A few weeks ago, out of the blue, I got a lengthy email from the girl who was my best friend throughout childhood. In the interest of anonymity, I’ll call her Kelly. Kelly had recently moved back to Montana from Alaska, and wanted to know how I was doing. I hadn’t heard a word from her since April, when she informed me of her impending move and suggested we ought to have dinner once more before she left. I had asked when she’d be free to get together, and she’d suggested a Saturday on which I already had plans. I told her as much and said I should be free any other night. I never heard back from her. Getting a missive from her several months later was surprising and, given the overly congenial tone, a little galling. To have so much hurt done on both sides, and to have her blithely act as if nothing were wrong is frustrating. I don’t cope well with false friendliness, and I’m only ever able to muster a little common courtesy in response.
As many Uterined Americans may know, friendships between women can be tricky, tenuous things. I myself was unaware of just how tenuous they could be, and I never suspected that my friendship with Kelly could ever turn sour. We’d been thick as thieves since first grade, and of all the relationships in my life that have ended, the one that has pained me the most and the longest is the dissolution of this friendship. The truly unfortunate thing is that everything fell apart on account of some boy. Kelly got a little too chummy with my friend Amanda’s boyfriend and I spent the better part of a year trying to clear things up with Amanda while trying to tell Kelly how uncomfortable it was making Amanda (and, literally, everyone else I knew). She laughed me off and consistently said it was nothing and that she “could be friends with whoever [she] wants.”
Why couldn’t she just get a dog?
As any fool could predict, things came crashing down from all fronts. Amanda and her boyfriend eventually broke up, and he started inviting Kelly over to make Amanda jealous. Amanda, instead of speaking to Kelly, cut loose on me. I, thoroughly sick of it all, divested myself of the whole situation and informed them both I wasn’t playing peacekeeper any longer. Amanda was apologetic, Kelly was furious that I’d “abandoned” her. It was then that I saw just how black-and-white her thinking is: because I didn’t side with her unconditionally, because I didn’t just drop all my other friends when things turned sour, and because I dared to suggest she had a part to play in the whole mess, I had somehow “betrayed” her. I can’t fully trust or respect someone who deals in such blind absolutes.
In the meantime, I’d forked out a decent chunk of cash to help her move to Alaska and sold her my car. I’ve always taken good care of my vehicles, so buying it provided her with peace of mind as well as a patient lender. A little too patient, perhaps. You see, Kelly got started teaching music in Anchorage (a job I found for her), trying to build up enough students to really get herself going. In the meantime, she, being a writer like myself, joined a writer’s group in Anchorage. As she was only working part-time, she had more time to write, and got connected with an editor and a publisher. Knowing money was tight, I never asked for the remaining $2,000 she owed on the car. A year or so passed, all while right in the thick of the debacle with Amanda’s boyfriend/ex, and she announced she was finally getting her novel published. She begged my forgiveness for not being able to pay me back… by explaining that it had cost $7,000 to get her book to print.
“And I set $2,000 of that on fire and danced naked around it in counter-clockwise circles as an offering to the Gods of Literature. What?”
Moreover, Kelly was sharing the good news about her book getting published and inviting me to book signings while simultaneously vacillating between not talking to me for weeks at a stretch and acting excessively solicitous when she did. It all came off very disingenuous to me, and I was slightly perturbed by her constant less-than-subtle hints to buy her book. While I have nothing against vanity publishers per se, the manner in which she behaved seemed at best naïve and at worst willfully deceptive. She paid seven grand to get it published and had to sell each copy one-by-one herself hoping to break even. While enterprising, it’s barely a step above taking it to Kinko’s and running off copies yourself, and she played it off as some amazing stroke of luck (instead of an amazing stroke of her pen through a check-book). I can’t blame her for vanity publishing her book, all she really wanted was to see it in print, but doing so when she owed me a debt less than half the cost chapped my ass.
It’s just a shame how easily and how frequently things like this happen between women. They keep secrets, they don’t trust their friends to cope with all the facts, and most of all they lie to themselves. I won’t say I was blameless; I knew Kelly was the sensitive type, one who couldn’t take criticism well, yet I was blunt with her, and a little more harsh than I could have been when I decided I wasn’t going to be in the middle of her tiff with Amanda, anymore. I also should have known better than to mix finances with friendship. We did have a written agreement, however, and I did eventually get the money. Still, hearing from her now tends to put me on edge. Whatever we have now will never be the same as it was. The sad fact is, I don’t trust her motives. The chummy tone she uses leaves a bad taste in my mouth, and I can’t decide if I’m more angry or heartbroken over the fact.
Gently Used Foliage 