Bonnie is a painter, but lately she makes her living three or four different ways. One of the ways is cutting hair. She won’t cut your hair if you’ve newly been through a breakup. That’s her rule. See how you feel in six weeks, she’ll tell you, and if you still want the haircut then, she’ll do it. But not before.
The reason she’s making an exception for me is that, after a breakup, all I want to do is grow a cloak of hair and hide in it. Because she is my oldest, best friend—we met as children, at the college where our fathers taught—she knows this.
“Sit,” Bonnie instructs, pointing at the kitchen stool she’s relocated to the living room. She snips a neat hole out of the front page and drops the newspaper bib over my head. She hands me a glass of iced tea, which is more for her entertainment than my refreshment: occasionally, I raise the tea to my face, trying my best not to move, and stab myself with the straw.
Divorce Court is on TV while Bonnie cuts my hair. At the end of the show, after the man has not gotten the settlement he wanted, and neither party is very satisfied, he is asked if he has anything to add.
“You still feed me,” he says ominously into the camera, addressing his ex-wife. “You still the fool.”
What Joel said: that it was not about her. But how do you believe a thing like that, when the facts so unquestionably dwarf the claim? The facts are: the two of them are now living in South Carolina, not far from his family—happier, presumably, than we ever were.
Last June in San Francisco, all our things packed into boxes, I had to caramelize onions in the only clean pan I could find, a cookie sheet. I mixed them in with potatoes I’d microwaved and mashed, and that was our last dinner, though I hadn’t known at the time.
We were switching neighborhoods—that was what I thought. I thought we were moving into a one-bedroom in Bernal Heights. I thought we were moving because the space was bigger, and the rent was curiously reasonable. Joel had taken great care to pack his things separate from mine, and I had thought that he was only Joel being Joel, when actually it was Joel not coming with me.
There were signs, I guess, I’d chosen to ignore. At parties, talking to another woman, Joel used to reach out to touch me lightly when I walked by, as if to say, Don’t worry, I still like you the best. I noticed when it stopped happening. I told myself that it wasn’t anything.
Anyway, the point is, I didn’t catch on, and what could I have done differently if I had? He told me, Ruth, don’t get me wrong, I care for you deeply. He said that! And what I thought then—and what I still think now—was, That’s not something to say. That isn’t anything.
“Forget it,” Bonnie says. “He doesn’t deserve you,” she says, sternly, the way friends assure with a lot of conviction but have no way of knowing for certain. What if we deserved each other exactly?
The party is in Highland Park, at the home of Bonnie’s friend Charles, from art school. Before it, we drink tumblers of vodka in Bonnie’s kitchen and chase them with baby carrots dipped in sugar, the way we used to.
At the door, greeting us, Charles seems nervous or flustered. His face is completely pink. “Does he have a crush on you?” I ask Bonnie, once Charles has moved on to greeting newer guests. But she says no, it’s that he’s eaten too many Wheat Thins. All Charles had was a niacin flush, from all the enriched flour. It’s happened before, Bonnie tells me. The two of them dated, very briefly in college, and that’s how she knows. He still loves Wheat Thins. He’s still unable to exercise restraint around them.
Inside, a group is assembled in front of a TV that’s playing the recorded broadcast of the ball dropping in Times Square. Many of them have familiar faces, but I have trouble placing them. Three or four people, you can tell, have fresh haircuts. I’m relieved it isn’t just me.
“Ruth?” one of the familiar-looking people says. He has a thick red beard and ears the shape of paper clips—Jared, my high school biology lab partner. I know—by the unabashed way he’s talking—he’s forgotten that he was not a very good lab partner. He’s a sushi chef now. He graduated recently from a special sushi academy. He has a knack for peeling eels.
Jared asks what I’ve been up to, and if I’m living in LA, and I tell him, no, San Francisco. But I’m considering staying home for the year, to keep an eye on my dad, who’s having “lapses in memory.” I don’t know why I say that—“lapses in memory.” It was what my mother had said, and I was echoing it, because I’d never had to articulate it before.
“Only for the year,” I say again.
He raises a punch glass full of something bright blue and knocks it against my champagne. “Cheers,” Jared says, full of admiration. It’s too much. I excuse myself. I tell Jared I’ve forgotten something in my car.
In the car, I stretch my legs out across the backseat. I reach gingerly into my purse to retrieve my phone. Gingerly, because my purse is full of trash—so many receipts and pamphlets and ticket stubs I’m afraid I’ll get a paper cut.
There’s a voice mail from Joel’s mother. She’s called to wish me a Happy New Year—to see if I’m doing all right. I wonder if it’s a drunk-dial. She always liked me—sometimes it seemed she liked me more than she liked her son—and I wonder what she thinks of Kristin. I let myself fantasize that she dislikes her so much that she’s had to call to tell me so.
There is, inexplicably, a cigarette in my pocket, where somebody must have slipped it. It’s bent and I straighten it and roll down a window to smoke it—it’s menthol—while people shout the countdown and the old year becomes the new one.
Joel could be indecisive in a way that exasperated his mother. With him around, I could assume the opposite position. I think she liked that about me. Empowered by his waffling, I could decide: Let’s do this, and Let’s go here, and Are you sure? Because I am.
Now I think: I did that?
My phone rings a minute after midnight. It’s my brother.
“I’ve been singing a song about you,” I say, and sing, “Christmas minus Linus.”
“It’s catchy,” Linus says. “You have a gift.”
The thing is, I’m not allowed to find fault, not with his litany of excuses, not when so many resemble my own.
I’m wearing somebody else’s coat, I realize. I don’t know who the coat belongs to—I don’t remember seeing a person encased in this particular coat walking in—but it isn’t a very effective coat. The owner is probably inside, wearing an impractical outfit. She’s going to be too drunk to be concerned about the weather once the party is over. I’m not sober, but I am also not drunk enough to be unaware that I’m freezing.
I’ve never liked New Year’s. The trouble with beginnings is that there’s no such thing. What’s a beginning but an arbitrary point of entry? You begin when you’re born, I guess, but it’s not like you know anything about that.
A few weeks after the engagement someone asked what I was looking forward to, about marrying Joel, and I thought: the clarity. But that was kind of pulled out from under me.