A couple of weeks ago, we met our friends’ children on the beach. It had been a long time since I had been down to that particular stretch of ocean. The two little girls scampered about at the water’s edge, daring the surf to lap up to their bare feet. My husband and I sat a little ways above them on the dry, soft sand. I rested one elbow on an upright knee and my chin on the back of my hand, staring out at the water. Suddenly, I was reminded of another person, on another day in August, on another beach, on another ocean.
Denise and I were 14 and about to start high school. We had known each other since the third grade and been best friends since the seventh. She had invited me along on her family’s summer holiday to the shore. Her parents had rented a cottage at East Beach. We were to spend a week there—just Denise, her mother and father, her little brother, Bruce and me. The minute we arrived at the simple, white board and batten cottage, Denise and I quickly changed into our bikinis and grabbed our towels, Coppertone and Agatha Christie paperbacks. Then we all walked down to the water. We carefully arranged our paraphernalia and Denise and I stretched out on our stomachs to work on our tans. I remember her father looking strangely out of place, sitting there on a big blanket, one knee propped up, his chin on his hand, peering out at the waves. He wore a crew cut, khakis, a plaid cotton shirt, socks and Oxford shoes. ”A crew cut keeps a man looking young,” Denise’s mother always said.
On the third morning of our stay, Denise and I were awakened very early by her father’s furious coughing. Denise jumped out of bed and sprinted out of the bedroom. Her mother must have run off to call for an ambulance. The wail of a siren came closer and closer. I stood by myself in my zippered serape striped bathrobe, rolling and unrolling the long sleeves, peeking outside the bedroom door as two paramedics wheeled a gurney in then out of the cottage.
We three kids were left alone. I joined Denise and Bruce in the tiny living room. Bruce was an adorable nine-year-old with big hazel eyes, thick lashes and ginger freckles. My friend generally regarded her baby brother as a minor inconvenience, but now she beckoned to him through breathy sobs, “Come here, honey,” she said. Bruce slowly crossed the room and huddled down beside his big sister. She wrapped one arm around him. The three of us sat in startled silence.
Hours later, Denise’s mother returned. “He’s gone,” she whipsered as she crossed the threshold into the cottage. After awhile, she picked up a broom and began to sweep the wooden floor under the kitchen table. “Daddy was eating crackers last night,” she said.
The following Friday, Denise’s father’s wake was held in the old Victorian funeral parlour downtown. Denise looked reserved and grown-up in her pleated black watch skirt. It matched the jacket that her father was wearing. “We’re not burying him in the pants that go with the suit,” she told me. “He always called them clown pants. He wouldn’t be caught dead in them.” She had inherited her father’s droll sense of humour.
Life resumed. Denise’s mother was 42 years old. She got a job as a secretary. She tended to her house and lawn and flower boxes. “We had 15 happy years of marriage and two beautiful children. I am grateful,” she said. I remember so much of what she said.
On Saturdays, when my mother was not on the golf course, she took us shopping. We introduced Denise to Lord and Taylor’s and G. Fox. Denise convinced her mother to let her get her ears pierced. Soon after, she was sporting small, tasteful pearl earrings like mine and soon after that, the same painful and embarrassing orthodontia as me.
In the seventh grade, we had worn big bell bottomed jeans, flannel shirts and construction boots. This fashion was followed by straightleg Levi’s corduroys, botton downs and deck shoes. Denise and I often bought the same sweaters and shirts in different colours. I was partial to earthy tones and she favoured navy blue. We cycled our ten speed boys bikes around town. We found Mad Magazine uproariously hilarious.
In the eighth grade, Denise got special permission to opt out of the girls mandatory home economics class and joined the boys in mechanical drawing. She began to draft her own sense of style. She was disciplined about her flawless complexion and long, sleek dark hair, which she washed every Wednesday and Saturday. She lacquered her nails in shades of orange and cerulean. She announced one day that she was going to become an architect.
In high school, I enrolled in German, advanced English and art electives. Denise studied French, accelerated math and mechanical design. I took ballet and piano lessons. I practiced yoga and then started running. Denise was unabashedly nonmusical and unathletic.
My father drove us to school every morning. At 2PM we took the bus home and headed over to Denise’s. Her house always bore the faint scent of Pine-Sol and Lemon Pledge, while mine smelled of my parents’ cigarette smoke and wet dachshund. For the next few hours we would finish up our homework, share issues of Seventeen and listen to Sgt. Pepper’s and Abbey Road on the turntable. Denise’s mother would bake Toll House cookies and pour us cups of milky Lipton tea. In our third year of high school, we were both elected to The National Honour Society and scored reasonably well on our SATs.
One day folded into a seemingly endless succession of similar days. Yet, as we reached the year of our graduation, Denise had become aloof. She still appeared at my back door every weekday morning at 7:40 to drive to school with my father and me, but we said little along the way and we no longer spent any time together outside of school. One spring morning, she revealed that she had been accepted to the architectural program at USC. At our class picnic, shortly after graduation, she arrived with her hair cut in a chic bob and the next month she flew off on her own to California.
I began art school and lived at home for the first two years. I visited Denise’s mother often. She would keep me up to date on how her daughter was doing, whom she was dating, describe how she was up all hours of the night, painstakingly fabricating scale models of buildings. Once she said wistfully, “I don’t know what happened between you and Denise. You were like two peas in a pod.”
A few days ago, someone left a paper bag of pea pods outside our courtyard door. I stashed the bag in the refrigerator. The next day, I pulled out a pod and hastily bit into it. It was bitter and thick and stringy. I spit it out. I’d never shelled peas before, but obviously that’s what needed to be done. I grabbed the red mixing bowl from the kitchen cabinet and poured the contents of the bag out onto the cutting board. I picked up a pod and gently pried it apart with both hands. I was surprised and mesmermised by the tiny rows of peas inside, four on one side, three on the other, neatly dovetailed into a perfect architectural order.
Over time, I have come to realise that relationships, too have an architecture—that a lasting friendship depends not upon the identical nature of two individuals, but on a commonality of sensibility and unconditional support, to which even a long history of shared experience is subservient. The peas aren’t kept together by how superficially alike they are, but by the cohesive structure and foundation of the pod.
The last time I saw Denise we had been out of high school for over a decade. I had been living in California for several years by then, but was back home for the holidays. I called Denise’s mother. “Stop by,” she said. “Denise and her fiancé will be here.”
I stayed only a short time. I admired the Christmas tree and we exchanged polite conversation. As I was leaving, I turned to Denise and said, “You always knew what you wanted to be.”
“If I had it to do over again,” she answered, “I would have been a photographer.”
The other night, as the anniversary of that fateful day at the seashore loomed, I typed my old friend’s name into my laptop. I expected to find her website, but what came up was a link to a newspaper death notice. As I read the obituary, I was stunned to discover the parallel construction of our respective lives—the comings and goings, starts and stops, beginnings and endings that are the brick and mortar of a lifetime.
The photo accompanying the article was of a face I knew and didn’t know. The woman’s hair is still dark. It is cropped short, not unlike her father’s. She has the delicate nose of her mother. She is gazing out to sea.