The Impractical Guide to Losing a Friend

The bad thing about being self-aware was that you always knew when you were ruining your life.

“You’re cute,” I said. “But…I just don’t think it’s going to work out.”

She stared at me.

“Ohhh, don’t give me that look, Annie,” I groaned. “I promise you, it’s for the best.”

Annie did not look impressed.

“What?” I asked. “This is just how it is with me.”

Annie made a frustrated noise, and I sighed, dropping the stuffed dog into her crib. She squealed with excitement and started gnawing on the dog’s ear with her toothless gums.

That was about when I decided for sure I would do it.

“Carry on my wayward so-o-o-on,” I hummed, because it was stuck in my head. “There’ll be peace when you are do-one.”

Annie seemed to find my off-key singing highly amusing, and giggled.

“You gotta get better taste, kid,” I muttered.

“You two look like you’re getting along.” I looked up to see Sarah’s smiling face walk in, the door swinging behind her. In her arms were three paper bags of groceries.

“Saraaaaah,” I said with as much cheer as I could muster, taking a bag from her. I thought I may as well be helpful. You know, considering. “Your kid is adorable, but I think she thinks I can sing. Also, she might be a little obsessed with that dog.” Sarah glanced over at where Annie was chewing on the dog’s nose. “Where am I putting this?” I motioned to the paper bag holding…cucumbers, some kind of lettuce, and what looked like an alien’s brain.

“You can just put that in the kitchen,” Sarah told me, and I followed her there, setting the bag below the island. “Thanks, Jean.”

“Yeah, no problem.” I rubbed my hands together. There was no time like the present. “So—crazy budget Mark sent out, huh? It’s gonna take me all week to get that sorted….” Which, of course, was code for Let’s never speak again.

But Sarah only laughed—I guessed that was on me; I’d been too subtle.

“I know, right?” Sarah was saying, taking the groceries out and setting them on the island. “I don’t know what he was thinking!”

“Yeah. Haha,” I agreed, bending down to extract the alien brain. I put it on the table. “Ugh—you know, I just remembered, I’ve got that ad campaign for that romance novel I need to work on, too.”

“The one with the genies?” 

“Yeah. I’ll be swamped all night with it….”

This was Sarah’s cue to say, “That’s too bad; well, this has been fun, you go home now” and for me to say “Yep, damn shame—well, see you never!” and skip off to my lonely little apartment to eat instant ramen and never talk to her again. But such was not fate.

“Lisa was telling me about that book,” Sarah said instead, opening the refrigerator to put things away. “Back when they got the manuscript. Sounds like they had to do a lot of work on it.” She laughed. Damn it, Sarah, take a hint!

Don’t get me wrong. Sarah was great. She was nice, she was sweet—normal, wonderful friend, all around.

That was the problem.

Sarah was a kindhearted, put-together adult, and I was an unreliable jackass.

Before I could decide between “My mom called and it turns out my aunt died” and “By the way, I gave Annie a bit of my Twix earlier, hope that’s all right” as my next attempts, Sarah said,

“Jean, why don’t you stay for dinner?”

This was not how this was supposed to go. I was so out of practice. 

“Oh—I couldn’t—do that…” I said, kinda lamely. Sarah looked at me with those big brown eyes of hers. “I don’t wanna…impose….”

“Come on, Jean,” she said. There was a strained little note in her voice, even though she was smiling as lightly as ever. “You wouldn’t be imposing at all.”

I sighed. It would delay my plans a bit, but…I guessed it could wait.

“Uh—okay,” I said. I think the last time I was invited to stay for dinner was at Alexis Black’s house in third grade. And her mom had invited me, not Alexis. Alexis had wanted me to get the hell out of there so she could play with her Barbies in peace without me suggesting we take their heads off or cut their hair or make them fight with their high-heels. “Can I…uh…help with anything…?” I cringed. The voice of my mother, echoing in my head, saying, “A good guest always offers to help out” just wouldn’t let me be rude.

“Can you slice these cucumbers?” Sarah asked, proffering the bag and handing me a knife and cutting board. I took them.

“Sure,” I said, and got chopping. Halfway through the first cucumber, it occurred to me to ask if she wanted them cut straight, diagonally, or in quarters—but then I decided she’d say something if I was doing it wrong, and kept going. “So—what did E.T. do to deserve this?” I asked, gesturing at the alien brain Sarah had begun chopping. She gave me a funny look, and I experienced a twinge of embarrassment, which was odd since usually you need self-respect for that. “Um—just, I thought it looked kinda like an alien brain, that’s what I…you know….” I trailed off, and focused back on my cucumbers, which I was becoming progressively convinced I was screwing up.

“Oh!” Sarah laughed. “You’re funny. No, this is Romanesco broccoli, but I can see where you got alien from. It is a bit weird-looking.”

“Oh,” I said, and we both went back to chopping our respective vegetables in silence.

Sarah was interesting. Sarah was what I called a Ring Three friend—or, in common parlance, a work friend. Recently, however, she’d crossed the boundary into Ring Two and gained the status of Regular Friend—someone you hung out with and talked about your lives with and went for mani-pedis with, except we had never done that because you could not pay me to walk into a nail salon. Then, today, she’d asked if I could keep an eye on Annie while she did a grocery run, and it dawned on me that she was possibly shooting for Ring One: Best Friend.

That’s when I’d realized it had been too long.

Work friends I could handle because they didn’t require much upkeep, and regular friends were acceptable for short periods of time—but there was a steadfast rule I lived my life by and which Sarah was going to have to learn, and that was that Jean Ross did not have best friends.

“So,” I said, because I was one of those people who could only bear silence for so long, “what does one do with Romanesco broccoli?”

“Well,” Sarah explained, “you can roast it, like regular broccoli, or sauté it. I think that’s what I’m going to do.”

“Sauté it?”

“Yeah. I think I’ll sauté it with some garlic and red pepper and put it on some pasta—what do you think?”

“Oh—sounds good to me.” It actually did sound good. I mean, pretty much anything was better than my gourmet meals of tuna melts and the occasional omelette. It wasn’t that I was broke—I was just lazy.

“And then we’ll whip up a nice cucumber salad to go on the side,” Sarah added, gesturing at me. “Oh—usually I like them in half-moons, but that works, too.”

I swore inwardly. Half-moons! Why didn’t I think of that!

Sarah filled a pot with water for the pasta and set it on the stove while I shook my head at myself. Well, good thing this would be the last time I chopped cucumbers wrong in Sarah’s kitchen.

“Are there any dishes you like to make?” Sarah asked. For some reason, I really thought about her question. I decided not to tell her about the tuna melts.

“Well—I’m not much of a cook,” I admitted—Sarah had an inexplicable knack for getting me to be more honest than I usually was—“but my mom would make this soup, growing up—just a regular butternut squash soup, I think it was, but I remember I really liked it.” I was a little horrified to find I was sort of smiling.

“Yeah?” Sarah asked. She was smiling, too.

“She would always make it on the first day of every month.”

“Really? Why?”

I laughed—it was an edgy thing, my laugh. I’d never liked it much. “Not a clue,” I told Sarah. She laughed, too, and it was a pleasant, bell-like sound.

“My mom liked to make a tomato soup when we were younger,” Sarah said. I knew from previous conversations that ‘we’ referred to herself, her younger brother Theo, her older sister Veronica, and their dog Freddy—although Freddy was perhaps excluded in the context of our current discussion. Could dogs eat tomato soup? Could dogs eat any kind of soup? My brain became occupied with the image of a dog lapping up tomato soup from a doggy bowl. I was a strange person. “You know,” Sarah continued, pulling me out of my weird dog reverie, “I think there’s really something to it; moms and soup, and all that.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s like…soul food, you know? It sticks with you.”

“Hmm.” I thought about this. “Yeah,” I said finally. “I think you’re right. It’s like…” I searched for a phrase, “childhood in a bowl,” I finished. I looked up to see Sarah grinning, and I realized I’d said something sappy. This, of course, was horrifying. I wondered if I shouldn’t make another attempt now….

“What was your childhood like?” Sarah was asking me. 

“Like…what specifically do you want to know?” I asked back. Sarah was always trying to get me to tell her things about my life. I mean, what a bitch. So unreasonable of her. Anyway.

“Like…. Did you ever ride a bike?” she asked, seeming to just think of it.

“Uh—yeah, actually, I did,” I admitted. “It was red. It had a bell on the handle. It annoyed the hell out of my neighbors."

“Why?”

“Oh, because I would ride back and forth in front of their house ringing it every three seconds.”

Sarah paused with a pan in her hand and stared at me.

“Yeah…I was kind of a menace as a child,” I said, looking down at my cucumbers—which apparently were finished now, which was inconvenient. Didn’t they know they’d been my excuse to avoid eye contact? Stupid cucumbers….

Sarah burst out laughing, and I looked up again.

“Oh, man!” she said, setting the pan on the stove. “Oh, that’s hilarious! I can see it,” she added, framing me with her fingers and closing one eye, like she was taking a picture. “Little Jean, riding her bicycle and trying to think of how she could piss off as many people as possible!”

My face felt hot and I poked the bowl full of cucumber bits. “Uh—what should I do with these now?” I asked.

“I got it,” Sarah said, thankfully calming down, and took the bowl. She doused it in olive oil, lemon juice, salt, and pepper, then gave me a spoon to mix it. She poured some more oil into her pan, put the heat on, and started sautéing her alien broccoli. Bereft with no more cucumbers to chop incorrectly, I rested my elbows on the table and put my chin in my hands and watched Sarah cook. Maybe I should try cooking more often….

“Did you, uh…ride a bike when you were a kid?” I asked, because, again, silence. Sarah chuckled a bit.

“No, actually,” she confessed, “don’t tell anyone, but…I never learned how.”

“Whaaaaaat,” I said. “How is that possible?” 

Sarah laughed again. “I know,” she said. “Crazy, right? But no one ever offered to teach me, and I never asked to learn.”

“Did you ever learn?”

“No!”

“So you still don’t know how?”

“Yeah,” Sarah said, mixing her alien broccoli in the oil. It made a sizzle sound. The air was starting to smell like tasty, savory alien.

“Well, we’ve got to fix that,” I said, because apparently my mouth had a mind of its own now. What the hell was I saying? This was so counterproductive…. “Uh—I mean, we’re probably both too busy, though,” I added, trying to walk it back. But Sarah was looking at me with one of those smiles she always had, and said,

“Do you really mean that? You’ll teach me to ride a bike?”

“Um. Yeah, sure….” What, was I gonna say “no?”

“I’d love that, Jean, thank you!”

“Ahaha…. You’re welcome….” This was a new level of self-sabotage for me. It was like double self-sabotage. I was sabotaging my own attempt at self-sabotage. What was wrong with me?

At this point, Sarah put me on pasta-watching duty as she turned the heat off the alien broccoli and went to go nurse Annie, who’d started crying.

As I stared into the cloudy bubbling water, I wondered if I was even capable of teaching someone to ride a bike. Was I qualified? I hadn’t ridden a bike in years. I know they say you never forget, but I wasn’t so sure….

Sarah came back after a few minutes and took over again—which meant handing me Annie, who promptly began touching my face with her sticky little hands.

As I tried to avoid getting her fingers in my nostrils, it suddenly struck me that maybe Sarah was lonely.

She didn’t talk about her ex much, and I’d never met him, but he’d left her a single mom with no one to talk to except her baby—who was very cute, but not much of a conversationalist. Was that why she’d invited me to stay for dinner? Did she want someone to talk to? Was I a bitch for trying to leave her too? Though, it wasn’t like I was such a fantastic friend, anyway….

I watched Sarah fish out a piece of penne and bite into it. Apparently satisfied with the texture, she turned off the heat and drained the pot into her sink. She tossed the pasta in with the broccoli for a minute, then turned off the stove.

“All right,” she announced, clapping her hands. “Let’s eat.” She took a couple of plates down from a shelf and grabbed us each a fork. “Tell me when to stop,” she said and began spooning pasta onto one of the plates.

“That’s good,” I told her. She added some of my wacky cucumber salad on the side. “Thanks,” I said. She plated her own dinner and I followed her into the dining room. She cleared some space at the table for us, grabbed a couple of napkins, and took Annie from me, setting her in her high chair. We sat down.

“Feel free to add salt,” Sarah said. “I won’t be offended.”

I speared some pasta with my fork, making sure I got a bit of the sautéed alien broccoli, and took a bite. 

“This is really good,” I said, and it was true. The alien broccoli was crisp, a little sweet, and kind of nutty-tasting. Not bad. 

“You know, I kind of like the cucumbers like this,” Sarah said, trying them. I made a face.

“It’s okay, Sarah, you can tell me I screwed up the cucumbers. I’ll know for next time,” I added, for some reason. What was this 'next time' I spoke of? There was not supposed to be a 'next time!' “I mean, unless I’m banned now,” I tacked on. Lame. I was so lame today. I really was not trying. Sarah laughed.

“You’re not banned, silly,” she said. “You did a fine job. Besides,” she added, a little casually, “it was nice to have some company while I cook.”

I chewed more of my alien broccoli, thoughtful. “I used to watch my mom cook a lot,” I told her. “There was this stool in our kitchen, and I would just sit on it and watch her. She told me it made her feel like she was being tested. I don’t know what she was worried about; I would’ve eaten pretty much anything that wasn’t the cafeteria food at school. I was like a raccoon, that way. Still am.”

Sarah snorted, which surprised and kind of delighted me. I smiled a little.

“You talk about your mom a lot,” she noted.

“Do I?”

“Yeah. I think I’d like to meet her,” she said. I shrugged.

“Well, you can. She comes over every few weeks to tell me to clean up my apartment and buy groceries.” Should I just give up? Apparently my filter was functioning at negative capacity today. Sarah laughed again.

“All right, let me know,” she said.

“Sure.”

Eventually, we finished eating. I helped Sarah clear the plates, making another dumb alien joke she laughed too hard at. She set the dishes in the sink and Annie squealed, so I hurried over to give her her stuffed dog.

As Sarah walked me to the door, I realized I hadn’t managed to end things. That was probably bad. Then I had the strange thought that maybe friendship was a bit like alien broccoli: weird-looking, a little nutty, and surprisingly delicious.

“Thanks for having me,” I said as Sarah opened the door. I meant it to be a forced politeness, but it came out feeling oddly true.

“Thank you for staying,” she replied, a little quieter than usual. “We should do this again some time.”

“Yeah,” I said. I was feeling weirdly peaceful. I supposed I could worry about the fate of our friendship tomorrow. “We should.”

We said bye to each other and I stepped outside, Sarah closing the door behind me.

“Lay your weary head to re-e-e-est,” I sang quietly, because it was still stuck in my head. I unlocked my car. “Don’t you cry no more.”