She Matters by Susanna Sonnenberg

thinking about Claudia, holding her off with one arm while I took hold of her semiboyfriend. In the kitchen after sex, Diet 7-Up cans on the table next to the roses I’d put in a vase, we said that we couldn’t tell Claudia, we mustn’t. We were both very clear about that.
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    That root-cellar summer Claudia and I phoned all the time, mulled our preparations and packing for college, where we’d be only two hundred miles apart instead of two thousand—not as close as we wanted, but close. She fluttered and didn’t seem to know what she was doing, what to do, and this made me the one who knew more, who could calm her when things ended with Mick. I had our photo in a frame, the picture with our arms around each other, our faces splendid with a joke of our own cultivated vocabulary. Behind us you could see our former campus. I don’t know who took the picture, because who else really mattered to us? She visited me in the fall, a weekend in my freshman dorm; and I took the bus to New Jersey to visit her, maybe twice, as I remember snow, and not snow. She walked me around, introduced me to dorm mates whose open doors we passed, but I wished for Sunday to hurry up, and I double-checked the bus schedule. We didn’t understand how to tend our friendship beyond our common world. What could we talk about? I had failed to calculate the pernicious results of so much lying.
    We went to brunch Sunday at a B and B, sharing the weight of my small duffel as we walked in the whipping white cold, snow and the crusted sidewalk breaking under our shoes. The dining room was close with adult voices and silverware, the low tones and thehigh silver notes. We were used to entering, to our unrivaled female power, but after we’d put the popovers and seeded jam on our plates, filled our cups with coffee, she talked in her half-decided way, her stops and starts, she checked to see what I thought; and I wasn’t listening. I just wanted to leave. She needed so much, and I knew I could withhold it from her, take from her, because I had, which made me anxious to get to the out-of-business gas station where we’d wait until the Adirondack bus lumbered around the tiny corner and pulled in, and then I could put miles between myself and the rotten real me. From my bus seat I looked down as Claudia waved both arms, hurling kisses at the window, the teen drama for others to watch, and I silently pressed the driver into action. Please pull away, I was thinking, and waving.
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    The years after college we shared little. She couldn’t afford to come to Montana, and she lived in Cincinnati houses I never saw, our connection less and less vital. “Hi, Sue!” “Hi, Claudia!” we burst out at the start of each call, excited and ready. History filled in for us.
    â€œGuess what I heard on the radio! ‘Our Lips Are Sealed!’ Still have that Go-Gos cassette?”
    â€œIt’s in the car!”
    â€œGod, and Juice Newton sucked,” one of us would say. “Do you have any idea how much she sucked?”
    Then the pauses. We were fading. We had our stories—the time we tried to order a pitcher at Pizza Hut, the time we pretended to be lesbians and totally freaked out those boys by the bleachers. We stuck with those.
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    Claudia had a new man, again older. He got angry, she said.
    She said, “He tends towards violence.”
    â€œHe’s hit you?”
    â€œOh, no,” she said. “He did break a wall.” She was upbeat. They got married.
    One night she called crying, but it wasn’t about him. Her father had drowned. I’d met him over graduation weekend, watched him eat a hamburger, had seen his fingers work the laces of his buffed, black shoes. How could these words be uttered— drowning accident —how could they be ? She raced me through each frantic frame, crazed. I wanted to say