Chapter 6: Friendship

Sarah and I are making bracelets. On Saturdays we often make bracelets. Or other jewelry. I’ve spent the morning in the hospital. Grandma is doing okay. Or so the doctors claim, according to my mom. I found it hard to tell, with the nurses coming in and out and the hospital and my family crammed into the room. She seemed exhausted, like there wasn’t enough oxygen in the room for all of us and the surgery and the pain. Like there wasn’t enough space, and someone had to leave or something had to give and so grandma, the way I know her, wasn’t really there. Not really around to be visited. Just wasn’t. Come back later, Leia, when the pain is better. Or the air. I’m stringing beads on a string, with more force than finesse. As if enough beads will cause the world to feel right again. To make sense. 

Sarah, too is making a bracelet. Her bracelet is an effortless combination of red gemstones. One bronze accent bead that sets the whole thing off perfectly, somehow giving the feeling of a living flame. Sarah is a genius at designing jewelry. On a good day I’m also pretty good at it, but not today. I slide my haphazard arrangement off the string, to start fresh. “Pass me the green ones” I ask Sarah and she slides over a little plastic box of green stone beads. “What are you making?” Sarah asks me. I shrug. “Not sure yet” I say. “You?” She holds up her red bracelet. The stones catch the light from the dining room table, creating little red light dots on the wood. I try to smile at her. “It looks good”, I say. She smiles back at me. Making jewelry is a friendship tradition for us, one that we’ve been following for many years. 

For a while we simply work in silence. I’ve finished laying out the green beads, together with some green-grey ones that match. I like the subtle gradient from grey to green, and back to grey. The little stone beads feel cool to the touch as I slowly start sliding them on the string. There’s a rhythm to it. Pick a bead, coax the string through the small hole, slide it down. Pick another bead and repeat. The holes in the beads are small enough that getting them on is strenous and requires focus. I’m about half way done getting them all on when Sarah lets out a large sigh, drawing my attention away from the beads and towards her. I look at her over the table. “What’s up?” I ask, cocking my head to the side to take her in. She looks… frustrated. A chaotic pile of beads is strewn on the table in front of her, including the red ones that were constituting a beautiful finished bracelet a few minutes ago. Seems like I’m not the only one who has trouble with the beading today. 

Sarah sighs again, shuffling the glowing red beads around in front of her. “Nate and I had a fight this morning”, she says, not making eye contact. Sarah and Nate have been fighting more recently, I think. They mostly don’t involve me, but sometimes I can hear them arguing in their room. It’s normal for couples to fight, I guess. Ben, my ex, and I definitely argued all the time. But then again, I haven’t had a relationship in so long that I don’t know what counts as normal. My normal consists of being alone, not having anyone. Sarah still isn’t making eye contact. “He never wants to do anything”, she continues. “And we never go anywhere.” Her voice is thin, and a little robotic, somehow sounding not at all like the Sarah I know. Like she’s reading off a list someone else has written for her to recite, not talking about the man she loves. “I want us to do things, to go places, but all he wants to do is sit at home and meditate.” I nod at her, which is pretty pointless, given that she still isn’t looking at me. “Have you told him about it?” I ask, trying to be helpful. She glares at me. Which, I guess, is at least a change from not making eye contact. “Of course I have”, she says, a note of exasperation in her tone. “But I don’t think he cares. He’ll always say that we’ll do it more in the future but then obviously we don’t. Like somehow he’s the one always trying to give me what everything I want, except in reality what I want just gets ignored.” I take a breath, slightly taken aback by the sharpness in her voice. Somehow I can’t imagine Nate not caring, or being as callous as she’s describing him. Sarah and Nate have always been the perfect couple, the perfect mixture of energies. Nate is sweet, and easy-going and adores Sarah. Sarah is boisterous and alive, full of jokes and pulling him along into her adventures. Pulling me along, too. I wonder if she feels the same way about me every time I want to stay home rather than go out. Now I’m the one not wanting to make eye contact.

“We’re not having sex”, Sarah continues, marching on with her litany of complaints. “We haven’t had sex in weeks and the last time we did it wasn’t any good. He never initiates. I always do. Like, I’m not even sure he wants to anymore. Wants me, anymore.” She has tears in her eyes now, angry red tears like little daggers ready to fly and rend themselves into whoever comes along and isn’t careful. I nod again. I’m not sure what to say. The tear daggers are waiting on her cheeks, watching me be silent, waiting to bore into me for daring to not have an opinion. Sarah’s hands on the table feel heavy and too big, like they’re being fists without being folded up. Like she’s taking up more space than a person should, filling the room with her energy. I’m looking down at the table again, where the orphaned beads from her disassembled bracelet glimmer red. “Can I use the red beads?” I ask, before I can stop myself. Sarah nods. “Yeah”, she says, her voice halfway between normal and far away. “Thanks” I say, automatically, or maybe for lack of a better thing to do with the situation. I scoop the red beads up, putting them in front of me, starting to string them back up on some of the leftover elastic string.

Nate, Sarah and I all met each other in psychology grad school. I met Sarah first, at an official feeling mixer with champagne in flutes and awkward faculty comingling. Even back then she was larger than life, tall and confident, waving me over to her group of friends to get to know me. We met Nate a few weeks later, after class. Sarah and I were already fast friends, despite having known each other for such a short time. He was one of only two men in our class otherwise composed out of women. That’s psychology grad school for you. I remember how boyish he looked, with his clean shaven face and lanky limbs, his blond hair cut short. His large, long-lashed blue eyes were beautiful, or would have been called beautiful if he had been a woman, his gaze sweet and a little bit mesmerizing. He had the habit, as I would learn in time, of keeping long eye contact, making women fall for him. Making Sarah fall for him, in those early months of grad school when everything was new and full of limitless, never-ending potential.

“Do you remember the day we first met Nate?” I ask, my tone gentle, my eyes still glued to the table in front of me. Sarah raises an eyebrow. “Yeah,” she says. “At the grad school reception.” I look up. “Actually, it was at class, a few weeks later”, I say, feeling immediately silly for correcting her. Like it really matters right now. Sarah nods. “Yeah”, she says, her eyes half closed, as if seeing the scene in front of her eyes. “At Tolman Hall.” I nod again. “I remember that old building”, I say. Tolman Hall. A brutalist building, all weathered concrete and square windows. They’ve demolished it since, and replace it with a modern building almost entirely made out of glass. “I kinda miss that ugly old building.” I say. Sarah smiles. “What makes you think of that day?” she asks. I shrug. “I was thinking of the necklace you were wearing that day.”

Sarah was there, that day at the reception, as I walked in, talking to two other women. She waved me over immediately, to include me in their conversation. I remember feeling grateful, having felt out of place at the fancy party. And I remember her outfit: A classy blue-ish cocktail dress emphasizing her height and curves. And a large, chunky necklace made out of seaglass and shells. I remember thinking that I had never met anybody who’d wear a necklace like that to a fancy party. It somehow made her look like a sea goddess.

“Here, help me with the glue”, I tell Sarah, holding the repaired bracelet out for her to apply the glue to the knot, fixing the knot inside one of the red beads. The bracelet creates its set of red light dots on the table, dancing chaotically like a red disco ball. The bracelet is pretty, but without the bronze spacer the red looks a little ungrounded. A little more like blood than like flame. I push the thought out of my mind as I hand the bracelet over to Sarah, who puts it over her wrist. It fits her perfectly.