MWF Seeking BFF (28 page)

“How do you eat with her?” my brother asks Matt.

“Oh, I just tune it out.”

Nice guys. I used to be on their team though. I was annoyed when strangers talked to me—
I’m trying to get things done here, people, not have a pow-wow
—and even more frustrated when the people I was with chatted up everyone in sight—
Um, hello! I’m right here. Pay attention to me!
I’d stand off to the side with a half smile, not knowing when to jump in or how to cut the conversation short.

Now I’m the talker. Not the kind that can’t read social cues and overstays her welcome (although I’m sure that’s what they all say), but the kind who gets pleasure from a few bits of friendly banter. And you know what? I like life better this way.

“Don’t you teach at The Daily Method?” I ask the yoga girl after class.

“I do.”

“I thought so. I took a class with you last summer.” She looks guilty, as if I’ve caught her in bed with the enemy.

“I’m cheating on them!” she says with a laugh. “But actually a lot of the teachers take yoga as a complement.” I want to tell her she doesn’t need to justify herself to me.

“Aren’t you getting married this summer?”

“Wow, that’s some memory.”

I’ve always had eerily good recall. I remember this tidbit
because when we met she told me she did The Daily Method in hopes of getting arms like Jessica Biel’s for her wedding. I wanted the same thing.

“It’s actually in three weeks,” she says.

“Congratulations! That’s so exciting.” We talk about her nuptials as we roll up our mats and head out. I’m not even toying with the idea of asking her out. She’s getting married in less than a month. I know how busy and exhausting the lead-up can be, and I can hear the stress in her voice. I have no interest in adding to her anxiety.

A year ago I wouldn’t have talked to her at all. Six months ago I might have, but only to get a girl-date. Maybe now I’m just friendly, no strings attached.

When I tell Matt and Sam about the encounter, which isn’t much on its own but is a nice model of my growth, they seem impressed.

“You’ve become quite the friendship expert,” Sam says.

“Ha! Maybe you missed the part about how this whole year started because I had no friends?”

I
have
started to feel like something of a self-made friendship scholar though, if only because relationship behavior is the framework through which I now see the world. Got a beef with your boyfriend? Maybe you’re cocooning. Sending a text? What a modern-day communicator! Even going to brunch is like that restaurant scene in
Being John Malkovich
, where the actor’s face is everywhere and all anyone can say is “Malkovich Malkovich Malkovich.” Except in my world it’s tables of friends everywhere I turn, taunting me with their air kisses and giggly BFFness.

Even when Sam and I go to the zoo later in the week, all I can think of is how friendless the lone polar bear must feel.

* * *

FRIEND-DATE 31.
I’ve wanted to get together with Dianne since she started working with me a year ago. We have some mutual friends so we’d both been given the heads-up about the other when she was hired. We’ve talked about getting after-work drinks, but the few times we’ve tried, work got nutty and Dianne had to cancel. She’s on the tech side of things while I’m just a words person, so she is called on at the eleventh hour to fix problems way above my paygrade.

Dianne sent me an email while I was out of town about a new social dining website in Chicago. Grubwithus is similar to OpenTable, the online restaurant reservations site, but instead of reserving a table, you secure only a seat or two at a party of eight. “Being recent transplants to Chicago, we wanted to meet new people but didn’t want to hang out at the bars and clubs every night,” the founders say on their website. “We thought it’d be much more fun to bond at the best restaurants in Chicago for a discounted price.”

Basically, they’re me, but they launched their search over family-style dining rather than girl-dates.

It’s a brilliant idea. A real why-didn’t-I-think-of-that in our Groupon-hoarding
Top Chef
–obsessed culture. Meals cost anywhere from fifteen to twenty-five dollars, and even though the company is brand-new, they’ve already set up partnerships with some trendy Chicago restaurants. From a friend-making standpoint, it makes perfect sense. Nothing brings people together like food, except maybe drink, and these meals promise to be rife with both.

I am definitely intrigued.

The problem is that since the site is still in its infancy, you have to be invited to join and I haven’t been issued such an
honor. So when Dianne tells me she’s thinking of going to the inaugural meal—she was granted access for being a prolific Chicago restaurant Tweeter—I jump on my chance. I know each diner is allowed to bring a friend.

“I’d love to try it out,” I tell her, completely inviting myself along. When you’re on a determined quest you must be willing to be assertive and this is too good an opportunity to pass up. It could be both a friend-date with Dianne
and
a chance to meet future date prospects.

I’m not entirely clear on the ethics of picking up a potential friend while I’m already out with one. Perhaps the most egregious romantic-date transgression is the wandering eye. Checking out other prospective mates—no matter how cute they are, or how horrifically inept/obnoxious/meatheaded your date is—is not okay. Does the same hold true in the world of friend-dating?

I wouldn’t want Dianne to feel like I’m only half paying attention to her. But friendship is not romance, no matter how similar girl-dating and the romantic kind are. There is no exclusivity. We don’t have to have The Talk. (“What
are
we?” “Why do we have to give it a label?” “But do you like me? Or do you like like me?” “I just want to be friends! Not best friends. It’s too much too soon.”) And adding a third to the mix doesn’t bring up any porn imagery.

At dinner, it quickly becomes clear that this concern is a nonissue. Dianne is as interested as I am in new methods of socializing, and she spends more of her time talking with our fellow diners than she does with me.

Our group is seated at a long rectangular table, not the ideal scenario for group dining. I’m at the end, which means I have three people within speaking distance—Dianne, who’s seated
next to me, the girl across from her, and the girl across from me. If I shout I can talk to one of the company’s founders, who is sitting on Dianne’s other side, but she has his ear. Early in the meal she mentioned that she’d found some flaws in their website, so they’re debriefing operating systems or coding problems or some other such techspeak.

“How are things going in the office?” I ask her during a break in their conversation.

“Fine. Crazy. You know. I’d love to get home before eight some night soon,” she says before turning back to Daishin, the founder.

Luckily the girls across from me are talking books and I jump in as the conversation turns to
Harry Potter.
Sonia, a nurse practitioner, is an überfan. We talk shop—the theme park, the real-life Nicholas Flamel (I had no idea he was an actual guy!)—and our conversation takes off from there. As if single-handedly advancing child literacy weren’t enough, J. K. Rowling has now been the guiding force behind two of my friend connections. It’s a bit overachieving.

I don’t gel with Dianne nearly as much as I expect to, but I do find Sonia. And I sample three appetizers, a sushi roll, three entrées, and dessert for eighteen dollars. Overall, I’d call it a win.

When it comes to sleepaway camp, there are two, er, camps: Those who get it, and those who don’t. Even today, twelve years after my last summer, I find myself struggling to articulate to noncampers why my nine seasons at Tripp Lake (plus one as a counselor) were so life altering. It’s a losing battle.

“I don’t get you people and your camp obsession,” my coworker
Kari said recently, after I told her I was going to Maine to sleep in old bunks and shower in what can only be described as a moth-filled plastic box.

“If you didn’t go you’ll never get it,” I said. “It sounds a bit ridiculous in the retelling.”

“I went to tennis camp for two weeks,” Ashley offered.

“Not the same!” She looked offended. “I don’t know what it was, specifically. We sang a lot, played a ton of sports, made pottery. We basically played all day long. What could be better?”

I was lucky to get to spend the summers of my youth in a corner of Southwest Maine rather than having to work. My noncamp friends had jobs or family reunions or swim team, while I played soccer and beaded bracelets and learned to water-ski. All in the same day. Even then I knew how good I had it. I was eight years old my first summer at Tripp Lake, and it didn’t take long for me to develop a “cult-like mystical connection” to my seasonal home, as
This American Life
host Ira Glass once perfectly described it. I became
that girl
, memorizing lyrics to old songs, keeping scraps from every occasion, having the camp logo spray-painted onto my tennis racket strings. During the school year I counted down the days until I could go back, and during the summer I counted the days I had left. Sara and I would have long talks about how much we “worshipped” life at “The Promised Land.” It was all fairly melodramatic.

But more important than the activities or the songs or the amenities was how easy it was to be a camper. You didn’t have to be good at anything specific, you just had to have a good attitude. The Spirit of Tripp Lake Award was the most coveted honor each summer, and to win it you just had to be an easygoing, happy, excited kid.

The school year took work—balancing school and dance class and basketball and friends. When you’re a type-A child with perfectionist tendencies, the stress of those demands can take a toll. At camp the pressure was off. We wore uniforms. There were no boys or schoolwork. Our greatest worry was having last-choice activity sign-ups. It was a two-month-long slumber party.

If I had to pinpoint one experience from my childhood that is responsible for my perhaps unreasonably high expectations of friendship, camp would be it. If you live in a bunk with six other girls for all that time, they become like sisters. Of course, there were fights—this was a summer camp not a commune—but there was a level of intimacy not rivaled by school or sports teams.

Which is why I have no qualms about boarding a plane to New York City less than two weeks after my return from Europe and driving six hours up to Maine with Sara and two other ex-campers for Tripp Lake’s one-hundred-year alumni reunion.

“I made a special camp mix for our road trip,” Sara says when I arrive. “I also went digging in my parents’ apartment and found my old uniforms and our yearbook videos.” She’s as camp-crazy as I am. Maybe more.

We pop the tapes in the VCR (our camp days were pre-DVD, but it’s completely characteristic of Sara to still have a VCR) at 11
P.M.
Three hours later we’re still up watching old movies. This one is from our final summer. 1998. Flashes of other campers bring up obscure memories I didn’t even know I had. Remember when 8-year-old Micah woke us up every morning singing from
Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat
? Remember the year Bruce the rock-climbing
counselor hit his head on a barbell and the hippie counselors sang that war chant in the talent show? We’re in the midst of a serious this-isn’t-that-funny-but-I-can’t-stop-laughing fit when Lizzie, Sara’s roommate, emerges half-asleep from her room.

“Are you guys actually watching this?” We can’t pull it together long enough to respond. She rolls her eyes and heads to the bathroom.

That night Sara and I share her bed for our sleepover, hoping to doze for all of three hours before we hit the road.

This isn’t the kind of friendship I’m looking for this year. My relationship with Sara is eighteen years in the making. Nothing I find in twelve months can come close to our intimate understanding of who the other is and who she once was, and I don’t need it to. But it’s certainly an aspirational model of what, with a little time, a friendship can become.

“Can you guys keep it down? My daughter is trying to sleep.”

On top of being an alumni weekend, this reunion is also a mother-daughter affair. The bunk next door is home to a group of 7-year-olds and their moms for the weekend, and we’re keeping them up.

My bunk consists of thirteen women, all of whom were in my age group or the one above me while we were campers. Each of us has slipped back into our roles from those years ago—the class clown, the nurturing mom, the up-for-anything, let’s-just-have-a-party girl. I haven’t spoken to some of these people in ten years, but if a stranger walked in right now she’d think we’ve all been best friends since birth.

“Bertsche, remember when your hair looked like a boy?”

No one calls me Rachel here, and no one will ever forget the bowl cut my mom forced on me my first summer. She was
scared I wouldn’t brush it and would come home with a rat’s nest for a head. She was probably right.

(My mother met one of her best friends on the train to their Wisconsin summer camp when she 9 years old. Joy took one look at Mom’s short hair and said, “What are you doing here? This is a camp for girls!” I guess it’s a rite of passage.)