Frenemies(46)
“Gus!” she exclaimed when she saw me walking toward her. “This new diet is fabulous—I can feel the fat simply melting away!”
She waved her hand in the general direction of her midsection, inviting me to agree and—preferably—to shriek at length that she looked simply weak with hunger so she could accept whatever cakes I then pressed her to consume.
I knew the routine.
This was, evidently, why Minerva had failed to notice my mood. This latest diet had something to do with eating shoots and leaves, if I’d heard her correctly, and had come recommended thirdhand from her longtime best friend and diet coconspirator, the horrifically named Dorcas Goodwin who was—for her sins—a middle school math teacher. (Yes. The woman was named Dorcas and taught vicious, sniggering thirteen-year-olds. I could only imagine the whispers in the halls, the name-calling in the notes passed in class.)
Their previous diet had involved a series of complicated shakes and revolting powders for a very trying ten-day period.
“This one’s all about foraging,” she was telling me. “After all, it’s how our ancestors lived for ages. Ice ages, Gus, and frankly I just can’t imagine why we’ve rejected the hunter-gatherer lifestyle. There were no fat cavemen racing around the steppes, now were there?”
As if she had personally spent time on the prehistoric steppes, instead of reading? Jean Auel novels like everyone else.
She was nothing if not frighteningly logical when you least expected it, if somewhat hazy on the details of the rise of agriculture. She was also obsessed with dieting. The fact that she remained a perfectly reasonable size ten on a five-six body, no matter how intense her exertions, never seemed to appease her. Once upon a time, when she was a slip of a girl (I’d heard the story too many times to repeat it without snideness), she’d dreamt of being a dancer, and she’d been a size six. That this had occurred when she was fifteen and largely without breasts never seemed to penetrate her diet-muddled brain.
“Minerva,” I said then, because I had to stop her before she started raving about glycemic indexes and the importance of hydration. “You and Dorcas have been friends since you were kids, right?”
“Oh yes,” she said, fastening her gaze on me. “It was practically preordained. You can’t imagine what it was like to be so creatively named in the midst of all the Brendas and the Barbaras.”
Until that moment, I don’t think it had ever occurred to me that “Minerva” was a name that had been foisted upon a poor, defenseless child—that Minerva’s parents were as much to blame (if there needed to be blame) for the odd duck of a woman before me as she was herself. Because what could anyone do, when thirteen and gawky and tragically named something like Minerva, but choose to be Minerva. It was sort of touching, when I thought about it.
“I can’t imagine you as a Brenda,” I told her.
She preened, pleased. “I wanted so terribly to change my name,” she confessed. “I was jealous of the other girls, but in time, I grew into my name and now, of course …” She waved a languid hand. “Why did you ask?”
“Oh.” I had to think about how to phrase the question I wanted to ask. I settled on: “How have you been friends with Dorcas for so long? How do you keep from fighting?”
“We don’t do anything of the kind,” Minerva said with a small laugh. “We fight all the time. She claims I’m attention-seeking and really, she’s dreadfully immature behind all that ranting about responsibility. I expect we’ll argue about it all the way to the grave.”
“But do you ever have real fights?” I pressed her. “The kind of fight you’re not certain your friendship will recover from?”
Not that what had happened with Amy Lee could be called a fight. In the strictest sense of the term, I would have had to participate in it, if it was a fight. Instead of just standing there while she told me off.
Minerva shifted her legs, and considered.
“You don’t have to tell me the details,” I assured her. Which was a waste of breath, of course. Minerva existed to over-share. She made a pensive sort of face.
“I don’t recall the details,” she said after a moment. “I know that we stopped talking for a while—you would think I’d remember everything that led to it. It was several months, I think. I was furious with her—I was determined we would never speak again, unless, of course, she offered a full apology.”
“What did she do?”
“She was very unsupportive of me,” Minerva revealed in hushed tones. “I wanted her to be on board with my decision to open a yoga studio, and she refused. She thought I was being led astray by a certain gentleman we knew at the time”—Minerva batted her lashes coyly—“and she would not accept my assurances that my love of yoga would transcend any possible relationship I was having with him.” She sighed. “It was very unpleasant.”
“Do you have a yoga studio I don’t know about?” I asked, working hard to keep my tone even. I was trying as hard as I could to avoid imagining Minerva striking yoga poses, or writhing about on a mat trying to touch her knees to her nose. It was a struggle. And unless there was an attic in the Museum I didn’t know about, Dorcas had been on the winning side of that argument.
“It didn’t work out,” Minerva said with a heavy sigh, as if she regretted the lost yoga studio nightly. “Though I do love the practice of yoga, and often wish … But that’s neither here nor there. She was just so smug—it was unacceptable. We had a terrible argument, and then we didn’t speak. You know Dorcas.”