Georgie, All Along (5)

Instead, I feel strangely extraneous, and now that we’re done with the tour, the topic of conversation Bel’s landed on—my unemployment—isn’t exactly helping. I wish I hadn’t left my phone downstairs, not that anyone’s calling at the moment.

“I don’t understand how she could up and leave,” Bel says, the hand that’s not holding her milkshake smoothing over her rounded belly. She looks serene and stylish—black cropped pants, black sleeveless top, a pair of delicate gold studs in her ears, her dark blond hair pulled into a low ponytail. When she showed me her home office, already set up with two monitors and a whiteboard calendar on the wall filled with her careful handwriting, she’d told me that she gets dressed for work every day, even in this new setup.

“I read that it’s important to keep routines when you work from home,” she’d said, and I’d gotten strangely stuck on the phrase. I’d worked from home sometimes, I guess—in Nadia’s small guest house, where I’d moved only three months after I started working for her, I’d often made calls and travel arrangements and filtered through thousands of her emails. But I worked in the main house, too. I worked in hotel rooms when we traveled. I worked on sets. I worked standing against the walls of ballrooms and restaurants where events were being held. I worked anywhere, and there wasn’t much of a routine to any of it.

“Bel,” I say from my spot on the floor, my back pressed against the spindles of the recently assembled crib. “You literally left DC less than a month ago.”

She furrows her brow, looking offended. “It’s not the same,” she says, but the thing is, it kind of is. On the face of things, Nadia and Bel don’t have a huge amount in common. Nadia is a famed screenwriter and director, part Nora Ephron and part Nancy Myers; Bel is a quiet but powerful force in the world of US education nonprofits. Nadia is a vortex of chaotic, whirlwind creativity; Bel is a steady, organized problem-solver.

But however different they are, both of them have made big changes. Both of them are all about slowing down, living different lives.

And both of them are doing fine without my assistance.

I blow out a breath, annoyed with myself at dwelling on the comparison. Nadia was your boss, I scold myself. Bel is your best friend.

Still, the blankness yawns in front of me, and I’m desperate to change the subject.

“I saw Mrs. Michaels at Nickel’s,” I say. It’s a sharp turn, and at first I don’t think it’ll work. Bel narrows her eyes at me for a split second, because she knows what I’m doing, deflecting this way. But she decides to give me a reprieve, I guess, because she tosses back her head and laughs.

“Oh my God, of all the people,” she says. “Remember when she gave you detention for teaching us—”

“The new and improved ‘Circle of Life’ lyrics?” I say, smirking. It’s not so bad to be reminded of my foibles in this context, since Bel has never made me feel like a flake. “Yes, it did cross my mind.”

“She was a pedagogical terrorist,” Bel says. “I still think of her when my posture slumps.”

I do the sharp, quick double clap Mrs. Michaels used to do when she caught any of us slouching on the risers, and Bel laughs again before pressing her foot into the floor, stopping the motion of the glider, her eyes bright with excitement.

“Oh my God,” she says, “This reminds me. I have something to show you!”

Is it another already unpacked, beautifully arranged room? I think.

I want to turtle right down into these overalls for the stray, snarky thought. In the twenty years of our friendship, I’ve never had this kind of reaction toward Bel—impatient, resentful, dangerously close to envy. And we’ve been through bigger shifts in our lives than this one, times when the differences between our situations were even more pronounced. The first time I’d driven up to Georgetown to visit her at college, I was splitting my time between my morning shifts as a cashier at the Food Lion and my evening shifts at a diner over in Blue Stone. I’d worried a little, as I made my way through the congestion on I-95, whether it would be strained between us, whether college would have already transformed Bel so completely that we wouldn’t fit the same way we had for all the years of our friendship.

But it hadn’t been like that; it’d been the same perfect fit it always was. A big hug at the curb outside her dorm, squealing happiness over being reunited. We’d taken walks around campus, gone to a house party with loud music and red Solo cups, had a bunk-bed sleepover, stuffed ourselves full of greasy cafeteria breakfast. I’d soaked up the atmosphere of her university experience without a trace of frustration over the knowledge that I’d never have a similar one of my own. And in the years after—after I moved to Richmond to waitress, after I got my first gig as a set assistant, and then as a personal assistant, after I settled into my full-time role with Nadia in LA—Bel and I always fit. Every phone call or FaceTime, every meetup we’d managed over the years of long-distance friendship, we fit.

And I know, deep down, that we still fit now.

“Well, let’s have it,” I say brightly, pushing to my feet and pushing off my attitude. I’m tired, that’s all. Disoriented from all this recent change. Too much time in the car, in my own head, thinking about the blankness. I do want to see whatever she has to show me, even if it does have something to do with Mrs. Michaels’s terrible double clap.