You should call her, says my husband.
He used to make a face every time I said her name. But now he starts to cook dinner, gets a beer out of the refrigerator, tells the children they have to clean up their Legos before they can use the iPad, makes me a second drink.
Why not? he says now.
I guess, I say.
Did she call you on your birthday? he says.
Mommy, says our four-year-old, who’s Sasha?
I text her and she says thanks right away and sends me an emoji.
I hate emojis. As if, all of a sudden, we have agreed that words don’t work.
Sorry I missed yours, she says.
* * *
I wait a week. On the day that I watch the kids alone and my husband works, I let them watch TV in the back room, even though we try mostly not to let them watch TV, and they eat granola bars and chips for lunch. I only vaguely, in the background, imagine my husband asking what protein they’ve had so far today. I read my book most of the morning: The Time of the Doves, Mercè Rodoreda—the Spanish Civil War and a young and battered housewife; her husband forces her to care for the doves he keeps; he beats her, refuses to call her by her name; he leaves to fight in the war and she and the children nearly starve until the kind grocer asks her to marry him, feeds them, saves the day.
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 and butter and my sister and I learn slowly—because we’ve been taught since we were very small that fat is lazy and disgusting—that we have to either only pretend that we are eating or eat only this meal every day. We sit across from each other, our mother and our father at either end of the table. They spend the time leading up to dinner talking about work. My mom cooks and my dad makes the drinks, one and a half shots of gin with tonic for my mother, a whiskey and Diet Coke for my dad. They have these before dinner and then wine and beer with dinner, one and then another. My sister and I linger in our rooms or on the outskirts of the kitchen. We do homework, watch TV. Both our parents change out of their suits. When we sit down, the TV’s on, but we talk over it for the first twenty minutes. How was practice? asks my father. My sister doesn’t run and hates this part. Fine, I say, most of the time. We did speed today, I say. It’s understood I won if we did a speed workout. Sometimes I tell the stories that I know most please them: that I lapped some of the slower girls during intervals, that Coach sent me to run with the boys again. I hate running with the boys and do not talk the whole time and they seem to hate me even more when we have finished. They all need to stay at least a step ahead of me and we run faster than we’re supposed to. None of us is willing to let the other beat them, and it’s hot and humid and we come back sweating, panting; none of them look at me the whole time. We come back angry, our legs and arms and shoulders tight; we suck down water, and the girls are already back and waiting, hardly sweating, and they all talk together and I pour water over my head and walk back to my car or ride alone. How was math? my dad asks, because I’m in an advanced math class, was skipped ahead at their request, and this is something that he likes to ask about. Fine, I say again. I’m not as good at it as they think and I lose focus. I feel too young; everyone else feels so much older, and I sit in back and read a book in my lap as the teacher talks. My sister is a champion debater and I’m grateful when the focus turns to her and what she’s done or won or how she is preparing for her next competition. Her grades are not as good as my grades. She’s in fewer advanced classes, tests less well than I do, and my father often looks less interested when it’s her turn to speak. She eats lunch, I know, alone in the debate room. She’s two years younger than me and I drive her to school once I turn sixteen and get a car, but we seldom talk.