I meet Sarah in a restaurant with no prices on the menu. We are in Midtown, at a lunch spot that looks more like a ballroom for a charity benefit. Warhol portraits of Nureyev and the Shah of Iran stare down finance types in C-shaped booths. A glass chandelier, which looks like a wedding cake made from Krugerrands, dangles from the ceiling, sprinkling gold dust on our heads.
“You look so beautiful,” I say when I get to our table because that is what you say to a woman you haven’t seen in almost twenty years. But I mean it. She is still tall and lean-bodied, still elegant in the black wool tunic and tights she wore today, she says, because it reminded her of our old uniforms. Her eyes are narrower than I remember, harder to read.
I had posted a request on Facebook in search of Gary Wilensky’s former campers. When a classmate suggested Sarah and tagged her name, I waited to hear from her. And when I didn’t, I reached out.
She knew Gary Wilensky, too. She went to one of the camps where he coached. I had forgotten about this, like so many other things.
“You’re not remembering correctly,” Sarah says over a bowl of Amatriciana di tonno. She says we didn’t go to clubs in ninth grade, but rather tenth grade. I look down at the coiled tubes in chunky pink sauce, an explosion of brain matter. So strange that the mechanism responsible for our own realities is a substance you could fit inside a bowl.
“Really? I thought we started going to clubs earlier,” I say, trying to tone down my certainty out of respect. I’ve brought her here to share her memory. I need to honor it, and I should definitely pick up the check. That is the right thing to do, no matter how much it costs. I’ll take home leftovers—I’ll stretch it into two meals.
But Sarah suggested this restaurant, so maybe she picks up the check. What are the rules? Sarah comes here for lunch often enough that she knows the waiters. She usually sits in one of the booths, she tells me, but they didn’t have any available today. A waiter comes over to say hello. Ciao, he says, or she says ciao. One of them says ciao, a greeting native to this restaurant-nation.
It almost feels inappropriate to take out my recording device—a cold proclamation of my outsider status, with respect to this setting and our once-close friendship. I most certainly will pick up the check now.
“Tell me about your memories of Gary at camp,” I say, nudging the recorder between our plates.
“I used to receive birthday cards every year from him and I remember thinking, ‘How did he remember my birthday?’ because I never told him my birthday.” She smirks as she says this. Her lips bunch together over her teeth, holding back a smile. I’ve missed her face.
“At camp, he was the hero,” she continues. “He was why people went back there. They went for Gary Wilensky. They looked up to him.”
She describes him as a Pee-wee Herman type. “He made tennis fun and unique and crazy and against the rules,” she says. “That’s why we liked it.”
He broke the rules with no impunity—that’s exactly it. Our early lives are spent learning the rules, and our adolescent years are spent questioning the validity of such rules. Even in tennis, there were so many rules with no explanations for them. And to see an adult, the person who’s supposed to enforce the rules, breaking them was mind-bending.
“He would always come in the middle of your lesson and do something wacky and make the kids scream and get excited,” says Sarah.
She leans in closer to the recorder and lowers her voice.
“I remember one summer, Gary had a breakdown,” she recalls. “Something went wrong. He got in trouble.”
“Do you know what it was about?” I ask.
“Hold on,” she says. She is going to tell this story in the way she remembers.
“I’ll never forget seeing him after we got the announcement that Gary wasn’t going to be teaching tennis anymore and they sent him home in the middle of the summer.
“I’ll never forget seeing Gary. He did a going-away sale of all his stuff. I remember clothing hanging around the courts. He was on roller skates maybe, or maybe he was in a tennis skirt. It looked like a flea market of Gary’s stuff. It was a tournament and he gave away all his stuff—shirts and jackets with his face on it. Gary memorabilia. You’d win one if you hit the ball in the right way.
“I remember that as the downfall of Gary, that summer. I remember the announcement to everybody that Gary was leaving for the summer and he wouldn’t be coming back. I don’t know if he didn’t come back or if he just got suspended for that summer.”
“How old were you?” I ask.
“I had to be twelve, maybe,” she says. “Then I remember seeing Gary before he left and he had these cats. He was petting the cat and I remember going up to him and saying, ‘So sorry to hear you’re leaving.’
“The way he was holding the cat and petting it—holding it so close. He wasn’t his responsive self. He looked very depressed. Completely the opposite of that day on the courts. I knew something was wrong with him.
“After he left, through gossip we found out he had gotten obsessed with a girl at camp. I found that out on the bus ride home when one of the older girls told me. It was hush-hush.”
I had reached out to the camp directors and not received a response. But shortly after Gary’s death, they had spoken to the press about firing Gary, citing his favoritism and temper as reasons for letting him go. The camp directors told the Times, “His anger toward them and his attachments to favorite students became unacceptable.” This is the first I’ve heard of the rumor, and perhaps that was all it was.
Rumors are slippery things, passing from girl to girl on the verbal condition of secrecy and the unspoken promise of betrayal. A story to be believed or discounted, but never forgotten.
Mothers share rumors, too. “I need to ask you something,” my mom had said as I sat on the floor of my bedroom, a few years after my high school graduation. “Did you ever threaten Bianca with a knife?” She’d heard a rumor, which she’d kept to herself until enough time had passed that the truth would require no immediate ramification. The truth could just be the truth. “Of course not,” I said, trying to hold her gaze. “I didn’t, I swear.” I have a problem with the truth—the more confident I am in it, the less I believe it. I understand how innocent people buckle under interrogation. Even if they never committed the actual crime, the accusation becomes a question of would you, rather than did you, and even if you wouldn’t, you are forced to imagine the scenario in which you would. You are guilty of thinking it.
“You don’t think I would do that, do you?” I asked.
“Well, you were pretty troubled back then,” she said. My own memory of those days is imperfect, but I had no memory of this event. Still, the fact that my mother saw me as capable of it made me question my own certainty.
“Where did you hear this?” I asked.
“All I heard is that the reason you two stopped being friends is that you threatened her with a knife,” she said.
“You know that’s not true. You were there when I called them.”
One year after Gary Wilensky died, I had broken up with Sarah and Bianca on a conference call. It was my decision, not theirs, though it was influenced by my sister. When she was home from college one summer, she had witnessed the three of us together, and how self-critical I’d become around them. “Your friends are supposed to make you feel better about yourself,” my sister had said. “Not worse.”
But it wasn’t their fault. They never cut me down. I did it to myself. It was my approach to dealing with our increasing differences. I thought it best to be transparent, to call out what I imagined they hated about me as much as I did—not just the physical disparities, but the mental ones.
Sarah and Bianca seemed to be growing in straighter directions, north toward adulthood. They’d found a new, more popular set of friends from another school. The friends all wore boots they called shitkickers and had boyfriends with facial hair. They listened to hip-hop, DJ’d at clubs, and spoke of relationships—not even sex, but relationships. They were flyer girls, and Bianca and Sarah were becoming such girls as well. It suited them, and whenever they’d bring me along, I felt like a relic of their past. A loose tooth clinging to a lone root. Something that needed to go, and soon.
There was also tennis camp and the three boys, which had left me so ashamed, I really didn’t think I deserved a place in our threesome. I never told Bianca or Sarah what had happened while I was away, though I assumed they’d heard some version of the events. I assumed I’d let them down by not winning the boys over, and that my friendship was a stain on their reputations. Whatever these boys thought of me was the truth, and I didn’t want my friends to be associated with it.
Pacing in my sister’s room with the phone at my neck, I told Sarah and Bianca that I needed a break from our friendship. It was best for all three of us. We weren’t good for each other. Friends are supposed to make you feel better about yourself, and other phrases I’d written down on an envelope to prompt me if I forgot the reasoning. I didn’t mention tennis camp; I didn’t mention Gary. I’d already buried him underneath the three boys.
I don’t remember what they said, but I do remember their silence. “Hello?” I’d asked, and they were both still on the line.
When I hung up the phone, my sister said she was proud of me. My mother agreed. It was good what I did. We were best friends and then we weren’t. I had peeled off the sticky tape that sealed the three of us together, and now I would be better. Fixed.
They were the problem, it was decided. But that wasn’t entirely true. There is no accounting for the fear triggered in adults when three precocious teenage girls anoint themselves best friends, or how often that friendship is blamed for behavior by males in their orbit. The truth was, they weren’t to blame for my self-loathing, and I knew that. I broke it off because I thought they were going to break up with me.
“You guys were so mature, and I was a such a little emotionally delayed weirdo,” I tell Sarah over lunch.
“That’s not true,” says Sarah. “You were always so cool and creative.” I can’t tell if she means it or if that’s another thing you’re supposed to say.
I ask Sarah about Bianca. She’s good. A mother now. They still talk and text, even if they don’t live in the same city. This is how it’s supposed to be—friends from high school keeping in touch, sharing memories as they grow, moving up the steps of adulthood in parallel.
Sarah’s a shrewd businesswoman, as she always was, but now professionally. She’s doing well, she says. She never was one to complain. “And you?” she asks.
I tell her about my last of a string of relationships that burned hot and then fizzled. And how I’m living alone in the city, working a lot, obsessively researching dead men.
“So I’m basically the exact same as when you last saw me.”
She laughs.
“I think I’m stunted,” I say. This time she doesn’t laugh, because maybe it’s sad. It’s hard to know if I’m joking—it’s been so long.
When we return to the topic of Gary, she says, “I always knew he was awkward, but I was the only one.”
She speaks with an assuredness she’s never not had—her humor, founded on the principle that the world is nuts and she isn’t. I believe her. I believe I am part of the world. We are both right.
Sarah is the kind of person who knows things—a survivor, not with respect to being a victim of a specific trauma, but in the resilient, Darwinian way. She will be someone who lives long, I think, as if it were a fact written on a title card at the end of a movie, when the character is replaced by two sentences and a photo of the real person the character was portraying.
Sarah asks for the check and gets lost in her phone. I grab it, as I’d promised myself I would, but she insists we split it down the middle. I don’t fight her on it. Maybe I should have. Maybe then she would stay with me a little longer. She reminds me of home—the one with all the rooms, the barricade of doormen, the water bubbling on the burner, the bird on its haunches in the oven, the shopping bags under the table, the father on the sofa, the mother with her desk drawer full of secrets I was too young to see, and the bedroom window I decided to close because more was coming. Impossibly more.
We hug outside the restaurant. “It was good to see you,” she says, now that we’ve already seen each other and we’re about to not see each other, because the past is the past and there’s no going back to change it.