Ariana Grande as a Quantum Unit of Time

RTT could not bee-leeeeve I didn’t know who Ariana Grande was.

“She’s like the biggest singer there is,” he told me. “You need to get out more.”

I smiled and blinked in my vague, blank, comforting way.

No need to tell him that I’ve seen that movie before. Or that I’ve gotten out plenty.



A couple of nights ago, I got very stoned and did that Facebook free association thing. Is it stalking? Maybe it’s stalking. I think of it more as catching up on the narratives.

Anyhow, that’s how I discovered that both D_______ daughters had gotten married. Within six months of each other.



When you’re the mother of young children, your prerequisites for friendship change.

Of course, you continue to love all your friends. But you can only hang out with the ones that understand your kids come first. If it looks like one of your friends is pouting and that they’re about to pull you aside for The Talk—I feel like I put more into our friendship than you do—you mercilessly cut them before they can open their mouths.

The basis for all adult interactions is the children’s interactions. Play dates, birthday parties, school events. Of course, you continue to have standards! If you know, for example, that the mother of the two age-appropriate toddlers who live just four doors down is a Trump supporter, you’re unlikely to confide your midnight angst over the state of the nation. But you’re just likely to sit in her kitchen, sipping coffee, and to invite her to sit in your kitchen. You’ll talk about the new Make-a-Bear store that opened in the mall. You’ll talk about your Pilates class. You’ll complain that you can’t throw a kid’s birthday party anymore without investing in venue, elaborate cake, entertainers, swag bags. In time, you may come to believe that conversations about new mall stores, exercise classes and children’s activities represent the full extent of possible human discourse.

That’s how I came to be Best Friends with Jeanie D_______.



Editorial note: For me, the designation “Best Friend” doesn’t signal exclusivity; it signals a level of emotional intensity. It’s never clear to me why I love some people and don’t love others. In a surprising number of instances, the people whom I don’t love are clearly more worthy of affection.



Jeanie’s daughter Sydney was RTT’s Best Friend. They went to daycare together. We were blessed: We had the most extraordinary daycare provider in the history of daycare on this planet. The fabulous Diana (still a pal.)

I was working insane hours in a really demanding position that called for me to drive five hours a day, three times a week, between Monterey and San Francisco, and to fly at least once a week to Los Angeles. The rest of the time I flew around the country, exploring new technology at the behest of my employer, a huge entertainment agency in LA. It was a stealth operation: My employer had gotten tired of repping actors, directors and production deals and wanted in on the digital revolution.

I was making a shitload of money, and the gig was trés glamorous. But I was always exhausted.

I supported the family. And the family cost a helluva lot of money.

I don’t know what the hell Ben was doing during that time. He was supposed to be running the household, but he did a shit job of it: The house was always filthy, the kids were always running around undisciplined.

He was writing, he told me. He is a very good writer, better than me in many ways, and in the early days of our marriage, had attracted the attention of a top agent. The agent wanted some changes in the novel he’d written the year before we met, but Ben had never been able to create those changes, and so, the novel remained unsold.

(This is the real difference between professional-caliber writers and amateur writers, by the way. It’s not actually a matter of being able to write. It’s that professional writers are able to incorporate feedback.)

Ben was very secretive about the stuff he wrote. (He doesn’t write anymore.) I knew, or thought I knew, he was writing something. He told me he was writing something. But all I knew about that something was that it wasn’t going well, and that somehow, the fact that it wasn’t going well was my fault.

It was also my fault that he didn’t like living in Monterey.

And, of course, it was my fault that I was far more professionally successful than he was.



Jeanie also had a feckless husband whom she supported.

“If only he’d get a job that paid something!” she’d moan.

“At this point, I’d be happy if Ben got a job that paid nothing,” I’d moan.

We bonded over that before we began to bond over other things. We were both jocks. We were both readers. We both enjoyed the game of subversive sarcasm that disguises itself as over-the-top admiration: Wow! You got that laundry detergent for five cents off? That is so incredible!

Tony was this charming, gregarious guy who’d gone to Stanford on a football scholarship and then discovered science. He went on to get a PhD in Cellular and Molecular Biology and was doing invertebrate research at the Hopkins Lab. He loved the Beat generation writers. He loved hippies. “Honestly,” he’d tell me, “it’s the great tragedy of my life that I wasn’t born 20 years earlier."

Tony actually worked very hard; it’s just that the Hopkins Lab paid its post-doc fellows nada.

The idea was that Tony would land a professorship at some prestigious university in a sunny clime and that Jeannie would then say goodbye to teaching second graders in Pacific Grove forever.

“I’m thinking San Diego,” Jeanie would say.

“Or Santa Barbara,” I'd say.

“Or even some place in Florida!” she'd say. “I’m just so frickin’ tired of small town life in Pacific Grove. Ugh!”

Jeanie and I grew very, very close. Weekend trips to the beach with the kids and extended families; solitary hikes in the Big Sur mountains, just the two of us.

During a big chunk of that time, Lucius was living at my house—he was broke because he never paid taxes when he earned the Big Buck$, and the IRS came down on him hard. Jeanie became an enormous Lucius fan! Diana, too. They were both test readers for A Handbook of American Prayer (which was largely written in my guest room.)

And then her mother died, and just like that, she dropped me. I never understood why.

I wrote about it a bit. Hoping to make sense of it.

But I never could make sense of it.

It’s not an emotional thing for me anymore, getting dropped like that. But I still think about it every once in a while. When I’m stoned.



Tony eventually landed The Dream Job at UC Santa Barbara.

Jeanie and the girls went with him to Santa Barbara.

She moved back to Pacific Grove within a year.

They got divorced.

She’s still teaching second grade. According to my FB stalking, recently, she won the Crystal Apple Award for outstanding teachers on the Central Coast.

Sydney and Torrey, their daughters, who’d been pretty children, did not grow up to inherit Jeanie’s looks.

Sydney and Torrey are very blocky. Line-backerishly blocky, one might say. Meaning that they’d pointedly ignored all of Jeanie’s nagging: Be careful what you eat. Exercise.

They’d both had a tough time in college. After college, they’d both returned to Pacific Grove. Pacific Grove is a charming town, but there isn’t really anything to do there. The girls made due with whatever low-paying jobs were available.

And then they got married.

I stared at the FB photographs of Torrey and Sydney with their new mates.

OmyGAWD, Torrey! Why did you marry a guy with such a small head?

Sydney, Sydney, Sydney! I get it! You met the guy while he was at DLI; you married him ‘cause that was the only way to prolong the summer romance. But do you honestly think you are going to last a year living with your crazy Trump fan mother-in-law in Selma, North Carolina?

I know, I know. I'm a baaaaaad person.

###

It always throws me when human beings I used to know as children metamorphose into adulthood. I don’t know why that should be. I suppose it’s a kind of solipsism, this assumption that while I change, the canvas backdrop behind my life will remain stationary.

How can I grant these adults any agency at all? They're not really adults. I changed their diapers. I held their hands when they crossed the street.

It put me in a really weird mood to think of Sydney and Torrey married.

So, I turned on Spotify. I only listen to Spotify late at night when I am very stoned. It’s a substitute for travel to faraway places because there's only one thing I ever do on Spotify: I listen to Greatest Hit playlists in places where I want to go but probably (at this late stage) will never go.

The number one hit in Bulgaria? Ariana Grande, thank u, next.
The number one hit in Portugal? Ariana Grande, thank u, next.
The number one hit in Romania? Ariana Grande, thank u, next.

I hated Ariana Grande’s voice back when she was Mariah Carey and Christina Aguilara.

You’re really, really, really old, I could hear RTT’s voice sneering.