Friendship: A Novel by Emily Gould

Author:Emily Gould [Gould, Emily]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780374710897
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2014-07-01T07:00:00+00:00

23

When Bev felt well enough to leave the gynecologist’s office, they took a cab back to Amy’s apartment. As soon as they walked in, Amy turned on the TV, then shuddered when it turned out that MTV was playing a marathon of 16 and Pregnant. She flipped away quickly, but to no avail, because every other show was about pregnancy, too, or food.

Bev lay full-length on Amy’s couch while Amy sat on a cushion on the floor near her feet. It was early, golden dusk, and they were both wrapped in blankets because the weather had turned colder but Amy’s landlord hadn’t turned the heat on yet. Dying sunbeams were coming in through the window and painting the floorboards with bars of light. They settled on an old rerun of Keeping Up with the Kardashians. The middle sister was scared to have sex while pregnant, for fear of hurting her baby. She and her fiancé took a special sex class where a woman in a cape showed them how to use a foam wedge and a spooning position. “Let’s go home and [bleep] these pregnant girls!” the fiancé said at the end of the class.

Bev and Amy watched a couple of minutes of this in stupefied disbelief, and then Bev flipped the channel back to 16 and Pregnant, where a girl with tears pouring down her face narrated the daily misery of her new fun-free life with her infant. “It’s too much, being a mom and a daughter and a wife all at the same time,” she told the camera, but then a minute later said that she loved her son and wouldn’t change anything. Bev ignored Amy’s attempt to catch her eye; she could tell Amy was trying to get some kind of read on her impassive expression, but Bev didn’t feel like talking. It got darker and darker, and when the sun finally disappeared all the way, Amy went to the kitchen to start making some kind of dinner, and Bev was alone with her thoughts and the flickering teens.

She watched for a few more minutes, as much as she could stand, and then flipped the channel to the local news. A building had burned down in the Bronx and a botoxed TV reporter stood in front of it, trying as hard as she could to convey concern even though her eyebrows couldn’t travel a millimeter downward.

Bev’s familiar mental spirals were starting again, the habitual, incessant wish to be anywhere and anyone except where and who she was right now. In this mood, she could find a reason to envy anyone: the Kardashians, the pregnant teens, even the people wrapped in sooty blankets, smeared with ash, pouring wild-eyed out of the blackened building. They all had in common that they were not Bev, and she envied them for that reason alone. This was horrible, and she knew it, but then she felt guilty for having horrible feelings, and this just made being Bev more uncomfortable and put her back at the beginning of the spiral.

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