The interior was neat. A single desk, white metal base with wood laminate top, faced the front door. Colorful sour balls wrapped in clear plastic were nestled in a glass bowl on the corner of the desk next to an old, white phone and a couple of frames. A computer monitor sat to the right. Behind the desk, shelves lined with teddy bears made from scraps of colorful fabric ran from floor to ceiling, covering every inch of the wall save for a small hallway that led to a restroom.
“Mitty!” I heard behind me.
I turned around and saw an older and happier version of the friend I remembered.
“Bobbie Kay!”
Bobbie Kay—birth name Barbara Kennedy—had been my first friend. We met when I was six and she was five. On the surface, Bobbie was straight out of the pages of an East Coast prep school. She dressed in white, pink, or blue polo shirts, pleated khaki pants that she bought in bulk from the Gap, and Tretorn Nylite sneakers, and her trademark bob was trimmed every six weeks like the hairdresser suggested.
Bobbie had joined the entrepreneur’s club in high school and while her classmates worked up moneymaking schemes that involved day trading and the occasional gambling trip to maximize their investments, she’d devised a plan to make and sell teddy bears around town. She blew the doors off the next-highest-grossing project and surprised everybody in school when she donated her profits to charity. “Teddy bears should be used for good and not evil,” she’d said in a press release.
What most people didn’t know about Bobbie was that the pressures of staying at the head of her class had led her to the unhealthy regimen of over-the-counter diet pills, a habit that escalated to dangerously addictive levels. She developed a dependency her senior year and spent the summer after graduation in a treatment program. Not willing to test her newly healthy body with the unknown stresses of the Ivy League college she’d been planning to attend, she declined the scholarship that awaited her and instead accepted an internship with a local business. Now she ran her own nonprofit. Both her stress and her figure were maintained through early-morning yoga sessions. She was happy, healthy, and making a difference in the world, one teddy bear at a time.
Bobbie rushed across the office and threw her arms around me. I hugged her back. Even though the more recent years of our friendship had dissolved into birthday text messages, Facebook post “likes,” and the occasional e-mail, I felt as if I’d seen her yesterday. Some friendships are like that.
“Does anybody call you Mitty anymore?” she asked.
“Anymore? Nobody ever called me Mitty except for you, and if you stop now, I’ll never speak to you again.”
Ever since I’d known her, Bobbie had made a point to ignore her given name. Maybe Barbara was too feminine for a six-year-old tomboy who wanted to explore old barns and adopt stray kittens. Or maybe her parents, activists in their own right, nicknamed her Bobbie as a tribute to the presidential hopeful who was assassinated in 1968.
But sometime around her twelfth birthday she’d decided it was time for another identity, and Bobbie Kay was born. She hung a portrait of Mary Kay in her locker as a symbol of what could be accomplished by a woman with a vision and a tube of lipstick.
She’d decided that I needed a nickname too, and cleverly pulled the M and the T of my names to get Mitty. She claimed it worked because the way I dressed showed that I was partially living in a fantasy world. Come to think of it, her five-cent diagnosis wasn’t all that different from my sometimes therapist. Today Bobbie was in a pink polo, pleated khakis, and white Tretorns. Her straight brown hair was in her signature bob, parted in the middle, and both sides were tucked behind her ears. Even though she shirked makeup and still dressed like she had decades ago, she now wore a layer of maturity that she’d earned by confronting her personal demons and winning.
“I see you got my donation,” she said, standing back and checking out my outfit.
“I’ll have you know this came from my own closet, thank you very much,” I said. “But yes, the sailor suits are fantastic. We steamed the fishy smell out of them last night and I’m going to put them in the windows later today.”
“So Jerry’s doing better? I heard about his heart attack.”
“You’d barely know he had a heart attack. He’s in the desert with Don Digby, chasing alien costumes.”
“I bet he wouldn’t have considered going if it weren’t for you coming here.”
“Maybe,” I said.
“There’s no ‘maybe’ about it. When the local ice cream shop closed, they donated their backup uniforms to me. I stopped by to see if Jerry was interested in them and he kept me there for an hour showing me photos of a collection of costumes from some German-themed restaurant in Wisconsin. He couldn’t get over the lederhosen. I could tell he wanted to go, just to meet the guy and find out the backstory on the costumes, but he couldn’t.”
“He kept you there for an hour?”
“Yeah, he’ll talk to anybody who wants to talk about costumes.”
“Since when do you want to talk about costumes?”
“Don’t let the outer package fool you. I appreciate a costume as much as the next girl.”