2013
Virtual Friends
If there was one thing Claire would ban, it was TV commercials. And if there was one thing she couldn’t stop watching, it was these commercials. Her friends on Facebook told her to record her shows and just fast-forward through the advertisements or to download them from a streaming site, but Claire couldn’t help but watch each program in real time with all the ads—almost in a masochistic way. Like dwelling on a wound, like itching a scab and feeling it sting.
Every night after she came home to her small apartment in Watertown, Claire made herself a dinner of pita bread with turkey and tomato or Top Ramen noodles or microwaved packaged rice and a fried egg. She turned on the TV and prepared to feel the sting. She didn’t watch the shows her friends on Facebook watched—the dramas on cable that won all the awards: sexy, well-written, edgy shows that warranted social media status updates and spoiler alerts and virtual water-cooler conversations. She watched instead—almost with horror—reality shows featuring plastic-surgeried housewives fighting in expensive restaurants or families with twenty happy children going through scripted mayhem. During the commercials, Claire would lie under her beige blanket as buddies ate fast food together, parents and children found bliss with mobile phone apps, cute toddlers ran around in diapers, fathers tearfully watched their daughters grow up in a montage from baby-in-a-car-seat to teenager-behind-the-steering-wheel. Claire scoffed at the sentimentality and rejected it, but longed for it all the same. Years ago, she had been a long-legged undergrad at college majoring in English literature, convinced she’d end up as a successful and content university professor. But then her mother had called in tears saying, “It’s positive.” The tiny lump in her mother’s breast ended up, even after removal, continuing its evil journey throughout her body, so that by the time Claire was twenty-four, her mother was in a graveyard in Bedford, Massachusetts, just a mile from the local Whole Foods, and Claire was tented in chronic grief. Her father had died in a car accident when she was just a toddler in those diapers constantly featured in the commercials she watched at nights alone now. Claire had felt, at a very young age, the stunning reality of being alone. Boyfriends came and went. None of them stuck, even though she had been convinced that she was in love once. Maybe twice.
Now, at age thirty, her friends from school were either married or in serious relationships. They were scattered all over the country and even the world. Her link to them was through social media, not through phone calls or that ancient ritual of actually seeing one another. She followed their colorful, happy, but oh-so-careful-to-be-self-deprecating lives online. She read status updates of “Yes, it’s true, we have a bun in the oven!” and pressed “like” even though she sometimes felt empty and jealous. She saw the photos of her pregnant friends on beaches with their husbands’ arms around them and pressed “like.” She opened her laptop to see the babies born—small, scrunched-up newborns in hats—and read all the comments: “So happy for you, Jenna!” “OMG—he is GORGEOUS!” and pressed “like” and added her own “Congrats!” She scrolled through selfies of her former classmates vacationing in Costa Rica and Hawaii with their kids and was mired in a strange stew of envy and happiness for them. Then she turned on the TV and watched families drink hot chocolate and have fights and make up and fathers give car keys to their newly licensed daughters. And all she could think was just how much she missed her mom.
Her room was lined with books written by gurus and advice-givers who told her that she should look within and meditate and be grateful and count her blessings and write in a gratitude journal. Claire did. But once it became clear that her English literature degree from a small liberal arts college in Connecticut qualified her for administrative jobs and folding clothes at retail stores, once she realized that she was never going to have the courage to apply for a PhD program in English and become a professor, she took the money from her mom’s life insurance, rented an apartment in Watertown, floated from retail job to administrative job, and found herself, one day, at age thirty, working as the assistant administrator at the Duxton Senior Center.
She liked her job. She liked being with people day in and day out who were close to exiting the stage, so to speak. She appreciated that they did not have, for the most part, the fake humility and the need to prove that they were happy happy happy. She loved that the old, grumpy men coughed and spat and snarled and made no pretense that life was good. She enjoyed helping the older ladies apply bright-pink lipstick with religious regularity, as if skipping that one act alone would mark complete surrender to their age. She helped Miss Emily roll her nylons up her blue-veined legs and she buttoned Mr. Rosenberg’s cardigan with care. The ladies and gentlemen at the Duxton Senior Center were the only reason Claire hadn’t given up. They were all she had left. Her friends from elementary school and high school and college were now simply “Friends on Facebook”—a new category, it seemed, in her mind: FOF—who existed only as digital images, whom she hadn’t seen in years (she skipped the reunions), and who scrolled through life in happy, occasionally messy, but always exclamatory moments. Her father wasn’t even a memory because she’d been too young to know him. Her most vivid image of him was from a photo her mother had attached to their fridge with an eggplant magnet: a tall, grinning man with blond hair standing by a picnic basket next to her mom. There had been no fancy wedding. Just a justice of the peace visit, her mom had said.
For years she’d had a mother, beautiful and kind—a mother who told her stories about her father and who lamented being an only child who’d given birth to an only child and how little family they had but they had each other, didn’t they, and that’s really all they needed, and her baby was her everything, her beautiful baby who gave her life meaning. She was her gorgeous little girl, wasn’t she, I’m sorry if I’m embarrassing you, sweetheart, but it’s true—you are my life—and you and me, girlie girl, we’re going to take on the world, aren’t we, Claire, and oh, how your father would’ve loved to see you now, sweetheart, and we can make it on this planet, girlie girl—we can—you are so smart and so talented and you just wait—you’re going to be a big deal one day, you already are my pride and joy. And then cancer had wiped her mother from the world and Claire felt desperately, inexplicably, painfully, permanently alone. No mom to come home to, call on the phone, cook a favorite dish with. No mom to tell her that everything would be all right. And the strange, horrifying realization that things wouldn’t be all right. Ever. Even if her FOF scaled mountains in Asia and raised perfect children and celebrated romantic anniversaries in faraway resorts. Everything wasn’t all right for Claire. At thirty, she grasped this, owned this, knew this—she did not feel the need to pretend otherwise. The husbands and babies and romance and oh-my-gosh-look-at-my-messy-but-oh-so-full-and-beautiful-life! status updates were not in her future. Hers were nights of reality shows and days spent in the reality of people nearing death.
She loved her senior residents at the center, even the ones so close to going that every morning hearing them say “Well, hey there, Claire!” felt like a miracle. Mr. Rosenberg told her tales of his life in Queens, New York, “back in the day,” and Mrs. Ventura was about to “step over to the other side” every single week, or so she said. Claire’s favorite was a Mr. Bahman Aslan, who had been there for two years. She called him “Mr. Batman.” He was always kind and she loved to hear his tales of his youth in Iran, his political adventures, the years he spent during the war. His great love. People like Mr. Batman—his jokes, complaints, sorrows, ailments, regrets, perspective, memories—were the reason Claire woke up every morning, ate a dry, stale-tasting protein bar, and drove in her seven-year-old Honda from Watertown to Duxton. The Duxton Senior Center was a combination of a senior center and a nursing home. Seniors could just visit to partake in activities or be boarders under a more traditional nursing-home model. Claire threw herself into the concerns of her seniors and residents. Thanksgiving was with them. Christmas was with them. Her life was with them. And outside of that, life was simply FOF and the damn shows and commercials on TV.
She would take the stories of her residents any day over all of that. Especially the memories and life anecdotes of Mr. Bahman Aslan.