glasses. She was the first person I’d met who had allergies (wheat, eggs, dairy), and she sniffled year-round, except for a few brief weeks in the wintertime, when pollen season was over and before she’d caught her first cold.
Sarah’s mother was a nurse who worked in a gastroenterologist’s office, and her father was an engineer at MIT. They were strict with Sarah and her two older brothers. The Graham kids couldn’t watch television unless it was PBS, they couldn’t eat sandwiches that weren’t made with whole grain breads . . . and, of course, fashion magazines were forbidden in the Grahams’ house. “They reinforce gender norms,” Sarah said gloomily, flipping through my grandmother’s September issue of Vogue. She paused at a picture of an evening gown made of ecru lace, the model’s eyes darkly shadowed, her short hair covered with afeathered cloche, and sighed, brightening only after Elaine, the day’s sitter, asked if we wanted to toast marshmallows over the gas burner and make s’mores.
Sarah might not have been the friend I’d chosen if the choice had been mine to make. I loved to read and was deeply involved in the half-dozen television shows I watched. Sarah liked the Red Sox and video games, and could have happily spent all her free time and every quarter she could cadge at the Ms. Pac-Man machine in the back of Papa Gino’s, where we’d stop after school for a slice and a soda. She got antsy and bored after half an hour at the mall, while I could spend entire afternoons there, pitching pennies into the fountain, watching people—teenage couples with their bodies tucked around each other, mothers wearily pushing infants in strollers, old men towing oxygen tanks, senior citizens with fanny packs and puffy white sneakers, pumping their arms as they did their daily laps. Sarah liked horror films and boy bands and spray cheese right from the can. I preferred romantic comedies and Terms of Endearment and thought spray cheese looked like extruded orange snot. Still, we were friends, spending afternoons and Friday-night sleepovers together, possessors of each other’s secrets. I knew not only that Sarah had discovered her mother’s vibrator, tucked under a pile of washcloths in a bathroom drawer, but that she’d been using it since her eleventh birthday. She knew that I had a desperate crush on Mr. Herman, who’d been our substitute science teacher for six weeks while Ms. Van Rijn recovered from a mastectomy, and that, in the top drawer of my jewelry box, I had six Polaroid pictures that I’d taken of just the good side of my face, wearing the lipstick and eye shadow and false eyelashes that Cheryl, my sitter, had helped me apply. She was the one who read the stories I’d write in the journals my grandmother kept buying me, my own versions of the Baby-sitters Club and Nancy Drew, stories about twelve-year-old girls with no parents and missing limbs,girls who were blind or deaf or otherwise disfigured who discovered they had superpowers, or sixteen-year-olds falling in love.
What happened to us was a classic story, one that most women have their own versions of: “The Tale of the Lost Friend.” Sarah and I sat together at lunch, we played together at recess, we spent as many afternoons together as our schedules would allow. (Sarah had recorder lessons and, with her brothers, took fencing classes in Cambridge; I had piano and ice-skating lessons in the winter, and between my face and her allergies, there was usually a doctor’s visit once or twice a month.) Starting in junior high, we’d call each other every night to talk about what we were wearing the next day, and whether Jared Marsh (my crush) or Jason Biller (Sarah’s) had noticed what we’d worn the day before. The summer before high school, we spent afternoons in my backyard on towels, in bikinis, with Hawaiian Tropic oil on our bodies and Sun-In in our hair. I was planning on joining the swim team, and Sarah, still tall but much
Sarah’s mother was a nurse who worked in a gastroenterologist’s office, and her father was an engineer at MIT. They were strict with Sarah and her two older brothers. The Graham kids couldn’t watch television unless it was PBS, they couldn’t eat sandwiches that weren’t made with whole grain breads . . . and, of course, fashion magazines were forbidden in the Grahams’ house. “They reinforce gender norms,” Sarah said gloomily, flipping through my grandmother’s September issue of Vogue. She paused at a picture of an evening gown made of ecru lace, the model’s eyes darkly shadowed, her short hair covered with afeathered cloche, and sighed, brightening only after Elaine, the day’s sitter, asked if we wanted to toast marshmallows over the gas burner and make s’mores.
Sarah might not have been the friend I’d chosen if the choice had been mine to make. I loved to read and was deeply involved in the half-dozen television shows I watched. Sarah liked the Red Sox and video games, and could have happily spent all her free time and every quarter she could cadge at the Ms. Pac-Man machine in the back of Papa Gino’s, where we’d stop after school for a slice and a soda. She got antsy and bored after half an hour at the mall, while I could spend entire afternoons there, pitching pennies into the fountain, watching people—teenage couples with their bodies tucked around each other, mothers wearily pushing infants in strollers, old men towing oxygen tanks, senior citizens with fanny packs and puffy white sneakers, pumping their arms as they did their daily laps. Sarah liked horror films and boy bands and spray cheese right from the can. I preferred romantic comedies and Terms of Endearment and thought spray cheese looked like extruded orange snot. Still, we were friends, spending afternoons and Friday-night sleepovers together, possessors of each other’s secrets. I knew not only that Sarah had discovered her mother’s vibrator, tucked under a pile of washcloths in a bathroom drawer, but that she’d been using it since her eleventh birthday. She knew that I had a desperate crush on Mr. Herman, who’d been our substitute science teacher for six weeks while Ms. Van Rijn recovered from a mastectomy, and that, in the top drawer of my jewelry box, I had six Polaroid pictures that I’d taken of just the good side of my face, wearing the lipstick and eye shadow and false eyelashes that Cheryl, my sitter, had helped me apply. She was the one who read the stories I’d write in the journals my grandmother kept buying me, my own versions of the Baby-sitters Club and Nancy Drew, stories about twelve-year-old girls with no parents and missing limbs,girls who were blind or deaf or otherwise disfigured who discovered they had superpowers, or sixteen-year-olds falling in love.
What happened to us was a classic story, one that most women have their own versions of: “The Tale of the Lost Friend.” Sarah and I sat together at lunch, we played together at recess, we spent as many afternoons together as our schedules would allow. (Sarah had recorder lessons and, with her brothers, took fencing classes in Cambridge; I had piano and ice-skating lessons in the winter, and between my face and her allergies, there was usually a doctor’s visit once or twice a month.) Starting in junior high, we’d call each other every night to talk about what we were wearing the next day, and whether Jared Marsh (my crush) or Jason Biller (Sarah’s) had noticed what we’d worn the day before. The summer before high school, we spent afternoons in my backyard on towels, in bikinis, with Hawaiian Tropic oil on our bodies and Sun-In in our hair. I was planning on joining the swim team, and Sarah, still tall but much
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