Frenemies(14)
“HEY!” Helen shouted across the room, completely at odds with her supposed daintiness. The woman was like a cockroach. A nuclear winter wouldn’t slow her down at all.
“Helen, I swear to God—” I began, but it was too late. Sensing another drama—another one involving the same players as the other night—the room fell quiet in anticipation. I plastered my polite smile across my face, but it felt more like a grimace. I couldn’t imagine what it looked like.
“You will pay for this,” Georgia promised her, quietly.
Helen, of course, just waved her hand in the air, in the direction of two men who appeared, from across the room, to actually be Abbott and Costello. Or maybe that was the hysteria, taking over my sight.
“Robert and Jerry, get over here!” she cried out. “I have two single girls you must meet! They’re absolutely gagging for dates!”
chapter five
It took me until my third bathroom break on Monday morning to even think about getting over it.
It being Helen, mostly, with a generous side helping of fury for Henry to go along with it.
Henry I was furious with because he was always right there to make me feel worse. Only Henry would think letting someone in so that she could personally witness her boyfriend cheating was the right thing to do. Only Henry would call that helping, the jerk.
Helen, on the other hand, was a more complicated problem. Screaming that we needed dates had been plain old nasty, and had necessitated evasive maneuvers on Georgia’s and my part, but was, in the end, just annoying. I’d spent the entire weekend stewing less about that and more about her unexpected intervention technique. At first, I’d just been stunned. And a little bit—okay, a lot—hurt. But then it had occurred to me that she was deliberately playing a game. If I could just figure out her goal, I too could play the game, and she’d better watch out because I was all kinds of competitive when I wanted to be.
I was just having some trouble figuring out why she’d chosen to drag me off into a private room so she could spout obviously crazy nonsense right to my face. She couldn’t possibly believe that she was motivated by concern for me. So what was she up to?
When I returned to my desk, I amused myself by thinking up revenge scenarios, but then decided to go in a completely different direction and deal with my rage productively. I decided to act like an adult and not play any girl games. (Not that I gave any credence whatsoever to anything Henry said.)
And what was more adult than having a rational discussion about one’s problems with one’s peers?
“I’m not sure I will ever be able to talk about Helen, that bitch, but I definitely can’t talk about it today,” Georgia snarled. “This is because I am about to board a plane to some godawful town with a name I swear to you is deliberately unpronounceable, in the company of Chris Starling.”
“Married, balding, lecherous Chris Starling?”
“The very one. Although it turns out he’s separated. Somehow, his telling me this didn’t present the green light I think he hoped for.”
“You have fun out there,” I said, rather wanly.
She made a noise that could only be described as a growl, and hung up. I told myself the pounding in my temples had more to do with what sounded like African tribal chants floating down from Minerva’s quarters—and if arias had given way to tribal chants, I might as well buy myself a month’s supply of Excedrin at once—than with any urges toward homicide.
I thought about calling Amy Lee, but that would mean coming up with excuses to make it past the formidable Beatrice, the receptionist/hygienist in the dental practice Amy Lee and Oscar shared, who didn’t believe in personal phone calls during the workday. I was exhausted by the very idea, and Beatrice, I knew, would pounce on any hint of weakness.
I made a few gestures toward actual work, and then spent the rest of my day with my earplugs in (I’d bought them during Minerva’s particularly trying Scottish-bagpipe phase and couldn’t imagine how I’d managed without them), Googling people I held grudges against.
For example: the name Henry Farland, it turned out, was etched on a large selection of gravestones in the greater Amherst area, every one of which had been photo-shopped online by some industrious amateur genealogist. None of those long-buried relatives, however, had been discovered to be the incarnation of evil during their lives, at least not so far as I could tell from the blurry headstones.
I found myself brooding ever so slightly on my way home from work that night, as I pretended to read my book on the T. I could see my reflection in the foggy glass of the windows of the Green Line car, and tried to remove the frown that seemed permanently lodged on my face with a few deep, cleansing breaths. It didn’t work.
Girl games. What an obnoxious phrase. There had been something in the way Henry had said it that—days later—made me feel immature and a little bit sullen.
The fact of the matter was, I felt I was neither immature nor sullen. I was twenty-nine, and soon to be free of the madness of my twenties altogether. I was practically in my thirties already, and once I was I would exude calm. I would be an adult. At last.
Not that there was anything wrong with the madness, I thought when I got off the T at the Hynes Convention Center/ICA stop. I headed toward home through the prematurely dark Boston night, crossing Mass Ave to march down Boylston—after all, who wasn’t a little melodramatic when they were in their twenties? Being unapologetically histrionic was, as far as I could tell, the entire point of being in your twenties. Just about everyone I knew who’d crossed the Great Divide into their thirties talked about their twenties like they’d escaped the gulag of drama simply by celebrating their thirtieth birthday. My birthday was January second and I couldn’t wait.