The Friend Who Got Away by Jenny Offill

Author:Jenny Offill
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307419378
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-17T16:00:00+00:00

HEATHER

Emily Chenoweth

MY MOTHER WAS my first best friend. We were each other’s great confidantes, advocates, and allies, bound by a deep and sometimes ferocious love.

When my mother was dying, my best friend was Heather. There had been other intimates over the years, but Heather had eclipsed them. When she came to Ohio for my mother’s funeral, she sat with me in the first pew—the royalty of the grieving— and held my hand through the eulogy and the hymns. My boyfriend sat somewhere in the back of the church, another indistinguishable mourner. It was November 1991, and Heather and I were nineteen.

I met Heather at Swarthmore College, when we were assigned rooms on the same freshman hall. My first impression of her centered on her hair, which was coppery brown and fell in uncombed but shiny waves almost to her waist. To me, it was a striking style: in the Midwest, girls wore their hair long only until their mothers let them cut, perm, and feather it into lacquered crests. Heather’s hair made her look younger, more approachable; she was the kind of girl boys at my high school called a granola.

My father, in between unloading suitcases, was charming the new arrivals: You came from California all by yourself? he asked Heather. Heather smiled brightly: she had. My mother proclaimed her very brave—and her parents, too, she said, for letting her come so far alone. We stood for a moment in Heather’s doorway and watched the other students filing past. Someone had set up a stereo already; Rico Suave poured into the hall.

Later, after all the families had waved good-bye, I went back to Heather’s room, where she sat me down amidst the mess of her unpacking—the space would never fully recover from it— and pulled out a fat photo album. Here was Santa Monica High, she said, and here was the beach; here she was getting ready to go to a party, and there was her boyfriend with the grape boycott sign. She had dozens of friends, and a story for each—that one had joined the cheerleading squad as a joke; this one spent her summers in India; that one wrote passionate editorials for the school newspaper. Like currency, she counted the friends up; they were beloved and she missed them already. Then she told me that her high school best friend and her mother were both named Emily.

She closed the album and turned to face me. “Emilys have always been very important to me,” she said.

I was shy and uncertain; Heather could not have crafted a more gentle invitation to friendship.

In those first days, smitten already, I watched her use this gift of instantaneous and effortless connection. “Oh, I was at the Greek Theatre when Jerry played ‘Dark Star,’” she said to a hippie with bells jingling on her wrists. “I took campers all over the Sierra Madre,” she might say to a boy wearing hiking boots. To the political, she was an activist; to the athletic, a dancer;

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