Essay

BETWEEN FRIENDS
Writing Women Celebrate Friendship
Edited by Mickey Pearlman
Houghton Mifflin - 1994

FRIENDSHIP’S GIFT

You can close your eyes to reality but
not to memories...
Stanislaw Lee

If the first place one learns about friendship is in the home, one’s first friend, it seems to me, is a mother, although my mother, now seventy-four, would vehemently disagree.

She still thinks it a terrible mistake to make one’s child a friend, warning me of the dangers for the entire twenty-one years of what she still sees as my own maternal apprenticeship. Such friendly familiarity, she insists, soon earns a child’s contempt, and then discipline flies out the window. But I can remember a dreadfully rainy afternoon in our top-floor apartment that looked down on rusty fire escapes and on an empty courtyard so bleak that only the alley cats might notice the Christmas lights.

On this rainy day, my young mother has planned for us to have a picnic, my very first. I am around three. Together we spread an ancient, unraveling, white damask tablecloth and two equally worn napkins (all liberally stained pink with cranberry sauce) on the gray livingroom carpet. We carry a plateful of cream cheese and jelly sandwiches from the kitchen for lunch, and big red apples (with soft brown spots that we won’t notice until it is too late) for dessert. We bite into the apples at the same time, screw our faces in giggling horror, hold the old napkins over our mouths, the dangling strings tickling our cheeks, then we fall on the floor laughing.
My mother’s hair is long and copper-shiny; when she falls on her back, her hair fans out around her head like a peacock’s tail. When I climb on top of her, I am struck by how much smaller she seems than the mountain of my father.

For the rest of my life, apple pieces make me think of that rainy-day picnic and of my mother, despite her protests, my (first) friend.

The friends one’s mother chooses for herself, though, let her daughter see what grown-up female life is like: to see, to paraphrase Simone de Beauvoir, how one becomes a woman.
My mother’s friends were once our apartment house neighbors and they seemed beautiful to me, lush. Some had ebony hair curled around their shoulders, there were redheads with poodle cuts, and the blondes in towering beehives, or Debbie Reynolds-style ponytails pulled back by headbands that matched their heavy cotton bathing suits. Their full breasts as they bent over the coolers packed with cola on ice made me squeeze my arms over my own freckled flat chest in giddy anticipation.

On hot summer mornings, these women packed all fifteen of us, their collective children, into one old beige Rambler and brought us from Jackson Heights, Queens, to Rockaway Beach. They wore white rubber bathing caps strapped underneath their chins to keep their hair dry, and they bounded the children atop the waves. Their shiny wet arms were as strong and firm as their devotion.

They made all the novenas (especially the somewhat more intense ones to the Sacred Heart, who seemed to be their favorite), bringing us to confession on Saturday afternoons, watching us kneel in the quiet pews to say our penance prayers. They grew angry when they realized that we were stealing their Jayne Mansfield-style chiffon scarves and wrapping them tightly around our Miss Tonied heads pretending to be a peculiar group of repenting nuns. Lying prostrate on the building’s cold vestibule floor (and courting polio) we prayed to the imaginary remains of some imaginary saint atop the very real mahogany lobby table that someone later stole.

They hemmed their daughters’ stiff pastel dresses and starched their husbands’ and sons’ shirts, and made sure that everyone went off to Sunday Mass. Standing at the altar rail with their heads bowed after their babies had been born, they waited to be churched, or blessed. Afterward, they stopped in one another’s kitchens to borrow the often-borrowed christening gowns and the tiny matching caps.

Most voted first for Ike, and then for Nixon, but only if their husbands said they should, ignoring the fury of their own Irish Democratic pasts (their old fathers coming to visit looked aghast when they found out, climbing up to the roof to brood). Feeling rebellious and excited, they secretly swooned before handsome Kennedy, although they laughed when they saw that same ardor in the parish nuns, the real ones, leading our classes through the schoolyard with their starched habits covered in Democratic campaign buttons.

They went to the movies together once a week - usually on a Tuesday night, when the men tried to be home for the children - unless of course there was a Fuller Brush party which was outing enough. Sometimes in the dead of winter they traded ironing baskets, stiff cotton pants and shirts piled on top of one another like kindling, just for fun.

After everyone had grown up and gone away, the neighborhood a nightmare of graffiti and broken glass, one of the women in whose bed I had slept, her sheets smelling of roof-dried Oxydol, was found murdered in the exact spot where the mahogany table had stood. All that penance in our bones, in the very air, and not a suspect in sight.

It seemed to me then that becoming a woman had much to do with keeping my hair not only curly but dry, and going to church - doing as I was told and working like a horse, like my mother and the others did. I’d seen them dragging shopping carts bulging with A &P food up four flights in our creaking walk-up building, and when mice began slipping out of the painted-over dumbwaiters, the women carried the leaking bags of garbage down to the cellar, closing their eyes when the mice scampered around their feet.

Sometimes, while they sat on folding chairs underneath the big tree out front, watching the children play, the mothers argued with each other, screaming and shaking, while we children stood up and stared at them, but we never knew what had happened. Sometimes, there were whispers of an affair, one of the women alone with one of the men, but the truth was denied us. A day or two later, one of the mothers sent one of the girls through the hallways with flowery, Scotch-taped notes of apology. These were delivered into the tiny hot kitchens where blazing ovens held turkeys, rib roasts, legs of lamb, the boiling vegetables sent tears rushing down the window’s glass. Often, the tears belonged to the woman setting the table, the quickly-read note dropped on the dishes, we daughters overwhelmed by someone’s else’s mother crushing us in her arms, her wet cheek stuck to our foreheads.

They cut and dyed one another’s hair and lent each other clothes, milk, slipcovers, curtains and a ton of cigarettes. They ran back and forth over the roof from one apartment to the next when the children were sick, carrying alcohol for fever rubdowns, cod liver oil, Ace bandages and squares of flannel to press Musterole to our chests. Sometimes they delivered the big red encyclopedia everyone borrowed for the school reports, or baby food jars filled with whiskey that they mixed into our milk to ease our coughs.
They lent each other the table money even if it meant hocking their wedding rings at the pawnbrokers, and if they met one another on the roof at dusk, looking for their husbands who were late again, they never made mention of it to each other, although they were terrified that the men had fallen fast asleep in their seats and were at that moment snoring in the railroad yard. In a way, that might have been something of a relief, for many of the men were what was called “hard drinkers,” subject to raging senseless tantrums, throwing ottomans and toasters through the windows, or the carefully prepared dinners and the schoolbooks out onto the street, the homework floating softly to someone else’s fire escape.

Last summer, before the first reading from my first novel, my heroine a bit of all of them, I waited across the street from Brentano’s on Fifth Avenue, watching my mother and these same friends (save one) slowly making their way down the street in soft pastel dresses like the ones their daughters wore long ago. My mother wore a light pink dress much too big for her; she looked delicate and pale, as if she were made of rice paper. (Such clarity, I thought, in what can be seen from a distance.)

They were all in their seventies now, their men tucked safely in their graves (they finally know where they are at night), no longer neighbors but still friends. Their faces are softly lined and worn, thin cheeks surrounded now by pillows of soft gay hair, carefully arranged yet thin at the crown, like a baby’s. They laughed when I read the scene where one of my male characters pitches his Copacabana ashtray through his darkened living room, and they were silent hearing the part where he beats his daughter, although they seemed glad somehow that I’d remembered. After it was over they came up to the podium and hugged me, one after another, with faces more strange than familiar, like faces in a dream.

Their eyes were gleaming and they fluttered around me like little girls at a birthday party, dressed up in shiny flat shoes and party dresses.

I watched them through the bookstore window, surprised at how they grabbed for one another’s h ands crossing the busy street.

I thought of Emily Dickinson: “We don’t get older with the years, just newer.”

There was an awful silence at the end of writing this first book, after it was actually gone from my life, leaving me furiously angry at my characters for their sudden silence, as if they were shunning me after I had learned to trust them, after we had become - in the deepest sense of the word - friends, and I was stunned by their cold-hearted indifference.

It was autumn when I finished, the sudden black nights crashing down on my head. The afternoon the manuscript was mailed, I stood in the yard, pulling stiff towels from the clothesline and shuddering at the chill in the air, almost as if the summer had passed before I’d had a chance to notice. I cried, dropping laundry into the wicker basket, wiping my eyes on the hem of my shirt. At least, I thought bitterly, at least you’d think they’d have the decency to write and tell me how they were. I realized that such concentrated work in such peculiar isolation has to be temporary or else lunacy settles itself around your feet like a cat.

Someone once wrote that one of the hardest things in the world is looking at the backs of the people you love, that it makes you sting.

When my mother and her friends left Brentano’s the minute the applause died down (for none of them wanted to be out in the dark) they took the soul of my first book along.

I realized, watching the party dresses melt into the crowd, that Delia Delaney, my heroine, was no longer with me but with them, for her story began just like theirs did; it was never mine at all, except maybe around the edges where children tend to live. In life, Delia would be an old lady now, just like the others. Delia Delaney, as you might have already guessed, was born from my mother’s missing friend who had died fairly young, her decline begun by the death of her third daughter, stillborn, the cord wrapped around her neck.

It happened in the Kennedy years, when everyone in the world it seemed was Irish and proud, enraptured with the president whether they’d voted for him or not. His picture was everywhere in the Heights, like Orwell’s Big Brother, hanging in the hallways of St. Joan of Arc School, on the walls of all the dusty bars where we were sent to find our fathers, and even in the window of the Chinese hand laundry. It was summertime, a broiling August when this woman was too uncomfortable to go to the beach and sit wedged in the sand, dabbing zinc oxide on her fair-skinned daughter’s noses.

Like the other men, her husband was a hard drinker but unlike them he was a traveling salesman and so she was twice as accustomed to being without him. She sat by herself that month of August, on the roof where it was cooler, staring in the direction of New York. If any of the other women climbed the stairs to the roof to hang their clothes, she’d ask each of them in turn if their babies had moved near the end, and though they whispered among themselves they assured her that their babies were always quiet.

Everyone went to the same doctor, a compassionate general practitioner who spend most of every August on vacation, sending his patients to doctors in the area. He tried to send the woman to an obstetrician but she trusted nobody else - none of us did - and so she waited, sitting on the roof, staring into the air. Her friends were worried and so they gave her some presents for the child, not a shower but more like a show of faith, and she piled them into the newly-painted crib which stood in the corner of the girls’ bedroom. (We girls hung over the crib that entire August, shuffling the baby’s things.)

By the end of the month, it was over, a day or two after the doctor returned. For the rest of his life, for some twenty years, the doctor told everyone who knew her (and some who didn’t) of her courage and her strength.

When she came home, she never spoke of the baby, nor the experience, and neither did anyone else, as if she might have forgotten. Her husband was home long enough to clean the apartment, disassembling the crib and giving back the unopened things, and then he was gone again. By September, she was back in her old clothes, the neatly ironed skirts, the primly buttoned blouses.

And then she began to drink. With her husband, people said, something they did together when he was home as if they were playing bridge. And then when he was gone again, they said she drank out of her loneliness.
She went without him to the church dances with the other couples, something she had never done before. The other women urged her to come along, bright-eyed and smiling eagerly, but she soon began to drink more than the men who were weaving on their feet anyway, having to half-carry her up the stairs, unfolding her from their shoulders onto her bed, telling her daughters that she was feeling sick. When her husband came home, the terrible fights began. He blackened her eye and she stabbed him with a steak knife while the furniture splintered all around them and their daughters’ screams filtered through the courtyard.

Everyone said that another baby would “cure” her, but when she gave birth to a son it seemed to be too late. She continued to drink. She left the child alone. Her daughters left her when they were teenagers, renting a tiny apartment nearby where their mother regularly appeared, smashing on the door for drinking money when she had run out.

In time, bodegas sprouted up around the shamrock-studded doors of the gin mills, the pictures of President Kennedy grew dusty or disappeared altogether from the walls, and the woman’s daughters left the area altogether, tried of crying their hearts out in the other mothers’ kitchens, tired of picking her up from the street.
While we children were peering in the gin mill windows looking for our fathers, she smiled and waved at us from her perch near the back and eventually one father or another felt obligated to wait for her and walk her home, her blonde ponytail resting limply on his shoulder. The wife watching from the roof, keeping dinner on the stove, was fit to be tied, but she or one of the others brought the woman to the priests anyway, caring for her son, consoling her daughters. They made her pay her bills on time, putting her on a budget, forcing her to ask them for extra cash. They visited her in the city hospital’s psychiatric ward where she delighted in the young doctors’ gullibility at her made-up stories - she told them she thought she was a bag of peanuts - then she signed herself out, and friendship began to show its limitations.

When many of the Irish bars became discotheques she took to wearing false eyelashes and white go-go boots, dancing with younger men, strangers who would buy her a drink. By then her son was a street urchin, a modern-day Oliver Twist. Some of the bolder youngsters from the street seemed to forget all about Rockaway and the zinc oxide and the way things used to be and they smirked when they saw her and called her by her first name.
She tried hard to have good days, desperate to redeem herself, walking her young son to school, pulling on her tan raincoat and trotting off to the A &P with a shopping list.

Every St Patrick’s Day, she appeared in all of the women’s kitchens with freshly baked loaves of soda bread that none of us dared to eat, for we had seen the roaches climbing out of her washing machine.
When the neighborhood became unsafe and the other families were forced to leave, she’d laughed and said the only way she could afford to go would be feet first, and that was exactly how it had happened.

On a cold and rainy April night, she’d left one of the old places with the wrong dancing partner, a dark-skinned stranger, or so the rumor went, and she was found early the next morning strangled like that baby daughter of long ago, the one that the Church had buried as quickly as possible with a name the woman hadn’t chosen for her child at all: Mary.

It was in all the newspapers. At her wake in the funeral home underneath the el, her elderly mother passed around a scrapbook filled with newspaper clippings of the crime, as if her daughter were someone important at last.
But Delia Delaney, my heroine, faced with similar circumstances, survives.
For in the end, I gave this woman the only gift of friendship a novelist has to offer, the chance at another sort of life.