Frenemies(47)
I did know Dorcas. She was one of those stereotypical New England Women of a Certain Age—the sort who would revel in describing herself as no-nonsense. She was always clomping in and out of the Museum in sensible shoes, while attempting to force Minerva to cut her hair into something more appropriate for her years, something like Dorcas’s own serviceable, manageable bob.
Thinking about it, Dorcas and Minerva could only have met and become friends in childhood. At any other point in life, they each would have viewed the other as impossibly alien. Where Minerva changed her entire self-definition on a whim and the flick of a beaded necklace, Dorcas was particular about her position as a middle school teacher, her little house on the outskirts of Braintree, and her lifelong enthusiasm for breeding Cairn terriers. They shouldn’t have been able to tolerate each other and so, naturally, they had been best friends for some forty years.
“How did you start speaking again?” I asked. “Did she apologize?”
“Did Dorcas apologize?” Minerva let out a peal of laughter. “Dorcas Goodwin, apologize? First she would need to know the meaning of the word, and believe me, Gus—she still doesn’t.”
“Then how … ?”
Minerva fingered the edge of one of her scarves, one in a hue I couldn’t begin to describe.
“One day she simply called me, and carried on as if we’d spoken the day before, as usual.” Minerva raised a shoulder. “And I missed her more than I wanted to hear any apology, since we usually speak several times a day, as you know, so I carried on the same way. The next thing I knew everything was back to normal. We never spoke of it.”
“You had a huge fight that you never talked about.” I tried to imagine it, and failed. In my experience, fights were inevitably followed by much longer State of the Relationship discussions which caused far more damage, and left much nastier scars. Which would fill me with trepidation under normal circumstances—but then, as I’d already worried, I wasn’t sure this was a fight so much as a personal exodus on Amy Lee’s part.
“After enough time passed, there wasn’t much to talk about anyway,” Minerva said. “Things worked out the way they should. Dorcas is my oldest friend. She’s more important to me than anything I was angry about.”
She tilted her head to the side then, and fixed me with a surprisingly perceptive gaze. I’d seen it once or twice before, and it always gave me pause. It suggested, among other things, that she knew I thought she was a madwoman. That she encouraged it.
I found I was holding my breath.
“And in any event,” she said slowly, without looking away, “I think the important thing to remember is that all relationships benefit from a bit of breathing room. Especially friendships. It’s only when you find yourself without the women who understand you that you realize there are very few women who will.”
That night, I stood in my apartment in front of my answering machine with its big, red 0 and faced the fact that deep down, I’d expected Amy Lee to call. I didn’t want to face it, but it was inescapable. No matter how many times I called my landline from my cell and vice versa, to make sure they were both in working order, there was nothing. Radio silence.
I hadn’t expected her to apologize, necessarily, but I’d half-imagined some sort of I was having a bad day, didn’t mean to snap conversation. That would make sense of the whole thing—because Amy Lee couldn’t really tell Georgia and me to f*ck off and mean it, could she? That had to be stress talking. Or maybe—who knew—she was having trouble with Oscar. Or with her dental practice. Once I thought about it, there could be a million reasons why she’d gone off like that. After all, Amy Lee was sort of famous for her temper. She had a short fuse, but the upside was she was usually over it just as quickly. I’d figured she’d spend Sunday ranting and Monday remorseful, and would call that night.
Georgia was a different story. I didn’t know how she would react to the Henry thing, because there was no precedent for it. So while I hoped she would call, I could all too easily see why she wouldn’t. I didn’t like it, but I was the one who’d crossed the crush line. I would have to deal with the repercussions.
I stayed up much later than usual, pretending to be engrossed in a Sci-Fi Channel miniseries, while I deliberately didn’t pay attention to my phones—landline and cell laid out on the coffee table, side by side with military precision. But no matter how much I pretended I wasn’t listening for them, that I was fully engrossed in the Battlestar Galactica movie I’d seen at least seventy times before, they failed to ring.
On Thursday, I started to get angry. I sat at my desk and pretended to concentrate on work-related things, but really I was spiraling into a dark, breathless sort of rage.
Who had asked Amy Lee to step in and appoint herself the moral authority? The grown-up? Were we all supposed to forget the eight thousand ridiculous things she’d done in her lifetime, most of which I’d witnessed without the same response? Who was she to sit in judgment of other people?
Once I opened that floodgate, the rage poured on out.
It cast a wide net.
Whatever with Georgia and her “I can’t.” You’d think being sliced into pieces by our mutual friend might have produced a little bit of solidarity. I had raced directly to Georgia’s side during the latest Stupid Boy crisis, at six in the freaking morning. I had been prepared to stay there for however long it took. Just because Amy Lee was suddenly too good for friends in need, it didn’t mean I was. Just because Amy Lee would prefer to stay out in Somerville with her house, practice, and husband, that didn’t mean I wasn’t available should Georgia need me. Why was I being punished for Amy Lee’s behavior?