"Drinking Buddies" by Emily Mathis
It’s Friendsgiving and I’m sitting on Tiffany’s porch when she pulls her pant leg up and says, “You see these? They are everywhere. All over me.”
“All over my leg!” she says.
Tiffany is my best friend since childhood. I look at her legs. I look at her ankles. They are swollen. There is a red tint to her skin. I wonder if her ankles have always looked like they are being stuffed inside of skin.
She leans her body across the collapsible chair she is sitting on. She licks her fingertips, wipes her concealer and blush off. She pulls the skin around her eyes down and then back.
“On my face too. They’re everywhere!” This “they” are red marks like strings, like red spider’s legs crawling beneath her skin.
There are three other women, all Tiffany’s friends, outside with us. Everyone is smoking cigarettes and drinking Bud Light or sangria. I look around at them. One of them inhales her cigarette and says, “Yeah, they’ve been there for a while now.”
“I know! Like what the fuck?!” Tiffany says. There is a Bud Light in her right hand and a pack of Marlboro Lights on the table in front of her. She pours herself a shot of Screwball whiskey. Then she and I both take a shot.
“Maybe you should go to the doctor,” I say. I don’t have spider veins on my face or legs. My ankles aren’t swollen. There is not a red tint to my skin.
“Yeah, I should,” she says.
“Yeah, you really should,” says the friend who mentioned the spider veins have been there for a while now.
Tiffany takes a sip of beer, puts a cigarette in her mouth, lights it, inhales, and says, “But I won’t. You know how it is.” She laughs. The other women laugh. I laugh too even though I wonder if we all know it isn’t funny, and if so, why it is that we’re laughing still?
In the time I have been back, I have seen Tiffany three times. Eighteen months ago, I moved back to North Carolina after fifteen years away. I moved back under the guise of getting my M.F.A. but the real reason was that my stepfather, the stable father figure in my life, was diagnosed with an atypical form of Parkinson’s.
Tiffany and I grew up in the same rural community in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. It was a small enough place where everyone knew everyone. Tiffany was always on the periphery but it wasn’t until sixth grade, when both of us started at the same middle school, that we became friends.
At that time, my father was training me to be a tennis champion, wanting me to leave the foothills, move to a tennis academy to train full-time. To him, friends weren’t important, all they would do was get me in trouble. My father’s insistence on training made me good at a lot of things that felt like the kinds of things only adults cared about. It was Tiffany, who was only okay in school, who didn’t have a hobby to speak of, who wasn’t training for anything, who was always surrounded by friends. She became someone I could share the secrets of what I wanted, someone who made me feel like I did not have to push beyond myself to find love. I could unravel myself with Tiffany and she taught me the meaning of being a good friend.
Tiffany and I started drinking together when we were fifteen. There are photos of us on the back porch of my grandmother’s house holding Smirnoff and Captain Morgan bottles. In the photos we are wasted and happy. We’d been calling boys, slurring our words and proudly claiming that we “took fifteen shots for our fifteenth birthday!” We said it over and over again. The boys laughed and no one thought a thing.
Some of those same boys died when we were still kids: overdoses, a suicide, a car crash.
I don’t know how consciously a fifteen-year-old processes any of that. I don’t know if there are fifteen-year-olds out there who sit next to death and become afraid of the things they should be.
If those fifteen-year-olds are out there, it wasn’t Tiffany and me.
Throughout the years, we followed different paths. I moved to New York for undergraduate and then graduate school in psychology, and Tiffany worked as a receptionist and stayed in North Carolina. For work, I moved around a lot and saw her on holidays and breaks. We both drank a lot when we saw each other. Sometimes when work was boring, I spent all day talking to her on G-chat and told her things I wouldn’t tell anyone else. With her, I could still be my full self. But over those same years, friends who lived closer to Tiffany distanced themselves. I heard Tiffany’s side of these stories and through the phone, it felt like I could both be a grown-up but not lose the person I had been.
Two weeks before moving back, Tiffany FaceTimed me. She was drinking Bud Light and taking shots of Fireball on her uncle’s property in the town in the foothills where we grew up. In the background was a bleacher full of people we’d gone to high school with. One of them held up the Fireball and said, “We’re waiting for you Emily. We’ve been waiting on you for fifteen years!”
I saw a flicker, a noise.
“Are you shooting guns?!” I said.
“It’s a BB gun,” Tiffany said and took another swig.
My boyfriend at the time was beside me.
“I catch a buzz just listening to them,” he said. I got mad and called him a dick. Tiffany and I had both moved away from the town when we were 18 but found ourselves circling it again and again. It was a place best known for moonshine and NASCAR. Outlaws were legends. Drinking and driving were a way of life. People said things like “they like to drink a lot,” or “she likes to get fucked up.” They said those people, the sober ones, were “stuck up,” “full of themselves,” or “too big for their britches.” They would just sit there, not drinking, making you feel bad about yourself all because you liked to get fucked up and they didn’t. I was both longing for home and terrified of it. Before moving back, I held the past and the life I’d created for myself in front of me and knew one of them had to slip away.
Some might call it loyalty or authenticity but there is a bonding that happens when someone gets too fucked up and someone else takes care of them, looks out for them when they can’t look out for themselves. This caring feels like acceptance, like comfort, like love—like home in a way.
I didn’t see Tiffany for the first four months and when I did it was because of a problem. My M.F.A. program was small, which made us close and intimate. One member of the cohort started crossing boundaries and then his comments turned into threats. When I reported these threats, the administration did little. I was scared and told Tiffany what was happening.
“Just come here,” she said. “You can stay here as long as you want.”
In the morning we went to the Renaissance Festival. Before leaving, Tiffany drank a glass of red wine and poured another into a to-go cup. The festival was eighteen minutes away. I didn’t know if this was a long ride or a short ride to need a glass of wine.
The parking was bad at the festival. Tiffany said, “Let’s just park at the gas station and walk.” She bought two forty-ounce beers for the walk. I drank some of the beer; she drank most of it. At the Renaissance Festival, we tried on floral crowns, threw tomatoes at a man who talked shit, and fell in a bale of hay trying to climb Jacob’s Ladder. It felt like we were kids again. I forgot about the man who said he would strangle me, who said he would buy a shotgun at Walmart.
The beer lines were long. Tiffany tried to order two beers. The lady said she could only have one. Tiffany said, “What if I chug this one right here and then buy another one?” The lady said no. “What a bitch,” Tiffany complained.
“Phew, I need a drink,” she said when we finally left, buying a case of beer at the gas station and a bottle of vodka at the ABC.
The summer after the Renaissance Festival, I was walking my dog when Tiffany called and asked me if I remembered when I turned fifteen. I said I did. She said we kept bragging about how we took fifteen shots on our fifteenth birthday. I told her, “I know. It’s so crazy.” I couldn’t imagine taking fifteen shots anymore. Tiffany said, “We thought we were so cool. Splitting a bottle of Smirnoff between two of us.”
“What do you mean?” I said.
“I mean, I drink a bottle by myself. Easily.”
There was a pause on the phone. A pause where I should have said something but I never found the words.
“Emmie,” Tiffany said in a tone that made me realize she was drunk. Then she started the story all over again: “Did you remember when you turned fifteen?” At the time, it was light outside, but it was summer. Was it too early to be drunk? It was a Friday. I didn’t know how to measure these things.
Three months before I turned thirty I stopped drinking. It was temporary, part of a meditation program I was doing. I was living in Hawaii. I told myself I was going to live less recklessly in my next decade. Then something strange happened. I couldn’t lose myself the way I once did. I would drink and feel my body and its sensations start to change and something in me clicked, told my body I felt sick quick enough before I could keep drinking until I blacked out.
After this period of no drinking, I went to North Carolina to visit. I flew into the city where Tiffany lived and had dinner with her before going home. She suggested a bar near her house. I said I didn’t want to drink and she said they had food too. Tiffany was there before me with two shots. I thought about taking the shot but said I couldn’t because it smelled like shit. She glanced at me for a second in a way that made me wonder if she thought I was stuck up now.
“Doesn’t it taste bad?” I asked. I knew how I sounded to her. Maybe I’d said it with a glimmer of hope, a desire for her to change.
“I don’t really know,” she said. “I don’t really have a good sense of what my body feels anymore.”
I said nothing again. I couldn’t find the words. In middle school, Tiffany had embodied freedom to me. Now I worried if my father was right about some things. I knew friends were important, but I worried that some friends did get you in trouble, eventually.
On the porch that Friendsgiving, Tiffany looks at her body as if it were a specimen that belongs to someone else. By then the situation with my cohort had remedied itself. The man left and I made new friends. I didn’t need Tiffany like I once did. I hadn't seen her for a year.
Eventually, her boyfriend says, “You’re doing the mouth thing again,” after Tiffany’s been drinking Screwball shots.
“What’s the mouth thing?” I say.
“Don’t make fun of me,” Tiffany says in the tone she used when we were little kids. She says it in that tone, but her mouth and chin are frozen in temporary paralysis.
We leave and go to a bar. Eventually, Tiffany and her boyfriend leave the bar without me. I don’t know why. I call a friend, cry, say I just want to go home. A man takes me back to Tiffany’s house. I have no idea if the man is a good man or a bad man: only that he doesn’t leave me alone at the bar and that he doesn’t bother me—he drops me off at Tiffany’s then leaves.
At four a.m., Tiffany comes into the bedroom I’m sleeping in.
“Do you know what happened last night?” she says.
“Nothing happened,” I say.
She says her boyfriend said he was robbed, his gun is gone, stolen out of his backpack, and he has to report it to the police. She says her shotgun is on her couch and she doesn’t know how it got there. I tell her I’m going back to sleep. I lock the door. I don’t sleep.
While I’m in the locked room, her boyfriend comes back to the house. He was black-out drunk the night before. No one stole his gun. He finds it in a magazine rack in Tiffany’s living room. No one knows how it got there. Tiffany tells me all of this while she lies on the couch watching Bachelor in Paradise on cable TV. The shotgun is beside her on the floor.
“Can you put the gun away?”
“It’s fine right there,” she says.
There are eighteen men and women in bathing suits drinking by the beach. There are black-out curtains on the windows of her house. They are all drawn. I have no way of knowing what time it is. I look at the magazine rack.
“Was his gun loaded?” I ask.
“Yeah, it was,” she says. She doesn’t take her eyes off the TV.
I drive home. On the way, I try my best not to have a panic attack. She texts me later that night wanting to know if I’ve gotten home safe, if I feel alright. I feel cold and alone and even when I take a bath I can’t help feeling cold and alone, and even when I turn my heat up and put hoodies and blankets on and cover myself in blankets, I can’t stop feeling cold and alone.
I can’t stop thinking about the guns, about the boyfriend, black-out drunk, playing with guns and not knowing the next day. I can’t stop thinking about what might have happened, how easily it could have happened, how easy it could have been for one of us to have never woken up.
A part of me wonders why, despite how far I move, no matter how many meditations I go to, I feel a fatalistic instinct engraved in my bones. I wonder why I can’t say the hard things. I tell myself I will never stay at her house again. I wonder if we were ever actually friends. Later, I wonder if writing this is a betrayal. Then I stop wondering because I know it is.
Tiffany texts me, “I love you Em.” I text, “I love you too.” I wonder if either of those things are true.
Emily Mathis is a second-year MFA candidate in fiction at UNCG. Her work was a finalist for the 2022 Ron Rash Awards, the 2022 Chester B. Himes Award, and was shortlisted for the 2020 Bridport Prize. Her writing has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Broad River Review, 5x5, FLARE: The Flagler Review, Cathexis Northwest Press and others. She is revising a book-length project of autofiction.
