On rare days when it was relatively quiet at work, Jamie and I would take our lunch break together. Him with a plastic container of salad, me with my packed Tupperware, sitting outside if the weather was good. Jamie took to removing his watch and laying it between us. Otherwise, talking and talking, it was easy to lose track of time. We’d come back inside, eyes readjusting after the noontime glare, and I’d feel refreshed and happy. But then Jamie would run into Eliza, or Rebecca. My happiness looked like a cheap imitation compared to what Jamie had with them. A different depth. A sense of trust.
Jamie had stopped asking me directly about my childhood. He saw that it made me uneasy. Instead, during one of our lunches that fall, he described the family vacations they’d taken to Florida. It was a clever technique, a way of drawing me out.
“My brother was fifteen and I was thirteen,” he said, shaking his container to disperse the salad dressing. “My parents let us wander Ocean Drive by ourselves. My brother convinced some older girls to buy beer for us. You know what they got us? A six-pack of O’Doul’s.” He laughed. “We didn’t know any better. And the weird thing is, I actually felt drunk. We lay on the beach and talked for hours. It was so much fun.”
He had a dreamy look in his eyes. The place he remembered was the Florida of ultramarine Miami skies, candy-colored midcentury architecture, forests of sleek glass condos. Palm trees and fast speedboats and mouth-puckering ceviche. As Jamie kept talking, I had a dizzying, vertiginous realization: he thought that this was common ground. He thought we had the same picture in our minds.
But I had only seen pictures of places like Miami. I grew up in a shitty town that could have been Anywhere, America. The beach wasn’t a factor. The beach was for rich people, or nice families who took vacations. And the one time we attempted a family vacation, I could tell there was something weird about this beach. On the Gulf side, there were no crashing waves or cool breezes. Just a flat blank canvas of gray-greenish water, stretching into the void. Water that had gone limp and surrendered to the heat, overtaken by the creeping, ticking life of the state. Mosquitoes thickened the air. Stingrays clustered in the shallows. The day was a bug-bitten, sunburned disaster. “I was trying to do something nice,” my mother snapped, slamming the trunk after we packed the car up. My father laughed. He was good at drinking just enough to ignore her moods, but not so much that he couldn’t drive home. “Nice costs money,” he said. As he turned the key in the ignition, he caught my eye in the mirror. “How ’bout you, girlie? You got any money?” My mother snorted. Laughing at me always made her feel better.
I couldn’t blame Jamie for not understanding. I hadn’t told him anything about it. Most of the time, it didn’t matter. We were in New York, we worked in television news, and life was crazy enough that we had plenty to talk about. It was comforting to think how childhood shrank in the rearview mirror of time. That proportion of my life, that giant black hole, would only get smaller and smaller.
As Rebecca’s party had worn on, it had segregated itself in a different way: not just by occupation, but by tenure. The old hands, like Jamie and Eliza, kept to themselves. They had different things to talk about. They had seen it all before. I found them so much more interesting than the interns and assistants. When Eliza and Jamie told war stories, their laughter was sanguine. Problems diminished in the long view. Experience could be a breakwater against seasonal storms.
I wanted that. I wanted nostalgic stories in common with Jamie and Eliza, a shared history. Recently Jamie had taught me the phrase “salad days.” At first, stupidly, I thought it was a reference to what he ate for lunch. Then he clarified: it meant his earliest years of naive inexperience. “But you seemed to skip those,” he said, one day. “How’d you get to be such an old soul?”
Practice, I thought. Years spent with the Bradley family, observing their refined art of omission. In good Wasp fashion, they never dwelled on the bad parts. It worked for them, and I figured it could work for me. But that answer was too depressing, so instead I shrugged and said, “No TV or internet in our house. Only the radio. I grew up like it was the 1940s.”
Jamie laughed. Clever enough, and it threw him off the scent. See, I could be like other people. I could toss out occasional filigreed details from the past. And this detail happened to be true. I didn’t have to explain that my mother shoved our TV to the floor during an argument with my father and it never got replaced. That our internet was cut off after the bills went unpaid.
“Violet,” a voice said. And then louder, “Violet.” I thought I had dreamed it, but when I opened my eyes, the voice was in the room. A hand on my shoulder. A draft of air from the open bedroom door.
“Jamie?” I said. Because I realized, half awake, that I’d forgotten to text him the night before. Illogically, I thought maybe he’d gotten worried and came to check on me.
“Who the fuck is Jamie?”
I rolled over. She was standing in the doorway, backlit by a brilliant ray of sunshine from the living room. Heeled leather boots, skinny black jeans, oversize cashmere hoodie, and blond hair piled into a messy bun. “Oh,” I said. “Stella!”
“Surprise,” she said, flatly. She was oddly stiff when I stood up and hugged her.
“When did you get in?” I said. “Just now?”
“A little while ago.”
“What is it?” I said. “Is everything okay?”
“You didn’t even bother to ask,” she said, turning abruptly.
“Ask what?” I said, following her across the hall and into her room.
“This!” she said, flinging her arms wide. “All my shit!”
There were skirts and dresses scattered across the bed from last night, shoes arrayed on the floor. My stomach twisted into a knot. Pure sloppiness on my part.
“Shit,” I said. “I’m so sorry, Stell. I should have asked. But there was this work party last night, and it was an emergency, I had nothing to wear, and—”
“You’re making it worse,” she snapped. She started shoving everything back into the closet. “Are you trying to make me feel stingy? Well, I’m sorry, but this creeps me out. Like, I have no idea what you’ve been doing this whole time. Do you do this every day? Do you dress up like me?”
“Stella,” I said. When she didn’t turn around, too intent on jamming her high heels back into the shoe rack, I said louder, “Stella Evelyn Bradley.”
It was an old joke, our way of puncturing a petty argument. You triple-named me, we’d say, laughing. No fair. For some reason, the mock sternness always worked.
She whipped around. There was a twitch in her upper lip. “Really?” she said. “We’ve only been together five minutes and you have to pull that out?”
“Give it up,” I said. “You’re not actually mad. You’re just hungry, right?”
Her veneer of annoyance receded, and then dropped completely. She laughed and said, “God, Violet. You know what I like about you? None of those bitches I’ve been hanging out with ever have enough to eat. We go to dinner and we split, like, two salads.”
I laughed, too, although there was a subtle sting in that comment.