B.F.F., page 2
If I’d had close friends, I would have turned to them instead of this random collection of people sitting at a diner talking about alcoholism.
During the meeting, I watched Meredith. And I listened. She talked about her mother and her sister, and I tried to figure out which one drank too much. She leaned forward when she talked, making eye contact with everyone. In her three-minute share, she mentioned having a sponsor, working the steps, and surrendering to a Higher Power. The holy trifecta of recovery meetings. By the end, I sized her up as a wise elder. She slid out of the booth five minutes before the meeting ended. “Work meeting,” she whispered to the woman sitting next to me. Her heels click-click-clicked against the diner’s tiled floor.
In Meredith, I didn’t see a friend, a confidante, a sponsor, or a sister. I didn’t have that kind of imagination. I saw a wise middle-aged woman who liked gold rings and spent her days at an important day job, where she wore blazers and managed a staff. I never dreamed we’d talk on the phone, cry on each other’s shoulders, or become each other’s family. I saw no common ground between her pain with her mother and sister and my devastation over my boyfriend’s drinking.
Anyway, I wasn’t looking for friends. I had my hands full trying to get Liam to cork the bottle and pay attention to me. He was my first great love, and I couldn’t bear the thought of living without him. If only I could get him sober, I’d have the perfect life.
2.
After driving those hundred blocks north and then the hundred blocks south every Tuesday morning for six months, I learned something about myself. The meetings didn’t confirm whether Liam was an alcoholic, but the moment he took a sip of alcohol—actually before the sip, when I heard the clink of the bottle as he eased it out of the fridge—I wanted to pull out my hair and scream my throat raw. To me, his drinking meant we slipped away from each other, and I couldn’t stand it. My body wouldn’t let me stay in the relationship—I slept in fits and starts, cried at the fax machine at work, and picked my nails into bloody stubs.
On the night that would be our last, he rented The Days of Wine and Roses from the hipster video store on Milwaukee Avenue, and as soon as I realized the movie depicted the near ruin of an alcoholic husband and wife, I popped off the couch and stood in front of him, my whole body shaking.
“I have a really hard time with your drinking,” I said, my voice wobbling as I pushed the words out. “I don’t think I can handle it. I can’t, I just can’t.”
He pointed the remote control at the screen and clicked Pause.
“We have vastly different ideas about how to relax,” he said, shaking his head.
“I think we’re not a match,” I said.
“I think you’re right,” he said.
We both cried. It was the first honest conversation we’d had since I’d moved back to Chicago one year earlier to be with him. I stayed the night—waking every ninety minutes to sob anew—and the next morning I slipped out of his bed and drove home, totally unsure of what came next on this drizzly, ash-colored Sunday morning. I knew that other women survived breakups by joining their girlfriends for $1-shot nights or trips to Vegas. I wished I had a friend on whose doorstep I could land so she could scoop me up and let me fall apart on her futon.
I did have Tony, my roommate who was a graduate student in the Divinity School at the University of Chicago. I leaned on him after the breakup, borrowing his cigarettes and tagging along with him to his regular twelve-step meetings and outings for Thai food. He’d recently broken up with a boyfriend—his first after a marriage to a woman—and felt as lost romantically as I did. We were a pair, holed up in our stifling apartment, crying into our pillows and wishing for more counter space.
“I dropped everything for this relationship, and now it’s over. What’s going to happen?” I whispered to Tony as we sat in traffic on I-94 one night, blowing our cigarette smoke out the window. “I’m serious. What’s going to happen to me?” I was so bereft I could not picture anything positive in my future.
“You’re going to find out who you’re supposed to be.”
“What, like my destiny? Is that what they teach you in Divinity School? I thought you studied medieval nuns?” I didn’t believe in destiny any more than I believed in myself. I couldn’t process the obvious truth that without an alcoholic relationship to suck up all the oxygen in my life, I was likely to build better relationships with lots of other people, including myself.
There were a handful of women I was friendly with from my original twelve-step program for my eating disorder. We talked on the phone outside of meetings, and sometimes we went for dinner in a big group, each of us ordering food that wouldn’t trigger our bulimia/anorexia/binge-eating. Sauce on the side. No butter. Substitute fresh fruit for potatoes. We left big tips because we were pains in the ass.
Several of those women called to check on me right after the breakup. One Sunday, after I cried through a meeting in a second-floor hospital multipurpose room, seven women left messages. “Thinking of you and wondering how you are.” I wrote each of their names on the back flap of my journal as I listened to their voices.
Trish
Lisa
Laura
Amanda
Colleen
Maya
Sharon
During that long, sad summer, I’d lie in my bed, filling my journal with my existential dread until my hand cramped. When I got sick of that, I’d flip the book over and read the women’s names over and over. The list turned into a poem. I’d called a few of them back, but not all of them. Sharon and Maya intimidated me with their put-together lives. I wasn’t scared to call Laura because she was going through a breakup, too; Trish and Colleen always smiled warmly when I walked into a meeting and seemed available for the minimal amount of friendship I could provide between crying jags. As the weeks went on, I kept crying through meetings, while the other women of recovery reported to their jobs, shuttled their children to soccer, and planned trips with their partners. They lived in the fullness of recovery, as I wandered, lost in heartache. My aloneness and sorrow felt pathetic.
A few weeks before the breakup, I’d asked a woman named Chloe from the diner meeting to be my sponsor. A sponsor is someone who leads you through the steps. Typically, they’ve been in the program longer than you have, and you picked them because they have something you want. A light in their eyes. A sense of joy and gratitude that prevents them from crying through every meeting. Self-acceptance. A life.
“Lean into your female friendships,” Chloe said one morning when I arrived a few minutes early to the diner meeting after the breakup. “You’re going to need them.”
“So they can set me up with a new boyfriend?” I’d read that 28 to 39 percent of people met their partners through their friendship network.
Chloe, an elementary school teacher who took zero shit from her fourth graders or from me, bopped me on the head with a menu. “No, you ding-dong! To help you find yourself. They are your net. Let their hands catch you. Call them up and ask if you can cry on their couches and watch Thelma and Louise.”
Chloe’s words made sense, but they didn’t match my life. She had no idea that my life was a friendship graveyard. That my obsession with my most recent boyfriend’s drinking had crowded out my relationships with my grad school friends; that in graduate school, I’d ghosted my college friends because I’d been freaked out to land in Chicago after a lifetime in Texas—the bitter winters socked me in the face and the intense graduate school courses full of references to Derrida and Cixous left me feeling like a backwater hick; that through graduate school, I stuck my head down, read for hours in the library, and went to recovery meetings—and soon enough, my college friends, busy in their new careers in Houston, Austin, and Dallas, stopped chasing me; that in college, I’d let go of my high school friends, the few souls still reaching toward me after I spent senior year chasing—surprise, surprise—a budding alcoholic.
“I don’t have a ton of girlfriends,” I said.
Talking to Chloe about my anemic friendship skills highlighted one of my great personal failures: an inability to hold on to friendships, not only when I was diving into an alcoholic romance but also in times of transition. How come I never called my college roommates or any of the girls I’d loved during the five years I spent on the campus of Texas A&M? It horrified me, though only slightly, that I had no idea how to answer that question.
“Get some,” Chloe said. “Quick.”
3.
When I was in grade school, I pined for a best friend. I pictured a cherub-faced girl with bangs and freckles who shared her Hostess treats with me and held my secrets close to her heart. This fictitious B.F.F. would find me endlessly fascinating—our inside jokes would leave us belly-laughing, and our mutual adoration would be as secure as a swaddle. We would share an emotional shorthand like that between twins or old married couples. Our moms would be friends, and we’d be so close people would stop us at the mall and ask, “Are y’all sisters?” When I looked around the playground, I saw friendships that looked like the one I dreamed of. Maria and Ginger. Ann and Robin. Carrie and Moira. If I couldn’t have a singular B.F.F. all to myself, then I wanted to be part of a defined group of friends that moved through the world of recess, lunch, P.E., sleepovers, and the birthday party circuit as a unit. A unit that I was clearly a part of. If three of these girls showed up somewhere without me, I wanted them to field the question, “Hey, where’s Christie?” That these friends would know my whereabouts was a given.
The only thing standing in the way of my friendship dreams was my personality.
“Let’s play ballet,” I urged the girls standing around during recess in first and second grade at Christ the King School, where we wore green-plaid jumpers and obeyed the nuns who taught us how to spell words like communion, crucifixion, reconciliation. “I’ll be the ballet master.” Obsessed with every aspect of ballet—barre work, Balanchine, Baryshnikov—I could not imagine how this invitation failed to entice my classmates. Sometimes I had takers. A few times Hattie and Kate joined me under the covered walkway between the school and the convent.
“Let’s work on tendus. Point your toes.” I tapped on Kate’s knee, urging her to straighten it. Like my French ballet teacher, I demanded precision. Didn’t everyone want to be perfect? Why do anything unless you were striving to be the best? It was only recess, sure, but why not pretend it was an audition for Swan Lake? “Like this,” I’d say as I showed them my own board-straight leg.
Soon enough, Kate and Hattie were plenty bored and ran off to jump rope. I stood there, confused. Sharing my obsession with ballet and bodily perfection was my best guess on how to connect. If they were real friends, they would join my obsessions and match my intensity. How could I find someone like me?
I wandered from the swings to the merry-go-round over to the jump ropes, always hopeful that I’d stumble upon someone whose longing matched my own.
Where was she?
“Let’s all stand in a circle,” I said to the handful of fourth-grade girls gathered on the bleachers of the newly designed soccer field at Christ the King. On the cusp of middle school, we were allowed to wear plaid skirts instead of jumpers, and I took the wardrobe evolution as a sign that this would be my year to draw toward that circle of friends I’d dreamed of. “Here’s my idea for a game. One person stands in the middle and everyone else will take turns saying one thing they don’t like about her.”
Poor Kate and Hattie signed up for this terrible game. At least I wasn’t impersonating a tyrannical French ballet master. Melissa and Nicole joined us. Did Kate volunteer to go first or did I cajole her into the middle?
Kate took her spot in the middle and smoothed out her skirt. The look of expectation on her face proved she believed in my genius.
“I’ll go first,” Nicole said. “You never invite me over, and you’ve been to my house ten times.”
“Your lunch smells funny,” Melissa said, looking down at her saddle shoes. “Egg salad is gross.”
“You cry too much,” Hattie offered, chest puffed out with the illicit thrill of tearing Kate down. “Like a baby,” she spat.
“Isn’t this fun?” I said, as I watched the emotion collapse Kate’s smile and twist Hattie’s smirk.
“You haven’t gone yet,” Hattie said to me, crossing her arms.
I looked again at Kate and for the first time noticed the tears pooling, ready to spill down her cheeks. My sadism now seemed shameful. I hadn’t pictured crying. My body suddenly felt hot and too big. What I’d been after was something meaty and genuine that might build a deep connection between us, but my best idea now made me feel sick to my stomach.
“Come on,” Hattie said, annoyed. I’d enticed them to cruelty, and now I had to ante up. I looked from Hattie to Kate, stalling for time to think of something I didn’t like about her that wouldn’t sting.
“I don’t like how you always do well in spelling.” I smiled at Kate, letting her see my tender feelings. I’m not a monster.
“That’s not real,” Hattie said. “Unless you mean you don’t like how Kate acts like she’s better than us.”
Kate looked at me, her expression a plea for me to stand by my first statement, but Hattie wanted more. I hated how dirty I felt for setting this up. I had to make it stop. “Maybe we should switch to saying what we like about the person. I’ll go first. Kate, I like the way you share your snack with me.” Kate brought plump raisins in the small red boxes and homemade cookies.
Hattie was already climbing down from the bleachers. “This is stupid,” she said. “I’m not playing.”
Everyone else dispersed. I hung back with Kate as she regained her composure.
“I don’t think you cry too much,” I told her, churning with guilt.
“Hattie does.”
“Sorry.”
Back in the classroom, my stomach roiled; I couldn’t concentrate on the lesson about solving word problems involving fractions. Why had I suggested such a mean game? What did I think would happen? I should have volunteered to go first. What would they have said about me—I burned to know.
Christie has a big stomach and greasy hair.
Christie is no fun.
Christie is an awkward black hole of neediness.
Kate’s crumpled face haunted me. Years later, I would remember that afternoon so vividly. I’d been gunning for expressions of displeasure and the chaos of resentment, which was my idea of intimacy. I have no other memory of fourth-grade recess, just that single day marred by my sick feeling of shame as I watched Kate slump over her desk all afternoon. Somewhere beneath my white uniform blouse and my little kid ribs, I knew I was going about things all wrong. When the bell rang at three and everyone poured out of the classroom, Hattie and Kate piled into Hattie’s wood-paneled station wagon and would hang out at Hattie’s until Kate’s mom picked her up. Ann and Robin, sporty girls, scarfed their snacks and then headed to soccer practice. Behind me, Maria and Ginger talked about a weekend sleepover. In every girl, I heard the easy, effortless syllables of friendship, like a secret language I couldn’t decode. How could I learn it? How come I didn’t know it already?
4.
Chloe had advised me to huddle up with my best friends, but I didn’t have friendships like that and had no idea where to get them.
Instead, I searched online for a new job, one that would require something more than manning a phone and faxing expense reports to the procurement office every few weeks. I signed up for the Law School Admissions Test, since I had no clue what to do with my graduate degree in humanities. I put together a version of the future that hardly seemed perfect, but it was an improvement on my present.
I spent my free time in recovery meetings, hoping to keep my eating disorder in check and to steer my heart away from active alcoholics.
Eventually, I discovered there were roughly thirty meetings for friends and families of alcoholics closer to my house than the Swedish diner one, and I started attending those. I lost track of Meredith for a few years, but then we both popped up in the same Saturday-morning meeting held in a kindergarten classroom of a Catholic grammar school in Lincoln Park. Gone was the smell of powdered-sugared pancakes and the public crying from the diner meeting days. We smiled at each other and nodded during meetings; we chatted in the parking lot before climbing in our cars and launching into the rest of our weekends. There was no deep connection. She still had those manicured nails, those gold rings, and an impressive array of scarves, and I spent most of my effort trying to sort out my romantic life. I focused on boyfriends and love interests almost exclusively because of societal pressure, loneliness, and a desire to have a family.
The word spinster hounded me as I celebrated my twenty-seventh and twenty-eighth birthdays. My chief fear was dying alone and unloved in the carnal sense, and the pressure I felt to sort myself out romantically grew to lethal proportions—one day I found myself wishing for death. Everyone I knew was coupled up. From TV, I knew it was acceptable to be single only if you were as glamorous or promiscuous as the characters on Sex and the City, and as someone who wore ill-fitting sweater sets from Marshall’s and repressed my sexuality, I felt round-the-clock shame about my single status. Soon I added intensive group therapy to my mental health regimen.
I also landed in law school and made friends: brilliant, hilarious women with whom I studied and on one occasion joined for a bar crawl. I kept a distance between myself and them, though, hiding behind giant property textbooks while I chased A’s and a high class ranking, hoping those external achievements would compensate for my unsatisfying personal life. In March of our first year of law school, Clare, Kiley, and Amma planned to attend the St. Patrick’s Day Parade in downtown Chicago.
