Tue, Nov 15, 2022 at 9:03 PM
Carson: There better be a gd pool.
What is time, really? It can be measured in centuries or seconds, calendar years or costume periods, milestones or metamorphoses. Some quantities we know to be immutable; seconds feed into minutes into hours; light speed being what it is, in midwinter it will take the sun’s rays eight minutes and twenty seconds to reach a backyard swimming pool in Palm Springs, California.
But time is also measured more subjectively, the experienced length of things, intensity times duration. Sometimes the days are slow but the years are fast—truisms aren’t born on a lark—and sometimes you lie down for a quick nap and wake up to find half your life has passed.
By this idiosyncratic stopwatch, maybe February isn’t the shortest month of the year, maybe those twenty-eight days can set a Guinness record for Longest Month Ever; this story’s quintet could make the case for it in 2023, given the pileups coming down their collective and respective pikes. Because while these women, the five friends we’ll meet in a moment, knew that sometimes the two modes of timekeeping decoupled completely, the milliseconds of the iPhone voice recorder staying steady even as one’s life fell apart in slower motion, they couldn’t have known that the first quarter of that year was to be the most consequential of their lives. They certainly wouldn’t have guessed, as they texted back and forth about their long-punted reunion, that they’d be seeing one another three times in three months, and that after the dumpster fire of late winter, their constellations would be tumbled into wholly different star charts. Bright pinpricks where there had been dim ones, some specks flaring more orange or pink than before, other lights absent entirely. Every aspect of their night sky, of their day sky, of their lives below the dome: different.
No, not every single one. One subjective thing that had become, through duration, objectively true and nonfungible was their friendship. Because the group had been friends for twenty years, more if they were honest about the starting bell, a literal three-hundred-pound inverted brass cup that rang out during their New England college’s convocation exercises, then continued gonging periodically throughout the welcome-to-campus activities of their freshman year. As for the five of them being placed along the same residential hall, maybe it had been the college’s social optimization algorithm, maybe it had drawn on all the compute power of eenie, meenie, miney, moe, but they were grateful for their forced proximity. Five women from four parts of the country, each with a distinct upbringing and different academic interests; on paper, they’d have been unlikely love matches, yet here they were, decades later, all and still dear and trusted intimates. They’d seen one another through marriages and at least one impending or recent divorce, childbirths and miscarriages, dead-end jobs and big-deal jobs and those deemed once-in-a-lifetime opportunities (some of which had turned out to be very good, while others had just sounded fantastic but became ho-hum, as quotidian and tedious and gray-hair making as the rest of their obligations). They’d been there for all of it.
For a while after graduation there’d been a critical mass living in New York, or if not living there then at least appearing at the West Fourth subway station with some frequency. Reba kept an apartment in the West Village, even if work (management consulting) more often shipped her to corporate apartments in Flint or Columbus or Orlando. During her internship year, Hillary did a surgery rotation at Mount Sinai; she’d hoped for lots of domestic violence reconstructions and asthma mitigation, but during her three months on the Upper East Side she mostly scrubbed into happy-birthday rhinoplasties for the daughters of the city’s elite. Gregg, still acting then, might get cast in an off-off-Broadway production; she had inadvertently become a specialist in the role of understudy. If Reba was between far-flung client consultations, the women would turn Gregg’s stage run into an extended sleepover, everything but the pillow fights; if she was absent, Gregg would go domestic in Reba’s apartment, vacuuming and mopping and taking her friend’s mussed and musty suits to the cleaner, things Reba always meant to get to but somehow couldn’t manage.
And then, for several years, they’d had the excuse of weddings. Theirs, less Carson, who was either hopelessly self-sabotaging or hiding an affair or truly as indifferent to romance as she claimed to be, and Reba, who was too busy to find love, at least until she did. There were also celebrations feting the next circle of friends; the women had plenty of mutuals among their outer, overlapping bands. In recent years, weddings—and the affiliated showers, bachelorette weekends, rehearsal dinners, recovery brunches—had tapered to zilch; people who were going to find love had done so. Or, if they were late arriving to the land of connubiality, the newcomers didn’t think it worth the fuss of mason jars and tea lights and hosting a hundred of their closest friends for steak and salmon. There was a time and place for everything; the time for passed rolls had passed.
Now only Carson and Bella were still in New York. Hillary had joined an ENT practice in Chicago, but between her still starter apartment and the transitional state of her marriage (which was chugging toward fine—the musical term, not copacetic), her life hardly seemed settled. Contrast this with Reba, who’d finally quit the consultancy, returned to San Francisco, and, once she’d off-loaded her parents to a nearby retirement community, moved back into the house in which she’d grown up. (Some of the women thought this was the ultimate settled, while others considered it settling . . . that wee gerund bore so much judgment.) Gregg had, improbably, wound up in Texas. Improbable because Gregg had been the savviest, most urbane of them upon arrival to college; she had grown up toddling across the Cambridge campus where her parents both taught, she liked Stoppard and Sondheim, she had eaten pâté! So when Gregg sent them all Texas barbecue sauce for Christmas 2015, it was like a pie to the face, that surprising and good tasting. How many missed roles does it take to get to the center of an actor’s psyche? We’ll never know, but after a dozen heroic years of mostly unsuccess, and close on the heels of the UT production that fortuitously brought her to Austin and introduced her to Zeke Graves, Gregg chomped down on that lollipop and went from theater in the round to the state’s Capitol Rotunda and the start of her political career.
And so, spread out as they were, tethered to home by third-trimester travel restrictions and breastfeeding requirements, because for years now it seemed someone was always coming or going from the maternity ward, it had been four years since they’d all seen one another. This was the longest stretch since forever, since the gongs of August 2001, when they’d endured their residential hall’s excruciating icebreakers (never mind that those cheesy campus scavenger hunts and three-legged races had worked—the five of them were forever bound in a six-legged race, happily joined at the ankles), though it hadn’t been a total abeyance. Bella and Carson still got together, once every month or two, to drink wine on the Metropolitan Museum’s roof or along its Great Hall Balcony as seasonally appropriate. Gregg had been through Chicago for a Lori Lightfoot fundraiser and seen Hillary; she thought her friend had looked exhausted but blamed a busy surgery schedule and the sweet menace of Roger (whom they all called the Little Raj for his already pronounced imperiousness, his little boy swagger). Weeks before the lockdown, Carson had flown to San Francisco to catch up with Reba and hear about her new beau, who would become her new husband, and who might yet become her new baby daddy, if the stars and the fertility treatments aligned. Terrence had been out of town that weekend, and so to Carson remained a minimalist Instagram profile, a photo on Reba’s living room mantel, a man reinventing himself after two tours of duty in Afghanistan and a dishonorable discharge. (These last points sounded somewhat sinister to Carson, but she set them aside, not wanting to deny Reba her ongoing swoon. And who was she to judge?)
But all of them together.
“Something must be done,” Bella had texted the group in fall 2022. Had it been Thanksgiving? A swirl of well-wishes around Carson’s fortieth? In any case, that doleful Something had stirred the group chat up from its latency. This same chain had chirped constantly during the first weeks of the pandemic, all of them rabid with worry and boredom and manic energy, news gathering and fear-mongering and loneliness. Since then, the chain had settled into an occasional chime, a kid doing something cute or some tea. But now, it was churning, churning back to life.
“You’re right,” Gregg typed in reply. The dot dot dot from Hillary’s phone was excruciating—it gurgled for several interminable minutes.
Until Reba chimed in. “Palm Springs. 2nd wknd Jan???”
It was a canny strategy. No one did anything the second weekend in January. People binged Netflix or swore off streaming; people regretted their consumption of Christmas cookies or made and froze the low-sodium soups that they’d dutifully reheat into April.
The women’s screens filled with cascading replies. A straight-forward thumbs-up from Hillary, a GIF of a B-list celebrity with a confetti gun from Bella. Gregg sent a clip of those cartoon kids from Captain Planet lifting their ringed knuckles to the sky and summoning an environmentally conscientious hero. Carson, the most deadpan of them—though quiet, earnest Hillary was a close second; she could occasionally unleash a scorcher—wrote, “Lemme check my calendar.” Bella thought about replying lol—Carson didn’t have a job, just that tutoring gig she’d had forever; and she didn’t have a husband or kids or aging parents to consider, the commitments that clogged up the rest of the women’s calendars and kept them within a stone’s throw of insane.
“Jk jk, im in,” Carson added after a beat. Then she sent a short video of a dog walking off the end of a diving board. The creature, a fluffy golden, seemed startled when the mint-green plank turned into air and then into water with a splash.
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From Clutch by Emily Nemens. Copyright © 2026 Emily Nemens. Published with permission from Tin House, an imprint of Zando, LLC.
