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Laura had an unerring sense of people; she could, within a matter of minutes, size up most people's personality and whether they were trustworthy or not. Now, never once did I hear her pronounce any sort of immediate judgement based on this talent: I learned to see it in her eyes, because we were so close. Rarely did she fail in this innate understanding of character; I think I could count them on one hand. But one of the great regrets of her career and her life was hiring a man she failed in reading, one who, in just one academic year, made me into his little puppet, controlling me utterly and systematically dismantling my mind and spirit. It didn't take long for her---and others---to realize how deceptive he was and that he would wreck me. Laura didn't say that outright. She was the only person I've ever known who would never, ever give friends relationship advice or tell someone, "You better dump him, girl," because, as she told me, it always comes back to bite you on the ass. If they break up, they blame you. If they get back together, you've lost a friend because you've called out the guy's character. So she didn't say much....but she didn't have to. I was her best friend and could practically read her mind by that time, as she could mine. But a lot of other friends and co-workers were VERY willing to try to get me off that fast track to destruction. I refused to listen to anyone, claiming that most pathetic of girls' excuses: "They don't know him like I do." He could and did convince me to break rules our jobs were based on. I began to favor his opinions over all others. Any free time I had, he had first dibs on---to go walking or to Ned's or to the lake, to listen to Smokehouse Blues on KMOD or play poker with a group of co-workers. I was happy to hear my phone late in the evening, when he would call and read me something he'd come across. Oh, I could write (and have) pages and pages about that story, but all that's important here is that, of course, everyone else was right. I was right, too---some part of me knew he would go and I'd be broken, but I went along willingly because I was young and, fancying myself a poetic sort, hell-bent on a kind of self-destruction only depressives crave. I had not one cold iota of what I'd got myself into.
For six months after he left, I went to bed at night saying a fervent prayer that I would die. Every morning when I woke, I would cry because my prayers failed. That's my only clear memory of what transpired during that time, though I know I kept working. But I do know this: I didn't go anywhere. I wouldn't go out of my apartment except when I had to, and most of all, I wouldn't hang out with anyone. I went to Laura's house the night he left, when she was packing to move to a new place herself, right at the end of the academic year. And that's the last time I set foot in her house for eight months. I wasn't angry with her; I didn't resent the fact that she was right. I simply couldn't face her. We had work conversations (she was my boss, after all), but nothing else. I didn't eat lunch with her, or with anyone else. Every system in me just shut down. I stopped listening to music and started leaving the TV on all the time. Before, TV was incidental to me; I'd only owned one for a year or so. And I remember that I tanned---tanned, with this fair skin!---every day that summer, with the baby-oil routine and everything. It would not be much of an exaggeration to say that I had a nervous breakdown, on my own terms.
It's perfectly possible that our friendship would have sunk under the weight of my stupidity if not for a kind, well-meaning co-worker who thought he might rescue me from all this. He'd seen the whole thing happen and thought he might be a replacement for Mr. So-and-So. There was no way that could happen---but I owe him a most fervent debt, because he gave Laura and me our friendship back. He would come over and make me go out walking that winter, because we had been friends for a while and he knew that I loved to go on walks. One February evening, we found ourselves (under his direction) walking near Laura's apartment, and he said we should stop by. I was very hesitant, but I agreed. Oh, it was so awkward. I cry now to think of that moment, how stiff and formal I felt sitting on the edge of her couch, and how much I owe Rob for returning us to one another. There's no way I can imagine what would have become of either of us if not for that visit.
We didn't really talk about it, not for years. I was so ashamed, and she was wary. Slowly, slowly, we began having lunch again, together and with other co-workers. By the end of that year, when I left the hall manager job for a full-time interim teaching job at NSU, we were back to shopping or hanging out on weekends. We took the first of many mini-vacations, the only kind we could afford: Easter weekend in Memphis to revel in the over-the-top tackiness of Graceland and the throbbing blues of Beale Street. She went with me to South Dakota to see my brother's family, and we visited her mother's grave in Sioux Falls. Time worked its healing wonders. The trust that had been shattered was mended, and forged in steel. Never again would it break.
Even when I went to work at the University of Texas for a year, still trying to repair my soul and needing to stretch my bounds, we didn't feel a strain, except for only getting to see each other two or three times during that school year. I remember once when she called me in Austin, scared out of her wits and crying because her father, deep in the throes of Parkinson's, had suffered a fall and been hospitalized. I remember that call so well, over an hour long, because I felt a tingling in my leg after about 30 minutes, and looking down, I realized that, unable to reach her, I'd been rubbing and patting my leg all that time trying to soothe her. There were a lot of signs that I didn't need to stay in Texas, but that is the one that seems most directly from God, his voice whispering "Go home, go home, girl." I didn't waste any time doing so; in May of '93, I came home to no job, very little savings, but my family and my best friend to see me through.
It took until November of that year to find a teaching job---Roland Junior High, another blog entirely for all it gave me. I could live less than an hour from Tahlequah, so Laura and I could visit each other regularly. I was only 10 miles outside of Fort Smith, which gave us all kinds of new places to explore. Laura always loved Christmas lights, and Fiona Hills gave us a whole new gorgeous setting to investigate, inspiring us to make up certificates we called Griswold Awards to leave in the mailboxes of houses we thought were especially well-decorated. Once in a while, she would make the ultimate sacrifice and travel with my speech team to be a judge. She was great at the judging, having done a lot of drama in school, but teenagers kind of made her skin crawl. Yet she supported me in that work, praising me in so many ways that I know she made me a better teacher----for her to lose faith or be disappointed in me would have horrified me. Together we scoped out Van Buren, Central Mall, the first Best Buy we had ever seen, and that delicious burger place in downtown FS, on Garrison. We spend a lot of time in the car, and we would have long talks that went everywhere and nowhere, and we were perfectly happy with that. And somewhere in this time is when we began to have a special Christmas celebration, sometimes with friends, sometimes just us, with a home-cooked meal and Christmas music and several little presents apiece before a bigger present. She could do that---make what seemed to be pretty paltry into an occasion.
This was also, no doubt, the time we began not only to realize but also to talk about how lucky we were to have such a good friend, and that most people not only didn't have such a friendship, but didn't even know such a thing existed.
Within a few years, I was ready to come "home," back to Tahlequah, although in truth, probably wherever she was would have been home by then. When the time was right, God put his hand at my back and gently pushed me forward to a new job in LG, a new home....and the best and worst of what could come of the deepest of friendship.
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Next week, the conclusion.
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