By Michele Herman
When my son told me his sixth-grade class at I.S. 89 was going on its overnight bonding trip to a place called Nature’s Classroom in Colbrook, Connecticut, I knew immediately I would have to find Denise. Back in the late ’60s when Denise and I were best friends at Cranbury Elementary School in Norwalk, Connecticut, Colbrook was the most magical name we knew, because, just like my son, the sixth graders went there every year on their overnight bonding trip (although no one called it that then).
For years, we longed for our turn. Then we finally made it to sixth grade, and for reasons I can’t remember, the trip was canceled. This was the first time I’d heard the name since. Some 34 years after our friendship hit its peak, I managed to track Denise down to Michigan and, one Sunday afternoon, I called. She responded just the way you hope a long-lost friend will: whooping with delight and telling me over and over that I’d made her day. We caught each other up on our respective adulthoods for over an hour. She understood about Colbrook, as I knew she would.
When we said goodbye, we vowed to continue the conversation via e-mail. Here in the Village, I have loads of good friends, but the older we get, the more of our history drops away behind us, like the summer jobs we once listed on our resumes. There are people I know well without knowing what their childhood home looked like, whether their parents stayed married or divorced, what college they attended, or even what their first career might have been; it’s a safe bet they didn’t start out doing graphic design on the Mac or counseling bulimics back in 1979, since neither existed.
Denise and I are the opposite. Between third and sixth grade, a time when our likenesses were in clearer focus than our differences, we had a friendship so intense we plotted ways to merge into the same person. We held mock weddings and adoptions. (An old picture of my younger sister comes into view. We’ve made her preside at one of our ceremonies, done up in a cotton-ball beard and long rabbinic robe, and davening madly, even though Denise is Greek Orthodox.) We forced my girdled mother to socialize with Denise’s swinging ’60s one.
We grew our hair at the same rate, and wore our first pigtails the same day, with the same fat yarn Hallmark used to sell for wrapping presents. She doesn’t know this part, but a chunk of my fourth-grade year was spent trying to crease my fingernails across the middle to give me white calcium lines, a sign of beauty in my eyes because she had them, and screwing up my eyebrow muscles in the mirror because she had the eyebrow-raising gene, which I took for a sign of her sophistication.
Our hold on each other started to loosen as early as seventh grade, when we were sorted into different classes, in both senses of the word. She got married earlier than she would have liked, soon after high school, and this time my sister did not preside. He was her longtime boyfriend from church, tall and dark and handsome and — one last detail — about to be ordained as a priest (in Greek Orthodoxy priests can marry, but only before ordination).
When I was living with roommates and applying to grad school, she already had two baby girls. The diocese sent the family to various towns in Middle America, while I kept hugging the Atlantic Ocean. Now that I’m raising two young sons, she’s getting used to an empty nest. She’s gone back to work as a C.P.A. for a real-estate developer while I sit at my desk in the Village and write scathing condemnations of real-estate developers.
Even our e-mails appear to be entirely different media. Hers come in a block that would be dense were it not punctuated with strings of exclamation points and ellipses and sideways smiley faces. I laugh to think she’s found an electronic equivalent to the little penned flourishes she used to put at the end of all her notes to me: those sideways “S”’s with two little vertical lines through the center. I used to fill pages with practice flourishes of my own, but I could never get them to flow the way hers did. Mine kinked or leaned, or maybe they just lacked conviction.
My e-mails to her sit on the screen, flat and underdecorated, half Yankee and half that’s-O.K.-I’ll-sit-in-the-dark Jewish. I am thrifty with my affections and even my sentences, jamming one clause into another into another to convey a thought, my computer green-lining almost every line I write, while she communicates perfectly well in the little bursts of words between ellipses. You can’t blame our education: we both received “A” ’s in grammar and creative writing from the same rigorous Mrs. Patricia Bruni.
“Love ya like a sis,” she gushed in a recent e-mail, and put in parentheses a sort of a disclaimer that made it even worse: “That’s what my girls always used to say to their ‘bestest.’” I think of my New York friend Sally and her great post-9/11 line, when all those rainbow-toned well wishes and stuffed animals that recited the Lord’s Prayer started flooding in to the New York schools from the heartland: “That’s why we live in New York — we hate that stuff.”
It’s true — I hate that stuff. And sometimes, when I cringe at some display of earnest cutseyness, my husband will look at me lovingly and say, “That’s why I married you.” Of course here in the city we contend with the opposite extreme, which makes me cringe just as much. Here we have cynicism as style, and an avant garde that embraces whatever fashion the rear garde has recently discarded.
There are many things Denise and I don’t share in our respective provinces. But it doesn’t matter. Just before Thanksgiving, she e-mailed. She told me that every November she laughs remembering the time my father, a pragmatic man who, when faced with the gift of a turkey far too large to feed the four of us, took it to his basement workshop and cut it in half, right through the middle, with his band saw. I think of the sawed-off turkey, of our lost trip to Colbrook now being granted to my son and a myriad other character-forming events Denise and I have shared. They’re all deeply embedded in my West Village self, though you wouldn’t know it to look at me now.
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