She was a heap of elbows and hair to me, a familiar metamorphosis, typical when she has something on her mind. Although my eyes were following the brown chips floating around in the mug of coffee idling in my hand, the woman whose return we were awaiting was also the subject of my thoughts. Unlike my rumpled friend, I wasn’t familiar enough with her to lay comatose on a kitchen table after crashing down head-first like I was earning my black belt. It must have been through sheer will that she was able to balance her upper torso on that waxed-to-Teflon table and the lower on those horribly painful chairs. After the flakes settled in my slum of a snow globe, I decided it was time to pull Alice from her stupor- her chair was one yawn away from carrying her tousled head to the even more horribly painful floor.
“Did I tell you,” I began as I swirled my cup, stirring the grounds as well as the hair pile, “that I saw a murder of silhouette crows spell your name last week? And a few days ago, in my glass a’ water, in the tiny bits of ice-” The warm, fuzzy cave that was her arms concealed my grin, but not my smugness, as the bats of her sarcasm promptly burst forth from the fleshy cavity.
“Celia, you card” grunted the hair, scooching her chair forward after rejoining the conscious world. Instead of baiting her with another eye-twitching reference to her name, I decided to lead the conversation somewhere constructive. Besides, after a lifetime of friendship, she knew how to get under my skin and I would’ve flipped the table over had I heard another hilarious mispronunciation of ‘Evehvuej.’ It has been my goal since I was twelve to hunt down and choke the descendants of the lackey who handled Eastern European immigrants on April 17, 1907. Some six syllable Slavic surname would have been better than the abortion scrawled on my great-grandfather’s immigration record.
“Should I,” I asked, craning my head down to see between her arms “tell Madame Alujevich that we can just buy it on On Demand?” A dumb question, as I already knew Alice’s answer and had no desire to call the woman. Her number was fresh in my phone, yet to be dialed, and I was reluctant to change that; we had barely surpassed the Acquaintance Milestone, that of exchanging numbers after three years of on-and-off small talk. Although I enjoyed our idle chit-chat and she seemed to express the same amusement, our relationship always lagged, growing like mold on a pineapple. Oddly enough, we clicked around the time the turmoil began and have been growing closer since then.
“No,” her head gently wobbled, “I need this time to plan what to say.” And I needed to rehearse the mixture of surprise and sorrow that I would have to express, because the I-already-knew-look would be catastrophic in every sense of the word. I should have known next to nothing about Eve; her entirety to me should have only been that facet at work, but she had become an open book. Out of concern and undoubtedly to shift some of the weight off of her shoulders- for which I can’t lay blame- Alice revealed that our friend was slowly sinking into darker waters, completely incapable of staying afloat. I knew she was drowning before I knew what she put in her coffee. My counterpart oozed sympathy for what she had become. I couldn’t; to me, it was simply Eve.
“G’dammit.” The door to the apartment rattled as its convulsing knob launched its routine counterattack against Alice’s keys, an admirable effort, as it was always defeated. I rose, about to offer support, but the brass battalion was pushed behind the threshold of room 144 of Grand Street Towers.
“You’ve got to get that fixed,” our triumphant friend said as Alice’s apartment welcomed her, striding towards the couch. “I feel like I’m raping your doorknob.” She went on to explain how Pulp Fiction wedged itself under her passenger seat, avoiding eye contact with Alice and I, though only one of the two sets was functioning. Why she bothered to hide the chafed, red aureoles around her eyes is beyond me, since women have the sixth sense of knowing when another has been crying, even if they don’t acknowledge it- which I was practicing.
“By the way, Al,” she turned her head, pretending all was well by flashing her profile, though she obscured her eyes with wisps of hair, “you’re no longer Jeuvheve, according to the placard-thing by the entrance. Just Jeve, now.” It’s strange how women behave, trying to convince others that they’re perfectly fine while silently screaming for them to notice something is wrong, and it was this screaming that Alice could no longer ignore. She finally untangled herself from her arms and got on her feet, a relief for me, as I was ready to pull out the Necronomicon and chant incantations until she rose from the depths of her elbows.
“You got a little…,” I murmured, drawing a circle around my head with my fingers. Gin blossoms were scattered across her face and her hair was thrown over her forehead. Alice took small, deliberate steps towards the woman with the crumbling façade, sliding her palm down her scalp to calm the blond rat’s nest. I followed, keeping my distance from the two and the olive green smudge on the ceiling that hovered like a thunderhead between them.
“I know you don’t know Celia that well, but,” her words were carefully spoken, like she was making sure there was a surface for her to stand on, “I’ve known her literally all my life and I need her here for this.” Her gaze was gentle, even compassionate, but I could see it was drilling a hole through Eve’s skull. Like a figurine revolving on a twisted spring, the woman before us pivoted around in erratic steps to face her assailant and retaliated with her own piercing stare. The silence betrayed Alice and roared her intentions before she could speak.
“Eve,” Alice struggled to keep her voice above a whisper, “you need help.” Instead of erupting with tears, angrily shifting the focus to the one pointing the finger, or making for the door, the cornered woman shook her head with a sigh, as if she were approached by a student inquiring when yesterday’s paper was due.
“Why would I get help?” she asked with genuine perplexity, head tilted to the side. Although I’m sure Alice anticipated this response, the irritation she had promised to suppress bedecked her face. Right on cue, she buried her forehead in her palm, groaning. Our new friend, Patience, had left without a farewell, along with the expressions and soft gasps I had prepared.
“Well,” she withdrew her supportive hand and held it before Eve, four extended fingers frozen in place, “You cry when you’re alone.”
Three remaining digits.
“You can barely keep from crying when you’re not alone.”
Two.
“You’re hardly able to pull yourself together and get any work done, which is all you do now.”
One.
“And I’m seriously worried.” I didn’t expect her frustration to come to a boil this quickly. “I see the way you stare at cars when you cross the street.” Eve’s eyelids flared. “And the way you look at the ground from that window on the 12th floor. You want to die,” those words emerged without gravity- they couldn’t after haunting her for months. “You need help.”
“Why?” The temperature was rising in Eve as well. “So I can fill a prescription once a month and go back to enjoying television, lunch breaks, and jogging?” I shuddered: to me, the question was rhetorical, but to Alice, it was bait.
“You…” The word swam in short breath. I expected Alice to bite her tongue so hard that blood would dribble down her chin. I expected her to hone her words into a pickaxe and strike the adamant woman’s core. I expected the hidden listeners to run for cover as the spark consuming Alice’s fuse met the detonator. But she looked at Eve as if she were a missing child’s smiling picture on a park bench. The transition from wrath to pity left me gawking at her with my head parallel to my shoulders. “You were happy. And not… in relation to now. Is going back to the mundane really worse than being like this?”
“Depends,” I took it upon myself to answer. Two surprised faces turned to meet my own, as I didn’t recall ordering my mouth to open. Nevertheless, I ran with it, “Depends on what she would be going back to.”
“Did I tell you,” I began as I swirled my cup, stirring the grounds as well as the hair pile, “that I saw a murder of silhouette crows spell your name last week? And a few days ago, in my glass a’ water, in the tiny bits of ice-” The warm, fuzzy cave that was her arms concealed my grin, but not my smugness, as the bats of her sarcasm promptly burst forth from the fleshy cavity.
“Celia, you card” grunted the hair, scooching her chair forward after rejoining the conscious world. Instead of baiting her with another eye-twitching reference to her name, I decided to lead the conversation somewhere constructive. Besides, after a lifetime of friendship, she knew how to get under my skin and I would’ve flipped the table over had I heard another hilarious mispronunciation of ‘Evehvuej.’ It has been my goal since I was twelve to hunt down and choke the descendants of the lackey who handled Eastern European immigrants on April 17, 1907. Some six syllable Slavic surname would have been better than the abortion scrawled on my great-grandfather’s immigration record.
“Should I,” I asked, craning my head down to see between her arms “tell Madame Alujevich that we can just buy it on On Demand?” A dumb question, as I already knew Alice’s answer and had no desire to call the woman. Her number was fresh in my phone, yet to be dialed, and I was reluctant to change that; we had barely surpassed the Acquaintance Milestone, that of exchanging numbers after three years of on-and-off small talk. Although I enjoyed our idle chit-chat and she seemed to express the same amusement, our relationship always lagged, growing like mold on a pineapple. Oddly enough, we clicked around the time the turmoil began and have been growing closer since then.
“No,” her head gently wobbled, “I need this time to plan what to say.” And I needed to rehearse the mixture of surprise and sorrow that I would have to express, because the I-already-knew-look would be catastrophic in every sense of the word. I should have known next to nothing about Eve; her entirety to me should have only been that facet at work, but she had become an open book. Out of concern and undoubtedly to shift some of the weight off of her shoulders- for which I can’t lay blame- Alice revealed that our friend was slowly sinking into darker waters, completely incapable of staying afloat. I knew she was drowning before I knew what she put in her coffee. My counterpart oozed sympathy for what she had become. I couldn’t; to me, it was simply Eve.
“G’dammit.” The door to the apartment rattled as its convulsing knob launched its routine counterattack against Alice’s keys, an admirable effort, as it was always defeated. I rose, about to offer support, but the brass battalion was pushed behind the threshold of room 144 of Grand Street Towers.
“You’ve got to get that fixed,” our triumphant friend said as Alice’s apartment welcomed her, striding towards the couch. “I feel like I’m raping your doorknob.” She went on to explain how Pulp Fiction wedged itself under her passenger seat, avoiding eye contact with Alice and I, though only one of the two sets was functioning. Why she bothered to hide the chafed, red aureoles around her eyes is beyond me, since women have the sixth sense of knowing when another has been crying, even if they don’t acknowledge it- which I was practicing.
“By the way, Al,” she turned her head, pretending all was well by flashing her profile, though she obscured her eyes with wisps of hair, “you’re no longer Jeuvheve, according to the placard-thing by the entrance. Just Jeve, now.” It’s strange how women behave, trying to convince others that they’re perfectly fine while silently screaming for them to notice something is wrong, and it was this screaming that Alice could no longer ignore. She finally untangled herself from her arms and got on her feet, a relief for me, as I was ready to pull out the Necronomicon and chant incantations until she rose from the depths of her elbows.
“You got a little…,” I murmured, drawing a circle around my head with my fingers. Gin blossoms were scattered across her face and her hair was thrown over her forehead. Alice took small, deliberate steps towards the woman with the crumbling façade, sliding her palm down her scalp to calm the blond rat’s nest. I followed, keeping my distance from the two and the olive green smudge on the ceiling that hovered like a thunderhead between them.
“I know you don’t know Celia that well, but,” her words were carefully spoken, like she was making sure there was a surface for her to stand on, “I’ve known her literally all my life and I need her here for this.” Her gaze was gentle, even compassionate, but I could see it was drilling a hole through Eve’s skull. Like a figurine revolving on a twisted spring, the woman before us pivoted around in erratic steps to face her assailant and retaliated with her own piercing stare. The silence betrayed Alice and roared her intentions before she could speak.
“Eve,” Alice struggled to keep her voice above a whisper, “you need help.” Instead of erupting with tears, angrily shifting the focus to the one pointing the finger, or making for the door, the cornered woman shook her head with a sigh, as if she were approached by a student inquiring when yesterday’s paper was due.
“Why would I get help?” she asked with genuine perplexity, head tilted to the side. Although I’m sure Alice anticipated this response, the irritation she had promised to suppress bedecked her face. Right on cue, she buried her forehead in her palm, groaning. Our new friend, Patience, had left without a farewell, along with the expressions and soft gasps I had prepared.
“Well,” she withdrew her supportive hand and held it before Eve, four extended fingers frozen in place, “You cry when you’re alone.”
Three remaining digits.
“You can barely keep from crying when you’re not alone.”
Two.
“You’re hardly able to pull yourself together and get any work done, which is all you do now.”
One.
“And I’m seriously worried.” I didn’t expect her frustration to come to a boil this quickly. “I see the way you stare at cars when you cross the street.” Eve’s eyelids flared. “And the way you look at the ground from that window on the 12th floor. You want to die,” those words emerged without gravity- they couldn’t after haunting her for months. “You need help.”
“Why?” The temperature was rising in Eve as well. “So I can fill a prescription once a month and go back to enjoying television, lunch breaks, and jogging?” I shuddered: to me, the question was rhetorical, but to Alice, it was bait.
“You…” The word swam in short breath. I expected Alice to bite her tongue so hard that blood would dribble down her chin. I expected her to hone her words into a pickaxe and strike the adamant woman’s core. I expected the hidden listeners to run for cover as the spark consuming Alice’s fuse met the detonator. But she looked at Eve as if she were a missing child’s smiling picture on a park bench. The transition from wrath to pity left me gawking at her with my head parallel to my shoulders. “You were happy. And not… in relation to now. Is going back to the mundane really worse than being like this?”
“Depends,” I took it upon myself to answer. Two surprised faces turned to meet my own, as I didn’t recall ordering my mouth to open. Nevertheless, I ran with it, “Depends on what she would be going back to.”
