bookshelf post 11: my brilliant friend by elena ferrante

“And then we liked the bars with their spiderwebs, the darkness and the tight mesh of the grating that, reddish with rust, curled up both on my side and on Lila’s, creating two parallel holes through which we could drop rocks into obscurity and hear the sound when they hit bottom. It was all beautiful and frightening then.”

More fiction today…

It had been easier back then, Sarah thought, back when they were kids. This was an obvious, common thought, the kind that many people have upon returning to their hometown, but that didn’t make it any less true. Sarah sat on a concrete piling in the parking lot at the edge of Lake Lucerne and smoked a cigarette. She’d returned to Chagrin Falls because her sister, Jeanie, was unwell. It was the end of her first pregnancy—she’d somehow become pregnant with triplets, a fact that Sarah found beguiling and oddly shameful, as if her sister had not only allowed motherhood to take her but to swallow her whole—and Jeanie was completely swollen, having a third trimester bout of morning sickness that left her wracked all day long. Jeanie’s wife had to go into work all week and so Jeanie was left alone.

Sarah’s mother had called her, can’t you come home for a few weeks? What are you even doing out there anyway? Sarah did not have it in her to explain, yet again, that she was auditioning and that you had to be somewhere to be there for the audition. If yet another man she’d been pining after hadn’t turned out to be married and yet still interested in starting something with her, or if the restaurant where she worked hadn’t just created a mid-afternoon shift that was a blank two hour stretch when no one came in the restaurant and no money was to be made, or her new roommate hadn’t turned out to be extremely strange in a sort of shut-in way, well, in those cases, she might not have come home. But as it had actually happened, here she was, smoking a cigarette down the street from her sister’s house because the smoke bothered her sister now and she didn’t want her mother to know about her habit.

There had a been a time when the whole world existed in the ten streets of that neighborhood where she and her four friends lived and where her sister now lived. Most of Sarah’s memories were from the summer time, when they rode their bikes together, fanning in and out as if they were geese riding the current of each other’s wings, listening to the clack-clack of the chain, throwing their bikes down into the yard of whoever’s house they were going to spend time in. Being home made her miss her friends more than she ever did when she was living her life in New York. It made everything she’d done in the fifteen years since she’d moved away seem inconsequential.

She’d just gotten a part, though, in a new play, and they’d already had a week of rehearsals. The play was on hold because of the director’s schedule and so Sarah had been able to come home for three weeks without forfeiting the role. Actually, she hadn’t had to forfeit much of anything—her roommate seemed only happy that she’d have their small Greenpoint apartment to herself and her boss at the restaurant had easily auctioned her shifts up to other hungry artists. This made her wonder if her life really was as flighty and inconsequential as her mother seemed to think it was.

The first night of rehearsals called for Sarah to slip off her underwear from beneath her dress and fling it out into the audience, an act that neither Sarah nor Leo, the man starring opposite her, was sure was meant to be funny or daring. The fact that Sarah and Leo’s characters were over forty meant that the director kept telling them to make their love scenes more desperate. You’ve finally found each other, he would say, after all this time. He had an eyebrow ring and wore tight shirts with floral patterns, carried a little bag he’d gotten in Ecuador. After the panty-flinging and embarrassing first scenes, they’d all gone out for drinks and Sarah had leaned over to Leo and called the director a super-youth. He was just out of college and this was his first play. Leo and Sarah laughed meanly about his age and his clothing and the way he talked about them like they were so alien to him just because they were older than he was. She had thought that night that maybe she and Leo liked each other, as he leaned in and really listened to her tell a story about her brothers living out in Idaho, as he asked questions about the trivial parts of her family life and actually retained the information, asking her follow up questions that showed how deeply he’d been listening. But, after an hour and two Pilsners, his girlfriend arrived. That was always the way, Sarah had thought at the time.

But she found herself thinking about Leo that evening after a day spent rubbing cocoa butter on her sister’s swollen stomach. It looked alien, with all of the veins green and purple and right at the surface of the skin. Sometimes, it made Sarah feel sick to look at it, but she tried to keep that to herself. After she finished smoking her cigarette, Sarah got up from the concrete piling where she could see the small lake open in front of her and got up to walk back to her sister’s house. It might be nice to call one of the girls, she thought. See what they’re up to.