Friendship, An Assignment

Anne Germanacos

9/5

It’s windy here, as usual. Still haven’t been in the sea. Wasted an awful lot of paper printing out stories. A good day. I practically forgot where I was.

Still drinking tea. Still haven’t written to my mother-in-law.

It’s Labor Day today. I’d better do something laborious.

My friend is expecting an essay on friendship in ten days!

What’s standing in my way: the idea of an ESSAY. Makes me feel I have to sew it all up, make it tidy and rational. Get rid of the edges. The kind of essay she wants me to write works against my method of working.

But maybe she’s right.

Friendship.

With an essay, one needs to start with an idea. I’ve been working less from ideas than fragments of sentences, images, emotions. But the summer provided a

Ugh.

How about just doing friendship?

(Not sure I want to go over that territory right now.)

Maybe I can’t do it.

Maybe I’ll have to wait until the last minute.

While walking to the sea, I had an idea: one friend standing for many.

9/6

She refused to get on a plane, so I had to be the one. Again and again.

She wanted to bring her dog but ended up bringing her daughter; three days later, they drove away in a huff.

(My brain works in high concentrations. Between bouts, it’s practically mute.)

9/7

So this is what I’m learning: That my brain has stopped working the way it did, once upon a time. That I can’t offer it a bone and say come, and expect the dog of it to run sloppily to retrieve the thing.

The thing is no longer out there, anywhere, but entirely inside, nestled at some curve in the ear. All of it’s brain, of course. I no longer believe in division of any kind.

I have to be dog and bone, both.

9/8

Not getting very far with my assignment. I guess maybe it won’t go anywhere at all.

Being with my sister that day on Mt. Tam was like being with a friend, not least because I’d taken a similar hike with a friend (not a sister—but then, in how many ways is a friend like and not like a sister?) the year before. We took a picnic and forgot about certain aspects of civilization. 

But the whole thing didn’t come into focus until I took off my sunglasses: Without accurate light, I couldn’t really see. The perfectly shaded world in front of dark glasses is bereft of time and history: the moments stand out, alone, without the psychological shading afforded by previous versions of that particular light, that hour in that season.

Walking back, moving eastward, the sunlight was in the trees and behind us. It made a holy echo. (That was the day my sister became, once again, my friend.)

9/9

When they drove away, I was left with five pounds of black and red licorice piglets. I thought they’d taken the dog but no, there she was, reincarnated as a long-haired terrier in a house around the corner from mine.

The dog was a little crazy, like her owner (her mother?), my friend. Or, this is what we say when the dog runs wild, carrying ragged stuffed animals to the latest visitor. But the truth is, the dog’s mother (owner?) isn’t any crazier than the rest of us. She suffers, is all, except while chasing the dog.

And she finally flew down to New York, where we drank wine together and told all the missing stories. There were so many of them and our time so short that we never even got to the secrets.

She wanted me to buy a new wallet, with her, so that whenever I spent money, I’d think of her.

I left the wallet in a closet—without a zipper, it confused me.

Another time, she and I discovered the boys in their dorm, the two of us too old by then to do anything with the boys’ charm and good looks. We flew to the branches of sycamores, protected ourselves from the rain with our floppy wings, and watched.

I give her trinkets, pass along minor obsessions, pelt her with letters and phone calls. When she’s silent for too many days, the rope of friendship turns to string and then thread.

9/10

On the phone, we weep together until we’re dry of tears. Then the laughter begins.

But when her mother died, I didn’t know what to say. I left food on the top step for three months running. When I skipped a night, she left a sarcastic message: Tired of making chicken soup?

And it was a year before we spoke; each of us wept alone.

I was seduced back by the smoke of her cigarette. Early one morning, reading the paper on a foggy corner, the scent of cloves entered my nostrils. She was down the street, sipping coffee. I caught her eye; we both smiled.

(About to get my period.)

For whole years at a time, our periods came together. I mean, hour and minute. But there’ve been other years when nothing’s in sync.

9/11

Something in me cringes to try a more essay-like voice. It feels so close-to-home, so personal, so unimaginative. And right now, in these circumstances, writing remains the only escape. So she will have to excuse my inability to write an essay and make do with whatever it is that I’ll send in four days.

9/12

Do I need coffee? Is that the problem we’re facing here? In this land of tiny thoughts and limited feelings?

My sister and her husband are going back into therapy. I guess it’s a kind of fall cleaning. Summer’s over, kids are back in school, time to work on the marriage.

9/13

Walked to the beach, swam for almost twenty-five minutes. My husband and I, together but apart.

9/14

So she said, “All right, here’s the assignment.” The sun was on my back but in her eyes. She was eating a small apple pie—the bite she offered told me how close we’d gotten to autumn. My choice was without season, a chocolate pudding tart that was surprisingly unsweet.

She said: “You write like me and I’ll write like you. On the theme of friendship.”

Then, because her sunglasses were at the bottom of her bag, and we’d both had enough of the sweets, we got up and walked out into the late August afternoon. A few minutes later, she was driving toward the Lincoln Tunnel and I was walking slowly up Sixth Avenue.

And now there’s this assignment between us. Will it unite us anew or draw us toward our first-ever fight? 

*

When his dusty black truck went noisily past the village square, everyone sitting there mumbled of the driver, Pentaro Michalis: He’s nobody’s friend.

9/15

So: It’s easy to wrap everyone into one and call it “the friend” or “she.” In order to write an essay, one needs to be abstract, to move away from the particular and look at the general sense of things. So I can smush my beloved friends together into one, call them “her,” and point to the various things that can happen in a friendship, particularly one between women.

And then a big wind comes and takes her house out from under her. She calls to let me know she’s driving away from it even before I knew of its existence. (I was eating a breakfast burrito while she was driving away from the quagmire, the mud, the swamp that was her life.)

Later she calls me a rock; I call her one back.

From the north, she (another she) brings chocolate, ginger, and coffee—to spice up our lives.

This is to not even go where the children are, the husbands, the boyfriends (lost and saved). This is a handful of friends smushed into one, for the sake of an assignment, an abstract view of friendship.

It doesn’t really work this way, the chronologies won’t synchronize, and I can’t begin to imagine the friend’s eyes or coloring.

Sometimes it’s useful, I suppose, to think One where really there are more. Because after the assignment, One breaks open into a handful and you feel inestimably rich.