Life and Other Near-Death Experiences(20)

I’d just closed my eyes when I heard someone squeal my name. “Libby?! Libby Ross Miller, is that you?”

No, no it most certainly is not, I thought, sinking lower into the leather seat and pushing my feet against the floor in a desperate attempt to make the chair swivel. Alas, it was nailed firmly to the floor, so I opened my eyes and confirmed what I already knew to be true. It’s funny, isn’t it, how a person can gain or lose a ton of weight, get her nose done, or do any number of things that would make it difficult to recognize her across a crowded room—but she says one word and you can immediately identify her? So although I had not seen Maxine Gaines in a good fifteen years, all I needed to hear was the first syllable of my name to know exactly who was calling it from behind a stack of self-massage tools.

As she rushed at me, I reluctantly stood to greet her. “Libby, OMG! How crazy to run into you after all these years!” she screeched.

While I trusted plenty of humans who didn’t deserve it, those who eschewed full words in favor of spoken acronyms did not make the cut. “Yeah, crazy,” I said.

Maxine and I were friends in high school, probably because I was one of the few people who would tolerate her insufferability; her hyper-achieving goody-goody act made my church girl seem like a delinquent who was just a few bad decisions away from becoming an after-school special. I wasn’t sad when I stopped hearing from Maxine once she went to college out east, as she coyly and constantly referred to Princeton, although I accepted her friend request a few years ago, largely because I hadn’t understood the nebulous, passive-aggressive way that online friendships often work.

“I’ve actually been thinking about you! Are you still in Chicago?”

“Not really,” I said. “I’m kind of between continents right now.”

“Wow! And here I thought living in New York was exciting. I’m still waiting to run into Paul, by the way. I’m practically right around the block from him and Charlie on the UWS.” Her tone told me that while she was plenty proud of her ivy matriculation and New Yorker status, she was even more impressed that my brother’s partner happened to be an actor on one of the top crime procedurals on network television.

Maxine zeroed in on my naked ring finger even as I ogled the engagement boulder teetering off the back of her hand, which I had already seen close-ups of online. “I saw that you and Tom are no more,” she said, making a pouty face. “Are you okay?”

I smiled stiffly. “I’m peachy. People change.” I didn’t believe this, but given my circumstances, I longed to, and it was a sufficiently vague explanation for why my marriage went the way of the stegosaurus.

“Do they, though?” she said, opening her anime eyes even wider.

“Yes, they do,” I said.

Her half smile dripped with pity. “If you say so.”

“I do say so. That’s exactly what I say.”

I kept waiting for her to announce that she had a flight to catch, but she just stood there. Judging me.

“If it makes you feel any better, I always wondered about Tom. Did he cheat on you?” she asked, raising a penciled-in eyebrow.

A petite growl escaped from my throat, which Maxine seemed to misinterpret as me struggling not to cry.

“Oh, Libby,” she said, leaning in to hug me, “I won’t pretend to understand why God has allowed such monumental challenges into your life, but know that I’ll be praying for you.”

As she attempted to squeeze the stuffing out of me, I decided to invoke my Fourth Amendment–mandated right to protect against unreasonable search and seizure and casually let my teeth rest on her bony shoulder blade.

She pulled back rather violently. “Jesus Christ, did you just bite me?”

“Bite you?” I said, flashing my canines pleasantly. “Sheesh, Maxine. Maybe people don’t change.” I shook my head, then sat back down in the massage chair. “Now, if you don’t mind, I’m going to try to unwind for a few minutes before I get on a plane to paradise. I’ll tell Paul to be on the lookout for you on the Upper. West. Side,” I said, slowly enunciating each word. “Adios!”

She opened her mouth, closed it, and walked away. I really couldn’t have asked for a better outcome.

Even so, I was a potent combo of sad and irate after Maxine left. People did indeed change, and I was exhibit A. While I wouldn’t necessarily describe myself as a fount of charisma, it used to be that you could seat me next to your mumbling grandmother or lecherous uncle at your wedding and know they would later report that I was a model dining companion. But in the past week, almost every human interaction I’d been involved with had taken a wrong turn—and worse, my behavior seemed compulsive. While being blunt and occasionally aggressive was extremely satisfying in the moment, I was ashamed afterward. I had to return to a more pleasant version of myself so that I wouldn’t sully everyone’s good memories. Lord willing, I would find a way on the beaches of Vieques, surrounded by a bunch of strangers who—if they had any sense—would bite back, then forget all about me.

When I was sure Maxine was nowhere in sight, I wandered over to my gate, and after what seemed an eternity, boarded the plane. I’d requested a window seat, so I pressed my face to the Plexiglas and watched the skyline disappear as we rose above Chicago and headed over Lake Michigan.

It was amazing, that lake—one of the biggest in the world, so expansive that an air traveler could easily mistake it for the sea if she didn’t know better. When Tom and I moved to the city in our early twenties, I made him drive me up and down Lake Shore Drive night after night, and even though gas sapped our already anemic budget, and Tom’s clunker was constantly threatening to quit, he took me because he was just as enamored as I was. Traffic at all hours of the day; twinkling skyscrapers stacked thick against the sky; the beautiful western coast, which we saw as the right side of the lake because it was everything that our childhoods in the suburbs of Grand Rapids were not. The city was our beginning.