When we were fourteen years old, my best friend's mother
died of cancer.
Becca* and I became friends at the beginning of seventh
grade, when her family returned to Louisville from her father's year-long
sabbatical at the Sorbonne. In our relentlessly bourgeois environment, the fact
that Becca's father was a chemistry professor seemed exotic. Her mother was an
artist, which was a jaw-dropping anomaly. There were stay-at-home moms and
there were divorced moms who were real estate agents. There were exceptions, of
course, but that was the general tendency.
My own mother was also one of the exceptions. She had just finished her PhD in
religion and was doing some college teaching. But even so, she felt required to
keep an immaculate house and spend her summer days making chit chat at the
country club pool.
Becca's mom's never cleaned the refrigerator or mopped the
floor. Her paintings were stacked all over the house. She was not trying to
accommodate bourgeois expectations; she seemed, from my perspective, to be
rejecting them. It was a breathtaking if somewhat terrifying model. Didn't she
care what people thought?
Of course, maybe she didn't clean the refrigerator because
she was doing chemo and the smell made her sick. Maybe what I imagined to be
her freewheeling bohemianism was a function of illness. But there was a
forthright, no bullshit quality to her that made me believe she was exactly
what she appeared to be: an artist with her mind on her work, not on the
decomposing vegetables in the crisper.
Sometimes Becca's mom sat with us at the kitchen table while
we ate Little Debbie brownies straight from the freezer. She laughed at some of
the things I said, which embarrassed me. Most of what Becca and I did, though,
occurred in a space in which our parents didn't exist. When we became friends
Becca's mother must have been pregnant with her sister. I remember discussing
amniocentesis on the bus to school. Was the cancer diagnosed while she was
pregnant, or afterward? Did continuing the pregnancy cost Becca's mother her
life?
This was not the kind of thing we talked about. We made each
other friendship bracelets and collages with pictures and phrases cut from
fashion magazines. We got perms. We rode our bikes to the pool and let older
boys with muscles throw us around the bull pen. We went behind the bushes
outside her house and taught ourselves to smoke because she said we would need
to, for high school.
The fall that her mother died, Becca and I had just started
ninth grade at a new school. It
was clear within the first few weeks that she was succeeding socially in a
spectacular way, and I was not. Maybe I had thought that since my mother had
been the homecoming queen at that very high school, that it would come easily.
Maybe after three years at a small, nurturing private school I misjudged what a
big public high school would be like. What I was like.
I had chosen to go to that school because of Becca. On that
basis alone the friendship was probably doomed. Becca was collecting her
homecoming accolades and handsome, soccer-playing boyfriends and older friends
who would sponsor her for the citywide high school sorority, while I stood
awkwardly off to the side hoping she would carry me with her.
One night that fall, when I was spending the night at Becca's
house, her father had to call an ambulance. My father came over in the middle
of the night to pick me up. That was very close to the end.
Becca's mother died in the early morning. Becca passed me a note in homeroom to tell me the news. All that day people kept coming up to me and asking
me about her, because I was her best friend, but I felt like a fraud because
already she was moving farther and farther away from me. At the funeral she sat
with another girl, a girl I disapproved of, because she was loud and got bad grades and was repeating
ninth grade. I also hated her, volcanically, because she was taking my
place.
When you are fourteen it's hard to accept that you are
collateral damage in someone else's tragedy. It's hard to be a grownup about
it. She had lost her mother. How could anything I needed, or wanted, matter at
all? A part of me understood that, but another part of me continued to need and
want just the same. Grief and jealousy, love and hurt were all mixed up
together and I couldn't tease out the strands. Because of course I loved her.
But it was a narcissistic kind of love, and she deserved better.
We were at an age where we desperately needed our mothers.
Becca's mother was dead, and mine was not. Even if my mother was, in the
deepest, most fundamental way, not able to be the mother I needed, there she
still was, making macaroni and cheese that was chock-full of Velveeta, picking
me up from swim practice, sewing buttons back onto things. But she was not the
kind of woman who would enfold another woman's bereaved child into her arms. It
didn't even occur to me until just now that she could have done so.
*
Years later I ran into Becca's old boyfriend Peter at a
party. This was when I was back in Louisville for a couple of years between
college and grad school. Peter and Becca had dated just before her mother died,
nine years before. I hadn't really known him during that time, and I left in
the eleventh grade to go to a different school, fleeing the aftermath of what I
perceived to be my utter social collapse. I would not have gone up to speak to
him, but he came to me.
He barely made it through the obligatory questions about my
life before he asked me what I thought had happened, why Becca had broken up
with him. In his mind, apparently, we shared a crucial connection, despite the
fact that we barely knew each other. We were the people Becca had dumped.
I said I thought that her loss was so great, so
excruciating, that she couldn't stand to be with anyone she'd been close to,
before. She had to get rid of everything and start over. I felt very wise when
I said it, even though I'm sure I was parroting something that someone,
probably my mother, had told me. Peter seemed comforted, absolved. Maybe, like
me, he had spent all of those years wondering how he had failed her. As he
walked away I wondered if I would ever reach a point in my life when men would
approach me for a reason other than to ask me what had happened with Becca.
*
I have wanted to write about Becca for years. In fact, one
of the first short stories I ever wrote, imaginatively entitled Her Mom, was about a Becca-like character and a me-like
character locked in some kind of battle over her mother's legacy. I couldn't
understand why it was so important. I just knew that there was more, much more
to the story than a lost friendship, sad as that can be. I knew, in some
inchoate way, that the story was not even about us, but about our mothers.
There are a lot of people right now whom I never want to see
again. Not because of anything they've said or done, necessarily, but just
because. My therapist tells me this is normal. In fact, she says, if I'm not
having dramatic fallings out left and right then I am doing better than most.
Which is why I've been thinking of Becca a lot these days. Maybe I won't always
feel this way. Maybe a year will pass, or two, and because a friend occupies a
different place when you're an adult, and a year when you're forty is a shorter
period of time than a year when you're fourteen, we can pick things up again. Maybe
not. We'll see.
*Names in this story have been changed.
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