Chapter Seventeen #2
She doesn’t say this to Arthur, though she knows she could.
He would listen and say something wise, tell her that she deserves to enjoy it and life isn’t meant to be a list of milestones.
He would say that what she’s doing now is just as worthy of being enjoyed as finding another job, a better apartment, a boyfriend.
Aubrey looks at him again. “A bit weird,” she says finally. “But we’re heading home together, and then it’ll be like usual, ganging up on the rest of my family to get through the holidays.”
“You think it’ll be like that again this year?”
“Nothing’s changed.”
He shrugs very loosely, as if tired of the movement. “I don’t know, maybe they’ve changed.”
“I’d like to see that.”
Truth is, she wouldn’t mind so much if they haven’t changed.
She’d prefer if she changed. Maybe if she finally found someone.
Maybe if she cared less. It’s so blurry which to strive for, as if she keeps splintering further into uncertainty, no matter how decisive she tries to be.
She hopes, in the confines of herself, that both can coexist.
Florence comes up to them then. She’s smiling wide and holding out a flute to Arthur. “God, you clean up nice! Happy holidays, blondie.”
They share a one-armed hug, through which Arthur replies, “Same to you, happy holidays. Nice evening you’ve put together.”
“You’re lying, you’ve been here three minutes.” Florence nudges his side, urging him forward. “Go, frolic!”
As Arthur greets everyone, Florence stands by Aubrey’s side. “He’s glad you’re here.”
“Mm. Is he?”
“So have you noticed the humongous crush you’ve got on him yet, or do we have to keep pretending still?”
Aubrey can’t really decide whether the question comes as a surprise or not. She smiles though there’s something like sadness in the curve of her lips. “At this point I almost wish that were the case. He really is nice, isn’t he?” She means it so earnestly.
“Mm. Fine. I’ll respect it. Listen, will you do me a favour and go chat with Renée over there?” Florence points at the younger woman who sits on her own, on the other side of the room. “She’s my cousin, and she’s very sweet, and you’d have a lot to talk about.”
“Like what?”
“Ask her if she’s got a boyfriend.”
“You ask her if she’s got a boyfriend.”
“No, I mean—she needs advice. Girl talk, some words of wisdom. I can never find the right words with her. I don’t know, I don’t have a way with things the way you do. Go on. Please.”
“This is so weird,” Aubrey hisses on her way to the girl, whose name she now realizes she’s forgotten. She takes a seat on the short, fluffy ottoman next to Florence’s cousin and offers a stiff smile.
“Hey,” she says with a wave of her glass, desperate now to cling on to this distraction.
“Hey,” the cousin echoes.
“Florence sent me over. She said to ask you strange, personal questions.”
“She said that?”
“More or less. I’m Aubrey.”
“I’m Renée.”
“Renée! Yes, Renée. So, you like your cousin’s party?”
She must hardly be twenty, though she looks much cooler than Aubrey did at that age.
Thinking back on this decade feels so strange.
She’d felt so old and wise at the beginning of it, like maybe she had yet to figure things out but she was an adult at last, and she was ready for adult things, and her friends spoke of marriage and houses and babies already.
But who she was at twenty was so far from who she ended up being at twenty-five, at twenty-eight, and she looks at twenty-year-olds and thinks, Jesus, how young they are.
In motion at all times, always on the edge of shifting.
And she feels like one of the older people she’d looked at when she was younger and thought were so lame, that they didn’t get it at all. But they got it, very much.
Renée smiles politely and shifts in her seat. “I thought maybe I might meet some people if I left the house, so. Here I am.”
“Meet some people?” The words taste so familiar on Aubrey’s tongue.
“Yeah, you know—my cousin knows some cute guys. And I get to drink for free.”
This makes Aubrey smile. She recognizes in Renée a hint of Florence’s spunk. “Why do you want to meet someone?”
Aubrey senses a reluctance to answer in the way Renée searches for something in the room. So she adds, “Sorry, you don’t have to tell a random person this, obviously. I just think I might relate.”
“Ah, well. I’ve just never met a guy that I really cared for. Ever, I mean. And I’m twenty, so. My folks are starting to get to that point where they wonder if they’ve failed me, or whatever.”
“Mm. Like you should’ve had your first boyfriend by now, and you haven’t, and they think somehow it might be their fault.”
It feels so easy, slipping into this conversation. It reminds Aubrey of when she’d first met Florence. Renée stares at her shoes. “Right.”
“You know that’s where your cousin’s at, too.”
“No, yeah, I know. That’s not helping with my parents. Makes them think it might go on for a while still.”
“Right.” Aubrey drops her chin in the palm of her hand and looks at Renée’s dark hair, her makeup, her pretty dress.
She wishes so much to hear Renée say that it doesn’t matter at all, that she doesn’t care and she hopes actually that it would go on for a while.
That there’s more to life than finding a partner and having firsts at an early age.
She so desperately seeks a different version of this narrative.
“Maybe it will,” Aubrey says softly. “It’s gone on for a while for me, too.”
“Really?”
“Mhm. Up until today, actually.”
“You’ve never been with anyone?”
“Never.”
“But you’re hot. I mean, not that it means anything. I know I’m fairly hot, and I haven’t met anyone either. I just didn’t—well I didn’t realize it’s so common.”
“You know I didn’t really realize it either.”
Renée leans over a little closer, her arm across her seat, her attention travelling from the group to Aubrey. “I just haven’t cared that much about it, to be honest. Some days I wonder if it’s for me at all. Like, maybe I just like being on my own.”
“It’s great, being on your own.” Some of that is a lie, but Renée doesn’t need to know that. And Aubrey really wants to believe it.
“I think so. I don’t even know how I got here, to be honest. I mean, to this point. I never really thought about it that much when I was in school, and then suddenly it became this thing. Now I’m the single friend, and it’s so weird thinking that could change at some point.”
“Well, there’s more to you than being single. You’re not going to vanish if that changes.”
Renée says nothing for a second. It’s nice silence, comfortable.
It makes Aubrey feel like she’s said something right.
She takes that moment to steal a quick look over her shoulder, just a glance, to spot a flash of blonde hair and a very nice shirt, a little further away.
He meets her eye. Someone is talking to him. They both look away.
“You know what’s the weirdest thing, actually?”
Aubrey spins back. “Tell me.”
“Sometimes I can’t even imagine I’d meet someone who’d be a good fit for me.”
“Mm. I feel that. You know you don’t have to, if you don’t want to.
If you do, you do. If you don’t, it shouldn’t be a problem, right?
” Aubrey feels so aware of others in the room, of the eyes around her, of a certain specific pair of eyes.
She could swear the back of her head is burning, and she wants to turn again and look back, but she can’t.
“When I was younger it didn’t really make a difference, what people told me.
I didn’t care to hear how it would happen when I least expected it and all that.
Everything sounded cheesy and overdone. And now I’m sitting here and I think everything I want to say sounds like that, cheesy and overdone. But some of it is true.”
Renée hums, her eyes dropping to her lap. “It’s fine, I guess. Sometimes it’s just nice to hear it from someone else.”
“I don’t know, it’s not like I’m any authority on anything.
It’s just, you should really know it’s fine.
Sometimes it won’t feel fine, but nothing feels fine all the time.
It’s like happiness. It’s an emotion, right?
No one feels one emotion all the time. It changes, and it comes and goes.
It’s been like that for me, being on my own. ”
Renée’s attention drifts off to Florence, on the other side of the room. “It’s been like that for Flo, too.”
“It’s like that for people in relationships, too. For people who’ve had ten relationships. That’s the thing, I think. No one’s really inherently happier than anyone else. We can only do what feels right to us in the moment.”
“Right. I hear you, yeah.” Renée leans back in her seat, with an expression that Aubrey can’t quite read—something like amusement, reflection, but she seems distracted, too.
“Thanks for saying all that,” she says, and then before Aubrey can say anything, she adds, “You know Artie’s been staring at you, yeah? ”
Aubrey sits very still. “Artie?” she echoes.
“Yeah.”
“You know Arthur?”
“Everyone knows Arthur.”
“Okay.”
“He keeps looking over.”
“Well, good for him, then.”
Renée breaks into a big smile, wide and goofy. She nudges Aubrey’s leg with her foot. “Come on.”
“What?”
“Flo told me about—you know.” Aubrey says nothing, so Renée adds, “How he’s got a crush on someone. I’m gathering it’s you.”
“Right, okay. Well, I think I’m done here. I hope you liked the advice.”
Renée’s laughter rises above the other conversations, like a chime in the small apartment.
“Sorry if I struck a chord,” she says. “I really did like talking to you. It’s like, I can tell this is the stuff I’m meant to be listening to.
Not my parents or my friends. Telling me how I’m being too picky, how I should just give anyone a chance.
I mean, isn’t that such a weird thing to say? ”