My Year of Rest and Relaxation (3)

Ironically, her desire to be classy had always been the déclassé thorn in her side. “Studied grace is not grace,” I once tried to explain. “Charm is not a hairstyle. You either have it or you don’t. The more you try to be fashionable, the tackier you’ll look.” Nothing hurt Reva more than effortless beauty, like mine. When we’d watched Before Sunrise on video one day, she’d said, “Did you know Julie Delpy’s a feminist? I wonder if that’s why she’s not skinnier. No way they’d cast her in this role if she were American. See how soft her arms are? Nobody here tolerates arm flab. Arm flab is a killer. It’s like the SAT’s. You don’t even exist if you’re below 1400.”

“Does it make you happy that Julie Delpy has arm flab?” I’d asked her.

“No,” she’d said after some consideration. “Happiness is not what I’d call it. More like satisfaction.”

Jealousy was one thing Reva didn’t seem to feel the need to hide from me. Ever since we’d formed a friendship, if I told her that something good happened, she’d whine “No fair” often enough that it became a kind of catchphrase that she would toss off casually, her voice flat. It was an automatic response to my good grade, a new shade of lipstick, the last popsicle, my expensive haircut. “No fair.” I’d make my fingers like a cross and hold them out between us, as though to protect me from her envy and wrath. I once asked her whether her jealousy had anything to do with her being Jewish, if she thought things came easier to me because I was a WASP.

“It’s not because I’m Jewish,” I remember her saying. This was right around graduation, when I’d made the dean’s list despite having skipped more than half my classes senior year, and Reva had bombed the GRE. “It’s because I’m fat.” She really wasn’t. She was very pretty, in fact.

“And I wish you’d take better care of yourself,” she said one day visiting me in my half-awake state at my apartment. “I can’t do it for you, you know. What do you like so much about Whoopi Goldberg? She’s not even funny. You need to be watching movies that are going to cheer you up. Like Austin Powers. Or that one with Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant. You’re like Winona Ryder from Girl, Interrupted all of a sudden. But you look more like Angelina Jolie. She’s blond in that.”

This was how she expressed her concern for my well-being. She also didn’t like the fact that I was “on drugs.”

“You really shouldn’t mix alcohol with all your medications,” she said, finishing the wine. I let Reva have all the wine. In college, she’d called hitting the bars “going to therapy.” She could suck a whiskey sour down in one sip. She popped Advil between drinks. She said it kept her tolerance up. She would probably qualify as an alcoholic. But she was right about me. I was “on drugs.” I took upwards of a dozen pills a day. But it was all very regulated, I thought. It was all totally aboveboard. I just wanted to sleep all the time. I had a plan.

“I’m not a junkie or something,” I said defensively. “I’m taking some time off. This is my year of rest and relaxation.”

“Lucky you,” Reva said. “I wouldn’t mind taking time off from work to loaf around, watch movies, and snooze all day, but I’m not complaining. I just don’t have that luxury.” Once she was drunk, she’d put her feet up on the coffee table, scooching my dirty clothes and unopened mail to the floor, and she’d go on and on about Ken and catch me up on the latest episode of their soap opera drama, Office Romance. She’d brag about all the fun things she was going to do over the weekend, complain that she’d gone off her most recent diet and had to do overtime at the gym to make up for it. And eventually, she’d cry about her mother. “I just can’t talk to her like I used to. I feel so sad. I feel so abandoned. I feel very, very alone.”

“We’re all alone, Reva,” I told her. It was true: I was, she was. This was the maximum comfort I could offer.

“I know I have to prepare for the worst with my mom. The prognosis isn’t good. And I don’t even think I’m getting the full story about her cancer. It just makes me feel so desperate. I wish there was someone to hold me, you know? Is that pathetic?”

“You’re needy,” I said. “Sounds frustrating.”

“And then there’s Ken. I just can’t stand it. I’d rather kill myself than be all alone,” she said.

“At least you have options.”

If I was up for it, we’d order salads from the Thai place and watch movies on pay-per-view. I preferred my VHS tapes, but Reva always wanted to see whatever movie was “new” and “hot” and “supposed to be good.” She took it as a source of pride that she had a superior knowledge of pop culture during this period. She knew all the latest celebrity gossip, followed the newest fashion trends. I didn’t give a shit about that stuff. Reva, however, studied Cosmo and watched Sex and the City. She was competitive about beauty and “life wisdom.” Her envy was very self-righteous. Compared to me, she was “underprivileged.” And according to her terms, she was right: I looked like a model, had money I hadn’t earned, wore real designer clothing, had majored in art history, so I was “cultured.” Reva, on the other hand, came from Long Island, was an 8 out of 10 but called herself “a New York three,” and had majored in economics. “The Asian nerd major,” she named it.