On Friendship

This isn’t part of the memoir, but It feels like it belongs here.

On Friday I ran and saw SEX AND THE CITY the minute it opened, and it was the best two-and-a-half hours I’ve spent since I rented the TV show’s DVDs. Fashion, beauty, love, sex, laughter, The Big Apple…plus, it’s a very secure feeling to know, when everything falls apart, it’ll all be made right at the end. The movie was panned, mercilessly and unfairly, in the NY Times. Hey, nobody’s saying this is high art: for what SATC is, it was well done. A lot of scenes had me tearing up, especially the tender way Carrie’s friends take care of her, and I realized that a big appeal of the show lies in its romantic view of friendship. In an age when we’re not supposed to romanticize romance, the romantic impulse in SATC is superimposed onto friendship instead. Maybe that’s what I always liked about the series.

Friendship is a topic I’ve been thinking about a lot this century, almost as much as I think about aging. Last century I had dozens of friendships, ranging in longevity from three to forty-five years. I’m talking close friends, not mere acquaintances, mostly women, some in California, some in New York. Today I have almost none. I lost a few people to death; the others either drifted away, intentionally dumped me, or I dumped them. Some of the dumpings were as dramatic and painful as the deaths. I’ve spent much of this century so far trying to figure out what happened.

Before I could analyze the breakups I had to look clearly at the relationships as they were. One reason I’m so moved by the friendships in SATC is that I’ve never in my life had friends who treated me the way these women treat each other. Charlotte sat on the bed and spoon-fed Carrie during her meltdown. Miranda the attorney saved her apartment, and wheeler-dealer Samantha arranged to get all her belongings back into it—all accomplished while sitting on a veranda in Mexico, where they’d gone to nurse Carrie back into a reasonable semblance of human. Who has friends like these, much less three of them? I wish!

I used to say that the women in SATC were like no women I’ve ever known, that the show was a gay man’s fairy tale…but I suspended disbelief because I love fairy tales. What I was talking about then was the clothing, the clubbing, the easy pickups, the money. Let’s be real: no New York columnist at Carrie Bradshaw’s level, writing three times a week, makes enough bucks to pay New York City rent, much less buy Manolo Blahnik shoes with regularity and eat out every meal. Now I realize it’s the actual friendship, the heart of SATC, that’s the real fairy tale. Contemporary women are beyond the myth of Happily Ever After with the Prince—but we still believe it can happen with friends.

I used to consciously and seriously believe in friendship. It was one of my core values. Back in the 70s, when I got into consciousness-raising and the women’s movement, one of the first illusions that got tossed along with the bras and razors was romantic love—from my head, if not my heart. We actually held seminars and workshops on the subject. You’d be ridiculed if you believed that coupledom, as we sneeringly called it, could save you. It wasn’t just theoretical, either—I’d been married, I’d done the whole husband-kids-picket fence routine, and found it wanting.

We believed in forms of group living as a Solution, an antidote to the nuclear family, a phrase as loathsome to us as coupledom. We were vague on the details—maybe a variation of the Israeli kibbutz would save us, maybe Chinese style socialism. We read up on these systems, studied them. The hippie commune has become a media joke, but many of them were conscious efforts to forge a better way of life and raise healthier kids. I lived in two or three group situations, all disastrous in one way or another. Still, though I came to the conclusion that communal living was my own worst nightmare, I didn’t stop believing in friendship as the key to a good life. I put a lot of time and energy into my friendships, as much as I put into my kids and my serially monogamous relationships—maybe even more, to my everlasting regret. As an investment in the future…better stick with blood, it really is thicker than water—though I couldn’t swear to that either.

You’d think by now I’d be done idealizing friendship, but, while I may be disillusioned, I’m not completely cynical. If I were, I wouldn’t be so enamored of Carrie and Company. Somewhere deep inside, I still believe that do-or-die friendships exist. I imagine that lots of people, or at least women, have them; I know for a fact this is so. I’m always reading stories by older women who say it’s their friends who pull them through. Just this year I read a memoir by Isabel Allende and another by Lillian Rubin, both extolling their glorious friendships. I know a San Francisco woman whose birthday parties I used to go to—the last one I attended was her 70th—where dozens of devoted women come to honor her year after year bearing gifts and poetry. These aren’t casual acquaintances, either, but intimate friends, nurtured during four decades of living, working, and political activism in San Francisco.

In my forties—a relatively late age for starting new friendships—I formed one that was far healthier and more positive than previous relationships. Andrea’s chief mission in life was collecting people, and when we met, through a mutual friend’s death, she signed me on for life. (People in New York tend to be that way—whoever you happen to stumble into can end up a lifetime connection from which you can’t opt out without major drama. Californians, I’ve found, are more transient, drifting in and out of each other’s lives with little fanfare). During the eighteen years I knew Andrea, I learned what had been missing in my friendships. I also faced up to my own failings as a friend, and learned to do it better. When she told me she had lung cancer, I confess that my first selfish reaction was self-pity: I’d finally found a real friend, so of course she was going to die. (She did, last February.)

My longest lasting friendship began in high school. Over the years and decades, she and I gave a lot of lip service to the depth of our love and loyalty—but the truth is, our friendship came nowhere near SATC quality. She never spoon-fed me when I was depressed, or helped me with any of my relocations. Not that I needed that—but she didn’t even keep me company during the long days and nights in the hospital when my son had his operations–and that I did need. Worse than what she didn’t do was what she did: she criticized my decisions, mocked my ideas and values, and ridiculed me whenever I made some major change. She was the stable housewife and mother, and, like so many Americans, assumed that hers was the normal life, mine was aberrant. I moved around a lot, let my kids live with their father for awhile, and embraced one social movement after another–all of which made me, in her eyes, flighty and irresponsible. After our kids were grown, she said it was a miracle that mine turned out so well despite our lifestyle. I wanted to say, maybe it’s because of our lifestyle–but my inability to defend myself was a central part of our dynamics. She was convinced her choices were superior to mine, and made no secret of it; I can’t count how many times she dismissed me with, “Oh, it’s just another one of your phases.”

You might ask why I remained in such a relationship for 45 years. Actually, I tried to break away from her early on, when my divorce took me in a very different direction from her, but somehow it was far easier to dump my husband than her. Every time I managed to put some distance between us, something would throw us together again, like her daughter’s brain tumor or, years later, resulting seizures. Despite our vast differences, we shared an emotional bond, a gut-level connection that was, at certain times and under certain circumstances, deeply satisfying. Our conversations could be profound, often spiritual. The odd thing was, while on one level she knew me deeply, in some fundamental ways I was invisible to her. I always loved her and still do—but sometimes love is not enough.

I broke off the friendship once and for all in 2002, during a health crisis that put me into the hospital seven times in one year. For more than two years I was sick, poor, and profoundly dissatisfied with my life, and she got tired, she said, of my “negativity.” Here is what my alleged best friend of 45 years had to say in an email to me at that time: “Yes, it’s true that my life is a lot better than yours—tough!”

It was during this time that other friendships also collapsed. To my astonishment, none of my friends helped me when I got sick. Hell, they couldn’t even tolerate me, much less help. Yes, I was whiny; yes, I cried and complained a lot—but I don’t care how negative or insufferable I might have been at that time…what the fuck are friends for?

One friend in New York who did come through happened to call me just as I arrived home after four days in hospital. I’d just walked into an empty apartment, frightened about taking care of myself, and was trying to figure out the medication instructions the nurse had given me. Unable to make head or tail of them, feeling lost and alone, I answered the phone crying.

From 3000 miles away, Joani called the hospital and got the information, then called me back to deliver it. At this time I had friends in San Francisco who told me, “Gee, I wish I could help you, but I’m all the way on the other side of the bridge.” It’s not like this was the first time Joani had come through for me—we have a 30-year history, our kids have remained friends since kindergarten, and her husband’s been a good friend to me too. It’s just that at this time, when I was so sensitive and needy, I was looking at my friendships in a new way. I knew then, if I hadn’t before, that Joani was a keeper.

Unlike four or five others.

For almost 30 years I’d been helping S. with her health crises—taking her to doctors, writing bureaucratic letters for her, giving her a television when hers broke, always bringing her musical compilations and other gifts. I never expected too much from her because of her health problems, but she did manage to go out to a movie or to see friends from time to time…so why couldn’t she visit me just once? Another friend stuck it out for a few months, once even drove me home from hospital…but then she decided we were “going in different directions.” She was trying to be spiritual and kind, she explained, while I was becoming bitter and negative. After fifteen years of friendship, she walked out the door for good.

With this litany of complaints I’m leaving myself wide open to judgment and suspicion: when we hear stories like mine, we automatically wonder what we’re not hearing—the other side of the story. We read between the lines trying to imagine the horrible deeds this person must have done to deserve so much bad treatment. It’s true that all these people have their stories, and that I’m no angel. But as clearly as I can make out, what I’m describing is what happened. I’ve become someone I never in a million years thought I would become: a statistic: a lonely, isolated senior with no support system.

It’s all such a cliché, isn’t it—the notion of fair weather friends, the old saw that in times of need you find out who your real friends are. The thing is, I should have found it out long ago. As the single mother of a son who had seizures and surgical procedures, I already had a life full of crises. I felt quite alone with all that, which wasn’t just a feeling. I see now that I couldn’t bear to face the truth: I’d already given up on romantic love and the nuclear family; if I gave up on friendship, what would be left?

My mother used to tell me, “You can never count on anyone but yourself.” I scoffed at her cynicism. My generation was different. We’d care for one another. All you need is love and so forth. But as it turns out, to employ another cliché, my mother was right. Life has taught me that all I can count on is myself. I loved Sex and the City because it offered momentary escape from that harsh reality, a few minutes or hours pretending that friendship can be what I once thought it should be.