A Road I Haven't Lately Walked

It's November 12th, the birthday of someone who was, long ago and in another life, my friend. As a matter of fact, she was my best friend, and I utterly adored her. She had a sense of mischief and adventure, a quick wit and a gritty voice, and a waif-like beauty that we all yearned to possess in those days, something along the lines of Marianne Faithfull.

She was a person with charisma, although I wouldn't have known that word for it then, and I fell completely under her spell, always mildly amazed that she found my company at all appealing. It may well have been my worshipful devotion that appealed to her most of all, but it would be many years before I understood that.

She grew up in a clamorous ragtag family of eleven children. Her father, a thin man named Jordan Clarence who hailed from Texas, worked hard but spent a lot of time in a bar on Carlton Avenue. Her mother, a good Catholic woman of ample flesh and resounding voice, was hilariously eccentric and superstitious, but also full of love, and irrepressibly good-natured.

My friend honed her survival skills and manipulative talents in this crowded, chaotic household, and the distracted parenting granted her an unusual amount of autonomy and freedom. She didn't have to sneak around as I did; she just came and went freely, and in the eyes of my over-protective Italian father, she was a very bad influence.

But most of our escapades were rather innocent.  In summer, if I spent the night, we might sit for hours on her front stoop on Elmore Street talking about our hopes and schemes and flirting with the local cops who kept pulling over to chat.

Sometimes we took walks along the railroad tracks and through the streets of the housing tracts of the town we couldn't wait to get out of, and once we discovered a secret wooded area by a creek beneath an overpass, where we ate chocolate-covered toffee bars and, corny as it sounds, we sang this song from West Side Story, and we sang it from the heart:

There's a place for us,

Somewhere a place for us.

Peace and quiet and open air

Wait for us

Somewhere.

Once we tried getting drunk together -- she got sick and I couldn't manage more than a sip. (Our favorite drink was tea with milk and an avalanche of sugar.) It's true we went to church on Sundays only because we knew a certain group of boys would be there, and afterwards we'd go hang out with them in some Lowell Avenue basement listening to music, so my father was right in his skepticism about my newfound religious devotion, but honestly, nothing happened.

I think the worst thing we did was go to New York City  without permission on a school night with our good friend Richie, a college guy who had a car, and there was hell to pay for that. But all we did in the city was walk around aimlessly, astonished to be there but trying to pretend we belonged. I have an enduring image of her that night, standing in front of a little grocery store in the Village, wearing a cotton print dress, very short, very 60s, and biting into a large green apple. A man walked by and said, "That apple is bigger than you are!" and she smiled her heart-stopping smile, and he sighed. It's funny how an inconsequential moment like that can inhabit your head for forty years.

She got that sort of attention all the time--the airy banter reserved for the adorable. She was somehow both innocent and sexy back then, and she knew how to play it. I wanted to be like her, but I lacked the knack, not cute enough, or quick enough. So I followed her lead and basked in her reflected light, and I interpreted her occasional jabs as insights that might be good for me, convinced that she was deeper than most people realized.

I saw that she could turn suddenly cold and was capable of grudges that calcified and never went away, but I focused on the fact that she was also very kind. She felt sorry for people, tried to intervene, turned them into projects for awhile. I am sure I was a project more than once. (Monte has concluded, based on the many anecdotes I've shared with him over the years, that she was a textbook example of the archetype we now refer to as Mean Girl, case closed.)

But  it's never that simple, is it? And I loved her with the intensity of love young girls have for their best friends. Even when we were miserable, if we were together, it was a dark and glamorous misery; it was theater. We walked through the rain in short black skirts and fish-net hose, singing Bob Dylan songs, and eating Twinkies because they resembled little sponge-cake coffins.  We made up nonsense poetry and chanted it out loud, went to a Gene Pitney concert, took pictures of each other in a graveyard. (Yes, Gene Pitney. I think the schmaltzy yearning of Town Without Pity resonated with us. We were, after all, just a couple of Long Island girls trying to find our way in the world, without a clue as to how clueless we were.)

In the 1970s we took a cross-country drive in a Volkswagen bug, she and her then-husband bickering in the front, me in the back seat by the cooler. We detoured to get a quick look at the Grand Canyon. "A big yawn," she said.  By then she was a sultry smoker, short denim shorts revealing skinny tan legs, her long hair sun-bleached. We were already nearing the end of our friendship but didn't know it yet.

And of course it didn't end well. I guess I disobeyed a rule, or overstepped my sidekick role. Do the details even matter? My life was a mess, but I was slowly and surely becoming myself, and in doing so, I fell seriously and irrevocably out of favor. I was dead, she said, and never spoke a word to me again. I went to her house in Syracuse, New York. She looked right through me to the street beyond, and quietly closed the door.

Believe me, it hurt at the time.  And no one could understand it--we'd been good friends...best friends...for so long.

But in a way, it was also inevitable.

So we went our separate ways and I eventually gained perspective, letting her settle into an appropriate place in my history, by and large forgetting.  In time her adolescent power, already well past its expiration date, no doubt faded. I knew from one of her sisters that she sold real estate in New Jersey, that she had a son, and in time a second divorce. It all seemed disappointingly ordinary.

Then, because we live in a world where we can do so, I  idly googled her a few years ago, and shocking stories surfaced. She had been arrested for the attempted murder of her ex-husband, stabbing him in the neck with a kitchen knife. She was convicted and sentenced, but she died of cancer about a year later. Maybe she was already sick when she stabbed him, and maybe it was a form of cancer that affected her brain.  This is what I have chosen to believe.

It's strange to zoom out and see the whole trajectory of a life.  Strange to see someone once so close to you transformed into a headline. A mean girl? Sometimes. But she was so much more, and so much less.

And on this, her birthday, I will remember the day we sat by the creek beneath the overpass, eating chocolate, singing about the time and place that waited for us somewhere, fully believing it did.