Our mother, who continued her whole life to exchange lipstick-kissed letters with her best friend in Armenia, must have seen herself in Jean and Emily’s friendship. This is the only reason we can come up with to explain why she made Emily the one exception to her rule that Jean couldn’t spend the night at anyone else’s house. Mom had no idea, of course, that Emily’s dad was addicted to methamphetamine. She would’ve died even earlier had she found out. Jean put two and two together only because Emily’s house always smelled like cleaning products but never looked clean. The Goodsons owned a pet iguana, and Jean used to pluck out the cigarette butts Emily’s dad tossed into the terrarium. Emily’s parents fought constantly — screaming at each other for hours into the night — and Jean rarely got any sleep. In the mornings, Emily wouldn’t look Jean in the face during breakfast, and then she’d apologize. But Jean always told her she never heard the fighting, told her she slept like a rock.
When Emily’s parents divorced, she moved in with her mom, a cake decorator at Albertsons. The two of them supported each other, and Jean couldn’t exactly blame Emily for staying in the Antelope Valley after high school. Still, Jean felt sorry for Emily. She even began to feel, secretly, superior.
Which was a first. All their lives, Emily had been better at everything. She was blond and big breasted, for one, in a town that seemed to appreciate that kind of thing. Jean, on the other hand, had always described herself as a hairy-armed, bespectacled, dark-skinned dork. (The most serious boyfriend she’d had, for God’s sake, turned out to be a skinhead.) Together Jean and Emily spent most of their adolescence at the mall, scouting for cute boys with skateboards, and Emily always ended up making out with someone in the photo booth at the arcade while his invariably nerdy friend killed time with Jean, aiming for 100s on the Skee-Ball ramp. On top of this, Jean wasn’t even the better nerd between them — Emily scored higher on every test and appeared in more club photos in the yearbook. She even started an animal rights group her junior year, leading protests at KFC, which, partly due to Emily’s looks, Jean suspected, were broadcast on local television. All of which is to say, Jean looked up to her friend, and sometimes, years later, when people asked about her early political life, Jean fibbed and used parts of Emily’s story as her own.
And so she was disappointed with Emily for doing what most girls in the Antelope Valley did: for staying in the desert, for not getting an education, for not using her intelligence and her passion and — yeah, sure — her good looks to make some major changes in the world. Emily would have been a better activist than Jean, probably. But there was Emily’s mother, newly single, and for that reason, Jean kept her disappointment to herself.
But then Emily’s mother remarried, purchased a cute and memorable domain name for her cake decorating service, and was getting along better than she ever had, and yet Emily still stayed. She got a new boyfriend, a twice-her-age engineer named — Jean couldn’t believe it — Gunnar. Gunnar set Emily up with an office job at Lockheed Martin or Northrop or Boeing — Jean could never remember which. The pay was three times what Emily was making at Chili’s, and when she moved into Gunnar’s brand-new, three-thousand-square-foot tract home, the first thing she did was she called Jean. Jean told her over the phone how great Emily’s new life was, how exciting, all while stifling the various moral questions being raised in her mind. Namely: (a) Emily’s contributions to suburban sprawl, (b) her work — even as a secretary — in the military — industrial complex, and (c) her decision to share her life with a man named Gunnar.
And then, just a few months ago, Emily called again to say she was engaged. Gunnar had taken her out to the desert on his four-wheeler, proposed to her from his dusty knee while she sat on the ATV. How romantic—imagine how Jean must have sounded on the phone, trying to congratulate her. Emily — still not dumb — could sense Jean’s condescension, and so my sister started to feel like a jerk. She loved Emily, after all — she really did. So she said, You know what? If you’ll have me, it’d be great to visit, to meet your fiancé, and to say congratulations in person.
And so Jean took two days off from work, bought a plane ticket, and stayed with our parents the night before she planned to meet up with Emily.
The next afternoon, Emily came by to pick her up. My parents hadn’t seen Emily in years, and Mom tried her best to bridge the awkward gaps in her knowledge of Emily’s new life. Eventually Mom — she was feeling pretty good that day, Jean thought — resorted to the past. They spoke of sleepovers and grade school teachers and the time Jean, chasing an eight-year-old me through the house, cut open her head against the corner of our kitchen cabinet. Before taking Jean in for stitches, Mom had come home from work to find Emily rinsing Jean’s scalp with the garden hose out front.
Even after they said good-bye to my parents and left for Emily’s house, in the car on the ride over, Jean and Emily slid back into their old roles with one another — Emily the star and the storyteller, Jean the supportive listener — using a kind of muscle memory learned only in friendships developed before puberty. In fact, in those fifteen minutes before they pulled into the four-car-wide driveway of chez Gunnar, Jean laughed at a joke Emily made, looked out at the blue mountains surrounding the desert, and felt, for the first time since she’d left for college, happy to be home.
The house, though, was an underfurnished monster. Everywhere Jean looked, she saw spiral banisters, hardwood floors, and mirrors. Dozens of mirrors, not a single wall spared. A couch sat in the middle of one room, facing an enormous flat-screen TV. As far as home furnishings went, that was all Jean could find.
Unless you count Gunnar, which Jean was prepared to do, just from what she knew of him already: right-wing, war-profiting, typical AV white guy that he was. But when he shook her hand—“The famous Jean!”—and pulled her in for an impromptu hug, she had to admit she liked him. He was long-haired and handsome, wearing a sports coat and brown saddleback shoes — she’d imagined him in fatigues, for some reason. He smelled like a green tea latte. He feigned embarrassment about the size of his house and the proposal on his ATV, mocking himself, calling the four-wheeler “the adult skateboard.” This, of course, reminded Jean of their predilection as kids for boys on skateboards, a reminder she found sort of endearing. Not to mention he was kind to her, and curious about her work, and asked follow-up questions even Emily had neglected to ask. If he thought something wicked about Jean helping undocumented LGBT immigrants seek asylum in the United States, he didn’t let on. They all three stood in the kitchen around a rectangular marble-topped island, drinking red wine. At one point, Emily said, “Isn’t my life pretty great?” And Jean said — without having to lie even a little — that, yes, it was.
Then Emily went to the fridge and pulled out a large dish covered with aluminum foil. When Emily uncovered the dish, Jean saw eight bloody strips of steak. “Marinated London broil,” said Gunnar, “once I get it marinated, broiled, and London-fied.”
Emily knew Jean had been a vegetarian since high school. She knew because she’d been the one to convince her, way back in her animal rights days. Apparently, Emily had given up vegetarianism herself in the years since, but Jean couldn’t figure out why Emily would invite her over for lunch without having anything she could eat. Jean took it personally, as if Emily were making a point. On what, she couldn’t say. She just knew that the point felt directed at her — chicken in the salad, bacon in the macaroni and cheese — and she considered faking a stomachache and calling home.