People Who Knew Me (7 page)

“Boo!” a voice said, so close that I felt warm breath on the back of my neck.

I turned to see Marni in an outlandish faux-fur coat—dyed purple—that went down to her shins. I knew it was faux because Marni had become a staunch vegan, which was somewhat revolutionary in 1997.

“Where in the world did you get that coat?” I asked, touching it.

“I'm doing well, thanks for asking,” she said, pulling up a stool and squeezing in next to me, forcing one of the tie-tucked guys to move over. He scoffed, out of Marni's view, which was lucky, because she would have told him to move to the Midwest if he didn't like rudeness.

“Sorry, how are you? Blah, blah, blah,” I said.

“Great. And I got this also-great coat at a thrift store near my new apartment. It's so freaking hot outside, but I had to show you.” She took it off, elbowing the scoffer next to her in the process.

“New apartment? Geez, how long has it been since we caught up?”

“Last time I saw you, it was snowing outside, if that says anything.”

“That's unacceptable.”

“You're telling me.”

She flagged down the bartender aggressively. Marni was born and raised in New York—the Bronx, to be specific. She was forthright and firm, with little understanding of boundaries or personal space.

“So. New apartment?” I asked her.

“Oh, right. I moved to Queens. Little studio on Shore Front. It takes me, like, ten hours to get anywhere, but I like it,” she said. “You guys still in Brooklyn?”

“Same place,” I said. When we chose our tiny apartment, I thought we'd be there a year, max. Somehow the months just passed and we just stayed.

“Em, it's time to move on up in the world and out of that shithole.”

“Yeah,” I said, folding the corners of my napkin distractedly. “So, congrats on the new position. How is it?”

She got her first drink—some kind of dark beer that I thought only men drank—and closed her eyes as she took her first sip.

“Stressful,” she said. “Did I tell you they put me on the Durex account?”

“Condoms?”

She rolled her eyes exaggeratedly. “I mean, what am I going to write about condoms? I brought up the idea of just publishing photos of herpes as a campaign, and that didn't go over well.”

“You don't say.”

“Do they still have you writing about paper towels?”

I nodded. That had become my primary gig at Mathers and James. I'd worked my way up from a proofreading peon to a copywriter. I used the word “absorbent” more times on a daily basis than any one person should. The highlight of the year was when the brand came out with a perforated paper towel “for smaller messes.”

“I don't even know why we're talking about work. That's boring. Tell me about you and your hubby.” She said “hubby” with a tinge of disdain. Marni never wanted to get married, and had trouble hiding her skepticism of the institution. Once, she compared a husband to a mole: “You sort of just learn to live with it because getting it removed is a big hassle.”

“Are you popping out kids soon?” she asked. She hated the idea of children even more than the idea of a husband. “I would strongly advise against it. I can give you free condoms.”

“We don't need those,” I said, “because we hardly ever have sex.”

With Marni, I knew this declaration of accidental celibacy would be shocking. I wanted it to be shocking. I wanted someone to commiserate with me. Before Marni, I never really talked to friends about sex. She had no off-limits topics, a fact that intimidated me at first. I considered her crude, mostly because I was a prude and prone to embarrassment—blushing cheeks and all. But then I got used to her, came to appreciate her frankness. Every woman needs a Marni, someone who says “pussy” and uses “fuck” as an adjective, verb, and noun. She told me she'd use it as an adverb, too, but she wasn't one hundred percent sure what an adverb was, despite making a living as a writer.

“Unless one of you had some kind of genital injury, this is not okay,” she said, speaking a little too loudly for my liking.

“We've been busy,” I said.

“You're freaking twenty-five years old. You can only use the ‘busy' excuse when you're thirty-five or older and have two maniac kids.”

“It's true, though. I'm billing ten-hour days at the agency. Drew's finishing up cooking school…”

“Is he
still
in school?” she said.

“He just has one summer class left and he's done.”

“Finally,” she said. “But that's beside the point. Let's go back to the lack of sex. Is it really that exhausting for him to sauté crap all day?”

It was a thought I'd had myself, on the nights I managed to get home by seven and wanted him with all my twenty-five-year-old gusto. His usual refrain: “I'm beat.”

“It's not just school. He's talking with his friend—this guy, Domingo—about opening a taco shop,” I said, repeating the rationalizations I told myself. “It's stressful for him.”

“Domingo? First of all, what kind of name is that? And second of all, tacos are never, ever stressful. For anyone.”

“It'll be a gourmet taco shop.”

“Oh,
gourmet
. Well, that's stressful,” she said sarcastically.

“It's a big deal—going into a food business. They fail all the time.”

“So do marriages.”

“Oh, Marni, don't be such a cynic.”

“I'm a realistic, Em. A
realist
.”

She drained the rest of her beer and let the bartender know—with hand signals alone—that she wanted another one. I wasn't even halfway done with my vodka tonic. I guided my skinny cocktail straw around and around my glass with the tip of my index finger.

“Anyway,” she said with a disapproving sigh, “what about you? What's next, then?”

“Next?”

“Yeah—what's the plan? I can get you in at my agency, if you want. Could be a pay increase.”

“I don't know, I'm pretty happy as I am,” I said. “Especially with Drew doing this taco shop. I don't want to shake up things too much.”

A guy walked by and hit Marni in the side with his elbow. She glared at him, following him with her eyes all the way across the bar until he went into the restroom. She muttered, “Asshole,” under her breath and turned her attention back to me.

“You know what you are?” she said. Whatever it was couldn't be good, judging by her tone. “Complacent.”

“Maybe,” I said. “Is that so bad?”

“Jesus, you're complacent about being complacent.”

“Mar, my life is different from yours,” I said, remembering why I let months pass between these meet-ups of ours. “I can't be free and crazy like you.”

“I resent the ‘crazy,'” she said.

We turned our attention to our drinks.

Then: “Do you ever think about going back to school?”

“I think I'm past that,” I said.

And I was. It didn't make sense anymore. I was making good money at the agency. It made me nervous to leave, to put pressure on Drew and his tacos.

Marni looked off, above the top row of bottles at the bar, into a distance I didn't know.

“Don't you ever wonder about all the different paths we could take in life? Like, what if I had married Phil?” Phil was one of Marni's many guys who had come and gone. “Or what if you hadn't married Drew?”

“You could make yourself nuts considering all those what-ifs,” I said.

“I'm already nuts, according to you.”

“Then you could make
me
nuts.”

I pulled a twenty out of my purse and set it on the bar.

“I've driven you away already?” she asked, as I stood.

“I have to go. We're having our moms over for dinner tonight.”

Marni laughed a laugh reserved for comedy clubs.

“You don't even like your mother.”

“It was Drew's idea,” I said.

“You really are two old married farts.”

*   *   *

I never minded the commute from Manhattan to Brooklyn. It gave me time to make my daily to-do lists and prepare for the transition from home to work (or vice versa). That's what it felt like—two different worlds, home and work, Manhattan and Brooklyn. Drew offered to meet me for lunch sometimes, in the city. I said I was too busy, I had a client meeting, I was on a deadline. The truth was the hours between eight and six were my own. Creating taglines, preparing for campaign pitches, brainstorming with the art team. Drew didn't know any details of this and I preferred it that way. He saw me leave in the morning—in my pencil skirts and heels—and he saw me come home, tired. We didn't talk about the in-between. When it was just the two of us, we talked about just that—the two of us.

That night, like every weeknight, I caught the R train at Prince Street, got off at Fourteenth/Union Square, and took the L train the rest of the way. My stop was DeKalb. Home was just a short half-mile walk from there, at the corner of Irving and Menahan. Marni could say what she wanted, but I liked our little place. The subway station was close enough to walk to, even in the dead of winter. We had a favorite bakery down the street where the owners knew us by name. Drew was eyeing a storefront for lease on Knickerbocker, just a short walk away. He didn't want a long commute since he'd already be working long hours—at the beginning, at least. His priority was me, he said.

I took the stairs two at a time and unlocked the door to our apartment. We always locked it, even if we just went up the street for takeout. Inside, my mom and Drew's mom were sitting on our new leather couch—one of our proudest purchases as a couple. It wasn't
new
new, but it was new to us. The previous owner said he'd used it for only a year. He was moving in with his girlfriend and she insisted on keeping her own couch. So it goes.

“There she is,” my mom said, the annoyance in her voice making it obvious that I'd kept them waiting. I dropped my purse, kicked off my heels, and hung my keys on a nail on the wall by the door. Bruce gave me his usual evening greeting—a jump that resulted in two clumsy paws on the front of my dress and slobber all over my hands.

I hadn't seen my mom or Drew's mom in months—“just so busy,” I told my mom during our intermittent obligatory calls. In college, before I met Drew, I hardly ever called my mother. He was the one who said, “Come on, Em. You should try harder. Family is family.” Any rebuttals I had—
She never tried very hard
, or
She should call me
—sounded childish. So I tried, begrudgingly.

Drew's mom looked more frail than I remembered, and older, like a woman in her seventies instead of her early fifties. I watched her hands—trying not to stare—and they were trembling uncontrollably. Both of them. It had been just the left one before. It seemed difficult for her to stand from the couch when she hugged me, and even more difficult to sit back down. She held on to my arm—not as a sign of affection, but for balance. I felt the weight of her, little that there was, leaning into me. I gave her a smile, an it's-okay, I-got-you smile, and she tried to reciprocate, but her face didn't seem to cooperate.

Drew was at the stove, donning his chef's hat and apron.

“Whatcha making?” I said, wrapping my arms around him from the back. I always loved how my head fell just on his shoulder, without having to stand on my tiptoes.

“Shrimp scampi,” he said. “I opened a bottle of white. You want some?”

“That's a ridiculous question,” I said, reaching for one of the wineglasses that were permanent fixtures on our kitchen counter. He poured for me, like a fancy waiter, one hand behind his back and all. One of his culinary schoolteachers made his own wine and gave Drew free bottles. This had become our routine every night—gourmet meals and homemade wine. His cooking had really improved. When he first started out, every night felt like an experiment with a strong probability of failure. I'd even have a snack on my last leg of the L Line, worried about going hungry. I hadn't done that in months, though.

“I'll set the table,” I said, referring to the round wood table we'd inherited from his mom. We covered it with a white tablecloth because it still showed evidence of when he'd drawn on it with markers as a kid.

“So Drew was telling us about his taco shop idea,” my mom said, emphasis on the word “idea,” as if it were fantastical, as if it would never be a reality. She had her feet up on our coffee table, wine in her hand. I guessed she was on her second or third glass.

“Pretty exciting, huh?” I said, laying out the silverware. We didn't have cloth napkins, so I just folded paper towels in half.

“Restaurants fail all the time, you know,” my mom said. I hated her for saying that, then remembered I'd said the same thing to Marni.

“I'm sure it'll be successful,” Drew's mom snapped, with as much force in her voice as she could muster. Whatever it was that was making her hands shake and disrupting her balance and disabling her facial expressions was slowly taking her voice, too.

“It's a big venture for a kid,” my mom said.

I looked over to Drew, expecting him to refute her, but he just tended to the scampi, pretending not to hear.

“We're not kids, Mom,” I said.

Drew dished out the scampi into four bowls and brought them to the table, along with a salad.

“Dinner's on,” he said.

“It's just good he's finishing with that school,” my mom said, unwilling to let it go. She never liked the idea of Drew going to cooking school. She thought he should get what she called a “regular job,” like the one I had. She said that was a man's responsibility to his wife. I tried to explain that times were different, that men and women were partners now, but she just shook her head and said, “It's just not right.” I reminded her that she didn't need a man to take care of her. She said, “But I sure as hell wanted one.”