of fight you’re not certain your friendship will recover from?”
Not that what had happened with Amy Lee could be called a fight. In the strictest sense of the term, I would have had to participate in it, if it was a fight. Instead of just standing there while she told me off.
Minerva shifted her legs, and considered.
“You don’t have to tell me the details,” I assured her. Which was a waste of breath, of course. Minerva existed to over-share. She made a pensive sort of face.
“I don’t recall the details,” she said after a moment. “I know that we stopped talking for a while—you would think I’d remember everything that led to it. It was several months, I think. I was furious with her—I was determined we would never speak again, unless, of course, she offered a full apology.”
“What did she do?”
“She was very unsupportive of me,” Minerva revealed in hushed tones. “I wanted her to be on board with my decision to open a yoga studio, and she refused. She thought I was being led astray by a certain gentleman we knew at the time”—Minerva batted her lashes coyly—“and she would not accept my assurances that my love of yoga would transcend any possible relationship I was having with him.” She sighed. “It was very unpleasant.”
“Do you have a yoga studio I don’t know about?” I asked, working hard to keep my tone even. I was trying as hard as I could to avoid imagining Minerva striking yoga poses, or writhing about on a mat trying to touch her knees to her nose. It was a struggle. And unless there was an attic in the Museum I didn’t know about, Dorcas had been on the winning side of that argument.
“It didn’t work out,” Minerva said with a heavy sigh, as if she regretted the lost yoga studio nightly. “Though I do love the practice of yoga, and often wish . . . But that’s neither here nor there. She was just so smug—it was unacceptable. We had a terrible argument, and then we didn’t speak. You know Dorcas.”
I did know Dorcas. She was one of those stereotypical New England Women of a Certain Age—the sort who would revel in describing herself as no-nonsense. She was always clomping in and out of the Museum in sensible shoes, while attempting to force Minerva to cut her hair into something more appropriate for her years, something like Dorcas’s own serviceable, manageable bob.
Thinking about it, Dorcas and Minerva could only have met and become friends in childhood. At any other point in life, they each would have viewed the other as impossibly alien. Where Minerva changed her entire self-definition on a whim and the flick of a beaded necklace, Dorcas was particular about her position as a middle school teacher, her little house on the outskirts of Braintree, and her lifelong enthusiasm for breeding Cairn terriers. They shouldn’t have been able to tolerate each other and so, naturally, they had been best friends for some forty years.
“How did you start speaking again?” I asked. “Did she apologize?”
“Did Dorcas apologize?” Minerva let out a peal of laughter. “Dorcas Goodwin, apologize? First she would need to know the meaning of the word, and believe me, Gus—she still doesn’t.”
“Then how . . . ?”
Minerva fingered the edge of one of her scarves, one in a hue I couldn’t begin to describe.
“One day she simply called me, and carried on as if we’d spoken the day before, as usual.” Minerva raised a shoulder. “And I missed her more than I wanted to hear any apology, since we usually speak several times a day, as you know, so I carried on the same way. The next thing I knew everything was back to normal. We never spoke of it.”
“You had a huge fight that you never talked about.” I tried to imagine it, and failed. In my experience, fights were inevitably followed by much longer State of the Relationship discussions which caused far more damage, and left much nastier scars. Which would fill me with trepidation under normal circumstances—but then, as I’d already worried, I wasn’t sure this was a fight so much as a personal exodus on Amy Lee’s part.
“After enough time passed, there wasn’t much to talk about anyway,” Minerva said. “Things worked out the way they should. Dorcas is my oldest friend. She’s more important to me than anything I was angry about.”
She tilted her head to the side then, and fixed me with a surprisingly perceptive gaze. I’d seen it once or twice before, and it always gave me pause. It suggested, among other things, that she knew I thought she was a madwoman. That she encouraged it.
I found I was holding my breath.
“And in any event,” she said slowly, without looking away, “I think the important thing to remember is that all relationships benefit from a bit of breathing room. Especially friendships. It’s only when you find yourself without the women who understand you that you realize there are very few women who will.”
That night, I stood in my apartment in front of my answering machine with its big, red 0 and faced the fact that deep down, I’d expected Amy Lee to call. I didn’t want to face it, but it was inescapable. No matter how many times I called my landline from my cell and vice versa, to make sure they were both in working order, there was nothing. Radio silence.
I hadn’t expected her to apologize, necessarily, but I’d half-imagined some sort of I was having a bad day, didn’t mean to snap conversation. That would make sense of the whole thing—because Amy Lee couldn’t really tell Georgia and me to fuck off and mean it, could she? That had to be stress talking. Or maybe—who knew—she was having trouble with Oscar. Or with her de
ntal practice. Once I thought about it, there could be a million reasons why she’d gone off like that. After all, Amy Lee was sort of famous for her temper. She had a short fuse, but the upside was she was usually over it just as quickly. I’d figured she’d spend Sunday ranting and Monday remorseful, and would call that night.
Georgia was a different story. I didn’t know how she would react to the Henry thing, because there was no precedent for it. So while I hoped she would call, I could all too easily see why she wouldn’t. I didn’t like it, but I was the one who’d crossed the crush line. I would have to deal with the repercussions.
I stayed up much later than usual, pretending to be engrossed in a Sci-Fi Channel miniseries, while I deliberately didn’t pay attention to my phones—landline and cell laid out on the coffee table, side by side with military precision. But no matter how much I pretended I wasn’t listening for them, that I was fully engrossed in the Battlestar Galactica movie I’d seen at least seventy times before, they failed to ring.
On Thursday, I started to get angry. I sat at my desk and pretended to concentrate on work-related things, but really I was spiraling into a dark, breathless sort of rage.
Who had asked Amy Lee to step in and appoint herself the moral authority? The grown-up? Were we all supposed to forget the eight thousand ridiculous things she’d done in her lifetime, most of which I’d witnessed without the same response? Who was she to sit in judgment of other people?
Once I opened that floodgate, the rage poured on out.
It cast a wide net.
Whatever with Georgia and her “I can’t.” You’d think being sliced into pieces by our mutual friend might have produced a little bit of solidarity. I had raced directly to Georgia’s side during the latest Stupid Boy crisis, at six in the freaking morning. I had been prepared to stay there for however long it took. Just because Amy Lee was suddenly too good for friends in need, it didn’t mean I was. Just because Amy Lee would prefer to stay out in Somerville with her house, practice, and husband, that didn’t mean I wasn’t available should Georgia need me. Why was I being punished for Amy Lee’s behavior?
Unless, of course, Georgia was mad about the Henry thing, and if she was? Then maybe I was the one who couldn’t. I could see being upset. I’d lied, after all. I could stand to do some groveling for that. And in truth, I should have been up front about things as they happened instead of waiting to be caught. But it wasn’t as if Georgia had had us camping out at Henry’s door any time recently. As far as I knew, she’d been over her Henry crush going on five years now. Was she really going to end our friendship over a never-requited, never-consummated college-era crush?
I thought about Henry, too. Finally. And, at first, reluctantly.
I was humiliated for exactly twelve seconds and then I thought that actually, he could go to hell and take his “I don’t think so” with him. What an ass. The man stood in a hallway and basically presented me with a point-by-point analysis of the reasons why it was okay for him to be into me and then, when I could have actually used him, he bailed on me. If that wasn’t representative of my entire love life, I didn’t know what was. I couldn’t even call it a love life—it was just one pathetic relationship—or epic, fruitless crush, if I were to recall the embarrassments of my earlier twenties accurately—after another. I aspired to tragedy and heartbreak—my own relationships ended in whimpers and indifference.
Except for the only one I’d actually had recently, I reminded myself. I kept picturing that apologetic smile Nate had aimed my way at the caroling party. What did that mean? Was he apologizing to me or for Helen? Why had he called me so many times that night and then never again? Did he have any idea that it required nightly acts of near-Herculean will to keep from calling him again?
I didn’t know what to make of Henry, or what he thought was the pattern between us. I didn’t want to know. I was lost when it came to Amy Lee. In the woods over Georgia. The solution with Nate was simple: remind him how much he liked me and dislodge Helen’s claws from him. Mess cleaned up, just like that. Jilted girlfriends were only considered psychotic losers when the boyfriend had really moved on, after all. And really moved on did not include seven voice mail messages in one night.
The rest of them could all go straight to hell, I thought self-righteously. They were far too messy to deal with, and I didn’t know where to start. And in any case, I was more than fine without them.
chapter sixteen
The hyperactive holiday season in Boston, I discovered quickly, was not the greatest time of the year to be friendless.
My outrage faded to a slow burn as the days passed. After work every evening I’d wander around the city in much the same way I had years before, when I was eighteen and intoxicated by my sudden freedom. I’d fallen in love with Boston back then, and with Amy Lee and Georgia, all at the same time. The city was a monument to our friendship—there was hardly a corner in it we hadn’t imprinted with one memory or another. Nights we’d hung out in the Bukowski Tavern, for example, toasting dead authors with over a hundred different beers. Running wild on Lansdowne Street in our clubbing phase. Celebrating Patriots’ Day, or getting all kitted out in our Red Sox gear to root for the home team.
Helen was mixed up in there too, much as I’d prefer to deny it. The nights we spent trolling for cute boys when we were supposed to be studying. Shopping with Helen on Newbury Street and marveling at her seemingly limitless credit card.
First Boston had been our playground, then it was our campus, and soon after that it was our home. I couldn’t begin to imagine what it would be like on my own.
Okay, that was a little overdramatic. I had other friends. It was just that they were weekend and occasional friends. If I wanted to spend more time with the other members of my larger social group, I was going to have to expend a whole lot more effort. I was going to have to make a lot of phone calls, start accepting each and every invitation I received—do the things you were forced to do when you wanted to expand your circle. I hadn’t had to do it in a very long time. The very idea of doing it filled me with a pervasive sense of ick. And, of course, even if I threw myself into it wholeheartedly, it would take ages to build up to the sort of friendships I had just (apparently) lost. You couldn’t transform a coffee-once-a-month friend into a call-me-every-day-maybe-three-times-a-day friend just like that. It took time. Caution. Patience. And in my circumstances, it would also require explanations about why, exactly, Amy Lee and Georgia were out of my life. I couldn’t face it.
And that was why, when I got home and allowed my nose to defrost, I called Nate.
I didn’t want to spend even one more moment sitting around, wondering what he was doing and why he wasn’t calling. None of those things seemed to matter any more. If he loved Helen, he wouldn’t keep having those moments with me, when he looked at me in ways she would hate. When he reminded me that he could count on me. If he loved her, he wouldn’t have called me seven times or turned up at my apartment that night.
There were all sorts of ways that someone could get trapped in a relationship that seemed like a good idea from the outside, but not so much from inside. Helen knew how to play games, so who knew what she’d used to entice him? And now he was stuck with her. He’d thrown me over so publicly and flagrantly—it had to be a matter of pride that his relationship with Helen last, right? It made sense. He was the one part of my incredibly messy life that could be cleared up with a simple, long overdue conversation.
With all of that in mind, it also made sense to call him.
I got his voice mail, which didn’t surprise me—I didn’t want him to pretend I was some random guy again. While I could see why he’d done it, it made me feel icky, the same way that old video for “Part-Time Lover” with Stevie Wonder did. It was all just gross. I was a fully grown woman, who was taking charge of her own destiny. Voice mail was much better. Voice mail, I could handle.
“Hey,” I said. “It’s me. I really want to talk to you about what’s going on.
We never talked about that night, and I think we should. I wish I hadn’t missed all your calls. I feel like there’s stuff we need to work out, don’t you? Call me.”
I was proud of myself when I hung up. Short and sweet. To the point. No hemming or hawing.
Go to hell, Amy Lee, I thought with extreme smugness. I can too be a grown-up.
A feeling that was confirmed, about an hour and a half later, when my cell phone rang. Nate’s name scrolled across my screen.
“I’m glad you called,” I said, picking it up.
“I bet you are,” Helen snapped at me.
I felt my stomach drop to the soles of my feet.
“Why are you calling me from Nate’s phone?” I managed to ask.
“Why are you calling my boyfriend?” she countered.
“You have to be kidding me.”
“You better leave Nate alone,” Helen hissed. “Don’t think I’m not wise to your little games, Gus. But you better remember that I’m not like you. I won’t sit back and watch it happen, do you understand me?”
“Are you threatening me?” I was flabbergasted.
“I’ll do whatever I have to do to babysit what’s mine,” Helen threw at me. “And if you think I’m going to—”
I heard Nate in the background then.
“What are you doing?” he demanded. “Is that my phone?”
“You want to tell me why you’ve been calling Gus?” Helen screamed at him. “She’s on the phone right now! You can tell us both!”
I just sat there, listening with the part of me that wasn’t frozen into place.
There was what sounded like a scuffle. Then Nate’s voice on the phone.
“I’ll call you later,” he told me, as Helen shouted something (happily) incomprehensible in the background. Then he hung up.
And for the first time since she’d walked away from me in that hallway out in the country, I entertained the possibility that Amy Lee might have a point.
My life was completely out of control. My best friends had stopped talking to me. I was, apparently, embroiled in a love triangle, except the only embroiling I’d been involved in recently had been with someone else entirely. Henry thought I was a nutcase, with good reason if I was honest with myself, and my mind kind of skittered away when it landed on that land mine. I suspected I had just made things a lot worse with Nate.