B.F.F., page 7
I saw it, too! A woman placed a giant sheet cake with thick ridges of white icing decorated with blue and red rosettes on a table. She dipped a ladle into a crystal punch bowl filled with frothy lime-green juice. I hoped the cake was chocolate inside and that I could get a corner piece with extra icing.
A man stepped up to a mic at the front of the room. The rumble of chatter slowly quieted. The guy at the podium welcomed everyone and introduced himself as Gerald R.
“Hi, Gerald,” the entire room responded. Their voices erupted like thunder. Gerald then called each person celebrating an anniversary to the podium, gave them a chip commemorating their sobriety, and allowed them to say a few words.
I hooked the heels of my sandals on the low metal bar on the back of the chair in front of me and let my body slouch. Might as well get comfortable.
When Gerald called out a name, the birthday celebrant—most of them men—would weave through the aisles, take his new coin, and introduce himself. I knew I was supposed to say, “Hi, Rick,” or “Hi, Jared,” or “Hi, Burt,” when they introduced themselves, but I couldn’t do it. Neither did Dirk.
Eventually, Gerald called my dad’s name, and he rose from his aisle seat, buttoning his sports coat as he walked to the podium. He stepped up to the mic and said he was grateful for all of the people, many of whom were in the audience, who helped him. He praised my mom as a wonderful wife and mother. He mentioned my brother and me by name, and I ducked my head low, scared to see all the eyes turned toward me. I let my hair fall over my face.
“And then there’s our youngest, Virginia. She’s our sobriety baby. She’s our miracle.”
I didn’t hear a single word after miracle. I felt a shiver of satisfaction in finally hearing someone say it, Virginia is a miracle, but it flickered and disappeared. Thanks to my first-grade teacher, Sister Mary Margaret, I was well versed in miracles—the tomb, the loaves and fishes, the lame man who stood up and walked. Miracles were extraordinary. They were inexplicable. They were straight from the heart of God. Virginia was a miracle; I was a reason to get drunk. I swung my feet back and forth hard, hard enough that my chair scooted forward. Mom set her hand on my thigh to still my legs.
The meeting finally ended, and I got that corner piece of cake. The flowers felt greasy on the roof of my mouth and the sweetness clung to my tongue. I slipped away from my family’s huddle and snagged a second piece. I considered lunging for a third, but Mom was onto me. She warned me about a stomachache from all the sugar, but she was wrong. Sugar made it possible to live in my body and carry the blame I was sure belonged on my shoulders.
* * *
I shared this miracle story with Meredith a few days after she called us miracles.
“See why that word fucks with my head?” I said.
For a split second, I thought she was going to scold me for latching on to this tiny moment—Get over it, already. If she had, I would have spat back, defensively, I’m trying! I felt shame about how fiercely I clung to this line my dad said when I was seven or eight years old. Or at least that’s the line I remember him saying. We all know that memory is faulty. In law school, our torts professor set up an experiment where one of the administrators knocked on the door of our classroom, talked to her for a few minutes, and then handed her a file. After the incident, our professor told us to write down a description of the administrator. When we shared our descriptions, the answers varied widely—some reported brown hair and khaki pants; others insisted her hair was blond and her pants were gray. Some said the interruption lasted for thirty seconds; two people insisted it was over three minutes. Intellectually, I understood the malleability of memory and the ways that perception shifts over time, and for God’s sake I was in grammar school when I heard the line on which I hung so much of my identity. My dad’s words proved that my little sister was divinely perfect, and I held that truth close to my bones.
“Oh, I relate to so much of that,” she said. “Both of my sisters were perfect in ways that I wasn’t. All I wanted was to be someone’s favorite. It really messed me up. I drank and starved because I’m an addict, and I fell in love with addicts because I’m deeply codependent and terrified of intimacy, but my perfect sisters were good excuses. I blamed my misery on their perfection.” She shook her head and pressed her lips together. “All that’s made me skittish as a friend. Once I decide a friend is better than I am, she becomes one of my perfect sisters, and I withdraw. I’ve missed out on a lot.”
Obviously, I used food and bulimia to cope with my feelings of jealousy, envy, and inferiority. I hadn’t binged or purged in years, but I remembered how soothing it felt to chew and swallow more food than my body needed. It took the edge off my roiling feelings for a spell, but then the inevitable shame about my appetites and horror at the calories I’d consumed telescoped my life to the size and shape of the toilet bowl. I’d binged and purged over crushes who didn’t like me back, academic pressure, ballet solos I wanted and didn’t get chosen for, friendships that crashed, and over and over because of my shame at being a failure as a girl, a sister, a daughter, a friend, an eater, a human in the world.
Every time I talked to Meredith, I felt amazed we had so much in common. It seemed improbable. On the day I was born in 1973, she was twenty-three years old and well on her way to drinking herself to death. Maybe the night I was born was the same night she fell asleep drunk with a lit cigarette that started a house fire in which she would have perished if her cat hadn’t roused her. I didn’t know drunk, self-destructive Meredith—she got sober long before I met her at the Swedish diner. The Meredith I knew from meetings sounded strong, full of faith in her Higher Power.
In our one-on-one conversations, though, I heard someone different. Someone more like me. Searching. Seeking. Unsure. Willing, but not always strong enough to undo bad habits or create new ones. Up close, I could see that she often deprived herself. Once after a meeting, we walked to a coffee shop, and when she ordered tap water, I offered to get her a bottle of the good stuff (San Pellegrino). “No, no, no,” she’d said, and I could tell she was uncomfortable with my offer. And she’d recently told me that she drove three neighborhoods away to shop at a discount grocery store, even though the sketchy location scared her and the traffic made the trek a hassle. When I asked her why all the effort to save a few bucks, she waved her hands and said, “I’m working on it in therapy,” with enough edge that I understood further questions were not welcome. She dreamed of a vacation in Italy but spoke as if such an extravagance was as unlikely as booking a private jet to circumnavigate the globe. I noticed her deprivation, but I didn’t press because it didn’t seem like my place. Up close, she was as messy and “in progress” as anyone—as I certainly was—and it comforted me to know she wasn’t nearly as perfect as I once imagined.
10.
Catholic school was a balm for my soul after the social bruising I took in fifth grade. In sixth grade, I returned to nuns, plaid uniforms, and religion classes. Now I saw my classmates on the weekends at Mass, and the world felt less hostile than it had in the godless quarters of public school. I started St. Rita’s with the humbling knowledge that I could be dumped on my ass at any time, so I should be kind and attentive to everyone, even if their lunch sacks didn’t double as tiny piñatas for their chosen friends and followers. In these calm waters, I entered my first best-friendship at the tender age of eleven.
Tara lived across the street from St. Rita’s and earned A’s with little effort. We had all of our classes together. We both wrote poetry—hers was insightful and showed a sophisticated grasp of metaphor; mine less so. We flirted with dieting. Tara said we should say the Apostles Creed, a long, complicated prayer from Mass, between every bite of food. My method was to drink lots of Kool-Aid and ask God for skinnier thighs after eating a row of Nutter Butters. We talked on the phone, passed notes in class, and gave each other filthy nicknames. Tara was Asswipe; I was Buttface. For the first time in my life, I stepped into the buoyancy and joy of comfortable, compatible friendship without wishing I could be with someone else.
Once when we were in the bathroom after recess, Tara asked me to turn to the wall so she could sing “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina.” She’d recently seen the New York production of Evita and longed to sing Perón’s anthem with abandon. Tara’s rendition gave me chills and almost made me cry, but I couldn’t weep or we’d be late to class. After she hit that final note, we hurried back to class, and I remember thinking, Tara is the best friend in the whole world. I admired her voice, but also the bravery it took to share it with me and only me. The first time she signed the note she passed me in science class, Your B.F.F., my head grew light. The thrill of being claimed! It was all I ever wanted. But instead of simply enjoying that we had so very much in common—musical theater, a hatred of our math teacher, nascent eating disorders—I felt afraid of losing her. I gripped tightly. I finally found my B.F.F., a good and true friend, and I wanted it to be official.
“We should get friendship rings,” I said. I had my eye on a James Avery sterling silver ring; the design was two hands clasping. In the catalog, it was called “the friendship ring.” If we had this ring, we’d have proof we belonged to each other. We couldn’t break up if we had jewelry. When Tara agreed, I buzzed with joy.
I hadn’t picked Tara because she was the queen of sixth grade; I picked her because we laughed so hard together and being with her made time fly by. It felt like we picked each other. The magic of friendship no longer seemed mystifying, unattainable. With Tara, I had the free, unclenched feeling I had with Dani, but there was no longer the sidecar of longing for more.
At the start of seventh grade, my second year at St. Rita’s, I gathered my school supplies into my new backpack and floated to school, grateful not to be the new kid. Tara and I picked lockers next to each other. We still despised our math teacher, Mrs. Kramer, and one time our snickers caught her attention, which earned us a trip into the hallway. Mrs. Kramer leaned against the radiator. “What’s the problem, girls?” We feigned innocence and copped to nothing, and then went right back to making fun of her for reasons I no longer remember. Mrs. Kramer wasn’t soft and kind, but she was fair and gave a reasonable amount of homework. I felt a twinge of shame for being rude to her, but I had no intention of stopping because it was essential to bonding with Tara. I would have snickered and rolled my eyes at Jesus himself if it kept Tara laughing.
At the end of September, we all paired up for cheerleading tryouts, which wouldn’t take place until late spring. Tara picked Angie as her tryout partner, and my heart nearly stopped with anxiety when I heard them talking about getting together to work on their routine. The pairing made sense: Angie was tall and strong; she could be the base on whose shoulders Tara would stand to execute the stunts required to make the squad. Tara and I were the same height—neither of us was strong enough to be the other’s base. I paired up with a generous, happy girl named Jenni, who was tall, lean, and mighty enough to hold me.
Everyone had a partner who suited her needs, but I fretted about losing Tara to Angie. I was convinced that the pressure of tryouts and hours of practice would bond Tara and Angie, leaving me bereft of my beloved B.F.F. When I looked into the future, I imagined Tara and Angie making the cheerleading squad, and Tara asking me to slip my friendship ring off my finger and onto Angie’s.
All fall and winter, I burned with jealousy every time I heard Tara and Angie scheduling a practice session. I didn’t picture them solely working on their spread eagles and herkeys; surely they were also learning to smelt iron so they could design their own friendship rings. I felt fear and as the tryouts loomed, it consumed me.
It was Texas in the eighties, after all, and cheerleading was as important for girls as brain-battering sports were for the boys. The prospect of Angie and Tara making the squad without me terrorized me.
The morning of tryouts, I hardly touched my breakfast or lunch. I didn’t tell anyone that I’d snuck a full bottle of Tylenol into my bag and planned to swallow every last red pill if the judges didn’t pick me. In my mind, I would lose everything. If I didn’t die of sadness when Tara reported for three-day cheer camp at SMU in August, I would have to endure the torture of watching Tara and Angie cheering for the football team every Sunday afternoon. I would shrivel into nothingness, while all the cheerleaders grew more lively and colorful.
The bottle of pills gave me a way out of the future I feared.
For tryouts, Jenni and I fastened matching green and white bows as big as pinwheels on our heads. When it was our turn, we cheered our throats raw. “Go Spartans,” we hollered as we jumped and clapped across the gym, hyping up an imaginary audience. Afterward, we huddled in the bathroom with everyone else, waiting for the verdict. When we were called into the gym for the announcements, each pair clung to each other like baby monkeys. I squeezed my eyes shut and prayed to hear my number called.
“Number Fifteen! And Number Sixteen!”
Jenni and I sprang to our feet, squealing with joy. The current cheerleaders pulled us to the front of the room. I would live! I survived my own private Hunger Games. When all the numbers had been called, I looked around for Tara and Angie, who remained on the other side of the gym, still clinging to each other, except now they were sobbing. Their numbers weren’t called. They would not be part of the 1986–1987 Spartan cheerleading squad. I never once considered how it would feel if Tara didn’t make it and I did.
The cheerleading coach ushered each new squad member to a van that whisked us to Crystal’s Pizza Parlor for a celebration. A new worry consumed me: Would Tara and Angie become best friends over their shared devastation? Worse, what if Tara resented me for making the squad and that was the wedge that drove us apart?
“Have some pizza, Christie!” Jenni said, once we spilled into the loud parlor where a giant screen broadcast airplanes stunting in midair to Kenny Loggins’s Top Gun anthem, “Danger Zone.” All around us the sounds of happy cheerleaders, Skeeball machines, and pop music invited me into a raucous joy. I felt none of it. My mind was back in the gym where Tara and Angie huddled up, no doubt making plans for a B.F.F.-ship that would be way better than short green cheerleading skirts and rah-rah-rahing at a football game.
“I can’t stop thinking about Tara,” I said to Jenni. “She must be so sad.”
I thought of that bottle of pills rattling in my bag under my chair. It didn’t feel right to swallow them after making the squad. But I felt as bad about Tara’s loss as if it had been my own. I took one bite of pizza, and my stomach heaved. I left it on my plate until it was cold and limp.
Tara and I weathered the cheerleading season. We didn’t talk about it much; over the summer I kept mum about the nights at cheerleading camp, and in the fall, I excised all discussion of cheerleading from our conversation. My official squad duties wrapped up in early November, which relieved me of the burden of pretending I did anything other than go to ballet, study for math tests, and polish my friendship ring. Christmas of eighth grade, Tara invited me to join her family on a ski trip to Lake Tahoe. We took our friendship and our poetry notebooks out west, where she patiently waited for me to snowplow my way down easy slopes. In the back of her family’s van, we declared the Survivor ballad “The Search Is Over” as the theme song—not of a mature love between two adults who wanted to fuck each other forever but for our teenage friendship.
When the radio played “our” song, I wept real tears, because the end of our bliss loomed on the horizon. Tara wasn’t headed to the all-girls’ Catholic high school with me—she was bound for an East Coast boarding school. From there, I understood she’d catapult to a school like Harvard or Princeton, and we’d never share a zip code again. Once she was fully ensconced in the East Coast Ivied world, she’d hardly remember her junior high B.F.F. from Texas.
Tara and I talked a few times in high school, but I found myself twisting the phone cord around my finger, embarrassed that my provincial stories involved algebra quizzes and school dances with boys we’d known for years, while hers revolved around dining halls, weekend ski trips, and seminar classes among Kennedys and Rockefellers. Our conversations petered out by Christmas of ninth grade. I didn’t know how to stay in touch or how to be curious about her boarding school life, while also holding on to a sense that my life wasn’t lame and second rate because, at age fourteen, I still lived at home and went to school a mile from my house.
Maybe I could make a friend, a best friend with whom I shared sterling silver jewelry after all; but I couldn’t keep her once she crossed state lines. If you didn’t go to school together, you couldn’t be best friends anymore. That seemed like a truth too obvious to state.
11.
I didn’t avoid Meredith, but it was easy to become too busy for the emotional labor of “becoming a better friend.” I was working full-time as a lawyer at a huge firm with a steep billable hours’ requirement, while also planning a wedding. When I wasn’t flying across the country visiting manufacturing sites for one client or trying to settle a fraud case for another, John and I squeezed in visits to wedding venues, bakeries, and florists. Underneath the busyness, I had other reasons to delay. I was exhausted. I wanted a few months off from working on myself. For this season, I wanted to be carefree and a little frivolous—a bride preparing for her wedding, not someone constantly excavating her past transgressions.
Couldn’t I cruise into marriage and address my friendship issues down the road—after the blur of the wedding and honeymoon? My friendship issues weren’t fatal—they’d never driven me to suicidal ideation, like my relationships with men had. Friendship could wait. I deserved this time off.
My plan to flit to the altar with no greater worries than how to deal with water retention and how to store leftover wedding cake did not come to pass. A friendship conflict blemished my untroubled horizon. Nothing I couldn’t manage, just a little bump or two in my friendship with Callie.
A man stepped up to a mic at the front of the room. The rumble of chatter slowly quieted. The guy at the podium welcomed everyone and introduced himself as Gerald R.
“Hi, Gerald,” the entire room responded. Their voices erupted like thunder. Gerald then called each person celebrating an anniversary to the podium, gave them a chip commemorating their sobriety, and allowed them to say a few words.
I hooked the heels of my sandals on the low metal bar on the back of the chair in front of me and let my body slouch. Might as well get comfortable.
When Gerald called out a name, the birthday celebrant—most of them men—would weave through the aisles, take his new coin, and introduce himself. I knew I was supposed to say, “Hi, Rick,” or “Hi, Jared,” or “Hi, Burt,” when they introduced themselves, but I couldn’t do it. Neither did Dirk.
Eventually, Gerald called my dad’s name, and he rose from his aisle seat, buttoning his sports coat as he walked to the podium. He stepped up to the mic and said he was grateful for all of the people, many of whom were in the audience, who helped him. He praised my mom as a wonderful wife and mother. He mentioned my brother and me by name, and I ducked my head low, scared to see all the eyes turned toward me. I let my hair fall over my face.
“And then there’s our youngest, Virginia. She’s our sobriety baby. She’s our miracle.”
I didn’t hear a single word after miracle. I felt a shiver of satisfaction in finally hearing someone say it, Virginia is a miracle, but it flickered and disappeared. Thanks to my first-grade teacher, Sister Mary Margaret, I was well versed in miracles—the tomb, the loaves and fishes, the lame man who stood up and walked. Miracles were extraordinary. They were inexplicable. They were straight from the heart of God. Virginia was a miracle; I was a reason to get drunk. I swung my feet back and forth hard, hard enough that my chair scooted forward. Mom set her hand on my thigh to still my legs.
The meeting finally ended, and I got that corner piece of cake. The flowers felt greasy on the roof of my mouth and the sweetness clung to my tongue. I slipped away from my family’s huddle and snagged a second piece. I considered lunging for a third, but Mom was onto me. She warned me about a stomachache from all the sugar, but she was wrong. Sugar made it possible to live in my body and carry the blame I was sure belonged on my shoulders.
* * *
I shared this miracle story with Meredith a few days after she called us miracles.
“See why that word fucks with my head?” I said.
For a split second, I thought she was going to scold me for latching on to this tiny moment—Get over it, already. If she had, I would have spat back, defensively, I’m trying! I felt shame about how fiercely I clung to this line my dad said when I was seven or eight years old. Or at least that’s the line I remember him saying. We all know that memory is faulty. In law school, our torts professor set up an experiment where one of the administrators knocked on the door of our classroom, talked to her for a few minutes, and then handed her a file. After the incident, our professor told us to write down a description of the administrator. When we shared our descriptions, the answers varied widely—some reported brown hair and khaki pants; others insisted her hair was blond and her pants were gray. Some said the interruption lasted for thirty seconds; two people insisted it was over three minutes. Intellectually, I understood the malleability of memory and the ways that perception shifts over time, and for God’s sake I was in grammar school when I heard the line on which I hung so much of my identity. My dad’s words proved that my little sister was divinely perfect, and I held that truth close to my bones.
“Oh, I relate to so much of that,” she said. “Both of my sisters were perfect in ways that I wasn’t. All I wanted was to be someone’s favorite. It really messed me up. I drank and starved because I’m an addict, and I fell in love with addicts because I’m deeply codependent and terrified of intimacy, but my perfect sisters were good excuses. I blamed my misery on their perfection.” She shook her head and pressed her lips together. “All that’s made me skittish as a friend. Once I decide a friend is better than I am, she becomes one of my perfect sisters, and I withdraw. I’ve missed out on a lot.”
Obviously, I used food and bulimia to cope with my feelings of jealousy, envy, and inferiority. I hadn’t binged or purged in years, but I remembered how soothing it felt to chew and swallow more food than my body needed. It took the edge off my roiling feelings for a spell, but then the inevitable shame about my appetites and horror at the calories I’d consumed telescoped my life to the size and shape of the toilet bowl. I’d binged and purged over crushes who didn’t like me back, academic pressure, ballet solos I wanted and didn’t get chosen for, friendships that crashed, and over and over because of my shame at being a failure as a girl, a sister, a daughter, a friend, an eater, a human in the world.
Every time I talked to Meredith, I felt amazed we had so much in common. It seemed improbable. On the day I was born in 1973, she was twenty-three years old and well on her way to drinking herself to death. Maybe the night I was born was the same night she fell asleep drunk with a lit cigarette that started a house fire in which she would have perished if her cat hadn’t roused her. I didn’t know drunk, self-destructive Meredith—she got sober long before I met her at the Swedish diner. The Meredith I knew from meetings sounded strong, full of faith in her Higher Power.
In our one-on-one conversations, though, I heard someone different. Someone more like me. Searching. Seeking. Unsure. Willing, but not always strong enough to undo bad habits or create new ones. Up close, I could see that she often deprived herself. Once after a meeting, we walked to a coffee shop, and when she ordered tap water, I offered to get her a bottle of the good stuff (San Pellegrino). “No, no, no,” she’d said, and I could tell she was uncomfortable with my offer. And she’d recently told me that she drove three neighborhoods away to shop at a discount grocery store, even though the sketchy location scared her and the traffic made the trek a hassle. When I asked her why all the effort to save a few bucks, she waved her hands and said, “I’m working on it in therapy,” with enough edge that I understood further questions were not welcome. She dreamed of a vacation in Italy but spoke as if such an extravagance was as unlikely as booking a private jet to circumnavigate the globe. I noticed her deprivation, but I didn’t press because it didn’t seem like my place. Up close, she was as messy and “in progress” as anyone—as I certainly was—and it comforted me to know she wasn’t nearly as perfect as I once imagined.
10.
Catholic school was a balm for my soul after the social bruising I took in fifth grade. In sixth grade, I returned to nuns, plaid uniforms, and religion classes. Now I saw my classmates on the weekends at Mass, and the world felt less hostile than it had in the godless quarters of public school. I started St. Rita’s with the humbling knowledge that I could be dumped on my ass at any time, so I should be kind and attentive to everyone, even if their lunch sacks didn’t double as tiny piñatas for their chosen friends and followers. In these calm waters, I entered my first best-friendship at the tender age of eleven.
Tara lived across the street from St. Rita’s and earned A’s with little effort. We had all of our classes together. We both wrote poetry—hers was insightful and showed a sophisticated grasp of metaphor; mine less so. We flirted with dieting. Tara said we should say the Apostles Creed, a long, complicated prayer from Mass, between every bite of food. My method was to drink lots of Kool-Aid and ask God for skinnier thighs after eating a row of Nutter Butters. We talked on the phone, passed notes in class, and gave each other filthy nicknames. Tara was Asswipe; I was Buttface. For the first time in my life, I stepped into the buoyancy and joy of comfortable, compatible friendship without wishing I could be with someone else.
Once when we were in the bathroom after recess, Tara asked me to turn to the wall so she could sing “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina.” She’d recently seen the New York production of Evita and longed to sing Perón’s anthem with abandon. Tara’s rendition gave me chills and almost made me cry, but I couldn’t weep or we’d be late to class. After she hit that final note, we hurried back to class, and I remember thinking, Tara is the best friend in the whole world. I admired her voice, but also the bravery it took to share it with me and only me. The first time she signed the note she passed me in science class, Your B.F.F., my head grew light. The thrill of being claimed! It was all I ever wanted. But instead of simply enjoying that we had so very much in common—musical theater, a hatred of our math teacher, nascent eating disorders—I felt afraid of losing her. I gripped tightly. I finally found my B.F.F., a good and true friend, and I wanted it to be official.
“We should get friendship rings,” I said. I had my eye on a James Avery sterling silver ring; the design was two hands clasping. In the catalog, it was called “the friendship ring.” If we had this ring, we’d have proof we belonged to each other. We couldn’t break up if we had jewelry. When Tara agreed, I buzzed with joy.
I hadn’t picked Tara because she was the queen of sixth grade; I picked her because we laughed so hard together and being with her made time fly by. It felt like we picked each other. The magic of friendship no longer seemed mystifying, unattainable. With Tara, I had the free, unclenched feeling I had with Dani, but there was no longer the sidecar of longing for more.
At the start of seventh grade, my second year at St. Rita’s, I gathered my school supplies into my new backpack and floated to school, grateful not to be the new kid. Tara and I picked lockers next to each other. We still despised our math teacher, Mrs. Kramer, and one time our snickers caught her attention, which earned us a trip into the hallway. Mrs. Kramer leaned against the radiator. “What’s the problem, girls?” We feigned innocence and copped to nothing, and then went right back to making fun of her for reasons I no longer remember. Mrs. Kramer wasn’t soft and kind, but she was fair and gave a reasonable amount of homework. I felt a twinge of shame for being rude to her, but I had no intention of stopping because it was essential to bonding with Tara. I would have snickered and rolled my eyes at Jesus himself if it kept Tara laughing.
At the end of September, we all paired up for cheerleading tryouts, which wouldn’t take place until late spring. Tara picked Angie as her tryout partner, and my heart nearly stopped with anxiety when I heard them talking about getting together to work on their routine. The pairing made sense: Angie was tall and strong; she could be the base on whose shoulders Tara would stand to execute the stunts required to make the squad. Tara and I were the same height—neither of us was strong enough to be the other’s base. I paired up with a generous, happy girl named Jenni, who was tall, lean, and mighty enough to hold me.
Everyone had a partner who suited her needs, but I fretted about losing Tara to Angie. I was convinced that the pressure of tryouts and hours of practice would bond Tara and Angie, leaving me bereft of my beloved B.F.F. When I looked into the future, I imagined Tara and Angie making the cheerleading squad, and Tara asking me to slip my friendship ring off my finger and onto Angie’s.
All fall and winter, I burned with jealousy every time I heard Tara and Angie scheduling a practice session. I didn’t picture them solely working on their spread eagles and herkeys; surely they were also learning to smelt iron so they could design their own friendship rings. I felt fear and as the tryouts loomed, it consumed me.
It was Texas in the eighties, after all, and cheerleading was as important for girls as brain-battering sports were for the boys. The prospect of Angie and Tara making the squad without me terrorized me.
The morning of tryouts, I hardly touched my breakfast or lunch. I didn’t tell anyone that I’d snuck a full bottle of Tylenol into my bag and planned to swallow every last red pill if the judges didn’t pick me. In my mind, I would lose everything. If I didn’t die of sadness when Tara reported for three-day cheer camp at SMU in August, I would have to endure the torture of watching Tara and Angie cheering for the football team every Sunday afternoon. I would shrivel into nothingness, while all the cheerleaders grew more lively and colorful.
The bottle of pills gave me a way out of the future I feared.
For tryouts, Jenni and I fastened matching green and white bows as big as pinwheels on our heads. When it was our turn, we cheered our throats raw. “Go Spartans,” we hollered as we jumped and clapped across the gym, hyping up an imaginary audience. Afterward, we huddled in the bathroom with everyone else, waiting for the verdict. When we were called into the gym for the announcements, each pair clung to each other like baby monkeys. I squeezed my eyes shut and prayed to hear my number called.
“Number Fifteen! And Number Sixteen!”
Jenni and I sprang to our feet, squealing with joy. The current cheerleaders pulled us to the front of the room. I would live! I survived my own private Hunger Games. When all the numbers had been called, I looked around for Tara and Angie, who remained on the other side of the gym, still clinging to each other, except now they were sobbing. Their numbers weren’t called. They would not be part of the 1986–1987 Spartan cheerleading squad. I never once considered how it would feel if Tara didn’t make it and I did.
The cheerleading coach ushered each new squad member to a van that whisked us to Crystal’s Pizza Parlor for a celebration. A new worry consumed me: Would Tara and Angie become best friends over their shared devastation? Worse, what if Tara resented me for making the squad and that was the wedge that drove us apart?
“Have some pizza, Christie!” Jenni said, once we spilled into the loud parlor where a giant screen broadcast airplanes stunting in midair to Kenny Loggins’s Top Gun anthem, “Danger Zone.” All around us the sounds of happy cheerleaders, Skeeball machines, and pop music invited me into a raucous joy. I felt none of it. My mind was back in the gym where Tara and Angie huddled up, no doubt making plans for a B.F.F.-ship that would be way better than short green cheerleading skirts and rah-rah-rahing at a football game.
“I can’t stop thinking about Tara,” I said to Jenni. “She must be so sad.”
I thought of that bottle of pills rattling in my bag under my chair. It didn’t feel right to swallow them after making the squad. But I felt as bad about Tara’s loss as if it had been my own. I took one bite of pizza, and my stomach heaved. I left it on my plate until it was cold and limp.
Tara and I weathered the cheerleading season. We didn’t talk about it much; over the summer I kept mum about the nights at cheerleading camp, and in the fall, I excised all discussion of cheerleading from our conversation. My official squad duties wrapped up in early November, which relieved me of the burden of pretending I did anything other than go to ballet, study for math tests, and polish my friendship ring. Christmas of eighth grade, Tara invited me to join her family on a ski trip to Lake Tahoe. We took our friendship and our poetry notebooks out west, where she patiently waited for me to snowplow my way down easy slopes. In the back of her family’s van, we declared the Survivor ballad “The Search Is Over” as the theme song—not of a mature love between two adults who wanted to fuck each other forever but for our teenage friendship.
When the radio played “our” song, I wept real tears, because the end of our bliss loomed on the horizon. Tara wasn’t headed to the all-girls’ Catholic high school with me—she was bound for an East Coast boarding school. From there, I understood she’d catapult to a school like Harvard or Princeton, and we’d never share a zip code again. Once she was fully ensconced in the East Coast Ivied world, she’d hardly remember her junior high B.F.F. from Texas.
Tara and I talked a few times in high school, but I found myself twisting the phone cord around my finger, embarrassed that my provincial stories involved algebra quizzes and school dances with boys we’d known for years, while hers revolved around dining halls, weekend ski trips, and seminar classes among Kennedys and Rockefellers. Our conversations petered out by Christmas of ninth grade. I didn’t know how to stay in touch or how to be curious about her boarding school life, while also holding on to a sense that my life wasn’t lame and second rate because, at age fourteen, I still lived at home and went to school a mile from my house.
Maybe I could make a friend, a best friend with whom I shared sterling silver jewelry after all; but I couldn’t keep her once she crossed state lines. If you didn’t go to school together, you couldn’t be best friends anymore. That seemed like a truth too obvious to state.
11.
I didn’t avoid Meredith, but it was easy to become too busy for the emotional labor of “becoming a better friend.” I was working full-time as a lawyer at a huge firm with a steep billable hours’ requirement, while also planning a wedding. When I wasn’t flying across the country visiting manufacturing sites for one client or trying to settle a fraud case for another, John and I squeezed in visits to wedding venues, bakeries, and florists. Underneath the busyness, I had other reasons to delay. I was exhausted. I wanted a few months off from working on myself. For this season, I wanted to be carefree and a little frivolous—a bride preparing for her wedding, not someone constantly excavating her past transgressions.
Couldn’t I cruise into marriage and address my friendship issues down the road—after the blur of the wedding and honeymoon? My friendship issues weren’t fatal—they’d never driven me to suicidal ideation, like my relationships with men had. Friendship could wait. I deserved this time off.
My plan to flit to the altar with no greater worries than how to deal with water retention and how to store leftover wedding cake did not come to pass. A friendship conflict blemished my untroubled horizon. Nothing I couldn’t manage, just a little bump or two in my friendship with Callie.
