Someone You Can Count On

The eatery, as my once-in-a-while best friend calls it, serves the best crab salad she’s ever tasted, and this is where we are to meet and have lunch together today. She’s forgotten that I’m allergic to shellfish so I scan the pricey menu laid face up on this table for two in hopes that I can find something I’m not allergic to. Cecily is always traditionally late, so I have time. And there’s time to take in my upper crust surroundings as well. Waiters dressed in white flit from table to table at which are sitting upper crust diners far better dressed and far better looking than I’ll ever be.

The eatery sports a variety of impressive hanging plants suspended from the rafters whose tendrils the waiters have become adept at dodging as they carry out the expensive lunches and even more expensive drinks. There’s also soft and tasteful music playing from somewhere: is it Herb Alpert? Burt Bacharach? I’ve long forgotten.

A good looking waiter sidles up to our table and suggests, “How about a drink while you’re waiting? A mimosa? A glass of champagne?”

What I really want is a double shot of Don Ramón, but I demure. I just tell him, “I’ll just stick with this water, if you don’t mind.” I give him a smile and he flits away.

My water glass is empty by the time Cecily makes it to our table, out of breath. She makes it seem like whatever event she’s coming from or is going to is intensely interesting, including right now. She practically flutters down in her tasteful mauve and sage green short sleeve blouse and white size 0 shorts to the chair across from me and sighs, “You won’t believe who I just ran into!”

It’s some actor or other, nobody I’ve ever heard of. But I feign interest as I always do with her the few times we meet up as adults.

Growing up, Cecily and I were best friends in a competitive way from first grade until we graduated high school. Looking back, she and I had always been in competition with the grades we’d earned, track, dance, art, even the boys we were dating. But it was a friendly competition and we’d been glad for whoever of us came first. That’s how I remember our friendship. Something I could always count on.

But after graduation, we went our separate ways. Cecily had always wanted to act ever since we were in first grade. Her well to do parents sent their only child to the Julliard School in NYC and that’s when we lost touch for a while. I toiled away at Cal State University, Fullerton on my own dime and actually did well for myself.

While my best friend was learning the art of physical and vocal expression, character development and dramatic repertoire, I was doing my student teaching under a teacher who had spent 2 decades wowing his teenage students with literature they thought they could never like or understand. The Crucible. Of Mice and Men. Macbeth. The Invisible Man. Under this teacher’s tutelage, and under my own developing form of reaching the students, I fell in love with my chosen career and looked forward to having my own classroom.

Cecily and I would touch base then every couple of months, but as the years went by, my calls to her and her calls to me dwindled. Adult life had taken hold of each one of us.

Then one Friday night, I got a late call from New York and I knew it was her. I’d just struggled through a week of testing and volunteering to stay late and grade. But despite my exhaustion, I told Cecily, “Hang on, girlfriend. Let me get a glass of wine.”

I settled down in my boyfriend’s and my queen sofa bed a few minutes later with a kitchen glass of some store bought wine I’d forgotten he’d put in the fridge. He rolled over away from me and resumed snoring softly. “OK,” I said to my friend, “I’m all ears.”

When she told me, “Sheila, I’m getting married!” I almost spilled my drink. My mind was telling me, first she’s a famous actress and now, she’s getting married! She’s of course doing so much better than you!

I gulped, staying quiet on the phone for a brief second. Then I dredged up a good best girlfriend’s reply and scream-whispered, “You are? Cecily, that’s incredible! Tell me all about him!

We talked till midnight, and I learned he was an actor (of course) who’d already had minor parts in some obscure TV shows and was headed to starring in a major hit, a police series coming out that fall.

“And, Sheila, I haven’t told you the best part!”

I snuggled down, wrapped my leg around my boyfriend’s and whispered, “I’m all ears again!”

She and her fiancé were moving to Los Angeles in two weeks so they could start filming the series on site. And our dwindling friendship was about to begin again.

—————

My boyfriend Bruce, a fellow teacher at my high school, has been sharing my apartment with me for the past five or six years. He’s an art teacher and an artist and the limited space we have makes him keep his ongoing painting projects in a studio with three other artists, two of whom are female.

That used to bother me, I admit, but our frequent get togethers have made me consider all of them good friends. Besides, they are extremely good painters in my opinion.

Sitting here in this high class restaurant across from Cecily, now married to a has-been actor with one hit TV series that petered out in its 4th season, I almost feel sorry for her. But not quite. She still comes from money, even though her acting career was sidelined by the instant and brief fame of her husband. She still looks good for being a thirty-something. But today, she looks troubled and has barely touched her crab salad. We settle back in our designer chairs with our wine and I say, “Tell me all about it.”

She flips back her streaked hair and says, “Sheila, I’m tired of him. I’m tired of being married.”

I just nod.

She goes on, “It was absolutely great for a while, I swear. While they were filming and he was on the set and people were saying, ‘Have you seen this series?’ God, those were good times!”

“But now?” I urge her.

She takes a swallow and sighs, “Sheila, all he does now is sit around the house playing video games or watching boxing on TV. Plus, he’s such a slob! I’m embarrassed to have anyone over.”

I understand that, for Cecily, this is bad. But I have no idea what to say to her. Finally I venture, “Cecily, what about your own career?”

She laughs bitterly and says, “For someone my age? Ha! I am way past my prime time, girlfriend.” She finishes her wine and calls a waiter over to order a bottle. At least she doesn’t have to worry about money, I think.

I reflect on the pile of 15 page essays I have yet to grade. I suppose they’ll just have to wait.

I only have one more glass while my friend quaffs another two or three. Our new topic, thanks to me, is when we were attending high school together and she now seems more comfortable with herself. And with me.

We spend another hour reminiscing about our teenage years. Her eyes actually fill with tears when she tells me, “God! Life was so much simpler then. We always had things we could count on, you know?”

I reflect back on my own family life during my high school years. There was never enough money and my parents were always fighting about that. My older brothers, sick of the way our family was living, had struck out on their own be it semi-legitimately or flat out against the law. I, on the other hand, spent the majority of my time after school and on weekends at Cecily’s house. She and her mom and dad became my anchors.

How I loved it when Cecily’s father took me aside to hear about my aspirations to become a literature teacher – and in a high school no less! He loved hearing me describe the books I was planning to teach my students and he delighted hearing me repeat some of Atticus Finch’s lines, like:
“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view…until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.” And Cecily’s father would ask me, “And how would you explain that line to a bunch of high schoolers?”

And I’d go off, absolutely thrilled with someone actually taking an interest in what I wanted to do with my life.

Remembering this now, I’m certain that if it weren’t for my best friend’s parents – her father especially- I would have been headed down the same path as my brothers.

I counted on them.

—————

We end up being two of the last not-so-successful diners in the eatery, the waiter having removed our plates with our barely touched food. Outside, the afternoon has begun to darken. The wine bottle Cecily ordered is now almost empty and she and I are both mellow and on the verge of being tipsy.

We both stand up a little unsteadily and give each other a hug. Then we go back to our imperfect lives, having resolved nothing, and as I’m driving homeward, I somehow know that that’s not what our friendship is about. It’s about having each other, it’s about having someone you can count on.