Best Friends (8 page)

Sally laid a photograph on the table. Her father was standing in the sun on what I recognized as their patio, the espalier behind him. He wore a white shirt with the collar open, his face lit up with his most radiant smile, the smile he gave his daughter. “How does he look?” Sally asked.

Margaret picked the photo up and studied it. There was no mistaking her surprise. “He looks . . . normal.”

Sally snorted and took the picture back. The waitress arrived. Sally ordered a ham and cheese omelet, which I'd never seen her eat. Normally she didn't care for eggs.

 

 

 

SALLY AND I SAW a bad cop-action movie, where a villain was shot though the door of a bathroom stall. I heard about that scene for weeks. I thought Sally would never get over it.

Especially after Timbo died, Sally was always thinking how much something would hurt, how frightened a victim must feel. The person being hurt was always her. Ironic, because her parents never once even spanked her.

Sometimes she wouldn't run down the hall to answer the phone at the appointed time her father called and I would feel compelled to get it. “She okay?” Mr. Rose would ask.

“She's fine,” I'd say. She's washing up/in the shower/finishing a sentence in her paper, will be out in a minute.

“Tough thing,” Mr. Rose said once, and I knew he was referring to Timbo. I agreed.

“You hear about the ring?”

I almost dropped the phone. Did Mr. Rose really have to mention the ring? Did everybody in God's creation have to talk about the ring? Was it really that big a deal? My heart sank to hear that Sally had told even her father about it; but of course she told him everything. I realized that Mr. Rose was amused. I felt a kind of hopeless grief for Timbo, whose death evoked more titillation than tragedy.

“Yes,” I said shortly.

“She should have slept with the guy,” Mr. Rose said.

“Oh, I don't know,” I said, exasperated. “I don't see how that would have made any difference.”

“For Sally!” Mr. Rose said. “Now she'll never know. Now she'll always wonder: What would it've been like to sleep with Timbo? Remember, Clare, and I tell this to Sally too: you're only young once. Once. And you said he was quality.”

 

 

 

WHEN I TOLD my mother, I started, “It irritates me, because everyone—” My mother jumped on this, because for once the thing irritating me wasn't her.

“What? What?” she said.

“Well, when Timbo was in that car wreck, he was wearing . . .” I stopped. How could I do this? I wouldn't. I was better than that. I had inner strength.

“What?” my mother said.

I scrambled: “He had an engagement ring in his pocket. He was probably going to ask Sally to marry him.”

“Ohhhh,” my mother sighed. She sat down at the kitchen table, wiped her hands on a towel. “Maybe it's best,” she said after a pause. “They're both so young.”

I RELAYED OUR CONVERSATION to Sally. “And guess what else she said? She said maybe it was for the best, since you were both so young.”

Sally winced.

“And she wonders why I don't want to come home over Christmas.”

“Come home with me,” Sally said. “Did you look in the paper? There're always ads for people to drive cars cross-country. All you'd need is plane fare back. You could stay all January. We could both do our winter term out there.”

 

 

 

“ I REMEMBERED SOMETHING,” Sally said as we drove west. “I was about seven or eight, it was before Ben was born, and we went up to Lake Tahoe. Daddy took me swimming. We went to a store beside the lake for ice cream, and there was a tabloid paper in a rack on the floor. I read the headline and I thought I was going to die. I mean, it was awful. I couldn't breathe, and I didn't want Daddy to know I'd read it, and I was trying to get between him and the paper so he wouldn't read it too.”

“What was the headline?”

Sally hesitated. “MAN FEEDS SON TO PIGS.”

I recoiled. It was pretty horrific. Especially to a seven-year-old.

“I used to lie awake in bed at night thinking of that headline. And I'd been excited to be able to read, but then . . . it scared me.” She hesitated, then started in a lower tone. “Please don't tell Daddy how upset I am about Timbo.”

My hands almost fell off the wheel. “Doesn't he realize?”

“Daddy doesn't understand about me and Timbo. He thinks it was a”—out of the corner of my eye, I could see Sally's mouth twist—“crush. That's the word he used. And I don't even want to say it, but I think he thinks how Timbo died was funny.”

“It was tragic. The fact that people think it was funny makes it more tragic.”

“I know,” Sally whispered, her eyes glistening. She watched the road for a while. “I figure other people I love will die. I figure this is the worst of it, because it's my first time.” She swirled her hand in the air in front of her, an un-characteristically chaotic gesture. “From now on, I'll expect this grief.”

I loved driving west. I loved the sky opening out and the land flattening, the very landscape an echo of my own widening horizons. I was going to California, California! It staggered me that my life, without my planning it, was leading me again to such a wondrous place. It must be fated that I should drive cross-country, in Stan Guardino's dark blue BMW, a novelty car for 1975, a car that provoked all kinds of stares and honks. “You don't need to drive,” my father had said. “I'll buy you a plane ticket.” But no, I wanted to drive, to eat with my best friend at truck stops and stay at cheap motels with fake log walls and erratic heating and tepee-printed curtains.

“L.A.,” Mr. Rose would say when I got there, “you look L.A.” And I did, I knew I did. Ben let me play with his pet snake, and Mrs. Rose fussed a little less in the kitchen; Patricia had had to go back to Mexico to help out her sick mother. I acted as a sort of shield between Sally and her father, and in gratitude she let me drive her little Kharmann Ghia. I drove up and down the canyons, took corners fast, drove all the way down Sunset from Olvera to Pacific with my sunglasses on and the Who on the car radio. I could drop Sally off downtown at her winter term project, working with a woman lawyer who specialized in estate planning and trusts, and have the car all day.

My winter term project was to experience Los Angeles. I'd found a sponsor in the sociology department; I didn't even have to write a paper. I saw Warren Beatty in a terrible rush. And Dennis Hopper, draped by two dissolute girls, playing what looked like hopscotch on the sidewalk.

Mr. Rose liked to repeat that truism about youth being wasted on the young, but in my case, that was not to be. I loved slamming on my brakes and smiling sheepishly at the drivers beside me. Once I spotted a guy beside me at a red light and noticed his pleasure as I glanced over, glanced again: he had a neon green streak in his hair. He smiled; I smiled. The light changed, he lifted his hand, and we went on.

“I'm glad you're here,” Sally said. “It makes things easier.”

“You're a good friend to us, you know that?” Mr. Rose said. “When you're done with that pinko college of yours, you should move out here.”

At the end of winter term, we came back to Ohio. My father mailed me plane fare, and Sally and I flew back together.

I hadn't realized Ohio was so gray. The trees, the roads, the sky. The worst was the sky, a sheet of clouds almost white, variationless. Walking out in the middle of the day, you couldn't tell where the sun was. What was I doing here? Me, Clare Mann, young, smart, and allegedly free. Ohio was nothing but my dues to pay this winter and the next, my junior and senior college years. Then I would be gone. A little puff of gray on a gray landscape.

Years later, Sally and I saw the movie
Prizzi's Honor.
In the climactic scene, if you haven't seen it, the husband and wife who each have a contract to kill the other meet in their mutual bed. She has a gun and he has a stiletto. It's hilarious, they're like two barracudas, and the question is who'll get it first.

I knew Sally wasn't looking. There was a gunshot, then a whizzing sound and a thwack.

“What happened?” she whispered, face squinched. “Did she hit him?”

“Missed.”

“Did he hit her?”

“Yes. She's dead.” I waited until the image of her neck pinned to the wall left the screen. “You can look now,” I whispered.

“That was a good movie,” she said afterward. “I'm glad you made me see it.” I remembered that comment later, thinking of the other things I'd forced Sally to see.

I grayed things up for her, yes. Then she grayed things up for me.

 

 

 

ABOUT OUR SENIOR college year I remember two things, a dog run and Dan.

The Dan story isn't very interesting. It doesn't matter how we met, his last name, the color of his hair. He was an associate professor of chemistry at Case Western Reserve in Cleveland, but he lived in Oberlin because his wife (yes) taught French there, and it was cheaper to live in Oberlin than in Cleveland.

He used to appear in the hall outside my classes; in his car, driving slowly down the street; in the lobby of the library behind a newspaper. He was everywhere. One of the things he liked to do was throw me up against a wall and kiss me. Another was to open his passenger-side door and say, “Get in, little girl.” I got in. I crouched on the hump in the middle of the floor and unzipped his pants and did things, and then he twisted my body onto the seat beside him and dove his fingers between my legs and moved me with such vigor that I bounced like a puppet. We did this even in daylight, and once parked in front of the Oberlin bank while Sally was inside cashing a check. We didn't have a lot of places to go, other than his car and my house. Sally and I lived in a rented house then, far off campus.

I'd been understanding enough with Sally—letting her cry over Timbo, letting her sulk—that she returned the favor, and although I later learned she thought my affair with Dan was crazy, she never at the time let on. She would go into the kitchen and make her methodical tea (Earl Grey, made using a tea ball), discreetly shutting the door as Dan and I rolled off the couch in the living room. She told me, before he showed up, that I looked nice, although how I must have really must have looked was
loca,
running to the front window hoping to see him, throwing myself on the bed in despair that he might not show. He didn't always. For all the times he surprised me from the shadows as I left a movie theater, there were whole evenings of plans when he simply didn't arrive. Marriage was unpredictable, he said.

I thought at the time that my loving Dan was a tribute to Sally, because I really did love him, madly, especially his hands and eyes; I lusted after him and enjoyed every libidinous moment in a way I never had before. In fact, I could have an orgasm simply thinking about him, as I did several times in physical chemistry class. I was proud of all I felt for him, this intimacy, this letting go, which maybe I couldn't have experienced without knowing Sally. She was my first real female intimate, so I had been primed for a male. “Get over here,” I'd say on the phone, “I want to jump your bones.” Or words to that effect.

Our two-bedroom bungalow was at the south edge of town, and I could afford it only because Sally paid three quarters of the rent. We were the only two Oberlin students I knew with a house to ourselves. In size and atmosphere, our house was very much like a lakeside cottage (wood paneling, mildew), but I thought it was fabulous. Its only drawback was a dog run next door with barking day and night, a problem our landlord tried to solve by giving Sally and me white-noise boxes to keep in our bedrooms. The white noise didn't work for Sally. “I hate static,” she said. She talked to the neighbor who owned the dogs, Mr. Morgan, at least every other day, suggesting solutions from muzzles to canine hypnosis. She liked to catch Mr. Morgan in his driveway when he got home from work, before he could disappear into his house and take care of his sick mother, a shriveled woman who, on nicer evenings, appeared in a wheelchair on the porch as her son worked in the yard. “Maybe it's like
Psycho,
” I said. “Maybe she's dead.” But she wasn't dead, she actually cackled, and I had the feeling her son was afraid of her, running across the lawn to her whenever she made her screechy noise.

“I doubt she can hear the dogs,” Sally said. “He could move the run over to her side of the house.”

Mr. Morgan had three strands of long hair he combed over his bald head, a round belly, and a giggle. He worked as a clerk at the state liquor store in Wellington, ten miles down the road, and although I suspected he drank, Sally was less convinced. “They're dogs! I tell you, dogs!” Mr. Morgan would say, giggling. “Dogs bark!” I remember watching from inside our house as Sally arrived home, got off her bike and locked it, and Mr. Morgan, spotting her, scurried behind his house to stand plastered against the back wall, arms out, palms flat on the bricks. But Sally had spotted him too, and soon she was behind the house with him, bobbing her head earnestly as Mr. Morgan made desperate gestures toward the house. They must have talked for twenty minutes, or Sally talked and Mr. Morgan gestured, as the evening came and the backyard darkened.