04.20.2008 - 1:28 p.m.

My friend's mother is making the dresses for her wedding. I go over to her apartment after the bridal shower, and soon find myself standing in my underwear in the center of her living room, a tube of eggplant-colored fabric pinned precariously around me.

Her hands are cool and professional, and she keeps up a running monologue about pulling this seam in, and thinking the back is okay, but we want darts in the front from the bottom of my bra line to my last rib or so. She is shorter than me, with my friend's same thick, dark hair worn down to her waist. Her arms are soft and faintly wrinkled, and I am fixated on the scars on them. The marks are thin and short for the most part, almost the kind you'd get from cat scratches except that they don't come in sets. There are a lot of them. And there is one, a good three inches long, a thicker, straight pale line perpendicular to her arm.

I have never known what to think about this woman, who chose a man who would one day abuse the children they made together, and stayed with him until the children had all gone from the house. I wonder if those scars are his doing, too, or if they are her own work, evidence of a coping mechanism she later passed on to her daughter. Did she know? Or did she just find ways not to see? Surely she hadn't agreed, or her daughter wouldn't still speak to her.

Two of her cats occasionally scope me out while I stand there and she talks. She has me hold my hands out from my sides, and as she pins up another seam, she tells me how she could never put up with what I am putting up with, that she has no patience. She's only stuck me once or twice, and never hard. I wonder if it is the time, the sticking, or the being touched by a stranger she is referring to. I don't ask. Anything.

That night my friend breaks our plans with a phonecall and a complicated message about a shitstorm and friends who need her in Baltimore; I tell her it is okay, that we will hang out when I come back up for the bachelorette night, maybe for the afternoon beforehand. She tells me she loves me, I say the same, and that is that. I have to work in the morning.

So instead, I go out with the matron of honor, who is another old friend, her husband and his old housemates. We end up in a gay bar with karaoke, where I sing Lisa Loeb and K. T. Tunstall, and in between, while my fingers page through a song list made vaguely sticky by a spilled drink, I think about the way my friend surfaces and disappears in my life, the way she surfaces and disappears in her own.

It took me years to understand that I would never carry her through her troubles, that I could only stand beside them and hope my presence, even in the loosest sense, gave her something she needed. I still never know how far in I should lean. But for now, she seems happy. She'd smiled all afternoon, and I like the way her eyes change when she talks about her intended.

So I do karaoke, and I have a fucking good time.

-stonebridge

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