“I think my sister will have a stroke if she hears me one more time,” I said, and I could sense how remote I sounded.
Erica said nothing in response—really, what was there to say?—and it’s possible that our friendship might have begun to evaporate forever right there on Boylston Street. We had lost all commonality, and now we would just grow apart. But then an empty cab stopped at the traffic light, and Erica abruptly pulled me inside it.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“One of my friends from high school is having a party. She has her own apartment now in Cambridge.”
“Really? I won’t know anyone.”
“Doesn’t matter. It will be good for you. It will be good for us.”
The taxi smelled of beer even worse than the bar, and when I looked down I saw why: an empty Heineken bottle was on its side, the last of its contents on the floor mat. When the cabbie accelerated through the light, the bottle rolled against the bottom of the seat and tinkled with a weirdly appropriate holiday-season cheer. The driver heard it, swore in a language I didn’t recognize, and stopped at the next red light. There he climbed out, opened the back door, and grabbed the bottle with the urgency of a mother plucking a child from harm’s way on a busy city street. He was furious. He slammed our door and dropped the bottle into a metal garbage can on the corner—or, to be precise, smashed it into the garbage can. We could hear it break even inside the vehicle. When he got back in, he turned to us and said, his dark eyes piercing us with rage, “My cab is not a speakeasy. No drinking, do you two understand?”
“It wasn’t my Heineken,” I said. Erica was glaring daggers at him from her side of the seat.
“I know that! It belonged to the idiots I kicked out before I saw you two.”
And then we set off, and it might have been the smell of the beer and it might have been the way the cabbie drove with undisguised rage, starting and stopping, but suddenly I was clammy and nauseous. Before I could stop myself, I added to the reek of the cab by vomiting between my legs and onto the floor.
“No, no! How dare you!” he yelled. “How dare you!”
“I’m sorry,” I groaned. “Can you stop? Please? Can you pull over?”
Erica found a small packet of tissues in her purse, but they were mere sandbags against a tsunami. The driver pulled over against the curb, still blocks from Storrow Drive, and I mopped the floor mat and the back of the front seat. (I wouldn’t allow Erica to help; I was ashamed and this was penance.) I had a little bottle of perfume in my purse, and without telling the cabbie I sprayed some into the rear of the vehicle. Erica paid the angry man, tipping him well after my meltdown.
“I am so sorry,” I said, taking a deep breath. “Now what?”
She looked at me as deeply as she ever had: “Are you seeing someone? Are you pregnant?”
“No. I’m still on the Pill,” I told her, and then added quickly, “Not that it would matter, because I’m not seeing anyone. I’m just…”
“Tell me.”
“I just think I’m really close to falling apart some days.”
She put her arm around my shoulders and started walking me past the long block of stately brownstones, some of which already were festive with Christmas lights. I saw one family trimming their tree through the bay window, and I felt as if I had traveled back in time to my parents’ or even my grandparents’ childhood. The father was actually wearing a sweater vest. “We’re just going to get you some crisp, fresh night air. We’ll promenade,” she said. She waved cheerfully at a woman walking a pair of tiny dogs in black dog booties and an older couple in elegant Burberry trench coats and scarves; she knew none of them. We had walked four blocks and I was feeling better, and my dreamlike fear that our friendship was failing began to evaporate. We’d be fine. Still, I apologized once more.
“Stop that. You’ve been through a lot.”
“I guess.”
“I still remember meeting your mom. Parents Weekend our first year.”
I nodded. She hadn’t met my mother the day I moved into the dormitory because my family had already come and gone. They had dropped me off and settled me in by the time Erica and her parents arrived.
“I thought she was so glamorous,” Erica went on. “Not what I expected from a rube like you from Vermont.”
I knew what Erica meant. I wasn’t insulted at all. “She was, wasn’t she?”
“And she used to walk so fast,” said Erica, nodding. “Those great big strides. She was wearing such hip boots that weekend we met. I loved them.”
I recalled how my father sometimes teased her for walking so quickly. When Paige had been little, she’d practically had to skip to keep up (which was usually fine with Paige; like her mother, she was rarely a body at rest). “I remember those boots,” I said.