So, there’s this amazing woman, with whom I share much in common, that so far, I’ve met every ten years.  We are not bad for one another, but actually very, very good for each other, at least so far, and my mom was a smart woman and she felt our friendship was important (I learned from Lady H. last week).  Thus, I feel that we may, by staying in close touch this third time around, not only make my mom happy (wherever her energy carries on) but also pull Sylvia Plath from the water, the coma, the oven – demonstrating that us women who, at times do “terrify” (as we seemed to scare the parents of some classmates   ) have actually made progress, and can strut down the street, alone or together, and be beautiful.  In case I lost you at “Sylvia Plath”, I am referring to this fairly famous poem, “Lady Lazarus”, by she who shares my birthday:

I have done it again.
One year in every ten
I manage it—–

A sort of walking miracle, my skin
Bright as a Nazi lampshade,
My right foot

A paperweight,
My featureless, fine
Jew linen.

Peel off the napkin
O my enemy.
Do I terrify?——-

The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?
The sour breath
Will vanish in a day.

Soon, soon the flesh
The grave cave ate will be
At home on me

And I a smiling woman.
I am only thirty.
And like the cat I have nine times to die.

This is Number Three.
What a trash
To annihilate each decade.

What a million filaments.
The Peanut-crunching crowd
Shoves in to see

Them unwrap me hand and foot ——
The big strip tease.
Gentleman , ladies

These are my hands
My knees.
I may be skin and bone,

Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.
The first time it happened I was ten.
It was an accident.

The second time I meant
To last it out and not come back at all.
I rocked shut

As a seashell.
They had to call and call
And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.

Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I’ve a call.

It’s easy enough to do it in a cell.
It’s easy enough to do it and stay put.
It’s the theatrical

Comeback in broad day
To the same place, the same face, the same brute
Amused shout:

‘A miracle!’
That knocks me out.
There is a charge

For the eyeing my scars, there is a charge
For the hearing of my heart—
It really goes.

And there is a charge, a very large charge
For a word or a touch
Or a bit of blood

Or a piece of my hair on my clothes.
So, so, Herr Doktor.
So, Herr Enemy.

I am your opus,
I am your valuable,
The pure gold baby

That melts to a shriek.
I turn and burn.
Do not think I underestimate your great concern.

Ash, ash—
You poke and stir.
Flesh, bone, there is nothing there—-

A cake of soap,
A wedding ring,
A gold filling.

Herr God, Herr Lucifer
Beware
Beware.

Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air

(Oct 23, 1962)

Oh, Lady H., isn’t it us from first line to last?  Now, I will release our story, as best as I can tell it after learning what I did from you last Thursday .  No, I do not have any delusions about being anywhere near Sylvia Plath in talent regarding usage of the English language.  So, it might not be The Bell Jar, but it’s something I have been blown away by during the past three days, in between necessity and frustration and speed, I think we are quite special, and that the story must be told:

Last Thursday, about two minutes after I updated my facebook status to: “Where is everyone?  I’m lonely… “, I received a text from Lady H., who accompanied me to the Tori Amos concert a month ago.  She had not seen my embarrassingly pitiful statement on facebook, it was to be a night filled with such synchronicities.  I do not recall what she said, but I replied with a comment about Lindsay Primmer’s Eighth Birthday Party, which was quite the event back in Grade Two, primarily because she had a swimming pool in her backyard, and secondarily because she was mean and knew exactly how to use the fact that her parents were wealthier than the rest of ours to manipulate and crush little souls.  If she happens to read this, perhaps, Lindsay Primmer, you have outgrown your nastiness.  I hope so, as the world needs another mean woman like it needs another hole in the ozone layer.  In Grade Two, and Grade Three, when our catfights often ended in bleeding arms, the product of scratches with little fingernails that looked eerily similar to my scars.  I didn’t start biting my fingernails until Grade Five, when I decided to copy the boy sitting next to me in homeroom that bit his.  I didn’t stop until I moved to Vancouver.

I digress.  So, Lindsay Primmer began making a list of people she was going to invite to her pool party (I don’t even know if her birthday was around that date, or if it was just an excuse to make a big fuss about the damn in-ground, kidney-shaped pool, where I once thought I was going to drown after hitting my head on the diving board on my way in, and where many dreams about drowning have taken place, mine, and I’m sure those of other classmates) weeks before the Saturday afternoon on which it was held.  It was rather redundant, as she was inviting all girls in the class, but, of course, it was a fabulous tool of manipulation.  She was Santa Claus for those weeks – better be nice (read: kiss ass) or else you’ll get crossed off the list!  I don’t know what my Lady, nor what I did to get crossed off, but we were the only two girls righteous enough (at the time I didn’t know what righteousness was though, even though I may have done many righteous things, I was seven and usually they ended in tears) to get crossed off that list – permanently!!  Others earned their way back on.  Neither of us were willing to stoop that low.  However, when Saturday came around, we were not happy.

I remember sitting with my mom and dad in my backyard and being able to hear the gleeful shrieks and splashes five houses down, at the Primmer residence, surrounded by a white picket fence (of course!  ) that I would later deface with permanent marker (who knew those smelly markers that teach kids to sniff permanent pens and glue are actually permanent?  ) – first single words, and then, after being pushed far enough by Lindsay, writing on the gate in bright, cherry red ,”Lindsay Primmer is a BITCH.”  I was too young and was too young in an innocent enough time to really know what my words meant, but I knew how angry I was, and what I can still remember is how fast my heart was beating as I struggled to finish the entire sentence.  This was after being chased off the Primmer yard by her dad with a shovel when I and a couple of boys attempted to steal some garden gnomes, and no one dared join me.  I pulled it off without getting caught, but when my dad would tell me about seeing Lindsay’s father outside very early in the morning, as he walked to the bus that went downtown to his workplace at the Canadian Wheat Board (ah, the false but blissful liberty of the Clinton/Chretien early-nineties…  ) , painting over my words with bright white on that stupid tacky fence, any feelings of accomplishment were replaced with guilt.  Alas, the cruelty of being kind, even as a child.  Eventually I think I fessed up to my responsibility, which I’m sure was already known as I have rather distinctive handwriting.  My parents were not that angry, though, and only now do I know why.

Tori Amos does, though.  The other girls were those demi-gods, not tortured little Goddesses in waiting like Lady H. and me.  I started to cry, sitting in a lawn chair in between my parents, and they decided I should invite Lady over.  I was excited for her to come – strange, the way I can remember my feelings so much better than words or events.  I guess they were my strongest sense, even then!  I didn’t remember anything else though, but luckily I am 27 now, so Lady H. and I have reunited – once and for all, if we know what is good for us – and after I mentioned that two-decades-ago party last Thursday, she dropped everything and called me to tell me about the life-lesson my mom taught her that day.  Then she came over – well, after we went out for mojitos, doubles (of course).

Evidently it went like this: Little Lady H. came to join me in wallowing about our non-invitee status, and that was just what we did.  My family couldn’t afford a pool, so it wasn’t like we could try to outdo the noise coming from down the street or anything.  We watched a tape of The Babysitter’s Club – the show, based on the books we were both obsessed with – with my mom, but we were so angry and upset we could not enjoy ourselves.  Then, Lady told me, my mom announced: “You know what girls??  We don’t need Lindsay Primmer!!“  Apparently, though, I did not dissolve into laughter as I would today at such an announcement.  Instead, I ended up fighting with Lady, who decided to go home and ran out onto our front porch in tears.  Seven year-old projection.  Ouch.

My mom went after her.  And she taught my dear friend a lesson that she still holds onto tightly today.  I wish I could remember the sound of her voice as well as Lady H. does.  See, the thing is, Lady moved away sometime before Grade Five, so she never knew my mom when she was ill.  I finally understand why my dad cannot, when begged as I often have, to tell me something, anything, about the woman who gave birth to me.  She was so lovely, but her illness was so devastating, and its length, including a summer of false-hope “remission”, so long, that we who witnessed her then have much trouble recalling the her that was before the her consumed by cancer cells.  My dad is not guilty of anything more than I am – I remember the day, driving home from piano lessons with my mom, that I realized how difficult it was becoming for me to remember what she was like before she was sick.  I kept these thoughts to my self, just like the tears I learned how to pick out of my eyes before they fell down my cheeks so as not to scare my little sister, or my mom, or, perhaps worst of all, my dad.

The first time I ever saw my dad cry was in the same van, driving home from school, when he told me that she had breast cancer.  Cancer.

Cancer.

That was the first time around, when hope was a full glass and nothing – so said the experts, ignoring my mom’s complaints of numbness in one arm, the arm on the same side as the lump, oh, no, just a coincidence, or maybe a fear so vile it had manifested itself in a physical symptom, yes, all in a woman’s head, like so many things, all in her head – and we would arrive home to a strong woman who reassured us that because she was not ready to die die, to die, not ready, she wouldn’t!  A lump, like so many lumps in so many breasts, removable.  Scary, but scary like a bogeyman, not a serial killer, a noise in the dark, thunder, not footsteps.  Not ready, cancer, to die, I’ll be okay, because, cancer, not, die.  And she fought until the very last week, as did I, gripping the glass that still had a sip left in it, there would be something the doctors could do for her.  She was still my mom, and my mom had outlived each other time she was told, by the same doctors, to prepare for death, almost ten years to the day, when the a doctor called my dad and I overheard their conversation and realized that she would die, that the glass was really empty, breaking glass in the dark, silent sobbing, feeling so stupid.  Exactly one week later, she was gone, and with her, our memories of the amazing woman that we assumed would always be there, beside dad in bed, in photographs, in the garden.  Photographs fill boxes in the new house, much bigger, photographs that we have yet to look at, that are sometimes spoken of by dad, of scanning them and making albums for each of us.  We cannot remember her hair.

“Picky-picky is precocious.” Mom said to Lady H. one other day.

“What’s precocious?”

“Picky-picky is precocious.”

She never looked it up and neither will I.  The definition of precocious is a calico cat named Picky-picky, after the name of Ramona’s cat in those books, ironic as she was anything but picky – Picky-picky would eat pancakes, and Picky-picky was precocious.

Back on the front step mom told the crying girl with dark brown hair – the dark brown that is pretty, not mousy like my real colour, or how I remember it before I dyed it for the first time, right after she died – “You can call your parents and you can go home if you want.  But I want you to stay.  People fight, people say things they shouldn’t and people hurt each other.  But then life carries on.  It’s not worth it, staying angry.  So you can call your parents if you want, but I wish you would stay.”

And she stayed.  I soon joined them on those steps and we stopped being angry at each other or the rest of our class, five houses down.  But I missed those words, and when we met ten years later when she got a job at the bookstore where I had already worked for two years – the last two years of high school – I heard from another girl that she was trying to get me fired, telling my manager that I was always fifteen minutes late (the latter part was true, but the former was bullshit, but I was only eighteen and did not hear her say that it was a waste, to hold grudges against people who we love, people who are the same as us, people who read about Ramona and baby-sitters even though they may not have backyard pools.  Another girl told me she had called me “materialistic”, and that was the end!  I was living with Josh and my entire income was spent on his wants, though I did not even realize it, this was why a comment about some pants I bought in Montreal (I did not ask how the topic arose) compared to my life with Josh, not much of a life, when the store had to buy me three shirts, just me, to meet new dress requirements when instituted after Heather Reisman bought the Chapter’s chain and we started selling more “giftware” than fiction, “we are doing this for everyone who cannot afford to buy new clothes”, one of the managers told me one afternoon as I ate my ramen noodles for the eightieth day in a row, everyone, I was, that time.

Plus we both fooled around with that guy who worked in the magazines section upstairs.  Though I wouldn’t know for ten years.  Ten years that went by so much faster than the ten before them.

So, Lady, I think we better stick together for the next ten, and ten more, and if I do not die like the woman we sang “You Are The Wind Beneath My Wings” to and appreciated our ode like it was that of Bette herself, for she died when she was twenty years my senior, I think we should stop counting and just remember that there are countless women and even more men that we do not need, but we need each other.  Because we just do.  A Cancer and a Scorpio, raised by a Pisces.  Living by the ocean, now.

Because I do not want to be lonely next Thursday, but I am very picky, picky about who I allow to come over, about who may share my time.

Because we only have so much, so we must spend it well.

And with you – and you, you, and you – I am well.