Best Friends Read online

  AARGH, LARS. SENIOR, avid vegetarian and bicyclist, beard that looked like parsley. Sally met him at a classical guitar concert she’d attended. He started popping up at our quad at all hours with his lean and hungry look, and one Friday night he arrived when Sally and I were tucked in our beds reading. I walked into the study room and opened the door. “It’s late, Lars,” I said. “We’re in bed.”

  “Lars?” Sally called. “Is that you? Come on in.”

  It took only an instant to realize that Sally had no idea what she was doing. By then Lars was through the study room and into our bedroom, eager to close the door. “I live here too, Lars,” I said, pushing the bedroom door back open. “Remember?” I walked over to my bed, got in, and stuck my book in front of my nose.

  What a day he’d had! Bicycling thirty miles out to the reservoir and back, stopping by some friends’ for a bulgur and root-vegetable feast, reading Kierkegaard. . . . On and on he went, perched on Sally’s bed, inching closer and closer to Sally’s lips and breasts. I set my book down and lay on my side, facing the two of them, hoping to get Lars’s attention.

  “I’ve got to go to sleep, Lars,” I finally said. “And I can’t do that listening to you.”

  Sally giggled.

  I WOULD PEEP OVER her shoulder at her sleeping face, head sunk into the pillow, mouth open, amazed anew that this was a California face. Her lips were pink and shaped like Chatty Cathy’s, her dark eyelashes curved like a baby doll’s. “Such an open face,” my mother had said in wonderment, glancing at my own face with suspicion. I asked Sally questions. Do you know surfers? A few. They’re normal boys. Not glamorous. Don’t people dress differently in California? Maybe a little. Daphne has two midiskirts. Do you know anyone in the movies? Oh, sure. Screenwriters’ daughters and lighting people’s sons, and one of the girls in high school, her uncle—

  “Are people really, you know, spacey? I mean, like you hear about California, that people latch on to every new fad?”

  Sally looked troubled. “Of course, some people do that. They must do it anywhere.” I nodded, unsatisfied.

  The temperature was in the sixties in Los Angeles in the winter, Sally said; she didn’t have a winter coat. Flowering plants and shrubbery ringed her house. Do trees lose their leaves in winter? I asked. Are there squirrels? Thunderstorms? Can you really feel a breeze off the ocean?

  There was another girl from California in our dorm, Gwen Myers, whom I’d seen in the dorm kitchen with her back to me, wearing a pair of tattered denim overalls over a ribbed knit shirt, her blond hair twisted behind her neck and draped over one shoulder. Now Gwen, I thought, Gwen is California. While Sally was a pretender, an impostor, a girl with the geography but not the feeling, a person less from a state than from a family, from a world more circumscribed than my own.

  THE MOMENT LARS LEFT, Sally bolted out of bed. “He wanted to sleep with me, didn’t he?” she squeaked.

  “Don’t tell me you wanted to sleep with him.”

  “Oh no! He’s dorky.”

  This startled me, because Sally was dorky.

  “Vegetarian,” Sally scoffed. “God, there are a million vegetarians in California. You can’t open a car door without hitting one.” She grinned. “One riding a bicycle!”

  I was astounded. This was a whole new Sally, a Sally I could understand. I felt almost tingly with possibility. People became best friends with their roommates, lay in the dark and talked, got drunk together, lusted after guys, shared clothes. Years later, they hoped for their children to go to college together. I laughed out loud, showing Sally I appreciated her, that I knew what she was offering, that I was available too.

  That night I chased Lars away, we lay in our beds in the dark and talked.

  “Is sex really that good?” Sally asked.

  “Oh yeah,” I assured her, although I’d wondered, after my high school experience, the same thing myself. The anticipation had seemed a lot better than the real thing. I hadn’t met the right person, I told myself. Then I wondered why Sally assumed I would know about sex. I took it as evidence of my obvious worldliness.

  “A guy kissed me once at a wedding,” she said, “but he was too old. This guy who works with my father, Hank Barresi. We were dancing, and he pushed me to a corner and kissed me, and I was excited because I knew it was coming and I wondered what it would be like, but when he did it I was disappointed. He had Kahlua on his breath and he was sweating, and then right away he put his tongue in my mouth. I might like someone’s tongue in my mouth, but that wasn’t the right tongue.”

  I was taken aback. It struck me that Sally, in her way, was franker than I was. And what did Kahlua smell like? I thought it was a kind of liquor, but I wasn’t sure.

  “Then last summer this guy bothered me,” Sally went on. “In Oahu. He was walking past me and he grabbed my breast.”

  “Just grabbed it?” I said. “Through your clothes?”

  “He was walking in the other direction. And there was a huge crowd. It only lasted a second. Then he was gone.”

  “God,” I said. “How icky. Did you see who did it?”

  “I saw his arm.” Sally laughed. “Pretty hairy!”

  “Were you wearing a bra?” I was trying to think if there was anything about Sally to provoke a man to grab her breast. She did have big breasts, but in the weeks I’d known her, she always wore a bra, even to bed. I hadn’t worn a bra for years, but I was flat.

  “Of course.” Sally sounded offended. “I mean, you’ve seen me.”

  Not asking for it at all. As I thought this, I realized it was sexist, the sort of notion I’d jump all over my mother for.

  “That’s depressing,” I said. “That someone could just do that to you.”

  “Isn’t that weird? And in front of my parents, too. I was right beside my dad, and Ben and my mother were in front of us. Nobody saw it.”

  “What did you do? Did you yell or anything?”

  “Oh, no. I kept going. What else could I do? It was over, I didn’t know who’d done it.” She sighed. “You want to hear something else strange? I enjoyed it.”

  I gulped. Every feminist urge in me said I shouldn’t believe what she’d just said. “You did?”

  “It made me feel good. I’m kind of big, some guys like that, and the blouse I had on was white cotton with little flowers. It wasn’t see-through or anything, but it was a summer cotton. I thought when I got dressed that morning that I looked nice.” She hesitated. “So I took it as a compliment.”

  We paused and thought, Sally doubtless of the way she’d looked in the mirror, the way her torso thinned out nicely below her breasts; me trying to imagine her looking sexy. I could see it, in a robust, farmgirl-in-the-hay sort of way.

  I had a funny thought: “Hard to imagine some Oberlin guy grabbing you like that.”

  We both laughed.

  “People are funny,” Sally mused. “That’s what Daddy always says. ‘You can never tell what’ll ring your bell.’ ”

  The more I thought about this, the truer it seemed, and not just in the obvious sexual sense. The one course I loved this semester was Introduction to Genetics. Who would have dreamed that I’d love that course? I’d only taken it because it was premed and I wanted to prove to myself that I was as smart as the premeds, even though I planned to major in English. The doctors I knew were too conservative. “That’s pretty profound,” I said. “Did your dad think that up?”

  “Probably. I’m sure he did. He’s a smart guy.”

  “What does he do again?”

  “Magazine distributor.”

  “Oh, that’s right. I remembered he distributed something.” The adult world of business and money was still a mystery to me.

  “Magayines,” Sally said, then explained: “I saw a box for a magazine rack once and it said ‘magayine rack, made in Taiwan.’ ”

  “A little problem with the more exotic letters.”

  “Eyactly.”

  “Amaying.”

  We were pr
obably closer at that moment than we were at any time during our freshman year. I was as happy that night as I’d ever been, almost as happy as on the warm night in Los Angeles, almost two years later, that I’ve labeled for years the happiest moment of my life. It’s no wonder we’ve stayed friends. It’s no wonder we’ve done all we’ve done for each other.

  FALL SEMESTER, SOPHOMORE YEAR, I took Introduction to Religion. Sally took it too. She took Introduction to Everything—philosophy, sociology, English, psychology, art history. “I won’t know what I’m missing if I don’t,” she said. Her father seemed to play into this somehow, to encourage her in this endless branching out. She bought and mailed to him, at tremendous expense, copies of the books she was assigned in each course. He then read along with her, and she reported to him each night what her professors had said that day. Sweet, I thought, touching—Sally’s father’s faith in education, typical of the high-school dropout he was. I’d always thought of education as a game, a slightly silly and disreputable game that I always won. All through high school, I’d barely studied. My first year at college—with the sad exception of Introduction to Poetry, whose professor, Mr. Gifford, never saw things my way—had not been much different, but sitting in Introduction to Religion in a rickety classroom in a rickety building, it hit me that there was a whole world of thought I hadn’t realized existed; for some reason, maybe the height of the room, I sensed this as an enormous orb grazing the top of my hair. It was a euphoric moment, one I couldn’t replicate years later when I tried. The spooky thing was Sally felt it too.

  She and I hadn’t talked for months, not since the spring before, after Pennsylvania and I had moved out of the quad together. “Listen,” Pennsylvania had whispered, gesturing at Sally down the hall on the phone and Indiana in the study room sucking, as she always did when she was reading, on the left sleeve of her sweater, “we’re clearly the two adults here. Why don’t we get our own room?” In April, Sally and I had met one Saturday afternoon for sundaes and I’d gloated—really gloated, afterward I was ashamed—about how happy I was rooming with Pennsylvania. “That’s nice,” Sally had said, but she looked listless, her pupils flat as tacks. Grace Chang, her new roommate, was okay. Just okay? Maybe not even okay. “You know what?” Sally said. “I don’t know why she’d do this, but I think she went through my letters from home.”

  “You’re kidding!” I feigned shock, hoping I wasn’t giving myself away by a blush.

  Sally was nodding soberly. “I know. It’s like Daddy says, she’s not quality.”

  How damning! But Sally was right, to go through someone else’s letters was not quality. I frowned inwardly, wondering where this left me, a person who wanted to do it, who might have done it but for the ribbon. But I hadn’t done it, had I? There was a difference between Grace Chang and me. Maybe the ribbon was less an impediment than a scruple.

  “This course is exciting, isn’t it?” Sally whispered six months later as we filed out of Introduction to Religion.

  Yes, it was exciting, although I never would have expected Sally to recognize it. “I love it,” I said, looking at her in surprise. My forehead felt suddenly damp. I hated sounding emotional. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d said I loved something. “Daddy took me to a Indian temple once, off the road, way out in the desert,” Sally said, “and I could feel that—I felt it was a sacred space. It didn’t look special, but it felt special.”

  I felt a surge of envy. What I would give to visit a sacred space!

  AS A SOPHOMORE, Sally had a double to herself in the hall where we’d shared a room freshman year; her father had written a letter to campus housing. The doubles in that dorm were two small rooms, originally planned as a study room and a sleeping room, although everybody split them into two separate bedrooms. I noticed that Sally had the same furniture as last year, plus some new things: a stereo system, a microwave, a little TV. Luxuries. I wondered again about her phone bills.

  Pennsylvania had a boyfriend who took to staying overnight in our room that year. One weekend I arranged to go home, and several nights I spent in the dorm lobby. I tried to talk to Pennsylvania about it. “There’s no reason you have to go off somewhere,” she told me, breathing quickly. “Jeff and I don’t care if you watch.”

  When I repeated this to Sally, she burst out laughing. I was startled to see her head back, mouth open, the fillings in her teeth revealed. A real laugh. What had happened to her over the summer? She was a thousand times more relaxed.

  When she finished laughing, she smiled. “Would you like to move in here with me?”

  WE WERE HAPPY TOGETHER. I had the room that led to the hall, and Sally had the inside room. We kept Sally’s refrigerator and TV in my room. We sat in my room evenings after studying, splitting a carton of ice cream. We shared the usual late-adolescent fascination with our parents, the burgeoning realization that they were people too, and we talked a lot about our families, who were, after all, the filter through which we saw the world. By then Frank and Eric were both married, play-acting at adulthood (Frank was very proud of his car; Eric’s wife, although they had no children, worried endlessly about school systems), and Baxter was off in his strange woodcrafting world, doodling chair designs on paper bags, wood shavings tangled in his increasingly bushy beard. Sally knew my mother drove me crazy and how much I liked my dad, and I knew Sally’s mother counted so little in her life it seemed as if she didn’t have a mother—a revelation I found most haunting years later when I had a daughter of my own. At the time, Sally’s estrangement from her mother seemed romantic—or maybe I admired it because my mother and I were so antagonistically entwined. My mother could still slip a line in a letter that would anger me for weeks. You’re not going to get an A in every course. You looked so tired last weekend. You’re just like me, you always think . . .

  Sally adored her father. There was something to this Oedipus thing, we agreed. Sally’s dad was just so interesting, she’d say, and so interested. How many forty-eight-year-old men would read along with their daughter’s courses?

  He’d done Introduction to Sociology and Introduction to the Novel; now he was doing Introduction to Religion. He didn’t have to do any of this, Sally pointed out. He was a businessman, incredibly busy. Night after night, he’d have meetings or business dinners and not get home till ten. In high school, Sally waited up for him. They’d sit in the family room or on the patio, and Sally’s dad would fix her a weak Scotch. “Tell me everything you’ve learned today,” he’d say, and not just school stuff but personal insights, news of the world, observations about the weather. Everything.

  “He lets you drink Scotch?” I asked, incredulous.

  “I love Scotch,” Sally said. “Have you tried it? It tastes like smoke. We’ll have to get some.” She had no idea that this would be difficult, no thought that in Ohio (as in California) the legal age for buying alcohol was twenty-one. When I pointed this out, she was startled. I was struck, as I would so often be, by Sally’s peculiar blend of worldliness and naivete.

  She still talked to her parents—but now I knew she was talking to her father, her mother only an absence on the line—almost every night, but maybe for only fifteen minutes. I kept my door cracked and listened with a kind of pleasure, so I could hear the nice things Sally said about me: Clare calls our religion professor a priest in disguise. Clare made us beef Stroganoff in the dorm kitchen. Clare found this new shampoo made with placentas, it’s disgusting, you should see. . . .

  I WAS WATCHING SALLY as she talked about her brother. She waved her hands, explaining the way he flitted from enthusiasm to enthusiasm like a bee from flower to flower, when I realized: my friend is odd. I had great respect for oddness, for both the force of character it took and the passion needed to sustain it. Once I realized that Sally was odd, the conventionality of her clothes no longer mattered, her enormous towels lost their intimidating aspect, her lips moving as she read no longer hinted at a profound dullness.

  I loved her adjectives. One day
she was talking about a teacher in her high school who had been in a plane wreck, an experience Sally called “searing”; another day she referred to our senior dorm adviser as “obsequious.” “You’re a real English major!” I said. Sally smiled her little turned-down smile and walked back into her room, pleased. Her adjectives took possession of whatever she was describing; their precision made them inarguable, tiny facts rather than opinions. And Sally had lots of opinions. She would burst into speeches precariously near dogmatism—about Martin Luther, whom she liked despite his anti-Semitism, or the women workers in the cafeteria line, whom for a variety of trivial reasons she didn’t like—and then listen to someone else’s opinion with barely disguised impatience, if the person had the nerve to voice an opinion at all. I thought Sally was a radical feminist without having the slightest notion that she was feminist at all; I’d never heard a girl (and I thought of us as girls, although in the campus lingo we were women) present herself with such fearlessness and definition. Certainly I never presented myself that directly. I made jokes, sly asides, sarcastic underminings—I didn’t come right out and say things.

  In Introduction to Women’s Studies our sophomore year, Sally read The Diary of Anaïs Nin. Halfway through, she decided Nin was a selfish and silly woman, a real dolt—a thesis that appalled Sally’s professor, a female Nin fan, or, as we dubbed her, a “Ninite.” As Sally finished each assigned reading, she presented to me the ways in which Nin had revealed herself to be an idiot—occasionally she even let out a whoop and said, “Listen to this!”—and I sat there enjoying her show, anticipating how she’d burst into class and torment her professor. I wished I was in that class. Sally versus the Ninite, three bouts a week. Sally gave me the blow-by-blows. The Ninite would bridle when Sally walked in; was slow to call on Sally; and tried to cut Sally off as she was talking, although Sally was quick to assure me she wouldn’t be cut off. At the end of the course, the Ninite wondered aloud if Sally—in her neat red vest, oxford-cloth blouse, trousers instead of blue jeans, knee-high stockings—wasn’t threatened by Nin’s “unapologetic sexuality.”