We officially became friends that evening, on the train ride back to Brooklyn, when we discovered not only that we were both scared of Tracy—I said scared of Tracy but Rose said she was kind of scared, just so I knew who was in charge here—but that we were both enraged by that Rolling Stones lyric about American girls wanting everything. Rose was impressed by my reading of the situation, which referenced Isabel Archer and Daisy Miller, and I was impressed by Rose’s reading of the situation, which referenced Margaret Sanger and Emma Goldman. But, I said, hesitantly, ultimately our rage is impotent, because I suspect Mick Jagger knew the truth that all our women’s studies classes refused to acknowledge, which was that all the raised consciousness in the world couldn’t prevent—
Rose interrupted me with a laugh, and said: Oh my God, no. Dude didn’t get blown by some Pan Am stewardess. That’s what that’s about. End of story.
A picture of what Rose and I looked like, taken at Coney Island, on the boardwalk, beach and gulls in the background, in the summer of 1998, the year we became friends: I’m wearing a baby tee that says Girls kick ass! under denim overalls, barefoot, my pair of red suede Pumas in one hand, cat-eye glasses, my red-brown hair cut in a bob like Tracy’s. Rose is wearing a red zip-up polyester minidress, formerly a waitress’s uniform that had come with a name tag—Brenda—still pinned to the front, and silver Doc Marten boots. Her curly blond hair, bleached platinum, is caught up in a topknot in a red bandanna and she is striking a James Bond pose in front of me, one knee down on the boardwalk, gun pointed off camera. Later I would refer to outfits like the one I’m wearing there as examples of an unfortunate tendency to drift toward clothes that made me look like your kid sister the garage mechanic, and Rose will, even later than that, tell me that though she protested at the time, she saw what I meant.
The guy who took the picture drove us to Coney Island that day to decide which of us he wanted to sleep with. He told me, while Rose was off buying us beer, that I’d probably have more luck finding men who wanted to fuck me than I would trying to publish books. He told Rose, while I was off buying us tickets for the Cyclone, that she’d probably have more luck trying to publish books than she would trying to find a man who could take her level of crazy.
Rose is beautiful, that guy said, while Rose was off buying us beer. But you’re a good person. If I could live another life in addition to this one, you’d be the one I’d marry.
You mean, I said, in the life after this one, where you’re actually talented?
He laughed, loudly, and I think sincerely. He was too confident to care that I’d insulted him. It was not unattractive.
We were twenty-five.
What did we want?
We wanted the guy who took that picture in Coney Island to write a song about us. And he did—or he might have. Rose was sure he had us in mind when he wrote a song that started with the line Two girls, one freckled, one curled. I remember driving us to Long Beach that summer and playing the advance copy of that guy’s record and hearing that line and thinking, Am I crazy to—and then Rose started cackling. We won! she said. Now we both were cackling. And then Rose again: That prick! The windows down, the wind tearing our hair apart, the heat of the day a drink we could not get enough of. Well, I said, after a few bars went by, that could be anybody, demurring out of habit, and Rose said, Yeah, but we’re not just anybody.
Some more of what we wanted, which we talked about in bars, so many nights in bars, that first year we met: I told Rose that I sometimes thought I could die when I knew that I had lived nearly every line that Joni Mitchell had written and sung on Blue. Rose said she thought she could die when she knew that she’d lived every word written or sung by Aretha Franklin on I Never Loved a Man the Way I Loved You. I told her that I knew I could die also when I had written myself out of the fear that Joan Didion would laugh if she were ever introduced to any of my sentences. Rose said she knew she could die when she had written something as good as In Cold Blood. I made fun of her for owning Sarah McLachlan’s Fumbling Towards Ecstasy, and she made fun of me for owning the Weezer album, but we both agreed that “Box of Rain” was the only Grateful Dead song worth shit, and that we’d been in love with Sting for one album too long. But what were we supposed to do? said Rose. Get it up for Axl Rose? I told her that sometimes I wanted to be Wendy Darling, wanted to be responsible for these Lost Boys in bands we saw coming through the office, wanted to be bedded among their absurdity and mess, wanted to be enthroned in a high-necked nightgown, above their absurdity and mess. Rose nodded. She said: In college I’d have met one of these dudes in a band and said, Fuck you and your bullshit, I’ve got my own stuff to do, but you know, now—and then she remembered that in college she’d almost had a one-night stand with someone who had been busy making rock history, as they used to say, when we were children. Rose, I said, I feel the need to say maybe fuck you and your bullshit! And she laughed. I guess, she said, I am into your bullshit if you are old enough to be my father. Then I laughed, and nodded, and didn’t say much, because as a feminist I felt I wasn’t supposed to admit to wanting to be seduced by an older man. I did, though, mention that I first learned what erotic feelings were the first time I watched The Sound of Music on television, and watching Captain von Trapp blow his whistle at the bottom of the stairs made me feel uncomfortable that my parents were in the room with me—I mentioned it because I wanted a laugh, and I got one. Yeah! Rose said. Me too! And said that she remembered feeling the same exact thing—but then started worrying about what Anne Frank would think of her for being turned on by an Austrian. Anne Frank was my Joan of Arc, she said, until I read Hannah Arendt. Then, to see just how closely aligned we were on the subject, I brought up Mr. Bhaer, the German professor Jo falls in love with at the end of Little Women. We learned that in the summer of 1983, both of us ten years old, Rose and I—she in her twin bed in Port Jefferson, Long Island, and me in my twin bed in Somers Point, New Jersey—separately but together came to the conclusion that while we too thought we should of course one day marry professors who were older men, Mr. Bhaer was much too old. Laurie was too pretty, too foppish, too flimsy a foil for Jo, we knew, but Mr. Bhaer was grotesquely old. Too old and too bearded, per the illustrations in our respective copies, to be contemplated as a suitable match for Jo, who was our once and future self.
The first thing I did when I learned Rose was pregnant was to track down the exact copy we’d owned as girls. Grosset and Dunlap Illustrated Junior Library edition, first printing 1982.
What did we want? In childhood, Rose wanted the love of one man and the praise of the world; I wanted the praise of the world and the love of one man. We could see traces of adventurers in our ancestry, but no full-blown cases. No one had escaped the bonds of familial or economic duty fully enough to have both love and fulfilling work—that was the fairy tale the two of us had raised ourselves on, that work would set us free. Rose had great-uncles who would have tried out for the Dodgers if only they hadn’t gotten their girlfriend pregnant; I had great-aunts who would have gone to work in New York City as secretaries but for their dying father and a fear that they’d end up as single women living in boarding houses. Our family trees were groaning with missed or ignored opportunity. So we had taken it upon ourselves, in our respective twin beds, in the 1980s, to achieve glories and freedoms our female relatives had never dreamed of. We had read, in our respective twin beds, that you could have a maiden aunt, circa 1908, who worked in a factory and organized her fellow working girls to demand what would later become known as the weekend, or, if it were circa 1947, you could have a maiden aunt who taught French, and spent her vacations traveling the world when the world was still shrouded in danger and mystery, or if it were circa 1966, you could have a maiden aunt who became a nun and shortly thereafter went to jail for plotting to burn down a draft office.
Rose joked that she came from Italians who were too sad and lazy to join the mob or the church. I joked that I came from Irish potato farmers who came to America and farmed laundry and appliance repair. My father managed a plant that cleaned clams on the Jersey Shore. Rose’s father, who died in a motorcycle accident when she was five, had managed a lawn-care business started by his uncle. And both of our fathers escaped being drafted for Vietnam because they’d signed up for the National Guard early enough. Rose’s mother was a hairdresser who gave haircuts in her basement and did hair and makeup for weddings when she wasn’t working at a strip-mall salon that, as Rose liked to say, she presided over like Madame de Staël. My mother helped keep books for the plant; she also altered prom dresses, wedding dresses, and suits for all occasions on a Kenmore sewing machine in our basement.
Rose and I loved each other because we were relieved to finally find a friend who understood what it was like to want so much for yourself it hurt—and who understood that real heroines don’t let on that it hurts, they shut up and do the work. A friend who knew what it was like to love your family but to want another family created out of the authors you have decided are your truest relations, and to try to live up to what the famous dead, unrelated by blood, had asked of you. What it was like to have known even before you learned the word existed that you were a feminist, but to be raised by women who were never impelled to take up that label and in fact sometimes disparaged it. What it was like to be the first person in your family to graduate from college and how that could make you feel like a changeling; like an alien; like a prodigy one day and perennially late to class the next. What it was like to have read so much, and wanted so much, that you could sometimes ride a subway feeling distended with hope and intent as you’d finish a book, and then look up at all the people sitting around you and get what felt like the bends trying to reconcile the want that book had stoked in you with the chaos of the world in front of you, the world as it was.
We did not want children.
I have zero interest in getting involved in a power struggle with a two-year-old, said Rose, in a booth at O’Connor’s that year.
Same here, I said. I don’t want to trap some unsuspecting human in a psychodrama that’ll go on running even after I die.
Say that again? Rose rummaged in the bag that sat next to her and fished out a pen.
I did, and she wrote it down on the back of a damp Sam Adams coaster.
Rose and I would never have said that we had unhappy childhoods, but they were shadowed childhoods, because we knew, or thought we knew, that our mothers were unhappy, even though Rose’s mother and grandmother and aunts worked it out so that she would never have to see the worst of her mother’s grief if they could help it, and my mother and grandmother and aunts hid all their true feelings behind jokes and food and alcohol and housekeeping. Still we sensed that there were clouds hanging over the women who raised us, and it made me quieter than I should have been, made Rose louder than she should have been, and left us both determined never to be mothers. To be a mother meant to die inside, constantly, so that everyone else could live. No thanks.
My mother had no blood to bleed, or so I believed, nothing to say or sing or else she’d die. Rose believed the same of her mother. We didn’t run around saying that we would die unless we wrote, however, because we did not come from people who would put up with that kind of nonsense.
Sometimes I think that growing up puzzled and shadowed by our mothers’ sadness did as much damage as if we had grown up without mothers at all. Not knowing what our mothers wanted from their own lives and what they loved sent Rose and me off into the world a little blind and a little lame. Because we did not know these things, we imagined ourselves the first women on the moon, shot out of a void into more void, which made us more susceptible than most, perhaps, to the notion that we had to constantly labor to make it new, like Ezra Pound said. And even more frequently I wonder if Rose and I might not have been feminists as much as girls who possessed a deep horror of becoming their mothers, which as I type tempts me to ask whether there’s any other kind of girl, and if, because of when we were born, we just happened to run into a body of literature that we could raid at will for the fuel needed to keep running away from home. If I wanted to condemn us, I could say that our feminism was almost purely personal—nothing but a tool for self-empowerment—and hardly ever political. I could blame us for being more interested in finding the right word than fighting for the rights of others, and for being content with an education that left us with the impression that cultural representation mattered as much or more than economic equality. But if I don’t want to condemn us, I don’t want to celebrate us by counting the ways in which we did try to improve the lives of all women, and all people, and either way I’d be giving in to the voices in my head that demand I legitimize my existence by desiring exactly what others desire.
Another night that first year we met, I said that I hated how sometimes being a feminist seemed to mean never having questions about feminism, that there was a party line as immutable as the ones drawn by Communists and the Catholic Church. Said Rose: I know, I know. But you have to speak your mind about where you think it’s wrong. What would Anne Frank say? I laughed. I’m serious, she said. I mean, it’s crazy, but I always, well, no, I used to, ask myself, what would Anne Frank think of me if she knew I was wasting—
I finished her sentence by quoting the last line of Mary Oliver’s “The Summer Day.”
Rose cackled. We hated that poem. Too much Morrissey on my part, too much N.W.A. on hers. Too much children of the children of the children of the Depression. God, I hate that poem, she said, but I love you for hating it with me. Anyway, so, yes, what would Anne Frank do if she knew I was wasting my precious freedom of speech worried about what the fuck other people would think?
Rose and I might have been a little bit better at hating what we hated than loving what we loved.
Rose and I didn’t want to be rich—at least not when we were twenty-five. We wanted to have enough money to buy used books and vintage dresses; we wanted to be able to buy turkey sandwiches at a bodega when we were drunk at 2:00 a.m. on a Saturday, and then bagels and the Sunday Times when we were hungover the next afternoon, and not have to think about it. We wanted to save money to travel. So I got us jobs moonlighting as cocktail waitresses at a bar in the East Village. One night, in December, while I’d been reading and waiting for Rose to show up, the bartender mentioned they were losing two of their Friday night waitresses. I volunteered us both on the spot, because Rose and I had both waitressed summers and school nights.
Rose and I, standing across from each other in that crowded bar, backs against the wood-paneled walls, holding our trays against our chests as patrons squeezed by, exchanging identically elated smiles: benevolent presiders over loves at first night. Rose and I sparkling under red lights, because of the tiny fake pearls covering every inch of my ice-blue lamé minidress, and the silver sequins on the white tulle skirt of hers, both dresses bought for ten dollars each, fished out of cardboard boxes full of vintage clothes outside Canal Jean Company on Broadway before our first night on the job. That dress of mine lasted four shifts. It shed and scattered its tiny fake pearls over the floor of the bar and the floor of the subway and the floor of my apartment. Years later, I’d keep finding those plastic beads under the couch and in the corner of my closet. A votive candle on a table set Rose’s tulle skirt on fire, burnt most of the front right off, but she continued to wear it with glittering pink fishnets and old Capezio dance shoes that she’d painted silver. Rose called her look Cancan Girl Just Sprung from Bellevue; I called mine Arthritic Former Figure Skater on a Bender.
A digression: Rose and I once followed Lou Reed up Broadway into Canal Jean Company and hid behind a column while we watched him look through a rack of used sport coats. At one point he looked up at us and said Are you following me? and I said Yes because I was too stunned to lie and Rose was too stunned to say anything at all and he nodded, no big deal, said Just checking, and went back to perusing used sport coats. Give Laurie our love, Rose said on the way out, and he either did not hear us or ignored us.
New York. Or maybe I mean: Lou Reed. Same diff, to use a phrase beloved by Rose’s mother.
Lou Reed, Rose used to say, with dream in her voice, and sometimes apropos of absolutely nothing, Lou motherfucking Reed.
At the end of the night at the bar, sitting on stools counting our tips and eating cheesecake the bartender ordered from Veniero’s three blocks up. Cheesecake. I don’t know why, and we used to beg for him to order burritos or falafel, but the bartender, who came from outside Nashville, used to tell us to hush now and let him get the diabetes like the kind what killed his pawpaw. That bartender. Our first night ever in that place, I asked if they had any nuts. You’re looking at them, he said, motioning out to the crowd. Rose always said he liked me, I always said she was crazy, and if he did like me, he never did anything about it, probably because he had a girlfriend finishing up college back home, and the bartender, we guessed, was no younger than thirty-two. That jukebox, which the bartender tended like a garden, planting and weeding, weeding and planting—he removed “Walkin’ After Midnight” when he thought I’d played it one too many times. That jukebox, that bar, where I first heard Johnny Cash and June Carter sing “Jackson.” The heat of the light coming through the smooth glass, warm and bright like a fireside, while I fed it with dollars, snow blanketing the streets, silencing the East Village, sending all the children home. That jukebox gave me an education. Memphis Minnie, Skeeter Davis, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Kitty Wells, Loretta Lynn. Better the jukebox than that bartender.
Walking to the subway one night that year, back to Brooklyn after a reading in Manhattan, I felt compelled to confess to her that at one point I had certain thoughts about Karl. I did not want to hide anything from Rose, and I told her so.
That’s brave, she said.
We walked a block in silence and then she spoke.
I did, too, once, she said. But I am now of the mind that he and I missed our chance. It would never have worked. Karl’s too good for me, for us, for anyone on earth.
She sounded sad—so sad I wondered if something had actually happened between them. But she did not seem to want to talk about it, and neither would I, if Karl had judged me and found me wanting. I changed the subject and leaned into the mere reporting of fact.
I saw him eating a hard-boiled egg for lunch yesterday, I said. One egg. Just one. He didn’t even salt it.
Rose laughed, and I relaxed a little bit more. Oh, God. His one egg. And his exactly three shirts and exactly two pairs of pants from Galaxy Army Navy.
We walked another block. I think he thinks I’m too much. Now she sounded even sadder.
Well, I like you.
I like you, too. You’re teaching me that women can actually be friends.
Rose! I stopped, but she laughed and pulled me on. Who on earth have you spent your life hanging out with?
Self-hating punk chicks who think it’s uncool to talk about your feelings. Rich bitches with serious self-esteem issues who mistake my bossiness for replacement mothering. Anorexic kleptomaniacs who steal not just your shoes, but the thesis for your senior thesis.
Ah. Drama queens and sociopaths.
Yep. I—oh, I don’t know why I couldn’t find one good female friend. I guess I’m supposed to say I didn’t really want one.
The way I’m supposed to say I didn’t have a boyfriend in high school because I didn’t really want one.
Don’t ever leave me, she said, and I linked my arm in hers—just like Anne and Diana did as they walked along the Lake of Shining Waters, just like Betsy and Tacy did as they entered the halls of Deep Valley High, just as girls across centuries have done, as they walk streets and sketch dreams—knowing that in doing so I’d made a choice.