MWF Seeking BFF (6 page)

“What do you mean the age talk?” I ask. “How old is he?” I assume she means he’s too old to want kids.

“Well, how old do you think I am?”

Yeah, right. I know this game.

Natalie jumps to my rescue. “Anne looks so young,” she says before directing attention back to the conversation at hand. “How old is this law student?”

Anne explains that he’s 29, six months older than her last boyfriend. That she’s counting his age by months is a tip-off, but if I were to have answered her question I would have guessed 33. Maybe 35. She’s tall, blond, and has a dancer’s body. I’d kill to look like her at 35.

“I’m 41,” she says. “But it’s not like I’m a cougar. I just tend to like younger guys.”

When talk turns to the book, I finally forget I’m the baby of the group. Those of us who’ve read it have a stimulating discussion. Anne is actually quite fabulous—she sews yoga mat
bags and has a contagious laugh. The fact that she’s fourteen years my elder is much less an indicator of our friendship potential than is the fact that she owns her own dog-sitting and -walking business. (I’m not an animal person, but three of the women here refer to their dachshunds as their babies. As in, “My baby has a yeast infection in her ear.”) And while allergies alone would never allow me to go to her apartment—she houses up to eight dogs at a time—she seems to have BFF potential. She too loves
Les Miz
and eighties movies, and clearly she believes age is nothing but a number.

What a cute buddy trio we could be. Twenty-seven-year-old me, Natalie, who’s 32, and Anne. I can see the women’s magazine spread now: Best Friends Span the Decades. There’ll be a
Real Simple
-esque black-and-white photo of us laughing together about that time when Anne told Rachel she wasn’t a cougar. Ah, the memories.

Natalie’s taking me under her wing. I can feel it. She says she’s going to send me an invitation to her friend’s upcoming cookie party, where each guest must bring three dozen homemade cookies. I laugh to myself at how Suzy Homemaker it sounds, then realize that cookie parties are the kind of thing people in the market for friends can’t laugh at. There was a time when I would’ve scoffed and made some snide remark about cookie parties being for moms in the suburbs, but I guarantee that some of the guests are, in fact, moms in the suburbs. And, I have to keep reminding myself, there’s nothing wrong with that.

I’ve spent much of my life with an us-versus-them mentality. Us: the young, hip urbanites who would never leave the bustling city for the station-wagon lifestyle of the ’burbs, who are too young for kids and would never give up our careers for babies and the stay-at-home life. Them: the family folk who’ve
settled down and have two ear-infected dachshunds, composters, and cookie parties. It’s like I always say to Matt, “It’s so weird that we’re married. We’re too young to be married. Marriage is for grown-ups.”

Or, us: the too-old-for-going-out-on-weeknights worker-bees, who laugh at the drunk college kids yelling outside the bar. Them: the just-out-of-college workforce who arrive at the office hungover because, I mean, it was Thursday night.

I’m straddling the line, slowly becoming a grown-up without ever having realized it, while still keeping a foot in the post-grad life. And beggars can’t be choosers. If I limit my best friends to an age or life-stage, I’ll probably be pretty lonely in eleven months.

I tell Natalie to count me in.

The morning after the book club I receive an email subjected “Catch Up.” I see that it’s from Rebecca, the former office intern who my coworkers called a virtual mini-me. Mostly because she has the same brown curly hair as I do and goes to Northwestern. Rebecca is seriously wrapped up in college life, saying things like “It was just me and my sixteen best friends,” or, “If you went to Northwestern now, you would
totally
be in Kappa.”

Now that she’s a senior, I know Rebecca’s especially eager to stay in touch with those of us who might be able to hire her in six months. I can’t blame her. Six years ago, I
was
her. In her email, she asks if I’m available to get “dinner or something” before her break. She has no idea what she’s in for.

I hit reply. “Are you free tomorrow night?”

FRIEND-DATE 5.
At 7:45, fifteen minutes after Rebecca the intern and I agreed to meet, I get my first indication that this bestfriendship isn’t meant to be. I’m waiting at the bar of a local sushi restaurant and haven’t heard a peep from her about a late arrival. Tardiness is my pet peeve, but tardiness with no phone call or text I’m pretty sure is just rude. Could I be getting stood up? By my
intern
?

When she finally shows—“my midterm ran, like, so long”—we settle in and catch up on office gossip.

“Dave quit,” I tell her.

“I heard!”

“And Tim,” I say.

“I know, so crazy.”

She’s as informed about my office politics as I am.

Most of the evening is spent going over the finer points of job searching. I give her some insider tips, share a website I found invaluable, and spend half the meal trying to convince her that no matter her qualifications, getting a publishing job
six months before you’re available to start working is impossible.

Rebecca’s life, one that still includes those magical words “Spring Break,” is pretty far removed from mine. Probably too far for a true friendship to blossom. It’s not merely that we’re six years apart—at 31 and 37 we could be a perfect fit. It’s that she lives in a college bubble, the same one I happily inhabited myself. I don’t begrudge her the sorority parties and dance marathons, they just don’t interest me anymore. I don’t care which fraternity raised the most money for the charity ball, and though I admire the work she does in her Investigative Journalism class, it doesn’t inspire much conversation between us other than how it can help her get a job. And given that she checks for texts/emails/BlackBerry messages whenever I utter words like “in-laws” and “wedding” and “mortgage,” it’s clear that the life of a married woman is one she’d rather gouge her eyes out than have to hear about all the time. It’s a total lack of social identity support. I don’t validate her role as college student, and she seems to think that being a wife and homeowner makes me something of a sellout.

But the night isn’t a total bust. I promise her that if I ever do start writing full-time, I’ll take her on as a research intern and it’ll come with no pay or benefits. She promises to accept such a position. Everybody wins!

On Friday night, I’m alone in my kitchen with my Empire Red KitchenAid stand mixer (God bless registries), making the one recipe I swore I never would: two batches of my mother-in-law’s Mandelbrot. It’s Matt’s favorite dessert and
his mom has been baking it and sending care packages to his various places of residence since I’ve known him. When he first offered it to me in his freshman dorm room I resisted. Same when it came from the fraternity house or the senior year off-campus dump or the law school apartment. But when I eventually visited his family’s home in Cape Cod, fresh with the smell of just-baked cookies, I caved and never looked back. Mandelbrot, for the gentiles out there, is a Jewish version of biscotti. My mother-in-law’s version has chocolate chips and is covered in enough cinnamon-sugar to kill a diabetic. Delicious.

When I first started dabbling in the kitchen, I warned Matt not to even ask for Mandelbrot. I would never be able to make it as well as his mother does, and I wasn’t interested in hearing my husband whine, “It’s not the way mom makes it.” Just the thought of it gives me flashes of
Everybody Loves Raymond
, and not in a good way. Still, Natalie has invited me to her friend’s cookie exchange and accepting invitations—interacting—is part of the process. So tomorrow I’m expected at a party, as are three-dozen homemade cookies. Since 1) Mandelbrot are the only cookies I know how to make, 2) I’m fairly certain no one else will bring them, and 3) each one is small enough that thirty-six doesn’t seem like such an undertaking, I am breaking my own vow and baking his beloved dessert. On a Friday night.

I want to believe that this cookie exchange could present me with my new best friend forever, but I don’t. The next day, standing outside my apartment, holding two Lululemon bags full of my mother-in-law’s specialty, I feel like a phony. Cookie exchanges are more her speed; I’m a
Law & Order: SVU
—marathon kind of girl.

This isn’t what friend-making should be. I need to be true to myself, not some super-smiley dessert-wielding chipper version
of myself, which is probably expected of someone at a cookie exchange. But “being true to myself” is perhaps just a self-indulgent way of saying “hiding in my comfort zone,” so when Natalie’s car pulls up to my apartment, I’m all grins.

We enter the home of the cookie master. It’s like a cozy winter wonderland. The entire downstairs, made up of a dining room, kitchen, living room, and enclosed back porch, looks like something out of a Martha Stewart magazine. The cookie table displays beautiful treats—frosted sugar cookies, giant peanut butter bars, and oversize classics like chocolate chip and oatmeal raisin. My own offering looks dinky in comparison.

The affair is filled with grown-ups. The 38-year-old host’s parents are here. Her in-laws are here. There’s a small gathering of grandmothers in a corner admiring the desserts. There’s a fire burning in the back room and an itty-bitty baby asleep on the couch. The kitchen has two pots of heavenly smelling soup, phyllo dough appetizers, and a champagne-spiked punch. The soundtrack is set to classical music. I had pictured a loud gathering of 20- and 30-something women laughing, gossiping and eating, but this party has more of an afternoon tea vibe. It’s the single most refined event I’ve ever attended socially. That doesn’t automatically disqualify it from being the bearer of best friends, but, looking around, I’m not hopeful. Unless there’s someone else who showed up and was caught totally off guard. I stand in the corner downing my punch as I scan the room for such a girl. She’s not here.

If this were an evening event there might be more mingling, but at noon on a Saturday this party is more of a family affair than a friend one. Considering I don’t even know the host, I wonder if everyone in the room is thinking, “Who the hell is
that
girl?”

When Natalie first told me about the exchange she explained
it as “such a fun girl thing,” but she and Anne are sitting in a corner by themselves. I settle in next to them. Rather than making new friendships, I’ll use the party to keep building these two.

A few hours later, my Lululemon bag is full again (the guests think it’s hilarious that the rookie didn’t know to bring Tupperware), this time with a variety of cookie flavors. I’ve met and actually talked to only Melanie, who lives in Wisconsin but comes to Chicago some weekends. Not BFF-qualified. It’s time to get out of here, and I feel perfectly satisfied that I put forth my best effort. There’s only so much talking to Grandma and gazing at a newborn I can take. Anyway, my friend—my
real
friend—Chloe is in town and I need to get home to greet her.

As I leave the party I think about my ideas of us versus them. I do think I could be close friends with a woman in a different life-stage, but between the date with Rebecca and this cookie party, I’ve come to realize that finding her may not be easy.

So, Chloe. She’s one of those effortlessly gorgeous friends who, no matter what she wears, looks fit for the pages of
Vogue.
She makes jeans and a T-shirt look fresh. She pulls off berets and sequined blazers and wears them so easily that I wonder, “Why haven’t I spent a hundred and fifty dollars on a sequined blazer?” And then I do. And then it sits in my closet. And then I give it to Goodwill, tag still attached. Where does one even find the occasion to wear a sequined blazer? But, anyway.

Chloe is Sara’s best friend from college and when we both lived in New York, we became friends ourselves. She’s smart and silly and whenever she visits we stay up late chatting on the couch like 12-year-olds at a slumber party. Chloe is in business school in Philadelphia now, and she came to Chicago Thursday
night for a job interview. The rest of the weekend, she’s staying with me.

I’m elated that Chloe might move here but I’m not planning our life together just yet. She’s teased me like this before. About a year and a half ago Chloe almost enrolled in Northwestern’s business school. I was skipping around town thinking my friendship problems had been solved, picturing our Sunday brunches, when she called to tell me she’d chosen Penn. I can tell Chicago’s a second choice for her this time, too, so I try not to get my hopes up.

But still, my hopes are a little up.

“Take a breath,” Matt tells me on our way to dinner. “You two have all night together.”

Chloe and I are talking so fast I’m not sure either of us can hear the other, let alone break for air. She’s telling me about business school dances and yesterday’s interview and I’m yapping about our 8-month-old nephew and plans for a one-year-delayed honeymoon. I’m a giddy schoolgirl, in a car with Matt
and
a close friend. I have it all! It feels as if, finally, I can stop trying. I’m talking about anything and everything—work, family,
Top Chef
—without a filter. It’s so natural and I feel so … light. It’s as if I was totally unaware I’d been lugging around this burden until it was lifted. The weight, I guess, was the heavy load of loneliness, though I loathe that word. It reminds me of those “Depression Hurts” commercials, the black-and-white ones where everyone is gazing out windows. People are always doing that in movies, staring out windows to signify their hardships. I’ve tried a few times, but it was pretty boring. I’d vote couch for a good bout of the blues. But that’s not the point. The point is that I’m
not
depressed, and to even think the word “lonely” sounds so … sad.