Friendship, Interrupted

Remember my Facebook friend? This is her story. I'm the dirty blonde. She's the one who makes me cry. Sobbing. Grab your tissues and read on.

She was a dirty blonde with bangs, and she was smiling at me.

A visit to the deep South of the country – especially to any public area, such as a school, will illustrate the divide between the blonde-haired and the chocolate-brown. Splashing into a Caribbean school, one finds a myriad of mulatto, or the obligatory black-haired, olive-skinned, Spanish descent.

I was eleven, and already seasoned at being the new kid. I landed at the 6th grade Episcopal Cathedral in San Juan, PR, and was immediately introduced as an American, and from Nueva York, no less. Mrs. Cuevas thought that was interesting.

So did the dirty blonde. She could hardly contain her excitement, glancing at me, and smiling from under her long bangs. “Gringa,” I decided, but was relieved to see her welcoming face. Used to being alone at the start of a new school, I kept to myself and let myself be examined. You can feel the absorbing eyes.

I don’t remember many details about when we first spoke, but I remember Jennifer (how much more “gringa” of a name can you have?) kept popping up beside me. At lunch, at recess, after school on the outside steps, she always had a fun smile, and a kind word.

I guess it was only natural that we were attracted to each other: my first name was Spanish with a gringa last name, and her first name was gringa, with a Spanish last name. Up until I came into the picture, she’d been the best English-speaking student in class – now, we were buddies who couldn’t stop talking in English.

My new friend introduced me to a lot in life. Empanadas, for one thing – of which I quickly became an addict. Caribbean schools, at least in OUR day, did NOT serve meatloaf with mashed potatoes and salad with token tomato. We had fried things. With CHEESE! Jennifer was appalled I had never had one, and righted that situation immediately. “Dos empanadas de queso,” was lunch – EVERY DAY.

She introduced me to everyone. She was not shy. I was. “Did you meet so and so,” she’d ask. No? Well, she’d quickly remedy that – despite my protestations that I was too embarrassed. I remember she was never embarrassed – she’d yell out a tease at whatever older boy was annoying her without flinching. I would later figure out that coming from her large family, she’d learned to tease others and defend herself. I guess, as an only child, I didn’t really have those skills yet.

I lived with my father for that year I was in Puerto Rico. He was surprised. So was I. For something that, in retrospect, was a rather normal childhood misdemeanor, my single, 60-hour-a-week working mom, had had enough, and decided that I should go live with my dad so that he could have his fill of my mischievous self. My dad was ill equipped.

He was almost 40, and still renting – never owned a home in his life. The apartment was littered with “collectible” Playboy magazines. Green shag carpet. Fifties plastic dinette set. Brown, canvas-cloth sofa. My mother wasn’t speaking to me, but she surely was speaking AT him. My father dutifully bought the multi-vitamin I was to take every day. And on her insistence, I attended the private school that her sister had gone to years earlier when she was young. Oh, and I was to stay in gymnastics – my father managed to find a class for me to attend twice a week which was not too far away…by bus. I went to school in the morning and came home in the afternoon by public bus to the small apartment in the high-rise, overlooking the smooty and congested street below, where I would wait for my father to come home from work. My father required a rum and coke when he walked in the door, and I dutifully became an expert at making them – although, they smelled awful to me, at the time. Thankfully, he was not an alcoholic, but more of a professional bachelor – an eighties workaholic who liked a little buzz at the end of the day, and a babe on his arm on the weekends.

Which explains why, when I came home and announced that my new friend Jennifer wanted me to come stay with her for the weekend, he jumped at the chance. Oh, yes, he called her mom and talked on the phone and “checked them out,” but as my visits to her house increased in frequency, so did his feeling of freedom. Rarely did it occur to me to ask him what he did for the weekend….what was most important was that he listened very attentively to my stories of adventure at Jennifer’s house. I think he may have even been, a little jealous.

Jennifer and I were fast friends, in every way. With most friendships, you remember an argument or two. All I remember was that she was the hydrogen to my oxygen, and I put her as that because she was worth two – double my energy, double my enthusiasm.

We spent Halloween together and I trick-or-treated in her neighborhood. I learned the best tricks to annoy her older sister Helen, who would come flying out of her room screaming for her mom to tell us to leave her alone. I’m not sure why we enjoyed that so much, but we did, and we were very good at it – I can see her in my mind running down the hall chasing after us with her long hair flying everywhere. Maybe she was trying to style her hair. But then, at times, she was very civil, why, even sisterly, as Jennifer and I would sit wide-eyed at the soap operas Helen would tell about her boyfriend. Oh, Jen and I ate that up! We told each other we hated boys, but I know we both dreamed of one day having boyfriends ourselves and busied ourselves learning new dance steps with which to impress them someday.

I was a big-city girl with my dad, but Jennifer’s house was far from the city and in a nice residential area that was still being added to. At a lot down the street was where my most poignant memory of Jennifer occurred. At this magical lot is where she showed me “the magical weed.” (No, not THAT!) I’d never seen it before, and being back to Puerto Rico numerous times as an adult, I’ve never seen it again – and I’ve looked. But for some reason this weed could be found in copious amounts at this lot down the street from her house. This plant, or weed, I guess, looked like a miniature fern, and she encouraged me to touch the fronds.

“Just touch it, you’ll see,” she insisted. Wary of some fun-loving prank she might be pulling, I cautiously touched it. To my surprise, the plant responded by closing together its little fern-like leaves in an effort to protect itself. Addicted to the result, we were soon running all over the lot looking for more of the plants with one of us touching it and both of us squealing with delight.

Ah, the simple joys of childhood friendship.

What with brothers and sisters and all our schoolmates, Jennifer was helping me to bloom into a social person – but I soon learned about “pushing it” from her father. Never push the bounds of conversation farther than what you know, or can intelligently talk about. Her father taught me that, ironically, with my father present.

At a kid’s party at their house where the family room stereo had been cranked to mindless disco for some time (which is what we kids liked to listen to) Jen’s dad grew weary and at some point, the music went off abruptly. I noticed Mr. Vides and my dad at the stereo and joined them. I asked about what was going on and Mr. Vides said, “That’s enough of that for the night, we’re going to have some real music,” and he and my father perused his music collection, commenting on how it was late and time to put on something mellower. Wanting to impress, I looked too, and after glancing at the titles announced, “Oh, I love Beethoven!” Mr. Vides calmly smiled and looked at me, and with genuine curiosity asked, “Really?” “Oh yes!” I continued, “my mother listened to him all the time.” Amused, he asked (or should I say, cornered) me, and inquired which symphony I thought we should listen to. I’m sure the shocked expression on my little face revealed I had no idea what to say next.

But somewhere in my little mind “9th” jumped out at me, so I blurted it out – it truly was the only thing that sounded familiar as Beethoven. Mr. Vides roared with laughter – as did my father, at the prospects of relaxing to a little “9th.” Mr. Vides asked me if I’d like to know why they were laughing, as he pulled the 9th out from his collection. Severely busted, I meekly agreed and he put it on, full blast, truly enjoying the moment. I was soon laughing, too.

Sadly, my time with Jennifer and her family was brief as my actual family needed me. My mother, with whom I had slowly started to build a relationship again, was suddenly and inexplicably hospitalized. After much testing, and a hospitalization in Texas, a long way from her home in New York, the doctors diagnosed a “total collapse” of her immune system. Not much was known in those days about what to do about that, but my mother ended up allergic to just about everything under the sun. What I had not known at eleven, was that when I was six, she had been diagnosed with Lupus.

I visited my mother for Easter, and never returned to Puerto Rico until my late teens. Despite my fun and active life with my father, I really had missed her and came to that realization full well when I actually saw her. As she relayed some of the realities of her illness (though not all) to me, I realized I was very worried about her. To boot, she asked me if I was happy with my father, and if not, would I consider living with her again.

Something about the Playboys and the strip-dancer who lived down the hall and babysat me, and the taking the bus to and from school, and my father with two girlfriends didn’t ring true as a good environment for me – my mom was perfectly horrified at the stories I told. And in our reconciliation she was tender, and loving and promised me we would be a team if I stayed. I bit.

And so ended my fast and intense friendship with Jennifer. We tried. At my father’s insistence (to his credit, he knew friendships like ours were hard to find) I wrote to my friend, and I remember treasuring her occasional letters. She moved to Costa Rica, I knew that, and she wrote to me about her favorite song, which was also one of my favorites at the time. I don’t remember it now, but it was a dancing, upbeat song, which after that point became a melancholy reminder of one of those great friendships, interrupted.