She Matters Read online

  Real Friends

  I remember, if I concentrate, the clutter of children, can’t see the teacher more than a smudge. She wrote our names on the blackboard, and Marjorie in chalk, like fabric in the fingers, is the texture of first grade.

  Marjorie was not my friend, but so central, bossy, taller than the rest of us, I never forgot her. She wore white tights and a tartan jumper with large white buttons at the waist to fasten the green straps that crisscrossed her yellow shirt between her shoulder blades (I sat behind her). Her name is still woven into plaid, into my idea of plaid. She was the first girl I saw wear a headband, and she had white patent-leather Mary Janes. The hairband, shiny red plastic, made grooves in the strands at her hairline. I don’t remember anyone else in first grade. She commanded all my attention.

  I had a certain standing in the classroom, allowed to be off by myself. Sometimes I’d cry. Marjorie would walk over.

  “What’s wrong?” she said, looming over me, pigtails rooted behind her ears. She hardly ever talked to me.

  “I miss my best friend. She died.” There was a pause. I’d suffered, had met the depths of life’s mysteries.

  “How did she die?”

  At home my mother handled the story. “Your very first friend died,” she’d tell me, and get sad, which made me sad. I loved to hear it: the first attachment beyond family, a tragic ending, my early heart broken but petted and mended by my mother. Sophisticated pain was part of me, and so, too, the passions of friendship. “Her poor mother!” my mother would say. “Just imagine how awful.” I could not imagine, had no image of the woman, but could almost picture the girl, this golden wraith, this perfect beauty. Scarlet fever or a weakened heart, something sneaky, stole my beloved friend away. One day she was there, fine. I could remember us, just about, three-year-olds with chubby wrists and white tights, half a lifetime ago. The next day she was dead: the empty stroller. According to my mother, I was inconsolable at her disappearance. “Don’t you remember? You thought she didn’t want to be friends with you anymore. You cried and cried. You kept asking where she was.” She stroked the top of my head. “We used to push you in your strollers, side by side.” I searched for any sense of proximity, any warmth. Blond curls? Did we dig in the garden with kitchen things? Did she cry when she dropped Ritz crackers in the dirt? She wasn’t mean, ever, of course not. She was the sweetest girl anyone had ever met, not like Marjorie, who scared me, whose voice grated, whose very name bullies my memory. My dead friend gave me her dolls, to keep. She wanted me to have them. She brought candy canes. We read Little Golden Books on the couch and sucked the peppermint. I followed her, waiting my turn as she pushed the clacking bubble toy over the flagstones. In the park we chose the swings, and our mothers stood behind us, didn’t they, their doubled voices sweeping far and near. All this I imagined, so I could miss her, feel kin. I pictured her stroller on the sidewalk, the waist strap to hold her in, her Mary Janes kicking up. See her dark curls; she clutched a doll under one arm; her big eyes were hazel, like mine. I tried to cope under this net of confusion—suggested drama, disappearing picture, willed memory.

  “What’s wrong, sweetie?” said the teacher, who left what she was doing with the others to come over, crouch next to me, palms down on her stockinged knees. Marjorie walked away.

  “My friend.” I sensed longing in the word, but I couldn’t quite touch it, arrive there. I needed more. “My friend died.”

  “Yes, that’s very sad, isn’t it? When someone we love dies.”

  Feeling better, I went back to the scissor table to work shapes out of construction paper. I kept pet mice, and one of them had died, too. So I knew. I really knew.

  Marjorie wrote in big letters, so I started to write mine bigger. Her navy blue kneesocks. A gold pin in her skirt. My mother took me to Gimbel’s to buy a tartan kilt with a gold safety pin. The fringe tickled my bare knees. On Mondays Marjorie looked different. Everyone else looked the same. Marjorie said, “You go there and you go here.” “Yes, Marjorie.” “What about me, Marjorie, pick me?” She didn’t pick me. After lunch, we came back into our classroom, a slow rope of kids. Marjorie always went to her cubby, took out a white hairbrush and with a flick of fingers freed her pigtails, then brushed her hair.

  I read The Autobiography of Frederick Douglass, a chapter book I picked because his stern face and white beard haunted me from a classroom poster over my seat. I made a timeline of his life, and the teacher taped it up under the high window. Come see, Marjorie, I wanted to say. I wanted that badly. She had a tutu in her cubby one day, and I asked to have ballet lessons.

  On Thursdays I got to leave school early for ballet. My mother at the classroom door, I hurried, got my coat, and we held hands in the hall, which retained the odor of lunch. She sniffed me, the air, asked, “What did you have?” Every Thursday we had baked beans. I’d push them into an island on the plastic plate, saving them for last. I ate the lunch and the fruit cocktail and then allowed myself the syrupy beans.

  One Thursday we had a fire drill at lunch, so loud and drastic it hurt my chest, and all of us stood right up and made a line by one door. The long-limbed second-graders were in giggling lines by other doors. In front of me, Marjorie’s pigtails brushed her shoulders. “Shhh,” said the teacher. We filed down the stairs, hands on the shiny black banister, and our teacher led us out the front steps, walked us to a leafy tree down the block, where we stopped and waited. We weren’t supposed to talk until we were back inside. Marjorie talked. Not to me, but I stood close. The drill over, we were to go back in, resume what we’d left behind, but we returned to the lunchroom, and I saw just the shock of bare table and that my beans, my favorite comfort, were gone. I decided, From now on, eat your favorite thing first, in case it gets taken away.

  • • •

  The ballet teacher wore a long-sleeved leotard, pale tights, and a little flap of skirt tied on the side. We wore ballet slippers with graying strips of elastic to hold them on and black leotards that showed our arms. Madame’s hair was stretched into a tiny bun. No matter how I brushed with my white plastic hairbrush, like Marjorie’s, my bun was never that smooth and small, so I wore a ponytail, a minor defeat. Mothers sat outside in the hall, pocketbooks in shiny white or black patent leather in their laps. My father came to collect me, itself strange and wonderful because I didn’t get to see him every day, and I liked this best about the class. Madame’s voice beat at us, “Un and deux and trois and quatre,” and I looked again at the clock, the white chunks of five minutes, and five and five and five. At the end of the lesson, the insides of my thighs clutching and hurting and my forehead tight from the pull of the ponytail, I checked the door for my father. Then he would come.

  • • •

  In the fall I started second grade at a new school, ten epic blocks further north, and my old school, with its unique banisters, fire-drill routines, Marjorie, melted away. I no longer took ballet. I didn’t miss it or miss anyone. What I saw was me, my existence central, the starting point on the timeline. I met Jenny and Gwen. My teacher, Joe, flicked the light on and off to quiet us. When I noticed him walking toward the switch, my stomach would jump. Here it comes, and was I the only person who understood the ache of anticipating? I liked to slip out to the gray hallway, seek the bathroom. I didn’t want whatever was next, didn’t want to sort dry beans into egg-carton compartments. I didn’t trust the lunches of arroz con pollo, nor the long tables instead of desks. In the stall I latched the metal door and sat, aligning the toes of my black patent-leather shoes with the black-and-white tiled patterns on the floor. I am seven, I thought. I lay on the tiles to cool my face. My parents are getting a divorce today, and I am the oldest I have been in my entire life. I will always be older than I’ve ever been before. I thought I knew everything.

  I didn’t think much about the dead little friend, although my mother liked to bring her up; Marjorie didn’t exist. Jenny and Gwen were real, every morning we hoped to be assigned the same table. I was riveted,
documented them—Jenny, her narrowed eyes, the jut of her chin, the brown hair in a blunt cut to her shoulders. She showed me how to subtract three-digit numbers, how to carry the one, her hand on my paper as she slashed a line through the zero, wrote in a tiny, precise 1. Gwen had string bracelets and the ends of her braids bounced against her collarbone when she ran. We raced each other in the park during PE, trying to let the other one win. “Is Jenny your best friend?” my mother asked. “Or is it Gwen? Which one?” Jenny or Gwen invited me over and I went with them after school. I stayed for dinner, sent home in a taxi. Jenny’s mother unloaded groceries, fridge door held open with a big hip, as she asked us which words we’d suggested for the classroom’s homonym list. Weight and wait, I said. “Good job,” she said. Gwen’s mother called me “lovie,” just as she did Gwen. She let Gwen bring home the turtles over the summer and one year the bunny, too. The fathers came home, elaborate noises of keys and voices we heard from the pretty bedrooms, and the girls rushed out. Men missing from the woken daytime and the solid life of school—their role was to appear.

  One day on the way home, my mother and I stopped into a soda fountain. She had come to pick me up from school, where she dimmed the other parents who stood outside our door, as we put our chairs upside down on the tables and gathered for dismissal. I walked next to her down Madison Avenue, tried skipping, walked again, took her hand and inspected it. It was very sunny. She suggested in her sunny voice, “Let’s get ice-cream sodas.” She ordered her special black-and-white, Coca-Cola with a scoop of vanilla fizzing it up. I got rice pudding. We sat at a table by the window, bright day on our faces.

  I looked at the counter and there was Marjorie.

  Marjorie, at the counter, with a woman.

  How could Marjorie be? My departure from my old school had ended everyone. The school ceased. But—here, now—Marjorie was still going, being tall, fiddling with the button on her jumper. Separate from me experiencing her, she had continued; she had her own timeline, was her own center. I looked at my mother and shock flooded me: when my mother wasn’t in front of me, she still was. New thoughts raced in, uninvited, an onslaught—the larger universe, experiences that were unknowable. I didn’t know if I should keep eating my pudding, as everything had changed. The strange wisdom kept widening, ways of knowing altering the truth, and fattening mine.

  • • •

  Over vacation, I cried because I missed Jenny so much, a piercing hollow under my ribs—love! “So it’s Jenny,” my mother said. “Jenny’s your best friend.” After the holiday here she was again! She didn’t die! As Jenny accepted the present I’d chosen for her, a zippered change purse beaded with shiny little shells, her face was passionless, my dawning sense that we might not feel the same strengths in “friend,” but I pretended not to notice.

  Gwen’s was the first phone number I memorized after my own, her voice a thrill through the receiver, then my voice answering hers, as if we knew much more, had secret power to exchange. Her apartment had two floors, an architectural cocoon of white sectionals, white rugs, white walls. I would attend sleepovers there until I left for high school, depend on them. When we were thirteen, the summer after eighth grade, Gwen and I would go with a student group to France, adoring each other on the flight over, catching each other’s eye, because each of us really trusted she knew what the other was thinking, and that the other was the only one who knew back. On the trip, new allegiances sprang up, magnetic twos and threes, and Gwen and I, without knowing we knew this, came to our end. High school would introduce new girls, permanently. But at seven, when we met, and at eight and nine and on until eighth grade, I would sit at the high white counter on a chrome stool as her mother buttered toast for us in the mornings, or I’d watch Jenny and her sisters tease their dad at dinner, the shared laughter in the same family tone. Each girl was a jewel, a clue that it was possible to have no drama at all. Boredom, they showed me, was an important form of love.

  Facebook

  At Walnut Lake, Jessica Ribicoff and I were assigned to the same cabin. The first night, rowdy returning girls bullied each other, and above them on upper bunks Jessica and I made eye contact, confirmed safety. In daytime we walked the trampled grass, the woods and worn dirt paths, her freckled arm threaded through mine, or we laced our fingers into the chain link that fenced the pool, watching the older boys swim and hoist themselves out. We were always talking, crush confessions dovetailing, excited voices that raced and united. She stood next to me and we held in our stomachs when Greg La Rosa ambled by and said, “Hi.” She explained marshmallow spread as we sat down with trays of Fluffernutter sandwiches. After lunches, we walked to the canteen to buy Pop Rocks. She made me a peach-pit ring, and I made her a peach-pit ring.

  On my last day we said, “How can I live without you?” over and over. Jessica got to stay for the second session. I was crying, and she was, too, as we embraced by the cars. We were girls, we lived big. Our arms chained around each other’s necks, our sobbing was pure. No lovers had been parted so cruelly, no bond had been severed so swiftly.

  She wrote to me from camp, prolonging the dramas I’d hated to abandon—Mandy kissed Greg!—and I delivered to her my important news—“My new passport picture is gross.” “Can you believe I’ve seen ‘Star Wars’ THREE TIMES???” We covered our envelope flaps in big-handed hearts and coded acronyms. I didn’t think to confess true circumstances or to hide them, because I was unconscious they happened, wouldn’t remember and assess them until many years later: in my mother’s cocaine-driven rages, she’d grow violent, and she was hitting me; my father, divorcing again, had dismissed my stepmother and my beloved three-year-old half-sister with chilling indifference. In the letters I wrote to Jessica Ribicoff, outsider, I could assure myself I was starring in my ideal life.

  • • •

  A few days after I activate a Facebook account, the name appears on my laptop screen, so familiar it’s almost physical pleasure, the six loping syllables of Jessica Ribicoff. She’d looked for me, hadn’t forgotten my name either. I’m amazed, peering at her thumbnail photo, by how little she’s changed—her crop of tight red curls, her giant smile, her freckled forearm. I’d know her anywhere. I friend her at once, and we trade rapid biography. We’ve both become artists, and we emphasize the coincidence, gratified by sameness. She’s read the memoir I just published, and she sends me a piece of her pottery as a present. I’m startled an eleven-year-old has made such a beautiful, delicate bowl, and given it away. Of course she’s not eleven. She’s forty-one, has passed the same years I have. Jessica suggests we see each other, insists. She lives in Brooklyn, and I promise to call when I next visit.

  She pulls up in front of the brownstone where I’m staying and waves me into her car. I’m deeply pleased to have the virtual representation inhabited, bright reality mixing with image and happy memory—curls, smile, vocal intonation. It’s odd, though, to see her driving, as if she’s kidding.

  “Hi! Get in!”

  “Hi!”

  The car is battered, the floor scratchy with leaflets and pebbles. My foot kicks aside an empty Sprite bottle. Before I click the seat belt we’re moving, and there can be no gravity to the reunion, no ceremony. Maybe it’s as it should be, instant and girlish. We’ll pick up from camp’s last day. Jessica chatters as she jams the car down narrow streets and finally into a parking spot, unconsciously good at it. She’s talking about her stomach problems. I’ve had some, too, I tell her. We both have! At the restaurant, which we glide into, I want for us each to know where the other likes to sit, but we don’t, we can’t. We’re shown to a back garden. “Is this okay?” Jessica asks me. I ask her, “Would you rather be inside?” Then, before the waiter comes, she launches her daily story—a litany of phone calls from her mother, boyfriend woes, creative endeavors and the attendant money anxiety. She leans across the table, puts feeling into each detail, as if I’m conversant in her temperatures, her high and low, as if I know by nostalgic telepathy what’s happened to her
and what hasn’t. I begin to feel I’m at the center of some imposter’s mistake, and I’m embarrassed. “Why tell me?” I wonder. Who does she see opposite her? Quickly, I learn every rumination of her recent weeks. We both act like we need to know. For my turn she’s nodding as I recount significant events, a checklist: know me. I mean to like this woman, the grown result of the girl I adored, but there’s no room for the build, no interplay, as if we each stare at a posted video ad, projecting hungry wishes for a perfect friend. I watch her eyebrows, her mouth, trying to find the link between a random lunch partner and the precious memory-girl. We were friends, but the ancient, amber friendship has dictated nothing, left nothing behind but itself. We cannot bust out beyond this, trapped by a season’s accident.