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Show Motherlunge a novel 174 chant of moans and oh babys for her client, she managed nevertheless to indicate that she liked my skirt and that I should help myself to coffee; she suggested by pointing to the kitchen clock that Eli would be home in an hour. She gave me a beautiful smile, rolled her eyes, and padded back toward her room. It struck me that she was like a friend. I dropped my backpack next to the door and took my shoes off. I thought about the friends I had had before I came to the city, and how these friendships tended to end, according to their type: There were girls who I felt sorry for-dull and irritating girls, many with physical impediments to social success (obesity, buck teeth, corrective lenswear, etc.) whom I eventually dropped, at least in part because they demonstrated a failure to understand that it was / who was being kind to them. These friends felt fake, auxiliary. On one hand, they didn't count. On the other hand, I owed them everything. At school, I often had no one else and I held them up as shields. Type 2 friend: smart girls. These were girls whose busy schedules and life plans and precocious accomplishments had estranged them to me, one by one. Girls who, when they went away to camp or college, said, "I'll write you!" and then really did, neatly and on cute stationery. Girls I tended not to keep in touch with, whose mothers, I suspect, thanked me for this. The third type of friend? The weird girls whose circumstances tended to remove them from me eventually. These were the girls who wrote notes in encoded messages and were prone to sudden tears. They were the nail biters (or, in high school, nervous smokers) and uninhibited singers with perfect pitch and good memory for lyrics. Girls who had crushes on the oldest men on daytime television, the evil patriarchs and neurosurgeons with their five o'clock shadows and expressive eyebrows. Girls who knew |
