Fish
Sometimes, Phoebe didn't understand her friends. Monica came home from work today, tired and grumpy. Everybody fussed and offered sympathy because she's wound up in a job where the waiters and the other chefs hate her because of that bad review.
"It's not even that," Monica grumbled, "Okay, it's mostly that. But they're not my kind of people. I'm a fish out of water with them,"
"I left the womb as a fish out of water," commiserated Chandler, "Which is ironic, because my mother had a water birth,"
"Remember when was in that play about those two guys waiting for God? It was gibberish! And everybody in it was some hotshot college graduate. I never felt more like a fish," Joey chipped in.
"What about you, Rach?" Ross asked.
"Are you kidding? What about when I first moved here?"
"Remember you didn't know how to use a subway pass?" Joey laughed.
"She thought a bodega was a hairstyle," snorted Monica, and the conversation drifted into talking about misunderstandings and homonyms and words everybody got mixed up with. Phoebe half listened, and she half reflected that she never felt like a fish out of water. All of the Village, the City, the world was her water. She knew that she could walk into the kitchen at Monica's new restaurant or Joey's intellectual play rehearsal, and make herself at home in the space and with the people there. She'd worked in Chandler's office for a week a few years ago, and while the work had been mind-numbingly boring, she'd enjoyed sliding into conversations with Chandler's City-boy colleagues. The free breakfast muffins were cool, too.
A few weeks ago Phoebe began attending a pregnancy yoga class, and she'd been the only woman there who hadn't brought along a husband or boyfriend. She didn't care, and it was entertaining to tell people, "Oh, the dad's at work today. He's nineteen. And he's my little brother". Phoebe loved calling him her little brother or her baby brother. It sounded familiar and affectionate, and like Phoebe had a responsibility to Frank; she had to look after him. It had never been like that with Ursula. Phoebe felt that she now understood the protectiveness in Ross' tone when he called Mon his little sister, or the playful mockery in hers when she sing-songed, "big bro".
When she mentioned the class to Joey he offered to come with her, but he ended up getting a call to be an extra that afternoon, and the following week was his nephew's dance recital, and by the third week he'd forgotten. It would have been fun to go with Joey or one of the gang, but going alone was fine, too. If it had been one of the others who had to go to a yoga class alone, Phoebe knew that her friends would have experienced various levels of self-consciousness. Rachel: some, mostly baffled, Monica: anxiously desperate to be the best at pregnancy yoga, Ross: would probably fall over, Chandler: would probably have a stress-induced hernia. Whereas Phoebe just shrugged and smiled and whispered to the babies that she hoped they were feeling the benefit of her attempts at a downward-facing dog.
Her friends travelled around the city for work, but they always rush home to the Village. Phoebe worked either at home or close to it, so when she wasn't working or hanging with the gang she liked to explore. She swanned up 5th Avenue, into Macy's and Barney's and Saks, and never felt self-conscious. She wandered the financial district and pretended that she was a City banker, ambled around Central Park, got the subway up to Harlem and the Heights. There were always new places to discover, new waters for her fish to swim in.
"What about you, Pheebs, d'you get anybody mixed up?" Ross asked.
"Err, hello? Demi Moore," Monica cut in.
Everybody laughed, and Phoebe joined in- she hadn't been listening but she could work out where the conversation had moved.
"Hey, you looked good with that hairstyle," she insisted, "No, you didn't,"
If it had been Phoebe with the catastrophic haircut, she'd have bought a hat- probably a balaclava since she'd always wanted to look like a cat-burglar. No, a fez. A fez would have been cool. Or one of those baseball caps with a little propeller on the top. But Monica had been too self-conscious to wear one of those. Often, Phoebe envied Monica and Ross- sure, their parents were hard on Monica, but they'd been able to afford theatre trips and tennis lessons, they had family dinners and annual holidays, and their lives resembled some version of normal. But that security meant that Ross and Monica knew what waters they wanted to swim in, and their fish gasped and flailed in unfamiliar waters. Phoebe's life had all been fluid. She'd been thrown in at the deep end more times than she could count. And that, she knew, was how she'd become the wise, contented, adventurous, satisfied fish.