Creating My Own Reality

Summer between eighth grade and high school I make a firm, intuitive decision. I just won’t be shy anymore. That’s all there is to it. Hardly anyone at my new Catholic girls’ high school will know me, and those who do won’t care.

“How To Win Friends and Influence People” from the Bookmobile is the answer to my prayers. I’ll shower the attention I have not received: Friend to All, Friend to the Misfit, Friend to The Different.

Passing in the halls between classes—that Times Square of High School—I greet everyone, even those I know from grade school. Coining nicknames, magnanimous, driving my personality through the halls like a brand-new ’65 Pontiac.

Get involved. Like a maple tree loosing helicopters, fluttering bits of myself all over the school. Clean up? I’m there. Chorus? I’m in. Plan the St. Patrick’s Assembly? You betcha.

At last I meet My Best Friend.

February 1966. Batman flooding the airwaves. Freshmen always stage the St. Patrick’s Assembly. “What about Patman and Robin?” I say. The Committee laughs. Acceptance. “He could fight ‘Big Orange.’ ”

(What are the Irish? What is TV?)

Suddenly someone with blue eyes, a scotch complexion, very long shiny brown hair makes suggestions back at me. “What if—then we could—then Patman says—”

Two musicians jamming for the first time.

“That’s right, Robin. Big Orange will be on ice a long time in the cooler!”

A gymnasium of groans and laughter. A hit!

And a person I’m ’specially glad to greet in the halls.

The year opens into spring, then summer. Doing dishes one night I hear her name on the radio. She’s sent the DJ a suggestion. I can’t believe it. I call her.

She hadn’t been listening. We talk a long time.

•••

She goes on a trip and she sends me a postcard. I never got one from anyone not a relative. Would I like to be in the Jan and Dean fan club? Sure would!

We stay in touch over the summer. She actually calls me. The first day of school we seek each other out, begin a conversation lasting fifteen years.

Sleepovers are best. We don’t have to stop talking. Doritos and malted milk balls, Judy Collins. We sleep at her house more than mine.

It’s amazing learning someone else’s landscape.

Her house has a sense of intention ours lacks. A small house—two parents, two kids (younger brother)—but well-thought-out.

Objects have places. Things in our house just land somewhere. They have a teal blue and lime green color scheme. We have no scheme at all. Their pillows are wooly and woven, not smelly and bunched-up. We have a painting of John-John saluting the casket. They have framed sheet music and a funny Peanuts calendar. Such a cool planter! Looks like a Frisco townhouse. Wit, texture, sophistication. Piles of New Yorkers. (Her Dad taught journalism at the University.) And fittingly, her mother’s framed collection of barbed wire.

For all her taste, I remember her mother’s tart tongue, my deep-set feeling that she didn’t like me.

And I felt the chill in that marriage like an open freezer door. Her parents lived side by side like neighbors hardly speaking except to argue about whose apples fell on whose side of the fence and lay there rotting and who had to clean them up and “it’s not even my tree.”

At least there’s warmth between my parents.

•••

Now I’m making friends because I’m being a friend and now I’m being in plays because my best friend can drive and get us there and I get to be in All My Sons and say, “I resent living next door to the Holy Family!”

And we sing and write scripts together and I make more real friends. They laugh at my jokes. One of them smokes and two of them drink and two of them want to kill themselves, but I help talk them out of it.

(I don’t smoke or drink—I want my gold watch—but I do press a razorblade into my wrist once just deep enough to know I didn’t want to do it.)

•••

Of course I’m still fat. I’m overeating and in our house we don’t have bodies. Since childhood I’d been carefully carrying nitroglycerin pills in their little brown bottle downstairs, pills that Dad took for his mending heart, pills I was scared I would drop and blow our landscape all to smithereens. Dad’s “bad” heart kept him from the sports he’d loved, or even marching in The Rosary Parade (for which I would have given many things to be a bead). Dad can’t swim with you, can’t play ball. Dad cannot be physical at all. And so we learn to place the head and heart above the body’s grace.

•••

But one night he risks it all: The Daddy-Daughter Dinner Dance.

He cancels a professional engagement to go with me that night. We talk and joke, as always, and dance the slower tunes, but a wild polka tempo comes up.

“A schottische!” he cries. “Well, I’m game!” It was the most and fastest you had ever moved in all my life, that single dance, and we whirled and whirled around the world, blue and white streamers fluttered from the basketball hoops and the foil stars swung.

•••