Lost Angela
Fran Schumer
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.
We met our sophomore year in high school. It was a huge school, 5,000 students and 1,500 in our class alone. The building was large and brick and solid, an entire city block square, a fortress. I felt uneasy moving from my middle school, which I had attended with the same small cluster of students since the early grades. I’d had an identity, also a boyfriend. Here, I felt uneasy and alone.
I noticed her because, on the first exam in a difficult math class, the teacher singled her out for having received one of the highest grades. I had been a top student in my middle school, but in this class, I floundered. I felt uncomfortable around the teacher, who had unnerved me the first day by asking if I was as smart as my older brother, a star student in previous years. I wasn’t but caught off guard, and afraid of being humiliated, I answered brashly, “smarter.” I knew it was only a matter of time before he found me out.
My grade on the first test was unremarkable; on the next, I did even worse. When he handed back my paper, I read in his raised brow and flared nostrils a sneer. When he handed Angela back her paper, he beamed. “Pretty impressive,” he said. Color suffused her usually wan cheeks.
I wanted to know this girl, always dressed in dark tights and skirts and sweaters that hung on her narrow frame. She had long hair, stick-straight and slightly greasy on days when she didn’t wash it. She may have faded into the background in any setting, but in every setting in which I saw her, she shone. Two large gold hoop earrings flashed brightly from the dark hair that covered her ears. Her green eyes sparkled. As soon as she spoke, her face lit up with expression and warmth and revealed a chipped front tooth. My first thought was that she looked like a nun; my second, a slattern. It was the combination that made her appearance beguiling. The smarter boys in our class thought she was beautiful. The girls liked her too because she was big-hearted and kind. The minute I spoke to her, I fell in love.
It wasn’t romantic love; it was girl love. Best friend love. The love you feel when you’ve met someone to whom you could reveal everything. I was close to my mother, but she was my mother; there were limits. With my old boyfriend, too, I remained guarded. I was funny, animated, athletic. I had a sense of adventure. For these reasons, I had friends, but they knew the outside me. Angela and I were friends from the inside out. We shared what has now become a cliché: our feelings. I’m not sure I even knew I had them until I met Angela.
It began with a simple confession. One day I broached the subject of math and how well she did on the tests. “Oh, Franny,” she said, using my nickname, which instantly endeared her to me. “I work so hard for those grades. They don’t come naturally.” While other girls went to the mall or hung out with guys, Angela studied. “I’m not like Alice or Evelyn. They think analytically. I just plod.” The two girls she named did almost as well as Angela, but seemingly with little effort. That was the beauty of it for her. They didn’t try, and they didn’t care. Why did she care so much? I had the same question about myself.
She had another confession, this one prompted by her comment. “Franny, you’re so thin.” She stepped back to gaze at me appraisingly. “Do you diet?”
“Not really,” I said.
Again, the avalanche: “My sister and I do all the time. Oh, it’s terrible. We’re Catholic, you know --.” I did know. Her sole ornamentation was a gold cross hanging long and heavy from her slender, pale neck. “My father is Italian, and with all our feast days and holidays, my sister and I can’t help but gorge.” She went on with a litany of the dishes served: stuffed clams, scungilli, and platters of lasagna. “Denise,” her sister who was three years older, “and I have to “practically starve” between holidays to make up for the damage. In the days and weeks that followed, I found out what ‘practically starve’ meant: nothing for breakfast, nothing for lunch, and at night, three hardboiled eggs or a half cup of ricotta.
All that year, we sought each other in the hallways, seeking relief from our heavy burden of trying to be so smart, all those Advanced Placement classes we were taking. I loved these meetings; the mutual terror that we shared buoyed me. Everything else about her did, too, even the scent of her slightly greasy hair and the kind of stale breath you get when you don’t eat.
By the end of sophomore year, I grew dissatisfied with who I was. Angela was the catalyst, but there were other factors. One was my older brother. He had just gone off to Harvard. While he excelled in history, science, and math, subjects I associated with men, I was more interested in English, a subject for girls, and therefore inferior. How could I ever match his achievements? The other issue was my weight. I had always been thin, but my mother, who had recently joined Weight Watcher, warned me how easy it was to gain weight. I was an adolescent girl; I worried.
Overnight, I decided to change entirely, everything about me. It started with my grades. At my request, my mother hired a math tutor. I watched him solve problems, and a miracle happened. I got the hang of them. Soon, I could do even the extra credit problems. The math teacher seemed baffled, even a little skeptical, but I didn’t care. My grades soared; I felt a kind of mastery. Next, I changed my diet. The catalyst for that decision was a trip our class took to Connecticut. On the bus, I saw my old boyfriend converse with Angela. It looked like they were flirting. Suddenly, the belt on my skirt felt tight. The next morning, I ordered my mother to skip my usual toast breakfast and replace it with one scoop of cottage cheese and a glop of her Louis Sherry artificially sweetened jam. Lunch was so absurdly minimal that at a reunion years later, a friend regaled our group with her recitation of its contents: a half cottage cheese sandwich on diet bread, an apple. Dinner was a chop of some sort, and some indistinguishable frozen vegetables. Eating less produced the same sense of mastery, almost a spiritual high, a la Angela’s Catholic martyrs. Now, eating disorders are so common the subject is a cliché. When Angela and I stumbled upon ours, the term “eating disorder” didn’t even exist. We thought we invented them.
I changed other things about myself, my wardrobe. Angela’s clothes looked so ordinary, items she probably picked off some sale rack at the mall. My wardrobe was the opposite. Curated by my mother, it consisted of expensive skirts and sweaters, all purchased at expensive department stores in Manhattan like B. Altman’s, even Bergdorf’s, and all designed to make me attractive. Now I rebelled; I wanted to dress like Angela, in dark tights, in sacks, in clothes that indicated there was more to me than my looks.
During our junior year, a funny thing happened. While I became more like Angela, Angela became someone else. Defying her strict Catholic upbringing, she started to date. Every summer, her parents shipped Angela and her sister off to France or Italy, hoping they would reconnect with their European roots and escape the counter-cultural influences of late 1960s America. In crinkly par avion aerograms, she described in rapturous detail the food and the men she encountered. When she returned at the end of the summer, I was shocked. She’d gained weight. More surprisingly, she had boobs!
Once school began, Angela reverted to type. She lost all the weight she’d gained during the summer, reporting each new weight loss gleefully in our meetings in between classes in the halls, but she could not or would not repress other desires and continued to fall in love. I did, too, here and there, but it wasn’t a priority. My main goal was to recreate myself into a more serious and scholarly person, which was sad because there was a time in my life when I was athletic and fun.
At the end of senior year, Angela and I were both accepted to Ivy League colleges. Her conservative parents, however, insisted she attend a lesser, local college and live at home. I was headed to Radcliffe, but before I left, we saw each other one last time. It was August. She had just returned from her annual summer abroad. Stepping off the bus at my corner, she told me she had fallen in love. His name was Emil, he was twice her age, and he taught philosophy in Amsterdam. She pulled a necklace out from her cleavage and showed me the gold charm dangling from the end of it. “It has to do with Kierkegaard,” she said, “a symbol for luck.”
The next few years ended badly for both of us. Despite getting into the college of my dreams, I unraveled. I was sixteen, a sack of bones, and I didn’t know what to do with myself now that I had achieved my goals, dubious as they were, a low weight and high grades. About Angela, the news was more shocking. She had run off to Amsterdam to live with Emil. She hadn’t even finished her freshman year. Other than the facts her mother told me years later, that she was divorced and living in Europe, I never heard another word about her.
So why do I still search? Why do I long to find this woman, then a girl, from that way back period? So much has happened since our fortuitous meeting in that big city high school: a whole second women's movement with its changing notions of gender, of “girlness,” which in adolescence in the 1960s, I found so limiting, even of weight and appearance. Cultural issues affected us too, but so did personal ones, the pressures we felt from our very different families, her strict Catholic one and my achievement-oriented Jewish one, both loving but unable to help us with the conflicts we faced. About those more familial issues, I’ve spent years trying to unravel them and will probably continue to, but still, I wonder what Angela would have to say about all of this, where she is, and what she did during the many years in between those few, tumultuous ones when we meant so much to each other. We were so young, and when you’re young, everything matters so much more.
Fran’s poetry, fiction, and articles have appeared in various sections of The New York Times; also, Vogue, The Nation, The North American Review, and other publications. She is the co-writer of the New York Times bestselling Powerplay (Simon and Schuster) and the author of Most Likely to Succeed (Random House). Her poetry chapbook, Weight, was published in 2022. She wrote the Underground Gourmet column for New York Magazine, and the restaurant reviews for the New Jersey Section of the New York Times.