Friends
A solitary child, Dorothy Parker grew up to become the social center of the group known as The Algonquin Round Table. Husbands came and went, but Parker held her friends close over the course of her life. As she once wrote, “Constant use does not wear ragged the fabric of friendship” (The Standard of Living). In this month’s issue of DPA, our writers consider the complex and compelling bond of friendship.
The Story of the Lost Friend
Word Count 1077
I had a coworker (I’ll call her Mary) at my last job whom I liked from the start, and came also to admire. She worked hard, seemed kind. We ate lunch together every day, spoke about our husbands, our boss, our jobs, our hopes. We shared secrets, even. We became friends … or so I thought.
I was several years into this job when my mother went into hospice. I took a leave of absence from work to care for her. Human Resources cautioned me not to check my work email, but I stayed in limited touch with Mary via text, keeping her abreast of what was happening. When I told her that I was thinking of quitting my job, she told me not to tell her, that she found it hard to keep secrets from our boss, and so we fell out of contact for a few months.
When my mother died, Mary sent a text saying, “Sorry.”. My mind was occupied by other things, but several weeks went by, and still, I heard nothing more from her. I was busy, of course, and mourning, but in the back of my mind, I was wondering, Where is Mary? My friends were stepping up in lovely ways, checking on me, sending soup and flowers and cat videos, but Mary was conspicuously absent.
Invisible Witness
Word Count 1123
When my mother died, we found a number of Super 8 home movies. They most likely would have festered in my sister’s attic until we all died, and that would have been that. But she has a husband who actually gets things done, and in due course, he took the films off to be digitalized.
My computer dinged a couple of weeks later, and I received five attachments containing the movies. Sitting in my living room in France, the early evening pressing in, I opened the first one and was immediately flung back to the summer of 1972 and to one of our frequent trips to England to visit my father’s family. My mother was British as well, but her family didn’t merit a visit for reasons I never understood.
That summer, besides staying with my grandmother and various aunts and uncles, my father accepted an invitation from an old RAF buddy, a man whose name, I think, was Hugh Pugh. He and his family lived in a thatched-roof cottage in Tiverton, Devon.
The Perfect Joke
Word Count 428
On my coffee table is the urn my best friend Chuck gave me for my 75th birthday. It is the color of a candied apple. The black lid has two birds perched on it. He told me the saleslady had assured him my ashes would fit nicely. We did a lot of joking about death. We discussed suicide. Had I ever thought about it? Of course, I had. In a miserable marriage, I had once dissolved half a bottle of aspirin in a glass of water and drank it. I was deaf for a week, and my face swelled up like the moon, and my voice was a high-pitched squeak like a mouse, but I didn’t die.
“What about you,” I asked.
“I’ve always fancied hacking my own head off,” he said.
PALAIS ROYALE
Word Count 1148
Marsha and I worked together at a film production company in New York in the late 1960s. We became friends instantly, always laughing, viewing life as a Woody Allen movie.
But Marsha’s early life was not amusing. She awakened every morning in a room she shared with her sister, thinking, “There has to be more than this.”
One of four children living in a drab Queens apartment, her depressed father spent his days sitting on the couch, staring into space. When she was twelve, her older brother touched her under the covers. Her sister cut herself with a razor. Their young brother became a heroin addict.
To escape the emotional chaos, Marsha invented an elaborate fantasy world. She envisioned passionate love affairs and travel to distant places with sophisticated jetsetters.
No Entry
Word Count 20
I always thought you were never home.
And you always thought I was never home
So
Hollapeño
Word Count 1544
Holly moved in across the street when I was 10. She was a dead ringer for Tatum O’Neil in Paper Moon (who was our age and had just WON AN OSCAR) and wore a Puka shell necklace that I immediately coveted. She was from a faraway land called New Jersey. Our dads had set us up. We sized each other up on the sidewalk in front of my house on Castro Street.
“I bet you can’t do this,” she stuck out her pointy pink tongue, made a cannoli out of it, pulled in the tip, and then turned it into a three-leaf clover. My green eyes widened.
“Bet I can,” I said, staring right into her brown eyes. I didn’t know the tongue could do such a thing and had never before tried it. Her eyes widened.
“You’re the only person I’ve ever met who can do that too,” she said.
We linked arms and went off to find discarded cigarette butts on the street and then smoked them pretending to be Angie Dickinson in “Police Woman.”
Kentucky Buddha
Word Count 1145
I never argued politics with Charles, my friend of forty years, a Trump supporter who reveled in his outlier stance in New York City. We shared many dinners, chicken over orzo, cooked at my place two floors above his, because his kitchen was impassable given the number of oversized bins stuffed with papers of unknown origin. The hallway was similarly jammed, with bolts of fabric and reams of wrapping paper in big wooden crates. Books in towering piles hovered in every available corner. A creative director at a publisher, Charles read more than anyone I knew.
Photographs and artwork covered all the walls, and even the kitchen cabinets and the bathroom door were adorned with oversized reproductions of idealized figures from mythology and classical dance. The living room was usually lit dimly. A Buddhist shrine, surrounded by twinkling white lights, sat serenely between two windows that faced the street, competing for the eye with his vast Barbie doll collection. Charles contained multitudes.
Farina, Farina
Word Count 538
Maison Bourbon in New Orleans, 1992. I was new. Farina, the seasoned cocktail waitress, taught me how to flirt for tips, spill drinks on asshole customers, divert the advances of our troll-like manager without getting fired, and escape out the back if cops raided the place. I lasted four months. She might still be there.
Farina was moving away from beautiful, but she had a ritual. All the jazz musicians new to town had to fuck her. Including my boyfriend, Tim, a sousaphone player. “What choice did I have?” Platinum blonde and glamorous, she wore blue-green contacts that made her look like a Persian Marilyn Munroe. When I met her, things were fading, like an apartment that looks lovely, the sunlight streaming in, but then you see the stains on the ceiling from water damage, decades of dirt caked into the floorboards. “She’s my friend!” I halfheartedly chided Tim. I understood her allure.
Hindsight
Word Count 186
I guess it began before COVID
although COVID put everything under a microscope.
At yoga class where we met
the instructor introduced you as new in town.
Over tea after class we discovered
we were both aspiring writers,
our husbands were into photography
and we loved good food.
Lost Angela
Word Count 2009
The last time I tried to find her was 1979. We were in our 20s. I dialed the number of her parents’ house, which I still knew by heart. Her mother, who is French, answered, her accent thick and charming as ever. “Alo?” She knew me, of course. I had been her daughter’s best friend in high school. Had she heard from Angela, I asked. “No,” she answered, her voice sad but resigned. “We don’t hear from her. She is still in Europe, you know.” I didn’t know. Did she stay married to the Dutch psychologist, I asked. “No,” her very Catholic mother said. “Angel-ie is dee-vorced.”
During every high school reunion since then, I asked about Angela. No one had heard from her. A few years ago, I met a friend who had gone to the same specialized high school as Angela’s brother. He gave me the name of the company where the brother worked. I left several messages for a person with his name, but I never received a response. Even in this age of Facebook and social media, I could never find her.
Remember Me?
Word Count 605
I was in ninth grade when Cornelia showed up at my school. She was from a German-American doctor’s big family and lived in Albany, a small town to the west. Her parents knew mine slightly—mine sold insurance to hers--so we were automatic friends. She was tall, like me (though not as freakishly so), with long, glossy hair. She was smart and played the cello. Exotic, she became popular almost immediately—that is, she walked confidently without a particular need for anyone. I was crazy about her. She tolerated me. Soon, a boy named Brooks was flirting with her, then became the kind of tangential boyfriend girls had in those days—him like a bee in flight, bumbling glancingly against her, then hovering above her, both hands low on her back, just below her hair, during a slow song at a dance.
The Complete Guide to Writing Thank-You Notes
Word Count 2444
If you’re thinking about whether you should write a thank-you note, you probably should. It is never wrong to send a thank-you note. Sometimes, it’s easy. Other times, it’s hard to know where to start. But don’t put it off. The longer you wait, the harder it becomes, and the less appreciative it will appear. Start with something simple. Here are 12 tips that will help you.
1. Start the note with a greeting such as Dear Aunt Mabel or Hola Miguel. Using a greeting is more personal than just starting right into the body of the note.
Dear Cathy. Hello Cathy! Cathy. Cathy my friend. Cathy my dear friend. Oh, Cathy. Hey Cathy. Dearest Cathy. Cathy. Cath. Dear C.
2. Next, state why you are writing the note. It might be obvious, but it is a good way to begin. Here are a few phrases that will help you get your thank-you card message underway:
The Silent Treatment
Word Count 529
Pat and I met in a local bar called Sgt. Pepper's. Underage, she was tending bar and playing jukebox songs with a sad girl theme. I was drinking away a broken heart. We've been friends for almost fifty years, five husbands between us in six or seven different towns. In 2009, we did something different from our biennial spending frenzies and drove up winding roads to a day-long silent retreat at Spirit Rock, a spiritual training institution grounded in the Buddha's teachings set among 411 acres of oak woodlands in the hills of Marin county in Northern California.
I do not know why we thought the two of us, who gab at every rendezvous, would enjoy a silent retreat, but there we were, dressed in black tights and oversize linen shirts clutching our sack lunches for our quiet day.
The Sacred Bond
Word Count 1321
“The bird a nest, the spider a web, man friendship.” – William Blake, “Proverbs of Hell,” from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Here you are. In my photographs. In my life. Throughout the better part of my life. Better because of you.
In a school assembly. In an acting class. In a dance studio. Each of you has made an entrance. I love our origin stories.
An intensity of understanding sprang up, spontaneously, between us, at our first meeting. Both the intensity and the understanding have grown, and grown subtler. My life is unthinkable without you.
These friendships are sacred. A long history, 30, 50 years, a history that bolsters us. Flickers within us.
The Beautiful Dead
Word Count 251
They were all my friends, and they died. - Jim Carroll, “People Who Died”
All friends or some variation thereof;
the point is I knew them, they were here,
and they floated away—some literally.
Glenn off the bay, capsized rowing scull,
his taut 19-year-old body later retrieved
by the Coast Guard in two feet of icy water.
The Accidental Cordelia
Word Count 1385
I was just sober enough to feel the things alcohol had killed. Anxiety called my name in shrill, bird-like bursts of alarm. The problem with spending ten years besotted by booze is that alcohol allows no solutions other than itself. Thirty-six on the outside, I was a stunted 13-year-old squirming in her ill-fitting self.
One night, while negotiating the passage through the murmuration of alcoholics at an A.A. meeting, I was stopped by legs splayed between two cafeteria tables. The legs were attached to a grandfather-gray, faded-tweed guy. He stuck his hand out. “Russ. Alcoholic. Sorry about the legs. Sometimes they like to dance, sometimes they lounge.”
Brexit Break Up
Word Count 967
According to a 2021 survey, the average American has between three and five close friends. Until recently, I would have scoffed at that statistic, priding myself on the large number of individuals I consider bosom buddies, but recent events – beginning with the 2016 Brexit referendum – have shaken that cherished belief. I was living in Japan at the time of that historic vote, employed as a full-time professor at a small private university but happened to be in England in June of that year, attending a conference on crime fiction as an academic discipline.
Talk of this impending event was on all the delegates’ lips. They were, overwhelmingly, ‘Remainers’. Whenever I ventured an opinion contrary to theirs, I was patronized as the little Yankee girl who knew nothing of the matter.