In kindergarten, Debbie and I had a crush on the same boy, Duncan. My first love triangle. I can’t imagine being all agog about someone named Duncan now (though at the right time of month, leave me in a room with a batch of anything by Mr. Duncan Hines and just stand back from the carnage) but at age five, his bowl-cut sandy blondness and mis-buttoned plaid shirt were the things from which dreams were made.
Looking back, I believe my crush was more on Debbie than on Duncan, however. I wanted her to like me so I needed to like the things she liked. Ergo, I liked Duncan.
But by the time I landed at Bellevue Montessori, Debbie already had a BFF: Melinda. With her round freckled face and red hair tied up in high ponytails, Melinda was the antithesis of me. She was All-American; she had dogs. Her dad drove a blue pickup truck. During a game of hide-and-seek at her birthday party, I stepped into something squishy. I looked down to see my white Sunday dress shoes sunken into a pile of fresh dog shit.
As the new girl, I was subjected to the necessary hazing. When I called Mrs. Bradley, ‘Teacher’, I was dutifully mocked. ‘Teacher, oh Teacher!’ Melinda and Debbie strained their hands into the air in exaggerated earnestness, dissolving into giggles.
‘You’re such a baby,’ they sneered, skipping off, arm in arm.
To be honest, I don’t remember how it was that Debbie and I transformed from frenemies to BFFs. Perhaps this is one of the mysteries of girlhood. We had nothing in common other than our ethnicity, but soon I learned to like other things Debbie liked: tuna fish sandwiches, The Black Stallion, gummy bears, bicycles. And playing the violin.
‘My violin teacher wears a flower in her hair,’ Debbie told me, hands on her hips, ‘Every. Day.’
‘Well, my violin teacher wears super-high heels and is really pretty,’ I countered.
This competitiveness was the thread that tied us to one another. Who could ride their bike down the hill to the bottom of the cul-de-sac the fastest? Who could stay up the longest at a slumber party? Who could find the most white stones in the backyard rockery?
Debbie also had two much older sisters, another point for her in the ‘coolness’ column. This meant she learned a lot of important stuff before I did. Leg shaving, aerobics class schedules, French kissing, and how babies were made. And even how they came out.
‘Alicia says it’s supposed to feel like taking a big poop!’
I looked at Debbie, incredulous. ‘Nuh-uh,’ I said, shaking my head, not wanting to believe her.
‘But Alicia told me,’ she said, head held high in triumph. And there really wasn’t anything I could say to that.
I’m not sure we would be friends had we met later in life. Not for any deep dark differences but mostly due to an inherent incompatibility, a slight irritation I would feel now upon realizing how differently we see the world.
But when you start something when you are five, it can act as a great equalizer. Weeks, months, even years can go by without talking to one another. But then I’ll hear her voice on the other end of the telephone and I am snapped back, as if on an elastic band floating through time and space, ever waiting for us to return. And in an instant, we are racing down that hill on our bikes, hair flying behind us, identical barrettes glinting in the summer sunset, ears pricked for that moment when our mothers would call us indoors once more. ‘Time to go home.’
