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| 44 years of friendship! |
My oldest and dearest friend has been my friend since eighth grade – that’s 44 years of friendship, in varying degrees of intensity. Through high school, our breaks from one another were really only when one or both of us had a boyfriend (it was usually NOT me.)
When I met Lisa, I was new to the backwater town of Sussex, New Jersey. I had just arrived, having extricated myself from an abusive home life, an alien being dropped unceremoniously into a foster home where I would spend the next five years. I had wandered down to the middle school, where a playground of sorts was spread out in front of the school building. Goofing around on the basketball court was a blonde girl who could make killer three pointers, and a really tall dark-haired girl, who seemed to take pleasure in knocking the blonde down on power plays to steal the ball. I’m not sure how I got invited to shoot hoops, since I was scrawny and had absolutely no skill, but there I was, shooting hoops with this girl Lisa (the blonde) and her older sister (the brute.) Of course, I did not once get a ball in the hoop. I think it was during this first meeting that I very badly sprained a pinkie finger. It could have been broken – that is the one that is the straighter of the two. It’s been so long, I can’t be sure.
I spent the rest of my foster five escaping either to Lisa’s house, where her mother would feed me tuna salad sandwiches and encourage us to get as much fresh air as was humanly possible, or with Lisa to another friend’s more welcoming homes. We are still friends with Donna D, who lived a street over from Lisa’s house, and remain in touch with others from the original squad (Melissa, Cathy and Kathleen, looking at you.) When we were sophomores or juniors, I cannot remember which, we were friends with a girl named Eva, whose mother and father were divorced or divorcing. Her mother, I recall, was always angry. She frightened me. Her father, still speaking with the accent of his native Hungary, was mostly sad. She lived in a little, dark arts and crafts house across town, where we’d go to eat pizza and listen to Bruce Springsteen or the B-52s (I think of Eva every time I hear “Rock Lobster”), write poetry and laugh at ourselves. Her father, bless him, was always happy when we would descend upon his sepia-toned reality and bring a little laughter. What an interesting trio we were: the little Hungarian elf, the blonde beauty and me. We couldn’t have looked more different from one another, but something bound us together. Eva moved away after that year and we lost touch with her. Periodically, I will search for her on Facebook, to no avail.
When we were seniors in high school, we both thought we were all that – and we both dated older (married) men who were separated from their wives (WE HAD NO IDEA) and drove Corvettes (this was really the only thing that mattered – mine was a red 1976 Sting-Ray – hers was white, I think, or yellow.) You would think someone somewhere would have stopped us, but nobody did. We thought we were sophisticated and worldly, and mostly we thought we were hysterically funny to be living this insane life that we ultimately didn’t want. That whole year is a story unto itself. Thank goodness sanity arrived in the nick of time to send us both off to college and away from the ridiculousness that was our teenaged years in that backwater town.
Lisa and I have been through a lot together. We’ve held each other’s hair while praying to the porcelain god after going on a bender. We’ve stood by one another when one of us (wasn’t me) popped a presumptuous (read: inappropriately aggressive) male in the nose and caused a bit of blood to spill. We’ve gone to after parties where one of us (me) hung the other of us (her) upside down in gravity boots. Later, when we were living with our respective beaus and only about a 20 minute drive from one another, we’d drink spiked lemonade while lounging poolside, always laughing at something. We stood up for each other at the altar, held one another’s babies, and supported each other when it felt like our lives were falling apart. We would spend years and years and years apart, only to fall into familiarity when we were together again. We each have whole entire lives, friends and lifetimes that don’t overlap, but we are never without one another.
We are both so different from the naïve girls we were then. And then, not so much. Our kids have grown up, she’s gotten remarried. I’ve seen more of her in the last year since she moved North than I have in the last twenty. She is the one person who knows where all the bodies are buried. She is the one person who has personally met all the skeletons in my closet, having helped put a few in there herself. We are both adult orphans with painful and strange childhood stories. We are each other’s best reflection of the person we’d like to be when we grow up. How we managed to survive our teens and twenties and remain friends for four decades is miraculous.