A couple years ago one of my close friends stood on my porch at midnight and stated with an actor’s conviction: “You are a fucking bitch,” and then, “Everyone thinks you’re a fucking bitch.”
“Oh, now you’re just exaggerating,” I said, and closed the door.
I wish I had said that. What I did say was “You’re drunk.” I hadn’t exactly been sober, but I wasn’t drunk, and I definitely wasn’t as drunk as she was.
I really liked this friend. She was really funny and she thought I was funny and even though we were both massive know-it-alls who got into it sometimes we couldn’t really prevent ourselves from spending all our time together.
When she got home she began to text me, sticking to the same theme. I blocked her number, took a long shower and then lay awake, wholly unsoothed, going over the details. I kept coming back to the same conclusion, which was that I had definitely been kind of a bitch, but that what she’d done in return was not right, a supreme overreaction, and possibly abuse. It didn’t feel good, but it was better than the other place I kept going, where I really was a fucking bitch and everyone thought I was. I mean, I had heard the words God, you’re such a bitch a few times in my life, but usually the person who said it was laughing or rolling their eyes or was my mother—who was also such a bitch sometimes—but, not a fucking bitch, and not really.
It kept me awake all night and I was shaky and weird the next day; I did a freelance job, badly, I thought, and I’m pretty sure the client agreed. This made everything worse. Now I was a fucking bitch who couldn’t handle my life. All I wanted to do was tell people the story, but if they didn’t have the exact right reaction — and once you cut out the people who weren’t really listening to me in the first place, this was almost everyone— afterward I just felt worse. At least a month after the incident, I was still going over the whole thing; I can’t imagine how, but I was.
“Please, stop,” said Tor, my boyfriend, so kindly I almost wished he were mad. “You’ve got to let this go.”
Is there anything worse than knowing that the one thing you want to talk about is the exact thing that bores and irritates everyone who knows you? I didn’t know what to do with myself. Every time I felt happy or relaxed I would think about being shouted at, and why I’d been shouted at, and I was angry, and I was ashamed, and I was angry, and I was ashamed. What kind of life could I have inside this loop? Other than maybe writing a book, like, “Eat, Pray and Be a Fucking Bitch,” or “What To Expect When You’re Just a Fucking Bitch,” or maybe just “Harry Potter and the Fucking Bitch.”
The worst part of it all—and I knew it the moment it happened—was that our fight was about something extremely dark. She’d been a bitch to me, but I’d been a snob to her. And I was proud of myself and felt superior to her because I don’t scream at people and I don’t really have to scream at people because I can just act superior to them. My friend had grown up working-class and I had grown up in the professional managerial class. Though I know the tribe in which I was reared is every bit as diseased as the worst of cults, what I’d said to her was all about letting her know that I was still a devout and prized member. The thing she’d screamed at me was all about her letting me know exactly what she thought of that.
She moved away and I was so relieved.
—
One day I told the whole story as a joke, just two sentences long: “A friend of mine shouted at me once, when she was really drunk, You’re a fucking bitch! And I said, ‘Well, I see my work is done here.’”
My friend laughed at this. He is very, very funny, one of the funniest people I know. I was pleased with his response and felt like I had found my experience a good home.
—
About a month ago, I got an email from her. She wanted to talk to me. My heart beat fast and I did some circles around the dining room. I forwarded the email to Tor. He wrote back HOLY SHIT SAY NO.
I said no. I did not want to talk to her, I said. I did not want to get into it. I felt all the anger that had dissipated over the last three years all over again. She replied no, it wasn’t like that, she just wanted to apologize. She was doing a Fourth Step, the part of recovery where you tell people you’re sorry you yelled at them, or slept with their wife, or killed their son. I felt like, Ok, I’m a name on a list. I said fine though, because, why not?
When she arrived, though, I was so happy to see her face, her smile, to hug her, and I don’t love hugging. I don’t hate it, but it’s not automatic for me. But I actually held her body, felt its weight. “I’m very sorry for what I said to you,” she told me. “It was insensitive and angry and hostile and super aggressive and I didn’t have any right to speak to you like that.” She said something like that.
I didn’t say, “I’m also sorry,” mostly because I just suddenly felt so good I didn’t want to get into it. I said, “I accept your apology.” Then we went for a walk and talked about other things, like the time we saw a friend of mine driving around, and I told her that I knew he had a new girlfriend and he wouldn’t tell us who she was. “Oh, let’s follow him,” she said, because we were in her car, and he wouldn’t recognize it. We followed him through two towns just to see who he was sleeping with, and we didn’t even care that much. It was just an immature, silly thing to do and probably the most fun half hour of my entire life.
I still believe all the stuff about myself that her yelling at me made me think about. I also still thought what she did was fucked up and an apology was appropriate. But after she apologized, I realized it wasn’t the apology that made things feel right again. I mean, I’d always kind of wondered if she thought I was a fucking bitch and I’d had to spend the last three years thinking about how, yes, she did. But she wanted to spend time with me anyway. I could not have anticipated how good this would feel, better than the thrill of success, or falling in love. Since that day she came over, I find myself worrying less, and sometimes feeling happy for no reason.
