In Eleanor Womack’s tightly wound “Jane,” a meeting with a friend becomes an exploration of the quiet norms and expectations that govern our relationships. The narrator, Eve, invites the reader into a space fraught with doubt, as a seemingly casual dinner conversation lays bare a relationship’s burdens, along with the unrecognized benefits and awkward costs to the parties in question. Womack conjures an undeniably contemporary world in which mediated forms of relation navigate what is said and what is merely sensed, and where lopsided romances are prisms for a spectrum of gender and power relations that can easily untether even our most casual interactions.—The Editors and the Fiction Staff
Jane
In the morning, I wake up, fry an egg, and am on the tram before nine. It is Saturday morning, and tonight I am having dinner with Janie. She is my oldest friend, and I haven’t seen her for a while now, though we live in the same city.
The tram stops, and a bunch of cars drive through the green light. It is supposed to snow tomorrow, so workers have laid out salt in the streets. And it’s funny, how all the cars going over the salt sounds like applause, and I text Janie, cars going over salt sounds like applause don’t you think. And then there are so many other things I can see from the tram that remind me of Janie, that seem like things she would find funny, so I text her:
in german the word for turtle is shield-toad
i saw a guy throw up out of a moving car
there’s a woman next to me talking about parmesan
a little kid just said a big word is bats a small word is cupcake
I get off, go to a liquor store and a bakery, and buy a bottle of wine and crusty bread. Then I get on the tram and take it two stops further than I need to and walk back home along the river. It is pleasant; there are all these families in coats on the benches and lots of people eating in heated patios. And then I’m at home and I make lunch.
At eight I leave for Janie’s, and I’m there by eight thirty. She opens the door and hugs me. Her house smells like meat. She asks me how I am and I say, Good, good, not been up to much, and I ask her how she is.
I’m good, she says, I’m good, just spent all day finishing things, and stuff. It’s like, how is there always stuff?
I know, I tell her, and I laugh and it feels good to laugh with her.
When we sit down, she puts the bread in the middle of the table and puts a slice on each of our plates—I had it pre-sliced at the bakery—and serves me meat that she made.
She asks me questions—that’s the thing I love most about Janie, that she asks so many questions.
She tells me about the things going on in her life, and they are many and interesting. She recently went to a party for a friend who won a grant to do research in Mongolia, and she is already making plans to visit next year. She asks me whether I knew that Mongolia is the second-largest landlocked country, and I tell her I did not, though I add that I can imagine the steppe looking like it goes on forever, that even in pictures it reminds me of how wide the world is and that it must be beautiful in person. It is, she says, and the largest landlocked country not near a sea. I ask her how that is possible, that something can be landlocked and also near a sea, and she pauses and says, I don’t know, maybe I’m getting it wrong but I definitely read that somewhere. She is repainting her dining room, too, light blue instead of yellow, and points to the color swatches behind me. But tell me, she says, how you have been, because even though it feels like no time has passed, I haven’t seen you in so long.
I tell her things have been actually very good, that I visited my parents last weekend and I’m thinking about getting a dog, a small one. And just the other day, I found ten dollars in one of the little plastic baskets at Rite Aid. She asks me if it was just lying there in plain sight, and I tell her no, it was underneath one of those sheets of coupons that get delivered to everybody. That’s probably why no one saw it, because no one would’ve picked up the sheet.
I wonder, she says, laughing, if anyone actually uses those. More? She slides two more slices of meat onto my plate and refills both of our empty glasses with the wine I brought. I don’t know, I say, and I laugh too. About what? she asks. I mean about the coupons, but just now I feel dazed and almost sad, even; I worry I’ve drunk my wine too fast. Nothing, I tell her, and she smiles again.
She’s doing well, too. She is seeing a man named Karl, who is a writer. She likes him but is worried he thinks too highly of himself, secretly believes he’s smarter than everyone else, which belief, she says, is hard to pin down in people, but she always feels like it’s sort of there with him. But mostly, she likes him a lot and they have all sorts of great conversations.
I tell her that sounds hard, then I tell her that I’m seeing someone too, Tom, who is so nice, but it’s hard, too, because he doesn’t laugh at my jokes and, come to think of it, rarely makes any of his own.
She laughs and says, Niceness is not the same thing as having a personality. She’s told me this before, and I’m glad to hear her repeat it. I nod and am silent for a moment, thinking about whether Tom has a personality.
What are you thinking about, she asks.
Oh, nothing, I say, just what you said got me thinking about Tom’s and my relationship. Like how, she asks.
Well, I say, like last week, when we went to this Italian market to get ingredients for spaghetti alla carbonara, we put the pancetta and the eggs into the basket and then we look at pasta. And there are these beautiful little fluted, I think they’re shells? And I point them out and tell him I think they’re beautiful and ask him if we should get them. And I pick them up to hand to him to put in the basket, and he doesn’t even take them, just looks at them with, almost disgust. And then he says, whenever I make carbonara, I always use a longform pasta. And I’m almost really upset, he’s so dismissive, but something about that—longform pasta—is just so funny to me. Like, longform journalism, only pasta. And I start laughing so hard, and I keep saying, “Longform pasta!” And basically, I can’t breathe, and then I look up and he’s staring at the other pastas on the shelves. I think he even had his hand on his chin. I don’t know, he didn’t even smile. And it’s not that I’m, you know, upset at him for not thinking longform pasta is funny, but he didn’t even acknowledge that I thought it was, you know? He wasn’t even ignoring me, he just didn’t think to smile or anything, because, I don’t know, we were just there to get the pasta. I don’t even know why I’m still so upset by this. It probably just got to me because last month we were eating in this French place, and toward the end of the dinner, the waitress came up behind me and asked if we wanted dessert, and I didn’t care, so I looked at him and tried to, like, communicate with my eyes that I didn’t care, and then neither of us said anything, and the waitress just stood there for a while until finally Tom said, No, just the check, thanks. And he was silent the whole walk home until he stops and looks me straight in the face and goes, WHY CAN’T YOU JUST BE MORE ASSERTIVE. YOU CLEARLY DIDN’T WANT DESSERT, WAS IT SO HARD TO JUST SAY THAT. And I was so stunned, he’d never done anything like that and hasn’t since, but it got me thinking, maybe it’s not that he’s nice because he really wants to be nice to me specifically. Maybe he has this deeply embedded code of social norms that he always acts in accordance with, and he gets so deeply upset when someone breaks it. I don’t know, I’ve just been thinking about that more and more lately. And suddenly, it totally makes sense that he doesn’t find jokes to be that funny, because don’t you have to accept that whatever you’re doing is always fundamentally ridiculous in order to laugh at all?
I run my hand over my face and cover my eyes for a while. God, I say, when I take my hand away, that doesn’t even make sense, maybe I’m just giving myself too much credit. I’m not that funny, I don’t think I’m that funny. It’s not that. But I guess when you put it all together like that, all these things about him that just get to me, which aren’t even totally his fault, it really does seem like we’re not in the best spot, like we should stop. But he really is so kind, and he knows me so well, it’s hard to find a person who knows you so well. And—
Just then I look back at Janie—I had been sort of staring at a kitchen lamp over her left shoulder while I was talking—and I see her sigh and look down and stab her food with her fork. And then, almost as if catching herself, she looks up and widens her eyes and nods. And something in the way she does fills me with this intense dread, because suddenly—I don’t know, just the way she smiles and nods—I suddenly feel like she feels like she’s doing me a favor, by listening, and I wonder then whether she is.
And of course, it’s not the first time I’ve thought this, but it’s the first time I’ve thought it while looking at her, but of course it’s such a hard thing to prove and impossible to accuse someone of. And then I think, is she bored? Is what I have to say, has it ever been interesting? And I wonder, and this is maybe even more disturbing, is she doing this—pretending to be interested—because she thinks I need it? And do I need it. I am twenty-eight, I think of myself as a happy person, and I’ve only been living alone for two years, but that’s still two years of aloneness.
Eve, she says, Eve, you were saying, about the market.
Oh, I say. Yeah. She is no longer nodding; her eyes have gone narrower. She looks concerned, or at least her concern seems genuine. Or is it interest? Is it interest when people narrow their eyes in conversation? And I feel stupid for having worried so much about our friendship, having doubted it, because here she is, my Janie, listening to me like she always does, but I’m still worried about whatever it is we are, whether she pities me and whether I’m worth talking to at all. She is still looking at me and I keep talking.