Perfect Tunes - Emily Gould Page 0,59

sipped her tea. She didn’t mean anything by it. She meant exactly what she said. She had no idea what she was talking about, thought Laura, and realized that she felt about Callie the same way the thirty-five-year-olds (unfairly) felt about her.

* * *

Laura and Mara met up at a bar on Second Avenue, skipping the opening band so they could brace themselves for fun. The pregaming had been Mara’s idea.

“I haven’t been to a show where you couldn’t sit down in years,” she’d said when Laura had extended the invitation initially. “I’ll need to ease into it.”

Winning Mara over had felt to Laura like a triumph, almost like a romantic conquest. She’d seen her on the street for months, doing school drop-off, at the playground, wrangling her small child in the grocery store, and had admired her outfits and her forbidding, perpetually distracted facial expression. She’d tried the basic moves—small smiles of solidarity, “How old is she?”—and gotten nowhere, until eventually they’d found themselves at the same birthday party for one of Kayla and Marie’s classmates. It was held in the backyard of a mind-meltingly enviable brownstone, with organic juice boxes for the children and chenin blanc for their chaperones, but no amount of social lubricant could make it unawkward for Laura, who kept trying and failing to join conversations between people who clearly all knew one another already. And anyway she had nothing to offer on the subject of Fire Island versus Martha’s Vineyard. Mara stood by herself, near the wine, looking unapologetically bored. Laura had come up to her and poured herself another glass, then raised it to Mara in a toast.

“To the birthday boy, Caiden, or whatever,” she’d said, and watched with excitement as a smile spread over Mara’s face. Her teeth were slightly crooked; maybe she held her face so stoically to avoid showing them. They were cute, though.

“It’s Theo,” she told Laura. “Just kidding, I actually have no idea.”

They had been friends ever since, but tonight was the first time they’d hung out without their children. It wasn’t immediately a welcome change. Laura missed being able to gloss over any lull by taking an interest in the miniature social interactions running parallel to her own; without any distractions, they were forced to complete their sentences and follow their thoughts to conclusions. But after a couple of rounds the initial awkwardness faded, and by the time they decided it was time to walk over to the venue, Laura and Mara were both feeling almost carefree. The sun had almost set and the sky was still streaky, the air was a perfect temperature, just a little bit too warm. They were ready to stand in a dark room and be pounded all over by waves of music.

Inside the venue, Laura flashed the badge that Callie had given her and they were escorted up to a balcony that seemed to be suspended almost directly over the stage, so they felt like they were floating in the dark. The other people in this section had also all been deemed important for some reason; they were journalists here to review the show, or, like Laura, friends with the band. She spotted a guy who looked familiar and almost said hi before realizing that he was a semi-famous comedian, not an old acquaintance.

The feeling that Laura got as she watched Callie play her songs was so strange, a mix of pain and pleasure. Or maybe it was more like the kind of minor pain you can easily stand to inflict on yourself but that’s intolerable when someone else does it. She stood there wallowing in it. She looked at the band and imagined herself in it, of course. She kept her jaw tightly clenched so that she wouldn’t be tempted to mouth the words. All around her, other people were singing along.

The band had just come out for an encore when the phone in her pocket buzzed. She shouted, “I have to take this; it’s Matt” to Mara quickly before pushing back through to the stairwell.

It was Marie, Matt explained. She’d woken up crying, complaining that her eye had an owie, and when he’d turned on the lights he’d seen that her cornea was red and her face was streaked with pink-tinged tears. He’d given her saline eyedrops and parked her in front of a Disney movie with a Popsicle, but the eye did look bad. Had something happened? Laura told him about the poke she’d sustained at the park.