Today Hal is curled up in the egg chair working on a business plan, and Jenni is sitting at the wobbly patio table, scrolling through her phone.
Jenni has started posting pictures of her Polaroids across her socials so she can get a following and monetize the talent. It’s slow going right now. She hasn’t exactly reached influencer status yet,but I think it’s better that way. It’s a slippery slope when you start pandering to a social media audience. I know because I posted some writing on there for a bit, but then I deleted my account. It wasn’t because I only had forty-three followers; it was because I felt like I was writing to get other people to click Like rather than writing something that I actually liked myself. I have too much artistic integrity for those games.
Jenni speaks without looking up from her phone. “Peter’s going to stop by the Inn for a few minutes,” she says very casually, like she’s announcing that she’s putting in our usual pizza and garlic knots order from Tony’s.
Tara stops her line mid-sentence. Hal lifts up her heavy-duty headphones, like a bomb just detonated, which it basically has.
I respond first. “Peter?” I try to keep my voice calm, try to give her the benefit of the doubt that perhaps I was so swept up in my lines that I misheard her. “As in your boyfriend?”
Jenni’s plan to ask out her old boss went very well, she’d tell you. Or very badly, I’d say. He’s snatching her away, bribing her with air-conditioning and laundry machines; the man has no shame. He’s gotten her crawling into a cage and thinking it’s a castle. They’ve gone from zero to serious in no time flat. Hal and Tara have assured me it’s just a phase Jenni’s going through, but I don’t like it, and here’s the proof that things have escalated to a dangerous level.
“Yep, that’s the one,” Jenni says, like she thinks I’m being playful. “He wants to meet all of you and see our place before we go to dinner. Don’t worry—he’s not staying over or anything.”
I don’t try to muffle the scornful sound that comes out of me. I just try to recall if we ever explicitly said that we wouldn’t bring romantic partners over in the daytime. Even if we didn’t, it still feels like a violation of something sacred as well as a grievous oversight on my end as the unofficial but unanimously accepted leader of the Redstockings.
Jenni seems to mistake our shell-shocked silence for acceptance. She bounces up and hops inside through the broken screen door. “I need to clean up before Peter gets here,” she says.
That helps me find my voice. “You’re not actually conforming to that 1950s housewife shit, are you? Don’t you remember how far you’ve come?”
Jenni tosses me an exasperated expression. “Come on, EJ, you’re blowing things out of proportion. Peter just wants to come by and say hi. It’s not a big deal.”
I look to Tara and Hal to back me up on this, but Hal’s not in the mood for combat; it’s too distracting. “Let it rest, EJ,” she says in her business voice, putting her headphones back on and resuming with theclickclickof the keyboard.
Tara’s my last hope. I know she doesn’t want Peter over here. I know she likes the stability of our space and feels threatened by an outsider. But the thing is, she’s also terrified of disappointing anyone, and so she winds up just half shrugging her shoulders. “I should go wash my dishes in the sink,” she says. “They’ve been there too long anyway.”
As she starts walking inside, I remind her that no, we’re not caving to those gender-normative pressures—we’re going to finish rehearsing. “Opening night is only eight weeks away, Tara,” I say. “You can’t afford to blow your big opportunity just because you’re cleaning up for some guy who’s stealing our friend from us before our very eyes.”
I realize it sounds harsh, but these are dire times. I can’t go easy on Tara and tell her how amazing she is and that she’ll slay either way, no matter how much I want to.
The doorbell buzzer goes off. It sounds more haunting than usual, and I feel proud of our little Dunge Inn. It’s like it knows this intruder doesn’t belong and is doing its best to scare him away.
It doesn’t work, though. Peter bounds in, big and burly like awashed-up college athlete who’s still clinging to his glory days as the only evidence of his importance in the world. Jenni’s beaming when she introduces him, and I catch a glimpse of her younger, sheltered self. Her hair and clothes and posture are different now, sharper now, but there’s still a softness in her face, a softness that I’m worried Peter has turned into a pillow to lay his inflated head on.
Peter doles out bottles of wine, the expensive-looking stuff we mock people for buying when they could get just as drunk on the grocery store stuff.
“One for each of the Redstockings,” he says very proudly, like it’s some big deal he’s remembered our name or knows how to count to four.
Jenni gives him a tour of the apartment, and you’ve got to give her some credit, she doesn’t even bat an eyelash to show him the top bunk she sleeps on. Her self-confidence has certainly improved over the years. That’s something at least.
Everyone goes out to the garden except for me. I stay and sulk for a bit.
Eventually I cave and join them because I don’t feel like being that dramatic friend who shuts herself in her room when things don’t go her way. I’m more mature than that. Also, my room is basically a boiler and I need the breeze.
Jenni passes out the terra-cotta cups that we use as wineglasses. I slurp greedily from mine to take the edge off the insufferably dull questions that the others are asking Peter about where he grew up and what he likes to do in the city and on and on. Finally, I can’t take it anymore.
“What’s your favorite bar in Bushwick?” I interject, keeping my voice nice and flat so he won’t suspect how I’m trying to get him to walk into my trap and reveal his total ignorance of everything beyond his immaculate Manhattan bubble.
He makes a joke that it’s this garden right here, then admits it’sactually his first time in Bushwick. I feel smug because my trap worked, but the satisfaction slips away as Jenni says it’s exciting that she gets to introduce him to Lone Wolf and General Deb’s and Le Garage and Public House. “How fun is that?” she gushes.
Peter is the dry kind of guy whose idea of a good time is talking about stock markets and sports. I wonder if he and Chris would be friends. At first I think they would be, but ultimately I shake out that they’d only be acquaintances. They really aren’t that similar at all because Chris at least has this underlying irony about him, this self-awareness that he’s not very interesting, whereas Peter seems perfectly oblivious to the fact.
He’s overly transfixed by Jenni too, draping his arm around her the whole time, his fancy watch catching the sun and blinding us like a white-collar weapon. He laughs too loudly at everything Jenni says. It feels like he’s entranced by the idea of dating someone poor, someone artsy, someone outside his echo chamber. But the novelty could wear off tomorrow and he’d be gone in the blink of a drink. This wouldn’t bother me except that I know it will bother Jenni. She still hasn’t gotten the hang of letting love in and out the revolving door every night. She’ll be pretty crushed when Peter moves on, but that’s what the Redstockings are for. We pick up the pieces and arrange them in glorious mosaics.
After tossing back a couple more glasses of wine, I’m not drunk, but I probably wouldn’t pass a sobriety test either. Unless I tried to pass it and then I could.
My phone starts buzzing. It’s a number I don’t recognize, probably some political pollster asking my opinion on gun control or abortion. I nearly always talk to pollsters because I respect their commitment to the cause, whatever their cause is, and I also like to tell them the opposite of what I actually believe. It’s a good time, leading people on like that.
I’m grateful for this call now. It gives me an excuse to stop payingattention to Peter—not that I was waiting for an excuse, but I’ll still take it. Walking to the far end of the garden, I pick up.
