Friendship

Locking arms against the wrong

“Home is the place where, when you have to go there, / They have to take you in.” A line from Robert Frost’s 1915 poem, “The Death of the Hired Man.” My foster mother recited that line of poetry to me the week I moved into her home. That’s me up there in the middle of the image illustrating this story having a rare laugh while wearing a pair of polka dot culottes that she made for me. I still love polka dots and she and I are still friends. Home for me is friendship. Friendship surrounds me. I would not be the person I am today without my friends, especially my female friends. Women able to withstand strong disagreement about important ideas. Women who are kind and honest. Willing to get their hands in the muck of life. Willing to question and resist the potential oppressor within. And without. Kind and compassionate women who have each other’s back.

Second grade at Grover Cleveland Elementary school on Lake Atlin Avenue in La Mesa, California. My best friend was Sharon Barajas. We kissed good-bye on the walk home. Hung out at her house after school dreaming of ways to punish our classmates, especially the teacher’s pet, a little blonde girl with pigtails pulled so tight they made her forehead red. She tattled. She bullied. Called my friend and I names. Pigtail girl was a girl like us, but we considered her a traitor. She told on us when we broke the rules which seemed most silly to us. Don’t talk in class. Stay in line. One day Sharon and I had enough of pigtail girl. When she name called us on the playground one more time we didn’t back down. We locked arms and ran towards her. She screamed and took flight. Ran so fast down the ramp off the playground. Hit the girl’s bathroom door at rocket speed, pushed it open and careened headfirst into the sink.

Sharon lost her crosswalk attendant post. I lost my class president position.

“It’s an elected position,” I told the teacher. “You can’t do that. You need to take a vote.” I lost that vote, but I didn’t care. I’d lock arms with Sharon again in a heartbeat to mow down that hater kid then and now. Sharon’s dad was a flamenco guitar player; mine was an electrician. Her mother was a housewife; mine was the talk of the neighborhood.

Mama didn’t make friends with any of the women on Lake Atlin Avenue.

In third grade Libby King was one of my best friends. We promised never to marry, to grow up and live next door to one another forever. Libby shared a mother and father with one older sister. In their bedroom, over their bed, her parents hung a plaster cast relief of another couple—a chicken and a fighting rooster. Their claws out, their feathers ruffled.

“That’s you and Mr. King, isn’t it?” I said to Libby’s mom.

Mrs. King laughed. Turned away from me, and whispered something to Libby’s daddy, Mr. King, who laughed too and shook his head from side to side as he walked into the other room.

I squeezed my belly into a fleshy mound, which dimpled and puckered like soft cookie dough. “Look,” I said. “I can make a bun out of my stomach.”

“Christy, you are something else.”

Was something else a bad thing?

I played at Libby’s house, amazed and comparing like I was visiting a foreign country. The rooms in Mrs. King’s house had more in them: more furniture, more pictures, more nick-knacks, more laughter, more attention. I wanted Mrs. King to like me, to pay attention to me, to pull her glasses up to her face like she did when she read something in the paper at her kitchen table in the morning, serious and quiet. To watch over me the way she watched over the neighborhood from her kitchen window.

Through our kitchen window there was a dark nothing.

Mama’s head did not hover there watching over her children.

Mrs. King knew something was wrong at my house. Something wasn’t right with Mama. Libby’s house was normal, and our house was not. Not on the inside. Not in the rooms of our house. Mama hid our TV in a knotty pine cabinet with little doors on the front like a stage or a puppet show. Sitting in a chair, or lying on the carpet, stomach down, legs up, head in hands, I watched TV: Captain Kangaroo, Lassie, Lost in Space, I Love Lucy, looking into those lives, lives recorded, lives put in the box for me: fancy mothers, suited fathers, safe children in upstairs houses. You could hear everyone when they spoke. Everyone was heard. Everyone got his or her turn to talk. Was there a microphone in all of their ceilings? I became camera ready, walking around the house looking up toward the TV in the sky.

Film me. Make me normal too. Make it all look real.

Show me how it all should really look.

One day I gave Libby a nickel to be and stay my friend.

She brought it back with a message from Mrs. King: “You can’t buy friendship.”

We moved away in the night not long after and I didn’t have another friend for a very long time. I was alone, without friends or the hope of them. There was never time. Even the simple act of listening demands time. And we were always moving. When would Mama stop running? When had she started? Did her wanderings start the night she ran away from our home on Lake Atlin Avenue; or did her escapades begin long before I was born?

When I aged out of foster care my caseworker told me to be good.

Be a good girl. Not, be happy, go find yourself, do your best to thrive despite the odds.

Just: be a good girl.

She meant don’t piss anybody off. Charity cases can’t afford to be difficult, they are inconvenient enough, taking up space they don’t deserve in places they don’t belong.

Our first friends are often siblings or cousins. One of my first friends was my cousin P. We’d listen together to our mothers talking. Scheming really. I was three when one of my other cousins took my trike away from me and I bit her on the arm. Her mother, my aunt, my mother’s best friend, came running. Chased me around and into the house. Tracked me down in the bathroom where I huddled against the bathtub and bit me hard on the arm.

Payback. Revenge.

That experience stayed with me. Informed the kind of loyalty I could offer myself and others. The kind of art I would make. The kind of friend I could be.

“You’re dangerous,” a former friend said to me a few years back.

Always ready to bite the hand which feeds me.

When I transitioned out of foster care I was driven by my foster parents to Edmond, Oklahoma to attend Oklahoma Christian College.

So lonely. So tired. Thinking who the fuck are these people?

First day there I met a girl name T. Hair a halo of golden ringlets. Skin pale. Eyes clear blue. Her eyebrows were amazing. They arched in a guileless face. So, unlike myself, dark-eyed and brooding. Our tastes were similar enough for sharing and different enough for jealousy. I permed my straight hair while she ironed her curls. We would spend the next seventeen years trying to be friends.

The last time I saw T. she was serving the table to my right. I don’t remember the food I ate but I do remember her face. Those arched brows were paler and traveled over eyes which glared as they stared. We could still swap jeans, but we could no longer share a meal.

Still, I dropped by her place before leaving town.

The rooms of her ground floor apartment were aesthete sparse. She had a round dining table and two wooden chairs. The rest of her place was decidedly empty. On the way to the kitchen, she checked her hair in an oval mirror hung at the correct height to catch her reflection. We drank cold, bottled water. I didn’t stay long. When I left, she handed me three jars of canned food, a gift from her garden—tomatoes, pickles and sweet corn relish. We both wished the other well. The girl who once needed her friend too much now wanted to say I was wrong to judge you the way I did. Wrong to hang on too tightly. But I couldn’t find the words.

I wanted to share my regrets with a young girl’s features; those forward-looking brows, which had framed a simpler face.

The last long look, the backward glance. Everything I touched imbued with hope and emotions so strong I couldn’t name them. I was always flying off. Moving on in mind or body. Move on, I’d say if friends asked me for advice. Move away from what you don’t want and what was once unclear will come into focus.

In defiance for so long, saved by that defiance, afraid to be weak and afraid to be strong—afraid to be in the moment. Calculated denial my closest friend. I wasn’t alone, because I had a roommate and a job. I wasn’t poor, because I had student loans and a full-time job. I wasn’t unloved. I was an artist, meant to explore, to stumble alone through life.

That’s what I told myself.

Because that’s how I’d survived.

I seldom shared much. Fearing what they’d say if I did confide in them. Keep it to yourself. Save your drama for your mama. Or worse. That must have been rough. But, you know it’s not my fault. And they were right.

All of us trapped in a wrecked ship at the bottom of an ocean.

All of us complex and flawed from the get-go.

After my stepmom kicked me out all I wanted was to be on my own, but I needed to finish high school. So, I told my friend Michele, just take me to the welfare office. And she drove me across town in her Volkswagen Beetle, dropped me off in the parking lot of the Jasper County Department of Social Services—right in front of its doors—and sped away.

When my caseworker asked if I was frightened, I answered yes and swallowed hard. My true feelings become my darkest secret. I felt relieved. I felt free. But never free of where I came from. Routine betrayals. Badmouthing come from the mothers. Co-conspirators. Mothers working hard to keep it together. Shunned by other women. Only friend a sister. Working to fend off anyone who might take their kids away.

With their you’re-not-the-boss-of-me vibe. Vindictive and undermining.

They were cruel and I did not love them anyway.

The day I lost my position as class president I came home to find my Baby Brother, a two-year-old boy, abandoned to his baby bed cage, blinds drawn, door shut. Mama in the kitchen, stomping her foot in time to her music as he wailed. He screamed, wanting out.

Out of his baby bed. Out of his room. Out of his life.

Mama darted toward me eyes blazing, grabbing me, scratching me, shaking me, and pushing me to the front door and outside. “What are you looking at, you little bitch? Ugly little brat. Get out of here. Get out. You’re driving me crazy.”

Moody Sister stood in the kitchen doorway, watching.

“You too, honey. Go outside for a while. He needs to take a nap. God I hate boys, why in the hell did I even have him?”

I ran out of the house ahead of my sister, off the porch, and down the curved driveway toward the parked cars at the curb out front. I crouched behind a car bumper and waited for Mama’s favorite child, to pass me by. Moody Sister always told on me in her slow, sad voice. Christy is down the street. Christy is playing at Mrs. King’s house again. Christy is saying a dirty word.

Moody Sister usually stayed inside with Mama when I left, playing with her poodle Pierre or trying on my shoes.

But on bad days, even the favorite stayed outside.

“Christy, Christy, wait for me, Mama said to wait for me. Mama said to take me with you.”

I crouched lower behind the bumper, next to the wheel of the car parked in front of our house, and waited for my sister to pass me by. Bigger, taller, slower, she ambled down the driveway and stood just on the other side of the car where I hid thinking get away, stay away. Leave me alone. Her black bangs veiled her eyes, a little fringe curtain over dark blue lights, looking through the haze for her sister, her big sister. Finally she gave up. Turned and walked up the street, to the right of the sidewalk, in the grass, close to the gutter where we played when it rained.

There was always something wrong going on. The kind of wrong that stays in a body for a long time. Until you wring it out. Call it a sob story if you like. The stuff of storytelling is simply human. Human sorrow. There you have it. You don’t have to see it my way. You do need to see it for what it is, what it continues to be.

The harm done to all of us when we gloss over the harm done is continuing the harm.

What would happen if we all said No in unison. No to the glossing over. If we were able together as friends to lock arms against the wrong. Because at last there is no leaving.

There is no outside.

At night all alone in our dark bedroom, away from Mama, Moody Sister and I were friends again. We played games across the divide between our twin beds, in that “go to sleep right now” shadow land I aimed balloons, like skipped stones, toward her head as she back flopped over her bed’s edge. Across our imaginary moat, she presented herself to me, upside down and singing. “Que sera sera, whatever will be will be, the future’s not ours to see, que sera sera.”

“What will be, will be.”