Best Friends Forever Read online

  Most days, though, we’d end up at the pool. Jon and I had summer passes to the Kresse Rec Center. Once Val’s bike was unpacked, we’d ridden there together. While I’d carefully locked my bike to the bike rack, Val had squinted at the sign above the desk that said admission was fifty cents. “I don’t have any money,” she’d said.

  “Oh.” My face heated up. This was a complication that hadn’t occurred to me. “We could go back home. I’ve got my allowance…”

  “Let me think,” said Val. She frowned at the sign. “Wait here,” she said, then hopped back on her bike. A few minutes later she was back, flushed and sweaty and looking pleased. “Okay,” she said. “Here’s what we’ll do.” Her plan was for me to present my card to the bored, magazine-reading, gum-chomping teenage girl at the booth, then spread out my towel at the far edge of the deck, near the chain-link fence, and slip the card through the fence to Valerie, who’d use it to get herself in.

  “But isn’t that stealing?” I asked.

  Val shook her head. “You’re really just paying for the lifeguards, and I don’t need a lifeguard. I’m a very good swimmer. In California, I swam in the ocean.” I was meant to be impressed by this, and I was. I locked my bike to the rack, flashed my card at the girl behind the desk, who barely looked up from her Cosmopolitan, and made my way to the edge of the concrete. A minute later, Val was there waiting for me. I rolled my card into a tube, looked around to make sure no one was watching, and passed it through one of the chain-link diamonds. A minute later, Val was walking past the pool, a raggedy towel tucked under her arm, the knot of her bathing suit halter top sticking up from the back of her T-shirt. “See?” she said, spreading her towel out next to mine. “No big deal.”

  On rainy days we’d stay in the kitchen, making concoctions of peanut butter and coconut flakes and whatever else we could scrounge from the pantry, or we’d go to the basement and take turns doing laps with my old pair of roller skates while listening to Val’s favorite (and as far as I could tell, only) record, a 45 of Kenny Rogers’s “The Gambler.” Sometimes my father would sing along.

  One Saturday morning, Val gave her usual knock at our door, then, as had become her habit on the weekends, pushed it open and presented herself at the kitchen table. “Hey, Addie, can you come over? My mom and I are going to paint my room.”

  I looked at my parents. My father was scrambling eggs. My mother stood at the sink, rinsing juice glasses and humming to herself. “It’s fine with me,” she said. “Do you girls want some breakfast first?”

  Valerie did. Perched on the edge of her seat at the kitchen table, all skinny legs and scabbed elbows, she polished off a plateful of eggs and French toast and bacon, then squirmed impatiently as my mother rejected the first two outfits I tried on, finally okaying an old pair of shorts and a ripped T-shirt previously destined for the rag pile. Val and I ran out the front door, dashed across my lawn, grabbed each other’s hands, and sprinted across the street.

  After her parents had died, Mrs. Adler had inherited the house on Crescent Drive. Her brother, Val’s uncle who lived in Sheboygan, had gotten all of the furniture, and so far, Mrs. Adler hadn’t bought anything new. There was a folding table and two metal chairs in the kitchen, a television set that stood on four orange milk crates in the living room, and in front of it, the DiMeos’ old couch, a hulking antique made of red velvet and carved dark wood that I guessed the uncle either hadn’t wanted or couldn’t fit through the door.

  When the DiMeos had lived there, the bedroom at the top of the stairs was crowded with a queen-size bed, two side tables, and a squat club chair covered in cabbage-rose print fabric. Now the room was almost empty, and the yellow carpet—pristine in spots where the bed and club chair had stood, sun-faded and stained everywhere else—was covered by a sheet of plastic. No, not a sheet. There were actually multiple sheets of Saran Wrap lining the carpet, and someone—either Valerie or Mrs. Adler—had Scotch-taped them together. Bare light switches jutted out of the walls, and strips of tape lined the edges where the wall met the ceiling and the floor. A third strip of tape split the wall in half. Two aluminum pie tins, one filled with pink paint, the other with green, sat on the Saran Wrap. Val’s flimsy wooden dresser and single bed in its metal frame had been pushed into the center of the room. Lying on the bed, propped on one elbow, was Mrs. Adler.

  “Good morning, Addie,” she said, in her drawling voice. Her running shorts—navy-blue cotton with white piping—were as brief as the ones Daisy Duke wore on The Dukes of Hazzard reruns, and she didn’t have a bra on underneath her white cotton T-shirt. She smelled like mentholated cigarettes and Breck shampoo, and looked more like a teenager than like a regular mother, barefoot with her hair pulled back in a blue bandanna and a thin gold chain around her neck.

  “What does your mother do all day?” I’d asked Val once, when we were at the Kresse Park pool, treading water in the deep end (I stayed close enough to the wall to grab it if I had to). All of the mothers I knew were busy. They complained about it all the time—“I’m frantic,” they’d say, or “I’m exhausted!” They drove carpools and led scout meetings and taught Sunday school; they shopped and gardened and cooked and cleaned. Some of them had part-time or full-time jobs in doctors’ offices or banks or shops. Then there was poor Mrs. Shea at the corner of Crescent Drive, who had eleven children and spent all of her days doing laundry, or going to the grocery store to pick up her daily five gallons of milk. But Mrs. Adler didn’t seem to do anything. She was always home, curled up on the couch watching soap operas, or lying on a towel in the backyard, wearing a white crocheted bikini, listening to the little boom box that she kept plugged in on the porch.

  “She gets alimony,” Val had told me, explaining that alimony was money her father paid her mother so that her mother could take care of herself and Valerie.

  “But what does she do all day?” I’d asked again.

  Val had shrugged under the water. “I guess she waits,” she said. “She waits for it to be night.”

  In Val’s room, I ducked my head shyly as I said hello. Mrs. Adler made me nervous. It wasn’t just that she looked like a teenager. She behaved like one, too. She cursed, and smoked, and sat in the corner of the kitchen having long, tense conversations on the telephone with a boyfriend back in California. She did not believe in balanced meals, and thought that popcorn and Lipton’s Cup-a-Soup was a decent dinner, even a decent breakfast in a pinch. Sometimes she’d let Val go days between showers—if she’d been swimming, she said, that was close enough. Val had no official bedtime. She got to watch whatever she wanted on TV, even movies and Tales from the Crypt on HBO, whereas Jon and I were always getting herded into the bathroom to wash our hands or upstairs to do our homework, and we didn’t even have premium cable. Mrs. Adler, who was always saying Call me Naomi, seemed sometimes like an impatient babysitter, waiting for Valerie’s real parents to come home and relieve her of her duties so that she could go live her actual life.

  That morning she’d been lying on Val’s bed with her torso curved around a clamshell that she’d been using for an ashtray. “My daughter”—she indicated Val with a cocked elbow—“wants a pink-and-green room.”

  “It’s pretty,” said Val.

  “What should I do?” I couldn’t wait to kick off my shoes and tie back my hair in a borrowed bandanna, to baptize myself in pink and green paint.

  “Grab a roller.” Mrs. Adler yawned, then fished a mother-of-pearl lighter and a box of Salem Lights from her pocket.

  “Ugh. Ma!” Val coughed. “Remember? Lung cancer?”

  Mrs. Adler flicked her fingers at her daughter cheerfully. “We’re all gonna go sometime.” I watched, entranced, as she extracted a cigarette from the crushed pack, tapped it against the crinkled plastic, lit it, and sucked in the smoke.

  “She’s disgusting,” Val announced. I waited for the reprimand, for the don’t-you-talk-to-your-mother-that-way that surely would have followed such a remark in my house. It never came. Mrs. Adl
er gave me a sly, pleased look—That Valerie! Isn’t she something? She blew twin plumes of smoke out of her nostrils, then tapped the ash on the lip of the clamshell.

  I crossed the room, my bare feet sticking to the Saran Wrap, and picked up a roller, aware that Mrs. Adler was watching me and looking amused. “Addie Downs,” she said (talking about me like I wasn’t even there was one of Mrs. Adler’s favorite things). “The good influence.”

  I bobbed my head affirmatively and dabbed pink paint on the wall. Valerie, meanwhile, was slathering green on the bottom half of her section in speedy strokes, splashing droplets on the plastic, like she couldn’t get the wallpaper to disappear quickly enough. I watched her, my forehead scrunched, as the paint pooled and beaded up on top of the wallpaper.

  “Um,” I said. Mrs. Adler raised her eyebrows. “Aren’t you supposed to take the wallpaper off before you paint?”

  Mrs. Adler looked at me, then at the wall. “Huh.”

  Valerie threw her roller onto the Saran-Wrapped floor, leaving a big blotch of mint. “MOM!” she yelled. I tensed, waiting for Mrs. Adler to tell Valerie not to raise her voice, but Mrs. Adler just shrugged.

  “Honey, I never said I was an expert,” she said, and ground out her cigarette in the clamshell.

  “We could ask my dad,” I volunteered. “He could help us. He did Jon’s room last winter. I think that he rented a steamer from somewhere. You steam the paper first, and then you scrape it off, and then you paint the wall with white stuff. Primer, I think.”

  “Huh,” said Mrs. Adler. “This is starting to sound complicated.” Valerie, meanwhile, was staring at the half-painted wall with her chin trembling.

  “You STINK,” she said without looking at her mother. “You are the WORST MOTHER EVER. We’re doing this all wrong!”

  Mrs. Adler uncoiled herself from the bed, planted her feet on the floor, placed her hands on her hips, and leaned backward. Her hair spilled out of the back of the bandanna, brushing the small of her back. “You’re right,” she said, not sounding especially concerned. “I have screwed this up completely. Then again, I never claimed to be a professional.”

  “You didn’t have to be a professional!” Val yelled. “All you had to do was read a book or something!”

  “You’re right,” Mrs. Adler said again.

  “Read an article,” Val said miserably. “You could’ve just read an article.”

  “Let me make it up to you,” said Mrs. Adler. She put her hand on Val’s shoulder.

  Val shook it off, rattling her mother’s silver bangles. “You can’t. This is a disaster. All I wanted was a nice pretty room, with PINK and GREEN, a nice room like Addie has, and you said that I could…”

  “My dad can help,” I offered again, but no one was listening. I recognized that this was a bad situation, but I was still flushed with pleasure: Val wanted a room like I had.

  “Disaster,” Mrs. Adler agreed. “You’re right. I vote we go clamming.”

  Valerie sniffled. “I don’t want to go clamming. I just want to paint my room, and you promised that I could.”

  “It’s one of the last nice weekends of the summer. We can paint your room anytime. But summer won’t last forever.”

  Valerie frowned. “How are we supposed to get to Cape Cod?”

  “We can drive.”

  I inched toward the bedroom door, unsure whether this was a private conversation, but reluctant to leave. Three years ago, my parents and Jon and I had driven to Lake Charlevoix and rented a cabin for a week. The cabin had been cobwebby and had smelled musty, and on the way up I’d shared the backseat with Jon, who’d spent hundreds of miles farting and then categorizing the smell of each of his farts (“This one smells like a McDonald’s hamburger… ooh, here comes baby food”). I’d pinched my nose shut and kicked his legs, telling him to stay on his side of the seat. Jon had grabbed my seat belt and pulled it until I felt like I couldn’t breathe. My father had snapped at us (“That’s enough, you two!”), and my mother had tried to distract us with the license-plate game, which was hard to concentrate on when you were trapped in what smelled like a bowel movement on wheels.

  “It’ll take, like, two days,” Val was saying. She’d gotten an atlas from between her mattress and her box spring and spread it open on the floor. “You see? This, right here?” She stabbed the state with her finger. “That’s Illinois, and this…” She stabbed the map again. “Is Massachusetts. And this…” She whacked the page so hard that it rattled. “Is Cape Cod. All the way up here at the top.”

  Mrs. Adler adjusted her bandanna. “When does school start?” She looked at her daughter. Valerie looked at me. I swallowed.

  “September third.”

  “That’s not for another week!” Mrs. Adler said. “We’ve got plenty of time.”

  Val pouted. “We need a license.”

  “We’ll use Poppy’s.”

  “And a canoe…”

  “We can borrow a canoe. Come on, come on, come on!” Mrs. Adler was saying. “It’ll be an adventure! Go find your swimsuit!”

  “We should call Poppy first.”

  “And a toothbrush! Pack your toothbrush!”

  “Is there gas in the car? Do you have money for gas?”

  “Don’t be such a worrywart,” Mrs. Adler said, and reached down to give Val a push. “Go throw some Tabs in the cooler. Oh, and Addie,” she said as she walked out of the room, hips swaying, bangles chiming. “Ask your parents if you can come, too.”

  I exhaled, giddy with excitement and relief. Val’s lips were tight as she bent down, dumped the paint out of the pie tins and into the cans, and tamped the metal lids back in place, but when she straightened, her eyes had their familiar spark. “Do you like clams?”

  “I love clams!” I’d never eaten clams, but this didn’t seem the time to say so.

  “Okay.” Val put one finger in the center of her chin. “You’ll need a bathing suit and pajamas.” She opened up her closet—my quick glimpse revealed that it was surprisingly empty—and pulled out a pink backpack and a sleeping bag that was ripped along one seam. Then she looked down the hallway and brought her lips so close to my ear that I could feel her breath, humid and maple-scented, against my cheek. “If you have any money, bring that, too.”

  Across the street, my parents had a brief, quiet discussion in the living room before deciding I could go (looking back, I think they were probably so relieved that I’d finally made a friend that they would have let me go to the moon with Valerie Adler). My mother gave me thirty dollars, which I folded carefully into my pocket before I raced off to grab my own backpack, clothes, money from my piggy bank, food from our cupboards… and then we were in the car, with Mrs. Adler beeping the horn as we sped down Crescent Drive, on our way to the ocean.

  I was only nine years old that summer, but I can still remember every detail of that trip: the sticky crosshatched vinyl of the Bug’s bucket seat branding the backs of my thighs, the salt and chemical taste of Tab in the back of my throat. I can remember the wind tangling my hair as we drove along I-90 through Indiana and Ohio, with the windows rolled down, Mrs. Adler’s elbow cocked on the windowsill and Val sitting beside her with the atlas open in her lap, tracing our route with her finger.

  At five o’clock, Val told her mother it was time to stop for dinner. Mrs. Adler seemed surprised to hear it, but she pulled into a McDonald’s, where Val and I feasted on cheeseburgers and French fries while she sipped Diet Dr Pepper and smoked. By midnight we were in New York, between Buffalo and Albany, according to Val. Mrs. Adler pulled into a rest stop and parked the car way down the parking lot, as far away from the other cars and the glare of the lights as possible. I followed Val’s example, carrying my backpack into the bathroom, where we used the facilities, washed our faces, brushed our teeth, and pulled on our pajamas. Then Val pulled out her sleeping bag, spread it on top of herself, and curled up in the Bug’s backseat. Mrs. Adler got back in the driver’s seat, reclining it as far as it would go. From the matt
er-of-fact way the two of them handled these arrangements, I figured this was something they’d done before.

  “Are you okay, Addie?” Val whispered. Her eyes shone in the darkness as she popped her head between the seats to look at me.

  “I’m fine,” I said, pushing the passenger’s seat backward until it was almost flat. I was actually thrilled. This, far and away, was the best adventure I’d ever been on.

  “Goodnight to the back!” Mrs. Adler called.

  “Goodnight to the front,” Val muttered a little grudgingly. I wanted to tell her not to worry: that having a beautiful mother who would take her on trips like this was a hundred times better than a pink-and-green bedroom. I wanted to promise that I would paint her bedroom, and I’d get my father and brother to help; that I would do anything as long as we could be best friends forever.

  “Goodnight, Addie,” they said, and I said goodnight back. I was sure I’d never be able to sleep—the car was hot, and the seat was narrow, and the parking lot was brighter than any bedroom I’d ever been in. Worse, the half-open windows had allowed the car to fill with whirring, whining bugs. I slapped at a mosquito and shut my eyes… and when I opened them, the sun was up and I was stiff and dry-mouthed and in desperate need of a toilet. It was just after six in the morning. Mrs. Adler walked us back to the restrooms, moving with her usual lazy, rolling sashay. When we were scrubbed and brushed and combed and back in the car, she drove to a convenience store off the highway, where she bought doughnuts and milk and coffee and cigarettes. By noon on Sunday, twenty-four hours after we’d left Pleasant Ridge, we were whizzing past a red-and-white painted poster of a beach scene, with an umbrella stuck jauntily in the golden sand, and the words WELCOME TO CAPE COD written in red underneath it.