There had been a string of blunt force beatings in the neighborhood to which we’d just moved and though no one had died, though no one had been even very seriously injured, I kept saying I wouldn’t take the dog out after dark, I kept saying I’d only walk him around the perimeter of our well-lit building to let him pee and then I’d come back inside. Except, in those months, the late-night dog walks were the only thing about my life that I liked.
Though I also liked the three hours two days a week when I paid a sweet woman sixty dollars to watch our kids. This time was for me to write, prepare to teach, but instead I haphazardly read criticism from the 1950’s, Alfred Kazin, Northrop Frye. Sometimes, very early in the morning, before my husband left for work, before the kids had started stirring, I’d say, I think I’m having a nervous breakdown, and he’d look warily at me and say, okay?
I’m not sure, I’d say, how to tell.
I had, in the past, had nervous breakdowns—nobody said nervous breakdown, but I’d cracked up a bit—but keeping two kids and a dog alive had made it harder to see signs. And then also, there was the pandemic, COVID brain. I’d forgotten to pay the power bill, signed the kids up for the wrong summer camp. By then we’d moved so much and were living out of boxes. When the power got turned off, I’d called, and, ten minutes later, it was back on.
During those three hours two days a week when the nice girl came to watch the children—Jack and Henry, 9 and 7—I sat half an hour in the Starbucks drive-thru scrolling through Twitter and half-listening to audiobooks—Nixonland, The Power Broker—about sad, damaged man who’d caused great harm. I got a seven dollar iced soy chai latte, even though a few years ago a former student told me soy caused cancer and I’d stopped drinking it. In the parking lot, sipping my latte, I smoked a cigarette. All the dying, it turned out, the ever-closer climate crisis, had made carcinogens feel less like a threat. I’d stopped wearing sunscreen and my skin had begun to feel tighter, warm and crisp.
Wake me up and I’ll take him, my husband said during my break from teaching the third week of the beatings. I taught remotely four nights a week from 6 to 10.
It’s fine, I said. I like it. The dog was a pandemic puppy. Sweet and easy. I like that he likes me best.
During the day I monitored the kids’ remote-school and failed at all the various life stuff I was in charge of. We were in Portland, Maine by then. A mid-sized city, my husband said when he first got the offer. We pretended that we were deciding if he’d take it, but it was a job, so we went.
The population of Portland, Maine is 66,000 people, I said, when I googled.
This mid-sizedness had made me dismissive, at first, of the beatings. A wife of one of the men for whom my husband worked sent me an email, a forward from the principal of their private school. Watch out! She’d written. This is your hood.
One of the other reasons I was attached to the walks was because it was the only time I had to call Maeve, who was my oldest, dearest friend. She’d just moved to LA, had a new baby and a big new job. She walked the baby in the stroller after work and before dinner and I walked the dog before I went in the house to watch hours of bad TV on my computer in my bed.
How are you? Maeve said.
I think I’m having a nervous breakdown, I said.
Maeve knows me better than any other person and she waited.
It’s fine, I said.
I didn’t tell her about the beatings or the cigarettes or the soy chai lattes, about the way Henry shrugged, didn’t look at me, when his teacher asked him why our power had briefly been turned off.
It’s nice, though? She said. The pictures all look nice.
Some of my other proof that I was not having a nervous breakdown was that I sometimes posted pictures of the children playing at the beach or swimming in a river on my Instagram account.
How are we defining nice? I said.
Maeve and I had been together in the months before this—before she moved and then I moved—in Florida, where both she and I grew up.
Jack got us invited to a mansion and we went, I said. Jack has ADHD and I’m always scared that kids will think he’s too much but instead they mostly fall in love with him. Most kids find it thrilling, the thing I find terrifying, the way he hardly ever thinks before he acts or speaks.
Was it fun? Maeve said.
David said maybe the house might be apartments when I googled it but he was being dumb.
Good food? Asked Maeve.
Seltzer and mixed nuts, I said.
I listened as she cooed to the baby, pulled her up out of the stroller.
I think I’m too old to make new friends, I said.
A guy was letting himself into his car while the dog pooped in the only driveway that he liked to poop in and the man looked at me and I looked at him. To turn to pick the poop up I had to lean over, my back toward him, and I considered briefly, what would it feel like, my face scraped across the driveway’s bricks.
The next night I didn’t have to teach but the people with the mansion and the mixed nuts had let their son come over to play with our son and the mom had come to pick him up. Our apartment had no furniture because our stuff was still in storage in New York and the dog had gotten muddy at the park. The way that mom looked as she waited for her son to get his shoes on. The floor was dirty; we had an old plastic table and two chairs from the Restore store that we’d bought so the kids would have a place to do school. After she left, after the kids were in bed, I ate seven Oreos and drank some gin.
I’ll take the dog, I said to my husband.
Just the block, he said.
There hadn’t been a beating in two weeks, but I’d read about them, three men and a woman, all by themselves, one Black, two white, none raped or robbed. The last had happened three blocks from our place, one block from the dog’s favorite driveway, in the basketball court next to a small patch of grass where we sometimes let the dog play off-leash with another dog.
The dog pulled on the leash because he only liked to poop in that one driveway. I called Maeve but she texted to say she was nursing. Love you, she texted. Me too you, I texted back.
I thought of walking an extra block to wait to see if she’d call me. Her husband usually had dinner ready when she got home. He was a painter. He complained about her job sometimes and they had lots of rules about screens while the baby was up, no phones at meals or in their bed.
I tweeted something about having another gin, still outside walking, even though I was probably just going to watch Bravo in my bed.
Don’t do that, Maeve texted, a screenshot of my tweet below the text.
I often tried to forget that Maeve followed me on Twitter. She had an actual job with direct reports, a salary, a 401k; it felt shameful that she had to see me prostrate myself in that flimsy desperate way online.
It’s just a tweet, I texted.
It makes me sad, she texted back.
The guy from the night before wasn’t out but a woman was, tall and strong, a little slouchy. I felt her watch me as the dog pooped and I leaned down to pick it up. I wondered if the driveway might be her driveway; there was a sign in the garden of the same house saying please no pee or poop. I wondered if the beatings might be imitations, individual violence begetting more individual violence. I remembered vaguely using a bad metaphor in class the night before about pool balls, comparing their chaotic spread to the clean linearity of falling dominos; I envisioned this tall woman coming at me with a cue ball, the sound it might make, slammed against the hard curve of my head. The empty thoughtless quiet that might come after that.
Maeve texted me a picture of her baby, grinning, as we walked the three blocks back home. Promise me you’ll go to bed.
I went inside and washed my hands and gave the dog a treat and snuck into the kids’ room to take a picture of each of them. I sat a while on Jack’s bed. Sometimes, when the lovely woman came to watch him and Henry, I’d sit in their bedroom with the door closed while they played or did school in the other room. I’d spend an hour, eyes shut, legs straight, back against the wall, and revel in their sounds, relieved not to have to be the one to defuse the fights or get the flair pen, not to be the one to find the right page in the math book or to make the snacks and lunch. Unwilling though, to be too far from them.
I sent Maeve the pictures of them sleeping, Jack’s covers twisted at his feet and Henry’s mouth half-open.
I just saw them, Maeve texted back, How are they already so much more grown up?!?
Three months earlier, in Florida, Maeve and I had sat out on the screened-in porch of the borrowed house my family’d stayed in the first few months after we’d left New York. Mae had moved in with her parents, left a job in DC for one in LA, but since all work then was remote, she’d spent the last eight months on parental leave and then working from her parents’ porch while her mom took care of her kid. That night we were waiting for our friend Elise, whom neither of us had seen in fifteen years.
She ran away from me, I said to Maeve, before Elise came. At Publix.
The ceiling fan whirred. Both my boys were in bed. We’d spent the whole day at the beach and they’d been tired in that sun-drenched, worn out way that felt elemental to that place where Maeve and Elise and I had all grown up.
It was the year David and I lived here, I said. Which means fifteen years.
She ran away, Maeve said. Of course.
Elise had been a regular opioid user for most of our adult lives and she did things like this often: disappear for weeks or months, take money from our wallets or our purses when we got up to use the bathroom, run away from us at grocery stores.
Earlier in the month, Maeve had seen Elise’s mom on a walk close to Maeves’s parents’ house. Elise’s mom had a new husband, her third. In the strange way of small towns and mothers and bad luck, mine, a divorce attorney, had represented Elise’s mom’s first husband, Elise’s dad, in their divorce, and Elise’s mom and my mom hated one another violently. The time I spent with Elise and at Elise’s house had always—and I’d liked this, back then—made my mom insane.
She’s a lot better, is what her mom said to Maeve when she saw her. She was in Phoenix a few years but she’s been back and better for a while. You should give her a call.
I would think about this a lot after: those years Elise was in Phoenix. For six years, while Maeve and I called each other on the phone often; while she came to see me and I went to see her and I met her boyfriend and then her other boyfriend and then that boyfriend became her fiancé and they both drove up from DC to watch our babies for the night because we had to go to a wedding and she was the only person that I trusted to watch our babies for that many hours when they were that little and then they stayed over, and then we all went to brunch; while I was walking up and down the hallways of all the various apartments we lived in, my husband and my children sleeping, standing on the balcony that one time we had a balcony, sitting on the stoop the years that we had dogs, talking to Maeve; all that time Elise had a whole life in a whole different place about which we knew not a thing.
When she first saw us, half an hour after the time that we’d agreed on, Elise complimented Maeve: You look the same but more refined. Maeve has always been the most beautiful. To me, she said—I was wearing red and white striped linen drawstring pants that I’d got on sale for seven dollars at Old Navy and an old t-shirt that had once belonged to David’s father and no bra; to me, she said, You look the same.
Elise did not look the same. Nor did I. Maeve still felt, I knew because we’d talked about it, weird and anxious about her almost forty year old body post-pregnancy. Elise looked like the mom in middle school whose kid my mom hated letting me spend time with which is to say she looked worn out. She had thin legs. Her face was a palimpsest of pretty. I wondered if I hadn’t known her twenty years if I’d have been able to see the face she used to have in the face she had now. She had a gut, Elise did, and she wore stretch pants and a loose fitting shirt that she pulled at as she spoke. Her skin was bad. She took a half gallon bottle of Sutter Home wine out of her bag and said, I brought this just in case.
I went inside the house to get the fancy wine glasses that, like the house itself, did not belong to us; but then because Maeve doesn’t drink and I didn’t want to drink that night and because Elise had brought an insulated coffee cup that was already full, the glasses sat there on the patio inert and shimmery.
Elise had told us, full disclosure, she texted in the group text we’d created for this meeting, that she’d had the virus a couple of months before. Just, you know, she said, FYI. Got it at a bar, she told us, shrug emoji-thing.
Sometimes, she told us later, I wake up still and I can’t breathe.
There were a few minutes, when Elise first got there, when I thought the night might turn out differently. David poked his head out from the living room to say hi.
He’s still so fucking handsome, she said.
I reddened, pulled my legs up onto my chair. David had also grown up in this same Florida town.
You teach right? Asked Elise.
I do, I said. I didn’t want to explain being an adjunct. She mentioned that she’d bought my first book but that she’d never read it. It looked good, though, she said. The first few pages, I read those and they were really good.
Maeve started to talk about her husband, but then Elise jumped in.
I’m married too! She said.
This was the beginning, I guess, of the unraveling.
When did you get married, Maeve and I said.
Three years ago, she said. I think.
We must have looked confused then.
She said, I don’t remember, totally.
What Maeve and I loved most about Elise, we said later, was how funny she was. And funny is so hard. It’s thrilling when you get it right. Elise was funny as she told us she didn’t remember when she’d gotten married.
Elise told us a story then about taking a kayak out with her fiancé to an island we all used to go to when we were in high school. We grew up in the sort of town where teenagers had access to their parents’ boats and jet skis and she told us they paddled the kayak out together then came back to their house. They’d planned a party for after, got a shit-ton of beer, but then a hurricane came and they had to cancel it. So, she told us, laughing, I just drank all that beer myself.
So, I said later to Maeve, Did they get married? We didn’t really know.
Easy, is how Maeve described Elise later. We were trying to understand why and how so many men had loved her. She was pretty enough, but pretty when you’re fifteen is not so rare. She was not exceptional, as, I would argue, Maeve was. But boys were always agog for her, very seldom were they agog for Maeve. Elise was easy, which is to say, she was fun, and both MaeMaeveand I, we are much less easy. In those early years, Maeve and I had always been friends, but the summers each of us spent with Elise were separate, different summers. We didn’t talk as often to each other. We liked, I think, how Elise helped us feel less hard.
The next three hours Elise talked almost without stopping. We would interject to comfort her, to try to clarify a thing she said, but mostly Elise talked. She moved the whole time, standing to refill her wine glass, sitting in her chair, then on the floor, then standing up, then chair again.
I did not trust most of what Elise said that night. But I understood this: there had been a rupture in her life: something that was messy, painful, and neither Maeve nor I had been there as it went down.
Here’s a story about Elise, one I also told to Maeve a few days later, a story I could not believe I’d never told Maeve, but also then, there’s shame: I was nineteen or twenty, a Depressed Person. I did not shower often or leave my dorm much, and had become obsessed with checking out DVD’s of prisoners performing Beckett plays from the school library. Elise was not in college that semester. She would try, off and on, the next six or seven years, a couple state schools, the community college one town over from the town where we grew up. I would come very close to getting kicked out of my New England college, but because my parents had money, I would be allowed to stay.
But the night that was the night of this story, I was home for break and Elise and her boyfriend and I met up at a bar. We were not of age but Elise’s boyfriend George knew the bartender and we all got drunk. George was slimy. Maeve confirmed it as I told the story. Right, she said. I met that one. He was incredibly attentive toward me, though, that night, George. He made a point to listen when I talked. George did not have to pretend to want to fuck me. He was fucking Elise, who had always been more compelling, a magnet for all types of male attention, but the fact that he listened to me, let me talk about those Beckett plays without his eyes glazing over or changing the subject, without telling me how weird or dumb or fucked up I was: It was seductive—more intimacy than I’d had in months. The way George listened to me, the way Elise had told the bartender, who was very clearly hitting on her, that I was her best, her smartest, her most gorgeous friend.
They were addicts, Maeve said, as I told the story. She has authority in this field. You were an easy mark.
That night, I drove Elise and George to the drive-thru ATM close to the bar and got out $800 and handed it to them. I’d never gotten that much money out of the ATM before and I got all twenties and I saw the look on George’s face as he held the bills: vague, fleeting annoyance, at how thick, how obtrusive, the wad I’d given him was. When I think about our friendship I often think about the feeling I woke up with the next morning, hungover in my childhood bed with all my clothes on. Not fucked but fucked.
The last full summer that I spent with Elise we were drunk most days before it got dark. To imagine my children, who are not so much younger than Elise and I were then, doing the things we did that summer, is to feel so sick and scared that I worry I might internally combust. We should have died probably, I would say when I told some of those stories later. The place you’re from is sort of a fucked place, said my friend in college when I told her some of this. Some of the kids we knew then are, in fact, now dead. Elise always did just slightly more than I did. More boys wanted to fuck her, more boys wanted to sneak her into the bathroom to give her Xanax or coke. I drank sweet liquors, flavored rums and vodkas, passed out in the empty rooms next to the rooms where she had disappeared to have sex. I made it out and she did not.
There was one night, though, that summer. It was Florida, pools and hot tubs, liquor, sweat and sunburns, we were almost always wasted before dark. But one night, in all those nights, we stayed in. It was early August. I would start school soon. A few weeks later she would move to Jacksonville with a guy and live there a few months. We were tired and hungover. The air was thick and sticky and we didn’t want to leave the house. A storm rolled in like it does every summer afternoon in Florida, grays and purples. The heat broke and thunder cracked. We sat inside in cotton shorts and t-shirts, hair pulled back and overlapping sun-browned limbs. We watched hours of Behind the Music, passed a tub of Betty Crocker icing back and forth. Her mom’s air conditioner never worked, and we both sweat. Once the rain broke, we put on swimsuits. They didn’t have a pool but also didn’t mow the lawn. We went out into the post-storm air and lay out in the wet grass.
Elise had not been invited to her mother’s house in close to a year that night on the porch. One of the last times she was there, she told us, she snuck up to her brother’s room to look. Her brother was living with her mother but she hadn’t seen him since he was in high school.
There were a lot of empty liquor bottles, she said. It was unclean and very dark. It made me sad, she said, to think this was his life.
We nodded, Maeve and I.
Once, a few days before David and I got married—we got married in Florida—I saw Elise. It was a year after she’d run away from me at Publix. There had been so much lying. The wedding was quite small. We weren’t living in Florida, were just in town for that week and then gone. I saw her at the beach; she wore flip flops, shorts, was suntanned, walking with a guy I didn’t know up the stairs to the wooden walkway to the sand. I’d been running barefoot, had peeled my shirt off and swam and was all wet. I was halfway up the stairs back to the car when I saw her coming from the other side. She touched her hair as she talked and laughed just like she’d always touched her hair. The parking lot had three different access points and I turned and walked back down to the hot sand. I had my keys and sweaty t-shirt, had left my flip flops in the car. It was an extra four hundred or so yards on the hot asphalt and my feet burned and I walked fast. I turned the car on, panting, feet on fire.
When Elise left that night, the Sutter Home bottle was empty. She stuffed it in her bag, left her cup. I used it for my coffee still in Maine. Maeve’s husband texted her to say the baby was up and she had to drive back to her parents’ house to nurse her. I’ll walk out with you, Elise said. I’d always been jealous of the fact that they have known each other longer: They went to the private catholic school through middle school while I went to the public and had been friends a handful of extra years. I felt that old prickly feeling rise up in me, the way Elise stuffed her bottle into her bag so quickly as Maeve responded to her husband. They both stood up before I did. They went through the backyard then the back gate to their cars. Elise was clearly very drunk but neither Maeve nor I said anything about it. As soon as Maeve got in her car and on the road she called me. I was putting the shimmery untouched wine glasses back on their shelf. I just needed to talk to you a minute, she said. Should we have… I said. I meant should we have stopped her, should we have taken away her keys and told her not to drive, she was too drunk. We’d driven those roads so often drunk and stoned, fucked out of our minds, we used to say. It’s not like you could have let her stay there, Maeve said. It’s not like we could have held her down.
The dog was just a tiny puppy then and even though he didn’t know how to use the leash and was still afraid of the dark I walked him out on the street in the same direction Elise went.
In Portland, on the fourth week of the beatings—there had been another two attacks that week and one of the women, in her mid-sixties, was still hospitalized—one of the other wives of one of my husband’s other bosses invited me for drinks and dinner at a restaurant not far from our place. David is a classical musician—a violist and a violinist; he also composes—but the job he got was doing sound effects for a video game startup. Though he worked fourteen hour days and mostly we weren’t talking, we were having some of the best sex of our lives.
You should drive, he said, referring maybe to the beatings.
I will not, I said, become a person who drives to go half a mile.
Be careful, he said. He’d come home early, bringing pizza. I was angry that he only came home early when I had to go have dinner with a group of women I felt sure I wouldn’t like because he thought it would be good for his new job.
He grabbed me and he kissed me, hand under the back of my shirt. He was older than Maeve and Elise and I in high school and much too cool to have ever talked to us. Sometimes I was embarrassed, having married someone who grew up in my same small Florida town, but also, it was comfort, having both come from that same place that was so beautiful and so fucked.
Have fun, he said. I watched him thinking whether or not to tell me to be careful with the drinking. Maybe you could get a car on your way back?
At dinner everybody but me wore sack dresses. Some of them expensive-looking and some not. Everybody was a little manic, first post-vaccination indoor dinner out for almost all of us. It was a tapas restaurant and we got a bunch of dishes to share, which meant we got less food than I would have had I ordered for myself.
David likes the job then? Asked the woman, Anne, who was the wife of his boss.
He likes it! I said. He was exhausted, anxious all the time that he was doing something wrong. He was making more money than he’d ever made and we were planning to finally get health insurance in a couple months after a terrifying year without.
We got dessert but no one ate it. We have to get the donuts, everybody said. They’re known for their donuts. We got three orders and each woman had one bite and then put their forks down, so I, who had had three gin drinks by then, took one of the plates and ate silently while they all talked.
Outside the restaurant, we all parted. Anne had asked me to head the book club that she’d always meant to start. Another woman suggested a book her life coach had recommended and three of the women ordered it right there on their phones from Amazon.
I’ll start a text chain! Anne said. It’ll be so fun!
The night was perfect, early summer. It had rained while we were inside the restaurant and the air was markedly less humid, lighter, cooler. I’d worn a cardigan over my sleeveless mock turtle neck and took it off.
You’re walking? one of the women said, getting into her car. I looked at her, my face smacked of not just gin but condescension; she’d had four cocktails and was driving half an hour to the suburbs.
I love to walk, I said.
I stuffed my sweater in my bag and put in headphones. Maeve had called and texted but I didn’t call or text her back. I found a cigarette and lit it. I scrolled through to my favorite song. I closed my eyes and held my arms out and felt the air on my bare skin. I didn’t have the dog but walked in the direction of his favorite driveway, the basketball court. I didn’t want to think about the beatings. I wanted to lay down in the wet grass.