Best Friends

Table of Contents

 

 

 

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either
are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously,
and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business
establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2001 by Martha Moody

All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not
be reproduced in any form without permission.
Published simultaneously in Canada

 

The author gratefully acknowledges permission to reprint lines
from “Waiting” by Miroslav Holub, from
Selected Poems: Miroslav
Holub,
translated by Ian Milner and George Theiner, published by
Penguin Books, 1967. Copyright © 1967 Miroslav Holub; translation
copyright © 1967 Penguin Books Ltd.

 

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Moody, Martha.

Best friends / Martha Moody.

p. cm.

eISBN : 978-1-101-11767-5

1. Women college students—Fiction. 2. Female friendship—

Fiction. 3. Roommates—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3563.O553 B-053323

813'.6—dc21

 

 

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

 

for Jill

In between, the passage grows complex.

 

DAVID ST. JOHN

 

REALLY, ALL I WANTED in a college was unrest and demonstrations. But I was late. By 1973 no one was demonstrating, Vietnam was basically over, and what good was college now? I wrote this in my letter to Sally, my mystery roommate whose name and address had arrived sometime in August, along with the names of two other roommates who would join us in a quad. I expected her to understand that I was joking because she was from California. She wrote back on fancy Hallmark stationery with a pink band edging the page.

“That roommate wrote me,” I told my family at supper. “The one from California.” She'd made no mention at all of my demonstration comment.

“Debbie?” my mother asked.

“No, Mother. Debbie's from Indiana.”

“Lindsey?”

“Lindsey's from Pennsylvania, Mom. Jeez.”

“Sally's the one from California,” my father said. “Sally Rose.”

“Right.” I smiled gratefully at him.

“I don't know how I'll ever keep you girls straight.” My mother shook her head.

“You keep your kids straight, don't you?” I was the youngest of four, the only girl. My mother taught classrooms of twenty-six. “Or do you?”

“You can't bait me into another argument with you, Clare Ann.”

“Clare,” my brother Baxter corrected her. He knew I wanted to rid myself of any cuteness.

“Clare,” my mother repeated, exhaling a short laugh. “It's certainly time for you to get away from home, I can see that.”

“Me, too.” Baxter smiled. He was hoping to move to Amish country to work as an apprentice chair-maker, a plan that caused my parents consternation because their older sons had both attended college, an educational commitment that was, as I liked to point out, at least partly explained by the draft.

My father cleared his throat. “How does this Sally sound?”

“She sounds nice.” I paused a moment, aware of the inadequacy of my description. She sounded incredibly straight.
I'm excited, but I'm nervous, too. I have one little brother, Ben. He is really sweet and I'm sure I'll miss him a lot.
She didn't sound California at all. “Amazingly nice,” I said. “Almost like . . . Debbie from Indiana.”

 

 

 

WE MET AT Oberlin College, just southwest of Cleveland, in September 1973. I was from an Ohio town midway between Akron and Youngstown, a town I referred to as Happyville (to call it Dullsville would underestimate the self-satisfaction of its residents), a place where the banner headline of the newspaper on December 24 read UFO SIGHTING OVER NORTH POLE. I picked Oberlin because it was the only school within driving distance of Happyville still likely to have demonstrations. Sally picked Oberlin because, on a visit from Los Angeles the previous spring, her father thought the professors were open-minded. Neither of these was a bad reason to pick a college. In fact, these reasons are probably typical. You can gussy them up with all the pretty rationales you want, but most major life decisions are whims.

According to my college guide, Oberlin was one of the most expensive colleges in the country, and this thrilled me because my parents didn't have money. If they were willing to send me to Oberlin, I must be worth a lot. I must really be, as my brothers called me, the Great White Hope of Happyville. My mother, who as a teacher had access to my IQ, refused to tell me in case knowing it would swell my head.

My parents drove me the two hours to Oberlin. The quad, at the end of a hall, consisted of a study area flanked by two bedrooms. Each bedroom contained two single beds, two closets, and two built-in dressers topped by mirrors. When I arrived, only one bed of the four had been taken. Its bedspread was an earth-tone floral; above it hung a poster of a cat dangling off the side of wooden bridge. HANG IN THERE, the poster read. A footlocker sat at the end of the bed.

It didn't make sense. Sally Rose had written saying she'd arrive in Oberlin early, giving herself time to adjust to the new time zone, but could these really be Sally Rose's things? Sally Rose was from Los Angeles! I thought Californians had style.

I thought of my own striped Indian bedspread and woven reed rug, my sleek yellow metal lamp and decorative postcards. “I'll go in here,” I told my parents, taking the empty bed in the room I'd decided must be Sally's. I imagined someone thinking my side was California and Sally Rose's Ohio. “You're kidding,” they'd say, “you're from Ohio? I thought . . .”

“Hello?” said a voice from the door. I swiveled. It was Sally Rose, wearing a name tag. She was shorter than me, her wavy dark hair shaped like a May basket turned upside down. Her smile was girlish, eager; the description “apple-cheeked” flew into my mind. “Are you Clare Ann?” she said.

“Clare.”

“Oh, I'm so glad you're here!” she cried, throwing her arms around me. Then she threw her arms around my parents.

 

 

 

SHE WAS SERIOUSLY HOMESICK. There was a phone at the end of our dorm hall, across from the bathroom, which Sally used for hours every night. “Oh, they're okay, Daddy, they're nice, they're just not like. . . . No, I wanted the art history course, but it was filled—yes, I did go talk to the professor, but she couldn't or she'd have to let in everyone who. . . . Benny? Benny, do you miss me?”

“You think she'd mind that everyone can hear,” Indiana said. “I for one have heard enough.”

“She's really pretty sweet,” I said. “I kind of feel sorry for her.”

“Maybe she'll quit and we can spread out and each take a room,” Pennsylvania said. “That'd be cool.”

On her nightstand, Sally had a photograph of herself and her little brother in a lucite frame. I assumed the photo had been taken at a country club, not that I was sure what one looked like. The little brother was adorable, skinny, curly haired and tan, eyes squinched against the sun; he and Sally stood in their swimsuits in front of a stone wall covered with a strange plant whose trunk twined up the wall and sent out branches right and left in perfect horizontal rows.

“What kind of plant is that?” I asked Sally.

She didn't know, some kind of decorative tree.

“It's amazing,” I said. I can't tell you how rare it was for me to say “amazing” in those days; I cultivated a jaded air. “I've never seen a plant that symmetrical.”

“Oh, it's trained,” Sally said, and as I tried to cover my bewilderment, she brought the photo up close and showed me the thin wires stretched across the wall behind the branches. “I think it's called an espalier,” Sally said. “Carlos likes to do it. It takes awhile to grow a nice one.”

“Carlos?”

“Our head gardener.” Sally set the photograph down. “He's very particular. He has the yard all mapped out.”

“So this is”—I waved my hand, trying to think of a subtle way to put it—“at your house?”

“By the pool.”

“It's pretty,” I said weakly.

“It's a beautiful house,” Sally said. “We've been there nine years. Daddy built it. I think the landscaping makes it. It does help to have a particular gardener.”

“Head gardener,” I said, watching her closely.

Sally showed no trace of discomfort. “There are a couple of others, but Carlos is the idea man. He says do this and they do it.”

“Very obedient of them,” I noted. For all her love of obedience in me, my mother hated the thought of obedience in workers. Sheep! she said. Management always wants sheep! My mother was the most radical person in Happyville; she believed, for example, that it was not unthinkable for teachers to unionize. Once she had been lucky enough to get a death threat.

Sally and I took the same Introduction to Poetry course, and my first paper didn't get the ecstatic response I was used to. For the life of me, I didn't know why. Sally got better comments than I did, but her paper was so organized and simplistic, every paragraph starting with a topic sentence, that it sounded more like junior high school than college. “My sophomore English teacher taught me to outline,” Sally said proudly. “I think that's going to help me all through college.” She said the same thing later to her parents on the phone in the dorm hall, sounding even more pleased with herself, and then she went on and on to them about how wonderful they were and how much she missed them, until I kicked the study-room door shut, wondering how much self-congratulation a family could stand.