Once we’ve bought a new phone, we walk down toward the canal and Carmen has to stop several times to rattle a stone around in the toe of her shoe. Why don’t you take the shoe off, I want to say to her, and take the stone out, but my head feels sickish and heavy with the promise of oncoming weather, and anyway what difference would it make.
“When I broke up with Tom,” Carmen says, “it was hard because for so long afterward I felt like I was still in it, d’you know what I mean? Like he’d moved on and I was still in this relationship all by myself.”
“When you broke up with Tom,” I say, “you threw all his clothes out onto the street.” Carmen looks at me like this is hardly the point.
“What I’m saying is, the pain is in the aftermath, more than it is the break.”
“Well, we haven’t broken up,” I say. “But thank you.”
Carmen is wearing her glasses today and they give her eyes a near-telescopic exaggeration. We walk along the towpath sandwiched between the canal and the fenced-off gardens of the houses that back onto the water and she asks me what it is I’m worrying about.
“She’s been away so often before,” she says to me without waiting for an answer but in the kind of voice that strains to make it clear she’s open to unpleasant confidences. “Even before this time, I mean. I know it’s for her job or whatever but I can imagine it’s frustrating. It’s difficult to navigate a relationship like that—everything always working to her schedule. Especially this time, with how long it took, with how long it was supposed to take. The world doesn’t revolve around her, around when she decides to be home, you know?”
OK, I think of saying, but that’s not the point. The problem isn’t that she went away, it’s that nothing about her going away felt normal. It isn’t that her being back is difficult, it’s that I’m not convinced she’s really back at all.
Of course, I haven’t actually given Carmen many details, which does make things harder to explain. Carmen might know that Leah was only supposed to be away for three weeks but she doesn’t know how Leah has been behaving, for the most part, I think, because I’m too exhausted by the prospect of her comparing it to something that Tom used to do. I remember when I was with Tom and he’d play Red Dead Redemption all day and eat Pringles and not put his shoes away, so believe me I know what you’re going through. This, I suppose, is unfair of me. Carmen’s my friend—my best friend, I sometimes worry—and I’m supposed to want to share my miseries with her, to grasp her hand and confide all the blandly conventional problems that pepper my day as much as anybody else’s. I do love her, I think for her familiarity, for the way she demands to see me where other old friendships have fallen by the wayside, the victims of mutual inattention. She is a good friend, inasmuch as she is a present friend, or at least a friend who likes to make plans. And yet too often I find myself stoppered by unwillingness to admit to basic frustrations, to look at her across a coffee shop table and respond to her humdrum admissions with a straight me, too. Carmen talks about her bad dates, about arguing with her brothers, about hating her next-door neighbors for always allowing their children to kick balls against the dividing wall, and I listen and I nod and I give her advice and I tell her things are fine with me, that I really can’t complain. I suppose, in the main, this comes from a wish to appear in control, if not to say superior. I hate and have always hated her insistence on comparing Tom to Leah, and perhaps I have allowed this feeling to bleed too freely into everything else, allowed myself to clam up around the possibility of shared experience. Really, no one should feel as paralyzingly superior as I do around Carmen, around a lot of people, especially given that in many ways I have little enough to back this feeling up. It’s a failing, and one I am aware of. Carmen is patient with me, I think, or perhaps she simply doesn’t recognize my behavior as rudeness, accepts my role as a good listener as synonymous with being a good friend. Leah always used to say that I was kind, but I’ve never felt at all convinced of that. You’re interested in people, she would say, you like to hear about their siblings, and I would tell her I wasn’t sure that was the same as being kind to them.
“Miri?”
I realize I have not spoken in several minutes and Carmen is looking at me with a keenness that is at least 40 percent real, though unquestionably assisted by the magnification of her eyes behind her glasses.