Best Friends

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  One

  Two

  Three

  Acknowledgements

  Keep reading for a preview of Martha Moody’s next novel The Office of Desire ...

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either

  are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously,

  and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business

  establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2001 by Martha Moody

  All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not

  be reproduced in any form without permission.

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  The author gratefully acknowledges permission to reprint lines

  from “Waiting” by Miroslav Holub, from Selected Poems: Miroslav

  Holub, translated by Ian Milner and George Theiner, published by

  Penguin Books, 1967. Copyright © 1967 Miroslav Holub; translation

  copyright © 1967 Penguin Books Ltd.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Moody, Martha.

  Best friends / Martha Moody.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-11767-5

  1. Women college students—Fiction. 2. Female friendship—

  Fiction. 3. Roommates—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3563.O553 B-053323

  813’.6—dc21

  This book is printed on acid-free paper.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  for Jill

  In between, the passage grows complex.

  DAVID ST. JOHN

  One

  REALLY, ALL I WANTED in a college was unrest and demonstrations. But I was late. By 1973 no one was demonstrating, Vietnam was basically over, and what good was college now? I wrote this in my letter to Sally, my mystery roommate whose name and address had arrived sometime in August, along with the names of two other roommates who would join us in a quad. I expected her to understand that I was joking because she was from California. She wrote back on fancy Hallmark stationery with a pink band edging the page.

  “That roommate wrote me,” I told my family at supper. “The one from California.” She’d made no mention at all of my demonstration comment.

  “Debbie?” my mother asked.

  “No, Mother. Debbie’s from Indiana.”

  “Lindsey?”

  “Lindsey’s from Pennsylvania, Mom. Jeez.”

  “Sally’s the one from California,” my father said. “Sally Rose.”

  “Right.” I smiled gratefully at him.

  “I don’t know how I’ll ever keep you girls straight.” My mother shook her head.

  “You keep your kids straight, don’t you?” I was the youngest of four, the only girl. My mother taught classrooms of twenty-six. “Or do you?”

  “You can’t bait me into another argument with you, Clare Ann.”

  “Clare,” my brother Baxter corrected her. He knew I wanted to rid myself of any cuteness.

  “Clare,” my mother repeated, exhaling a short laugh. “It’s certainly time for you to get away from home, I can see that.”

  “Me, too.” Baxter smiled. He was hoping to move to Amish country to work as an apprentice chair-maker, a plan that caused my parents consternation because their older sons had both attended college, an educational commitment that was, as I liked to point out, at least partly explained by the draft.

  My father cleared his throat. “How does this Sally sound?”

  “She sounds nice.” I paused a moment, aware of the inadequacy of my description. She sounded incredibly straight. I’m excited, but I’m nervous, too. I have one little brother, Ben. He is really sweet and I’m sure I’ll miss him a lot. She didn’t sound California at all. “Amazingly nice,” I said. “Almost like . . . Debbie from Indiana.”

  WE MET AT Oberlin College, just southwest of Cleveland, in September 1973. I was from an Ohio town midway between Akron and Youngstown, a town I referred to as Happyville (to call it Dullsville would underestimate the self-satisfaction of its residents), a place where the banner headline of the newspaper on December 24 read UFO SIGHTING OVER NORTH POLE. I picked Oberlin because it was the only school within driving distance of Happyville still likely to have demonstrations. Sally picked Oberlin because, on a visit from Los Angeles the previous spring, her father thought the professors were open-minded. Neither of these was a bad reason to pick a college. In fact, these reasons are probably typical. You can gussy them up with all the pretty rationales you want, but most major life decisions are whims.

  According to my college guide, Oberlin was one of the most expensive colleges in the country, and this thrilled me because my parents didn’t have money. If they were willing to send me to Oberlin, I must be worth a lot. I must really be, as my brothers called me, the Great White Hope of Happyville. My mother, who as a teacher had access to my IQ, refused to tell me in case knowing it would swell my head.

  My parents drove me the two hours to Oberlin. The quad, at the end of a hall, consisted of a study area flanked by two bedrooms. Each bedroom contained two single beds, two closets, and two built-in dressers topped by mirrors. When I arrived, only one bed of the four had been taken. Its bedspread was an earth-tone floral; above it hung a poster of a cat dangling off the side of wooden bridge. HANG IN THERE, the poster read. A footlocker sat at the end of the bed.

  It didn’t make sense. Sally Rose had written saying she’d arrive in Oberlin early, giving herself time to adjust to the new time zone, but could these really be Sally Rose’s things? Sally Rose was from Los Angeles! I thought Californians had style.

  I thought of my own striped Indian bedspread and woven reed rug, my sleek yellow metal lamp and decorative postcards. “I’ll go in here,” I told my parents, taking the empty bed in the room I’d decided must be Sally’s. I imagined someone thinking my side was California and Sally Rose’s Ohio. “You’re kidding,” they’d say, “you’re from Ohio? I thought . . .”

  “Hello?” said a voice from the door. I swiveled. It was Sally Rose, wearing a name tag. She was shorter than me, her wavy dark hair shaped like a May basket turned upside down. Her smile was girlish, eager; the description “apple-cheeked” flew into my mind. “Are you Clare Ann?” she said.

  “Clare.”

  “Oh, I’m so glad you’re here!” she cried, throwing her arms around me. Then she threw her arms around my parents.

  SHE WAS SERIOUSLY HOMESICK. There was a phone at the end of our dorm hall, across from the bathroom, which Sally used for hours every night. “Oh, they’re okay, Daddy, they’re nice, they’re just not like. . . . No, I wanted the art history course, but it was filled—yes, I did go talk to the professor, but she couldn’t or she’d have to let in everyone who. . . . Benny? Benny, do you miss me?”

  “You think she’d mind that everyone can hear,” Indiana said. “I for one have heard enough.”

  “She’s really pretty sweet,” I said. “I kind of feel sorry for her.”

  “Maybe she’ll quit and we can spread out and each take a room,” Pennsylvania said. “That’d be cool.”

  On her nightstand, Sally had a photograph of herself and her little brother in a lucite frame. I assumed the photo had been taken at a country club, not that I was sure what one looked like. The little brother was adorable, skinny, curly haired and tan, eyes squinched against the sun; he and Sally stood in their swimsuits in front of a stone wall covered with a strange plant whose trunk twined up the wall and sent out branches right and left in perfect horizontal rows.

  “What kind of plant is that?” I as
ked Sally.

  She didn’t know, some kind of decorative tree.

  “It’s amazing,” I said. I can’t tell you how rare it was for me to say “amazing” in those days; I cultivated a jaded air. “I’ve never seen a plant that symmetrical.”

  “Oh, it’s trained,” Sally said, and as I tried to cover my bewilderment, she brought the photo up close and showed me the thin wires stretched across the wall behind the branches. “I think it’s called an espalier,” Sally said. “Carlos likes to do it. It takes awhile to grow a nice one.”

  “Carlos?”

  “Our head gardener.” Sally set the photograph down. “He’s very particular. He has the yard all mapped out.”

  “So this is”—I waved my hand, trying to think of a subtle way to put it—“at your house?”

  “By the pool.”

  “It’s pretty,” I said weakly.

  “It’s a beautiful house,” Sally said. “We’ve been there nine years. Daddy built it. I think the landscaping makes it. It does help to have a particular gardener.”

  “Head gardener,” I said, watching her closely.

  Sally showed no trace of discomfort. “There are a couple of others, but Carlos is the idea man. He says do this and they do it.”

  “Very obedient of them,” I noted. For all her love of obedience in me, my mother hated the thought of obedience in workers. Sheep! she said. Management always wants sheep! My mother was the most radical person in Happyville; she believed, for example, that it was not unthinkable for teachers to unionize. Once she had been lucky enough to get a death threat.

  Sally and I took the same Introduction to Poetry course, and my first paper didn’t get the ecstatic response I was used to. For the life of me, I didn’t know why. Sally got better comments than I did, but her paper was so organized and simplistic, every paragraph starting with a topic sentence, that it sounded more like junior high school than college. “My sophomore English teacher taught me to outline,” Sally said proudly. “I think that’s going to help me all through college.” She said the same thing later to her parents on the phone in the dorm hall, sounding even more pleased with herself, and then she went on and on to them about how wonderful they were and how much she missed them, until I kicked the study-room door shut, wondering how much self-congratulation a family could stand.

  WHEN YOU’RE IN COLLEGE you haven’t had that much life. Parents, school, assorted youth activities—that’s about it. I remember a girl in my freshman dorm whose twin had been killed in a boat wreck. Someone else told me her story. I used to run into that girl in the dorm bathroom and she seemed perfectly ordinary. She had long brown hair, and she smiled and washed her face in the sink and used organic toothpaste. How could someone look so normal with a dead twin sister? I was in awe of her. I wished something dramatic would happen to me.

  I TOOK SALLY HOME for Thanksgiving with my family. God knows why. Ten minutes after dinner, she was on the phone in the front hall, talking to her parents in her clear, unavoidable voice.

  “Nice girl,” Frank, my oldest brother, home for the holiday, commented. “I didn’t know you had nice friends, Clare Ann. I thought all your friends were just smart.”

  “Cute, too,” my second brother, Eric, said. Baxter wasn’t with us. The family he lived with in Amish country had left town for the weekend, and he stayed to look after the dogs.

  “Such a sweet girl,” my mother said as we cleaned up the kitchen. “Immensely mature.” Sally was still on the phone with her parents, phrases wafting in to us from the family room.

  “I wouldn’t call her mature,” I snapped. “She just hasn’t rebelled yet.”

  My mother stood at the edge of the kitchen and listened to Sally’s voice. “And she likes her parents so much.”

  “She’s rich, though, you know,” I whispered. “Can’t trust her.”

  I knew she was rich from the pictures, from how much she’d traveled, the casual way she and her parents talked for hours long-distance, the puzzled look she got when I said I didn’t want to skip the cafeteria and join her for dinner out. Early on, when she was at a class, I’d gone through her orderly closet. Her clothes were about the dullest I’d ever seen: corduroy pants with flared bottoms, jackets with wide lapels, flowered blouses. It shocked me when I saw their labels. I’d never seen designer clothes before. Pierre Cardin. Bill Blass. How much could they cost? I sometimes looked at Vogue, hoping to find out I looked like a model (people said I looked like Joni Mitchell, which didn’t thrill me), and I thought about the prices beside those photos. And what did you get for such riches? Ordinary clothes, boring clothes, clothes that looked like something you’d buy at Penney’s. I was into thrift shops then. I had a green silk blouse with a pussy willow print that I dearly loved, and a skirt made of vertical rays of fabric. I wore Indian embroidered cotton shirts and jeans with torn knees, and I thought I looked ten times more interesting than Sally “Fashion Plate” Rose.

  The next day I took Sally to the county nature center. A few tattered leaves clung to the trees, and it was unseasonably sunny and warm. I remember Sally looking up into the trees as she walked, dizzy with excitement. She took photographs of tree limbs against the sky, of a red barn, of a bridge over a brook. “Clare,” she kept saying, “this looks like a picture! This looks like National Geographic!”

  “How droll,” I said.

  I TOLD SALLY about my dad’s office. It wasn’t his, exactly: he was business and personnel manager for a group of doctors. I’d worked there after school doing filing. I knew everything about that place: which patients drove the nurses crazy, which doctors cheated on their wives, who sneaked cigarettes. I even knew which doctors didn’t like my father—and I hated them, because who dared not like my father? Their complaint was that he wasn’t tough. He didn’t have the oomph to fire people. I loved it that he didn’t have the oomph, that he split his Christmas bonus with the janitors, that he knew Denise McCalley was pregnant and didn’t tell the doctors until she did on the day she quit. “So the doctors make a lot of money, Dad?” I used to ask.

  “They work extremely hard,” my father answered.

  I could read that answer. “Maybe I’ll be a doctor,” I said.

  “You could be,” he said. “You could be anything you want. You’re a capable young woman.”

  “YOU KNOW, ” Sally said, frowning, “I’ve never been to my dad’s office.”

  “He doesn’t invite you?” We were writing papers in our room, Sally at a desk engraving a legal pad with her heavy print as I wrote down ideas on scraps of paper and let them drift to the floor beside my bed. I’d been telling her about my father’s office and the demented patient who always called me Miss Muffin.

  “No. And your dad’s office sounds interesting. I’ll have to ask Daddy to take me to his.”

  I had recently realized I said “interesting” in an idiosyncratic way—inneresting—and while I was trying to determine whether to change this, I listened very closely to how other people said the word. In-ter-est-ing, Sally said, which was typical of the way she spoke. She organized her drawers, and in a very unimaginative way: underwear in the top drawer, shirts in the second, jeans in the third. She got a letter or card from home almost every day, and after reading it, she would add it to a bundle she kept in her underwear drawer. I was dying to know what her family wrote, but I would never know, because she tied the ribbon around her treasure so precisely I could never risk removing it.

  “It’s just a business, though,” Sally was saying. “I don’t think there are all those strange people around like at your father’s work.”

  “They’re normal people,” I said with agitation, not sure what I was defending, “they just do strange things.”

  Sally looked at me a little too blankly, the red spots in each of her cheeks reminding me suddenly of Tootle, the disobedient engine I had read about as a child. There’s a whole world out there, I thought, annoyed. Could she really know so little about it?

  Sally was
Jewish but had gone to Catholic schools. Her father believed in nuns. He had gone to religious schools himself. There were a lot of good things religion could teach you, he said, if you threw out the guilt and punishment stuff. Sally had always worn a school uniform, and she and her father and her cousin Daphne, who was also her best friend, went shopping together for her nonschool clothes. “Daddy wanted to keep me sheltered,” Sally told me, “but now he figures I’m old enough to see the world myself.” It sounded like a strange upbringing to me: eighteen years in the nest, then an airborne shove cross-country. I’d been taking short excursions by myself for years.

  She couldn’t set an alarm clock. She didn’t know that whites and colors should be washed separately, and her first pink-underwear experience put her in such a tizzy I heard her down the hall speaking in Spanish to her family’s maid. “Ay,” she said, “es muy complicado.”

  There were nights I sat in the study room of our quad with the door ajar so I could better hear her phone conversation. “Although I don’t know why,” I told Pennsylvania, who sometimes listened too. “It’s impossibly boring.”

  I had some other friends. Margaret was the daughter of two missionaries. She was born and raised in Guatemala to age fifteen. This left her, as she was the first to point out, with No Cultural References. “Like I Love Lucy,” she’d explain, her eyes widening. “I’d never heard of I Love Lucy till I was sixteen years old.”

  “You think that’s a loss?” I asked. Margaret did: cultural references were a kind of shorthand, a means of communication. I hadn’t thought of that, I admitted. To catch up on her education, Margaret watched a lot of TV. I don’t remember any other freshman having a TV in their room, but Margaret did, and it was always on. Soap operas, game shows, sit-coms, Sonny and Cher, The Rockford Files. Sometimes she’d hardly acknowledge your presence, she was so engrossed. She made a good argument, I thought, for letting kids get their fill of TV when they were children. But when you got the TV turned off, she was very likable.