After she left, I spent days in the house alone, poring over my childhood photo albums, sobbing over piles of my mother’s unopened packages of pantyhose. I cried over my father’s deathbed pajamas, the dog-eared biographies of Theodore Roosevelt and Josef Mengele on his bedside table, a green nickel in the pocket of his favorite pants, a belt he’d had to drill holes in to make smaller as he’d grown sicker and thinner in the months leading up to his death.
There was no big drama. Things were quiet.
I imagined what I’d say to my mother if she suddenly reappeared now in Reva’s basement. I imagined her disgust at the cheapness of things, the mustiness of the air. I couldn’t think of anything I wanted to ask her. I had no burning urge to proclaim any fury or sadness. “Hello,” was as far as I got in our hypothetical dialogue.
I got up out of bed and fished through one of the cardboard boxes on Reva’s bureau. In her senior yearbook, I found only one photo of her, the standard portrait. Hers stood out in the rows of boring faces. She had big frizzy hair, chubby cheeks, overplucked eyebrows that zoomed across her forehead like crooked arrows, dark lipstick, thick black eyeliner. Her gaze was slightly off center, vague, unhappy, possessed. She looked like she’d been much more interesting before she left for college—a Goth, a freak, a punk, a reject, a delinquent, an outcast, a fuckup. As long as I’d known her, she’d been a follower, a plebeian, straitlaced and conformist. But it seemed as though she’d had a rich, secretive interior life in high school, with desires beyond the usual drinking and foosball soirees suburban Long Island had to offer. So, I gathered, Reva moved to Manhattan to go to college and decided she’d try to fit in—get skinny, be pretty, talk like all the other skinny, pretty girls. It made sense that she’d want me as her best friend. Maybe her best friend in high school had been one of the weirdos, like her. Maybe she’d had some kind of disability—a gimp arm, Tourette’s, Coke-bottle glasses, alopecia. I imagined the two of them together in that black basement bedroom listening to music: Joy Division. Siouxsie and the Banshees. It made me a little jealous to think of Reva being depressed and dependent on anyone but me.
After my mother’s funeral, I went back to school. My sorority sisters didn’t ask if I was okay, if I wanted to talk. They all avoided me. Only a few left notes under my door. “I’m so sorry you’re going through this!” Of course, I was grateful to be spared the humiliation of a patronizing confrontation by a dozen young women who would probably have just shamed me for not “being more open.” They weren’t my friends. Reva and I were in French class together that year. We were conversation partners. She took notes for me while I was away, and when I came back, she wasn’t afraid to ask questions. In class, she diverged from the curriculum to ask, in halting, bad French, how I was doing, what had happened, if I felt sad or angry, if I wanted to get together outside of class to speak in English. I agreed. She wanted to know every detail of the whole ordeal with my parents, hear the deep insights I had gleaned, how I felt, how I’d mourned. I gave her the basic gist. Talking to Reva about misery was insufferable. “Look on the bright side,” was what she wanted everyone to do. But at least she cared.
Senior year, I moved out of the sorority house and into a two-bedroom suite with Reva in an off-campus dorm. Living together solidified our bond. I was the vacant, repressed depressive, and she was the obsessive blabbermouth, always knocking on my door, asking random questions, looking for any excuse to talk. I spent a lot of time staring at the ceiling that year, trying to cancel out thoughts about death with thoughts about nothingness. Reva’s frequent interruptions probably kept me from jumping out the window. Knock, knock. “Chat break?” She liked to look through my closet, turning over price tags, checking the sizes of all the clothes I’d bought with the money I’d inherited. Her obsession with the material world pulled me out of whatever existential wormhole I’d wandered into.
I never confronted Reva about the fact that I could hear her vomiting when she came back from the dining hall each night. All she ate at home were sugar-free mini yogurts and baby carrots, which she dressed with yellow mustard. The palms of her hands were orange from all the carrots she ate. Dozens of mini yogurt containers cluttered the recycling bin.
That spring, I went for long walks around the city with earplugs in. I felt better just listening to the echoing sounds of my breathing, the phlegm roiling in my throat when I swallowed, my eyes blinking, the weak ticking of my heart. Gray days spent staring down at sidewalks, skipping classes, shopping for things I’d never wear, paying through the nose for a gay guy to put a tube up my asshole and rub my stomach, tell me how much better I would feel once my colon was clean. Together we watched little flakes of shit flowing through the outgoing tube. His voice was soft but enthusiastic. “You’re doing great, doll,” he’d say. More often than I needed, I’d get face peels and pedicures, massages, waxings, haircuts. That was how I mourned, I guess. I paid strangers to make me feel good. I might as well have hired a prostitute, I thought. That’s kind of what Dr. Tuttle was years later, I thought—a whore to feed me lullabies. If anything was going to make me cry, it was the thought of losing Dr. Tuttle. What if she lost her license? What if she dropped dead? What would I do without her? Then, finally, in Reva’s basement bedroom, I felt a tinge of sadness. I could feel it in my throat, like a chicken bone caught in my windpipe. I loved Dr. Tuttle, I guessed. I got up and drank some water from the tap in the bathroom. I went back to bed.