Lost Along the Way(6)
Jane had been trying to figure out for years when exactly they’d started to grow apart, and how much of it was actually her fault. There was never a big fight. As far as she was concerned, no one had done anything that could’ve been seen as unforgivable, though she wondered now if maybe they felt differently. Their separation had been gradual and graceful. It had probably started as early as their freshman year of college, toward the end of the first semester, when Cara had called Jane and told her she was thinking of transferring from Bowdoin to NYU.
November 1994
“What do you mean, you don’t like it? You’ve been there for one semester; you can’t know if you like it or not,” Jane said defensively, cringing a little at the sound of her own voice. She knew it wasn’t what Cara wanted to hear, but she was unable to stop herself from saying it anyway.
“You sound like my mother. I don’t care that it’s only been one semester. I know enough to know that I don’t like it. It’s cold here.”
“New York is no warmer, I assure you.”
“You come to school up in Maine in the winter and tell me that. And why do I feel like you’re trying to talk me out of this? I thought you’d be excited to hear that I was thinking of transferring to NYU. Why do you sound like I just ruined your day?” Cara sounded offended, which was silly. Jane was merely trying to point out that expecting her to serve as Cara’s de facto security blanket was a bit ridiculous. Jane loved Cara, but they needed to learn how to live their own lives. It was as simple as that.
“That’s not true. Of course I’d be happy if you came here, it’s just that you were so excited to go to school up there. I don’t want you to give up before you really give it a chance.”
“If you don’t want me to transfer there, why don’t you just say so?” Cara insisted. It was clear that short of Jane’s telling Cara she’d kick out her current roommate and let Cara move in, there was no way of getting out of this conversation without coming off as selfish. She wasn’t selfish. She was just more concerned with her own happiness than with Cara’s at the moment, which was perfectly within her rights as a newly independent eighteen-year-old girl. Why was that such a hard thing to understand?
“Cara, stop. That’s not what I said.” Which was true. She might’ve been thinking it, but she never said it out loud.
“You didn’t have to,” Cara said quietly. She hung up the phone before Jane had a chance to answer.
Jane put the cordless phone back on its base and stretched out on the duvet covering her bunk bed. Cara was right. She didn’t want her to transfer, and she was angry that she felt like she needed to apologize for it. These years at college were supposed to be her time. All she had ever wanted was to get out of the suburbs and into the city and be able to experience life outside the stupid small town they’d grown up in. She wanted to do something else, she wanted to be someone else, and she couldn’t possibly do that with her past sitting right next to her in art history class. Wasn’t college supposed to be about self-exploration and reinvention? Why didn’t Cara want to do that for herself? Why didn’t she get it?
Jane thought about that conversation often, wondering if she should’ve said something different. So what that she wanted to build her own life in college? While Meg went to school at Vanderbilt and Cara decided to brave the frigid winters in Maine, Jane had tried really hard to build her career as an actress. She’d wanted excitement and adrenaline and adventure. She’d wanted new experiences with new people.
Was that really a horrible thing for her to have thought? Did that really qualify as a friendship-altering event? Cara didn’t end up transferring, and as far as Jane was concerned, things worked out for the best. Cara had met her husband (whom Jane hated with a passion) at college, and that never would’ve happened if she’d left and come to New York. After graduation, when Cara and Meg moved back home to look for jobs and save money, Jane decided to stay in the city so that she could continue to pursue her acting career. Plus, at that point, Meg and Cara both had serious boyfriends, and neither of them could have a conversation that didn’t revolve around them. Once they got married, it only got worse.
Friendships shift and change and roll along as you move through life, and Jane was fine with all of that, but she always felt that really good friendships should be elastic—they should stretch at times but always snap back to a familiar shape and place.
She hadn’t expected her friends’ marriages to change anything between them, but somehow they had. All of a sudden Cara and Meg no longer had time for her or any of the things they all used to do together. Jane felt like a little kid sitting at the adult table any time they had lunch, having to listen to Cara drone on and on about the wallpaper she’d chosen to hang in the powder room of her new house in the suburbs, or Meg talk about what great meal she’d whipped up for Steve the night before. They’d been through every milestone together until then—sweet sixteens, junior proms, drivers’ licenses, college graduations—but now they’d left Jane behind. Without warning, when they hit their midtwenties, the two of them set off on their own little married ladies’ adventure while she was stuck on the wait list. She felt like they found her life silly or selfish or unimportant on some level. Is there anything more infuriating than your closest friends taking pity on you and your life choices because you don’t have a man yet? Being single and poor in your late twenties is hard enough without having to withstand that kind of judgment over breakfast. She really didn’t need it, and eventually she got tired of feeling like the odd man out. People grow up and change, and the pressure to keep up with Cara and Meg got the better of her. So she gradually decided to back out of the race entirely.