Friends from Home Read online

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  When the check arrived, I saw that the bottle of champagne Michelle had ordered cost $150, making the dinner twice as expensive as I’d planned. I swallowed and reached for my card without saying anything. Michelle had paid for her flight and for us to stay in a hotel, and she had been picking up the tab at our dinners for years, slipping her card to the waiter discreetly and assuring me I could “get the next one.” She looked up from her phone as I replaced the check folder on the table, and for a second, I thought she might ask if I was sure or offer to split. I winced when she simply smiled and said, “Thanks, babe,” but I had made the reservation and offered to take her to dinner, I reminded myself. I wanted to treat her to something. Next time I would be more careful about the restaurant’s wine list. In the meantime, maybe I could pick up some more work; I had been freelance editing for a professor at Columbia on the side, to make extra money. I picked up my champagne glass and chugged the rest of it, determined to get buzzed enough to dull the sting of the price tag, before we called an Uber downtown to BINY Karaoke, a place we had been to twice in one weekend when Michelle visited me in New York during my intern summer. Michelle loved karaoke.

  After climbing the grimy stairs to BINY’s attic-like space, we settled on a private room for the two of us while we “warmed up” and a pitcher of some kind of vodka-based punch to distract us from my off-pitch Whitney Houston stylings.

  “Start with Kelly Clarkson?” I asked as Michelle flipped through the songbook delicately, touching the sticky laminated pages as little as possible with her middle finger. “Since U Been Gone” was a middle school, singing-into-the-hairbrush favorite, but Michelle one-upped it.

  “No way.” She raised her eyebrows. “Divinyls.”

  “Noooo!” I howled, and then she doubled over in drunken laughter, pressing her face against the disgusting songbook in her lap, not caring thanks to the drinks, or the moment, or probably both. “You know I’m still not over that. I’ll never be over that.”

  “I love myself, I want you to love me . . . ,” she warbled, and I covered my ears.

  “Oh my God, I hate you!”

  “Was it Mike LeMore who made fun of you?”

  “It was all of those guys.”

  Some memories will always hold visceral embarrassment, even far beyond the awkward years of adolescence. The Divinyls were one such trigger for me. At a sleepover at Darcy Palmer’s in ninth grade, we had taken turns belting out our favorite songs on one of those personal karaoke machines, a Christmas gift from her parents. This was the mid-2000s, so most of the girls chose the standard sleepover fare of the time—“London Bridge,” “(You Drive Me) Crazy”—but I decided to be different. I saw “I Touch Myself” on the track list, and since my mom was a huge fan of eighties and nineties throwback radio, I knew every word.

  As usual, my social skills were just a half step off. I thought everyone would be impressed by my “offbeat” taste, but no one knew the song. No one except Darcy, that is, and she knew one crucial fact about it that had somehow slipped by me: It was about masturbation.

  I know, I know. Who could possibly be surprised that “I Touch Myself” was about, you know, touching yourself? But my mother, open as she often was about her many brief relationships, hadn’t given me much in the way of practical sex education. I had always thought of the song in abstract terms. It also has to be said that the experience of growing up in Langham was largely a sheltered one, with sex viewed as a taboo subject, a cardinal sin tucked somewhere between intravenous drug use and not following SEC football.

  Anyway, by Monday morning, when Darcy had told the entire freshman class about my “favorite song” and what it said about me, public opinion was not entirely kind. Girls were “blessing my heart” up and down the hallway. I ignored it until I opened my locker and found a note dropped through the slats, reading only a single word: “Slut.” I shrank, looking into the darkness of my locker and wishing I could climb right into it, when Mike LeMore and his football buddies sidled up next to me.

  “Why don’t you give my hands a try, huh?” he said, his friends snickering behind him. “I could do it better.”

  Then they all disappeared, ribbing each other and laughing as they walked away.

  Michelle had heard what was happening by the time I shyly confided in her at lunch. I hoped for sympathy but expected her to do nothing. Making a scene wasn’t her style, and to force a confrontation would risk alienating Darcy and her crew by calling her out in front of a crowd. I knew Michelle wouldn’t stick her neck out like that. It turns out I was right—she had something else in mind.

  She pulled my hand and dragged me to stand next to Darcy’s lunch table, far enough away that it looked like we were having a casual conversation, but close enough that everyone could hear.

  “Bless their hearts,” Michelle said loudly, overenunciating. “You only like that song because your daddy produced the Divinyls album. How silly.”

  At last, the fact that no one knew my estranged father or much about him played to my advantage. Now he was absent only because he was a successful music producer in LA—no, in London; no, in Sydney. Rumors swirled for days and then died down. Was the story absurd? Of course. But if the most beautiful girl in school said it and sided with me, then it had to be true. Michelle had that kind of power over people. To save me, and to make both of us look better at the same time. It’s why I worshipped her. She had even gone so far as to say that my father sometimes sent us demos from his label, but, no, we wouldn’t be sharing them with anyone else.

  Remembering this, combined with the serious onset of drunkenness, made me warm with feeling. I grinned at Michelle as I grabbed the karaoke songbook.

  “Come on, do it—your daddy produced that song, after all,” Michelle goaded, and we howled with laughter again.

  “Only if you sing it with me. And I need to finish this drink first.”

  “Well then, bottoms up.”

  We clinked plastic glasses, chugged the overly sweetened drink, and queued up the song.

  * * *

  • • •

  We sang for an hour in our private room and then we took the show on the road, moving into the public space and performing more Kelly Clarkson and then older Shania Twain hits for everyone from the makeshift wooden stage. Michelle danced around me, flipping a pink feather boa around her shoulders and stealing the show like she always did, in spite of the occasional off-pitch note. But she had worn heels that were appropriate for ABC Kitchen and thus wildly unsuited to BINY’s beer-soaked floor, so when I saw her starting to wobble I grabbed her arm, guided her downstairs, and hailed us a cab on Canal Street.

  “Where are Ritchie and Dana?” she asked as I slurred the address to the cab driver. “I thought y’all were always out together.”

  “We used to be.” I laughed, somewhat surprised that she actually remembered my Cornell friends by name. “But Dana is a first-year law associate and Ritchie is at Goldman Sachs, so things are crazy. We only go out all together like once or twice a month.”

  “You don’t have an accent anymore.” Michelle looked at me wide-eyed, as if it was the first moment she had noticed. “I swear I even heard you say ‘you guys’ earlier tonight,” she said, feigning disapproval.

  “It went away after a couple of years in Ithaca.” But the real truth was, I had never really had an accent. I lived the first seven years of my life in Cleveland, after all, but over time I had shaped my inflection to be more like that of Michelle’s and Marcia’s, loving their soothing drawl and finding that it helped me to fit in better at school, too. In contrast, at Cornell, fast-talking and New York accented seemed like the way to be. I found that I could shape my voice in that direction as easily as I had once picked up Michelle’s y’alls. Ritchie taught me to stop calling all soft drinks Coke and start saying soda. Adaptability was a side effect of being an
eternal transplant.

  “Well, y’all still probably go out more than I do. It’s more for special occasions now, you know?” Michelle leaned her head on my shoulder, drowsy affection a betraying sign of her drunkenness.

  “This from the girl who once went out sixteen nights in a row freshman year at ’Bama? I think that was some kind of record. Like, what is there to do on Sunday nights in Tuscaloosa?”

  She laughed tiredly and laced her fingers with mine as the cab sped up Bowery, and the simple gesture gave me that “I’m home” feeling again. “Well, things change.”

  “You’re getting married, Miche.” The truth of it struck me suddenly.

  “I am,” she half whispered, sounding reverent. Amazed.

  “You know married women can still go out, right?”

  She sniffed. “You’re the one who once said marriage is a death sentence.”

  “No, I didn’t,” I contradicted. “Or if I did, it was probably back when I still thought boys had cooties.”

  We both laughed, but I felt a false bottom under my words, like a trapdoor that might give out. Marriage didn’t feel like a death sentence, no, but something about it did feel like isolation, like Michelle might be exiled to a country I couldn’t or didn’t want to visit. But in that moment, I wanted her to be happy far more than I wanted to defend myself. “For you, it’s going to be wonderful, Miche.”

  “I know it will.”

  I smoothed her hair as we pulled up in front of the hotel, wondering if I would ever feel so certain about anything in my life.

  CHAPTER 4

  The first writer I ever fell in love with was Joan Didion.

  It was her essay “Goodbye to All That” that did it—a cliché choice, but it was mine—and I fell for her and publishing and the idea of New York at the same time. We read the essay collection in AP English my senior year of high school, and the second I finished it I spun in my desk chair toward Michelle and told her I had to move to New York City. “But it’s about leaving New York,” she said, laughing at me, and she had a point: Didion’s seminal essay is not an endorsement for the city at all. The sense of ennui she describes is real, and I felt it myself sometimes, but it didn’t matter. I fell more in love with New York all the time, in spite of everything there is to hate.

  Now, years later, when I crossed the threshold of my tiny walk-up apartment, full of dust from the crumbling moldings of the ceiling and the mice that scratch inside the walls, I still sometimes thought about her words. “To those of us who came from places where . . . Wall Street and Fifth Avenue . . . were not places at all but abstractions . . . , New York was no mere city. . . . To think of ‘living’ there was to reduce the miraculous to the mundane.”

  I had done exactly that, I thought, heaving two heavy grocery bags onto the counter after climbing four flights up. I had reduced the miraculous to the mundane. Wall Street was a subway stop on my commute, and Times Square a tourist trap to be avoided at all costs. Even still, I couldn’t imagine ever leaving the city, and I did actually feel relieved to be home after the posh weekend in the hotel. Parts of being with Michelle—belting out our old favorite songs, walking arm in arm down Orchard Street—felt as natural as breathing. I could be a version of myself with her that no one else would ever see. Yet, other parts, like when she dragged me through Central Park and three different Kate Spade stores only to ask how I could live in a city that was “so tiring,” were less welcome. As I watched her get into an Uber bound for JFK, a mix of nostalgia, sadness, and excitement washed over me. Every time we said good-bye now reminded me of the last day of summer break before we had gone away to college. It felt like I was stepping between lives.

  I surveyed the apartment as I unpacked my Trader Joe’s bags, finding it mercifully quiet, and contentment settled in as my shoulders unclenched from carrying the heavy bags. Both of my roommates were out. They kept odd hours, one working as a freelance makeup artist for celebrities and the other a production assistant on several New York–based TV shows. These were the kinds of jobs no one had back in Alabama. Growing up, becoming an astronaut would have seemed more likely, because at least I knew astronauts existed. There were whole industries, whole careers, that seemed to exist only on the island of Manhattan. Terry and Demi were quiet, and we coexisted well—as well as any three people could in four hundred square feet—but the reason we lived together had nothing to do with friendship and everything to do with broker fees.

  No one warns you about the broker fees. When I had first moved to the city three years earlier, I got off a Delta Connection shuttle at LaGuardia with my diploma, a promise of a publishing job, and $1,645 painstakingly saved from a series of odd jobs in Ithaca. (There are people who remember the exact figures in their bank account when they first came to New York, and people who do not. I assume the ones who don’t had a few more numerals to keep track of than I did.) I thought this would be enough money to cover my first month of rent, and that my job could get me a lease, even if I had to have roommates. My publishing salary was tiny, but I was sure I could make it work. I hadn’t grown up with much.

  As it turned out, those who were new to the city like me were typically subject to broker fees in addition to rent and security deposits, forced to fork over up to fifteen percent of an apartment’s annual rent in exchange for the privilege of signing a lease on 150 square feet of the New York dream. If it sounds like extortion, that’s because it basically is. That might have been the end of everything, but thankfully, Dana, who had grown up in the city and moved back the very same week I did, offered to spot me a screened-off corner of her living room for the month it took me to find a lease I could jump onto. Since then, I had lived in a series of apartments, some nicer than others, before finally landing six months ago with Terry and Demi on the border of East Williamsburg and Bushwick, a more recently gentrified neighborhood that wore its “trendy” label in a relaxed, almost disheveled way, like a sweater slipped off one shoulder. In between old industrial buildings and the canal of standing water off the sound, new cocktail bars and back-room restaurants cultivated a sophisticated air that aimed to say, “What, this old thing?” This attitude put the rent at the upper edge of what I could afford, even though I lived a full thirty-five minutes away from my Manhattan office. But I found myself liking it enough to stay.

  The apartment buzzer blared like a fire alarm as I finished unloading the groceries. “Who is it?” I barked into the intercom, annoyed, balancing a bag of apples in my free hand.

  “Uh, Mark?” my boyfriend called back, a note of hurt in his voice audible through the intercom static. Between the good-byes to Michelle and the after-work errands, I had completely forgotten I had invited him over as soon as he landed at the airport.

  “Right! Sorry!” I apologized. “Come up, I have beer.”

  A few minutes later, Mark rounded the turn of the fourth staircase, suitcase and garment bag in hand. His blond hair looked a little disheveled, and he still wore his traveling outfit of sweatpants and scuffed sneakers, but catching a glimpse of him before he spied me in the doorway, I saw him as I had the first time I noticed him across a crowded bar. His slightly clenched jaw, his smile when he finally looked up and saw me. A growing familiarity sometimes dulled the edges of his attractiveness, but these moments when my awareness of it rushed back heightened all my senses. I wondered if anyone ever saw me anew in that way. Patting the back of my frizzed hair, I decided probably not.

  But Mark grinned at me anyway. “Hello, gorgeous.” He bent down to kiss me. “Missed you. How was the weekend with Michelle?”

  “Missed you, too. And it was . . . good,” I told him as I walked toward the fridge to get the six-pack of beer. I grabbed a bottle for each of us, opening them immediately, and then took a swig and hoisted myself up to sit on the counter. “It was just a lot of catching up.”

  “Come on, give me more than that,” he said, sidling up to the counter to st
and between my legs. “I’m sure you guys got up to some stuff.”

  “Well, the biggest news is that I agreed to be her maid of honor.”

  Mark set his beer down and regarded me with a look of surprise. “Well, that’s . . . great? Did you expect it?”

  “I thought bridesmaid,” I admitted. “But it makes sense. She did make me swear to take the job back when we were, I don’t know, eight?”

  Mark had been the best man in his older brother’s wedding a year ago—I hadn’t attended; we had met only a couple of months before—but that was the extent of our mutual experience. I shrugged and told him I assumed I’d find out more details soon.

  “Anyway, after she popped the question at dinner Friday, we just did some karaoke at BINY. Your rendition of ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’ was sorely missed.”

  “It’s not eighties night without me,” he quipped. “So, I bet she’s mostly just psyched that Jake finally proposed, right?”

  “Of course, you know Michelle.” I paused to take a swig of my beer. “But why does everyone keep saying ‘finally’? Michelle. Her mom. I mean, it’s not like they’ve been together a decade, and it’s not like she’s forty years old.”

  Mark shrugged. “Well, I guess when it’s right, some people just know. Seems like they’re the kind of people who have known for a while.”

  Silence hung in the air between us for a moment before he launched back into chatter.

  “Anyway, my trip was good, too. The great metropolis of Omaha isn’t the most exciting place I’ve ever been, but we’re still doing good business with some insurance companies out there. I think I made some major progress this weekend, and my boss was there to notice, which was great.”

  “Sounds productive.” I carried our beers over to the couch and collapsed, still a little sweaty from the humidity and the four-story climb to the apartment. “So, Netflix and chill tonight?” I asked in a flirty voice. “But with some actual Netflix involved?”