A blast from my thesis: Driftwood

Maria sang in the shower, loudly, lungs so full I heard her in my room. I put a pillow over my head to drown her out. It was early and she was singing Carol King off-key: soprano “You make me feel,” lowering her voice to a baritone, “you make me feel!” I swore she did it just to annoy me as I turned over in bed, sighing. “You make me feel like a mansion or a woman! . . . (high pitch –) WOMAN!” I cringed and almost yelled “NATURAL woman!” through the wall, but then, I smiled, thinking it was more creative than “Secret Asian Man.”

My first memory of Oregon State University is a night just before Fall classes began my freshman year, running with Maria. Under the orange campus lights, the pavement seemed to stretch forever, and the evening air was warm and humid and full of possibilities. I felt alive, my lungs burning, my heart ready to take on the world, my best friend beside me. But she soon transferred to the University of Oregon for Sam, her high school sweetheart, who I helped her get over a few months later, sitting in her car on the U of O’s campus under the street lamps, brushing the hair from her wet face. I repeated what she’d told me during my first heartbreak: “time, it brings the truth sought…” and took her to buy a pint of Ben & Jerry’s.

She used to drive a Chevy Nova, old and bare with its primer coating, and everyone at our high school knew it was hers. It had long bench seats and buckles that fastened in the middle and only AM radio, but she liked the country music that came in scratchy. It was quirky and fit her perfectly. But now she drives her grandma’s Oldsmobile wagon, beige, a car so common that I think I see it everywhere. Whenever I see it, I think Maria! – even out of state, I think Maria! and look to see. Once, walking home from college in Corvallis, I saw it pass on the street a few blocks ahead, and stop briefly at a stoplight. Maria! But I knew it wasn’t because she lived in Eugene and she wouldn’t have come up midweek. Although the windows were up, I saw the driver listening to music, moving her head, and I thought of a song Maria liked, hummed, and walked to its rhythm. The driver looked at me as the light changed, from blocks away, startled to see me walking to the same beat as the song in her car, before she realized who I was. She parked on the next street. We walked faster toward each other until we were running.

Once a week that year, I walked home in the afternoon, and when I turned onto my street, I saw her car parked next to my house. She sat on the front porch with her braided hair flopped to one side under a bandana, which made her look a little like Rosy the Riveter, her face, round and German with big cheeks, always in a book. I liked staying with her in Eugene better because she made her own tea with peppermint and served it in old jam jars. But finding her at my place, just up for the night to surprise me, I knew she loved me.

I liked knowing little things about her. She hates cooked carrots and her middle name – Gerlinda; she’s afraid of drowning but loves sailing; she likes Cyndi Lauper and daisies; she reads the Eugene Weekly personal ads every week to see if anyone wrote about her under “I Saw You;” she wears cowboy boots and skirts in the rain.

We used to walk from her house to a coffee shop near the University of Oregon, and study at Café Roma where she drank tea or decaf coffee, and I thought it was silly to drink decaf. She was good to study with because she could focus, but also because she would talk from where she was thinking, laying down her book and looking across the table to ask if I thought we were just societal machines and programmed, or if I knew why humans are so violent, or if I wanted to join the Peace Corps with her. Or she told me a story so crazy that it must be true, although I wondered, shaking my head.

At a friend’s house, Maria grabbed a colored scarf, and with her back to me, she wrapped it over her head and held the ends under her chin. Suddenly, she turned around and sang deep and dramatic, “Matchmaker, Matchmaker, make me a match!” her body swaying side to side. Everyone stared. Only I laughed.

Once, I confused us. Our friend and I sat in a dark theatre, waiting for Maria’s entrance in a play. I listened to the lines she’d read to me, telling him that she should be onstage soon, and remembering the first time I saw her, onstage as Snow White in a middle school play, and how I wanted to be her friend. Her cue came, and he touched my arm to alert me as Maria stepped out in a gaudy dress and too much makeup, her voice loud across the room with a fake Southern accent. I thought, “that’s me. There I am,” immediately and easily, like looking at myself in a mirror or a picture or a dream. And then, just as suddenly, I knew it wasn’t, because I recognized Maria’s walk and it wasn’t mine, because I was in the audience watching her.
We waited to take her home after the curtain call, and through the pictures and people telling her that she should be a model because she’s tall and beautiful and dynamic, waiting for her to return in overalls and hair down. When she and I were alone, I mentioned my displacement, thinking she’d laugh. “You too?” she asked; it happened to her looking at pictures of us in groups, when she picked out me, more than once, thinking, “I looked good that day,” or “I don’t remember wearing that.”

Last summer, she was leaving to work in the jungles of Ecuador, and I was going to live at home and waitress. Before she left, we had a barbeque to celebrate my college graduation and my parents’ anniversary. Relatives and my parents’ friends mingled in the yard while Maria and I sat at a picnic table bored because she was the only person I invited who came. We drank too much beer, talked about her trip, and both said we wished that I was going too because I had planned to go, but when the time came, I didn’t have the money. I promised to visit.
She got a headache from the beer and the sun and went home early, leaving me with my dad’s drunken friend, who cornered me as soon as Maria left. “I watched you two,” she said through crooked teeth, leaning back on the table. “There’s a lot of love there. But you’re worried about her going. You’re jealous.” I inched away, not wanting to hear it from a drunk. “You’re afraid she’ll grow and leave you behind, and experience things you’ll never know.” I said that I was happy for Maria, but not that I was afraid, or that I knew I wouldn’t visit because Ecuador was her idea and, truthfully, I never wanted to go.
On her last day, Maria came over but didn’t stay long because she had things to do, and her new boyfriend was stopping by. We stood in the driveway, kicked gravel, and didn’t know what to say, so I traded my lucky necklace for her favorite ring and hugged her goodbye, swearing it would be okay. But I saw her crying as she drove away with a honk. I didn’t cry until I got her first email about the images that haunted her, then I couldn’t get them out of my head either: her taxi driver pulled a knife that she kicked out of his hand; her bus rolled in a mudslide; and she had to give CPR to a girl who’d been buried in the mud while the mother screamed “Madre Madonna!” beside her, as the girl went limp in her arms. But she never wrote about how sick she got from a parasite in her stomach, needing hospitalization and going numb from the waist down. She never wrote about nearly dying. Why didn’t she tell me?

I sat with her mom in their garden, rubbing her back as she cried. Or I listened while she played me answering machine tapes of broken messages from Maria – because the phone systems were not adequate there – insisting that they sounded as if she’d been kidnapped and her voice distorted. I promised Maria would come home okay, although I wondered. I assured her that at least Jason, the new boyfriend I hadn’t met, was going to Ecuador to bring her home. I never visited. I was poor, and I fell in love that summer too, with Richard, who Maria didn’t meet for months. I thought I’d at least be at the airport when she returned, holding her mom’s hand, flowers under my arm, but when the day arrived, I wanted her to be with her family and Jason, so I waited until she came home. Driving to her parents’ house that day, I was afraid to see her, worrying about what to say since we had not emailed as frequently as I expected, thinking she’d be too thin because she was hungry and sick in Ecuador. But she looked the same, except she looked tired. I crossed the room, but I didn’t know what else to do than hug her, and just keep hugging her.

Can women hold on to their girlhood friends? Now I don’t tell her my secrets first, but second, or sometimes not at all. Months after her return, I mourned for us, knowing we changed, wishing we hadn’t. So I left messages on her machine, unanswered, and called her mom to leave a message there. Women’s friendships are dynamic and complicated – I’d been jealous, and protective, and supportive, and I’d been hurt by her lack of attention and her putting boyfriends first. And I’d been comforted by her braiding my hair, like a mother, and crying with her because life can be unfair. I talked to her in my head when she was gone, complaining of the new development in our hometown that destroyed her favorite old mill. But I was afraid to admit that friendships also wax and wane, worrying that our boyfriends replaced each other. So I put a personal ad in the Eugene Weekly in the “I Saw You” column: MAPIA – I always mean “Mapia” with love, teasing you for wetting your pants yrs ago. Been so long since I saw your face. Hard to meet, but I think of you in all I do. You are the bravest person. And you make me proud to be your friend. And I hoped she read it.

I keep a picture of her on my bathroom mirror of a day when we drove west on a whim, Fall air rushing in the open windows, the car’s heater wastefully high to combat the coolness, and the radio loud over the rush of the wind. We squinted through the dirty windshield, passing green farms sprinkled with cows, noting the season’s change, and taking another picture of us driving. The beach was solemn, a gray and windy day typical on the Oregon Coast. We traced the edge of the ocean, in and out of the water, searching for smoothed shells, looking out to the horizon. We said little, and Maria cradled a pink cake box as we walked, keeping its contents secret.
Driftwood dotted the shore, and we chose a log, kicking off our shoes, sitting with our feet bare in the cold sand for the novelty of it, digging small holes with our toes. We watched the waves crash, not needing to talk, thinking we already knew. She opened the pink lid and we propped the box between us, shielding it from blowing sand, eating the cheesecake she bought me with plastic forks.