the girl
Thursday 25 August 2005 | I like a cookie
Often when I reckon, in the dawn, it up, I’ve known Mandarin at least a decade. We just had our ten-year college reunion (but didn’t go); we attended what she would call a schmantzy-ass women’s college together, on lots of scholarships and loans. Both only daughters, both poor, both with Elgin-marble-sized chips on our shoulders about being uneducated and from rural squalor, and both determined to Make Something of Ourselves. If only we’d known that, as John Trudell told me flatly in that interview, “I didn’t need to make someone out of myself; I already was someone.”
Here’s us before our junior-year spring cotillion, looking desperately inebriated; she’s wearing borrowed Betsey Johnson, I’m wearing $5 thrift-store, um, let’s call it vintage.
And I’d include a photo of her now, except she’d kill me for using the only one I have, which is her passport picture, but I think she looks herself in it, all her Scots-Maine hooded phthalo eyes and tragic/stoic/vulnerable cheekbones—the look we’ve tried so hard to perfect, seeing as how we knew we were going to be implacably stuck with it anyway, as its stolid indomitability having been that of our impoverished ancestors for wretched, mud-slogged generations.
Anyway by the time we graduated we’d had a grand falling-out, based on the fact that in our senior year I wanted to be her lover and she tried to comply but ultimately didn’t feel the same way about me. This artifact from that time period had the Brujo exclaiming, “You’re so glamorous! It’s like The L Word.” Though it was in fact spectactularly unlike The L Word.
After it was all over but the screaming, we went our separate ways—her to California, me to Britain and then Boston. But curiously while thus separated by distance, and fairly incommunicado, we had experiences of startling overlap, which we discovered when we reconnected a few years later. E.g., we had both:
- been diagnosed with endometriosis (okay she knew about hers in college and I only found out about mine the year before, but still)
- had life-sucking seventy-hour-a-week desk jobs where we’d destroyed our wrist and elbow tendons and had to go on worker’s comp;
- fallen in love with and married British men (hers Oxon, mine Cambs) and imported them to the US, battling wads of mindnumbing INS paperwork to do so;
- become Zen students and done relatively intensive residential/monastic practice;
- at times been either vegan or vegetarian but our mania for sushi (her: hamachi and tempura rolls, me: maguro and those massive futomaki that stop you talking for five full minutes) eventually prevented our adherence to either, thus we remain sushitarian;
- and not last nor least, continued our mutual obsession with a weirdly parallel assortment of cultural artifacts from Anthony Lane to Fight Club, from Donna Tartt to sharp Irish cheddar, from expensive hardbound spiral unruled journals to fountain pens and their fetching spectrum of inks (hers browns and greens, mine blues and purples), and other oddly jointly homologous/analogous fetishes, including but not limited to our common fascination with narratives of climbers, mountaineers and polar explorers stuck on/in horrible glaciers/blizzards/mountains/ice falls/crevasses/desert arctic wastes—climbing porn, I call it.
Why, just last night I watched Touching the Void and now I’m desperate to discuss it with her; because only meine fleidermaus can understand.
And now we’re both divorcing our pretty British husbands, and now once again she’s had to make it clear she doesn’t feel That Way about me, and now I’ve once again grieved and will struggle again for our friendship not to become romanticized, not to be a Boston marriage she doesn’t really want, so now we write and talk on the phone, now I probably can’t visit her for a while, now we’re both on the same antidepressant (which we call Romanoff, as in strawberries, but that’s another story) and similar combinations of activating and antanxiety meds, and we both love long hot (shared) baths and Dr. Bronners (me almond, her lavender) and we both rely on blenders and Lara Bars for calories.
Sometimes I’m afraid that she’s too much like the other half of my brain; that without her I’d be one of those Oliver Sacks cases, who’s had their cingulate gyrus or amygdala or whatever severed, and forever after that is puzzled by a glass of milk, calling it “white water.” As Mandarin notes, we’re basically a cult of two, with what amounts to a twin language. “Let’s play I’m a mice.” “No, let’s play tickle ourchother.” We’re pierced (her rather more so than me at present, and, more bravely yet, thoroughly tattooed) and have identical Zen-student shoes (black Danskos, brown clogs—mine Josef Seibel, hers Birks I think) and we both love Brie with organic potato chips, Spud Puppies with tamari, and Ben and Jerry’s New York Super Fudge Chunk. We both have G4 PowerBooks and wouldn’t dream of using anything else. She’s the only person in the world with whom I seem able to cohabit peaceably; she scribbles in her journal (collages, ephemera, shattered and petalled drawings) while I read the good bits aloud to her (psychology, women’s history, poetry, fiction, biography, or those had-to-cut-off-her-own-leg-and-eat-it extreme sports/adventure snow-and-ice things we love). We are neither one scared of anything; we both are horrified by centipedes, which have far too many legs. (What do they need all those legs for? I tell you, it’s suspicious.)
(And, it gets even worse…what the hell does it mean, “left it there overnight”?!?)
She’s mad for cycling (and is a seriously skilled cyclist), I’m mad for climbing (and mostly prefer to read about it or watch it, half for reasons of tendons, half because I’m indolent by temperament). She loved it when I told her excitedly of my discovery that Eugen Boissevain, who was married to Edna St. Vincent Millay until his death, had been married previously to Inez Milholland, Alice Paul’s suffrage martyr. She loves it when I quote an obscure fruity passage from The Secret History: “And as we leave the shores of Metahemeralism, we wave a fond farewell to those famous chums of yore.” No one knows these things but us.
We make up silly book and chapter and blog and poem and painting titles:
What Ezra Pound Is Trying To Say
And Then I’ll Fall on the Floor and Then I’ll Die
I Was Not Expecting So Much Karma Right Away
Sometimes I worry that she’s the one who discovered everything and I, to misquote Roethke, merely came behind for her pretty sake—that I only dress the way I do and have the personal aesthetic I do because she taught it to me. If so, that’s okay. At least I share it with someone I admire and understand.
Sometimes I fear I’ll have to live without her, which happened to me once in the worst nightmare I ever had, but fortunately she was right there when I woke up. The Unnarrator can’t really think about death right now, the grave proving the child ephemeral / mortal, guilty, but to me / the entirely beautiful.
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