For Friends Only
I recently read in Anne Lamott's book Dusk Night Dawn: "Never give up on intimate friendships or science or nature. They have always saved us, and they will again." At our family New Year's Eve dinner, I asked our foursome what was working for them in 2021, and what they're inviting in 2022; Pip answered "friends" to both questions. He has always been a wise soul. Although I never had the peace of mind to set friendships as my intention for the year ahead (I was always demanding I lose or change some perceived flaw), I have been blessed, since a young age, with the best friends.
Phoebe recently had a sleepover with their best friend. Wrapped in cozies, they exchanged Christmas presents, made bracelets, played survival, watched a movie, bickered, giggled, and fell asleep, side-by-side. In her book, Becoming Duchess Goldblatt, Anonymous describes the purest friendship as "two little kids running around together...only aware of extracting the greatest possible fun out of that moment."
For Christmas in 5th grade, my best friend, Mary, gave me an address book filled, in her whimsical, erasable-blue-ink handwriting, with our friends' phone numbers, and a wooden, floral box that sits on my bureau today. I remember well our ritual of falling asleep after our own fun-extracting: in a twin bed, with a blue light, and our favorite mixtape (stolen from one of her four older brothers) playing low in the background, featuring songs like "Friend of the Devil". I can't explain how, or why, the blue light (it feels like a portent of what was to come), but come bedtime, on Friday or Saturday night, we'd screw the blue light bulb into the wall sconce to the left of the non-working fireplace, hit play on the beat-up sony player, crawl into bed together, and discuss where we planned to live when we grew up. We took turns getting out of bed to turn the tape over.
At the end of 8th grade, Mary told me she was going to boarding school. I was heartbroken. Determined to change her mind, I made her a new mix, and wrote her a letter listing all the reasons she should defer her acceptance one year. It didn't work. I was devastated; how could she leave me?
A year later, I went to boarding school, and I met Blair. At Deerfield, it was mostly singles in the girls' dorms, but every Saturday night, Blair would sign out, and trek across campus to squeeze in for a sleepover. We were both long - Blair is at least 5'10" and I'm almost 5'9" - but no matter, we'd crawl into the extra-long single, feet-to-head, and sleep soundly, every time. This went on until our senior year when Blair and I won the housing lottery, and scored a gigantic double at the top of Rosenwald Shumway, the newest dorm on campus. During our sleepovers, she always insisted sleeping near the the wall, so it was no surprise when she requested the bed by the window, against the wall. I said, "OK," because it's like that with a best friend: it feels good to make them feel good.
Blair is beautiful, smart, creative, athletic, and a gifted writer... She was genuinely surprised when I didn't also make varsity, or also get into Harvard and Stanford. "They made a mistake," she'd say. Blair always made me feel like a superhero; I wanted to believe she was right--that I was as bright and talented as my friend. I used to say there was nothing quite like being in the ray of Blair; it was enchanting, especially when she wrote you a letter. She sent me this after my grandfather passed away: "I am so sorry to hear about your Grandpip. I myself have perfectly intact images of his busy but quiet shuffle all about the Marion property (dog always at his heels)." Having a friend (not just a family member) be able to describe my grandfather so precisely was an unusual pleasantry.
We also made plans to live together as we fell asleep at night: Blair made me promise we'd be roommates again in New York City. She was always so sure it would work out just as we planned. After Stanford and a stint in LA, Blair moved to New York. I was already there, living with Roo on the Upper East Side, working at a corporate law firm, falling asleep with a pager on high on my bedside table. Blair moved to the East Village and immersed herself in selling art to "the rich hedge fund guy who came on to you before putting you down, buying art from you as a status symbol." Aside from me being with Roo, none of this was in the plans we whispered across our beds atop Rosenwald Shumway in Western Massachusetts.
While some friendships last a lifetime, others are brief; some serve a singular purpose, others complete us; some turn sour, others float away with fondness like a sky lantern full of intentions. Each friend is woven into the fabric of our beings. In 5th grade, our teacher, Mrs. Johnson, charged our class with filling a three-ringed binder with collected and self-composed poems. I remember this excerpt from a poem in Mary's binder:
"Lord, you said once I decided to follow you,
You'd walk with me all the way.
But I noticed that during the saddest and most troublesome times of my life,
there was only one set of footprints.
I don't understand why, when I needed You the most, You would leave me."
He whispered, "My precious child, I love you and will never leave you
Never, ever, during your trials and testings.
When you saw only one set of footprints,
It was then that I carried you.
The mention of "Lord" made me skeptical; I had been raised to think of religious people as different. We didn't go to church and we certainly didn't talk about a Lord. Yet this didn't stop me from going to Mass with Mary and her family on Sunday mornings--anything to not have to wake up and end our sleepover. After Mass, Mary and I would walk down Main Street and order lunch. We'd take our brown bags to the center of the village green, kick off our Sunday best, and discuss abortion. "Mary, you can't possibly think it's OK to take away a woman's choice?" "Georgia, you can't possibly think it's OK to choose whether a baby lives or dies?" By the time Mrs. Burke picked us up, our shoes were back on, our lunch bags thrown away, and we were discussing homework due the next day. Because it's like that with a best friend: it's OK to disagree.
Something about Mary's poem resonated, so deeply I still remember it all these years later. Because I had no concept of a Lord at 12 years old, I interpreted the footprints in the poem as those of a friend. Today, I would add: a friend sent by a higher power. My friends have always been (and continue to be) my loyal companions, trusted witnesses, and often my only antidote to hardship and struggle.
I was the most vulnerable and unhappiest during my tenure at Deerfield. For me, the institution was a loveless place, steeped in privilege, sexism, and elitism, that caged my spirit. I graduated with a high tolerance for discomfort, an aptitude to "finish up strong," and a bad taste in my mouth. Blair and I took turns carrying each other to the finish line. When we got sick, Blair and I would first alert each other before heading to the health center: "Hey," Blair wrote in a message left on my pillow, "I'm going to the Health Center. I feel very sick. Sorry I couldn't find you. I came in your room, it wasn't locked, and I felt so shitty I was gonna wait until you came back." When we missed the mark, whatever mark it was that day, we would seek each other out: "Have you seen Blair?...Can you tell I her I need to talk to her?" We left each other "You Can Do This" notes all over our dorm rooms: "Don't worry 'bout bio. Bio is lame and this test is only one test of about a thousand you'll have. It counts so minutely in the grand scheme." Senior year, we stayed up way past bedtime to finish AP Lit or AP Chem, and if one of us finished first, we never asked the other to turn off her light, sometimes we'd stay up to keep the other company. The darkness always felt lighter with Blair there.
Blair stood up next to me when I said my vows to Roo; and I stood up next to her, some years later, when she said her vows to Eli. But as the years piled up between our Deerfield days and the present, we were in contact less and less. Once she showed up for my vinyasa class on a trip to Boston. When I cautioned the class not to take the next pose if they were, like me at the time, pregnant, Blair settled back into child's pose: I blurted out with glee to the 85-person class: "Oh my goodness, everyone, Blair's having a baby!" Later, over dinner, we discovered we were both keen on the name "Phoebe." Frankie was born a few months after Phoebe. Because it's like that with a best friend: you let them have first dibs.
Blair was diagnosed with oral cancer in 2016. She underwent a major surgery followed by a brutal round of radiation. As soon as the time was right, I drove to upstate New York to be with Blair. I brought Phoebe to play with with Frankie and Smokey Rose. While our children played outside, I lay in bed with Blair, massaging her feet and hands. She was so tired and so thin. On her bedside table, there were flowers, a lot of half-full glasses, a set of colored pencils, and her sketchbook. Blair was designing glasses, and Eli was prototyping them: the glasses had drop-like shapes all over them. Blair described the shape as "particularly comforting to me—it felt like the glass was reaching out and touching me back...They helped me feel better." The glasses were, like my friend, very cool. Eventually, Blair and Eli packed up and moved to Washington where they they started their glass business ASP & Hand. Most nights, I drink a beer from one of these glasses--it's blue with yellow nipples (as I affectionately call them). And everytime I hold the glass, I think of Blair.
I haven't seen Blair since our visit to Hudson Valley in 2016. We've talked on the phone some. But Washington is far from Massachusetts, and COVID has kept us apart from so many of our loved ones. It was while scrolling through social media posts a few months ago that I discovered a Go Fund page for Blair. The cancer was back and she needed another MAJOR surgery. I called her. Somehow, days before her surgery, in the midst of closing her business, Blair found an hour to fill me in. I am so grateful, especially because the surgery has (temporarily) taken away her ability to talk.
Our conversation was surreal: Blair described the gory details of her horrid upcoming surgery--and that this would be her last intervention. I listened while she articulated what it's been like living with pre-cancer and cancer all these years--she described different levels of "cancer consciousness." She expressed relief to have this one, final, all-in attempt to get the cancer out. Thankfully, I didn't offer any advice or creative ideas about a new therapy I'd heard about in Switzerland. Instead, we talked about our relationship to time--she recommended a book that breaks down our assumptions to reveal a universe where time disappears. Then she brought up Deerfield. "G, all these years I've been trying to figure out why I went to Deerfield--what I got in exchange for the cost of my elite education." (I know she didn't just mean dollars.) "I may not be awesome at daily tasks, like keeping house, but man, I can read, and I can write." As she spoke, I thought of Frankie and Smokey Rose, and the folder of letters I have saved from Blair over the years. Her ability to distill, weave, and create from her surroundings and experiences has given my friend the key to explore deeper, wider, and more imaginative levels of consciousness. We are the beneficiaries. Her writing and her letters (and our nipple glasses) are Blair's greatest weapons in her cancer battle. Those microscopic fucking cells don't stand a chance.
Blair is on the other side of her surgery. I have been sending her daily texts; the exchange is one-sided with the exception of her heart tap-backs, and a few (heartbreaking) updates here and there. As soon as the time is right, I will get in my car, or on an airplane, to go and be with my friend. I will get into bed with her, and let her lie closest to the wall. I'll massage her tired body, and we will make plans about being in Maine together this summer. Because it's like that with a best friend: you make plans together for a brighter future, even when it's against the odds.
I'll leave you with an excerpt from a poem by W.H. Auden titled "Thanksgiving for a Habitat: For Friends Only," which Blair shared with me, some years ago, with the following post script:
Easy at first, the language of friendship
Is, as we soon discover,
Very difficult to speak well, a tongue
With no cognates, no resemblance
To the galimatias of nursery and bedroom,
Court rhyme or shepherd's prose,
And, unless often spoken, soon goes rusty.
Distance and duties divide us,
But absence will not seem an evil
If it make our re-meeting
A real occasion. Come when you can:
Your room will be ready.
[stanza omitted]
Felicissima notte! May you fall at once
Into a cordial dream, assured
That whoever slept in this bed before
Was also someone we like,
That within the circle of our affection
Also you have no double.
*PS - galimatias=confused language, meaningless talk, nonsense
As always, thank you for reading,
Georgia
P.S. If you are interested in reading some of Blair's writing, she recently started a blog on substack: PURE/IMPURE DIALECTIC; If you'd like to own your own nipple glass, ASP & HAND is shipping out their last pieces, and all proceeds go towards Blair's recovery.
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