Chapter 20 #3
We ate dinner at the big tables set up in the backyard.
The long light of summer hung on past eight, an open-ended dark blue against which the flames from the tiki torches trembled pale gold.
Large white ceramic bowls of food with heavy wooden serving utensils were handed up and down the tables, eventually reaching me and Eleanor, seated all the way at the farthest end from her parents.
The adults became drunk and exuberant, bordering on inappropriate.
This kind of behavior from members of my parents’ generation was unfamiliar to me, and I watched their revelry as a revelation.
My own family was like an island, adrift and apart from other people.
My parents’ friends all lived in other states.
They talked to our extended family over the phone and at holidays.
I still thought the whole grown world, or at least most of it, was as serious and indomitable as my mother.
No wonder El had such confidence, having seen for herself already that adults could be fools.
All through dinner we spoke to each other privately, with our chairs scooted very closely together, so that if our neighbors attempted to converse with us, they had to do so across obvious physical distance.
I didn’t feel bad for being rude, because Eleanor and I weren’t really attending this party.
We were an addendum, alone with each other but not alone at all, safe in our intimacy because of its limits.
What a strange time of life—to be for the first time included in a larger social infrastructure but not yet subject to its rules or burdened by your own personal embodiment of its hypocrisy.
The catering staff carried out dessert, lemon tarts overladen with berries. Eleanor’s father stood up at the end of the table and raised his glass, thanking everyone for coming to celebrate and thanking his wife for staying married to him all this time. The guests laughed.
“Our children are our joy,” he said. The guests looked to us and applauded.
One of them stood up to thank the hosts and offer congratulations.
The gaze of the party withdrew. While he spoke, his voice loud enough to carry down the long tables, Eleanor wedged her hand, palm up, beneath my thigh.
He kept talking. She pushed further, steadily inward, until her fingertips met the hot space between my legs.
My eyes went hard as gems and my mouth fell open.
She raised and lowered each finger one at a time, pressing my underwear into my flesh.
Then she did it again. I looked at Eleanor, half mesmerized, half in disbelief, but she continued to face forward, toward the man still speaking at the other end of the table, not a line in her pixie face.
She pushed harder on the keys of the instrument.
I prevented myself from producing the notes of her song.
When everyone raised their glasses, she withdrew her hand from beneath me and used her other to raise her own cup, to clink it calmly with her neighbor’s.
Then she turned and touched her glass to mine, which still sat on the table, dripping with condensation.
—
Dinner continued with my body at an exclamation point.
Again, Eleanor had identified a manner of advancing our relationship that allowed for no acknowledgment, bracketed as we were by the people sitting on either side of us and other social obligations, like the rest of dessert, which lasted long enough for me not to know how to bring us back to what she’d done.
We spoke to our neighbors at the table. We ate our lemon tart.
The party mostly ended by eleven. Eleanor and I traipsed in and out of the house, disassembling its components.
Eleanor’s father carried the final folding chair back down to the basement and excused himself to bed.
Kim found one last guest lingering in the front hall.
The woman, whom Kim called Nayan, explained she had to wait for the arrival of an unexpectedly distant rideshare, the nearest car still eighteen minutes away.
“I never remember to hit the request far enough ahead of time when I’m out here,” Nayan said.
Kim waived off even the start of an apology. “Come keep us company in the kitchen while we do the dishes.”
The plates, utensils, and glasses had all been rented, but the wooden and ceramic serving dishes, the elongated tongs, and stylish serving spoons all belonged to the house and had to be washed, dried, and returned to their shelves.
I did the returning because I could reach all the high cabinets without a stepladder, Eleanor instructing me where each dish belonged.
Nayan took a seat at the raised kitchen island.
She had long black hair oiled into a smooth wave and wore an incredibly chic olive-green column sheath that dragged on the ground a little bit when she walked.
Her earrings were large gold shells. Of course Eleanor’s mom’s friends had good outfits.
Kim introduced me as “Mina, Eleanor’s best friend,” and Nayan as “my friend and orthopedic surgeon. She fixed my broken hand fifteen years ago, and then we started having lunch.”
“I was going through a difficult breakup at the time,” Nayan explained.
“And I had a broken hand, four teenagers, and a newborn baby,” Kim went on. “She brought the lunch to our house.”
Eleanor, who was drying a large ovular salad bowl, gave me a look that meant I was supposed to understand something about the situation that I didn’t. They were telling their friend story to me, which wasn’t something I’d received from adult women before, really.
Nayan offered to help with the dishes.
“When we’ve made it this far into the evening without breaking anything?
Absolutely not,” Kim replied. “Why trust a surgeon with my plates when I have two fifteen-year-old girls?” And then, noticing me and Eleanor standing the same way, both of us with our weight in one leg, hip out, she went on, “I remember when my friends and I all had the same mannerisms.” Kim’s teenage friendships had probably been much more similar to mine than my own mother’s.
“Good Lord,” Eleanor said, lifting up a giant wooden fork used to distribute salad. “Not a memory.” Kim laughed. Eleanor continued, “Not my life, which I’ve lived this far only to prompt you to reminisce about your eight hundred friends and children.”
Kim put a hand to her face, and Nayan began laughing too.
“How many lives have you lived through?” Nayan asked.
“Enough to find them all funny,” Kim answered, her hands in the sink.
Nayan checked her phone for her ride’s progress, and I felt a pang in my chest that she would be leaving.
She was one of Kim’s best friends—I could tell—but adults didn’t have sleepovers.
They didn’t spend the night in their friends’ beds and then wake up in the morning and eat cereal together.
Instead, they went home. They saw each other once a month and made reports about their lives instead of living them together.
Eleanor sliced a handful of soap bubbles from the surface of the dishwater. She didn’t throw the foam. That would have made a mess. Instead, she carefully placed the bubbles on top of her mother’s head.
“Mmm,” her mother said. “Thank you.” And then she gently danced, so the foam tipped and jiggled but never fell. We all started giggling. When Nayan’s ride arrived, Kim walked her to the door and kissed her on the cheek.
“You’re a wonderful last person to have at a party. Overstay your welcome anytime,” I heard her say. “And tell your wife we’re sorry she was on call tonight and would love to see her soon.”
However Nayan responded, I couldn’t hear. She was the first woman with a wife I’d ever knowingly met. They were both doctors. I’d only met her for eighteen minutes, and I didn’t say anything important or ask any questions. I didn’t even get to see her wife.
—
Upstairs, Eleanor and I prepared for bed without speaking.
We washed our faces in her bathroom. The water she splashed on herself flecked my exposed neck and shoulder.
I didn’t remove my eye makeup. I felt like I still might require mascara.
We got into her queen-sized bed and turned off the lights.
Warmth emanated from Eleanor, the two of us lying back-to-back beneath a single sheet and her big cream quilt, the way we always did when we had sleepovers without Margaret. Eleanor knew Nayan had a wife.
I knew Eleanor and I wouldn’t touch each other in her bed.
Many times in the course of our friendship we had played video games at her desk until late at night and then slept like this.
Eleanor bought and half-played games with abandon, whereas I wanted to finish every game I started.
Sleeping in a bed together was sacred. We couldn’t ruin it.
We couldn’t yet allow whatever was new between us to touch what already existed.
It had to live where our friendship didn’t, lest we lose the closeness we already had.
Once we kissed in her bed, would we ever be able to sleep in it as friends again?
I couldn’t sleep at all. I felt too aware of the bedsheets on my bare legs.
I lay there for half an hour or more. I started thinking about Eleanor and Margaret kissing.
I thought about Margaret’s tongue in Eleanor’s mouth.
I thought about the face Eleanor made after she kissed me and wondered if now Margaret had seen it too.
A team of jealous horses frolicked and stomped on my heart.
The worst part of Margaret and Eleanor kissing was that it aroused me.
I didn’t want them to have kissed each other in real life, but once they started kissing in my brain, I found it difficult to get them to stop.
I wedged one hand high between my thighs to try to quiet my pulse there but then could think only of when the hand had been Eleanor’s.
“Bea told me about Margaret,” I finally said into the dark.
A long pause. “Don’t say it doesn’t matter because it was a dare,” Eleanor said. Her voice didn’t sound tired at all.
“I wasn’t going to.”
“Margaret doesn’t appreciate—” She cut off. “You weren’t there to kiss her instead of me. I didn’t want to leave her alone in the moment.”
“I know,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
I waited for an answer, but she gave none. She nestled further into the blanket. One of her feet brushed the back of my leg. I closed my eyes in the dark and waited to stop thinking.
In the morning, I packed my bag and was retrieved by my mother.
I left the photo of Eleanor in a drawer in her bathroom with her face wash.
I felt she’d given it to me on loan. I wanted her to know she could trust me to give her back to herself.
Beneath the picture, I left her a note, handwritten on a sheet of the monogrammed stationery stacked on her desk.
I’ve never seen anything better in my life
hyperbole isn’t good enough for you