Rich and Pretty(17)
It’s a week before Lauren deals with the package under the desk and the anniversary card for her parents. Writing these things down sometimes makes her feel that she’s done them, the downside of the to-do list. Finally, she lugs the cardboard box home and leaves it at a little office supply place down the street where you can ship boxes, make copies, send faxes on those rare occasions faxes must be sent, and where she also finds an acceptable greeting card (the Brooklyn Bridge, rendered in ink) and leaves with the satisfaction of having patronized a mom-and-pop joint, when so many of the local ones have been supplanted by pet boutiques and fussy grocery stores and the sort of charmless, middle-of-the-road chain retailers (ugly handbags, cellular telephones) that can afford the newly astronomical rent.
Stepping back on the street she hears someone calling, and her instinct is to ignore it. Hey lady, miss, excuse me—no good ever comes of all this: scams, pleas for directions, hassles about caring for our animals or ensuring our rights to abort our fetuses.
“Lauren. Lauren Brooks.”
“Oh.” She says it, too, like it’s a word, not a sound; like it’s a greeting. She’s staring. The neurons are firing but nothing is happening, it’s a terrible moment. She went to high school in the city and a college upstate that excels at producing the next generation of publishing and art world talent, so of course, she’s run into old classmates from time to time. She finds it baffling. Melissa Reid had frozen for her at seventeen; to see her, as she had a year or so ago, in her mannish blazer, stabbing away at a phone, looking a little thick around the waist—it was hard to make sense of. It isn’t that Lauren has a bad recall, it’s just that she can only recall what she knows. She had been able to recall the Melissa Reid with the hot older brother, the Melissa Reid whose parents divorced in such spectacular fashion that she ended up with two cars on her sixteenth birthday, the Melissa Reid who was alleged to have sucked Dylan Berk’s dick in the backseat of a bus en route to a field trip at Fallingwater. Melissa Reid, securities trader—she was someone Lauren never knew.
“God, how are you?” the girl says, unhelpfully. She has high cheekbones and short hair, like a fashion model from the nineties, like a girlish lesbian, like a little French boy. She leans forward, toward Lauren, doing this thing with her neck that is so unflattering Lauren almost wants to tell her to stop before remembering that she’s trying to figure out who she is; the tips on comportment can come later.
Lauren can’t tell what’s warranted: handshake, half hug, kiss, sincere embrace. She tugs her tote bag over her shoulder and sort of hides behind it, protectively. “Hey!”
“God, you look beautiful, look at you!” The girl puts a hand on Lauren’s arm, a gesture that is clue enough—the implication of an intimacy now passed—and as their skins come into contact, Lauren remembers. Maybe it’s hormonal, animal, some secretion by which we can identify others of our species. Jill Hansen. Fraternal twin brother, Riley (fat, pale, much less pretty than Jill), elderly dad, and much-younger mother, from whom Jill had, fortunately, inherited a perfect, perfect nose, and of course, those cheekbones. Jill Hansen. Lauren hasn’t had occasion to imagine Jill Hansen in the past decade and a half, but they were friends, once. Lauren’s default attitude to these old acquaintances encountered on the street is usually disdain, so she’s surprised to discover she still feels warmly toward Jill Hansen.
“Jill. Wow!”
“It’s great to see you.” Jill Hansen’s eyes widen. She’s turned out to be one of those people who look better at thirty-two than at thirteen.
“You look amazing!” This is what you say, but Jill does.
“I don’t.” A dismissive wave. “But I’ll take it. I need to hear it. I just had our second, I feel like a corpse.”
“Your second!” Lauren’s at the age now where she’s required to affect enthusiasm about other people’s fecundity. She likes babies well enough but feels the false note in her own words.
“Yeah, do you have kids?” An excited edge in Jill’s voice: visions of playdates, the kids squirming in front of a movie, the husbands discussing whatever heterosexual men discuss with one another.
“Me? No, no kids.” She has a strange urge to proffer her hand, show there’s no wedding band there. How hetero-normative someone like Jill—an early adopter of veganism, who refused to wear leather shoes and organized a schoolwide letter-writing campaign in support of Mumia Abu-Jamal—would probably find that. “You have two!” Changing the subject.
“Leo, he’s four, and Audie, she’s two months.” She says it proudly, but doesn’t produce photographs.
“Two months. God, you do look amazing.” Lauren means it more now that she better knows the context. It’s hard to believe that Jill’s body, only eight weeks or so prior, produced the body of another human being.
Another dismissive wave. “So what are you up to?”
“Oh, I live around here,” Lauren says, answering a question different from the one that’s been asked.
“So do we! God, what a small world. We just bought over on Degraw; where are you?”
The conversation Lauren likes less than the conversation about children is the conversation about career and the conversation she likes still less than that is the conversation about real estate: original details, the expense of boiler repair, the logistics of adding a powder room on the parlor floor, the state of the local public schools and whether, a couple of years from now, they’ll have improved enough to be a viable option. If Jill Hansen’s cheekbones are her mother’s contribution, the three-million-dollar house on Degraw is probably her father’s doing. “Oh, over there,” Lauren gestures vaguely over her shoulder. “Have you been in the city all this time? All these years? And we’ve never seen each other even once?”