Pamela Schmid
Together Again One Day
Best Friend says she can’t recall the last time she tweezed her eyebrows or even thought about doing it, that her eyebrows have turned into fuzzy caterpillars.
Just saying this feels like some kind of moral victory, she tells you with a conspiratorial wink, like I’m remembering how I used to be in the Before Times.
Best Friend has been less available lately. At least, this is what you tell yourself. But deep down, you know you haven’t gone out of your way to see her, either. Since Little Guy arrived, it has taken three long months for you to summon the strength to walk to her apartment on Smith Street, and here you finally are.
Today you brought Little Guy a Jacques the Peacock toy with little white hearts for pupils and stars on its tailfeathers. When you tell Best Friend that you picked it up at a new boutique called Tiny Bee, she says you shouldn’t have, she knows how triggering those kinds of places can be. You don’t tell her that for a hot minute you considered making a beeline out of that store and opting instead for one of the half-dozen Aquafina water bottles you’d filled with beans and glitter and seashells—an idea gleaned from CaféMom or the like. Then you remembered: You collected every one of those bottles a few weeks back and shoved them down the garbage chute; even today, the sight of an Aquafina bottle at Food Garden makes your heart lurch. So Tiny Bee it was.
Only later did it hit you that if you really had your shit together, you could have just ordered something from Amazon.
Best Friend asks you how you’ve been as she bounces Jacques the Peacock in front of Little Guy, and you flash a half-smile, shrug, let out an ambiguous mmmh. She pierces you with her stare and looks away. Every question these days feels freighted.
She says she misses your Sunday morning breakfasts of pancakes and egg coffee at Gus’s Diner, a tradition that started back when you both were still single, back when you had hangovers to nurse and eyebrows that didn’t resemble caterpillars.
Best Friend reaches for a burp cloth. God help me, she says, we will eat pancakes together again one day. And they will be glorious.
And now, she is whipping her boob out for Little Guy and telling you she’s recently started singing. It’s crazy, she says. I could never carry a tune before, but this kid has turned me into a regular Ethel Merman. You emit what you hope is an appropriate chuckle. Little Guy’s eyes are closed, his pudgy hand resting just inside the hollow of Best Friend’s neck. His sandy brown hair reminds you of tiny onion rings.
You remember feeling like Ethel Merman in the Before Times, when you could make up songs from scratch. The words just came floating out of you, as if from some invisible teak chest. You found inspiration everywhere then: dirty diapers, jarred bananas, the elephant nightlight beside the faux-leather glider where you would rock and rock. You remember eyes that looked like miniature versions of your own gazing up at you before drifting away. You wondered how that tiny thing in your arms could even be alive, depending on you, only you, for sustenance.
You remember the day the teak chest slammed shut, throwing you into the After Times, when nothing would ever make sense again. And even if she can never truly understand, you want to tell Best Friend this: After never stops being Before. Because sometimes even now, when you hear a chair squeak, it sounds like crying.
Pamela Schmid
Pamela Schmid is a St. Paul-based writer and editor. She was the recipient of the 2013-14 Loft Literary Mentor Award in nonfiction and the runner-up for the 2014 Wabash Prize for Nonfiction. Her work has appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, River Teeth, The Common, Blue Mesa Review, Tahoma Literary Review, Baltimore Review and elsewhere. Before receiving her MFA degree in creative writing from Hamline University, she spent more than a decade as a staff writer for the Star Tribune of Minneapolis. She has recently completed a memoir about the power of silence and words.