Chapter 27: Should auld acquaintance be forgot, / And days of auld lang syne?
Friday night
Lisa Vanderwerf’s lake house is one of several dozen small cottages lining a gravel loop around a man-made lake most of the way to Youngstown. It’s dark when I arrive, so I drive past Lisa’s place at least twice before I finally realize that there’s only one house on the road whose lawn is packed with a dozen cars. I park Mom’s SUV behind Amy’s blue rental car, step out into the lawn, picking up the faint sound of ’80s music emanating from the little cabin.
I’m here
I text Amy.
And as if I’m a nervous kid at a high school kegger instead of a grown-ass woman showing up to a bachelorette party for other middle-aged women, I have to take a long, deep breath to steady my nerves before I weave through the cars towards the house.
A few girls sit on the cabin’s front porch, their feet up on the railing in front of them, drinks in their laps. I recognize one of them vaguely as someone I think I went to high school with; the other two aren’t familiar at all. They track me with their eyes as I approach, and momentarily I feel ten feet tall instead of six-three, exposed and alien and utterly out of place.
But the feeling doesn’t last, because the front door opens, spilling out more ’80s music and a triangle of soft light onto the porch. Amy steps out, and that beautiful smile is on her face again, and she’s not looking at the girls with the tracker eyes, she’s looking at only one person, and that person is me.
She’s got two drinks in her hands, pushes one of them at me after I walk up the short flight of porch stairs and greet her with a peck on the cheek.
“You made it,” she states. “You brought your overnight bag?”
I nod. “Even some extra nail polish and a brush so we can do each others’ nails and hair later.”
Amy laughs; the three girls sitting with their feet against the railing all just keep giving me a look.
“Do you know these lovely ladies?” Amy asks, sweeping a hand towards the girls.
I meet eyes with the one I recognize. “We went to high school together, right?”
She nods. “You’re Anika Singh. You got a basketball scholarship to Rosemont.”
“Yeah, that’s me,” I say, embarrassed that I can’t come up with her name or how I know her.
But she doesn’t seem bothered by it. She stands up, reaches across her friends to shake my hand. “Callie,” she says. “I was in band with Grace and Jenny.”
“Right, of course,” I say, even though I still don’t really have any fucking clue who Callie is or if we ever actually hung out in high school. There was only one band nerd I paid attention to in high school. “Nice to see you again, Callie.”
After Callie, there are other, equally awkward introductions and small talk with the other girls.
When I feel like I’m small-talked out, I turn back to Amy. “Should we go in? Meet the rest of your friends? And I should say hey to Grace.”
#
Inside the stuffy cabin are about a dozen more women, some of whom I recognize, some of whom I don’t. Three or four play a board game at the kitchen table; Lisa Vanderwerf sits on the couch, where she and a couple others are sipping glasses of wine and exchanging tips about potty training over the high synths of what I’m pretty sure is Hall & Oates.
I let Amy take me from group to group, introducing me to everyone, including the ones I should really remember but don’t. When I spot Grace Adler herself mixing a drink in the kitchen, I excuse myself from Amy to do the polite thing — go say hello and congratulate her on the upcoming marriage. Second marriage, that is.
Grace turns away from the counter just as I cross the threshold into the kitchen, and when she spots me, there’s this double-take of pure shock that crosses her face that she doesn’t even try to hide.
“Hey, Grace,” I say. “Congrats on the — ”
“Anika?” she says, not even letting me get my well-mannered congratulations out. “What are you doing here?”
Grace closes the distance between us in two long steps, goes up on her tiptoes to give me a hug, which I am a little slow in returning. After a quick, tight squeeze from Grace, with me awkwardly kinda patting her back, she releases me and looks me up and down.
“God, you look exactly the same as the last time I saw you. Except your hair is shorter.”
“Thanks… I think.”
She gives a rapid shake of her head. “Definitely thanks. You don’t look like you’ve aged a single day.”
“I have.” I think of Jenny. Of her children. Of finding Grace and Jenny in my apartment the day I found out she was pregnant. “Believe me.”
“So what are you doing here? — sorry, I didn’t mean like what are you doing at my bachelorette party, because, of course, I’m glad you’re here, I meant more like — ”
As usual, Grace Adler makes me feel as if I need to justify my presence.
“I’m here as Amy Ellis’s date,” I say.
Her mouth drops open — further shock — and she closes it again quickly as her eyes dart past me to I guess wherever Amy’s standing. “Amy Ellis? My Amy Ellis?”
You know how your stomach lurches right before you’re about to throw up, and a bunch of hot fucking stomach acid starts burning your throat? When Grace says “my Amy Ellis,” putting her stamp of ownership on the Tinkerbell Jane Lane I found in a British airport, I get that feeling for a quick second. I can’t say why exactly. Maybe because I’ve already started thinking of Amy as my Amy, not Grace’s Amy, not anybody else’s Amy.
Maybe it’s because this is the second time the catty redhead has ended up as one of the nearest-and-dearest of a girl I like.
“Yeah. That Amy Ellis.” I hope my distaste for Grace — and the fact that I almost just threw up on her — isn’t too noticeable. After all, Amy likes Grace, and Jenny likes Grace; maybe I should be trying to give her a second chance (third, fourth, fifth chance), too.
“How in the world do you know Amy?” she asks, and the way she says it offends me a little further because the implication underneath the question is something like, What would Amy be doing with a person like you, Singh?
“We met on the plane to Cleveland,” I say, and briefly explain about Amy recognizing me as a basketball player, about Snakes on a Plane, about me distracting Amy with the story about my parents.
“Huh. Small world, I guess,” is all Grace says when I finish. Then she adds, “She always was into athletes,” which feels slightly demeaning again even though I’m sure she didn’t intend it that way.
I’m just about to say something like, “Well, congratulations on the wedding this weekend,” and then excuse myself so I can get back to Amy when Grace grabs my elbow.
“Anika,” she says seriously, lowering her voice, “you know Jenny’s going to be here tonight, right?”
(“Don’t even fucking think about throwing up! I just washed these floors!” shouts the janitor who lives in my brain.)
I gently shift my arm out of Grace’s grip without being rude about it. “That’s fine. I’ve talked with Jenny a few times this week. We’re cool.”
And like she’s a fucking shark who can smell blood at a ratio of one part-per-billion, she cocks her eyebrow in a way that’s skeptical and curious at the same time.
“Honestly, Grace. Jenny and I are okay. It’s not a big deal.”
Annie. Ani. Yes, Jenny and I are completely cool. No drama whatso-fucking-ever.
“But you cut Jenny off,” Grace says, cocking her head like a curious cat. “You two haven’t spoken in five years. Now you’re hanging out with her again?”
I grind my teeth. Nosy as ever. Making it her business to know everyone else’s. I bet she has a fucking logbook she records shit like this, some leather-bound, dog-eared journal locked in a drawer somewhere. And right past the five-year-old entries about spying on her neighbors, there’s probably one that reads, Summer, wedding of Dechen (“Dutch”) Singh and Matthew Raeburn: Last time Anika Singh speaks to Jennifer Pearson. Tonight she’ll add a new entry about how she found out we’ve been talking again.
Fucking Grace Adler.
“Well, ‘hanging out’ might be overstating it,” I say after a moment. “I’ve been working at my parents’ restaurant this week. Jenny stopped by a couple times; we had lunch.”
There’s this long pause, like she’s waiting for me to elaborate, and then she says, “That’s good. Because she’s supposed to be here in ten or fifteen minutes. She just texted to say she’d stopped for gas on the edge of town.”
“Cool.” I point at the counter behind her. “Mind if I make a couple more drinks for Amy and me?”
She grins broadly. “It’s a bachelorette party, silly. Drink as much as you can!”
#
I find Amy sitting on the couch with the wine sipping, potty training tips moms a minute later. She gives me a grateful smile when I settle onto the arm of the couch and hand her the martini I made in a red plastic cup, then returns her attention to the woman who’s speaking.
“Left him naked,” the woman says. And the statement is apparently some kind of conclusion.
“Naked?” echoes a second woman.
“As a jaybird,” the first woman says. She’s heavy and pink, with carefully styled shoulder-length, red-brown hair and so much makeup piled onto her face that she almost resembles a drag queen. “Something about being naked stops them from just going — or at least makes them slow down and think about it for a second. It worked like a charm for my daughter. My son’s had a few more accidents than she has, but it’s working for him, too.”
Lisa Vanderwerf nods knowingly, but the second woman — a slight, pretty blonde who’s younger than the rest of them and still in possession of a slim figure — looks between the other two skeptically.
“But don’t you worry about… you know, number two getting all over the house?”
Heavy-and-Pink shakes her head. “Didn’t happen even once.”
Amy stands suddenly, drains the rest of the martini in three mighty swallows. Her cheeks are flushed an apple-red when she finds my eye.
“Did you see the dock behind the house?” she asks me.
“No. There’s a dock?”
Lisa looks over, nods in my direction. “There is. But be careful — I don’t think it’s supposed to get down to freezing tonight, but it’s still pretty cold out there, and the dock could be slick.”
Amy gives a business-like nod. “I’m going to show Anika the dock. We’ll be back in a few.”
Heavy-and-Pink glances from me to Amy. Her eyes land back on me again. After talking with such gusto a moment earlier about letting her toddler run around “naked as a jaybird,” she’s now tight-lipped and oddly silent.
I smile at her; she looks away.
Okaaay. What was that look for?
Amy tugs on my hand and I stand up, drawing myself up to my full height and squaring my shoulders towards Heavy-and-Pink almost reflexively.
“Go get our jackets from the other room,” Amy directs. “I put them on the green easy chair.”
I do as I’m told, and the moment I walk back into the living room with our coats, the front door swings open.
Jenny.
She steps inside, wiping her feet on the mat, and her arrival immediately triggers a chorus of women calling her name with excited little sorority-girl-style squeals. She smiles and waves like a fucking movie star, kisses Lisa Vanderwerf on the cheek and gets wrapped into a hug by Grace, who’d pranced in from the kitchen as soon as she heard all the hubbub.
Alarms blare and flash inside my skull; the janitor living in my brain runs around desperately pulling levers and pressing buttons and locking doors. Out of the corner of my eye, I see Marty McFly weaving through the throng of women in an effort to get to me.
But then Amy reaches for her pea coat; I hand it to her without a word. We leave through the front door before Jenny has a chance to close it again.