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Time, curious time, gave me no compasses, gave me no signs
Were there clues I didn’t see?
And isn’t just so pretty to think all along there was some invisible string tying you to me?
- Invisible String, Taylor Swift
Monica makes many unfortunate discoveries during Thanksgiving 1988; she learns that torn flesh throws unkind talk into perspective, and she learns that she might be insane.
She follows the hospital stretcher, her heart pounding, tearing itself asunder. She knows that Chandler isn’t a person worth feeling this amount of remorse over, but he’s still a person, and she’s mutilated him out of her own vanity and hurt feelings. She’s horrified.
At some point, late in the night, she murmurs, “I’m so sorry, Chandler.”
It’s measly compared to all the apologies she shouted earlier, but there’s fresh sincerity in her solemnity. Something softens in his gaze, as though he recognises her hushed fervour. Monica observes his very blue eyes and remembers how breathless she had been, meeting him for the first time the year before. That was why it had stung so much, when he had turned around and proved himself the opposite of the gentleman she envisioned of him.
Chandler musters a nod, but says nothing. Monica can’t know if he’s accepting her apology or not, which rules out the possibility of peace. She supposes that this pallid torture is a fitting sentence for her atonement; the tight, squirmy sort that not everybody knows of, unless they do and it’s enough to turn them inside out.
She’s already fidgeting when he asks, in a quiet voice, “Can you go?”
Warmth blossoms in her cheeks. She knows they’re not round and full anymore, that blushing doesn’t emphasise the worst of her anymore, but the wretched embarrassment she feels is familiar. It is the kind that has measured her life. She used to believe it was because of how she looked, but she is learning that it is because of who she is. She walks out of the hospital in tears, wishing she had treated the mean boy with the beautiful eyes with a little bit more grace.
The day she leaves home can’t come quickly enough, and then it arrives and her first hint of grief is stifled by the realisation that her parents don’t care at all. It isn’t difficult to recall the day Ross started college, when there are photos on the mantelpiece documenting the fanfare of his departure - captured moments of Ross grinning at his going away party and standing on the steps outside the college for the first time.
Perhaps masochistic, doubtlessly foolish, Monica doesn’t prompt her parents to take photos all day and relents that they won’t think of it on their only volition only after dusk, managing to procure from the first day of the rest of her life a flash of a hasty twilit smile. She knows she’s wobbling in the frame even before Judy frowns and advises her to be still.
Sitting in her dorm, staring at the blank walls, Monica tries mourning home, but the sadness stretching around her seems to have a different connotation. Despite the recent distance between them, she calls Rachel for distraction, but she can tell in her friend’s airy voice that they are running out of things to say, drawing ever closer to their last conversation. She isn’t sure why her friend is pulling away or why everything has to change all at once.
Starting her culinary training is exciting, and she doesn’t struggle with making friends, but in the following months, Monica is starved of any familiarity and she somehow ends up seeking it in Ross. They aren’t close, partially because he’s her annoying and condescending big brother, but mostly because every time she looks at him she tends to think of how her parents don’t love her as much as they do him.
But they’ve been living apart for two years now, which has made for a lot of silence and very little fighting. Out of nowhere, it’s different, as though they’ve grown up without noticing and along the way been bestowed with merciful compassion. Monica shows up at his door without context of any kind and Ross greets her with a hug and smiles at her like he really cares about her. Soon, it becomes routine to spend some time with him every week, often alongside his girlfriend Carol and almost always alongside his roommate Chandler.
It takes Monica off guard the first time she visits, how the very sight of Chandler is enough to fill her with shame, despite his ridiculous haircut and their mutual agreement to never bring up the incident with the toe again. But her worry wanes more every time she sees him, because he always smiles at her and asks her how she’s going and directs jokes made at Ross’s expense at her. She isn’t sure why he’s being so gracious when she literally maimed him, but she doesn’t question it, because she finds that she likes his company.
One evening, Monica knocks on the door of their dorm with a container of lasagna clamped beneath her elbow. Despite Ross’s promise from earlier in the week to meet her here for dinner, Chandler is alone when he opens the door.
“Hey,” he greets her, smiling, but his face is quick to fall. “Oh, no. You and Ross had dinner plans, didn’t you?”
Monica sighs, her disappointment dull. “Yeah. I’m guessing we don’t anymore?”
“Not unless you want to join him and Carol at McDonald’s.”
“He took her to McDonald’s?”
“The kids’ meal comes with a dinosaur toy, limited time only,” Chandler explains.
She laughs with incredulity. “It’s a wonder that he even has a girlfriend to be flaky for. That suggestion didn’t even get a raised eyebrow from Carol?”
“No, much worse,” he says. He clasps his hands by his chin, flutters his eyes, and says in a high, feminine voice, “It doesn’t matter where we go, Rossy, as long as we’re together!”
It makes Monica laugh for real, sincere and unrestrained like she doesn’t mean to be.
“Do you have plans tonight?” she asks. “Someone to be insufferable with?”
“I have a box of frozen pizza pockets with my name on it. We’re getting to be pretty serious.”
She laughs again, and it occurs to her that he’s the only person she knows who can smile and make it earnest and sardonic in the same instant, that she doesn’t know another person so friendly and so cynical. Maybe there isn’t another person like him.
“Do you want to blow them off for some actual nutrition?” she chances, lifting her container.
“Sounds great,” he answers. “Though, you should know, I haven’t been acquainted with nutrition in years.”
“It’ll be like a reunion,” Monica says. She’s gratified when he laughs. Making Chandler laugh always makes her feel like she’s impressing Shakespeare with a sonnet.
There’s a brief silence, while she dishes their dinner. She notices that there’s a slight shake to her hands as she works and she scolds herself. She glances at Chandler, hoping he won’t have noticed, but there’s sympathy in his eyes that makes her face feel hot.
“I’m sorry, Mon,” he says, softly. “If it’s any consolation, it’s not just you. He’s been flaky with everyone since he and Carol started going out. It happens every time one of my friends gets a girlfriend, they just don’t have time for anyone else.”
His sincerity is not embellished by humour and it is both strange and sweet to observe. Monica feels instantly, genuinely comforted, and she smiles at him. “It’s okay. I’m used to it.”
“What do you mean?”
Monica shrugs. “It’s just typical in my family.”
“Really?” he asks, seeming surprised, but thankfully not dubious. “Your parents have always seemed friendly enough to me. Especially your dad.”
“I guess they’re friendly,” she says, uneasily. “We’re a competitive family – ”
“Oh, you don’t say?” Chandler snorts. “You should’ve seen Ross playing charades last weekend. He totally derailed the whole party, and cost me any chance with Penny Martin.”
“I’ve beaten Ross at charades,” Monica says.
“I don’t doubt it,” he says, chuckling. “He’s mentioned that you two didn’t always get along. Is that because you were in competition a lot?”
“I think that’s part of it. But I don’t think it would have been as bad if we were better matched,” she says. “I could put up a fight in most things, but never with our parents. They’ve always preferred him. I’ve always felt like I could just disappear and they wouldn’t care.”
Monica is immediately bashful for oversharing, but Chandler doesn’t seem uncomfortable. He’s only looking at her, his face twisted with concern and sadness.
“That’s terrible,” he eventually says. “I don’t see how it could be true.”
“It is true,” Monica insists, hackles rising.
“I believe you,” Chandler says. “I just mean that it doesn’t make any sense.”
She feels her chest settle. He’s the first person since Rachel to listen to her, believe her and be offended and baffled on her behalf. Her aunts, uncles and grandparents all batted her concerns away with insistences that her parents loved her. Of course they love her, and the fact that they love her excuses anything they might do to hurt her. But Chandler is an objective outsider and he is agreeing with her, telling her that what she experiences is real and wrong.
“With my mother, it’s like nothing is good enough,” she blurts. “Now that she can’t say anything about my weight, it’s about my skin or my hair, or discouraging me from becoming a chef.”
“Don’t listen to that, you should definitely become a chef,” he says. “I remember your cooking from Thanksgiving, you have a gift.”
“I made you macaroni,” she sighs.
“It was the best macaroni I’d ever had!”
Monica shakes her head, amused. “Well, thank you. That’s higher praise than I’ve ever gotten from my mother.”
“That really sucks,” Chandler says. “But I get it. My parents probably wouldn’t notice if I disappeared, either. My dad definitely wouldn’t.”
“You don’t think so?”
“No. My mom’s pretty self-involved, and I haven’t seen much of my dad since I was a kid. They got divorced when I was nine, on Thanksgiving day.”
“That’s why you hate Thanksgiving,” Monica realises aloud.
Chandler nods, looking embarrassed. “After that, they sent me to boarding school and more or less called it a day on raising their kid.”
Monica can’t think of anything significant enough to say to him, except for, “I’m sorry.”
She thinks she understands him better now. She understands that he uses wryness like a pair of gloves when interacting with the world. She understands why he’s always trying to make people laugh. She sees a similarity in her own tendency to bring her friends food.
After a while, it must be more for Chandler than for Ross that she keeps visiting their dorm, because her brother is so infatuated with his girlfriend that he is seldom there, and Chandler never seems to leave. Monica wonders if it’s his introversion or tendency to skip classes or her own good luck that keeps him there, and never considers the possibility that if she’s the one looking, he’s the one staying, waiting to be found.
Chandler is sitting inside the café, flicking through a newspaper. His bored expression lightens when he reaches a certain page and Monica smiles fondly, knowing he’s found the comics. She finds the contrasting components of his personality funny. Last week, her friend bumped into them together and was so taken with Chandler that she asked for his number, but then refrained from calling him, intimidated by his clever humour, his aloof detachment from the world. Monica couldn’t convince her that Chandler was really the sweetest guy around.
Reflecting on this, her excitement somehow expands. She is practically shaking with it as she hurries through the glass door and meets him at the table, greeting him with a broad smile.
“Hey, Mon,” Chandler says, his expression mirroring hers automatically. “I take it you passed the store with the vacuum sale, on the way over here?”
“No,” she says, rolling her eyes at him before retrieving a sheet of paper from her bag. She places it on the tabletop and smooths it down flat so he can read it.
Chandler keeps his eyes on her, his expression amused. “What’s this?”
“It’s an apartment listing!” Monica exclaims. “I know you’ve been looking for a place – ”
“ – which means, presumably, that you know I can do that myself – ”
“ – and there’s an opening in my building! Right across the hall from me!”
She watches as her proclamation registers with him and makes him drop all pretence of a careless jester. He looks at the apartment listing, eyes speeding across the lines, greedy for information, for substance to inflate the hope painted starkly on his face.
“We’d be neighbours,” Monica says, softly, unable to help herself. She knows that he realises this detail, that it’s what has him so quiet. She feels like bouncing up and down in her hope for the possibility. She can’t imagine a person she’d prefer to have living so close to her.
“We could hang out every day, see each other whenever we wanted…” she continues.
He looks at her with a warm smile. “We’d save a lot on phone bills.”
“I know!”
Chuckling, he looks over the advertisement again, pausing when he notices the strips protruding from the bottom, marked in phone numbers, intended to be torn off. “Did you take the entire ad?”
“It’s a good apartment, I didn’t want you to miss out.”
“That’s unethical,” Chandler says, grinning. “I like your style.”
“So you’re interested in the apartment?”
“Of course I am,” he says. “Living across from you? I’d never go hungry again.”
“You’ve gone hungry before?”
“No, but I did live on ramen for four years, and it wasn’t all that filling.”
Monica rolls her eyes again. “You seriously need to learn to cook, it won’t be long before being twenty-one can’t be an excuse anymore. Ooh! I could give you lessons!”
“And deprive you of the chance to show me what a great chef you are?” he tries.
“You can still appreciate my cooking if you’re remotely self-sufficient.”
“But I don’t wanna,” Chandler whines, with such exaggeration she bursts out laughing. “I do want this apartment, though. I’d have to go and check it out first – but I guess you’ve already done that?”
“I was excited!” Monica says, defensively. “It’s really nice, though! Big living room, small kitchen, two bedrooms. You could get a roommate, if it’s too pricey.”
“Or three roommates,” Chandler muses, consulting the ad again.
“Oh, it’s not so bad – ”
“Easy for you to say, with your rent-controlled apartment from heaven.”
“Chandler,” Monica admonishes. “Take this seriously!”
“I am taking it seriously! I’ve already said I want it, what more do you want?” he asks, but then he narrows his eyes at her, takes in her stance, and realises exactly what it is. “You’re not going to be able to sit still and enjoy your coffee until after I’ve checked it out, are you?”
“I didn’t even order,” she points out, already reaching for her bag.
“Well, I guess I’ll have this put in a takeout cup,” he says, holding up his still-steaming ceramic mug. “Do you want anything to go?”
“Will you split a blueberry muffin with me?” Monica asks.
“Sure. I guess that’s as good as chocolate.”
Monica tries to be patient while he orders, but it seems to take him an eternity. By the time he’s finished, she has abandoned the table and stands bouncing by the door. He hands her the muffin and two coffees – one for her, though she didn’t ask for it – and then makes a show of jumping through the door, mocking her excitement.
He looks so silly that she can’t find it in herself to be annoyed. She knows better, anyway.