Good Friends

When we were young parents, my husband and I moved in next door to Ma Baker. A widow in her midseventies, Ma had raised thirteen children and still scrubbed her laundry on a washboard, pieced together quilts on a treadle sewing machine, and grew her own food.

Eager to start a garden, I called on Ma for expert advice. Following her instructions, I tilled an area to match the size of her large plot, and we spent many hours planting and cultivating our adjoining gardens. Ma’s gardening methods were not exactly scientific. “You can get more beans from a crooked row than a straight one,” she’d say. She worked in the early morning to avoid the heat and often knocked on my door, calling me out to dig potatoes or fight “the vine”: the dreaded creeping Charlie that constantly threatened the fruit of our hard work.

At harvest time I realized I’d planted more than I could ever eat. I was overwhelmed by this bounty. Again, Ma came to the rescue, teaching me to can and “put up” the abundant produce. When I didn’t think I could handle the chore, she came over and said, “We’ll just work side by side.”

Celeste Poole
Carlock, Illinois

We were a tight bunch: fourteen friends, seven couples in our thirties who lived life with abandon while raising families and holding down jobs. We gathered frequently for dinner parties, barbecues, ski trips, jaunts to the beach. Late at night we’d dance in someone’s living room, or take bong hits in the basement, playing music and laughing until the tears fell. Our relationships were all long past the honeymoon phase. Wives complained about their spouses; husbands were looking for more action in the bedroom. But everyone seemed basically happy — everyone except me. My relationship had lost its fire, and I wanted to feel that flame again.

I found it with two of the other women’s husbands. We weren’t ending our marriages, we told ourselves, just making our hearts beat faster. Besides, their wives would never find out. Eventually the truth did come out, and more disclosures followed. (I wasn’t the only one who’d been unfaithful.) My relationship with my partner ended, and friendships were severed. I struggled to repair what I could, but my betrayal had been too great.

That group of friends is no more. They were some of the most important relationships in my life, and I helped destroy them.

Name Withheld

I’d never been friends with a soldier. In college, I’d walked by the ROTC building and felt an enormous divide between myself and anyone who would pass through those doors.

Now I was married and owned a home, and one day Tracy had stopped on the sidewalk to compliment me on my garden. A forty-year-old major in the army reserves, she was my neighbor, and a mom, like me. We met frequently for coffee. We grieved together when George W. Bush was elected to a second term. We shared mulled cider after taking the kids caroling at Christmas. When I naively asked why she’d joined the army, Tracy said, “I liked the idea of leadership.”

The day came when Tracy told me she’d been called up for duty in Iraq. How do you send a friend off to fight a war neither of you supports? I decided to host a going-away party. I hung banners the children had painted. A friend brought red-white-and-blue decorations, which I put up with ambivalence. I cut lengths of yellow ribbon for guests to take home and tie around a tree. The cake had candles (the children insisted), and we sang “For She’s a Jolly Good Fellow” and toasted our brave friend.

Tracy gave a brief speech. Though the army had prepared her to leave, she said, no one prepares the loved ones to be left behind. She urged all of us who had an opinion about this war to make our voices heard. One neighbor interrupted: “On the other hand, many of us are proud of what you’re doing.”

An excruciating pause followed. Then Tracy cleared her throat and went on with her farewell.

My first e-mail from Tracy in Iraq was a Q and A chain letter: last movie you saw, first car, favorite this and that. Then I came to: “What are you most afraid of?” “Loss of limb or mortal injury in combat,” Tracy had typed.

We continue to correspond. I send news of neighborhood-association elections. She jokes that her vote should count more now that she totes an M-16. At times I feel envy: she is focused on matters far more serious than dishes, weeds, children’s homework, and an unfulfilling part-time job. After she survives this, her career is likely to advance. Deployment has also been a boon to her fitness: she’s lost thirty pounds. But when explosions wake her from her military bunk, I know she’d gladly be overweight and under the covers of her bed at home, grateful for another day of ordinary tasks in suburbia.

I may have missed knowing a lot of Tracys when I was a college kid shouting, “U.S. out of Latin America!” But now, later in life, she has helped me understand how a soldier can be my friend.

Sonia Koetting
Fort Collins, Colorado

I came from a strict Baptist home; Carol had grown up in a ramshackle hovel out in the country. At fifteen she was married and had a daughter. She and her husband lived in a new trailer — their “mobile mansion,” we called it. I thought she was the luckiest gal in town, not having to answer to anyone, no strict parents tracking her every move, no school.

I was dating a friend of Carol’s brother, and lately my boyfriend had grown sullen and possessive. He’d throw me against a wall when he got mad at me and sometimes threaten to kill himself. I kept quiet about it until we had a fight at my parents’ house that ended with my father ordering my boyfriend off the property. He refused to go, and it took four sheriff’s deputies to subdue him and shove him into the back of a patrol car.

A few weeks later my boyfriend and I were back together and watching cartoons when we started to argue. He stormed out. I waited to hear his car race down the drive, but instead I heard a loud pop. I ran outside to find him standing on the back porch gasping for air, a bullet hole in his chest. Someone called an ambulance, but he died before he got to the hospital.

Carol prevented me from cracking up. She kept me me busy and would stop by the house and say, “Come on, girl, get your ass up.” With her help, the fog of grief lifted.

When I turned sixteen, my parents helped me buy a car. Carol and I rode around in it, listening to Don Henley’s “Boys of Summer.” On weekends she’d drop her daughter off at her mom’s or a neighbor’s, and we’d go to the beach and smoke pot.

We worked a stream of crappy jobs that did nothing but interfere with our social lives. I blew our gig as lawn-care workers when I mowed between the customer’s house and the air-conditioning unit, severing the electrical connections.

Carol eventually landed a high-pressure sales position in which she thrived. I went into law enforcement at nineteen, became a traffic cop, finished my college degree, and curtailed the drinking. Though we ran in different circles, we stayed in touch. Whenever I heard “Boys of Summer” on the radio, I thought of Carol.

Years later my sixteen-year-old daughter got into an auto accident when she ran a stop sign on her way to school. She was in a coma with a broken neck and wasn’t expected to survive.

I don’t know how Carol found out about it, but when she burst through the doors of the ICU, I’d never been so thankful to see anyone. “We’ll get through this, girl,” she said. I believed her.

And we did. After nine months in the hospital and thirty-six surgeries, my daughter came home. She still has difficulties that break my heart. I cry to Carol about how I want things to be back to “normal,” but Carol only reminds me that my daughter survived.

Now Carol faces embezzlement charges from an employer and will go on trial soon. Whatever happens, I’ll be there for her. I wish I could whisk her away to a time when our biggest concerns were scraping together pizza money and applying suntan oil.

Becky H.
Holt, Florida

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