Chapter 16 #4
Another possibility for the evening existed.
I could remain behind with Eleanor while Margaret went with the other group, and we could reconvene later.
This solution had obviously occurred to Margaret.
I could tell—I saw her smile over at the other girls, still standing by the tractor, waiting for her answer—and I was offended by it.
If we separated, there was no guarantee we’d find Margaret again.
She’d return to us only when the fun of the other group ran out.
We were supposed to be hanging out the three of us.
On the other hand, Eleanor and I could be alone together for hours.
I think this occurred to Eleanor too, because when I looked over to gauge her reaction, she was rapidly typing on her phone.
Margaret proceeded without my encouragement.
“Unless you guys want to hang here?” she said, raising her voice up into a question. “And I could meet you in like an hour or two, whenever everyone starts to show up again.” Margaret, I thought, wanted to investigate what it would be like to have friends who weren’t us.
“Actually,” Eleanor announced, “I’m leaving. I have a ride.” Apparently her mom was still in the area.
“Wait, are you sure?” I asked, confused and bereft. What was she doing?
“Yeah, are you sure?” Margaret echoed in a way that made my question sound hollow because hers was. I couldn’t decide if Margaret was more relieved to get rid of an impediment to her plans or annoyed because without Eleanor she couldn’t also leave me. I wanted to whack her in the head.
“I’ll come with you,” I said to Eleanor.
“Do you want me to come with you?” She declined.
I asked again, in case the no was perfunctory.
“I can come with you.” Surely after all we’d just said, she’d rather hang out with me than leave me with Margaret.
But in fact, after all we’d just said, she wanted to be alone.
She’d engaged her solitude protocol and wanted to get away as fast as possible.
“No,” she said. “I want to go back.” She hugged me goodbye with a great deal of air between our bodies and then walked off into the crowd without turning around for one last wave. I waited, in case, but after a minute she disappeared from view, and a heavy, empty feeling spread through my stomach.
“She always does this,” Margaret said, as though neither of us had had anything to do with her leaving.
I didn’t want to walk a mile in the heat to reach a cheeseburger I could have bought fifteen feet from where I was standing.
Yes, I felt bad for having indicated I’d be willing to follow Eleanor into leaving Margaret, but on the other hand, Margaret had at the time been in the middle of indicating that she wanted to leave me and Eleanor both.
Margaret and I knew we could be mad at each other for these offenses, or we could allow them to cancel each other out in favor of preserving the possibility of a good time.
I’d hardly been eligible for a good time all summer, and Margaret prided herself on her resilience of spirit with respect to socializing, so we walked twenty-five minutes down the sidewalk of a multi-lane commercial boulevard fed by highway exits, dripping with sweat, to arrive and find that the girls hadn’t come. We had to start laughing.
“If El were here,” I said as I got into line, “she would have bought a large cup of soda and then thrown it at us.”
Margaret bent over and put her hands on her knees theatrically to catch her breath. “She would have cut off all my fingers and toes.”
The vibe in the restaurant was almost hilariously grim, most of the tables empty, their chairs askew, a giant line of cars around the building waiting for the drive-through because none of the drivers wanted to come inside.
We had no reason to be there and none to ever come back again.
Other locations of the same chain existed closer to home, making the dinner a strange and unique event.
Most places in our lives we went to either routinely or on vacation.
To be somewhere we’d brought ourselves, not driven by our parents, a place both unknown and unremarkable, highlighted the arbitrariness of our life’s container, which made us laugh even more.
“This is like the world’s most random place we could be right now,” I said.
We looked at each other and shook our heads.
We ate our food in a booth. Margaret took off all her rings before she touched her fries.
Our phones lit up simultaneously. Eleanor had tagged us in a photo from the animal pavilion.
She’d taken the picture without telling us.
In the left foreground, her face in profile.
In the right background, myself and Margaret with our backs to the camera, leaning over a wooden fence, my butt cheeks slightly visible beneath my shorts and Margaret’s new hair down her back in smooth waves.
Beyond the fence, I knew, were some cute pigs. The caption read: incognito mode.
“Holy shit, she loves to be inscrutable,” I said.
“Loves it,” Margaret said. “I mean, she’s good at it. Her pictures never look like anyone else’s.”
“She knows at least one of us will post something normal, so she doesn’t have to. I’m going to post a picture of your nostrils instead.”
Margaret laughed. “Please do,” she said. “Please do because then that’s what we’ll be. One of El’s inexplicably sexual candid photographs for the internet and a picture of my nostrils.”
The memory of Eleanor’s very explicably sexual posed photograph for me flashed like a lightbulb in my brain and then faded to black just as quickly, the image too corrosive to my social normality to linger.
“That is who we are.” I grinned, one third of a cheeseburger stuffed in my cheek. “Just those two things.”
Margaret finished her fries and wiped her fingers one by one on a brown paper napkin before putting back on her rings.
All her rings, necklaces, and most of her bracelets were delicate metal.
Thin chains and fine charms that she copiously layered.
She had one real gold necklace, a gift from her parents when they told her they were separating, with a small butterfly pendant, which she wore every day.
All the other pieces had to be cycled in and out as their metal coating wore away, sometimes staining her skin.
“You know, El also left like this when we went to Olivia’s,” Margaret said as she removed the ring that she’d slid onto her right ring finger to try it on the other hand. “She didn’t sleep over.”
I wondered if Margaret knew Eleanor was mad at her. Eleanor leaving a function on her own inconvenient schedule was normal enough, but the questions she’d asked me hadn’t been.
“Did she say why?”
Margaret considered the question. “No. She said she wanted to sleep at home. I had to make up a family emergency to explain why she suddenly bounced. Like, she’s not their friend. She’s my friend who I brought with me to Olivia’s house.”
Eleanor leaving would have been less significant if I’d been there, but I hadn’t.
I repositioned myself at the table, sat with my back against the inner corner of the booth and my legs sprawled over the cushion.
Knowing Margaret had been thrust into a weird social situation as a result of my absence improved my mood.
Knowing something about Eleanor that Margaret apparently didn’t made me downright cheerful.
I’d been the one to know the least for weeks.
“Were they bothered?”
“Not really.”
“But they could have been.”
“They definitely could have been.”
I remembered to text my mom confirmation of my continued well-being.
“Do you think El’s mad I didn’t leave with her tonight?” I asked.
“I mean, she can’t be.”
This stung a little. I wanted Eleanor to demand I leave places when she left and feel sad if I didn’t.
On the other hand, Margaret’s expression had opened in response to the question.
She rearranged her jewelry in the way that meant she was present.
The confederacy I’d felt with Eleanor talking about Margaret, I now felt with Margaret talking about Eleanor.
The confederacy was the same and not the same.
In both cases, talking about the girl who wasn’t there seemed like the only way of saying something true.
“Are you mad I offered? I didn’t want to like abandon you, but she seemed—”
“I know. It’s okay. Obviously, she wasn’t going to say yes when you offered anyway.”
“I don’t like being between the two of you,” I said.
“I don’t like being between the two of you either,” she said.
A child in line for food wailed briefly about the absence of a blanket.
“Is El ever between the two of us?” I asked.
By which I meant, had she been between us in the time since she’d kissed me, the time of the loneliest summer in my short and urgent teenaged memory, the only summer I’d not spent almost every day of which with Margaret?
Had Eleanor been between us while Margaret spent those weeks with people she had historically liked less than me but that I now worried she liked more, even if she still loved me, even if I believed our love was written in too permanent a marker to be so easily wiped away?
Margaret studied me. I felt like I hadn’t had her full attention in years.
I felt like she hadn’t looked me all the way in the eye since June, which was strange.
It seemed especially strange now that we were talking like this.
Having a conversation we’d never had before still felt more normal than the way we’d been acting, because it was revelatory, and we were usually always revealing things to each other.
“She must be sometimes, if the three of us are really equals to each other,” Margaret answered.
I wondered if we were equals and what even was the nature of the measure.
After dinner, queasy from meat and shriveled by air-conditioning, we retreated to the bathroom to fix ourselves.
A damp chemical aroma clung to the room, which was windowless and wet.
It had been recently serviced. Large gray squares tiled the floor, and brown sheets of metal enclosed the few stalls.
Our faces confronted us in the twin mirrors above the two sink basins.
We appeared melted. Our skin shone through our makeup.
Our hair, curled and matted from the heat, stuck to our temples and fuzzed from our foreheads.
We stood for a moment disoriented by the work of retroactively pasting the faces we saw in the mirrors onto the way we’d thought we looked in our memories of the immediate past. We’d chosen all our gestures and actions in part because of how we imagined ourselves to look while performing them. We’d imagined wrong.
“Well,” I said, “alright,” extending one hand out in front of me, as though holding off unwelcome input.
Margaret caught my eye through the mirror, and we started cackling.
This was exactly why I tried not to check photos as I took or had them taken of me.
I tried to wait until the night was over in case my face was going to hurt my feelings.
“Okay, but the lighting in here is terrible,” she said. “And we just walked a mile. We didn’t actually look like this all day.”
“What happens when we walk the mile back?” I asked.
“Nothing,” Margaret answered. “We become more beautiful.”
I giggled, giddy, because we were becoming silly and defiant for each other, the way she always made me. “Right,” I said. Then, “The new hair is perfect, though,” because it still was, sweaty or not.
Margaret thanked me and started playing exuberantly feminine pop music on her phone.
I used a stiff sheaf of ripped brown paper towel to wipe down the bathroom’s laminate countertop.
We emptied the cosmetic contents of our tiny backpacks onto its surface between the sinks.
We washed and dried our faces and armpits, reapplied our makeup, and attempted to desiccate our sweaty scalps by standing beneath the hot, stale-smelling air of the hand dryer affixed to the bathroom wall.
After fifteen minutes of peaceful working, a woman entered wearing pink-and-silver running shoes and a pronged headband.
She looked at us as though we were monsters.
Margaret turned off our music as a concession, but the result was that the three of us all had to listen to her pee.
We moved out of the way while she washed up, a gesture that failed to compensate for us having taken up more than our share of public space.
She tried to use soap, but the dispenser had run out.
She wrung her wet hands, flinging drops of water onto me and Margaret, then wiped them on her jeans rather than using the hand dryer.
She did so with a displeasure pointed in our direction, as though we’d left her with no other option than such base compromises.
“Have a wonderful evening!” Margaret called at the last second, when the woman had already passed almost entirely through the bathroom door, so she had no opportunity to react.
“Lol!” I said.
“L-O-fucking-L,” Margaret echoed.