Mind Reading

by Savannah Bell

Bianca and I weren’t friends for long—only a few months, really— but I missed her like hell. She always told me these stories where I knew she withheld something from me. Her fraudulence was almost admirable; she created such an intricate image of herself she must have believed it was true. I couldn’t help but to wonder why I loved her so deeply. 

We had dinner in the city together once a week. In mid-September, we went to our favorite Indian restaurant. She bought expensive dishes that she picked and played with just to prove she wasn’t hungry. Sometimes, it made me feel fat. Other times, I felt superior. Look at me, I thought. It takes courage to be authentic. 

I forget why I wanted to be near her so badly until I remember nights like those. We sat barefoot on pillows and laughed too loudly. She dissolved in dim lighting and I remembered she was a real person with Tikka Masala on the corner of her lip. We talked about everything. 

She asked me once why I never took multivitamins. We planned to go out that night, and she spoke to me through bubbles of water while she washed her face. 

“I always assumed they were pseudoscientific,” I said. 

“You don’t even take ashwagandha?”

“Like the psychedelic?” 

“No,” she corrected. “That’s ayahuasca.” 

“Either way,” I said. “I don’t think it makes much of a difference. I have never needed any of those things.” 

She turned toward me and I noticed her dandruff. The white flecks huddled together like miniature mountain peaks. I couldn’t take her seriously. 

“That is really bad for you,” she said, and wiped her face with a towel. “That’s probably why you need hormonal birth control— it's the only thing regulating your emotions.”

“Are you serious?” I asked. 

“Well,” she continued. “You said that Nick sensed you’re not very zen right now.” 

“We both agreed he was too drunk to know what he was saying.”

“I gave it more thought,” she said. I scoffed and sat up from the toilet seat. 

“I can’t believe you said that to me,” I said, and walked to the kitchen. My irritation and glass of wine made my face hot to the touch. I tried not to cry. Bianca never cried like I did, pathetically and often, like a ridiculous child. I heard her turn off the tap. 

“You’re making assumptions about what I said,” she yelled from the other room. “Mind reading.” I knew she learned that term from her life coach. I hated her pop psychology— it made me feel like a stupid dog that needed to be trained. 

“I don’t want to go out anymore,” I said. She walked into the kitchen in my wet t-shirt. 

“Okay,” she replied. She gathered her things and called her boyfriend as she walked out the door. He was always there when she wanted him. 

Toward the beginning of our friendship, we ran together. When we finished, we ripped our sweaty shoes off and laid on the floor of my apartment. We were both still young enough to be comforted by the cool, hard wood. The tops of our heads touched. Our hands occasionally linked. I massaged her scalp once as we did this, but I was never sure if she understood the gesture. It was my medium to tell her that whatever grief she had was mine and I would hold it for her. That was what I thought love was back then. I didn’t have the language to express anything else. 

I was very depressed during that period— when I wasn’t desperately groping for anything in my life that gave it meaning, I resisted it with my entire body. In hindsight, I can see my relationship with Bianca clearly. She expected for me to be better, and I wanted her to be like myself. We treated each other like infinite nesting dolls of judgment and understanding: mother and child, mother and child, on, and on, and on, and on. 

“That was what I thought love was back then. I didn’t have the language to express anything else.”

One especially cold night, my boyfriend Nick walked in the snow to come see me. He took off his coat and shook out the small flurries in his hair by the door. The most shocking thing about our relationship was that I actually liked him, and it was as simple as that. He always touched me gently. 

Even when I was alone with him, I couldn't help but to mention Bianca. We lied together on my plaid comforter, nestled in the dry warmth of my space heater. He told me he liked the color of my lipstick, tracing it with his thumb. 

“It’s very natural,” he said. 

“Really?” I asked. “I wasn’t so sure about it.” 

“Why not? It’s perfect.” 

“I don’t know,” I said, lying. “Bianca picked it out for me.” 

“She has great taste,” he replied. I said nothing. “She must if she likes you so much.” He rested his head in the nape of my neck. I hated to admit it to myself but his flattery nourished me. I ignored his compliment. It’s funny— the sheer amount of things I did falsely. The things I prevented myself from thinking, as if she was truly a part of me, inside my own mind. 

I called Bianca whenever Nick wasn’t home. We made cosmopolitans and watched movies, typically westerns. They were easy to talk through until some brutal violence gripped our attention and we could pretend to be outraged. When Clint Eastwood dragged a Southern belle by her hair we turned on the next one. Then, he stabbed a man in the neck over a dispute about cattle. The cycle continued. I admired Bianca’s willingness to be disturbed. I wondered if she had the same dreams I did; where she would lie facedown in a crisp body of water or be violated by someone strange— a childhood friend or a coworker. In my mind, we bonded over this despite never discussing it. She was, in a lot of ways, my imaginary friend. 

Because Bianca and I met in our late twenties, we never shared the pivotal, desperate moments particular to young women. We could never say we drunkenly kissed in college because she went to Duke, and I, to Smith. We shared none of our firsts. Our sleepovers were always unplanned and ended with one of us rising early to go to work. She has not met my mother, and has no idea how we are so alike, not in behaviors, but in subtle gestures. I sleep with one foot outside of the comforter like she taught me as a child. I love peanut butter with bananas because she does. This is what I always imagined being known was like, and why I have not been able to replicate the feeling. Nobody else knew me before I was able to read. They didn’t plait my hair before bed. They couldn’t possibly know what I’m thinking. 

I believed a wise person had to pay attention to everything. I noticed the motion of my hips while I rolled back and forth on a yoga ball. Through the French windows, I watched the careful movement of the trees. I listened carefully to the sound of Bianca’s breath in Child’s Pose. I couldn’t stand the incense she loved, but it was better when it mingled with the scent of our melted deodorant. 

In Cobra Pose, I tried to imagine my life without Bianca in it. Nobody would have been there to calm me down when I had a panic attack at Sarabeth’s. I imagined the empty spaces of time I would have without her. Maybe, if I wasn’t so busy, I would ride my bike more often. I could sew. Maybe, I would spend it alone, staring at these exact French windows. I thought I would never know. 

Her breath stiffened and released as she clenched her abdomen. She opened her eyes and looked at me. 

“What are you thinking about?” she said. 

“How much I like your top,” I told her. She smiled and closed her eyes again. 

I taught ballet to kindergarten-aged girls. I speculated that they knew I wasn’t good enough to dance professionally and judged me for it, but later decided that was a delusion. Those girls hardly knew how to plié. They did not consider the trajectory of my career. 

Still, they whispered and giggled amongst themselves while I instructed. They grimaced while I told them to tighten their bums like they felt condescended to. I never knew what to do with them. 

But we shared tender moments. At the end of class each week, most of them hugged me and wrapped their twiggish arms around my legs. I combed the hair behind the ear of my favorite pupil while she cried. We talked about her parents. I wasn’t sure what to tell her when she asked me why people fell out of love. I didn’t know the sensation yet. Every love I have ever known ended because of my excessive examination of it. To me, it was like some small insect underneath a microscope. Staring at it wouldn’t make it alive again, but I watched anyway. I prodded at it with tweezers and wondered why its wings tore apart. My student left the conversation unhappy, but not worse than she was before. 

Bianca had too much to drink one weekend in December and slept on my couch. I cleaned the wine glasses and makeup wipes she left on my table while she was still asleep. Her hair tangled and her shorts were hiked almost as high as her hips. Even being awake when she was not emboldened me with a sense of power. I itched for a slight advantage over her like an addict. The adrenaline of watching her park outside of the lines or get into an argument with her boyfriend rose inside me and faded into a stream of self loathing and regret. The worse I felt about it, the more poorly I behaved. 

She suggested we go to the Museum of Modern Art and get lunch together. I didn’t feel very well, but agreed anyway. On the subway, I picked my nails until my fingers bled. 

We had entirely different tastes. She thought the art I enjoyed was pointless and confusing. She scoffed at Brancusi, and hated nothing more than Readymades. Once, she claimed she could have made a Kandinsky. These comments, though never entertained by me, created a feeling that suspended in the air between us and pulled us apart. I attempted to remedy our differences by pointing out an Impressionist painting of two women in a pasture together, but she just showed me her teeth.  It wasn’t quite a smile— it was something else. 

We talked in hushed whispers about our careers by the Rothkos. I complained that my life was at a dead end and when I asked her if she knew what I meant she said “no,” very plainly. We meandered through the next rooms silently, always looking at different pieces. 

After a few minutes, she sat next to me on a bench and said, “I understand. I was never very good at math in school.”

“What?” I replied. 

“That was my dead end. At a certain point, there was no reason to try.” Her confession confused but did not annoy me. I tucked her tag back into her shirt as if nothing we said was misunderstood. 

At home, her hand cream was still on my coffee table, like she subconsciously thought she would be back.

Nick heard from Bianca’s boyfriend’s sister that she had called me ‘exhausting’ at a wine tasting. I questioned Nick relentlessly. 

“What was the context?” I asked. 

“I don’t know,” he said. “I wasn’t there.” 

“Why didn’t you ask?” 

“I didn’t think it would matter to you. You two say things like that about each other all the time.”

“She's my best friend,” I said, defensively. “Who would say that about their best friend?” 

Nick placed his head in the palm of his hands and sighed. “I don’t know. But it’s obvious that she has enough issues of her own. She is probably jealous of you.” 

I rolled my eyes and pulled a skirt above my tights. Nick placed a hand on my shoulder while I threw my shoes into a duffel bag. 

“What did I do?” he asked. 

“It doesn’t matter if she has her own issues. She can’t treat me like this.” I gathered my hair into a ponytail. “Making an excuse for her is taking her side.”

Nick pulled his hand away and laughed, shocked. “Really?” He asked. 

“I have to go to work,” I said, and left his apartment. 

“Every love I have ever known ended because of my excessive examination of it. To me, it was like some small insect underneath a microscope.”

I rushed through our recital movements while the girls followed my lead. A few of them fell. A couple tripped over their feet. 

I stared at my body in the wall mirror and was confronted with everything that was wrong with it. My knees could not bend wide enough. My arms were too rigid. I was like a paper doll, fragile and stiff. 

One of my students couldn’t follow the steps and I yelled at her. Another asked for a water break and I told them all to leave the studio. They petted the first girl’s hair while she softly cried. I couldn’t move myself to care about anything other than what Bianca said. I thought about the terrible way she looked after she woke up and the days she spent ignoring my calls. How could I be more exhausting than her? What was so terrible about me? 

It was bitterly cold outside but I was too frenzied to change into warmer clothes. I walked the streets in a leotard and a cheap, gaudy coat. Electric billboards with advertisements for skin cream and high tops projected flashing colors onto my face. I noticed my surroundings— I saw the tourists with Hermes bags and young couples— but didn’t process what they were before they bothered me. Everyone walked too slowly. The air smelled like garbage. It all seemed as pitiful as I felt. 

I played with what I would say to Bianca in my mind. The words created and revised and shaped themselves. I harbored no illusion that I would leave the conversation as the bigger person. I would feel terrible and do something selfish, like demand Nick to hold me while I cry or throw up in his bathroom from a stress migraine. The houses in Bianca’s neighborhood blew past me in swaths of brick as I walked by. It would be untrue to say that I thought about anything other than myself. 

There was an uncomfortable tightening in my chest when I walked in front of Bianca’s apartment. Her living room was engulfed in a dim light. There was soft music playing. I watched from the pavement as she and her boyfriend laughed and danced on her Persian rug. He held the small of her back in his hand like she was a gentle, wonderful object. I wondered, from a distance, what it would be like not to care about anything at all. To have a gentle grasp on everything I loved.