That warm July night, there was the pleasure of destruction, of zippo lighters torching straw huts, of razing something truly good and valuable to the ground; There was the sense, however subliminal, of disemboweling a friendship. I remember filleting fish that I caught with my father on the docks, and seeing liver, kidney, roe, splayed open on the slick wooden docks, for all to see. There was something thrilling and disgusting about it. Tearing open my friendship with Stella had the same effect. I felt sickened. I felt the freeing thrill of ruining everything.
Raymond was tall and towered above me, his black hair shining, his loud laugh drowning out the world. He wore sharkskin suit coats and narrow ties; he was never at rest but always alert and impatient, as if he was on the verge of a getaway. In the hall at school, girls surrounded him. We called ourselves fag hags, scrambling for a place next to him on the courtyard bench. He provided shelter from the world of boys while also allowing us entry into it. Holding hands with him at lunch, you could almost convince yourself you were part of a love story.
Sometimes we skipped school and went to the park to drink cheap wine and smoke clove cigarettes. We listened to the Sex Pistols and swore we'd try heroin if we ever came across it. My new friends thought it was funny that I'd come from a state even lamer than their own and it didn't take long for me to turn my old life there into a joke. My best friend was a Christian who believed that the end of the world was near, I told them. Once she cried when I said I didn't believe in Jesus. We spent hours and hours just reading the dictionary.
And instead of upsetting me the friendship breakup came as a relief. I noticed the relief only in passing and reasoned that if Kelly was so ready to throw in the towel over a single argument--the only one we'd ever had--most likely the friendship hadn't been worth much in the first place. After all I had not asked her to choose between her boyfriend and her friend; I had only said I did not know how to be comfortable around him in the wake of her startling confidences. I had only been asking for elaboration from her--an acknowledgement of the vileness of the act, an outcry, a reassurance that she too was horrified by Alan's crime. I had been looking for some-thing--admittedly, something I had not named. But she had refused to give me anything at all.
I did not want to believe that sex was so powerful that it invariably undermined friendship, though I was perfectly aware that desire is one of the most powerful and subversive emotional mechanisms. But why was it so easy sometimes and so difficult others? I knew where my own trigger points were located, what I had to fear and control and make plain. Didn't everyone have such a list? I had told Carla some of the most painful of mine, she had told me some of hers. She had never been loved as she wanted, never treasured as she deserved. I knew that as her friend but it felt different after I started sleeping with her.
The last time I saw Janie was in Boston. We met for dinner. Her hair was still red and spiky, and she wore a great deal of brown toned lipstick that made her face look ghostly. She had on more eye make-up than I had seen before. I did not tell her what a friend had told me regarding cosmetics and age - the older a woman got the less make-up she should wear. Instead, I lied and told her she looked good. It seemed an easy, simple lie.
When I talk to my friends about their growing babies, I brim with excitement and pride, and then when I am alone, I cry, or sometimes, much to my shame, become angry. I once told my husband a terrible thing, that I wished it hadn't been so easy for them because then they'd understand me. As soon as I said this, I burst into tears, knowing it was utterly wrong. I did not really wish it, but I thought it, I did.
Then it happens. I find myself alone one morning. There are so many people I can call. I know that. But it is her number I dial. When I hear her voice, I start to cry. I say her name. My loss is still new, a few weeks at most. "Can you come?" I ask her. I can hear the desperation in my voice. She is at work. She hesitates. She tosses out reasons why she cannot come right this minute. A mammogram appointment. Her daughter needs a ride somewhere. I can't keep talking because panic is rising in my throat. The panic of grief, of being alone with it. My house has become a minefield. Grace's glittery nail polish, the MOM she shaped into a crown out of pipe cleaners, the shoe horn she used dramatically to put on her sneakers, her ballet tights tossed under the bed.
For weeks, then months, the Renoir sat on the floor in bubble wrap, waiting to be delivered. During those same weeks and months Lauren never called. Each time I was close to bringing the print to her something occurred. My parents took falls, broke bones, were hospitalized. My husband went into a tailspin over his job. Our daughter got a tattoo; our dog had to have its teeth pulled. Serious things, stupid things - all of which added up to the fact that the Renoir which I owed my oldest friend in the world went no where.
The next day, Emily and I walked at noon to the campus store. She'd said yes to gummy fish. She'd said no to lunch. All the way across the lawn she was telling me what she hated. Apparently she hated a lot. Her stupid classes, for one. How tired she was. She was so amazingly tired. This was obvious; her voice dragged and stalled, like a screen door on a foggy day, squeaking open, inching closed. She hated the stupid people at this school. The guys looked at her as tragic. The teachers treated her delicately. But she also hated how some people ignored it. How they blithely talked about their mothers. Like she wanted to hear about their mothers.
Maybe Heather went to the florist with me to buy the funeral flowers, a giant bouquet of freesia and delphinium. Maybe my father told her to take care of me, and maybe she had to tell me to eat. She may have stood beside me in the receiving line, greeting a church full of people she had never seen before. Who knows, in our blind grief, how much we asked of her?
The color starts to subside in his face and I can see him recollecting himself. He purses and unpurses his tidy red lips, he crosses his arms in a business fashion. Finally he slits his eyes at me as if admitting to himself, at last, that I really don't know much of anything. "You don't belong with them! You know that. You know that. The sort you are belongs with the sort I am. Like belongs with like. Father says. No in-betweens. The world isn't meant for in-betweens, it isn't done. You know that."
I want to insist that when Gina came to town, she changed everything. She was African American, which made her an oddity in our insular little community. I'd like to cast her as the star of an integration saga, one in which the brown newcomer alarms the white folks but ultimately endows them with a deeper appreciation of all humanity. But the truth is I beat Gina to that role. I am black, too, and I was there a few years before she was.
Yesterday, I saw Leigh Titus on the street. She was walking up Broadway, pushing a stroller, a newborn boy buckled in and riding, a little fluff-headed girl-child in a pink dress toddling by her side, her hair the yellow-white of a baby chick. Leigh was wearing a tank top with some black camisole underneath, cropped army pants, her blonde hair dyed even blonder (with purposeful roots) and twisted into braids. There was a tattoo on her left shoulder. She looked happy but tired, and when she noticed that I was staring at her, her blue blazed into mine. "I am here," her eyes said. She was the pretty, picture-perfect, exhausted, New York mom that Leigh would have been were she not dead.
In none of the ways that gross social profiles accumulate would we have been imagined compatible. Emma had married and stayed married, become a mother, pursued graduate work; I was twice divorced, had remained childless, and lived the marginal existence of a working freelance. She was a bourgeois through and through, I a radical feminist who owned nothing; she dressed beautifully, I indifferently; she longed for sexual adventure, I didn't know what to do with it; she also thought carefully and spoke slowly, while I ran on heedlessly, the words pouring out of my mouth. More to the point, Emma lived in perpetual struggle with herself as a wife and mother, I with the emotional bewilderment of my increasingly solitary state.
Jessica and I were comrades the way soldiers are buddies, a sense of do or die was always near. We first met in the Union Station ladies room in Washington, D.C., on the way to a demonstration. The door to her commode malfunctioned and she was locked in. I threw over a nail file and talked her through jimmying it open. That day we marched together.
I learned through Ava a new kind of thrill--the thrill of viewing oneself as a character that could be tweaked, edited, recreated. Before going out for the evening, we would meet at one of our apartments to swap clothing, style each other's hair, exchange makeup, share glitter. Borrowing each other's outfits--especially something unusual, like Ava's black pleather Avenger's dress, or my steel-tipped stilettos--allowed us to step outside of ourselves. Once in costume, we'd consider whom we might run into, discussing every conceivable social permutation and deciding which character would best handle these imagined encounters. Our night out would then be compared against these expectations, as though we were acting out a story we had already told ourselves, feeling our way through a script we'd already read.
That's not all. As part of your tenure package, here's what you get: You don't have to return my phone calls. If I must know, for instance, the name of the dry cleaner you swear is terrific and you fail to get back to me, I'll call again--and, if need be, again. I don't keep a mental ledger of phone calls. I am Patty of Little Pride.
The morning after Fourth of July weekend, was the first day I threw up, and the first day Monica didn't meet me at the door ready to go. She opened the door and let me in. She'd woken up late, she said. She let me into the house, the radio on the windowsill was on the morning Zoo station, and she was still taking the hot rollers out of her hair. I thought it made her nervous to have me inside. There was a black and white picture of a man on the refrigerator. Why was Monica with him? Sure he had a job, and a house, but what else?
I have thought so often about the moment that nurse came in, all the time really, because I think it's what I've always wanted from a friendship and never been able to have. How hard is it to let someone help you? I'll tell you: when you are stripped of your self and rendered an anonymous girl in an anonymous hospital bed, it's hard. Sickness closed me off to anyone but my surgeon who I had no choice but to let cut in. But my surgeon is not my friend. When you are aching perhaps it is mere presence, the click of metal knitting needles, a washcloth moving slowly over grieving skin, that's what's needed. I did not need to talk to my friends about how I was being left behind. Sometimes, I think, it takes a stranger.
