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I’m your best friend
, Peggy kept saying at
the time, in an increasingly weird voice. She couldn’t accept Marianne’s
laissez-faire attitude to the situation. You realise people are talking about
you, Peggy said one night while Marianne was packing. Marianne didn’t
know how to respond. After a pause, she replied thoughtfully: I don’t think
I always care about the same things you care about. But I do care about
you. Peggy threw her hands in the air wildly, walked around the coffee
table twice.
I’m your best friend, she said. What am I supposed to do?
I don’t really know what that question means.
I mean, what position does this put me in? Because honestly, I don’t
really want to take sides.
Marianne frowned, zipping a hairbrush into the pocket of her suitcase.
You mean, you don’t want to take my side, she said.
Peggy looked at her, breathing hard now from her exertion around the
coffee table. Marianne was kneeling down by her suitcase still.
I don’t know if you really understand how people are feeling, Peggy
said. People are upset about this.
About me breaking up with Jamie?
About the whole drama. People are actually upset.
Peggy looked at her, awaiting a response, and Marianne replied
eventually: Okay. Peggy rubbed a hand over her face and said: I’ll leave
you to pack up. As she went out the door she added: You should consider
seeing a therapist or something. Marianne didn’t understand the suggestion.
I should see a therapist because I’m
not
upset? she thought. But it was hard
to dismiss something she had admittedly been hearing all her life from
various sources: that she was mentally unwell and needed help.
Joanna is the only one who has kept in touch. In the evening they talk
on Skype about their coursework, films they’ve seen, articles Joanna is
working on for the student paper. On-screen her face always appears dimly
lit against the same backdrop, her cream-coloured bedroom wall. She never
wears make-up anymore, sometimes she doesn’t even brush her hair. She
has a girlfriend now called Evelyn, a graduate student in International
Peace Studies. Marianne asked once if Joanna saw Peggy often, and she
made a quick wincing expression, only for a fraction of a second, but long
enough for Marianne to see. No, said Joanna. I don’t see any of those
people. They know I was on your side anyway.
I’m sorry, said Marianne. I didn’t want you to fall out with anyone
because of me.
Joanna made a face again, this time a less legible expression, either
because of the poor lighting, the pixelation on-screen, or the ambivalent
feeling she was trying to express.
Well, I was never really friends with them anyway, said Joanna. They
were more your friends.
I thought we were all friends.
You were the only one I got on with. Frankly I don’t think Jamie or
Peggy are particularly good people. It’s not my business if you want to be
friends with them, that’s just my opinion.
No, I agree with you, said Marianne. I guess I just got caught up in how
much they seemed to like me.
Yeah. I think in your better judgement you did realise how obnoxious
they were. But it was easier for me because they never really liked me that
much.
Marianne was surprised by this matter-of-fact turn in the conversation,
and felt a little castigated, though Joanna’s tone remained friendly. It was
true, Peggy and Jamie were not very good people; bad people even, who
took joy in putting others down. Marianne feels aggrieved that she fell for
it, aggrieved that she thought she had anything in common with them, that
she’d participated in the commodity market they passed off as friendship.
In school she had believed herself to be above such frank exchanges of
social capital, but her college life indicated that if anyone in school had
actually been willing to speak to her, she would have behaved just as badly
as anyone else. There is nothing superior about her at all.
*
Can you turn and face to the window? says Lukas.
Sure.
Marianne turns on the mattress, legs pulled up to her chest.
Can you move, like … legs down in some way? says Lukas.
Marianne crosses her legs in front of her. Lukas scoots the tripod
forward and readjusts the angle. Marianne thinks of Connell’s email
comparing her to a deer. She liked the line about thoughtful faces and sleek
bodies. She has lost even more weight in Sweden, she’s thinner now, very
sleek.
She’s decided not to go home for Christmas this year. She thinks a lot
about how to extricate herself from ‘the family situation’. In bed at night
she imagines scenarios in which she is completely free of her mother and
brother, on neither good nor bad terms with them, simply a neutral non-
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