S2E1 Cassie and Steve: The Way We Were
Having Friends Is Very Hard Because We Are At All Moments Hurtling Towards Death
So last week the big conversation in my corner of the Internet was about friendships.
Specifically, people were talking about this one article. Have you seen it? It’s called “How to Rearrange Your Post-Pandemic ‘Friendscape,’” it was published in the New York Times (long sigh) and it does something that a lot of articles like this do, which is: explain something mostly normal, but in a way that sounds completely insane. The writer’s argument, as I understand it, is that the pandemic has given us an opportunity to reassess our relationships. Instead of spreading ourselves across a wide swath of unfulfilling friendships, we should focus on the people who will be positive influences on us going forward. These are our “foreground friends.” With everyone else:
Often the best course is to just slowly back off. Politely decline the other person’s invitations and don’t extend any of your own. Ghosting is almost never a good strategy. Unless someone is irredeemably toxic, it is better to be gracious. Let the person gradually recede into the background, rather than erasing them entirely from your friendscape.
You never know. Just as you can outgrow friendships, you can also grow back into them.
Everyone who was saying that this writer suggested we cut our depressed or “obese” friends out of our lives for their negative influence clearly did not read to the end. Hello! She merely suggested that we intentionally drift from them, but not so far that we can’t go back if for some reason they fit again (I am currently employing this strategy with several pairs of jeans, so I get it).
In fairness to her, I, too, have realized in my twenty-six years of living that friendships change over time. (I didn’t write a bizarrely mercenary piece about it in the Times, though.) My own “friendscape” - which is a term that for me conjures up this image - looks different these days than it did pre-pandemic. This is something we all know: some friendships can’t survive a postponed dinner, let alone A Really Terrible Year.
I feel incredibly lucky that so many of mine did, and I’m trying to express that gratitude by taking things in whatever form they come to me. I’m trying to accept that things are probably never going to be how they were again. But that’s life. Sometimes you take it for granted that someone is going to be there in exactly the same way forever, and then some big cataclysmic event comes out of nowhere, like a deadly virus or a catfishing scheme, and it’s just...over.
The Episode
We start with an email to Max and Nev, who are together in an anonymous hotel room somewhere in the country: “I need your help to meet my fiance.” The deal is this: Cassie’s dad died unexpectedly three years ago, and the grief set her on a self-destructive path of alcohol, drugs, and unsafe sex. After hitting what she describes as her “rock bottom,” which meant that she nearly lost her scholarship for college, she got a friend request from a man named Steven on Facebook. He was an aspiring rapper (I know, I know, but this didn’t set off any alarm bells for Cassie, because she works at a local radio station) based in Atlanta, and he was able to pull herself out of the dark place she’d fallen into. After years of talking regularly, she says, she proposed, and Steven said yes.
Max (honestly): Cassie, I think that’s crazy.
Nev (dishonestly): I don’t.
No, they haven’t FaceTimed! (They tried, but his webcam was broken. Also his microphone. Cassie says: “the attempt was enough.”) No, he hasn’t tried to drive from Atlanta down to Miami to visit her! (He’s always traveling for work, Cassie explains, and he spends a lot of time in the studio). They do, however, have a lot of phone sex, Cassie volunteers.
As they head to Florida to meet Cassie, Max is very stuck on the marriage proposal (also the phone sex). “Who gets engaged over the Internet?” he says, and Nev’s reply is that he’s seen people get engaged and married in Las Vegas after knowing each other less than 24 hours, which is kind of an interesting point. He’s saying that it’s more socially sanctioned to marry someone you haven’t had a real conversation with, but with whom you have a physical relationship, than it is to marry someone you’ve had three years of intimate (and intimate) talks with but don’t know IRL. As with a lot of wise observations Nev makes over the years onscreen, I couldn’t help but muse: is that true, actually?
Anyway. They arrive in Florida and meet Cassie, who is a good person who loves boldly. She introduces Max and Nev to Gladys, her very best friend. She and Gladys met the first day of school in pre-K and have been as close as sisters ever since. Gladys says she is grateful to Steven for helping to set Cassie back on the right track. “I got my friend back,” she says.
All of this takes place at a nail salon, nail salons being the traditional Catfish setting for meeting the hopeful’s friends. Nail salons represent femininity and suburban wholesomeness; as needed, they can signal that someone is deserving of love (engaging in rituals of self-maintenance, clean), undeserving of love (obsessed with appearances), or problematically unaware of the love they already have (depending on how many of the pedicure chairs are occupied). One gets the sense, watching Cassie and Gladys, that this is something they do together. This is the stuff Cassie’s life, and their best friendship is made of; their entwined lives playing out over decades of shared comforts and discomforts, hand massages, pumice stones. Going to a nail salon is something best done with your closest and oldest friends, because it can be tedious, and sometimes you are separated and have to cast coded glances across the room at each other that mean things like “I think this will probably take another fifteen minutes.” It is sort of an activity and sort of an errand, and you cannot do it with someone you need to impress.
I digress.
At the nail salon, Max and Nev report to Cassie that they found that Steven’s photos belong to a model named Deonee Arnaz who seems to have nothing to do with anything. They have also downloaded Steven’s songs and entered them into Shazam, and this bore no fruit, so he is probably not a working rapper. Cassie mumbles something to Gladys, who says “she’s embarrassed,” like a dog owner interpreting a whimper.
Things get weirder the next day, when Max and Nev are able to connect Steven’s music back to the profile of a guy named Tony. When they show the profile to Cassie, she nearly pukes. “That’s Gladys’ cousin,” she says, and runs to the bathroom to cry. Nev sits with her on the bathroom floor.
“I feel violated,” says Cassie, unseen, from her spot on the tile. “I’m going to be very mad if Gladys knows about this and let this go on. That’s the one person I trust with my life.”
Reader: Gladys knows.
Have you guys watched Hoarders recently?
I like to think of myself as an empathetic person, but there’s something about that show that hollows me out. I sit on my couch, and I look at what’s become of some person’s home, I witness their pain, and I shout things like: “they should burn this place to the ground!” I am ashamed to say that hoarding disgusts me, though I know it is a mental disorder (they remind you of this at the beginning of each episode), though I feel genuine anguish for the people who are so full of fear that they cannot throw away 25 boxes of VHS tapes they no longer have the technology to watch. Hoarding, it turns out, is where I draw the line.
You see, I’ve been trying to think of something that could drive me to a true falling out with my very best friend. Something that carried the power to, if not destroy our relationship, at least maim it permanently.
For me it would be hoarding. But if Lizzie created a fake online boyfriend for me in order to get me to stop drinking, procured an identical but separate iPhone to hers so that I wouldn’t be able to tell when she was texting me as the boyfriend, kept the ruse going for three years, accepted my proposal of marriage, and drafted her cousin to engage in regular phone sex with me in order to maintain the charade...that would also be pretty bad.
But Gladys was desperate. After Cassie’s dad died, things changed. Cassie went out all the time. She was drunk all the time. She could have gotten pregnant and ruined her life. She had new friends, ones who didn’t look after her the way Gladys always did. But wait, Gladys says, it’s important: she did not do this just because Cassie had new friends.
Gladys, like the people on Hoarders, actually, explains to the crew why she had to make this mess that they have all gathered together to try to clean, and says yes, she knows it is bad, but it worked. Steve gave her her friend back.
Cassie is not around to listen to the explanation. After Gladys emerges from her house, sighs deeply, and admits that she is Steven, Cassie strides back to the car, closes the door, and screams at the top of her lungs.
So it’s the laughter we will remember…
Even if Lizzie did start hoarding and I was forced to demote her from a “foreground friend” to a “background friend” (I hate using these terms even as a joke, they are so weird), that’s not to say it wouldn’t be the worst experience ever. Cassie is devastated at what Gladys has done to her, and Gladys is devastated at what has become of their friendship as a result of doing it.
The day after the reveal, they sit as far away from each other as humanly possible on a cream settee and try to make sense of it all. Gladys apologizes for everything, or mostly everything, but says that she isn’t sorry that catfishing Cassie helped her out of her downward spiral. Cassie acknowledges the truth of this, and says that she doesn’t hate Gladys.
“We’re still going to be friends,” she says. “But we’re not going to be as close as we were the other day.”
In a way it is worse than anger. At this point in the episode I felt true sadness, not for Cassie or for Gladys specifically, but for the passage of time and the inevitability of change. It seemed to me that Gladys and Cassie had drifted apart, that the process had perhaps been sped up by Cassie’s uncontrollable grief over her father but likely would have happened anyway. And in attempting to recapture a previous version of their relationship, Gladys had ruined it. Not ended it, exactly. But made it impossible to exist in the same way ever again.
Now here Cassie was, making explicit and uncomfortable something that could have just occurred on its own: that day, at the nail salon, was the closest they would ever be again.
I guess this is what I think about friendships: you can cling to something with every bit of ingenuity you possess, and you can do it out of concern and fear and so much love, and you still can’t stop people from making new friends or having kids or moving to Los Angeles. You can’t even stop people from letting you “gradually recede into the background” because they feel that you are too damaged or unhealthy to be around in the post-pandemic utopia. But hopefully, you find people who don’t mind that you’re both completely different people than you were when you met, and every new version of whom still meshes with every new version of you.
And in that case I think the best thing to do is just take care of them while they’re around. As yourself. Not as some guy named Steven.
(And if any of you ever use the word “friendscape” around me in earnest, consider yourself rearranged.)
XOXO,
Hannah
What to watch next (a new segment)
Friendship movies about asymmetrical growth like in Girlfriends (1978) or Frances Ha (2012), friendship movies where someone does something unforgivable and is forgiven like Bridesmaids (2011), friendship movies where someone behaves badly and is not forgiven like in The Last Days of Disco (1998).