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A Kindred Spirit

The book of welcome says, Let people see you. . . . It’s called having friends, choosing each other, getting found, being fished out of the rubble. It blows you away how this wonderful event happened—me in your life, you in mine.

ANNE LAMOTT, SMALL VICTORIES

FROM THE START, there was nothing fearful about Clara Wiebe. None of this timid, new-girl posture for her. She was six feet tall, with curly, dirty-blonde hair and huge army-green eyes. She bobbed into our eighth-grade English class, her long strides and bouncy way of getting around noticeably different from anyone else. She grinned and gave a goofy, hectic little wave after the teacher notified us that Clara had just moved here with her family from the rural town of Steinbach. I thought she was weird from the start, but good weird, definitely good weird. “Take me or leave me; I really don’t care”—that’s what her stance told me about her.

The Beautiful People took her in with a glance and left her alone, neither fawning over her as fresh blood or picking on her. Clara’s kind of beauty—towering, dramatic, unusual—held little appeal for fourteen-year-old girls who thought the epitome of exquisiteness was to be five feet tall and ninety-nine pounds, soaking wet. She was no threat.

Denelle Loepkke, the preacher’s daughter, had laid some claim to Clara already, as their parents knew one another somehow. Of all the girls at school, Denelle was maybe the most innocent in my shunning. We know now there are queen bees and targets, but the vast majority of girls are simply bystanders, who don’t join in the shabby treatment of targets or do anything to stop it. Denelle was a kindhearted bystander and behaved toward me as if I were a person, not a nonentity. I returned the favor by swiping Clara from under her nose, something I still wish had gone down differently.

But then again, how else could it have gone down? It’s like the couple who is just starting to date. Everything is positive and promising, when suddenly the guy introduces his new girl to his roommate, and as it turns out, the roommate and the new girl are soul mates, and the first guy emcees their wedding with a sheepish look on his face. There was no way this friendship between Clara and me was not going to happen.

Denelle, out of the goodness of her heart, and maybe with some pressure from her parents, included me in a weekend afternoon of cake decorating at her house. I was ecstatic. Clara was deep into a food-coloring creation by the time I got there. Her face and hair were smeared with Smurf-blue icing, giving her a zombie look. I don’t remember what we laughed about, but soon I was laughing so hard I was crying and gagging. Those laughs went down like medicine, a tonic for what ailed me. Clara was the funniest person I had ever met, and I could tell she didn’t give a flying fig for what Viola Goossen or anyone else thought of her. If I even brought up Viola’s name, Clara’s eyes would roll. “Who cares about her?” she would say. And then she would change the subject, as if the Violas of this world were crashing bores, not worth discussing. That was the cure I needed most.

So I straightened up without knowing, and I stopped bowing and scraping for the approval of my peers. I had Clara now, and she understood and accepted me. We drove our mothers to distraction with all the requests to be together, to monopolize the family phone with hour-long calls after spending all day together at school. At my house, Clara and I would wait until everyone was asleep and then raid the freezer, chewing on half-frozen brownies on the Murphy bed in our basement, watching music videos hosted by Terry David Mulligan on channel 2. Clara made me feel as if I belonged again.

At Clara’s place, we would lie awake for hours, talking and stifling giggles amid the chatter of her crazy bird, Louie Kablouie, and the blobby glow of her red lava lamp. Above us hung about twenty McDonald’s french fry boxes on strings, an art installation by Clara. The first time I came over, she showed me her painting Blood and Sunshine, a canvas splashed with dried drips of red and yellow paint. For a girl like me, who favored Monet and Renoir, Blood and Sunshine was a stretch, but it fit Clara’s subversive MO to perfection.

If I was Anne, all dramatic speeches, flowery imagination, and a heart noticeably worn on the sleeve of my pink angora sweater, Clara walked in the clogs of another carrot-topped orphan: Pippi Longstocking. Though Clara did not have a father who was a castaway king on some South Seas island, she was a firm iconoclast—in dress (mostly black with emerald green thrown in ornamentally), hair style (at one point half buzzed), and the ability to neutralize bullies with one hand tied behind her back. Her superpowers, like Pippi’s, were intense loyalty and Teflon skin.

With Clara as my shelter and touchstone, I could have strapped myself very comfortably into the role as her sidekick, riding shotgun until we graduated in four years. But then her dad got a job as a minister of music at a church in British Columbia, and I lost her just a year and a half after I had found her. We were crushed, to say the least. Soon after she imparted this horrendous news at the snowy bus stop, my dad got us tickets to go see Amy Grant, whom I held in the deepest of awe. (My room, filled with posters and other merchandising materials from my dad’s Christian bookstore was like Six-Flags-Over-Amy. The only thing missing was a wax Amy, although I did have a cardboard cutout Amy, which was probably stalkerish enough.) Her opening act was Michael W. Something, a frenetic piano player who zigzagged around the stage like a laser beam. Normally, we would have impatiently bided our time for Amy to take the stage, but when he broke into “Friends,” Clara and I clutched hands and sobbed bitter tears. The song, inspired by friends of the songwriter’s who had moved, hit us square between the eyes. How would we ever survive high school without our other half?

When Clara left, late in the summer before tenth grade, it wrenched and ripped us both. Letters flew back and forth over the prairies to Vancouver, along with mixtapes comprised of music by the Eurythmics and Duran Duran, plus hours of haphazard ramblings about boys, using baby powder as dry shampoo, boys, Madonna, and boys. This was in the days of long-distance rates, and both of us were in almost perpetual hot water from our poor parents about their skyrocketing phone bills. Without the shelter of each other, cold drafts of loneliness beset us both, and we were orphaned in a different way—bereft, left behind, and left. Clara shaved her head and began kohl-rimming her green eyes. I moped around the house and ate vast quantities of half-frozen brownies. We lived for New Year’s Eve, when we would be reunited in Banff, Alberta, at the Mennonite Brethren national youth conference.

Yet I realized something a few weeks into the new, forlorn school year. I went into tenth grade as a loner, planning to keep to myself, as my heart had traveled with irreplaceable Clara to Vancouver. But I carried her influence with me and was changed. I was tougher, more hard-wearing in the face of fifteen-year-old girl drama. Even though my dearest friend was one thousand miles away, she had imparted some of her nonstick coating to me. Not only that, but I also now had my faith in which to dwell. Teresa of Avila described God’s home in our hearts as the “interior castle,” and it made all the difference to me to be able to go to the castle and talk things over with the King.

Even so, it came as a great surprise that fall that I could laugh and commiserate with other girls and even form real bonds with a few of them, bonds that last to this day. I discovered I could stand on my own two feet without Clara; I was so much more than just a sidekick.

But, oh, how I needed Clara Wiebe to bob into my English class that day in eighth grade. How we all need a like-minded soul to come along at just the right time to rescue us, to remind us of our own capacity to love and to stand.

Experiencing true friendship after a poverty of loneliness is like suddenly having access to the treasure chest in Pippi’s Villa Villekulla. Each phone call and shared meal and visit is like a golden coin, a pearl of great price. A friend can be your own version of a parted sea, of manna from a loving hand. Each time you are understood and accepted, your jokes laughed at and your sorrows made smaller by care, you feel richer than Pippi and so very lucky.

As for Anne, who had lived such a famished, loveless existence before arriving on Prince Edward Island (PEI), she needed Diana Barry even more than most of us need our kindred spirits. Because when your previous best friend is one who exists only in a glass reflection, smashed and cracked by your drunken foster father, you feel all the more rich and lucky when your bosom friend comes along.

I adore the beginnings of Anne Shirley and Diana Barry’s friendship, when Anne trembled in excitement and fear as she prepared to join Marilla on an errand to Orchard Slope to meet Diana, her potential friend. As readers, we anticipate what extraordinary event will happen in Barry’s Garden, and we cheer her on.

Did Anne somehow know that in Diana she would find the acceptance her shriveled little heart longed for? Did she have an instinct that her loneliness and grief would melt away in the company of someone who accepted her exactly as she was?

She could wait no longer for a true friend. Amid the crimson roses, bleeding hearts, peonies, and white narcissi of the Barry garden, Anne just came out with it:

“Oh, Diana,” . . . clasping her hands and speaking almost in a whisper, “do you think—oh, do you think you can like me a little—enough to be my bosom friend?”[37]

Diana laughed, because here was a funny girl with a funny way of putting things. And Maud lets us know that “Diana always laughed before she spoke.”[38] But Diana liked this way. She saw at once that Anne was weird, but good weird. “A queer girl,”[39] Diana called her, as in atypical, peculiar, and unlike anyone Diana had ever met before. Through friendly eyes, Anne’s “spirit, fire, and dew” translated to something more like “vivid, unconventional, and lovable.”

Anne and Diana’s friendship was larger than life, one for the books. Anne was left behind no more: She had found her best friend, her first partner in life.

Diana taught Anne to sing “Nelly in the Hazel Dell,” a song to shell peas by. Clara taught me to enjoy the music of U2, Howard Jones, and Duran Duran, even though I didn’t name my firstborn son Simon Le Bon Craker after all.

Diana told Anne that Charlie Sloane was “dead gone”[40] on her, while Clara sent me a rose one lackluster Valentine’s Day with a card reading, “I want you. Richard Gere,” which is the closest I’ll ever get to hearing that Richard Gere is dead gone on me.

Diana’s sympathetic gaze counteracted Josie Pye’s malicious one, and she turned “pale with pity”[41] when her friend was wrongfully punished by Mr. Phillips.

Anne and Diana were perfect for each other. While Diana was a placid pond, Anne seethed like the ocean with waves of joy and pain, even to the point of conjuring despair at the thought of being parted from her friend.

She imagined Diana getting married someday, adorned in snow-white garments; a black-eyed, rosy-cheeked, raven-curled queen. She cast herself as Suffering Bridesmaid—yes, in puffy sleeves at long last but with a cracking heart beneath her brave martyr’s smile.[42] She hated Diana’s future husband passionately, to the point where I fear she might have done harm to good, docile Fred Wright had his future identity as Diana’s groom been revealed to Anne in that moment. (Run, Fred, run!)

Of course they made mistakes together, and a few of them were doozies, such as the episode I like to call “Pouncing on Aunt Josephine.” It all started when Diana invited Anne to a concert at the Debating Club and overnight accommodations in the spare room at her parents’ home, at which point Anne ascended to the ceiling like an orange-dipped balloon. For Anne, each “thrill was thrillier than the last,” even that of Mr. Phillips giving Mark Antony’s oration over Caesar’s dead body and gawking at Prissy Andrews as he finished every sentence.[43]

(I’d like a wee word with Prissy’s parents, the Avonlea school board, and Mr. Creeper Phillips himself. Yes, we are told by scholars of the era that Mr. Phillips’s interest in his sixteen-year-old student was actually well within the bounds of propriety for the time, that even the fact that he wrote poems “to Priscilla” during class time and was often caught ogling her with big, simpering, watery cow eyes, was considered appropriate behavior then. Are we to be comforted by this? I think not. Maud may have based Mr. Phillips upon Mr. Mustard, a teacher who proposed marriage to her when she was sixteen and living with her father in Saskatchewan.[44] I’d like a word with them as well—Mr. Mustard and Mr. Montgomery! By the way, I added “watery” and “cow eyes” out of my own imagination.)

Back to Anne at the Debate Club recital: She was changed forever by this experience, and ironically, by the mistake to come that very night. If the dazzling recital hadn’t been enough excitement, Anne was about to spend the night in the Barrys’ spare room, her fondest wish. A home’s most luxurious accommodations were generally found in their guest rooms. As Anne told Marilla, “Think of the honor of your little Anne being put in the spare room bed.”[45] Anne Shirley, orphan, was finally worthy of someone’s softest and most luxurious apple leaf quilt, their peak picturesque views, their best pristine mirror and polished dressing table. Even anticipating it made her feel like a million bucks.

Once Anne and Diana had their white nightgowns on, they raced each other down the hall, through the spare room door, and sprang upon the bed and a slumbering Aunt Josephine like two gigantic grasshoppers.

We all know it was Aunt Josephine’s fault for showing up too early.

Be that as it may, Anne owned her mistake and did what she did best, which was to win people over. Disarming Aunt Josephine was perhaps the biggest win in Anne’s career and led to another life-bringing friendship. Becoming friends with Aunt Josephine taught Anne that affinity sometimes occurs in unlikely sources and that devoted pals are not as rare as she once thought.

Anne said it: “Tomorrow is a new day with no mistakes in it yet,”[46] and I’m betting these two gal pals never again sprang into a spare room bed without first checking for rich, crabby relatives beneath the covers.

But, ah, there’s just something about mistakes with friends, getting into scrapes together that probably wouldn’t have happened if left to our own devices.

I think of my friend Bonnie and me, overcome by a fit of giggles during our clarinet duet at the Pioneer Girls mother-daughter banquet, our giggles causing the dulcet tones of our horns to come out in bursts of bagpipe-y squeaks. Nobody was blessed by that musical package.

I consider my friend Nancy’s and my near-fatal road trip from Chicago, where we were both attending college, to Winnipeg. Nancy had been pickpocketed at Water Tower Mall, so her five hundred dollars in cash was gone, including the two hundred dollars my parents had given her for my portion of the trip home. We had no cash for our trip and no credit cards, either. With the optimism of youth, we set out anyway and drove right into the teeth of a blizzard, at one point spinning out on the highway and screaming our lungs out. The angels were prudently occupied by our haphazardness that day, and we arrived in one piece at a motel in Minneapolis, where Nancy’s alternator promptly died. Safe but cash poor and stranded, we lived on “chicken noodle” soup—aka “bouillon”—out of the vending machine for two days while a mechanic fixed the little blue Civic.

Or there was the time in college when my beautiful roommate Becky accepted a date to eat in the school cafeteria with a fellow whose personality was sorely lacking in snap, crackle, and pop. Sweet Becky couldn’t say no, and neither could I when she begged me to come along and chaperone. Was it the cod loin on offer in the cafeteria that day that set me off, or was it Myron Flikkema’s robotic way of talking? I was once again capsized with giggles, a theme in my life. Poor Myron kept trying to get something going with Becky over plates of cod loin; he might as well have tried to start a fire by rubbing two wet twigs together. I continued to hoot like an impaired owl, which gave Becky something to say to Myron: “She’s not right in the head. I’m so sorry,” over and over again.

Sure, we didn’t learn that much from our mistakes, my friends and I, other than that it’s a bad idea to drive in blizzards and chaperone your roommate on a date she never should have accepted, but, hey! That’s what memories are made of.

While revisiting the series, I noticed for the first time that there was one way in which Anne and Diana did not relate completely to each other: Anne’s writing. Diana was many things—loyal, even-tempered, and mostly sensible—but a writer she was not. Diana admired Anne’s writing talents to the skies, but that’s not the same thing as being a companion on “the Alpine path,” as Maud called her own writing career.[47] Still, Diana was always game for whatever monkeyshines Anne suggested, even joining, with Jane and Ruby, the story club to “cultivate” her imagination.[48]

“It’s extremely interesting,” Anne told Marilla. “Each girl has to read her story out loud and then we talk it over. We are going to keep them all sacredly and have them to read to our descendants.”[49]

It was Anne’s first writing community, something Maud never really had in her own life. Except for her pen pals Ephraim Weber, a Mennonite writer, and George Boyd MacMillan, a Scottish journalist, she had no one with whom to climb the Alpine path. Worse, she never had anyone to catch her when she fell off that jagged, mountainous trail with bloody knees and a sick, discouraged heart, like every writer before or since.

Her lack makes me all the more grateful for my own story club, The Guild. As Mrs. Rachel Lynde would say, it was perfectly providential how we seven scribblers came together. A local reporter named Ann and I both were jumbo with child—my middle, her youngest—when she interviewed me about my first book, a little baby name tome. We hit it off, and she suggested we start a writing group with a couple of other local scribes. Two of us became five and then nine and then seven, the final number we’ve settled on after a few partings and moves out of town.

We’ve shared it all in The Guild: aging parents; grief; teenagers; risk taking (Shelly urged Tracy to be bold, fly to Cyprus, and jump from a boat into the Mediterranean for character research on the biblical Jonah, which she did); and what to do when an arsonist burns down your house (When Alison’s house was torched by a lunatic, the first thing we did was show up at her sister-in-law’s with an emergency kit, including chocolate sea foam, a lovely card, a Guild T-shirt, and a boxful of books. Then we all cried our eyes out from relief, shock, and love.).

Together we and our works have encountered screaming success and long, cold silences that feel a lot like failure. We are each other’s Sherpa guides as we mountaineer Maud’s path, a trail pitted with high peaks and deep, rutted valleys. We are for each other when an editor says no, when an agent says maybe and then vanishes into space, when a novel one of us has written with so much tender care is praised by critics and roundly passed over by book buyers. We have met once a month for years at Schuler Books and Music in Grand Rapids, unless it’s our Christmas Tea (Tracy’s cheese pie is not to be missed), the writer’s conference we founded together each October, or the occasional sleepover featuring a quantity of chocolate sea foam and a movie starring Colin Firth in knee-length pants.

This last summer, one of us experienced a piercing disappointment; a “sure thing” had become “not a chance” in the head-spinning fashion for which the publishing industry is known. We rose up as one big fireball of indignation and wrath. Tracy, who has a fondness for speaking in military terms, led the charge. “First rule of combat?” she wrote in an e-mail minutes after hearing about our member’s rejection, “Keep moving when fired upon. And we’ve got your back, because we all have scorch marks. Trust the ones with the scorch marks.”

I trust the ones with the scorch marks, every single one a wounded healer, each a contributor to my life’s story. Without all my friends, writers and nonwriters, I would be curled in the fetal position somewhere, sucking my thumb.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that for the orphan’s heart, friendship means even more. Our beginnings were marked by the loss of people vital to us, so when we are intentionally picked and preferred by friends, it’s kind of a big deal. I witness Phoebe with her friends—playing soccer, caring tenderly for animals, bombing around on their bikes—and I smile. She is known and cared for by her friends in a different, essential way. She belongs to them and they to her.

Bosom friends are like this: We chose each other and were found. We fished each other out of the rubble. It blows me away how this wonderful event happened—her in my life, she in mine.

Bonnie, the most like Diana Barry of all my friends, is unflappable, kind, and true. She is stuck with me as long as the sun and moon endure.

Nancy followed the same path as I from Mennonite Winnipeg girl to Chicago, the city of broad shoulders. We each married exotic foreign men—one from Michigan, the other from Florida—and are teaching our American children about the True North we love. Nancy was there for me more than any other friend when my dad was dying and then gone. I love her like a sister.

Becky has a heart as big as a house, serves grace on a platter, and has been my confidante and partner in countless emotional treks. She is incapable of judging, which makes me want to let her see me, as is.

Lori, my first friend, is now the angel on my shoulder. She feels kindred and present, even still. We shared a name and a street; our league of two was forged the day she stayed behind with me in kindergarten, when she quickly tied my hat strings into a bow. The teacher had kept me back, appalled that I didn’t know how to tie a bow yet without looking at it. Lori was appalled that the teacher was such a crank. We walked home together hand in hand that day and many days after that.

Though our closeness tapered off during the years that we attended different middle schools and high schools, I never failed to feel comforted and rooted—aligned—somehow when passing her house, six houses from mine. Lori was still there, my old companion and ally, along with her family. Gravelly voiced Mrs. McCaskill had been a second mother to me, driving us to hockey games, feeding me Pizza Pops, and chatting with us as she baked in the sun, slathered in baby oil and wearing a gold lamé bikini. This low-coverage ensemble stood in stark contrast to my own mum’s modest bathing attire. (She would not have worn gold lamé even in a one-piece suit with a skirt attached, because we all know gold lamé might lead to disco dancing.) Mrs. McCaskill taught me that there is no correlation between bathing suit choices and the ability to nurture, no appropriate costume for maternal instincts. She always referred to me as her kid.

I didn’t know how attached I was to this family and their girl until I got the letter from my mum at Camp Arnes, where I worked as a camp counselor the summer after graduating from high school: Lori had been diagnosed with a rare soft tissue cancer. We were both eighteen years old. I shivered there on the hot bench by the canteen and wrapped my arms around myself to keep from breaking. How could it be?

Thirteen years later, I held Lori’s hand as she was dying and held back a river of tears through superhuman effort. Lori had survived five malignancies since her initial diagnosis; she would not survive the sixth. She wanted to talk about leaving this blue marble of our earth and what was to come for her. Her parents were not religious people; neither were her closest friends or her husband. Astonishingly, she remembered things taught in the backyard Bible club at my house an eon before, during the days of Popsicles and tire swings, things seeded by the Holy Ghost Himself and watered by a thousand prayers. She wanted to take Jesus’ hand and trust Him to save her and keep her. One of the greatest honors of my life was leading her to that pierced hand that provides all of our healing. Soon He would take her to the place He had prepared for her. Soon, she would be gone, but not lost.

On our last day together, I smiled through blurry eyes (oh, it was hard!) and talked to Lori about heaven. Look homeward, angel. Look! You’ll be there soon, and I will carry you here with me until we meet on that beautiful shore. Every day since, I have looked at the brilliant blue stone on my right hand—her sapphire class ring—and I remember. I remember my first partner in life. And I think again that death steals so much, but it articulates a friendship like nothing else.

And what became of Clara, my bosom friend who freed me from slavery to the opinions of my own Josie Pye? She up and ran off with Fred Wright, er, Bruno Klassen, a fellow U2 fan from our high school. The bride wore ivory, and the Suffering Maid of Honour wore dark green velvet as she made a funny little speech.

This has taken me a long time to parse: Best friends may be inseparable for a season before the road diverges geographically, politically, or spiritually. Your best friend takes one road, and you take another. There is a day that comes that is very hard—when you know that something funny will happen to her on the way to class, and she’ll tell only one person about it and that’ll be Bruno, not you. Maybe that’s my orphan heart talking, but it takes only about twenty years of wishing for things to be the same before you realize that it is okay, really, it is, that they will never be.

When best friendships change, you make room for new types of relationships, and you wake up one day and realize you couldn’t live without having had those post-BF friends. They have added so much. If things had stayed the same with Clara, there wouldn’t have been room for Bonnie, Becky, Nancy, and other loves of my life. I’m so glad there was room.

Clara and I are still friends, of course, although we rarely see each other. Recently, we all miraculously ended up in Chicago on the same night, though Clara and Bruno live in Ontario and my husband and I live in Michigan. We had a ball, eating Lou Malnati’s deep-dish pizza, strolling Rush Street, and catching up and laughing. Clara and I could still speak in shorthand with each other. The surprise get-together made me grateful anew for our era, mine and hers, how it formed and ennobled me, and made me who I am. Plus, that Bruno Klassen is a pretty swell guy after all.

Anne’s divergent road also led her away from Diana, to new friends such as Phil, Stella, and Leslie, compatible souls to share her college experience, teaching life, and motherhood. Yet Diana was waiting in Avonlea, Anne’s touchstone always.

Few of us will ever experience that kind of undying closeness, but then again, few of us will ever need a friend the way Anne needed Diana, her salve and saving grace.

Yet if Anne teaches us anything about friendship, it’s that the spark of resemblance—you spotting me, me spotting you—can exist even in the strangest and most unexpected places. In the final analysis, it’s nothing but splendid to discover there are so many kindred spirits in this world.