Myla Goldberg: False Friend

            The title references “faux amis,” the false friends of language learning, words that at first seem to be friendly and familiar but trick us because they mean something else entirely in the other language. I wonder whether the title was originally faux amis? I could imagine a publisher balking.

            Faux amis perfectly describes the relationship between Celia and Djuna when they were eleven. They were best friends who fought constantly, but that’s not why the name is apt. Djuna and Celia became terrible people when they were together. I was very pleased to see this wasn’t set up as Celia, our narrator, being an innocent person led astray by evil Djuna. Celia was just as complicit in their mutual bad behavior and bullying, participating in it fully from the beginning. The one time Celia ever thought Djuna was going too far and tried to stop her was on the crucial last day of their friendship.

            The novel starts with Celia suddenly remembering what actually happened that day—not the story she told everyone at the time, which she now realizes was a lie designed to hide the awful thing she had done. She had told everyone that while Djuna and Celia and three tagalong friends were walking along a forbidden busy road, Djuna got in a car with a stranger. No one ever saw her again. Celia’s newly recovered memory is that Djuna ran into the woods and Celia followed her by a different path. Djuna fell down a hole, possibly an abandoned well, and instead of helping her or running to get help, Celia just turned away and went back to the others. Celia has been hiding this truth from herself for twenty years.

            Now she has to tell everyone the truth and confront the awful thing she did. But when she starts telling people, they don’t believe her. It’s so interesting to watch ourselves as readers decide whether we trust Celia’s new story or the old story that everyone else insists is true. Her old story obviously reflects a lot better on her, so she suspects everyone just wants to keep their nice version of Celia, the girl who does everything right, instead of the real one. But Celia insists on looking up everyone from back then, from the police to her three tagalong friends, and telling them what really happened. One by one they confirm the car story and Celia discovers the ugly truth about herself that she had completely buried.

            I adored this effect. I love questioning my own trust of the story while reading! Of course I believed Celia when she suddenly admitted to herself that she’d been lying all those years. She’s our narrator, after all. But as she talked to her parents and her old friends and yes, even the police, she finds out that the original story was true after all, which wouldn’t be that interesting, except that what she really had blocked out was how horrible she and Djuna were back then, especially to a girl named Leanne.

            Celia barely mentions Leanne in her first recounting of the events of that day. She certainly doesn’t tell us that the girls had just cut off all of Leanne’s hair, tied her hands together with rope, and led her down that forbidden road to abandon her in the forest. Each version of the story we hear from each new person does three things: one, it confirms that there was a car and Djuna got in the car of her own free will; two, Celia and Djuna were vicious bullies the way only eleven year old girls can be; and three, Celia has been lying to herself about her own past, her own actions and complicity in the bullying, not what happened to Djuna. The revelation was a false revelation, but it pointed Celia to history about herself that she desperately needed to face, since repressing it was ruining her relationships in the present.

            We don’t really know until the very last page exactly what happened that day. It’s a paragraph that gives us Celia’s returned memory of Djuna leaving her, turning to look back at her from the brown car that none of the girls had ever seen before. “[Celia] was out of breath from running, and with every step brambles scraped her arms. She thought of all that she was ready to say to Djuna, and how if that didn’t end things between them, they could compare scratches to see who the brambles had hated more. Celia left the woods, and Djuna’s anger wafted back to her from the road’s edge in waves of sour air tinged with exhaust. The brown car was not Mrs. Pearson’s Volvo, or any other car that Celia knew. When Djuna turned, her face was equally unfamiliar. It was a face of terrifying possibility, ready to pull, or to be pulled in. It was a face capable of anything” (253).

            It only occurs to me after typing this out that Djuna was fleeing from their abuse of Leanne that day, as much as punishing Celia for standing up to her for once. Celia and Djuna had pursued a campaign of psychological torture against Leanne for months, forcing her to follow their rules, judging and grading her harshly each day on every aspect of her appearance, making her do whatever they could think up, gleefully controlling the girl who wanted to be their friend. That last day, when Djuna was cutting off Leanne’s hair with blunt school scissors, she had cut Leanne’s ear. That little nick, no big deal otherwise, was the turning point for Djuna, the line they had finally crossed.

            This book gave me vivid memories of an awful friend who was late for our daily lunch one day when we worked together. I waited for her and ate my lunch and suddenly recognized the feeling I was having: I was dreading her arrival. I packed up my remaining lunch right away and went back to my desk, where I Googled psychological torture until I found the description of “emotional abuse,” and then literally never spoke to her again. The minute I realized what she was doing, I cut her off. The seduction techniques emotional abusers use draw someone in deliberately, being kind and overwhelmingly friendly and affectionate at first, and then gradually withdrawing affection and using the reactions from their victims to control them. I had forgotten a lot about her until I read this. She would critique my outfit and my body every day, under the guise of fashion advice. She would ask for some of my lunch every day, whether it was a slice of apple or a piece of cheese. She separated me from all of my friends by getting me to be cruel about them. She had tortured her sister into hopelessness and her husband was actively drinking himself to death. After our nightmare drive to her family’s house on Thanksgiving, her sister got me to go for a walk and warned me to get myself away from the friend, told me that the friend was much worse than I knew. I should have listened. There are people who crave control like a drug and will use kindness and cruelty both to get it.

            Celia needs to Google emotional abuse, that’s what I’m saying. In the second to last chapter, Celia goes to meet with Djuna’s mother for the first time since Djuna’s abduction. Celia has argued with her own mother about Mrs. Pearson, defending her as “totally great!” and then realizing to herself how ridiculous that sounds: “As far as she could remember, the last totally great thing in her life had been a Genesis album” (204). Brilliant!

            Mrs. Pearson is not totally great, however. Celia’s memory was that of a dazzled eleven year old. Mrs. Pearson is a monster, a control vampire exactly like Djuna, who instantly judges every aspect of Celia’s life a withering disappointment and punishes her for getting away. Mrs. Pearson’s condemnation is vicious: “‘I used to comfort myself with the thought that you had survived,’ Grace whispered. ‘That you had gone on to become something extraordinary.’ Her face had become strange, as if it were a hand liable to grab whatever came within reach. It was an expression of terrifying possibility, which Celia realized she had sighted just once before, on a girl with the same sharp chin, in the last moment that their brief friendship had known” (251).

            It’s easy to suggest that children don’t know better, or we didn’t know what we were doing when we did something mean, but that’s a cheap escape. Children do know, or they wouldn’t do those things. Children and adults are cruel sometimes, it’s just a fact. What causes Celia’s breakdown and drives the entire novel? She doesn’t realize and own her own cruelty until long after the event. What do we know and when do we know it? She knew at the time she was being cruel, but not how terrible she would feel about it later, or all of the ramifications of her cruelty in the life of poor Leanne, or what Djuna would do. Those are the limits of our perspective. We can’t know how everything will fall out in the future. Our narratives would be unreadably dull if we did.