The fog rolled in that night, draping a thick, blinding blanket across our Elementary school playground, stranding us the next morning amidst clouds of quietude when we should have been playing, frolicking, and running. Cacophonous children’s screams, which would have rebounded against concrete barriers in sharp tones were instead muted and condensed, barely audible and echoed off the asphalt. The lines of yellow and white that typically demarcated our games were hidden underneath murky billows. In faith, we ventured forward on what we knew was level ground. Our arms groped forward, pushing the thick, cool, mist aside, searching for one another. I found her on the other side of the fog wall before the early-morning bell rang.
We usually met at the Tether-ball courts, not because I liked the game but because she did. She prevailed at the game while others spent their time losing and falling back in line. On that day, no recreational items were checked out. In fact, no one played at all. There were only patches of children standing incredulous and still. Taking a few steps back, they disappeared as if they were part of a dream.
My friend had connived a mischievous scheme, borne neither of heaven nor Christian by any measure. I was certain to acquiesce. It seemed madly intriguing. Instead of minding my own intuition like I should have done, I veered once again onto a detrimental path. Under the cover of the fog, it became obvious that we could do something devious and possibly get away with it.
She ordered, as opposed to asked or proposed. It didn’t help matters that she was tall with actual big-bones. Her hair was long and blond–all of which made you take notice. She caused you to comply with her inappropriate ideas by using her sturdy stance and forceful, throaty voice. A few friends on our block had already been restricted from playing with her. I was one of the last holdouts.
“Let’s walk straight ahead and see if we bump into anyone,” she said, as though she’d invented the roller coaster.
Right away I knew this was the stupidest idea I’d heard since her last one, because I knew she meant, “Let’s try to bump into people….” But I allowed myself to go along with it.
She then told me to go in one direction while she was going to go in another—a scenario I was even less comfortable with enacting. However, I obliged like a brainwashed POW and trotted off into a packed, white mist. I senselessly popped through varied thicknesses of carpeted fog on my slow and pointless Kamikaze mission and had a few close calls with wide-eyed children. Then we somehow broke through the fog and met up with each other when our havoc was completed. I didn’t want to know about the body count on her end, but I figured that a few poor kids probably got body slammed. I kind of wanted to forget that I ever took part.
One boring summer’s day, she decided we should adorn ourselves with our mothers’ make up. This was an idea I liked from the start, but I knew it was wrong in the back of my mind. In those days, I never took the time to consult with the back of mind while I played with her like I should have done. We collected make-up from their cosmetic bags and over-glamorized ourselves in her mother’s bathroom with 1960′s blue-glitter eye shadow squeezed from a tube, red lipstick, mascara, and rouge. We didn’t stop at the makeup. She went a step further and plunged into her mother’s hair scarves.
We felt very Jackie-O in the end and went to show ourselves off to the Attendance Office secretary. We were deluded enough to think that she’d admire something about it or at least chuckle about our creativity. Instead, a look of horror crept across her face as if she’d just watched King Kong smash through the door. It was clear that she had no sense of humor. And she might have called my friend’s mother, who was quite upset about the scarves and the state of her cosmetics counter. I washed my mess off before I got home, and I don’t think my mother ever found out.
My friend and I were the only two girls on the street whose mothers worked during those years. Since both of our families had housekeepers, it afforded us enough time away from parental eyes to get into simple mischief. Her Jamaican housekeeper packed huge sack lunches of delicious barbecued chicken and homemade chocolate chip cookies. One time I was pleasantly surprised to find that she’d packed 10 large cookies for each of us but then reasonable assumed it was due to my friend’s power of persuasion and wondered how much arm twisting was involved as I took another bite.
We ate our banquet on the side of someone’s side-yard embankment, private property that my friend had scouted out. I was a little uncertain at first, but it turned out to be a lovely spot hidden from the street and set under shade trees. We picnicked there another time, feeling quite comfortable by then. We had Shake-a-Puddings that we shook, not realizing the racket we were making, until the owner of the property came out of her house and stood at the top of the hill.
“What are you doing here?” she asked, while surveying our spread.
“We’re having a picnic,” we replied innocently.
“Oh, okay,” skeptically. She let us stay there to finish, but we never went back.
On one especially dull day, my friend concocted a particularly twisted scenario. She took a Ketchup bottle and said, “Let’s scratch ourselves up and make it look like we’re bleeding, then go knock on those doors and ask for Band Aids.”
I was horrified at the audaciousness, but it was just too outlandish not to do it. Something pushed me along–it must have been the Devil himself.
She started marring her arm with a couple of jagged rocks she found on the ground, and then I did the same. We both squirted Ketchup on our scratches and walked to our target house. By all appearances, we smelled like meatloaf and had a few superficial scratches. I didn’t see how anyone would believe us.
She knocked on the door and a young woman answered. My friend became melodramatic and made up some story that I’ve, thankfully, suppressed, and said, “Could we please have Band Aids?”
I began to feel guilty, because the lady was so concerned about us that she invited us in and took us to her bathroom and began searching for her First Aid kit. We bandaged ourselves quickly and got out of there, thanking her. It was not our finest hour. I don’t know if my friend counted it a victory, but to me it was another defeat.
On my other proverbial shoulder, I had a friend who was borne of the angels and of everything good and heavenly and Christian. Her family treated me like gold during the time my parents were divorcing and one time sent me home with a dozen of her old dresses, which outfitted me that entire school year. We spent all of our time together doing salubrious things, laughing at our own tape recordings, going to movies, listening to music, typing silly letters to each other during Typing class, cooking together in Home Economics. In Orchestra, she played the bass violin and I played the viola. One time, during a hurricane-force storm, we traded instruments to carry around the school. Since her arms were breaking, I offered, and as the rain was coming down sideways I carried her bass viol until my arms broke.
My unscrupulous and domineering friend put an end to all of that, or I should say, I permitted her to do so. She told me to choose sides.
We sat on the bathroom floor where the Devil had taken up residence. She’d stolen cigarettes and matches from her mother, and I was there for the thrill. I’d always had an aversion to cigarettes, having smelled the smoke in my house and car from my mother’s habit. But I did want to look cool. We forced ourselves to puff those things until we were green and until the day we actually did smoke.
As we walked home from school, she collapsed into a heap in someone’s front yard. She wouldn’t tell me what the problem was for the longest time, but she finally pulled herself together and started walking again. She began to spill the beans in broken sentences. Her step-dad had molested her.
Even though I didn’t understand all of the implications at that moment, I eventually realized how it affected her with her negative-attention seeking behavior. In the process it had funneled down to me and my life. At least it was out in the open where her healing could begin. Her mother took her to counseling where she prospered. Her parents divorced and my friend moved away. It was the best thing that could have happened to me. It gave me pause to reflect upon the direction I’d been taking and what I should do about it. I quit smoking.
The damage had been done with my nice friend, but later in life I tried, unsuccessfully, to look her up to apologize and somehow make amends. She was the best thing that had happened in my life during that time. And if she was still around I wanted her to know that.
I can’t say that I should have done a thing differently, though. If I were to say that, it would mean going back to re-chart the course of my life, never having my children, not knowing the people I do, not living where I do now … and I wouldn’t have this piece to write. If there is a moral, after living an immoral piece of life, it would be something like this:
Listen to your intuition and chart your own fresh course with it in mind.
As for my angelic friend, we’ll always have the hurricane.
Copyright 2010. All Rights Reserved.
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