Storytelling
Eva Silverman
January 2017
I learn about Margaret’s whereabouts entirely from hearsay. “She was supposed to go to Germany,” her brother told me, “but as soon as she got there she hopped on a train to Paris.” Sylvia says that she’s been fucking a ton of French girls that she met on Tinder; Liz says she’s found a lover who’s paying
for all of her expenses and providing her with a place to stay; Sydney says she has not one, but two lovers, who may or may not know about each other’s existence. No matter which telling, the consensus is that Margaret is having a lot of sex. She’s living the life that everyone expects a beautiful young American to have in Paris: carefree, bohemian, glamorous. “I can’t believe she’s really doing it,” Ben tells me. “This is like, the coolest thing anyone could possibly do after graduating high school.”
Everyone seems to forget the fact she is only in Paris for three weeks, that she’ll be back here before we know it, back to the same mundanities that the rest of us experience day in and day out. Right now, she is our little ingenue, the Anais Nin of the DC metro area. I was hoping that when I came back for winter break, I’d be the homecoming hero. I was one of the only people in my graduating class to go to college out of state, well on my way to becoming a worldly city dweller. But any accomplishments of mine are dwarfed by Margaret’s triumphant romp through Paris. A regular life in New York City pales in comparison to the glitz of a truly incredible trip abroad, and we all know it. For the rest of break, whenever people start to talk about Margaret, I steer the conversation away.
October 2014
On Halloween we all go to the woods to smoke. There are around ten of us, and we sit in a big circle and Nick rolls two joints, smiling smugly because he is the only one of us who knows how to do so. Margaret sits next to me, dressed up as Margot Tenenbaum, wearing a brown slip dress and thigh high socks with a garter belt, eyes rimmed with kohl. I am wearing her jeans because I got too cold in my skirt and we had stopped by her house earlier in the day and she had offered them to me. They cling to my thighs but sag around my hips. Nick finishes rolling the joint and passes it around. Margaret takes long, greedy inhales so I try to inhale as much as I can, too. Ten minutes later we are giggling together about how we are both so high. I stand up and she pulls me back down to the ground with her. “Sometimes I don’t know how to talk to you,” she says, “but you are so cool.” Suddenly, she is effusive, bubbling out praise for me like she’s never done before. I stick by her side the whole night.
Nick joins us at a certain point, and she starts to praise him just like she did me, and I join her. “You are so NICE!” I tell him. “Like, so nice!” He grins and looks at Margaret. “She’s right,” Margaret says, “you’re really nice.” The rest of the night Nick is in full flirting mode, though I can’t tell which of us he’s focusing his attention on. Margaret starts talking about how much she misses her former boyfriend, how she feels ugly without him, and Nick looks stunned. “You are not ugly,” he tells her. “Not at all.”
◊
I met Margaret in seventh grade, after I transferred schools. She had straight brown hair then, and braces, and thick straight eyebrows and freckles all over
her face. When I first saw her, she was wearing a pair of round glasses that were obviously fake, and doing a Harry Potter impression. How weird, I thought to myself. I was still in a phase of my life where I was trying as hard as I possibly could to fit in with the norm. I wore brand name clothes that I had bought on discount, kept diligent tabs on who was popular and who was not, and read young adult books about people with lives that were harder than mine. I could tell immediately that Margaret was cut from a different cloth.
As I got to know her that year, I came to understand that she was unapologetically dorky and considered herself a feminist, a Buddhist, and an anti-capitalist, that she had no awareness of the pop culture that I obsessed over. Thinking of the person she was when I first met her, I can barely see the threads that connect who she is today to who she was then. The political conviction is still there, yes, but none of the other things that she defined herself by when she was younger are present within her now. When she blossomed out of her awkward phase, she didn’t just blossom, she pushed her old self so far away that it became irrelevant. When I think about it, that’s what I tried to do, but I don’t know if I ever succeeded.
◊
November 2014
Margaret invites me to a go to a concert with her at someone’s apartment
in Adams Morgan. A few of our other friends come along but I am most excited to see her. I’ve been thinking about our budding friendship a lot the past few weeks, and right now it still feels precarious. We’ve teetered on the edge of a real friendship before and it’s never really come to fruition. I take the metro to the show with Alex and Katie, who are both in a bad mood and pointedly talk to each other without acknowledging me. As soon as we get to the apartment that the show is at, I run over to Margaret. Liz is with her, and Liz is also in a bad mood, so she goes to join Katie and Alex, who is fervently complaining about his mom. Margaret and I are left standing alone, and we decide to go hang out on the roof. It’s the first really cold day of the year and the wind bites at my hands and cheeks. I wish I had brought gloves. Two men walk onto the roof, loudly complaining about how they want to smoke but don’t have a lighter. “Hey!” I call out to them. “I’ve got a lighter, you can use it.” They walk over to us and I fiddle around the front pocket of my purse to find it. “Can I get a cigarette in exchange?” One of them pulls two cigarettes out of his pack, handing one to me and one to Margaret. “I’ve never smoked a cigarette before,” she whispers to me, and I am shocked. I thought that everything I had done, Margaret had done already.
◊
I see people on the streets who look like Margaret all the time, people with bleached pixie cuts and impish smiles, wearing clothes like she the ones she wears, even walking with the same sort of sway. Every time this happens, my heart skips a beat. Is it her? I’ll think. Has she found her way to my city? Is she on her way to see a friend? Why didn’t she tell me she was here? And then I’ll look a little closer and realize it is not her, not her at all, that at least for now, I am safe from her reach.
◊
December 2014
Margaret comes over to my house one day and breaks down on my bed, unloading her troubles on me. This is the first and the last time that she’ll do this. She tells me that people have been texting her all day and that she can’t handle it, that everyone wants something from her and she doesn’t know what to do. I don’t tell her that I’d give anything to have people to depend on me, to be inundated with text messages. I watch the way that people desire her and yearn for it. It’s been clear for a long time that she is no longer the dorky girl I met in seventh grade who would talk your ear off about alternative medicine. She’s learned to harness the power of her charm, to make people love her. I wonder if being loved ever backfires, turns into something harsh and ugly. Do I even know what being loved really feels like?
January 2015
Last month Margaret told me that she had tricked her doctor into prescribing her a stimulant even though she didn’t have ADD. “Did you want it so you could focus better on schoolwork?” I ask. “No,” she says, “it’s an appetite suppressant, I’m trying to lose weight.” From then on I am her go to confidante for all of her dieting talk. She talks about how seeing pictures of skinny models makes her feel awful even though she knows that she shouldn’t be listening to what the media says is attractive, and says that she won’t feel comfortable with her body until she’s in another sexual relationship with someone. When I tell her how much I relate, she makes me rehash the history of my own body image issues. “I want to hear your story,” she tells me.
◊
Our friendship, I realize some months after we fell out of contact, was based on the stories we told each other. And I realized, a few months after I came to that first realization, that at a certain point, our stories became intertwined. We were a team, perpetually together. I was not myself without being oriented towards her. Jealousy boiled up within both of us, and I felt that as long as we were connected we were interlocked in a competition without an end. I began to develop dichotomies to help myself understand our relationship: Margaret was warm and friendly and popular, I was awkward and closed off. I got straight A’s and sucked up to my teachers, Margaret skipped class and never turned an assignment in on time. We each filled a role. My success was not just about succeeding on my own terms, it was about me doing better than her. I like to think that I’m a fairly reasonable person, but when it comes to Margaret, I am not reasonable at all. My thinking becomes warped and twisted, corrosive to my psyche and whatever is left of our friendship. I need to stop this, I think, but then Margaret does something, infringes on my carefully balanced life in some new way, and I’m lurched back into my funhouse mirror way of viewing the world.
◊
February 2015
Margaret loves sex. She loves to talk about it, to do it, to hint at it. She gyrates in metro cars, happy to have an audience. “I just want to give some unsuspecting guy a boner!” she exclaims. I shrink into my seat as I watch her. I wonder if the men who stare at her on the street notice me walking next to her, short and plain, attractive only if you look hard enough. We go to a club and linger on a couch by the pool table, and I joke about how all the men seem to see her and not me. Like clockwork, a man walks up to us and asks if we want to play pool. “Yeah,” Margaret says, “but only if you pay.” He slides a coin into the slot on the underside of the table. I am terrible at pool and the man uses this as a way to flirt with me. He slides up behind me and positions his hands next to mine on the cue. “All you need to do is tap lightly,” he says. I wriggle out of his arms and try hitting the ball with the cue on my own, lightly. The ball moves a couple inches and then stills. I don’t want to play pool anymore, the man’s guidance has exhausted me and I glare at him. Soon, he is flirting with Margaret much more intensely than he flirted with me, and I understand why. I don’t know why, but she is a perfect subject on which to project desire.
March 2015
Two things have changed: it is Spring and Margaret is dating Nick. Every
day, a group of us will be sitting outside eating lunch, and Margaret will whisper to Nick or Nick will whisper to Margaret and they’ll both laugh a little and then quietly extract themselves from the group. Some days when I don’t feel like being around my peers, I’ll go sit in the field behind our school, where it turns out is also where Margaret and Nick go when they sneak away to be alone. I watch them snuggle under the trees and give each other piggyback rides, carefree and buoyed up by the knowledge that they are now a couple. I am especially aware of my solitude when I watch them.
◊
What does it say about me that the only way I know how to tell my own story through the lens of my relationship with her? What sort of weakness of spirit does this signify on my part? I haven’t been friends with her, at least not
real friends, for over a year now, and I’ve been living over 200 miles away from her for months. But her presence is still inscribed in my mind. I’ve been thinking a lot about memoir lately, what I’d put in mine if I were to write one. I tally up the things that have happened to me and rack my brain for ways to turn them into interesting narratives, but it’s hard. My life is boring, I think, and I have done nothing of consequence. I have learned to be responsible; I do well in school, don’t drink too much, avoid getting romantically entangled with people I don’t like. I have amassed a small number of successes, but they are boring successes. Margaret, on the other hand, has really lived, with her recent trip to Paris and all the illicit affairs that unfolded after we stopped being friends. She has a way of courting failure but always avoiding total collapse, which, from a memoir writing standpoint, might be the best way to live.
◊
April 2015
I go to a concert with Margaret, Nick, and Alex, and Nick sneaks a bottle of vodka into the venue, taking huge, obvious swigs of it like he’s unaware that if he’s caught with it he could be kicked out. I am embarrassed to be associated with them, and I linger towards the back of the room in an attempt to establish myself as separate from the group. Margaret comes over to me after the second band finishes their set. “Everyone’s going back to Alex’s house,” she tells me. “Do you want to come?” I shake my head, tell her to go on. Amidst the crowd full of ridiculously cool people in punk bands, the thought of being seen without her suddenly seems exciting. This could be my chance to establish myself to the world as my own person, untethered to Margaret. I wave goodbye and she walks across the room to Nick and Alex, and then walks out. I roam around the venue until I run into Kim, the singer in one of my favorite local bands. She is sitting at a table near the bar with a friend, and she motions for me to sit down with them. I sit, and for the next hour we talk about music we like and books we’ve read, funny things that have happened in our weeks and concerts coming up that we want to go to. “Do you make music?” she asks me, and I tell her shyly about the short, experimental tracks I’ve been recording on my computer. “Send them to me!” she exclaims, and offers me a sip of her drink. It’s citrusy, and the alcohol warms my throat. I leave when it starts to near midnight because it’s a weekday and I need to get to the metro before it closes, but when I get back home I regale my mother with the story of my night, a goofy grin plastered across my face. “I can’t believe I hung out with the singer of one of my favorite bands!” I joyfully tell her, but what I am secretly thinking is that I can’t believe I hung out with the singer of one of my favorite bands without Margaret there, and that I can’t believe how freeing it feels.
May 2015
Margaret asks me to film the piece that she’s making for our art class. “What is it?” I ask. She explains that she is going to stand outside the playground at
our school where kids hang out during lunch and read a list of confessional statements, some of which are true and some of which are false. We go out to the playground one day with a couple of our other friends, and Margaret stands stoic and still, her long skirt blowing in the wind. I click record on the camera.
She begins to read from the list she has written. “I started smoking cigarettes because I wanted a problem,” she begins. “I want to dominate men the way
men have dominated me. I feel the same pleasure when people need me because they’re horny and when people need me because they’re sad.” Her friend tells her afterwards that some of the statements shocked them, but that they know they’re not true. I think that all of the statements are true, or at least they ring true to me. The need for a debauched problem, the conflation of sexual desire with emotional vulnerability. I remember what she said to me in the winter when she wanted me to confess my past struggles to her. I want to hear your story.
June 2015
Since the day in April that Margaret left the concert early, I had begun hanging out with Kim, the singer from the band, quite a bit. I send her demos of my songs and she offers to book me a show, she lets me borrow one of my favorite records from her collection and invites me to guest DJ her radio show. I am giddy at the thought that someone I so deeply admire finds me worth their time, and one day when Margaret and I are sprawled out on my bed, I tell her about all the time I’ve been spending with Kim. I had been keeping it a secret for a while, although I didn’t know why. When I tell her, Margaret looks hurt. “Why didn’t you bring me with you?” I am silent for a second, searching for a response that doesn’t reveal the pettiness of my concerns, the jealousy that drives me to be excessively private and unforthcoming. “I guess I just didn’t know if you’d want to come,” I reply.
It’s a bald faced lie, and we both know it, but I don’t want to explain the truth of it all, that I was being intentionally selfish, that every day I felt an increasing desire to forge friendships of my own, to separate myself from her.
“You’re so much better at befriending people than I am,” she tells me, and I am shocked. Everyone knows that she’s better at befriending people than I am, than anyone else we know. We all talk about it, her effortless charisma, her flirtatiousness, her charm. “That’s not true!” I exclaim. “You’re so good at making friends. To tell the truth,” I continue, “I’m jealous of you.” She crinkles her face up into a laugh. “Really?” she asks. “I’m jealous of you too!”
◊
I wish I could say that our admittance of mutual jealousy provided the reconciliation we needed, assuaging the tension bubbling underneath the
surface of our intimacy, but it didn’t. We had made ourselves vulnerable, laid
the competition that drove us bare, but instead of negating our competitive drives, it intensified them. Little pockets of animosity were opened, and sly digs became a significant part of our repertoire. When a boy I still had feelings for flirted with another girl in front of me, Margaret sat next to me as I cried about it, rubbing my back. “It must feel so bad to be rejected,” she cooed, smug with the knowledge that she had never been spurned before. I talked of college often, knowing that school was her weakness, that the promise of higher education that delighted me terrified her. We hung out intermittently that summer, and some throughout senior year, but we would never be close again.
◊
August 2016
Two days before I left for college, I saw Margaret at a concert. We said
hello, made polite small talk, waved goodbye and smiled. I knew that after this, I probably wouldn’t see her for at least three months, but I didn’t try to push our goodbyes into the space of that night. There was something poetic about the lack of closure. I came home the next morning, high on the thought that tomorrow I would be starting a new life, that the Margaret chapter was officially ending. That night, I decided to say goodbye over text. I felt like I owed her that. “I’m sad that I didn’t get to say goodbye in person,” I typed. “Our friendship has been very important to me.” It took her two days to respond, and once she did, I didn’t say anything in return.
March 2017
A friend of mine who has stayed in touch with Margaret comes to visit me one morning. I ask her about how things are at home, how my old friends are doing, and she tells me that she saw Margaret a few weeks ago. “What’s she up to?” I ask. “I don’t really know,” my friend says. “I think she wants to move to Paris permanently and go to the school that her girlfriend goes to.” I nod. I don’t know how she’s going to get to Paris, how she’s going to find a place to live, how she’s going to commit to attending a French university when she doesn’t even speak the language, but I don’t think she does either. “Her plans seem very vague,” my friend tells me. I tell my friend how I feel like Margaret won’t budge from my life, how despite the fact that we haven’t talked in six months, she keeps popping up in places I thought were my own. How she’s been following all my friends on social media, commenting on their posts and sometimes even sending them messages, befriending them from afar. “It’s probably really lonely for her living at home when everyone has left,” my friend says. “Maybe she’s jealous of you.” I ponder this for a minute, then brush the thought away. Even now, the thought of her envying me seems unfathomable. To me, she is still the girl who has everything, and I still can’t figure out exactly what I have.
Spring Issue 2018
Nonfiction
