Remembering Silliness, Remembering Me

Not long ago, I received a call on a humdrum Saturday evening. I was terribly, terribly sick, and was in a bit of a fog, having just taken a much needed dose of cough syrup with codeine. So when the caller told me her name, I thought, for a moment, that I was having an auditory hallucination.

"B.A.? This is Gidget. Gidget Lawrence? From High School?"

I croaked something like..."Who-wha?"

She repeated herself, and her identity finally sunk in. We had been close friends once. Best friends. Inseparable.

I still remember the day we met, when she came skating backwards down my street. Her behind shimmied and the hearts embroidered on the pockets of designer jeans danced to and fro. She was snapping her fingers and cracking her gum, lost to some internal groove. Her long blonde hair clung in fine silken strands to her heavily smackered lips.

She stopped and stared, perhaps as surprised at the sight of me as I was at the sight of her. She plucked the hair from her glossy mouth and grinned.

From that moment on, we were peas in a pod. My adventures with Gidget make up a HUGE part of my childhood memories. Some good (like the time we both got our first kiss in the same week) some bad, (when she tearfully confided to that her Dad sometimes hit her and her siblings with a belt)...but all of them precious to me.

In seventh grade, we tried out for the cheerleading squad together. I'm pretty sure that was her idea, but I didn't object. We both made it. I still remember her squeal of joy when my name was called.

But after a while, I realized that being a cheerleader wasn't for me. As I said in another post, I'm really not good at playing all the games that women play, and I certainly wasn't good at playing all the games that teenaged girls play. I realized I would never be sufficiently aloof or elitist to suit their standards. I realized I didn't want to.

So I quit.

Gidget took it as a personal betrayal and we never spoke to one another again.

For the rest of our school years, Gidget ran with the popular crowd. She wore the right clothes, she dated the right boys, she said the right things and she scorned the right people. She did whatever was necessary to maintain her place in the glittering high school hierarchy.

It disgusted me as much as the fact that I wouldn't do it disgusted her.

So I was taken aback by her phone call. And I was even more taken aback when she proceeded to talk to me as if our friendship was still as rock solid as it had been in 1978. As if we had never turned our backs on one another.

She was calling because our 20th High School reunion is taking place this year, (6 days from now to be exact) and of course, she is on the planning committee. She wanted to know if I was going to attend. She knows my parents still live in the town where we grew up, and had, in fact, talked to them for quite some time when she called trying to locate me. She knows that I visit once or twice a year.

While I hemmed and hawed, she told me all about the lives of people I had never been friends with; people who had disregarded me as easily as she had discarded me. She spoke as if I would be interested. As if I should be interested.

It was all very bizarre.

See...when I left that small midwestern town at 18, I never looked back. I moved 900 miles away and started over. And when I moved to a large and sparkling city, my life became large and sparkling too. I didn't miss her. I didn't miss anyone. And in the 20 years between now and then, I have not spoken to or laid eyes on one single person from high school, with one exception. (I'll tell you about it tomorrow.)

Why would she think that I would want to I attend a reunion for a class of people to which I never belonged? To which I was never permitted to belong? Why would she even ask? Why would she think that I would care at all?

I realized that it was because she didn't know. She didn't know that I hated high school and all the people in it. She didn't know that I found them all very ignoble and sad. She didn't know because she was too busy cultivating the popularity and the acceptance that she so desperately needed, to notice anybody who wasn't. She lived a small life with small people; a life that she still lives and assumes that others live too.

I thought about telling her. But in the end, I simply thanked her for calling. I told her that I would be unable to attend but that I would be there in spirit.

I said good-bye and hung up, and it was only then that I realized that although my boys had been whooping and hollering in the background, she had never asked about them.

I understood then that it wasn't the Gidget of my childhood that I had spoken to. The one who had sighed and dreamed with me on sultry summer nights, with Helen Reddy playing on the turntable. She had ceased to exist in 7th grade. I don't understand why and I probably never will. But I will always wonder what happened to her.

And I sometimes wonder if the girl I used to be still exists. It seems almost impossible that she does.

And yet, estranged though we were, I think I would have asked her about her children.

And I would have asked her if she still remembers that day we sat on that enormous craggy rock in the blinding July sun, with towels on our heads, chanting an imaginary prayer to a made-up Goddess. It was the height of silliness. It was the height of happiness. Boys and clothes and cliques had not yet entered our sphere of consciousness. We were innocent, carefree...as yet untroubled by the turmoil of adolescence.

Sometimes, in the chaos and calamity of motherhood, I long for that kind of peace. I want, for just a few moments, to shed my responsibilities like layers of skin grown too small and emerge as that stupendously naive 9 year old girl.

I wonder how she could have forgotten that. But then I realize...maybe...she didn't let herself remember.