Margaret won’t tell me anything about her life. From the start, she makes it clear that we’re here to talk about me. When I ask a question about herself, she tends to ignore it. She isn’t mean about it. Rather, she looks at me with a blank smile that implies I’ve spoken to her in a language she doesn’t understand.
“Just curious, do you have children?” I ask.
“What do you think knowing the answer to that would do for you?” she asks me, just like shrinks do in movies.
As a result of her reticence, I develop my own theories about Margaret. One is that she’s a measured and reasonable eater, unable to understand my personal battle with gluttony. I have seen a goat’s milk yogurt in her garbage before, the lid placed neatly back on the empty carton. Another of my theories is that she loves a warm bath. I am sure she loves wildflowers, trains, and heart-to-hearts with wise old women. One day she tells me that as a schoolgirl she was forced to wear a boater hat on field trips. I cling to this image, imagining a tiny Margaret marching to and fro in a long line of girls in hats.
Then there is the autumn day I come in to find her with a bright, shiny black eye. Before I can even register my shock, she points to it and laughs. “A bit of a gardening accident.” But I believe her. Margaret would never let anyone hit her. She would never let anyone wear shoes indoors. She would always protect herself, her floors, her flowers.
My father says his friend Burt knew Margaret in the nineties, that she had been “around for a minute,” having a dalliance with a video artist. I imagine their dates: he slides into the booth across from her and asks her how her day was. She just smiles and nods, smiles and nods.
That Audrey and I wind up at college together is one of the strangest things that has happened, maybe ever, but definitely to me. On the surface, it makes perfect sense: two New York City girls with similar SAT scores and similar authority problems being directed toward the same attainable liberal education by uncreative administrators. But spiritually, I can’t believe it. After all these years of separateness, we are together.
We bond immediately, more over what we hate than what we love. We both hate lox. We both hate boys in cargo pants. We’re both sick of kids from Long Island saying they’re from New York. We spend the first few weeks of the school year riding our new red bicycles around town in impractical shoes and too much lipstick, unwilling to let go of the idea that city girls do it differently. We can barely hold in our peals of laughter when a boy named Zenith arrives at a party in a shirt that says b is for baller. We set our sights on senior boys who run ironic literary magazines and try to avoid using the bathroom next to anybody but each other.
Audrey is an intellectual, likes to talk about Fellini and read thick books about tainted presidencies by old bearded men. But she also uses slang more confidently than I ever could and holds her denim miniskirt together with patches from hard-core shows. She cuts her own hair, applies her own liquid eyeliner, and appears to be able to eat as many cookies as she wants without breaking one hundred pounds. We make up funny names for each other: sqeedly-doo, looty, boober.
We have our first fight three weeks in, when I decide she’s holding me back socially with her misanthropy. “I came here to grow,” I tell her. “And you don’t want that.”
She runs into the woods of the arboretum sobbing, falls, and scrapes her knee. When I try to help, she cries, “Why would you want to!?”
I call my mother, who is on Ambien and cheerfully tells me to just “buy a ticket home!” I feel certain and terrified that Audrey is in her room talking to her mother, and that Robyn is mad at me.
We make up a few days later when, at a brunch potluck, I realize that I do, in fact, hate everybody. Even my new friend Allison, who runs the radio station, and even Becky, who makes vegan muffins and has a quilt composed of Clash t-shirts. The conversation at college is making me insane: politically correct posturing by people without real politics. Audrey was right: we are all that is good for each other.
Sometimes Audrey and I are eating cereal, or drying off after the shower, and I see a flash of her mother. Robyn is here: young and naked, my friend.
Margaret is on vacation, and it’s an emergency. My mother and I are in the worst fight we’ve ever had, one that tests the concept of unconditional love, not to mention basic human decency. And the thing is, no one is right exactly. We both followed our hearts and had no choice but to hurt each other deeply.