The Friday I Keep Rehearsing

The ice makes a small cracking sound when the whiskey hits it, and for a few seconds the kitchen is the most honest room I know. Pajama pants, the oven ticking as it warms, nobody to perform for. It is Friday, a little after six, and a question from earlier in the day has followed me home and is standing by the stove.

So, what do you do for fun?

A coworker asked it at the coffee machine, the way you ask whether it's been a busy week. She was already half turned toward the door, expecting a short answer and a nod. My ready answer was "Oh, nothing much." That is true, and it is the version that causes trouble.

"Nothing much" does not arrive in people's ears as the words I said. It arrives translated. Nothing much becomes no friends, and no friends becomes a man alone in an apartment, one bulb, a bottle he is hiding from himself. I can watch the translation cross a face in about a second and a half. Sometimes there is a small, kind tightening around the eyes. Sometimes there is the quick invitation, "You should come out with us sometime," delivered with the sincerity of a gym membership offer.

What nobody sees is the pizza. Last night's, four slices, reheating in the oven because the microwave is for people who have given up. The whiskey is a bottle I would be embarrassed to name, because the price would sound like a confession. Photographed, the evening says: this man is doing very well. Described in a sentence, it says: oh.

I did the other version for years, and I want to be fair to it.

In my twenties, Friday was a place you went, and the place was Carpool, in Ballston. Dark wood, a pool table nobody was actually good at, a table by the window we tried to claim by 7:30. Someone always racked the balls and someone always said "one game," which is a lie everyone agrees to. Nine dollars bought a drink that tasted like a rumor of whiskey. The bottle on my counter costs about five of those and lasts a month. I did that math once, standing at the bar, which should have told me something.

Was I happy? Partly. But the happiness was inseparable from being seen enjoying it. We were there, therefore we were people with Fridays.

Later came the family version: other families' living rooms, noise stacked on noise, a child under the table narrating a private war. I loved those evenings the way you love a storm you're not responsible for. I also remember standing at someone's counter holding a plastic cup, entirely surrounded and slightly absent, like a person in a photograph they are also taking.

For a long time I assumed the discomfort was a defect in me.

My neighbor, Priya, has the opposite Friday. Last month I met her in the hallway, grocery bag on one arm, heels dangling from two fingers. She announced, unprompted, that she was "wrecked, absolutely wrecked," and would be on her couch by seven with the phone off. She said it with a kind of triumph. She was announcing the exact thing I hide, and I nodded like it was perfectly reasonable, which it was. Wrecked is a respectable reason to stay home. Content is not. An evening alone is acceptable if it can be framed as a casualty. It becomes suspicious only when it's chosen and enjoyed.

An older colleague once said he spends his Fridays reorganizing spice racks and watching documentaries about bridges. The table went quiet for half a second, then someone laughed warmly and asked a follow-up about bridges. He was fine. Nothing collapsed. I remember being briefly furious with him, and I still can't fully explain why. It might have been envy, which tends to disguise itself as irritation.

So I have a small, strange habit now. When someone asks, I improvise a Friday.

It began in March, modestly: "Oh, a few drinks, some good food." Technically true. Then, because the listener's face was waiting for a plot, I added a friend who might call. By June he had a name. Nemat is an Iraqi-American with a strong penchant for food, and he has opinions about everything from masgouf to the correct way to tear bread. He has now been consulted on at least nine Fridays. He knows a place in Falls Church. He is a better social planner than I have ever been. Nemat never cancels, which is how I know he's made up.

Standing here, watching the cheese on the pizza begin to bubble, I'm aware of how much work this fiction takes. I maintain a second life, with continuity and a supporting cast, to protect the first one from a look that has never actually been given. The woman at the coffee machine has probably forgotten the question. I'm the one who stayed up with it.

Would I have heard it as lonely, if someone else said it?

Probably, a little. I've been fluent in that translation for years.

The pizza comes out crisp at the edges, better than it had any right to be. I put it on a real plate, which is a ridiculous thing to do for no one, and do it anyway. The whiskey has opened up, the way it does after the second pour. Outside, faint noise from the street: other people's Fridays going past on their way somewhere with a pool table.

My phone lights up on the counter. It's the coworker, a message about a spreadsheet, followed by a casual line: Have a good one! Off to my dad's birthday dinner, he's turning seventy and already complaining about the restaurant.

I smile at that, a real one, with no audience. A plan with a reason in it, a father who complains. I type "Tell him happy birthday," and then I hesitate over the next line, because there's an obvious opening. I could say something true. I could say I'm eating reheated pizza with a whiskey I can't name, and that it is the best part of my week.

I look at the sentence for a while. It reads fine. It sounds like a man telling the truth.

I send "Enjoy!" and sit down to eat.