A Good Friend
Tom said, “Seriously, what is wrong with blind people?”
Sara stopped checking her phone and looked up at Tom. Here it is, she thought.
Tom had been beginning conversations all day. At first, he would introduce something mildly offensive — a vague complaint coupled with a sweeping generalization. But every time he started to advance, she could see Kate’s eyelashes fluttering reflexively. A whisper into his ear, a measured clearing of the throat, a ‘one more G&T, please,’ Kate could stop a moving freight.
“Oh, I’m bringing my boyfriend to brunch,” Kate had explained earlier. “He’s a sweetheart but sometimes he can be a little unrefined.”
“Unrefined?” said Sara. Sara knew that Kate could be hard on people.
“I like him better when he doesn’t talk. He just blurts things out without thinking.”
“Blurt-ations!” Sara had responded.
Kate shrugged.
“The other day,” Tom continued, “this guy’s walking down the hall, swinging his cane back and forth back and forth. I mean really swinging it. Boom, cracks the wall, boom, cracks the other wall. He could have hit someone! I’m like ‘Whoa Buddy! Take it easy.’”
Tom took a handful of cheese puffs from the bowl on the bar and made a big crunch to mark the statement. “Where’s he going anyway, ya know what I mean, though?”
Sara paused, considering. “Well,” Sara said, “The dogs are worse though. There was a guy at work who brought his to the office once and the goddamn dog pissed everywhere in a conference room while we were having a meeting with the CEO.”
“Jesus Christ,” Tom crunched. “Did he get fired?” There were orange streaks on his fingers and a few clumps of orange cheese in the corners of his mouth like little hazard cones, there to warn of the next sentence.
“The dog never worked there to begin with,” Sara said. “That’s next though. Am I right?” Sara giggled softly into a closed fist and then let out a howling cackle. Kate had stepped away to take a call.
She collected herself and smoothed her hair — a crop, dyed parmesan yellow. She tried to move her straw around her drink with gingerly elegance, like she was stirring a warm crock of cheddar grits instead of a Seagrams and tonic.
Tom took a big sip of his beer, his Adam’s apple flexed. Like a baby boner, Sara thought.
“So, how do you know Kate?” Tom asked her.
“Pennsylvania. We grew up and away together.” Sara said.
“You mean you grew UP together?” Tom said.
“We grew up together and then I moved away after my mom died. And then we both ended up in Boston after college.” She corrected herself, “After Kate went to college.”
“You stayed in touch all those years?”
Sara thought of Kate’s mother’s annual Christmas greeting — a newsletter of Kate’s accolades in lieu of a card. “Sortof.”
Kate and Sara had met at St. Augustine’s, a K-8 school in Pennsylvania. St. Augustine’s Catholic church had once been a rousing collection of steeples and colored glass in the parking lot of a strip mall with a bagel place called Kenny’s Hole-ly Bread. While the girls entered kindergarten, the church was flattened so that it could be replaced with the cheesewheel type version frequently built in the midwest during the 1970s. In the meantime, students had to attend weekly prayer in the gymnasium. The chairs were set up in circles, not rows, because that’s Father Dave preferred it.
The girls’ moms met one Sunday mass. Father Dave sat at half court, strumming his guitar and singing his favorite hymn, “Be Not Afraid,” with a John Denver bravado. Sara’s mother turned to Vanessa, “Doesn’t he look like Michael Landon?” Sara’s mother’s favorite game was to identify someone’s celebrity twin. Vanessa had nodded warmly.
When Kate’s mother, Vanessa, discovered she was pregnant with Kate, she and her husband, Burt, were already building their retirement home, a modern structure set back into a soft clearing in the woods down a long gravel driveway. The façade was flat glass outlined in composite.
“Rhombuses.” Vanessa explained, pointing to the house’s unconventional frames. “They are Burt’s favorite form.”
“Arombas?” Sara’s mother asked. “It looks like two different A frames stuck together.”
“Exactly right, RUM-BUS-EZ,” Vanessa repeated carefully. A corner of the highest rhombus was higher than the tree line, encasing a den only reachable by a cavatappi staircase — the color of squid ink — spiraling down from a glossy white ceiling.
To Sara, the most fascinating thing about Kate was that she was an aunt at age 6. “Kate is our miracle child.” Vanessa said. “Well, she’s my responsibility, really. Burt has made that clear.” She laughed abruptly.
In an attempt to align the mismatching timelines of her life, Vanessa was singly focused on Kate’s immiment adulthood. Education and marriage, in that order, were critical to that plan.
Sara was part of the plan as she had tested as “Superior” on entry test scores into St. Augustine’s, only one or two points below “Reverential”. A large head, tiny frame, corrective shoes from Buster Brown to reset her pigeon toes, Sara was otherwise a gifted child. Kate looked like one of her imported German dolls, with white blonde hair, aquamarine eyes, and a contemptuous mouth.
Kate was Sara’s first of many arranged marriages — transactional, yet friendly enough, and based on tepid mutuality. Kate was a good friend to Sara, sharing her expensive toys and inviting her over for sleepovers. There were no televisions; the house was as silent as a wake but for Burt’s jazz records. Kate and Sara weren’t allowed to touch many things but they were allowed to go up and down and up and down and up and down the spiral staircase into the secret den and look out the rhombus glass. Sara had never seen anything like it. For hours, they would pretend they were kidnapped, and send signals of their whereabouts to the other homes — rundown Victorians, speckled amongst shingled bi-levels painted in a Sherman Williams palette, Countrified Suburban Splendor.
“Wanna get out of here?” Tom asked.
Sara dug her hand into her purse. She clutched a vape pen inside her bag. You have cheese in the corners of your mouth, she said to herself. She imagined Tom running his fingers through Kate’s cornsilk hair, tucking it behind her topaz adorned ears.
“Where? Kate isn’t back yet,” Sara said.
Tom took another gulp of his beer. He was sweating a little bit at his temple. “Yeah, I know that.” His pipecleaner eyebrows rose slightly.
She narrowed her eyes a bit. “Yeah, okay.”
Tom took down the last of his drink and slammed down his glass on the bar with a smile. “Let’s go now.” Sara grabbed her moto jacket and she went out the door. It was dusk; she was wild.
Sara imagined Kate’s reaction, “Sara, think about what are you doing.” Sara didn’t really know what the fuck she was doing at this point. Her therapist, Reba, had told her that spontaneous and erratic behavior was an indication of past trauma, but they could never figure out if Sara had actually experienced a traumatic event. It reminded her of the way they were using data science at her job. “We don’t necessarily know if someone’s roof is ACTUALLY damaged, but we have a good approximation based on age, location, and composition,” her boss explained.
Based on her age, location, and composition, Sara guessed she was probably damaged.
“Do you feel like this experience was traumatic, Sara?” her therapist would say, about most things. Sara would try to organize in her memories into something digestible, like one of those shows where they make you create a gourmet meal out of all of the random produce in your refrigerator and an aging can of beans. She tried for coq au vin but ended up with what her mom used to call “Trash Soup” — a concoction of old meats and veggies in a thin chicken stock, held together with a lot of celery salt.
“Could your whole life be trauma?” Sara had asked. She should stop making jokes in therapy, she thought to herself.
“No, Sara,” Reba said. “Only a single event could categorically be considered trauma. But your whole life can be impacted by a single trauma.”
It cheered Sara a bit to know that her life couldn’t categorically be a traumatic experience. Sara wondered about the type of people who had life “events” and managed to figure out the difference from one event to the other.
“My life has been an ouroboros,” she started to say. Reba looked at her strangely. Sara pulled up the hem of her dress slightly to show a tattoo on her right thigh, above her knee cap. It was hastily done on one of the nights that Sara had felt a bit forsaken by the universe. At first it had looked bold and shiny but now aged into a smudgy newspaper print.
“Oh,” said Reba, “Is it religious?”
Sara explained, “No, no. It’s a dragon feeding off its own tail.”
Reba nodded. “Thank you for sharing that.”
Sara continued to go to therapy every Sunday. Except for today. Today, she opted for brunch with Kate and her new boyfriend.
Tom and Sara headed to an English pub that Sara hadn’t been to since she worked at Filene’s Basement when she was 22. She stopped briefly at a 7–11 to buy a pack of cigarettes. Tom bummed one from her. Now that they were standing up, she could appreciate how masculine he was. He stood over her like a monument. He had a head full of chestnut curls. His arms were long and when he took the cigarette, looked like a grim reaper version of Ronald McDonald. Ronald in the style of the Spanish Flu, with brownish coloring and grey eyes.
They smoked together silently on the corner of Boston Commons. A homeless man kept them company softly snoring under a cover of a spongy blanket with unintentionally tattered ends like Sara’s hair.
“So, what is this about?” Sara said once they got to the bar and places their orders.
“What is what about?” Tom replied.
“What are we doing? What about Kate?” What about Scott? she asked herself. Scott was waiting back at the apartment for her. They were supposed to be studying for the next Heidegger exam. During their last study session, he had gotten so high that he passed out on their kitchen floor. She sat down next to him to make sure he was still breathing, propped a pizza box on top of his little body. She took a call with Reba right in front of him wondering if her traumas were filtering into his subconscious like Legionnaires’ disease.
“Nothing. I got sick of that place.” Tom said. “Come on, let’s play pool.”
“Maybe I’ll text her?”
Tom shrugged and grabbed a pool stick.
“I think that Kate’s gotta find her own way home tonight,” He said. “She’s hot but she’s kind of a bitch.” He corrected himself. “A rich bitch.”
“She’s not a bitch.” Sara didn’t like this word. “She can be a pill but she’s gotten me through some tough times.”
“She’s not nice, Sara.”
“Oh really.” She said. “So are you saving me? Or am I saving you?”
“No. But when I met you I was l like, what is this girl’s deal?”
“What do you mean?” Sara was delighted that someone had thought anything about her.
“I mean. Why are you friends with this girl?”
“That’s hilarious. You’re the one fucking her.”
“Fucking has nothing to do with lifelong friends.”
The first time Kate came over to Sara’s for a sleepover, she went up the stairs one floor to Sara’s mother’s garden apartment — rented not owned — where all rooms shared the same floor and the view out the living room window was of the other brick apartments across the large parking lot. In the middle was a pool never filled because of “temporary” maintenance issues.
Kate had calmly turned to Sara’s mother, “Why don’t you live in a house?”
Sara’s mother answered, “This is our home, sweetie.”
“But, this is not a house,” she pleaded. Kate had slept over a few times but each time Vanessa had to come get her in the middle of the night when Kate would refuse to go to sleep, blinking tears through her long lashes and down her piggy cheeks.
Kate had ended up being right, of course. Homes are something you keep. After her mother died, Sara didn’t get to keep the few things she had: her school, her uniform, her rosary beads. She moved in with her mother’s older cousin in a lake cabin in northern New Jersey — a recovering Mormon with a drinking problem.
Tom came over to her side of the pool table. He gently nudged Sara with his hip into a booth and sat close. Sara felt elastic and impressionable, like Silly Putty.
Tom put his hand on top of hers. He looked down towards her face, and Sara held her breath a little bit. “So, what are your tough times?” he asked.
Sara knew what was next. She had transacted upon her sadness before. Sara imagined Tom’s place, barren but for a futon mattress on the floor, an overflowing laundry basket and a half eaten bag of Cheetos. There would be no place to hide when Kate opened the door. Kate would see that Sara belonged there instead of Kate, the same way that Kate belonged to a house with a spiral staircase leading to a room that no one used.
“Has anyone ever told you that you look like someone?” she asked. “Everyone does.” She began to account for her things. She suddenly felt like she had accumulated items she no longer wanted. It made her feel sluggish.
“Let’s have a cigarette,” Tom said.
“I shouldn’t be here.”
“What?” said Tom and then he said, “Don’t.”
“Don’t, what?”
“Don’t talk. I like you.”
When they got outside the bar, Sara looked up at Tom illuminated by the moon on a blue gasfire sky. A man in the moon.
The T was closed. Sara walked up the hill from the English pub, taking the stairs built into the side of the Common. She thought if she walked far enough, she would find a main road, but the streets just kept winding upward and she landed at an unfamiliar intersection. She stopped momentarily.
Sara picked a direction and kept walking, knowing eventually she would get home.
