Chapter One: Beginnings
Ellen
The sun was setting when I pulled my battered red Chevy Vega
station wagon out of the driveway of the brown shingle house
that I had just bought with every last nickel to my name,
and headed off for Cambridge. The hands on the steering
wheel were still speckled with the red paint that I had been
rolling onto the living room walls that day, paint financed
by the sale of an engagement ring from a former marriage and
life.
I was thirty-two years old, a single mother, with a
five-year-old daughter and a brand new puppy, living less
than a mile from the house in which I had grown up, and I
was going back to Harvard ten years after graduation. An
adult now, a journalist, a reporter for The Boston
Globe, I had hustled and won a prize -- a mid-career
Nieman Fellowship in journalism -- and I was off to meet the
other members of my "class" for the first time.
In those days, I was breathless. Coping with work and family
and love -- what Zorba the Greek would call the whole
catastrophe. I was not at all sure how the pieces of my life
fit together. At work, I had learned to say what I thought
and to write about ideas. I was by no means as confident
when it came to the messy business of feelings.
But this September of 1973, I knew, in some inchoate way,
that I was on the edge of something more than a year "off."
Perhaps a year "on."
Pat
While Ellen was driving from Brookline, I was on the bus
coming from my rented house in Belmont, marveling at the
fact that I had landed in this place, at this time, in this
way. Harvard was only a few miles south of the working-class
town of Somerville (known locally, I learned later, as
"Slumerville"), where I had been born -- geographically
close, but in the days when my Irish immigrant mother and
father lived there, Harvard might as well have been on the moon.
That was the past, this was now. I was thirty-seven, a newly
divorced mother of four children working as a reporter for
the Chicago Sun-Times with a year ahead of me as a
Nieman Fellow. For a woman who had not graduated from
college until she was thirty, this new venture felt like a
huge leap across a class divide. Getting here had taken a
certain amount of audacity, and even though I had an
officially punched ticket of admission, I half expected
someone to snatch it away at the last moment.
I also had two teenage daughters living for the year with
their father back home in Evanston, Illinois, and two
younger girls nervously tiptoeing through a strange house,
wondering what the year ahead would hold for them. This was
by no means a carefree venture. But as I walked down those
narrow streets toward the home of Jim Thomson, the head of
the Nieman program -- the brick sidewalks scraping the backs
of my high-heeled shoes -- I also knew there was nowhere
else I wanted to be. I was literally walking into a major
life-changing experience, not knowing what would come next.
I knew that from here on, everything would be different. I
just didn't know how different.
Ellen
I remember when I first spotted Pat. She was wearing some
kind of full skirt, heels, and bright lipstick; her long,
wavy brown hair was parted in the middle. This was Harvard
Square in the black-turtleneck, ripped-jeans, straight hair,
early-'70s era. She was ironed and starched.
I added it all together and, in the way women will sum up
the totality of someone's personality through their shoes
and suit jacket, I came up with this: perky California
cheerleader. Suburban mom. Smiling, pretty, very Little
League, station wagon driving. Verrrrry straight.
Yet I knew she had to be a good reporter in the competitive
atmosphere of Chicago to have made it through this process.
And from the bios we'd been sent, I also knew that Pat was
the only other woman in the class with children. We were
both divorced. Cheerleader or not, we had these things in
common.
I wasn't looking for or expecting a friend, just a
classmate, but I was curious. Maybe there was something
below that conventional surface. She had four children to my
one and, as if my life were not overloaded enough,
had just published her first book. There was a long year
ahead of us, so who knew what I'd find out.
Pat
I first saw Ellen as I stood in the front hallway of the
house, exchanging stiff little pleasantries with a few
people whose names I hadn't absorbed. She was tall, with
long straight hair and blue aviator glasses, dressed in some
kind of loose pants, clearly not wearing a girdle. (I was
only weeks away from shedding mine.) I knew there were three
other women in my class, but she certainly didn't look as
nervous or uptight as I felt. Craftsy orange earrings; no
makeup. An in-charge, what's-it-to-you type. I fingered the
piece of paper in my pocket that listed all the class
members, and glanced around for a bathroom so I could duck
in and check them out. But the minute Ellen opened her
mouth, there was no question -- she stood out from the crowd.
"Well," she said in an easy, cheery voice, "I wonder what
bullshit everybody threw to get here?"
How blunt were you allowed to be at Harvard? Not that I
wasn't wondering myself how the others had parlayed their
credentials into this prize. But here was somebody who
actually said it out loud. The thought crossed my mind: How
can she be so irreverent in this rarefied environment? But
still she had an engaging air that relaxed me, that made me
listen for what she would say next. When I learned she was
the Nieman who had gone to Radcliffe, I thought, well, no
wonder she's so casual. This is her turf. It must all be
easy for her.
* * *
This is how we met, but it's not how or certainly why we
became friends. Pat saw a confident, breezy insider, but she
couldn't see the missteps or wrenching changes. Ellen saw
Pat's conventional surface, but not the rebellious soul, and
certainly not the pulls of tradition and independence that
had defined so much of her adult life and that would be a
running dialogue of our twenty-six-year conversation.
Would we ever have sought each other out after a chance
meeting at some ordinary cocktail party? We doubt it. But we
had the gift of time to discover and to get to know -- that
oddly flat statement -- each other. We had a chance to
become friends.
Friends? What's a friend? If the Eskimos have twenty-six
different words for snow, Americans have only one word
commonly used to describe everyone from acquaintances to
intimates. It is a word we have to qualify with adjectives:
school friends, work friends, old friends, casual friends,
good friends.
But this catch-all word doesn't catch everything, especially
how we describe a truly intimate friend. A chosen relative?
Bonded, but not by blood? When we asked women how they
define what a close friend is, they leaped past such
qualifiers to describe the impact: being known and accepted,
understood to the core; feeling you can count on trust and
loyalty, having someone on your side; having someone to
share worries and secrets as well as the good stuff of life,
someone who needs you in return.
This special person is not always easy to find. "Every so
often you run into someone from your tribe, a magic person,"
said actress Carrie Fisher. "People who give without keeping
lists and receive with gratitude." These "magic people,"
these close friends, she said, become like family.
The longing for close friendship begins early and goes deep.
In the much-loved children's classic Anne of Green
Gables, the young heroine is newly transplanted to
Avonlea and pining for a "bosom friend." With a yearning
that has resonated through several generations of young
readers, Anne confides her hope of finding "a kindred spirit
to whom I can confide my inmost soul. I've dreamed of
meeting her all my life."
The most famous young diarist of the twentieth century, Anne
Frank, herself yearned for a close girlfriend with whom to
share her feelings when she and her family went into hiding
to escape the Nazis. Deprived of that intimacy, she turned
to her diary, making up imaginary friends and writing them
letters chronicling life in the claustrophobic, secret
annex. "With them, she could laugh, cry, forget her
isolation," writes biographer Melissa Muller.
The desire for love, trust, and intimacy is at the center of
all close relationships, and friendship is no exception. But
because friendship has no biological purpose, no economic
status, no evolutionary meaning to examine or explore,
sometimes we see a curious vanishing act.
A friend who might have been privy to every nuance in a
courting relationship is not in the receiving line at the
wedding; the friend who delivers a heartfelt eulogy may have
been banned from the hospital room because she wasn't
"family." We have many ways of celebrating family
milestones, but not the milestones of friendship. "It's your
silver anniversary? Let's make the toasts and get out the
presents!" Nobody does that for friends.
We wanted to. We found ourselves walking away from interview
after interview, feeling we'd just had some of the best
conversations of our lives with women telling us the stories
of how they met, joking and laughing with each other,
thoroughly enjoying the pleasure of sharing their histories
together.
- Boston publicist Sally Jackson first laid eyes on
Melanie L'Ecuyer when, as a scared five-year-old, she came
into her mother's hospital room and saw two-year-old
Melanie, dressed in a camel-hair coat and leggings, throwing
a tantrum under her mother's bed. The howling child, she was
told, was the daughter of her mother's nurse.
- Nadia Shamsuddin and Maddie Hammond met as two
women glaring at each other on an elevator, wondering who
would be able to write a check faster to snare the choice
apartment they were about to see.
- Mary Landrieu was boarding a bus with a group of
strangers heading for a high school leadership conference
when, drawn by a friendly face, she sat down next to Norma
Jane Sabiston, the girl who would become her lifelong friend
and, eventually -- when Mary became a U.S. senator from
Louisiana -- her chief of staff.
- Author Mary Gordon took one look at Maureen
Strafford when she met her in grammar school and made a
firm, instant decision to ignore her totally. Why? Because
Mary was wearing a mohair sweater and Maureen was wearing plaid.
- Eileen Fennelly and Jenn MacDonough, now college
students, were five-year-olds wearing party hats when Jenn
mistakenly called Eileen "Elaine." Eileen decided right
there that she hated her. By the time they graduated from
high school, the longest period of time that went by without
their talking to each other was exactly, by their actual
count, seventy-two hours.
Some of these women felt an initial spark of connection, and
for some it was just a spark, but it's with great relish
that they remember these stories of meeting each other. They
were not so different in their exuberance from a young child
recounting the thrilling fact of what she has in common with
a friend -- "Do you know we were born on the same day?" "I
can't believe she uses ketchup on her hot dog, too!"
Certainly the two of us were very different; in an earlier
era we might never have met. We grew up a continent away,
Ellen on the older, colder side, Pat in the sunny California
world of shallow roots that had drawn her parents west when
she was a child. If we had followed the prepared scripts, we
each would have stayed in our place. We might have remained
in our circumscribed ethnic groups, our neighborhoods and
family circles, holding little in common. Pat was, after
all, expected to stay in Catholic schools, and when Ellen
went to college, she was assigned a roommate with whom she
had only one thing in common: they were both Jewish.
Looking back at the trajectory we were on, it was Pat who
made the moves. She was the one who moved in great upheavals
from one place to the next. Ellen stayed put, spending all
but four years of her life in her hometown. Pat's life was
charted by its uprootings, willful and imposed. Ellen had
traveled intellectually, but her feet remained on the same,
familiar ground.
It wasn't just ethnicity or geography that made for some of
the degrees of separation between us. In our early twenties,
we had nothing in common. When Ellen was starting college at
Radcliffe in September of 1959, Pat was changing diapers for
two small babies. Pat cannot imagine what she would have had
to say to the young college freshman from Brookline as she
stood at a changing table in Eugene, Oregon, with a wiggling
baby in front of her and diaper pins in her mouth.
At twenty-seven, Pat was a full-time mom with four kids,
learning the wonders of Hamburger Helper and Simplicity
sewing patterns. Ellen had started working in the early
'60s, and had one child at twenty-seven. She stayed home
after Katie's birth for a total of six weeks; Pat was at
home for nine years. Pat had the Feminine Mystique, while
Ellen had a ticket on the first anxious flight of Superwoman
before the myth came crashing to earth.
By the time Pat ventured back to school, juggling those four
children and final exams, Ellen was married to a medical
resident, living in Ann Arbor, and commuting to her job as a
reporter for the Detroit Free Press -- never quite
accepted as one of the doctors' wives raising babies at one
end of I-94, and never quite accepted as one of the boys
covering fires at the other.
By 1968, we would at least have understood each other's
language. We were both working mothers, trying to do what we
wanted to do: work and keep our families intact in an
atmosphere still hostile to the effort. Pat had broken from
the Catholic Church with a prescription for birth control
pills -- and deep ambivalence. For Ellen, Judaism had become
more a celebration of family and food than formal ritual.
By 1971, the women's movement was changing both of our
lives, and -- even before we met -- we already had more in
common than liking ketchup. Each of us in our own city was
covering the first "happenings." Pat wrote an article on
being ejected from a Chicago church because she was wearing
a "Women's Strike Day" button, and Ellen also visited a
church, to write a piece for the Globe about radical
feminists teaching sexual politics and karate.
You could say we had the classic first day of school
meeting. We were starting something entirely new, with hors
d'oeuvres rather than shiny lunchboxes in our hands. It's
the familiar story of friendships that emerge as natural
by-products of a new venture, antidotes to the fear of being
alone in an uncertain if not totally unfamiliar environment.
We've seen this happen with small children, even our own.
Recently Pat's granddaughter Charlotte, at the end of her
first day of school, tugged her mother, Marianna, by the
hand and pulled her into the classroom. "Come meet my new
best friend," she implored. "What's her name?" Marianna
asked. "I don't know, let's go ask her," Charlotte replied.
The connection was made; details to come later.
As grown-ups we were not afraid of starting school alone,
but we did realize we were in a privileged, special moment
of our lives. We had come to Harvard well aware that the
changes in our own lives reflected larger changes taking
place in the society; certainly as women we already had more
choices and more freedom than any other women in history. As
proof, we only had to look at the photographs of earlier
Nieman classes on the wall of the Nieman House: up until our
year, in the entire history of the Nieman Fellowship
program, there had been only ten women -- and ours was the
only class since 1947 to have more than one. In all those
years, there wouldn't have been another woman with whom to
share the experience. In our class, there were four.
We met in a landmark year. Richard Nixon had been elected to
a second term, and the first of the Watergate conspirators
-- the tip of the iceberg ahead -- were found guilty. The
U.S. Supreme Court ruled for the first time that women had a
legal right to an abortion. The divorce rate had soared 8
percent from the year before. The most popular television
shows in a changing America included The Waltons and
All in the Family, while on the big screen, Ingmar
Bergman's stark Scenes from a Marriage was making
people uneasy with hard truths of this rapidly evolving age.
Against this backdrop of change, women were going through a
major cultural transition. It wasn't just laws and political
sensibilities that were changing. So were ideas about human
development. The view that women had grown up with -- based
on a male model -- had taught them that humans mature to
sturdy, independent adulthood by growing away -- from
family, from friends, from connections.
But most women didn't experience life that starkly. They
didn't one day arrive at a static state of adulthood and say
to themselves, "Well, that's that," and they certainly
didn't want to be "grown-ups" alone. In the 1970s, women
like psychiatrist Jean Baker Miller first challenged the
idea that women grow up by separating. Carol Gilligan,
charting the moral development of girls, began to hear "a
different voice."
It's been easier since then to see the female reality, that
women develop in relationship, through
connection. Women don't "find" themselves or "understand"
themselves all alone but by interacting with others. They
forge and reforge their own identity in concert with others,
engaged in a long dance of mutuality.
Sociologist Lillian Rubin argues in her book Just
Friends that friends are central actors in the
continuing development drama of adulthood. Women are born
daughters, they recite vows that make them wives, become
mothers through giving birth -- but they choose friends.
They aren't just picked out of a line-up or sought through
the personals column -- wanted: a friend. Women
become friends.
Is there a moment between that first meeting and the time
when you become a friend? Is there a dot on the time
line that says, right here and now, from this point on, we
are friends?
Psychologist Judith Jordan has what she describes her "crazy
fantasy" about the moment of becoming friends. "I think
we're going to be able someday to do CAT scans of people
when they're connecting...you know, where you can actually
get imaging of different things that go on in the brain and
they can say this person's in a good alpha place!"
Ellen
A good alpha place? The stage setting for our very first
alpha lunch was the much too tweedy and wood-paneled Harvard
Faculty Club. It was no more than two weeks after we had met.
We had planned this lunch as no big deal, a quick salad
before a two o'clock class. It lasted until four -- the
first of a dozen times when I remember being delighted that
this time in college, I wouldn't be penalized for cutting class.
In my journal I report with little detail the "highlights"
Pat told me about that day, but I remember them vividly. She
talked about motherhood, how as a young Catholic mother she
finally got contraceptives from the doctor "for regulating
her period," and for the first time realized with a
lifesaving, emancipating joy that she wouldn't be the mother
of nine after all.
We shared the war stories of our divorces, in which neither
of us was entirely innocent. She confided that she still
loved her just-ex-husband and showed me the locket around
her neck that carried his photo. I told her about the end of
my marriage and the lingering, troubled relationship that
followed, one that I was neither in nor out of.
I would date the real beginning of our friendship from that
lunch. No, she was not the cheerleader I had expected, not
so verrry straight. We became friends the way adult women
do, telling the stories of our lives. Pat had no idea how
unusual it was for me to share those experiences or how
vulnerable I felt that autumn afternoon revealing things I
had never said out loud to any but family or my closest
friends. And certainly not to a stranger from Chicago.
I didn't make friends quickly or confide easily -- chalk it
up to Boston conservatism. Or to family. My sister, Jane,
and I were so close as kids, I didn't feel the need of
another friend. They used to say that Boston women didn't
buy hats, they had hats. So it was with friends. I
made friends slowly and carefully. But virtually from the
outset, I felt absolutely certain I could trust Pat.
In many ways, that first lunch set the tone of our
friendship: vulnerability and trust. The mutual baring --
slowly -- of darkest secrets seemed lightened by the
knowledge that they had been accepted. Pat had a way of
taking a thought and running with it that I found
delightful. She was a natural storyteller, dramatic, even
melodramatic. I didn't do melodrama. I did wry. But Pat saw
through wry.
I had the first intimations Pat would give me something I
could not give myself when I cautiously shared with her the
grand finale to a marriage that was already dying from lack
of attention. I shared it in the spare and tamped-down
emotional detail I often used, but she got to the dark heart
of it instantly. She gave me the acknowledgment of the pain
from the ending of my marriage that I had put aside in a
need to get on with life, to put one foot in front of
another, holding a small child by the hand.
In that first lunch, Pat offered up an expression that
dotted so many of our early years. It's one of those
ordinary phrases that takes on a new truth when repeated
much as one would a motto. "Life," she says to this day,
when describing something that can be amusing, bizarre, or
even deeply troubling, "is so interesting."
We were each bold and timid in different ways. But her
adventurousness, her lust for experience, her energy, and a
love life that was a soap opera without the tragedy all
appealed to my cautious soul. She offered both courage and
consolation, as each was needed.
Somehow my journal that year was filled with other
relationships, especially with men who swiftly became
incidental. But scattered throughout are the words, "Pat
said," or "Pat thought." We began to explore the world
through each other's eyes and minds. We were becoming part
of each other's DNA.
Pat
It was late one afternoon in that same first couple of weeks
when I walked up the stairs to the second floor of the
Nieman House and saw Ellen curled up in a chair, seemingly
absorbed in a book. I recognized the book jacket immediately
-- I would have known it from a mile away. What if she hated
it? Writing The Woman Alone had been my first
tentative effort to understand the changes taking place in
women's lives -- including my own -- and for all I knew, the
breezy blonde from Radcliffe was groaning at its naïveté,
even as my sudden, unexpected appearance demanded some
response on her part. I also knew I cared what she thought
-- a lot.
"This is good," she said simply, and then asked a question
that got right to the heart of the issues I had tried to
raise. I knew instinctively she would not stick to polite
comments. I had my first glimpse that afternoon into a
wonderful, ruminating mind that took other perspectives
seriously; a woman who was on a learning curve, as I was.
The confident Radcliffe insider who had loomed in my first
impression was not an intellectual know-it-all. She was
willing to explore a topic on terms other than her own.
I think this open-mindedness is one of Ellen's great gifts,
and it comes from more than intellectual curiosity. It comes
from a deep charitable core. I felt almost right away there
was a level at which I could trust her, which meant there
was a level at which I could be myself without softenings or
embellishment. As a child, I was too awkward, too bookish,
too different to attract many friends. Home, not school, was
my refuge. It was with my younger sister, Mary, that I
played, rode tricycles, baked chocolate chip cookies. She
was my first friend. As I grew, I expanded the circle, but
it was never large. Feeling accepted didn't come easily.
With Ellen, I could talk about family and politics and
change and loss and get back much more than supportive
echoes. More than that, she needed me, which is no small
thing. When she broke up with her boyfriend a few months
after we met, I was home for the holidays in Chicago. She
called and we talked for hours.
In all our conversations, she would offer a thought or point
of view, often unexpected. I would ruminate, take the idea
further down the road, hand it back to her like a baton in a
relay race, and then she would juggle it for a moment before
taking it further herself. This was fun, but fun of a
different kind. We were exploring our minds as well as our
hearts.
We began actively to seek each other out. Many mornings,
after the children were in school, we would meet at the
Pewter Pot restaurant next to the out-of-town-newsstand off
Harvard Square, order one muffin each, and sit there until
noon, drinking cup after cup of coffee. The waitress would
glare at us and slam down a check, but we couldn't pull
ourselves away. We offered each other advice, came close to
tears, laughed like crazy at some funny or forbidden
memories now shared. I found myself angry at whatever had
hurt her, and soon we were viscerally on each other's side.
We discussed Watergate, Vietnam, newspapers, editors -- all
the evils of the world. We scribbled notes on everything we
talked about on the back of napkins -- how to help my
Maureen, who was being teased in school; whether we would
have published the Pentagon Papers; the myth of the vaginal
orgasm -- and tucked them into the pockets of our jeans, and
we would walk out of there feeling invigorated, and more
than a little buzzed on caffeine. I consider those mornings
at the Pewter Pot the best seminars I've ever attended.
I see now how we got each other right -- and wrong. She saw
me as the risk taker in life, while I saw her as braver than
I in her career. She liked my penchant for nostalgia, while
I felt she was more fearless of letting go of the past. The
truth, of course, was more contradictory for us both. We
would later understand both ourselves and each other much
better, even at times swapping strengths and weaknesses.
One thing never changed: I always felt closer to cataclysm.
Once during that first year, for all my brave-new-world
feminism, I realized I couldn't balance my checkbook. I had
to march into the bank and get some officious guy to help me
straighten out my finances. I was amazed by Ellen's blithe
advice, and envied her ability to follow it: "Just open up a
new account, wait until everything clears, and then if
there's any money left in the old account, you just transfer
it to the new one." What an interesting idea...maybe, I
thought, I might try it sometime.
* * *
We had clicked, not just once, but time and again as we
continued to meet over coffee, attend classes together, and
share seminars. At some point in that year, we started
talking about "my friend Pat" and "my friend Ellen." So,
too, the women in this book told of their tremendous delight
when they knew they had made a true connection, at the point
where they realized they had gone from liking each other to
bonding.
Jane Mansbridge, a political scientist at Harvard's John F.
Kennedy School of Government, remembers dropping by to see
Sharland Trotter, an acquaintance stricken with cancer,
expecting to chat for a few moments and be on her way -- and
instead connected instantly and deeply with a woman who had
no time to waste on trivial relationships.
Barbara Corday, a young mother in Los Angeles in the '70s,
showed up at the offices of an antiwar organization run by a
dynamo named Barbara Avedon, and was so swept up in the
passion of Avedon's commitment that within weeks she was
flying to Washington for a protest demonstration with her
baby in a backpack. The two Barbaras went on to become
partners as well as best friends, writing a hit television
show about partners and best friends: Cagney and Lacey.
At a statehouse demonstration in the '70s, two
back-to-school welfare mothers, Dottie Stevens and Diane
Dujon, were side by side under a desk, practicing for a
protest skit. At the peak of the protest, their arms -- one
white, one black -- were linked. It was a life-changing contact.
And there was the time of the huge snowstorm in Baltimore,
when Oprah Winfrey, then a local television anchor, invited
a stranded production assistant named Gayle King to spend
the night.
"Yeah, but I don't have any underwear," Gayle said.
"I have underwear, it's clean, you can wear it," replied
Oprah. "But I draw the line at the toothbrush." They stopped
at a drugstore and bought a toothbrush, then went home and
stayed up talking until four in the morning.
We could go on, but you will meet these people and many
others at length in the chapters ahead. They are women who
have made the kind of contact that keeps them coming back,
knowing they have connected at a deeper level than usual,
that something new and special has come into their lives.
Maybe this is Judith Jordan's "CAT scan" -- the moment when
two women feel truly understood. When someone doesn't just
say "I know what you mean"...but actually does. When she
"gets" it, and, more to the point, "gets" you.
A new friend can reintroduce a woman to herself, allowing
her to look at herself with a new pair of eyes and a
different mindset. The younger sister cast as "daffy" by the
family is seen as "funny" -- and fun -- by a friend. The
melodramatic wife is welcomed as a rich storyteller. More
often than not, through close friendships, women see
themselves through another lens, experience a new kind of
self-consciousness. Flaws can be recast as strengths,
self-doubts lifted by acceptance. Friends help define and
motivate each other.
In recent years, a small group of researchers at Wellesley
College's Stone Center has been breaking conceptual ground
on women's research, putting together a new dictionary of
words to describe the "good stuff" that comes out of
connection: a sense of mutual empowerment, movement, change,
clarity, and zest. It is the last of these that applies
here. Zest? It wraps up in four letters much of what friends
mean as they describe the excitement and energy flow that
occurs in connection, when we take pleasure in each other's
company.
We very quickly felt the pleasure of both understanding and
being understood, of helping and being helped. Looking back,
we realize now that in some ways, during our early time
together, Ellen was looking to Pat for emotional
reinforcement, while Pat was seeking an intellectual
partner. In talking about men or writing, feelings or ideas,
we would add our own freight to the other's train of thought
until occasionally it brought about a change of direction.
We came quickly to respect each other. If Pat had an idea,
it was not to be dismissed; if Ellen had another viewpoint,
it was worth mulling over. We changed each other's minds --
and came to value the fact that we could. We were each
other's teacher.
After one Nieman seminar, Pat learned from Ellen how to draw
the distinction between being honest and being nice. ("You
don't have to smile when you're asking a speaker a tough
question.") It was a shock for Pat to realize that she had
for too long masked her mind by presenting to the world as
ingratiating a demeanor as possible -- trying, in a sense,
to sneak in under the wire.
We also had laid-back, time-off playtimes together. There
was the time Ellen introduced Pat to the bizarre ritual of
cooking lobsters. "Here, just put the bag between your
feet," she said one memorable afternoon, handing Pat a
wiggling bag of her first lobsters after coming out of the
fish market. Pat couldn't take her eyes off that sack all
the way home, convinced it took some kind of savage bravery
to cook the damn things. But Ellen showed her true colors
when the cooking began. The lobsters went tumbling into the
pot, Ellen banged the lid on, and grabbed Pat's hand.
"Here's the way you do it," she said. "You stick them in the
pot and you run out of the room until they're done."
We spent weekends taking our kids to museums and sharing
sleepovers, and we did the duet of guilt before hitting
Bailey's for sundaes with fudge sauce that ran like brown
lava over the rim of the stainless steel bowl (should we, oh
god, I'm so fat, will you get one if I do?).
In that incredible year off -- and on -- we gorged on the
smorgasbord of seminars and classes and weekly meetings that
brought the world to our privileged and temporary Cambridge
door. We had plates full of politics and philosophy and
family law. We enjoyed our classmates and their wives -- who
were rightly included as Niemans themselves. In our small
and large adventures, we created stories that form the rich
background for our lives.
At the end of May neither of us was ready to leave this
"camp." Before the class scattered, before we all returned
to our prior lives, we were invited to Europe for an
astonishing "freebie," a chance to study the Common Market
and then wing off to the country of our choice. Unreal?
Absolutely. We knew this would be an adventure of the first
order.
We were both excited. Pat began packing for the trip the way
she had packed when she went away to college in the '50s --
throwing everything in the suitcase that she might possibly
need under any circumstance. With the cabdriver waiting to
take us to the airport honking his horn outside, Ellen,
whose possessions were crammed in little more than a
backpack, was throwing things out of Pat's bulging suitcase.
"But I need that!" Pat kept protesting. When Ellen ran
downstairs to placate the cabdriver, Pat shoved as much
stuff back in as she could. Her vindication? Ellen was
borrowing from her for most of the trip.
The day we flew off to Brussels was Pat's birthday, and one
member of our troop decided we absolutely must have a cake
to celebrate. Well, not exactly a cake. She baked a batch of
brownies and laced them with marijuana (perhaps as a
complement to airplane food?). Some of us, feeling very
adventurous, began nibbling away at the brownies in the
waiting lounge. Hopefully the statute of limitations has
expired (does this qualify as a "youthful indiscretion"?)
because by the time the Nieman Class of 1974 staggered on
board the plane, half of us were capable only of giggling
through the flight attendant's instructions. Pat was scared
we would all be thrown off the plane. Her conservative side
reasserting itself, she made it back to the bathroom and
flushed away what was left of her brownie. She then
collapsed into her seat and remembers absolutely nothing
about that flight to Europe.
Our trip lived up to its billing, and all our adventures
obscured the jolt of the partings that were to come. With
time winding down, our class had one rollicking farewell
dinner in Brussels, and then the two of us boarded a train
by ourselves for Amsterdam.
On that dark train ride through the European countryside, we
shared an ominous flashback: only thirty years earlier,
Ellen, as a Jew, could not have made this trip without
peril. We could not have been friends. We looked at each
other, the truth jolting us out of our easy tourist mode.
That sense of time and place followed us up five flights to
our Amsterdam room where we stared out over the rooftops,
startled by the accidental and fragile nature of connection.
How casually this frienship had bloomed. How much we had
come to mean to each other. Our friendship had been nurtured
in a cocoon of privileged time off; we knew there was no
structure, no institution, to anchor it.
We had premonitions that we were going to have to go back to
who we were -- when we knew, deep in our bones, that, thanks
to each other, we were different. And we made a pact. We
would not let each other return to the "old" self.
These friends would stay friends.
Although we didn't quite see the Big Picture yet, on that
train ride we were "reupping." We were going into our first
voluntary reenlistment.
Copyright © 2000 by Ellen Goodman and Patricia
O'Brien