I tried to walk into the bathroom quietly, but I tripped over one of my shoes and steadied myself with a loud thunk. Diane didn’t budge.
I pushed the bathroom door closed behind me. It clicked softly, but I figured if my stumbling around didn’t wake Diane up, that wouldn’t either.
There was a red stripe down my cheek from the piping on the couch seam. My mascara had shifted and soaked into the creases under my eyes. I’d never finished taking my bridesmaid updo down, and there were half a million bobby pins sticking out of my head. I tried to pull one out, but it was hopelessly stuck. My hair had been sprayed and teased into the consistency of a Brillo pad.
I was still in my orange dress. I’d unzipped the back after my second drink. My strapless bra had slipped down almost to my waist. I unhooked it and pulled it out of my dress.
I used to be able to pass out drunk on a couch and wake up looking vampy and metropolitan. Somewhere around twenty-three it became necessary to wash and tone and moisturize so I didn’t look like a freak show when I woke up.
When Janie and I slept at the Castle, she fell asleep without even washing her face, and woke up looking like an angel and smelling like a flower garden. Her dark hair wasn’t knotted or tangled; it rippled in soft waves, and the tiny smudges of mascara under her eyes looked like they’d been drawn by a makeup artist.
It didn’t seem real that Peter had been stumbling around the living room the night before. Diane hadn’t said anything more about it. I waited all night, steeling myself for a big argument. She kept hinting that one was coming-tiny land mines she would set up but not detonate. And she would give me knowing looks between gulps of bourbon, while she chattered on and on about Janie and Peter touring through Europe for the next two weeks on their honeymoon. Diane had apparently played travel agent, planning every last detail down to restaurant reservations.
“And when they’re in the Loire Valley, I set them up in the best room at the Château de Coligny in the rue Condé,” she said, hitting the accents too hard, like a French whore in a bad movie. “That should put them in honeymoon mode for a very long time. They won’t have to lift a finger”- she took another gulp of her drink- “or get out of bed.” She snorted and stared at me, cold and hard, over her glass.
I ran the water in the sink; it got hot much quicker than it did in my condo. I washed my face with one of the fluffy washcloths and the milled French soap from the soap dish. It was Diane’s brand, not ours. It smelled like lemongrass. She’d always hated the smell of our pink Dove soap. It was funny the way she’d kept some things exactly the same but changed others. It was an inexact replica. Everything was just a little off. I dried my face on the hand towel. I used it to wipe under my eyes, leaving moon-shaped black streaks on the bright white towel. I slathered on some of my mom’s Oil of Olay from the toiletry basket.
Diane hadn’t always lived to push my buttons. We used to be friends, partners in crime, but now, since my mom died, we didn’t know how to act around each other.
When we were younger, Janie didn’t care about clothes or shoes or fancy restaurants, so Diane would take me with her to buy dresses for all of the fund-raising galas she had to go to. She hated going to galas, but events like those were par for the course. The Driscolls were a dusty old family with dusty old money. It was railroad money, originally, but the bulk of the business Charles Driscoll did involved using Driscoll money to make money. He took a car into the city every morning and came home to retreat to his study, where he yelled into the phone about things like futures, crude oil, and lean hogs. When he was done yelling about work, he yelled at Diane about how he didn’t like the way the hedges had been trimmed, and the new shirts she bought him were scratchy, and he wanted meat for dinner instead of that goddamned spa food the cook made.
As a Driscoll wife, Diane had to go to every fund-raiser for every cause under the sun, and at those events, it was important for her to dress appropriately and make appropriate small talk with people she found supremely boring. She dreaded every event, and couldn’t wait to come home, collapse on our sofa, and give us the dirt on Claudia Von Hoeffing’s eye work and how Richard Wertlinger was getting handsy with a cocktail waitress in the coat closet. But as much as Diane hated going to galas, she loved buying dresses for them. She’d sign me out of school and we’d spend the day hopping from Neiman Marcus to little boutiques. We’d wrap up the day with massages and facials.
We never told my mom or Janie. We never talked about not telling them, but it was understood. One of the first times we went, my mom pulled into the driveway at the same time we did. Diane told my mom I was sick and the school called her to come pick me up after they couldn’t get through at the carriage house.
My mom smoothed my hair and looked concerned.
Diane said, “I have some tea that will make her feel better. Van, you go get yourself in bed, missy.” She pouted at my mom like she felt bad for me. “Come on, Nat. I’ll get it for you.” As they walked away, she looked over her shoulder and winked at me.
I ran up to the carriage house and pulled the tape out of the cassette in our answering machine so it looked like it had broken.
But then there was the secret Diane kept from me. For almost a year she didn’t tell me. And neither did my mom. And when they finally told me, and I came home from college to be there, my mother was small and frail and bald under her red designer knit cap.
I walked into the carriage house and they were both in my mom’s bedroom. They didn’t hear me, and I watched in horror as my mom and Diane had a serious discussion over the fabric swatches for her casket.
“Satin is too flashy, Diane,” my mom said. “It’s not me.” She held up a rectangle of gray wool.
Diane made a face like she’d just sucked a lemon and shook her head. She grabbed for another swatch and held it up, smiling.
“It’s classic, Nat,” she said, “and the dark pink is just so- ” and then she saw me and stopped like she was caught in the headlights.
They had their own language about it. They had their own routines. Diane knew all the names of all the pills in the orange bottles that lined the bathroom counter. She could identify them by color and shape and she knew the dosage by heart. And until I saw them picking out options on the casket like it was a new car, all I had heard were phrases like
lump removed
and
routine procedure
. And I’d believed my mother when she’d said, “Everything will be fine, sweetie.”
The funeral was awful. Diane talked my mother into every lavish accommodation Driscoll money could buy. It was their pet project. They’d planned every detail from the moment they heard the word
terminal
. And it all upset me- from the ornate urns of yellow roses to the gray raw silk cover on the guest book at the funeral parlor (to match the casket fabric they finally agreed on) to the fact that they acted like it was normal to plan your own funeral. The details made me feel so far away- like I didn’t know either of them. And I wasn’t sure if it was the distance from my mother or the distance from Diane that bothered me more, but Diane was the only one around to take the heat for it.
I screamed at her. I cried. I called her every version of every name for the Devil I could think of. I threw things. And then I drove back up to Rochester and stopped answering the phone.
Janie told me that Diane went to my college graduation, and sat in the stands with a huge bouquet of flowers, looking for me in the sea of black robes. I spent that weekend in Ithaca at the Holiday Inn watching bad movies on the free cable. And after that, when Diane came to visit Janie, I was always out of town. It was easier to avoid Diane than it was to see her, because no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t forgive her for not telling me how sick my mom really was. I would have dropped out of college. I would have taken care of my mother. I would have known which pill was for what, and I would have held her hand through chemo and brought her Popsicles and made her laugh. I could have had a few more memories of my mom, and I would have held on to every single one as tightly as I could.
For a while, Diane kept trying. She called every Sunday. She left overly chirpy messages on my answering machine, saying things like, “I hope you had a great week,” even though it had been months since we talked. She sent me the kind of “Thinking of You” cards old ladies send each other in Hallmark commercials. She even had flowers delivered on the first anniversary of my mother’s death. I ignored all of it, and eventually, the phone messages became holiday-only events, and her voice sounded more clipped than chirpy. I got a card on my birthday, and another one at Christmas. The anniversary of my mother’s death came and went several times over without any fanfare.
Throughout the wedding events, I kept my distance as much as I could. I had a fake smile I wore just for Diane, and until she’d invited me back to the carriage house, she’d acted cool and polite, like I was just another one of Janie’s college friends, like we had no real history.
I slipped off my dress, dropped it in a big orange puddle on the floor, and sat on the side of the tub. I plugged the drain, turned the faucet on, and squirted a generous helping of lilac-scented bubble bath into the stream of water. I left the water to run while I peeled off my black panty hose. The mean red mark they left around my waist made it look like I’d slept with a tourniquet binding me.
Diane knocked on the door and opened it at the same time.
“I have to pee like a demon, Van.” She did a nervous jig into the bathroom, lifted up the toilet lid, scooched up her dress, and sat down. “Hope you don’t mind,” she said, smiling at me. “God, Van, I would kill for your boobs. I didn’t know nature made them that way.”
I felt so self-conscious. Diane took me to buy my first push-up bra, peeking over the door while I modeled each one, but I knew her then.
“When you go to get yours replaced, I’ll give you a picture,” I said, and then felt awful immediately. We used to have the sarcastic banter thing down. We said things like that to each other all the time and it was funny, but now, it just came out mean. I didn’t want it to be, but I didn’t know how to stop it. Maybe Diane felt the same way. I wondered if there was some way to suck the venom out. I ran my hand under the faucet to make sure the water was okay.
Diane flushed, but didn’t leave. She closed the toilet lid and sat back down. I turned away from her and slipped my underwear off quickly.
“Nice underwear, Vannie. Were you thinking someone might see them?” Her voice was supersmooth.
“Aw, Diane, thanks for noticing,” I said, trying to make my voice equally smooth. I stepped into the tub and pulled the shower curtain closed.
The backside of the shower curtain, blurred by the clear plastic liner, was familiar and safe. My mom and I bought it at a closeout sale. It was hideous and comforting at the same time. Fat purple fish blowing orange bubbles swam along in a green sea. The fish had eyelashes and bright pink lips like they were wearing lipstick.
I sat down and pushed my feet up against the end of the tub so I wouldn’t slip down too far.
“Good,” Diane said. “Now we can talk.”
“Crap, Diane. I don’t want to talk. I’ve got to take a bath and get my ass in the car. I have to work tomorrow.”
“Well then, you clean, I’ll talk.” Her voice was suddenly stern. She peeked her head around the side of the shower curtain. “Multitasking, Savannah.”
I snapped the curtain closed, scooped up a handful of bubbles, and clapped my hands together. A clump of foam landed on my nose. It was hard to focus on and harder to look past.
“You’ve lived in Rochester for a long time now, huh?” Diane tapped the tips of her fake fingernails against the marble.
I strained my eyes to watch the tiny bubbles popping on my nose.
“So?” I wiped the rest of the foam away.
“I just never saw you as an upstate person. I thought you’d be somewhere more exciting-living in London or Paris. At least getting a loft in SoHo. Not Rochester.”
“Diane- ”
“What are you staying for, anyway? I mean, you don’t have to stay. It’s not like you have family up there. Peter and Janie-they have Peter’s family. Peter has his dad’s firm. They have a reason to be up there. You don’t.”
“I have my job, and it’s not like I have family here either.”
“It’s not like you have a real job,” Diane snapped. She didn’t understand what I did at all. Working from home and wearing sweats instead of suits took all the legitimacy out of it for her. When Janie told her I started freelancing as a grant writer, Diane left me a twenty- minute message about the merits of getting a good, solid office job with good, solid benefits. Hysterical, really, since she’d never done it. She met Charles when she waited tables at the Larchmont Yacht Club, the summer between her sophomore and junior years at Manhattanville. She got pregnant with Janie halfway through her junior year and quit school. They got married, despite the protests from Charles’s parents, and Diane never worked another day.
“I do too have a real job,” I said, feeling like a child, tempted to add
you big meanie
.
“You don’t have an office.”
“I have clients. I have connections in Rochester, Diane. I’m established.”
Diane’s nails stopped clicking. “But you’ve got to be
lonely
.” She lingered on the word
lonely
, drawing it out like a song lyric. “I mean, you don’t really know anyone up there anymore, do you? Everyone from school must have left by now.” The clicking started again. “Janie and Pete will be busy with the house and all. Babies. Married people don’t keep single friends around, Van. You just won’t have anything in common, and I know you don’t want to be a third wheel.”
I flipped the bird in her direction, shielded by the shower curtain. I pedaled my feet, making small waves that hit the walls of the tub.