6. For Your Pruning

“Even as love crowns you so shall he crucify you. Even as he is for your growth so he is for your pruning.” —Kahlil Gibran

When Jen finally got out of bed, it was late afternoon, almost five. Looking at the clock, she cursed herself for not getting up sooner; her plans were going to be a lot more difficult now. Pulling on her sweatpants and a t-shirt, she crept quietly out of her room, listening to see if Becky and Chase had left. She wanted to go out and check the tabloids, but there would be no way to excuse that if Becky were still home. The unfortunate part of being best friends with your personal assistant, Jen thought bitterly, is that they know your calendar. Jen usually never went anywhere unscheduled; an unplanned evening excursion, even on Saturday, would seem terribly suspicious.

As Jen tiptoed down the hall, she could hear voices. She hoped that Becky had just left her TV on, but soon she recognized Chase’s drawl, and then Becky’s laugh. There was another voice, too, one that sounded familiar but which she couldn’t quite place. It was a woman’s voice, high and nasal, like someone who had grown up just on this side of the Canadian border.

Entering the kitchen, Jen saw Chase first, leaning over the sink and wearing an apron. Then she saw Becky, who was chopping onions on a cutting board. Finally she saw the owner of the third voice she had heard, Becky’s friend Paula. Paula was Becky’s friend from yoga teacher training, and one of the examples Jen had been thinking of when she had characterized all Buddhists as hippies last night. Paula’s father was from Ecuador, and though she had been raised by her mother in the Midwest, Paula now insisted on having her name pronounced as it would be in Spanish, Pow-lah. Becky had met her when she was freshly arrived in LA and still called “Pah-lah,” with a northern, nasal twang, so she rolled her eyes at Paula’s exotic new pronunciation whenever she could get away with it. Jen secretly thought it was pretty, but she had never admitted it to Becky.

Paula’s light brown hair was in long dreadlocks, tied back from her face with a striped scarf. She wore baggy green pants and ugly-but-practical sandals, and she had two rings in her nose, both in the same nostril. Her sleeves were rolled up, and from the large amount of flour on her hands, arms, shirt, and the table, Jen guessed that she was baking bread, an activity that Jen was fairly certain had never taken place in her house before.

The kitchen was spacious and beautiful with large wood-topped work surfaces and a high window looking out on the ravine behind her backyard. Jen usually used it to pour cereal with soymilk or heat up her lemon juice drink, which tasted better hot. Becky often cooked elaborate meals, though. Sometimes they were filled with health-food-store ingredients like wheat berries and burdock root, while others were decadent concoctions draped in melted cheese. Tonight seemed to be one of the second kind of nights; Jen saw a box of lasagna noodles and a container of fresh mozzarella on the counter.

“Morning, sleepy,” said Becky as she noticed Jen standing in the doorway. “Are you going to eat?” Without waiting for an answer, Becky automatically put down her knife and headed for the refrigerator, where she began to pull out the makings of a salad: fancy lettuce prepackaged in an inflated bag, a couple of carrots, a cucumber.

“She doesn’t eat lasagna?” said Chase, snippily, raising one eyebrow. This food-police aspect of his personality, evidently, hadn’t been part of his heterosexual act.

“Shh,” hissed Becky, setting the vegetables on the counter beside the sink where Chase had been peeling and seeding tomatoes. “Wash these.”

“Hi,” said Paula, barely looking up from the dough she was kneading. Jen nodded at her, but she felt too tired to make small talk despite the fact that she hadn’t seen Paula in months and should, according to her understanding of common etiquette, try to “catch up.” Paula seemed too interested in her baking to take offense. As Jen stood looking at her, wondering if she needed to say anything further, Becky came rushing past her holding a bunch of wet vegetables, dripping water on Jen’s feet. Feeling like an entirely superfluous member of her own household, Jen picked up a barstool from its place by one of the counters and carried it into the corner by the microwave, where she sat dejectedly like a small child on a time-out. She considered getting up and leaving the house, for a moment. Becky seemed so consumed with her friends and her lasagna that she might not notice. But of course she would—when Jen wasn’t around to eat her salad, if not sooner—and she would panic and start calling Jen on her cell phone, and Jen would have to either not answer, which would drive Becky into a guilt-ridden meltdown, or answer and make up some excuse about where she had gone, which Becky would see right through. No, there was no escape; she would have to stay here and eat the salad.

As Becky, Chase, and Paula cooked, Jen sat in the corner thinking about what a failed weekend it had been so far. She had set out to seduce a gay man, ended up with a drug dealer instead, in the process finding Becky a new best friend that she seemed to like better than Jen, and now she was forced to feel like an both an outsider and a prisoner in her own house. Jen searched her mind for what she might have done wrong in the last few days to deserve this karmic retribution. Was it that girl she had been rude to in the grocery store? Or that guy in yoga who made the walrus noises; she had directed horrible, murderous thoughts at him, she remembered ruefully.

Suddenly Jen realized: it was Becky. She had made Becky go get the magazine, had resented Becky for being at a seminar when Jen needed her, had rolled her eyes at the Groundbreakers lingo. But worst of all, Jen had rejected Becky’s advice, when in fact Becky had of course been correct all along: sleeping with someone else had not made her feel better, not at all.

Jen turned her attention back to Becky and Chase, who were cutting up vegetables and meat for the lasagna, trading clever insults about a self-help system called “The Light” that was a competitor with Groundbreakers. From their comments, Jen gathered that they considered members of The Light to be trashy, overweight hillbillies.

“I guess ‘The Light’ doesn’t refer to the weight of their asses,” said Becky, looking down at the cutting board.

“Actually it’s the kind of Budweiser they drink,” said Chase by the refrigerator, tearing open a paper-wrapped packet of spinach-and-fennel flavored sausages.

“You guys are so judgmental,” said Paula, accenting her syllables as she aggressively folded and pressed her dough, but sounding amused as she said it. Jen didn't know whether Paula was into Groundbreakers; it was a controversial topic amongst Becky's yoga friends, a few of whom loved it both most of whom thought it was total sacrilege.

“Maybe it’s the shade of peroxide they use on their hair,” said Becky, who was laughing so hard that she kept slipping and almost cutting her finger instead of the onions she was chopping.

“That’s gotta be it,” said Chase approvingly, patting her on the butt as he walked from the sink to the garbage can.

Becky and Chase reminded Jen of a pretend couple she had seen on a TV commercial for an online dating site, the boy playfully hugging the girl from behind as he passed her cutting up vegetables in the kitchen, the girl first protesting, then turning to embrace him and kiss him affectionately. Becky and Chase looked just like that, like a happy couple cooking dinner, uncannily happy, like well-cast actors. Was it possible these two people had met just twenty-four hours ago, Jen wondered? It seemed incredible. That must be what ‘soul-mates’ means, Jen thought.

Chase, seeming to be suddenly guilt-ridden for usurping Jen’s position, looked up from his chopping to engage her in conversation.

“You okay?” he asked her, raising his voice a bit to reach her in the corner.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” said Jen, trying to sound cheerful but not fake.

“It’s so nice how you guys live here together,” Chase said. “It gets kind of lonely being single and living by yourself, you know?”

“Yeah,” said Jen, sounding as forlorn as she felt.

“Were you sad, you know, when Bradley moved out?” Chase asked.

Becky, who was now layering the lasagna in a casserole dish, looked up attentively, waiting to see what Jen would say.

“He didn’t live here,” said Jen. “We kept our own places.”

“He was over here all the time,” Becky added, a resentful edge cutting through her helpful tone of voice.

“We were married,” Jen responded, her curt response sending Becky right back to her lasagna assembly. How could Becky fault her for having her own husband stay over—and wasn’t this Jen’s house? Becky was in fact lucky to get to live in this beautiful house; even with her combined yoga teacher and personal assistant income, Becky wouldn’t have been able to rent more than a small one-bedroom in any decent L.A. neighborhood.

After an awkward moment of silence, Chase said, “So you guys lived in two separate houses even when you were married? That’s so independent.” He spoke in a hearty, encouraging tone.

Becky laughed in acknowledgment of how far Chase’s assessment was from the truth of the situation. “It wasn’t independent, it was lazy,” she said. “They could never get organized enough to buy a house together.”

“We didn’t want to sell our houses when the market was bad,” Jen said, in self-defense. “Anyway, we almost always stayed at his place.”

“How did you guys meet?” Chase asked, apparently trying to change the subject.

Jen was surprised he didn’t know. They had met on the set of a movie that Chase had initially had a small role in. Chase’s part ended up getting cut before filming was even over, but he was still on set enough afterwards, drinking scotch with Bradley in his trailer. How could he not remember?

“On set?” Jen asked, as though she were unsure herself of the answer.

Chase laughed, recognizing her confusion. “Oh, I remember, honey,” he said. “That trailer was a-rockin’!” He laughed some more, then shuddered a little as though disgusted by the memory.

“No, I meant how did you and Becky meet?” he clarified.

“Oh my God,” exclaimed Becky. “That’s a weird story.”

“We went to middle school together,” said Jen, as though that were all that needed to be explained.

“And?” asked Chase, waiting for the weird part.

“And she stole my boyfriend!” said Becky, her hands on her hips in a gesture of faux-indignance.

“Oh, it wasn’t like it sounds,” said Jen, embarrassed. Still, there was no way Becky wasn’t going to tell the story now, with that set-up, and anyway it really was a weird story, if she thought about it. She sat back on her stool and waited for Becky to get into it.

“I was dating this really hot guy,” Becky said, forgetting about her cooking as she got involved in the narrative. Paula had finished kneading and was looking very preoccupied with shaping the dough into long, fat loaves. Jen wondered if she had heard this story before.

“What did he look like?” asked Chase, with interest, pulling up his own stool by the counter to sit on and wiping his hands carefully on his apron.

“Eww, he was twelve,” said Jen.

“He had a little mohawk,” said Becky enthusiastically. “And he bleached it blond. It was the coolest thing ever.”

“Hmm,” said Chase, grimacing skeptically. He was probably almost ten years older than Jen and Becky and apparently couldn’t appreciate pubescent high fashion of their era.

“So we were together for a few weeks and I was way into him. I used to leave him little notes with stickers in his backpack and I thought they were so clever and funny.”

“So you felt like you were really committing a lot of energy to the relationship,” said Chase.

“Exactly,” said Becky. “I even baked him cookies once, and I don’t bake.”

Everyone looked over at Paula, who was leaning over the oven, sliding the bread in. “Thanks, Paula, by the way,” Becky called over to her.

“No problem,” said Paula, slamming the oven closed. The bread taken care of for the moment, she came closer and pulled up a stool to listen to the story.

“So Valentine’s Day comes, and I’m so excited that I actually have this hot boyfriend, and I made him this totally funny valentine with little bugs all over it, and it said ‘Happy Bug Day.’”

“What’s Bug Day?” asked Chase.

“It’s nothing. I was just trying to be funny,” said Becky. “Relieve the pressure. Even when I was twelve I knew boys didn’t actually care about Valentine’s Day. But I wanted to make him a card to show him how much I liked him. So I got to school, and I was looking for him on the punk bench by the social studies building where I usually met him before class. But he wasn’t there.”

Chase gasped. Paula was looking absently out the large back window; she didn’t seem as concerned.

“I waited as long as I could, until the bell rang, but he never came,” Becky continued. “I had to run to class and I was late and got a warning. I was all worried that something happened to him. I was in algebra class getting all upset, crying, thinking ‘Where is he?’ and imagining his mom’s car had gotten hit on the way to school or something. But then at lunch, I saw him on this other bench where the preppy kids hung out. And he was sitting with this other girl.”

“Oh no!” exclaimed Chase, turning to look accusingly at Jen. “On Valentine’s Day?”

“I thought boys don’t care about Valentine’s Day,” Jen retorted snottily.

“So I went up to them and I was crying and I yelled, ‘Oh my god, how could you do this to me on Valentine’s Day? I hate you!’ And I threw the card in his face. I stormed off, and I was hoping he would follow me, and he did. I started yelling all of these accusations at him, like, ‘You ruined my whole life and I am never going to forgive you for cheating on me,’ and all this stuff I’d seen on soap operas.”

“What did he say?” asked Chase, riveted.

“He just stood there waiting until I was done yelling. And then he said, ‘Becky, I’m really sorry, but I think we should see other people.’ And he just turned around and walked back to the bench where this girl was waiting for him.”

As the story progressed, Chase kept looking over at Jen in disbelief. She squirmed uncomfortably on her stool, waiting for Becky to get past this part, which was making her feel a little guilty even after all this time.

“So I was totally devastated. That night I couldn’t sleep. I lay in bed all night thinking about what I was going to do to this bitch who stole my boyfriend. And I decided the only appropriate thing was that I was going to have to fight her.”

“Wow,” said Chase, sounding highly impressed. “I didn’t know you knew how to fight.”

“I don’t,” said Becky. “I’d never been in a fight before. But we’d been reading about the Revolutionary War in history and I felt it was my ethical duty to defend my territory.”

Jen’s eyes instinctively turned to Paula, whom Jen thought might be offended by this comment for some reason she couldn’t quite place. But Paula’s face was as unaffected and impassive as ever.

“I needed to figure out who this girl was and how I could find her alone,” Becky continued. “So the next day I asked around to some people who hung out by that other bench, and they told me that her name was Jenny and she was one of the rich kids and she would be walking to the math building for fifth period. I waited all day, and I was all nervous because I knew I was going to challenge her. I was kind of shaky and messed-up because I’d only slept like two hours. I was going to wait by the math building until I saw her, challenge her to a fight after school, and then hide out under the bleachers for the rest of fifth period since I wouldn’t be able to make it to my class on time. So I saw her, and I came up to her and grabbed her arm, and she recognized me from the day before and she looked all scared and embarrassed.”

“What did you say?” asked Chase.

“Oh, something like ‘Bitch, you stole my man,’ and ‘I want to settle this with you after school.’”

“Yeah, that’s what you said,” Jen confirmed, grimacing.

“What did you do?” Chase asked Jen.

“That’s the best part,” Becky interrupted. “I was expecting her to tell me off, you know, like, ‘It was time for him to take out the trash,’ or something.”

“But she didn’t?” asked Chase.

“No. In fact, she didn’t say anything at all. She just, like, burst out crying.”

“Hmm,” said Chase, thoughtfully. “Actually that makes sense. I think I’d cry, too, if this chick wanted to fight me,” he said, gesturing at Becky.

“Shut up,” said Becky. “So she’s just standing there, crying, and I didn’t know what to do. I wasn’t sure if I should ask her what’s wrong or try to be nice to her, since I had just told her I wanted to fight her. And she did steal my boyfriend. But she kept crying and crying and she didn’t even put her face in her hands, just stood there looking at me with her mouth shaking and tears running all down her face.”

“What did you do?” asked Chase.

“Well, eventually it got too embarrassing to just stand there, and people were staring at us. So I grabbed her hand and I pulled her to the side of the hallway and made her sit down on a bench. And I sat down, too, and watched her cry for a while. And finally she stopped crying a little and I said, ‘What’s the matter?’

“She told me that she didn’t mean to steal anyone’s boyfriend and they weren’t even dating, just talking. They had been hanging out and talking after their science class for a few weeks, and that was the first time he’d come to find her during lunch. And she had been starting to kind of like him, but he didn’t tell her that he had a girlfriend and she hadn’t realized until yesterday. And she had gone home feeling so horrible because it was Valentine’s Day, and she thought she was starting to date this cute guy, but now it had been ruined, and on top of that she had ruined the Valentine’s Day of some poor other girl without even meaning to. And she was so upset about it that she couldn’t sleep that night and had just laid awake most of the night thinking of what happened and feeling horrible.”

“Wow,” said Chase. “So did you forgive her?”

“Of course!” exclaimed Becky. “We were soul mates.” Jen was startled by Becky’s choice of words, the same ones she had applied to Becky and Chase not half an hour ago.

“After that we both stopped talking to the boy, and we became best friends. And it was only years later that Jen told me the saddest part of the story.”

“What’s that?” asked Chase.

“That Jen’s parents were in the middle of their divorce when that all happened. And that’s why she was so upset, because her dad had cheated on her mom, and her mom had said all that same stuff, ‘You can just stay with that bitch’ and that kind of thing.”

Jen was startled to hear this part of the story. She had forgotten it—well, not that it had happened, her parents getting divorced, of course she remembered. Perhaps it wasn’t actually part of the story in her version of it; for her, the story ended with her and Becky living happily ever after. But she couldn’t deny the connection that Becky was making. She felt touched, but also kind of pathetic, to know that Becky carried around such pity for her twelve-year-old self.

Even now that the story was over, Paula still showed no discernible reaction. Leaning her elbow on the counter by the stool, she stared lazily out the window, chewing on the end of one of her pale dreadlocks.

“That’s a crazy story,” said Chase, rising from his stool and stretching.

Finally Paula spoke. “But you said it was weird,” she pointed out, the lock falling from her mouth. “What’s so weird about it?”

Becky seemed to have been waiting for this question. “What’s weird is who the guy was: Vanto Hatch.”

Chase stopped himself mid-stretch, threw his hands down, and exclaimed, “No way!” Paula gasped loudly, clasping one hand and then the other over her mouth in disbelief.

And that’s when Jen knew for certain that Paula was also in Groundbreakers, because Vanto Hatch was the founder and CEO of Groundbreakers, and nobody but a serious disciple would know or care.

Chapter 7:
http://kickoutofyou.blogspot.com/2008/06/7-witnessing-violence.html