“Okay, I get your point. You didn’t like her, but remember you didn’t like me at first either.” Colleen and I were freshman-year roommates, but she barely paid any attention to me for the first month of school. She came to school knowing a few people from Long Island, and always had parties and bars to go to (she had a fake ID, I did not) and she never invited me. It wasn’t until she threw up in her bed one night, after returning home drunk, and I helped her that she even talked to me. I had to prop her up and change her sheets and she was disobedient and annoying, and I told her she was disgusting. The next morning, I woke up to her eating Cheerios on her bed (Colleen never got hungover), and she smiled at me. “You told me I was like a pig in slop last night,” she said. “You were,” I told her, and she laughed. “You’re funny,” she said, and after that we were somehow unexpectedly friends.
On the other end of the phone, Colleen sniffed. “That’s not true, I just didn’t know you. You barely talked when we first met. And even then, I knew you weren’t a total freak.”
“I’m just saying, first impressions aren’t everything. She’s nice. And she’s been a good friend to me here.”
“Whatever,” Colleen said. “I’m telling you, something about them is weird.” But then she changed the subject and we talked about another friend of ours from college who’d just broken up with her boyfriend. “I knew he was a creep all along,” she said. “Remember when he offered to buy her a Burberry scarf if she lost ten pounds?”
When we finally hung up, I poured myself more coffee and settled back on the couch. I wasn’t all that surprised that Colleen didn’t like Ash, and I wasn’t going to push for the two of them to be friends. We didn’t need to keep having them at the same dinner parties. Sometimes friends of friends just plain don’t like each other, and there’s nothing you can do about it.
Ash refrained from saying much about Colleen for a while, but sometimes she’d bring up Colleen and Bruce and ask me what I thought it was like to have sex with someone so old and wrinkled.
I never told Colleen that she’d guessed right, that a lot of the things she’d said about Ash were pretty close to the truth. Ash was Evangelical, and often referred to the time when she was “saved.” Once, I went to church with her because she invited me and we were new friends and it seemed rude to turn her down. Her church was in a theater with a live band and a screen that dropped down for the sermon. There were padded chairs and stadium-style seating, and people sang and clapped and murmured “Amen,” and said, “Mmmm-hmmm,” loudly, when they agreed with something. As a Catholic, used to kneeling and subdued chanting, I felt wildly uncomfortable with all this, which Ash must have guessed because she never asked me to go to church with her again.
Colleen was right about the crafting too. Ash wasn’t a scrapbooker, but she was a stamper, something I didn’t know existed before I met her. She had hundreds of stamps, which she kept in a small room in their apartment. She used them on letters, and made her own wrapping paper and cards. After that dinner party, she’d sent a card made on thick white paper, with THANK YOU stamped out, each letter in a different color. There were a bunch of bumblebees on the card, little trails of dots behind them.
Ash and I were friends, but we were also so different. There were things she said that would have bothered me if she was anyone else, hobbies she had that I would normally find ridiculous. She was a grown woman who called her father Daddy. She was unlike any friend I’d ever had, and sometimes I couldn’t believe we got along like we did. There were certain things that we just didn’t talk about, because I think we both knew it would bring our differences to the surface, afraid that if we examined things too closely, we’d see that we weren’t really meant to be such great friends after all.
But it didn’t matter, really. For all the ways that we were different, it was our husbands who brought us together, who made us the same. We had them in common, and they were both chasing after something that neither of us totally understood. Only Ash knew how it felt to be bound to someone like that.
When I opened the envelope with Ash’s thank-you note after that dinner party, my first urge was to laugh (which I did later when I showed it to Matt). I pictured Ash carefully picking out colors, biting her bottom lip as she concentrated on stamping out the words. I hung it on the refrigerator, because I didn’t know what else to do with it—maybe because it was handmade, or maybe because I felt guilty for making fun of it, I could never bring myself to take it down. It stayed there for the rest of the time we lived in DC.
Washington, DC
2010
If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.
—HARRY TRUMAN
Chapter 7
Because Jimmy was part of the advance team that staffed Obama, he and Ash spent Christmas and New Year’s in Hawaii. They were there for almost three weeks, during which time Ash posted daily pictures on Facebook of her polished toes in the sand, of pi?a coladas in the middle of the day, of Coronas in front of the ocean. In the meantime, Matt and I spent Christmas in Wisconsin eating lasagna with my parents while we listened to my aunt Bit (who watched a lot of Fox News) go on and on about death panels until my mom insisted that we change the subject.