“You can’t skip lunch,” Patti said, serious now, “I mean it. You have got to make sure you’re getting enough fuel for your body. I learned that the hard way.”
“Well I definitely want to hear about that,” Shoshana said, because that actually did sound interesting. She looked at the waiter and handed back the menu. “Could I get a Cobb salad and a water?”
“I’ll have a hamburger with onion, lettuce, and tomato, and some sweet potato fries, please,” Patti said, also handing back the menu. “Oh, and could I get some of that peach tea--they’ve started making that right?”
“For the summer, yes,” the waiter said, scribbling in his notepad. “I’ll put these in right away.”
“Thank you!” Patti called after him and then turned her attention back to Shoshana. Her eyes were very serious, and Shoshana felt the urge to sit back in her seat. Being on the receiving end of Patti’s full attention felt a bit like being on stage. She remembered the other woman did something in tech. She wanted to say software development but wasn’t sure. Maybe program management?
“So, taking care of yourself,” Shoshana said, hoping that picking up the conversation thread wouldn’t seem like she was trying to pry into Patti’s personal life. She wished she remembered the rules. But then, maybe she’d never really known the rules for these kinds of situations. How did one make adult friends when the people one was dealing with were people you knew from childhood? Was it just a constant stream of idle chat? Or did you just pick up where you left off?
She hoped it wasn’t the latter, if she remembered correctly the last time she’d spent any real time with Patti, she was daring the other girl to sneak into the synagogue’s kitchen and swipe the Shabbat wine.
“Yes, right, right, right! So, a few years ago I started getting sick. Like, really sick. I won’t give you the details because it’s gross, and it took forever to get anyone to take me seriously, but the diagnosis was basically ‘uhhhh’.” Patti did an overly dramatic shrug to illustrate that the doctors were clueless. She patted her hair at the base of her head and rolled her eyes. “Anyway, it was pretty debilitating and embarrassing, and I had to try a lot of different stuff to figure out what the hell was happening.”
“Holy shit, Patti,” Shoshana said, because she had no idea this had even happened. Leah and Abi never said a word.Though why would they, her mind whispered,you made it clear you didn’t want to talk about anything to do with the shul, now didn’t you?
“It was bad,” Patti said honestly, her tone serious. “For a while I couldn’t even work. That’s when I started seeing a therapist because, like, who even are you when your whole identity is wrapped up in being a high achiever and suddenly you’re not able to get out of bed, you know? So, the therapist turned me on to a lot of mindfulness stuff and I basically had to relearn my body. There’s more to it than that, but you know, you don’t want to hear the gross stuff.”
“I am so sorry,” Shoshana said, because what did you say to something like that?
“Oh,” Patti said, waving her hand to show it was fine, “don’t even worry about it, you didn’t do it. I just told you that story to say--you gotta pay attention to your body or it’ll fuck you up. That’s what my problem was, we think, I was so stressed out abouteverythingand I wasn’t really dealing with it so one day my body was likenope, not today, bitch. And then I had to deal with it.”
“So… lunch, right?” Shoshana said, trying to make a joke but it felt flat. If Patti felt it was off she didn’t show it. Instead she gave Shoshana a meaningful look and nodded her head sagely.
“What do you do to take care of yourself? You’re working, like,all the time,right?”
The waiter came back with their drinks and Patti took hers from him gratefully, taking a delicate sip of the tea. She made a sound of sheer pleasure.
“I live for when they put this back on the menu.”
“What is it, like sweet tea?” Shoshana said, cocking her head to consider the glass. Instead of a regular water glass it was served in a hurricane goblet.
“Oh my god, you’ve never had Joe’s peach tea? Try this. It’s okay, you don’t have a germ thing do you?” Patti took one of the straws off the table and neatly broke open the paper wrapper with her perfectly manicured nails. She deftly popped it into her goblet and offered it to Shoshana.
“I do not have a germ thing,” Shoshana said, accepting the tea and taking a sip from the straw. Itwasreally good. She didn’t usually like sweet tea, it was much too sweet for her, but this didn’t taste like it had the usual buckets of sugar dumped in it. Instead it had a delicate fruit flavor that really brought out the taste of the tea. She could see there were mashed peaches in the bottom of the bell-shaped glass.
“Oh good, that was a really ungraceful way to ask that. Rueben, my youngest, he’s developing a germ phobia and we honor that, but I should have phrased that differently. It sounds like I was judging.”
“No, no, it’s okay! I don’t think you were judging. Really, you’re great.” Shoshana said, handing her back the tea. She took a sip of her water. Even with the lemon it wasn’t nearly as good as what she’d just been drinking. She caught a look on Patti’s face that was almost unsure, and it brought Shoshana up short. She wasn’t sure what to do with that.
“Well,” Patti said, shifting uncomfortably in her seat, “thanks. It was just so good to see you at the oneg the other night. I was really looking forward to catching up.”
“Wow, really?” Shoshana couldn’t hide her shock. She shook her head, suddenly she was uncomfortable. “I don’t--I mean, that’s really nice.”
“I mean, yeah,” Patti said, nodding her head to further illustrate her point. She was so animated she reminded Shoshana of a friendly bird of paradise. “I don’t know if you remember, but I didn’t really have a lot of friends when we were kids. You were like the only person at shul that bothered to talk to me. You know more than a sidewaysgood Shabbos. I know it was cause of, your dad-well, you know...”
“Dad didn’t help, but I wasn’t exactly on anybody’s favorite list. I was a self-centered little shit,” Shoshana said, rolling her eyes to show she remembered what a pill she’d been. “I didn’t realize you felt so alienated though. I should have. I’m sorry.”
“Are you kidding?” Patti said, her face full of mock outrage. “You’re telling me a teenage girl was a self-centered little brat? How dare you.”
“Patti,” Shoshana said, laughing. She knew what the other woman was referencing, though.
Patti’s family moved to Campbell because her father bought up some of the old buildings on main street after the real estate bubble burst in the nineties. He’d invested heavily in a number of residential properties as well, which hadn’t sat very well with the good people of Campbell. Both because he was Jewish and because he was Black.
“Truly, I was so wrapped up in my own drama, I was not a very good friend to you. I didn’t even realize you considered us really friends,” she said, stammering through her response because Patti’s words stunned her so thoroughly, “You were always leagues more together than I was, no way you’d want me around, right? I really thought you just put up with me because Dad was, well,Dad. That was incredibly shitty of me though, and I apologize.”
“Your dad was a lot. I could see that.”