“Well, you’re not tough,” she told me, and I laughed. “Tough is a posture anyway. You’re something better. You’re resilient.”
I still cry most mornings when I awake and he’s not there. I hate looking up in the second-story window where he will never sit, breaking into excited noise when I come through the gate. But I know how to start over now, which means I can start over as many times as I need. I’m all too aware that the biggest challenges of my life are still in front of me. And I feel a little worried about that. Mostly, I feel prepared.
It’s funny how I used to think drinking made me a grown-up. Back when I was a little girl, I would slip a crystal wineglass off the shelf of my parents’ cabinet, and the heft of it felt like independence. I played cocktail party, not tea party, because that’s what glamorous adults on TV did. But drinking was actually an extended adolescence for me. An insanely fun, wonderfully complicated, emotionally arrested adolescence. And quitting drinking was the first true act of my adulthood. A coming-of-age for a woman who came of age a long time ago.
EACH YEAR, I drive out to see Anna. It takes ten hours to get to her West Texas home from Dallas, but I don’t mind. The rumble of the tires is like a meditative hum. The perpetual motion shuts down my brain. The sky is a blue that contains many blues: the milky blue of the prairie, the electric blue of the desert.
I listen to pop songs in the car, three-minute blasts of feel-good, a buzz that never fails. My Honda is like a portable ’70s disco: ELO, the BeeGees, Queen. As I drive across the empty roads, I sing with the surrender that booze used to bring, and I wonder if it would ever be possible to take this starlit feeling and somehow stretch it across the rest of my life.
Anna and I have had 20 years of these reunions. Twenty years of hugs and how-was-the-drives, and both of us politely disagreeing over who is going to carry the bags to the doorstep. And whenever Anna and I feel far apart, even as we are sitting next to each other on the couch, I tell myself 20 years was a good run.
The distance of these past years has spooked me. A couple years ago, I came out to visit, and we had a tense disagreement in her car. It was nighttime, and we were stopped at the railroad that cuts through town, the red light flashing as the boxcars hurtled past. I said to her, with too much grit in my voice, “I don’t think you know how hard it is to be single and alone.”
And she said, with perfect calm, “I don’t think you know how hard it is to be married with a kid.”
It was the full summary of the standoff we’d been having for years. The white arm of the gate lifted, and we crossed the tracks.
This time, I want it to be different. I know that her life has changed, but I want to believe that I might still have a place in it. I turn into the gravel road that leads to her place. I pull up to find Anna doing her jokey dance, guiding me into the driveway. Alice stands behind the screen door, watching. It’s hard to imagine a world farther from New York. There’s a clothesline on her patio, an ocotillo cactus growing in her front yard.
“You made it,” she says, and I smile. “I did.”
The next afternoon, we drive through the red-rock mountains heading to a natural spring. The vista makes you wonder why anyone ever moved to a city. I keep feeling the urge for some monumental conversation, but Anna and I have had two decades of monumental conversations. Maybe what we need are smaller conversations now. So we talk about the latest New Yorker. We talk about films. We talk about the view outside the window, a view we share for a change.
Best friends. For so long, those two words contained music to me, but also a threat of possession. I hung the words like pelts in my room. I had best friends for every life phase, every season. The words were meant to express love, but wasn’t I also expressing competition? There was a ranking, and I needed to be at the top. Anna’s closest friend now is a woman she works with at the legal aid office. They take care of each other’s children and giggle with the familiarity of twins. It’s exactly the kind of companionship Anna and I had once, and it stings sometimes when I feel replaced, but I wouldn’t wish anything different for her.
I know Anna and I will never be friends like we were at 19, because we’ll never be 19 again. I also know this is nothing I did. That while drinking wrecks precious things, it never wrecked our friendship. Sometimes people drift in and out of your life, and the real agony is fighting it. You can gulp down an awful lot of seawater, trying to change the tides.