Frenemies(55)

I just didn’t know what to do about it.

Because it was one thing to not call her, to share in the silent treatment, not-talking thing. It was something else entirely to risk calling her only to find myself screened to voice mail, or fobbed off on Beatrice, the receptionist. In this day and age, as Helen had already demonstrated to me, the only way to force someone into a confrontation they might not want was to show up in a place they couldn’t possibly avoid you (unless they were willing to climb up their own fire escape). There was too much technology to hide behind, otherwise. Until I picked up the phone, I was not talking to Amy Lee as much as she was not talking to me. Once I made a call, she might decide to blow it off, and then she was actively ignoring me and there was no getting around that.

I thought that someday soon I might be in a different place emotionally, where I could handle that possibility, but I wasn’t there yet.

Not yet.

Tonight I just missed her.


It actually came in handy that it was the Christmas season, I thought a few days later. I could mope through my job, or my nightly rounds of the stores in my vain hopes for inspired gifts, but at least the fact that I had to come up with gifts meant that I was moping while out and about in public. I made the usual last-minute selections for my parents, and agonized over what to get my sister and her husband. Only the kids were easy—and anyway, it was fun to shop in toy stores around Christmastime. The looks of abject horror on the faces of all the parents were sort of funny if you knew you weren’t responsible for Santa’s choices come dawn on Christmas morning. And besides, I could only descend so far into self-pity while surrounded by screaming infants, with Salvation Army bells ringing insistently in my ears.

It was this logic that got me to the last holiday party on the last Thursday before Christmas.

First, though, I’d tried to rustle up reinforcements.

“I’m happy to report that I am completely unavailable,” Georgia told me that morning, in a very alarming and perky sort of voice. “As I am currently sitting in the lovely Seattle-Tacoma Airport, enjoying the local ambience. But you have fun.”

“Is he right there?” I asked in an excited whisper.

“I’ll have to get back to you with those figures,” she singsonged. “I’ll call you when we land in Boston, whenever that might be—there’s apparently some storm.”

“It’s almost Christmas,” I said. “Of course there’s a storm.”

“We’ll talk soon,” she promised, and hung up.

I spent the rest of my day neatening up my work area in preparation for Christmas vacation. It was one of the major perks of working for Minerva. She and Dorcas removed themselves from wintry Boston every Christmas. One year it was the Bahamas, another year it was St. Barts. This year they were hitting Cancún. They were usually gone until after New Year’s. All I had to do was deliver them (and Minerva’s numerous trunks—yes, trunks) to the airport the following afternoon and I was free.

First, however, there was the evening to get through, and the last of the holiday parties. I debated not going. After all, if Georgia wasn’t going to be there, what would be the point? I didn’t know if Amy Lee would show up—and I couldn’t decide which would be worse. If she didn’t, I would be left friendless, which could prove challenging indeed should Nate or Helen turn up. If she did show up, well, that could turn out to be a very different sort of challenge.

And I wasn’t kidding anyone, least of all myself—I wanted to go. I wanted to see what had happened between Nate and Helen. I wanted to see Nate. I wanted to look him in the eyes and figure everything out once and for all. I didn’t want to do it without backup, of course, but it seemed that I was out of luck. I didn’t have backup—but I had a boatload of cosmetics.

I dressed in my best holiday finery—my favorite high-octane jeans and the sparkly top I saved for such occasions—and spent a long time making my eyes look deep and inviting. I tried not to think about the fact that it was Helen who’d taught me how to do those things—until it occurred to me that should I succeed at getting Nate back, it would all be very ironic. And then, when I was done, and had put on my absolutely insane stiletto boots—boots that practically begged the icy Boston sidewalks to knock me on my foolish ass, the ones I’d saved up to buy and loved more than the rest of my wardrobe put together—I sank down on my couch and let myself mope for a few minutes.

Strangely, it was thinking of Helen that got me back up on my feet.

The fact was, women like Helen achieved that girl status because they got away with things other women didn’t. And the reason they got away with things was because they dared to do what they wanted to do. I, for example, would never pick up a boyfriend’s messages or harangue another woman in his life. Not because I was above such things, but because deep inside I would be worried that the boyfriend in question preferred the other woman. Helen would never allow such a worry to penetrate her consciousness. Helen would always saunter through life as if everyone and everything she brushed against adored her. I had watched her do exactly that for years.

I sat a little bit straighter on the couch.

There was a divide between Helen’s sort of woman and mine. As an example, my kind of woman didn’t like to venture out alone. I preferred to march through life with my friends, in a pack, because we made our fun wherever we went (until recently), and because it was infinitely more comfortable that way. Helen, meanwhile, didn’t know the first thing about packs of friends. She went wherever she wanted, spurred on by her own bravado (also known as a healthy dose of arrogance, in my not even remotely humble opinion) and her knowledge that her legs really did look amazing in those shoes. I didn’t care what people thought of me so long as my core group thought well of me and shared my experiences. Helen didn’t care what anyone thought of her.