Best Friends (2 page)

 

 

 

WHEN YOU'RE IN COLLEGE you haven't had that much life. Parents, school, assorted youth activities—that's about it. I remember a girl in my freshman dorm whose twin had been killed in a boat wreck. Someone else told me her story. I used to run into that girl in the dorm bathroom and she seemed perfectly ordinary. She had long brown hair, and she smiled and washed her face in the sink and used organic toothpaste. How could someone look so normal with a dead twin sister? I was in awe of her. I wished something dramatic would happen to me.

 

 

 

I TOOK SALLY HOME for Thanksgiving with my family. God knows why. Ten minutes after dinner, she was on the phone in the front hall, talking to her parents in her clear, unavoidable voice.

“Nice girl,” Frank, my oldest brother, home for the holiday, commented. “I didn't know you had nice friends, Clare Ann. I thought all your friends were just smart.”

“Cute, too,” my second brother, Eric, said. Baxter wasn't with us. The family he lived with in Amish country had left town for the weekend, and he stayed to look after the dogs.

“Such a sweet girl,” my mother said as we cleaned up the kitchen. “Immensely mature.” Sally was still on the phone with her parents, phrases wafting in to us from the family room.

“I wouldn't call her mature,” I snapped. “She just hasn't rebelled yet.”

My mother stood at the edge of the kitchen and listened to Sally's voice. “And she likes her parents so much.”

“She's rich, though, you know,” I whispered. “Can't trust her.”

I knew she was rich from the pictures, from how much she'd traveled, the casual way she and her parents talked for hours long-distance, the puzzled look she got when I said I didn't want to skip the cafeteria and join her for dinner out. Early on, when she was at a class, I'd gone through her orderly closet. Her clothes were about the dullest I'd ever seen: corduroy pants with flared bottoms, jackets with wide lapels, flowered blouses. It shocked me when I saw their labels. I'd never seen designer clothes before. Pierre Cardin. Bill Blass. How much could they cost? I sometimes looked at
Vogue,
hoping to find out I looked like a model (people said I looked like Joni Mitchell, which didn't thrill me), and I thought about the prices beside those photos. And what did you get for such riches? Ordinary clothes, boring clothes, clothes that looked like something you'd buy at Penney's. I was into thrift shops then. I had a green silk blouse with a pussy willow print that I dearly loved, and a skirt made of vertical rays of fabric. I wore Indian embroidered cotton shirts and jeans with torn knees, and I thought I looked ten times more interesting than Sally “Fashion Plate” Rose.

The next day I took Sally to the county nature center. A few tattered leaves clung to the trees, and it was unseasonably sunny and warm. I remember Sally looking up into the trees as she walked, dizzy with excitement. She took photographs of tree limbs against the sky, of a red barn, of a bridge over a brook. “Clare,” she kept saying, “this looks like a picture! This looks like
National Geographic
!”

“How droll,” I said.

 

 

 

I TOLD SALLY about my dad's office. It wasn't his, exactly: he was business and personnel manager for a group of doctors. I'd worked there after school doing filing. I knew everything about that place: which patients drove the nurses crazy, which doctors cheated on their wives, who sneaked cigarettes. I even knew which doctors didn't like my father—and I hated them, because who dared not like my father? Their complaint was that he wasn't tough. He didn't have the oomph to fire people. I loved it that he didn't have the oomph, that he split his Christmas bonus with the janitors, that he knew Denise McCalley was pregnant and didn't tell the doctors until she did on the day she quit. “So the doctors make a lot of money, Dad?” I used to ask.

“They work extremely hard,” my father answered.

I could read that answer. “Maybe I'll be a doctor,” I said.

“You could be,” he said. “You could be anything you want. You're a capable young woman.”

 

 

 

“YOU KNOW, ” Sally said, frowning, “I've never been to my dad's office.”

“He doesn't invite you?” We were writing papers in our room, Sally at a desk engraving a legal pad with her heavy print as I wrote down ideas on scraps of paper and let them drift to the floor beside my bed. I'd been telling her about my father's office and the demented patient who always called me Miss Muffin.

“No. And your dad's office sounds interesting. I'll have to ask Daddy to take me to his.”

I had recently realized I said “interesting” in an idiosyncratic way—inneresting—and while I was trying to determine whether to change this, I listened very closely to how other people said the word. In-ter-est-ing, Sally said, which was typical of the way she spoke. She organized her drawers, and in a very unimaginative way: underwear in the top drawer, shirts in the second, jeans in the third. She got a letter or card from home almost every day, and after reading it, she would add it to a bundle she kept in her underwear drawer. I was dying to know what her family wrote, but I would never know, because she tied the ribbon around her treasure so precisely I could never risk removing it.

“It's just a business, though,” Sally was saying. “I don't think there are all those strange people around like at your father's work.”

“They're normal people,” I said with agitation, not sure what I was defending, “they just do strange things.”

Sally looked at me a little too blankly, the red spots in each of her cheeks reminding me suddenly of Tootle, the disobedient engine I had read about as a child. There's a whole world out there, I thought, annoyed. Could she really know so little about it?

Sally was Jewish but had gone to Catholic schools. Her father believed in nuns. He had gone to religious schools himself. There were a lot of good things religion could teach you, he said, if you threw out the guilt and punishment stuff. Sally had always worn a school uniform, and she and her father and her cousin Daphne, who was also her best friend, went shopping together for her nonschool clothes. “Daddy wanted to keep me sheltered,” Sally told me, “but now he figures I'm old enough to see the world myself.” It sounded like a strange upbringing to me: eighteen years in the nest, then an airborne shove cross-country. I'd been taking short excursions by myself for years.

She couldn't set an alarm clock. She didn't know that whites and colors should be washed separately, and her first pink-underwear experience put her in such a tizzy I heard her down the hall speaking in Spanish to her family's maid.
“Ay,”
she said,
“es muy complicado.”

There were nights I sat in the study room of our quad with the door ajar so I could better hear her phone conversation. “Although I don't know why,” I told Pennsylvania, who sometimes listened too. “It's impossibly boring.”

I had some other friends. Margaret was the daughter of two missionaries. She was born and raised in Guatemala to age fifteen. This left her, as she was the first to point out, with No Cultural References. “Like
I Love Lucy,
” she'd explain, her eyes widening. “I'd never heard of
I Love Lucy
till I was sixteen years old.”

“You think that's a loss?” I asked. Margaret did: cultural references were a kind of shorthand, a means of communication. I hadn't thought of that, I admitted. To catch up on her education, Margaret watched a lot of TV. I don't remember any other freshman having a TV in their room, but Margaret did, and it was always on. Soap operas, game shows, sit-coms,
Sonny and Cher, The Rockford Files.
Sometimes she'd hardly acknowledge your presence, she was so engrossed. She made a good argument, I thought, for letting kids get their fill of TV when they were children. But when you got the TV turned off, she was very likable.

 

 

 

AARGH, LARS. SENIOR, avid vegetarian and bicyclist, beard that looked like parsley. Sally met him at a classical guitar concert she'd attended. He started popping up at our quad at all hours with his lean and hungry look, and one Friday night he arrived when Sally and I were tucked in our beds reading. I walked into the study room and opened the door. “It's late, Lars,” I said. “We're in bed.”

“Lars?” Sally called. “Is that you? Come on in.”

It took only an instant to realize that Sally had no idea what she was doing. By then Lars was through the study room and into our bedroom, eager to close the door. “I live here too, Lars,” I said, pushing the bedroom door back open. “Remember?” I walked over to my bed, got in, and stuck my book in front of my nose.

What a day he'd had! Bicycling thirty miles out to the reservoir and back, stopping by some friends' for a bulgur and root-vegetable feast, reading Kierkegaard. . . . On and on he went, perched on Sally's bed, inching closer and closer to Sally's lips and breasts. I set my book down and lay on my side, facing the two of them, hoping to get Lars's attention.

“I've got to go to sleep, Lars,” I finally said. “And I can't do that listening to you.”

Sally giggled.

 

 

 

I WOULD PEEP OVER her shoulder at her sleeping face, head sunk into the pillow, mouth open, amazed anew that this was a California face. Her lips were pink and shaped like Chatty Cathy's, her dark eyelashes curved like a baby doll's. “Such an open face,” my mother had said in wonderment, glancing at my own face with suspicion. I asked Sally questions. Do you know surfers? A few. They're normal boys. Not glamorous. Don't people dress differently in California? Maybe a little. Daphne has two midiskirts. Do you know anyone in the movies? Oh, sure. Screenwriters' daughters and lighting people's sons, and one of the girls in high school, her uncle—

“Are people really, you know, spacey? I mean, like you hear about California, that people latch on to every new fad?”

Sally looked troubled. “Of course, some people do that. They must do it anywhere.” I nodded, unsatisfied.

The temperature was in the sixties in Los Angeles in the winter, Sally said; she didn't have a winter coat. Flowering plants and shrubbery ringed her house. Do trees lose their leaves in winter? I asked. Are there squirrels? Thunderstorms? Can you really feel a breeze off the ocean?

There was another girl from California in our dorm, Gwen Myers, whom I'd seen in the dorm kitchen with her back to me, wearing a pair of tattered denim overalls over a ribbed knit shirt, her blond hair twisted behind her neck and draped over one shoulder. Now Gwen, I thought, Gwen is California. While Sally was a pretender, an impostor, a girl with the geography but not the feeling, a person less from a state than from a family, from a world more circumscribed than my own.

 

 

 

THE MOMENT LARS LEFT, Sally bolted out of bed. “He wanted to sleep with me, didn't he?” she squeaked.

“Don't tell me you wanted to sleep with him.”

“Oh no! He's dorky.”

This startled me, because Sally was dorky.

“Vegetarian,” Sally scoffed. “God, there are a million vegetarians in California. You can't open a car door without hitting one.” She grinned. “One riding a bicycle!”

I was astounded. This was a whole new Sally, a Sally I could understand. I felt almost tingly with possibility. People became best friends with their roommates, lay in the dark and talked, got drunk together, lusted after guys, shared clothes. Years later, they hoped for their children to go to college together. I laughed out loud, showing Sally I appreciated her, that I knew what she was offering, that I was available too.

That night I chased Lars away, we lay in our beds in the dark and talked.

“Is sex really that good?” Sally asked.

“Oh yeah,” I assured her, although I'd wondered, after my high school experience, the same thing myself. The anticipation had seemed a lot better than the real thing. I hadn't met the right person, I told myself. Then I wondered why Sally assumed I would know about sex. I took it as evidence of my obvious worldliness.

“A guy kissed me once at a wedding,” she said, “but he was too old. This guy who works with my father, Hank Barresi. We were dancing, and he pushed me to a corner and kissed me, and I was excited because I knew it was coming and I wondered what it would be like, but when he did it I was disappointed. He had Kahlua on his breath and he was sweating, and then right away he put his tongue in my mouth. I might like someone's tongue in my mouth, but that wasn't the right tongue.”

I was taken aback. It struck me that Sally, in her way, was franker than I was. And what did Kahlua smell like? I thought it was a kind of liquor, but I wasn't sure.

“Then last summer this guy bothered me,” Sally went on. “In Oahu. He was walking past me and he grabbed my breast.”

“Just grabbed it?” I said. “Through your clothes?”

“He was walking in the other direction. And there was a huge crowd. It only lasted a second. Then he was gone.”

“God,” I said. “How icky. Did you see who did it?”

“I saw his arm.” Sally laughed. “Pretty hairy!”

“Were you wearing a bra?” I was trying to think if there was anything about Sally to provoke a man to grab her breast. She did have big breasts, but in the weeks I'd known her, she always wore a bra, even to bed. I hadn't worn a bra for years, but I was flat.