Happy Endings

My friend Gayle's face always looked crooked in the bathroom mirror when we stood next to each other. She lived across the backyard and had a playhouse. She had a ghost in the basement and liked to play Little Dolls. Mostly we played Kidnap and Murder. I could get her to do just about anything.

Once I got her to ask me to sleep over. We had Chef-Boy-Ar-Dee and played phone tricks and watched Twilight Zone. When her mother finally turned the light out, I fell apart and had to go home. I might've been bossy but I was also a spastic homesick crybaby. I didn't get over the homesick part until I was twenty-five. I'm still bossy.

Gayle's mother was from Florida and had dyed black hair and red toenails. She was overweight but knew how to wear it. She wore pedal pushers and hung a sign in her kitchen: Why is there always so much of the month left at the end of the money? She and my mother would get together for coffee at each other's dinette tables. Afterwards Gayle and I would count the lipsticked cigarette butts and promise to stay best friends.

Our mothers were best friends until Gayle's mother had an affair with the butcher across First Avenue. The store where the butcher worked had wooden floors and his apron was always bloody. Gayle's father worked in the mine and on washdays his overalls hung on the clothesline like so many bodies. He never said much, but he must have said something, because Gayle's mother lost 50 pounds and went back to Florida. She left her husband, her kids and the butcher behind, but she took along the father of another friend of ours. Eventually they got married, and she became Mrs. Robertson.

Once, years later, my mother ran into Gayle's mother out of the blue, in a department store a couple of towns over. The Graduate had just been released and my mother couldn't help herself. "Why, Mrs. Robertson!" she exclaimed, and giggled about this for years.

Meanwhile, Gayle's father got remarried and started talking more. His new wife wore glasses and played cards. Occasionally they played Pinocle and drank highballs with my parents. By this time Gayle and I were in high school, our friendship lightyears behind us. We moved in different solar systems. Occasionally our orbits intersected, and we'd briefly acknowledge one another, spaceships passing in the night.

When my lying son-of-a-lying-son-of-a-bitch boyfriend broke my heart, I began nonstop spastic crying. After a few weeks, my mother sent me into the backyard. After a few hours, Gayle walked over and sat beside me. Her face wasn't crooked. I wanted to get her to do something...play dolls...make pizza...change my life. But it was enough that I got her to come over.

Eventually Gayle moved to Florida and disappeared. Florida and California are similar that way, a couple of black holes sucking up all who come within a hair's breadth of their force fields. Meanwhile, I gave away my dolls and emigrated to the other end of the state and changed my life.

At our twentieth class reunion, I looked around for Gayle but didn't spot her. Though I spotted plenty of other sordid vignettes that made Gayle's mother look like the Avon Lady. Not the least of which was the fact that the Reunion of the Class of '68 broke all previous records for alcohol-consumption, evidenced by the handful of its constituents found sleeping under the bar at the Elks Club the next morning when the maintenance crew showed up for work. I was not among them. All's well that ends well.

Only, if Life's a continuum, then nothing ends. Everything just goes on and on, one thing after another, all smoke and mirrors and ghosts and lies. But it's Valentine's Day, we have to toast something. So here's to the illusion of a happy ending. And here's to you, Mrs. Robertson, I hope you got yours.