Chapter 6
AFEW HOURS LATER, THE ROLLING HILLS OF SEQUOIA FALLS CAME into view. I could feel my spirits lift; I hadn’t visited this gorgeous place since I’d graduated, which was stupid. There was no law saying I could come up only for reunion weekends. This campus in the middle of farm country in upstate New York was where I’d met the people who meant the most to me, who saw me at my best and worst. I remembered the wooded lakes where my friends and I had gone skinny-dipping on brisk May weekends. The vineyards where I’d tasted my first good Riesling and learned that terroir wasn’t just for wine snobs. The farmers market where I encountered that sourdough bread I still dreamed about.
I wouldn’t be who I was without my time at Coleman—four perfect years talking about books and ideas with the two people who could make me laugh harder than anyone. Geeta, Leigh, and I knew each other from living in the same freshman dorm, but our friendship didn’t expand beyond small talk until our second semester, when we all took the same medieval studies class. Tiny and beautiful, Geeta had been as focused as a ninja. She was quiet in my Thursday afternoon discussion section—taught by a gorgeous and brilliant TA named Tanya whom I was always angling to impress, and whom we still talked about today as if she were a celebrity. Geeta was always ready with the most insightful thing to say when called upon. Leigh, by contrast, was loud and opinionated, always trying to bring something provocative to the table.
Back in the day, I thought I was a pretty cool customer in my white leggings and vintage cowboy boots, smoking clove cigarettes on the side of Baron Hall after class. My friends were even cooler. People gravitated toward us. Mostly, though, we just loved being with each other. The three of us used to borrow 1980s comedy DVDs from the media-center library and hold Friday night film festivals in the thick-carpeted screening rooms while our classmates were congregating at some ridiculous frat party. That scene was never for us. Starting sophomore year, we coordinated our class schedules and, when the weather was good, we ate lunch under an oak tree in the arts quad, surrounded by hippies playing frisbee.
I took the exit off Route 90 and headed down the side roads, past fields of grazing cattle and dilapidated houses. I was feeling something close to happiness, alone with my thoughts and the tray of cherry almond muffins at my side. I couldn’t wait for Geeta to utter her signature compliment upon taking a bite: “This, my love, is transcendent!”
A sense of anticipation came over me as I pulled up in front of 25 Spruce Street, the same address where we had all lived together our senior year. When Geeta had discovered the three-bedroom apartment was now an Airbnb property, she’d pounced on renting it for the reunion. “We can’t not do it!” she’d said in an email to Leigh and me then privately messaged me to say that she’d already put down the deposit. The deal was done.
Steeling myself for the nostalgia trip that awaited me, I parked in front of our former home and made my way up the steps to the porch where we used to put kegs when we threw parties. The door was unlocked, so I let myself in, carefully balancing the tray of muffins in one hand and dragging my luggage with the other.
The apartment had been renovated beyond recognition. The kitchen countertops, once made of cheap Formica in a hideous geometric pattern, were now cream-colored marble. A huge butcher block island not dissimilar from the one in my Pittsburgh apartment replaced the wall that used to divide the kitchen and the living area, opening up the space. Clustered around the island were my friends, dressed up and posed before a stand of ring lights.
I had unwittingly entered a high-fashion photo shoot. Leigh and Geeta were both wearing gowns and jean jackets, their faces caked in foundation. A trio of makeup artists and hairstylists hung back, drinking espresso from paper coffee cups and talking among themselves about their favorite moisturizer. Did any of them even see me? I quietly deposited my baked goods next to the sink in the hopes that maybe someone would at least notice my muffins, then headed back toward the sofa, waving to people and mouthing “Hiiiii” so as not to disrupt whatever it was that they were doing.
“Jenny!” Geeta cried out. “We’re just wrapping up this silly thing!”
“Almost there,” Geeta’s husband, Matt, said as he clicked away on a professional-looking camera. Matt managed some kind of family fund with his brother, but he spent most of his life worming his way into everything his wife was doing. Today he was the royal photographer. Two digital cameras—one massive, one extra massive—hung from his neck. He crouched down to get the perfect shot. In between clicks, Leigh looked my way.
“Hey, girl!” she said. “You made it.”
“I did,” I said, pumping my fist in victory.
“Third time’s the charm, I guess.” She had to twist the knife about my bailing on the last one—and the one before that.
“I was worried that you’d sue me if I didn’t.” I watched the corners of Leigh’s mouth turn up. She looked like a model, with her superhuman bone structure and strawberry blonde waves. She also happened to be close to six feet tall. She was a skyscraper next to Geeta, who was as petite as a reedy schoolboy despite having given birth to twins just months earlier.
“Cute ’fit,” Leigh muttered. I looked up to make sure she was talking to me. Her compliment made more sense when she completed her thought. “Kristen wore one of those to the gym last week.”
I wasn’t going to take the bait and ask which Kristen she was talking about. Stewart? Bell? Scott Thomas? Good to know I was wearing what other people considered to be exercise clothes.
“Jenny, could you actually move over there?” Matt asked. “You’re blocking the light.”
That Geeta married Matt never ceased to astonish me. She could do so much better than this guy. Ever since the birth of the twins, Matt fixated on his daughters’ supposed maladies, taking them for allergy tests as often as most people went to the grocery store. But Geeta never complained about him, or anyone, or anything. She moved through life like a sharp knife through soft butter.
I hung off to the non-light-disrupting side while Leigh’s new girlfriend, a Swedish singer named Inge, introduced herself and offered me a cold seltzer. When I thanked her, she smiled, revealing a gold tooth. Leigh was so committed to living on the vanguard that even her girlfriends doubled as cutting-edge fashion accessories. I told Inge I loved her last single, which was true.
“How do you and Leigh know each other?” Inge asked. I glanced at Leigh, whose dress appeared to be made of paper flowers. It hurt that she hadn’t even bothered to mention me to Inge, a person about whom she was sufficiently serious to bring to our reunion.
“We met here. In college,” I explained to Inge, avoiding using the word “obviously.” “But we don’t really know each other that well—not anymore.” Inge was no longer paying attention as she picked at her cuticles.
Then Geeta’s realride or die, Dasha, the indomitable nanny who had been part of the family since before the birth of the twins, entered the room and settled on the couch with the babies, Luna and Maya. My heart swelled at the sight of my goddaughters—or, as Geeta non-denominationally called them, guide daughters, insofar that I was their designated guide mother. I rushed over and busied myself bouncing them on my knees. I tried to tune out all the chaos around me and take in that glorious fresh baby scent.
Something primal came over me when I held Geeta’s babies in my arms–and then, a sinking feeling. Hal didn’t want kids. And my biological clock was running out of batteries rapidly. Here I was, another girl becoming a lover but not a mother. For all her talk about leveling the gender gap, Alice didn’t feel it was necessary to cover even a portion of egg freezing for her female employees. And I sure couldn’t afford it.
“Is that a wrap?” Geeta said.
“Not yet,” Matt said. “Just a few more.”
“Sorry, Jen. It’s this silly thing for a magazine,” Geeta called out.
“It’s not silly!” Matt shot back. “You’re making change!”
“Which magazine is this for?” I asked.
“Moment,” Geeta said. “They have this thing called the Changemakers List.”
I froze. The same Changemakers package that Alice had been hounding me about.
This year, Alice told me she must be among the chosen Changemakers. She had been overlooked for too long. I didn’t want to be the one to explain to her why she’d never get her wish–she hated “Debbie Downers” and believed in the power of positive thinking–so I’d just made some performative outreach to somebody at the magazine, a shoe-closet assistant named Jade, one of Hal’s friends who had dated for a week. Then I told Alice I was in talks with someone on staff, that things were looking promising for her.
I wandered over to the kitchen sink and refilled my glass, then ripped off the top of a cherry muffin and shoved it into my mouth. I tried not to think about how furious Alice was going to be with me when the Moment piece came out. It was one thing if she wasn’t on the list. It was another if she wasn’t on it and the closest friends of the person who had promised, in a moment of unbridled positivity, to get her on it, were.
“You’re having the best time ever!” Matt shouted. “Nobody is having a better time than the two of you!” My friends fake-laughed and threw their heads back so hard I feared for their necks. When Matt was done scurrying around them and snapping pictures, their faces went back to their natural—and even more beautiful—states.
“So you both got on the Changemakers List?” I said in as gentle a tone as I could manage. “That’s a pretty sweet coincidence.”
“I know,” said Leigh. “It was cute the way they notified us at the same time, on a conference call, because they knew we were best friends and wanted us to be featured together—a celebration of women lifting each other up.” Leigh tapped Geeta on the nose. “Boop!” Leigh cooed.
I tried to smile, the words “best friends” echoing in my head. Geeta looked at the floor. She always could tell when I was uncomfortable.
“I love this for you,” I managed, tiptoeing a little closer to the two of them. Maybe some self-deprecation would save the day. “You’re both having your Moment moment, while I’m in Pittsburgh, hearing that I didn’t get the Memo.”
Leigh and Geeta’s arms were still wrapped around each other from the last pose. They looked like they’d been stun-gunned while performing an avant-garde dance routine.
“What did you say?” Leigh asked, her aquamarine eyes widening as she disentangled from her fellow Changemaker.
“Forget it.” I shrugged. I didn’t want to make this about me.
“No, really. What did you say? You didn’t get what?” There was something fishy about Leigh’s tone.
“What? Do you happen to be familiar with these mystery texts? About how I never got the Memo? Was it you?”
Geeta and Leigh’s eyes met but neither of them said anything.
“So that’s it.” I was genuinely shocked. “Very funny, guys. Thanks for that. I really needed a reminder.”
“No, it wasn’t,” Geeta said. “But... those texts. Could you show them to us?”
“Forget it, never mind,” I said, regretting having brought it up. I believed Geeta, and wanted to talk about anything else. “They deleted themselves. Who knows? Maybe I imagined the whole thing.”
I didn’t want to drag out this embarrassing episode. I was here to have fun with my friends, not shine a spotlight on the differences between us. They were the ones who got the Memo. I was the one who didn’t. It was plain as day. I didn’t need a text message to prove it.
“That is some freaky shit,” Matt said, which reminded me that he was there. “Do you think they’re coming from Russia? I heard they do that.”
“Who are they?” I asked. “The KGB?”
“The FSB. I hope you didn’t click on anything,” he said.
I stared at Matt, wondering what Geeta saw in this conspiracy theorist. There must have been something I was missing, some hidden quality that made Matt worth keeping around all these years. Geeta was usually so smart about other people. She saw things the rest of us missed. While I was shocked when Leigh came out to us our sophomore year, Geeta didn’t even blink. She’d known all along, but kept her inklings to herself out of respect for Leigh. That was nothing compared to the time the following year when Geeta had magically sensed something was wrong at the precise moment a drunk upperclassman had wandered into my dorm room and proceeded to rip off his rugby shirt and chant like an ogre. I had been certain he was about to kill me when Geeta appeared and managed to subdue him with a self-defense technique, then dragged his ass to the campus security outpost.
“I think we got the shots,” Matt said as the makeup artists and stylists pulled together their equipment. One of them grabbed a couple of my muffins on her way out.
Geeta clapped her hands loudly. “Thanks, everybody. I’m going to go wash my face. I can feel my pores clogging with all this makeup.” The next thing I knew, Leigh had vanished too.
I ducked into my old bedroom. It had changed less than the rest of the apartment. The bed was still against the back wall. The late afternoon sun filtered through what appeared to me to be the same curtains, with the same gray stains by the bottom, from fifteen years ago. The entire house had been improved except for the area that I had occupied. Imagine that. I sat on the bed and felt the lifeless air begin to settle on me. I needed to get outside.
“Guys,” I called out, coming out of the bedroom, “I think I’m going to take a little walk.”
Geeta’s door opened. I could see she was now in deep multitasking mode, nursing a baby while wearing a sheet face mask, a book in the crook of her arm. The words “Win While You Sleep” ran across the back cover. Geeta used to gobble up nineteenth-century Spanish literature, but I guessed that pursuit no longer helped her maximize her waking–and sleeping–hours.
“Don’t judge me,” she said as if reading my thoughts. “Everyone in the industry keeps bringing it up and I need to do my homework. It’s by this big-deal thought leader.” She rolled her eyes. I shrugged and headed toward the door. “But Jen, hold up!” she called out. “Where are you going?”
“Just a quick stroll around the old neighborhood.”
“The welcome dinner’s barely in an hour,” she said.
Her baby’s leg wiggled adorably. I turned around and planted a kiss on the sole of her foot. “I’ll be back before you know it. Promise.” Then I kissed Geeta’s cheek.