She smiled shyly. “Yeah, me too.”
“Really?” I looked at her. Something real ticked between us.
“Yeah. All that crazy stuff we used to do.” She laughed awkwardly. “I don’t know. I hope I haven’t been acting too weird or anything. It’s actually really nice to see you again. It was surprising. But it’s actually really nice.”
* * *
—
Out on the street, in that soft gray, fuzzy New York night, we began walking north. At a crosswalk I stopped. “Lace?” The light changed, but she stayed still, watching me. “I’m sorry.” I pushed the hair from my face. “I’m sorry for what happened. I want you to know that.”
She whitened. She didn’t accept the apology. But she didn’t reject it either. We crossed the street and passed a man sleeping on cardboard. At the subway entrance she said, “Well, thanks for coming out.”
“Thanks for asking me.”
She paused a moment more, so that the moment stretched like taffy, almost as if we were on a date, that awkward, sweet moment of wondering whether you will kiss or just walk away, and then she was saying, “This is strange, I can’t even believe I’m saying this, but would you ever want to move in?”
“Really?” I stiffened, thinking of that bare room, the dark trim and simple wooden desk, the solemn oak spreading its branches.
“I mean, I thought about it after you left that day. You’re right, I’m not really doing anything with that room. It’s sort of a waste.”
“Oh my God, really? That’s so nice. That’s so nice of you.” A strange giddiness rimmed my shattered lungs.
“Yeah, well.” Suddenly she looked uncertain. “It could be fun.”
So I moved in. I didn’t have much: two suitcases, a duffel, and a cardboard box of old notebooks, all of which I schlepped over on a soggy overcast day in early September.
That first night was strange. I remember thanking her profusely for taking me in, and apologizing for leaving my suitcase in the hall. We were tentative around each other, overly polite about who should use the bathroom before bed first, quick to wash even our water glasses after use. When I finally shut the door to my room, I was relieved. We were like a couple on our first weekend trip together, plunged into unnerving proximity. I wondered if this had been a mistake.
The room, though, was perfect, dark and serious, ideal for finishing a book. When I had first seen it, there had been no bed, but apparently Lacie knew someone who knew someone, and by the first night, one had arrived: narrow and thin, with a saggy mattress, but all mine, and for free. When I thanked her, she waved me off.
As it turned out, Lacie knew lots of people, and they were all shedding furniture or mounting plays or opening tiny group shows in sub-galleries by the Gowanus Canal. She introduced me around, and soon things I needed—not just the bed, but a dresser, and a desk lamp, and a membership card to MoMA—came my way. Supervising this flow of things delighted Lacie: it was like a game to her. Standing in the doorway to my room, she’d say, “God, the overhead light in here is ghastly. Let me ask Sophie if they’re still trying to get rid of that lamp,” and before I could protest, her phone would be out.
When I timidly suggested that I take the middle shelf for groceries, she gave me her famous head tilt. “For what?”
“Well, just so our food doesn’t get mixed up.”
In her eyes, distrust. Clearly this was not part of the plan. “I mean, we could also just, like, keep track?” My voice climbed an octave, hesitant, and yet I was also flaring with injustice: this—sharing a refrigerator—was what made her decide I was not the person she thought I was? She had no idea. Sure, we had known each other as kids, but the quotidian details of my adult self—such as whether I preferred to share food with a housemate—were as yet mysteries to her. I couldn’t already be disappointing her.
We were standing in the kitchen when this came up, and after my suggestion she slowly turned, as if seeing for the first time the ancient gas stove, the fridge plastered with snapshots, the glass canisters of rice and lentils and beans. Slowly she said, “I thought we could kind of—share food. I mean, I’m always buying too much anyway. And I don’t want to feel like the apartment is divided in half.” Her voice rose, even as she smiled self-consciously at her own sincerity. “I want it to feel like a home.”
Home. I wanted so badly to believe in the myth of us, in the myth of all female friendships, the deep ones, the lasting ones: that they were more true than romance, more fun than children. That they were a place to live: home.
“Yeah, me too,” I said. “A home. Let’s do that.”
* * *
—
Turned out, Lacie was that rarity, a single woman who had figured out food. She rarely threw out groceries, and yet there was always plenty to eat. When she came home from the farmers’ market on Sunday mornings, she set about chopping, roasting, broiling, and steaming. Then she stored the cooked vegetables in Tupperware, ready to be tossed into stir-frys or stews. As the days cooled, she became serious about soup: parsnip soup, lentil soup, minestrone. Bread too—dough was often rising above the stove, ready for her to punch it down a few times and then bake at night. Meanwhile, carrots and cucumbers pickled in vast glass jars, labneh strained through cheesecloth, and chickpeas soaked beneath a tea towel.
Years of solo living had had the opposite effect on me: I was used to subsisting on cheese and crackers, on cutting open an avocado and spooning out the meat while standing over the sink, on cereal at ten P.M. and cans of soup and frozen burritos. Hunger to me had always been a problem to solve with minimal fuss.
Still, I tried. Using a recipe from one of her cookbooks, I made lamb meatballs, but they came out both charred and raw. I attempted a salad with a dozen ingredients, but after laboring for two hours, hacking at impossible gourds and slicing the tips off green beans, I devoured the whole thing and still felt famished. Every recipe I tried was incredibly complicated, full of strange, expensive spices and herbs, of which annoyingly awkward amounts always remained.
Soon I gave up. I still bought groceries, and urged Lacie to eat them, but I couldn’t nourish her the way she nourished me. Every time I ate I felt both guilty and ravenous. Everything she made was so good.
Without making a big fuss about it, she often happened to be cooking when I got home, and always spooned me an extra bowl. While we ate she listened to me complain about work: the assignment to probe the “semiotic significance” of Huck Finn; the apartment with a yellow neon sign that read MY ASS IS HAUNTED; the sex therapist who dyed his eyebrows black but left his comb-over snowy white.
I confessed, too, that sometimes when a kid gave the wrong answer, and I didn’t really know how to do the question, I lied and said it was right. “I just, like, have this moment of impatience and exhaustion. I’m just like, Yeah, that’s fine. That’s great.”