R and S

I sent my babies off to new schools yesterday. Maybe it is because we have moved so much or maybe I am just so deeply connected with them like a little amoeba family or maybe it is because when I was young I told my Mom I would live with her forever and never go further than an hour away (ha), but I felt sick as I watched each of their gorgeous little backs walk way from me. I wanted to run like a madwoman into their new classrooms and march them right back home with me. How dare you try to take my children! I’ll have them back now, thank you very much. Geesh, like they need you! I can homeschool these little monkeys with my eyes closed and then our chances of head lice decrease signicantly anyway! I stood in the hallway with my high school girl before her morning greeting assembly and wondered how long I could pull off being a student there before they kicked me out. Wait! Stop! I’m not going to leave her here! She’s my people!!!! I don’t need “me time”, I need “we time”! -As authorities drag shrieking woman from high school and everyone rolls their eyes so hard their skulls crack.

But they went. And they stayed. And I went home with a blank stare and tears running down my face. I would sit in vigil for 6 hours wondering and worrying and hoping. Maybe they would be scared of their teachers, maybe the kid next to them would smell funny and they wouldn’t be kind, maybe they would be hungry because packing lunches…well….I don’t want to talk about it or maybe, just maybe they would meet someone. Someone who lights up their life and changes everything they ever knew about being a kid. That made me think about HER.

I need to tell you about somebody.

*************

“Meet you at the yellow house,” I shouted into the mustard kitchen phone with the tangled, curly mess of a cord which will forever feel like the best form of communication to me.

That phone always made it possible to stretch across the 3 blocks to her. My girl. My best friend. My long-lashed, brown-eyed soul twin sister. 324-XXXX. I still know the phone number.

I would hop on my banana yellow bike (why was everything YELLOW?) and pump my legs so hard- hell on wheels to get to the corner halfway between Monroe Street and Fillmore Street so I could wait breathlessly and catch her wide smile as she made it down the street towards me. Her name was Risa.

We met on the first day of Kindergarten. Mrs. V’s class. Half-days of tiny warm milk cartons that made me gag, see-saws before they banned those amazing things and the bathroom with the brown wooden door and a grey floor that always smelled vaguely of poorly-aimed urine and janitor bleach. She was the greatest thing to happen to me in my childhood. Every girl’s dream- the best friend of epic proportions. She was beautiful with olive-y skin and brown hair which varied in style over our years together from permed afro to long and slick. She was so cool, and she loved me. And I loved her, wildly. She was my 6-year-old soulmate.

She could not properly say her letter “R” and I had a calamitous lisp and a name full of “S’s”, so we would introduce each other to anyone we deemed necessary to know us.

“This is my best friend, Risa Rose,” I would announce, hitting those R’s with great exaggeration and laying off those S’s.

“She’s my best friend, Cecily Smith,” she would boldly claim.

Damn, her S’s were smooth as silk.

They called us the “Bobbsey Twins”. Risa and Cecily, where there was one, there was the other. Intertwined instantly and so tangled up in each other we shared head lice, the flu and Halloween costumes. We made rock bands out of trash cans and whispered into sunrise about our plans to marry Jon Bon Jovi and/or Axl Rose. Certainly they would both wait for one of us. We hauled pails of corn from the cornfield across the street and took turns heaving them up and down my treehouse pulley system. Our tiny arms working in perfect unison as we whole-heartedly pretended to be the great pioneers struggling to survive the summer. Then we would dump it all and tear inside to the air conditioning, a bag of Funyuns and The Brady Bunch. Lying together on thick brown lounge pillows, we knew we had the best secrets of anyone in the whole entire world. We had each other.

There was a clubhouse. A limp, half-rotted shed in the empty lot behind her house. We had rules and snacks and journals full of peppered entries from our detailed games of “spy”.

Your Dad is reading the newspaper. He sees me. RUN!

We called it the Rabbit Hutch and the password was “coca-cola bottles”. It might have been “blueberry”. It didn’t matter- no one was getting in -we didn’t need anyone else.

She was my first real relationship outside of my immediate family. The first person I shared a bed with and held hands with and made promises of eternal love to. Because that is what best friends get to have, eternal love. Love as easy as suntanned legs pressed together on warm concrete at the edge of the community pool, a box of shared Sugar Babies melting between them.

I always hear people saying “Awww, to be young and in love again.” Do you mean 6 years old? Because those 6-year-old sugar baby soulmates are everything. We orbit around each other for a lifetime, coming and going a little bit but still managing to keep each other in sight until it is time to come home again. This is the kind of pure-hearted love that walks us into adulthood and teaches us how to navigate all of the inevitable ditches of pain we dig ourselves into.

I slept in the same bed with her the night before her wedding. We lay together whispering our secrets again. We snuggled up as if the yellow phone and the pails of corn and hands brushing together in a bag of greasy chips had never disappeared.  Her huge, brown eyes were exactly the same as when we promised to never fight over Axl Rose. He would probably want her anyway- they did have the same last name.  As always, she was calm and so very cool- ready to start her life with her guy, her other person.

I’m your best friend, Cecily Smith.

I’m your best friend, Risa Rose.

To all of the babies out there navigating new schools, I hope you find your person. Trust me, you will need them.

xoxoxoxoxoxox