Family Friends
By Kyra Kondis
Dana didn’t want to carpool with Marissa to pick up their daughters from boarding school for the summer. She had made the trek to Edgewood enough by herself, when Lindsay got in trouble and Dana was called up to mend things. It was only a two-hour drive north, not the road trip Marissa seemed to be planning for, as if they were trekking cross-country to the Grand Canyon.
But Marissa was good at making things a bigger deal than they needed to be. “Smoothie?” she asked as Dana slid into the passenger seat of her Escalade, a horrendously suburban car that Dana herself would never be caught dead owning.
“Sure,” said Dana, fixing a smile on her face and taking the plastic tumbler, which sweated with condensation. The smoothie was the color of orange juice, but tasted earthy. Dana winced.
“It’s turmeric!” Marissa said brightly, making a show of checking her mirrors before pulling out of her driveway. Her blonde hair was teased up and it reminded Dana of puffy cotton candy. “It’s good for women our age,” she added, waggling her eyebrows. Of course Marissa couldn’t just give Dana a smoothie; she needed the smoothie to be a healthy smoothie, to make a show of just how much Marissa cared about Dana and wanted the best for her, and that kind of bullshit.
Their daughters, Lindsay and Jenny, had been best friends since Dana and her then-husband, Lindsay’s dad, William, had moved into the house next door to Marissa six years ago. They’d been in their mid-thirties then, and Marissa was friendly and newly divorced, working from home as a business consultant of some sort, in the process of remodeling the home she got in the divorce proceedings. Jenny came to sleep over in the basement with Lindsay while her bathroom was being redone, and the girls—nine then, so young and round-faced, their limbs skinny like popsicle sticks—were inseparable after that. It was about the best thing Dana could have expected to come from moving out of the city and into the tiny, wealthy suburb; at least Lindsay wouldn’t feel the slowness, the isolation of the new area, if she had a friend.
Dana put the smoothie down and Marissa began relaying the plan again, which she’d gone over plenty of times on the phone. “So when we get home with the girls, Bill will have put up the table and the decorations in the backyards—right in-between the two, so it’s both of our yards kinda—with that banner that says you finished your first year at Edgewood! and then I’ll go right in and get the cake while you help the girls unload the car to stall them.”
“And then I take them around back and we all say surprise,” Dana echoed. Marissa tried harder than Dana at many things—maintaining her physical appearance, posting on social media, showing up at neighborhood functions—and while it often made her seem like the perfect, involved, attractive empty-nest mother, right now, it just made her seem foolish. What fifteen-year-olds would want a surprise “party” that was just attended by their moms, and one of their dads?
The worst part was that she heard William would be helping them throw the “party” from Marissa, not William. Dana knew the two of them were still friends—she wasn’t about to be that ex-wife, who expected her ex-husband to never have had female friends, or accused him of wanting to sleep with the mother of their daughter’s best friend—but it had been jarring, realizing just how separate she and William were as co-parents now that Lindsay was away at school. Marissa called him Bill, something Dana had thought he never really liked. If Dana hadn’t agreed to go with Marissa today, would Marissa have gone with William instead? The thought made her angry, though she couldn’t place exactly why.
The first time Dana had gone up to Edgewood had been that past August with William, just three months after the divorce, dropping Lindsay off. It was such a bittersweet moment, driving the increasingly obscure-looking highways with Lindsay in the back seat chattering about how the Edgewood school paper was ranked #3 in the country and was a sure-fire way of getting into an Ivy League college, and how excited she was to be going to the same boarding school as her best friend. Dana and William had looked at each other with soft smiles tugging at the corners of their mouths, knowing that they had done what some claimed impossible: they had raised a well-adjusted kid with good grades—good enough to get into Edgewood—and ambitions and healthy friendships, despite the time-bomb their marriage had become.
“Are you sure you still want to do this?” Dana had said into Lindsay’s hair when it was time for them to drive back, folding her into a hug. William waited by the car, parked in the green shade of the tree-lined campus entrance.
“I do, Mom,” Lindsay said in that duh voice she used, like she was rolling her eyes. She hugged Dana back. “You don’t have to worry about me.”
That night was the first night Dana had spent completely alone in the house. When William had moved out, she hardly noticed a change, but without Lindsay, it was like a new kind of silence had descended upon her, one she had imagined, but had never realized would be so stark.
“You know, Jenny made the varsity soccer team,” Marissa said, unwrapping a stick of mint gum and scrunching it between her bright pink lips. “Did I tell you? Coach Kane says she’s the best sophomore they’ve had in years. She’s got a summer training regimen and everything.”
“Wow,” Dana said, looking at the trees whizz past their windows. Marissa had told her this before, when she had called Dana to explain her big surprise party plot for the first time last month. Dana had just gotten back from visiting Edgewood to talk with the Dean of the school, since Lindsay had gotten three C’s on her mid-term report card.
“Did Lindsay pull her grades up?” Marissa asked, smacking her gum, as if she’d read Dana’s mind.
Lindsay’s the only reason your daughter even knows about Edgewood, Dana wanted to say. Jenny had only applied for tenth grade because Lindsay did—her ninth grade English teacher recommended it—and Dana knew for a fact that Marissa had to donate a good chunk of cash to the school to solidify Jenny’s admittance. “She did,” Dana said instead. “She did some extra credit.” Lindsay managed to stay around a 3.2 GPA, but the Dean had told Dana, in his stupid dark office lined with dusty books Dana was sure never got read, that if she wavered too close to 3.0 again, there would be trouble. “This is an institution for outstanding academics,” he warned.
Dana could feel Marissa watching her stare out the window of the Escalade. She turned her head to look at Dana every few seconds, like the pendulum of a clock. They had over an hour left in the drive and Dana was determined to make it as quiet and painless as possible. She was doing this for Lindsay.
But after about twenty minutes, Marissa said, plainly, “Dana, why aren’t we better friends?” Dana snapped her gaze from the window to Marissa, and then back to the window again. “Our girls are friends,” added Marissa, as if this were an explanation. Dana prickled at the words — our girls.
Truthfully, Dana had wanted to be friends with Marissa, at first. When things started going south with William—not long after they had moved to the suburbs—a friend seemed like a good thing to have. Dana missed the city, the sounds of traffic from the high-rise two-bedroom they used to occupy, the way she could sit in one of a myriad of cafés down the street from their building when William was at work and Lindsay was at school, watching people come in and out. It was always in motion, and though Dana liked being a stay-at-home mom and wasn’t sure what else she would be, the city made her feel as though she was doing it somewhere important and bustling and alive.
But then Marissa had befriended William first, since William happened to work at a marketing agency Marissa had partnered with once, and Dana was often the odd one out at the backyard barbecues Marissa started planning, watching her then-husband laugh with Marissa and help her tend to the grill. Once, in a moment of weakness, she’d even checked William’s text messages with Marissa, trying to see if the chemistry she’d sensed between them was something more, like intimacy; she’d only found a weeks-long constant chain of friendlike, but harmless, texts. Somehow, this was worse than if William had slept with Marissa, though—he talked to her like he talked to his best friends from college, and as with his friends, it was clear that Dana was on the outside of the circle.
Dana opened her mouth to reply to Marissa, then closed it. Even though she wished she could blame William for her aversion to Marissa, she knew he wasn’t the reason, or at least the only reason. Marissa continued, “Is it because I’m friends with Bill? Because I swear, nothing’s going on there. He’s a very good friend.”
“No,” said Dana finally, listening to Marissa chew her gum. Her breath was so strong, the car had begun to fill with that secondhand spearmint smell—not the fresh, minty smell you want, but the smell of someone else chewing mint gum—and Dana rolled the passenger’s side window down an inch. “I just—I've been busy working since Lindsay left. Trying out a career, and all that.” This wasn’t entirely true either—Dana didn't really need the money, and didn’t have any lucrative passions—but after Lindsay had gotten settled into school, Dana had sold a few freelance lifestyle articles to local guides, detailing the best restaurants and activities in the city.
“Well, then maybe we should spend more time together,” Marissa said. “God knows we’re both home enough.” Dana tried not to frown at her, taking in her big hair and her bright red fingernails gripping the steering wheel at 10 and 2, which, for whatever reason, Dana remembered Lindsey telling her was an antiquated hand position for driving—if you crash, you’re less likely to have your hand bones shattered by the air bag if you hold them at, say, 9 and 3.
“I mean,” said Dana, “you’re so busy working, and I’m... I’ve got my own stuff, too.”
Marissa sighed. “I just think it would be so fun for our girls if we knew each other better,” she said. “It’s been six years, for God’s sake, and I don’t even know your favorite color! We won’t all be neighbors or school-mates forever, you know. Wouldn’t it be nice to have close family friends for life? If you and I are friends, too, we’re more likely to all stay in touch.”
There it was again, our girls. Dana remembered the first time she’d gone up to Edgewood to respond to disciplinary actions, that past November. It had been raining, and she’d driven slow, the road looking more like a straight, black river in the gray morning. Lindsey had been caught cutting class three times, and as the school handbook said, three strikes, your parents are called.
“What’s going on, Linds?” Dana had asked Lindsey over lunch at a café off-campus, which she’d wormed the Dean into approving. Lindsey was slumped over her club sandwich but not eating, the bread growing soggy where the quartered pickle on the plate touched it.
“Jenny said I made her boyfriend cheat on her,” Lindsey finally mumbled. “She won’t talk to me. It’s been a week.” She was a new fifteen, and Dana remembered being that age—she had never, never wanted to tell her parents anything about boys or sex or love.
She waited to see if Lindsey would continue, and when she didn’t, said, “Do you want to talk about it?” During the divorce that spring, when they’d gone to family counseling a few times to learn how to communicate as a group, the therapist had emphasized framing things to fit the other person’s needs; never tell me what’s wrong, but always, do you want to tell me what’s wrong.
“No,” Lindsey had said. “I won’t sleep through class again, Mom, I swear.” She’d had purple bags under her eyes and Dana had wanted to ask her again, are you sure you want to be here? but somehow felt, in that moment, that perhaps Lindsey didn't even know the answer.
“Fights with friends can be really stressful,” she eventually said. Lindsay nibbled on her sandwich.
It wasn’t until they were in the car, headed back to campus, that Lindsay had said, “She said I must have come onto him, because he sent me a dick pic.” The words—dick pic—had been so strange to hear from her mouth, like something Dana hadn’t realized was part of her world yet. “I showed her the picture thinking she’d break up with him, and instead, she blamed me. She said I probably have daddy issues from the divorce. And that he wouldn’t have done something like that if I hadn’t started it.”
Dana felt like she had been slapped. What she wanted was first to storm into Jenny’s dorm and tell her to stop being a little asshole, and then to call up Marissa and tell her to talk some damn sense into her daughter. Jenny had always been a nice enough kid, but slightly less well-mannered than Lindsay—less likely to say thank you when Dana let them have ice cream before dinner as kids, for example—and Dana wondered if this had been an early sign that she would go down this kind of path.
“Is there anything I can do?” Dana had asked Lindsay when they arrived at her dorm, turning to face her. Lindsey kept her eyes on her knees.
“No, Mom,” she said. “I’ll be fine.”
It was Marissa who ended up calling Dana, on her cell, right after Dana got home. “Are you back? Can we talk?” she asked.
“No,” said Dana, even though her car was clearly in the driveway. “I’m not home.”
“Well,” Marissa had said, “I just wanted to check in on Lindsay. I talked to Bill about this earlier, too. She was getting involved with Jenny’s boyfriend, and it’s so unlike her—I just wanted to see if she’s okay, and if there’s anything I can do to help you both. I know how hard divorces can be on kids.”
Dana had let the dead air between them hang for a second, then said, “You talked to William about this?” Dana hadn’t even had time to talk to William about it yet. They had a call scheduled for later.
Marissa paused, as if surprised that this was what Dana had chosen to ask about. “Well, yes,” she said. “I felt it best if our families talked about this. The girls are so close, I just... I worry about them, you know?”
“The girls can handle it,” Dana said. “I’ll talk to you later.”
“I just,” Marissa said as Dana was about to hang up, “I just hope Lindsey knows that no boy is worth putting between them.”
About three days later, Lindsay called Dana from Edgewood and explained that everything was okay with her and Jenny; “She broke up with him because she caught him with his ex-girlfriend's—you know—photos on his phone,” she said. “She told me that next time she has a boyfriend, she’ll just keep him separate, so no one has to worry about anything like what just happened.”
Dana didn’t like how the onus was still on Lindsay in this solution—by not bringing future boyfriends around her, Jenny was suggesting that Lindsey was the problem, wasn’t she?—but she wasn’t sure how to say this without upsetting her daughter more. “Just make sure Jenny’s being a good friend, okay?” she finally said. When she and Lindsay hung up, she had stared at Marissa’s frosted-over lawn for a bit, thinking about storming over there and giving her a piece of her mind, when she saw William’s car pull up and drop Marissa off, restaurant to-go box in hand. She gave him a cheerful wave and he drove off. Dana had known they wouldn’t stop being close—she'd known since she saw their text messages—but seeing them together in-person made her feel like William wasn’t on the right side of things.
And she told him so, in a text that evening—you need to be on our daughter’s side here, she said. Ours.
What do you mean? He'd sent back. I am. Jenny’s boyfriend is scum. Somehow, this didn’t make Dana feel any better. And it didn’t help that each time Lindsay got in trouble after that—mostly because of horrible fights with Jenny about Jenny’s boyfriends, Jenny’s bad test grade, Jenny’s bad lacrosse tryout—Dana was the one who drove up to deal with it.
As they entered what she knew to be the final half-hour of the drive to Edgewood, Dana had no idea how to respond to Marissa’s interrogation. Why couldn’t their families be closer? Could she be so blunt as to say that she doesn’t think their girls are going to be lifelong friends? Or would it just sound like she was resentful, as if she was hoping that they wouldn’t be? But then again, was that not the truth? In the late spring, days away from summer, the trees around them were a deep shade of green, and Marissa quipped, “God, it’s beautiful here.” Of course she hadn’t seen it in the winter, dark and foreboding. She hadn’t had to come up here like Dana had.
So Dana didn’t answer. She didn’t say a single thing to Marissa, and when Marissa realized that Dana wasn’t going to explain her aversion to being family friends, she set her jaw, visibly grinding her teeth, blaming Dana, probably, in her head. For being stubborn, for being rude, for not wanting whatever it was that Marissa wanted for their girls. Maybe for the supposed “Daddy issues.” Dana wondered if Jenny had been this kind of friend all along and she just missed it, preoccupied with her failing relationship with William and then the divorce, or if it was a new thing, a side to her that being away from home had brought out. By the time Marissa was turning onto the gravel road leading into the Edgewood campus, Dana had come up with five reasons in her head why she should have known Jenny was a bad friend all along, and Marissa was humming along to the radio, her eyes locked straight ahead.
“I’ll text Lindsay that we’re here,” Dana finally said when they parked in a visitor spot outside the sophomore dorms. She tapped out a message, here! to which Lindsay responded with see u in a few! and a heart. There were other students walking to their cars, wheeling carts of their belongings with the assistance of attendants that Edgewood hired to help so the parents didn’t have to. Bougie, Dana had thought when she’d gotten the email explaining this, but then she’d chided herself for thinking such a thing from the large, suburban house that she didn’t need to work to afford. The one she’d fought to stay in during the divorce, even though she’d been the one who didn’t want to move to the suburbs. The one William gave up surprisingly easily. She had prepared for a fight; worse, she had prepared for the reason he wanted to stay to be that he wanted to be close to his good friend Marissa. That was probably the only reason Dana wanted to stay in the first place, if she was being honest—so he couldn’t.
“I see the girls!” Marissa squealed, opening the car door to wave, and Dana looked up to see them coming out of the brick building, two attendants behind them with their things. They were laughing, the sun hitting their faces, like they were the best of friends. They were, Dana supposed. For now.
Marissa turned to her while their daughters stopped on the sidewalk to chat with someone, a lanky boy carrying a longboard under one arm. “Are you sure,” she said, blinking at Dana with all the naïveté in the world, “this isn’t about me and Bill being friends?”
Dana watched her daughter shift where she was standing, almost leaning away from Jenny and the boy. She wondered if Jenny liked the boy and Lindsay was worried she’d be blamed if the boy made a move on her. Or, perhaps, if the boy was just a friend, but Lindsey was scared of all male attention now, or of getting more attention than Jenny.
“No,” she said, opening her door so she’d be ready to help Lindsay with her bags when they arrived at Marissa’s obnoxious car. “It’s about you.”
She didn’t even pause to look at Marissa’s face before getting out of the Escalade and swinging the door shut behind her. She leaned against the hot exterior of the car, waiting for her daughter to come to her. When she arrived, Dana would smile wide, give her a hug, and pretend to know nothing of a surprise party. She would smile at Jenny, too, and at Marissa, and she would do her part of the ridiculous plan. And of course, above all, she would pretend that everything was fine.
THE END