chapter 1 Women Friends Talking Kathryn and Lily, friends for over sixty years, hadn''t seen each other in several weeks. They both felt this was too long, so they arranged to get together. When Kathryn arrived at Lily''s home, they sat down and talked. And talked. And talked. They didn''t stop, and they didn''t get up, until two and a half hours had passed. They talked about books they were reading, their significant others, politics, movies, their children, their children''s children, and how their bodies and their living situations were changing with age Later, they exchanged emails. Lily wrote, "That was a wonderful and soul-lifting visit, my dearest old friend.
Will let you know about the movie." Kathryn replied, "I felt the same way about our time together." Her email ended, "Let me know about the movie, and if we go to the other one I will let you know about that. Take care, dear friend." Andrea recalls that she and her best friend in middle school, Joelle, walked home together every day. They could take a bus, but they usually chose to walk instead so they would have more time to talk. At one point, there was a chance that Joelle''s family would move to another state. The prospect of losing her friend filled Andrea with dread.
"I won''t be able to live without her," she felt. "If she moves, how will I survive?" That feeling is usually associated with a life partner or parent. But a connection to a friend can be that strong, too. A deep sense of loss can result when a friendship ends. As with a romantic partner, losing a friend means losing a language. No one else can understand the particular meanings of words that you shared, the references that made you laugh or nod in understanding. That loss is a testament to the power of conversation--of talk--to create a connection, a shared world. If a friend who is part of your daily life moves away, a hole is left that is palpable every day.
Paula and her neighbor Nancy became fast friends by running together every morning before work. When Paula stepped out to pick up the paper in the morning, she faced Nancy''s house. During the winter months when days were shorter and mornings still dark, seeing the light in Nancy''s kitchen made her smile. It filled her with warmth to know that her friend was up, too, also preparing coffee and breakfast. Then Nancy and her family moved. Paula felt forlorn. She wasn''t motivated to run before work if Nancy wasn''t going with her. To her surprise, she found herself regarding the woman who bought Nancy''s house as an interloper.
Now if Paula steps out to get the paper and spies a light in the kitchen across the way, though she knows it makes no sense, she feels resentment toward the woman who is moving around in Nancy''s kitchen. A friend--just one single friend--changed the life of a girl named Maya. At eleven, Maya had never had a friend. Though she badly wanted one, she simply did not know how to relate to other children. As her much older sister, Chana Joffe-Walt, explained on the radio show This American Life, Maya had many of the traits associated with the autism spectrum: "sensitivity to touch, lack of eye contact, obsessive and intense interest in one topic, and difficulty with social emotional reciprocity, what many of us call conversation." Having struggled her entire young life, Maya "had amassed a team of therapists" and "a series of diagnoses that all seemed to take her most obvious character trait and add the word ''disorder'' to it." Despite the efforts of these experts, Maya "stopped asking for playdates altogether. She stopped reading.
She stopped smiling, and sleeping. And she was on edge all the time, especially at school. A kid would take her pencil or brush up against her at the bus stop, and Maya would blow up. She had to be physically restrained. She broke a window. She was diagnosed with oppositional defiant disorder. She got hospitalized for a brief period." Then the miracle happened.
Maya went to a horse camp, race horses being her obsession. And there she met Charlotte, who became her friend. Charlotte and Maya had playdates. They laughed together. They had sleepovers. Until then, children had kept their distance from Maya. But Charlotte told her mother, "Maya is perfect." Maya''s life changed so dramatically that her family referred to BC and AC, life Before Charlotte and After Charlotte.
Maya herself explained that through Charlotte she learned how to relate to other people: "Be more flexible. Not just talk about what you want to talk about all the time. Do other stuff that your friend wants." After two years of their friendship, Maya at thirteen "feels the feelings that come when you''re a girl and you have a friend who makes you laugh, and thinks about you when you''re apart, and gets you." Maya was transformed. She "no longer regularly gets in trouble at school. She now does her homework and washes her hair without a struggle. She has not had one violent incident AC.
She makes eye contact sometimes. She asks, ''How are you?'' sometimes. She does chores. That felt impossible BC. All of it seemed impossible BC." A friend accomplished what a decade of experts and therapists couldn''t. She Was There for Me Having a friend means feeling less alone in the world. You have someone to talk to, someone to do things with, someone you can call on when you need something--or, even better, who will come through without being called on.
I heard accounts of friends volunteering help in vastly different contexts. When Aisulu Kulbayeva, a linguistics graduate student, talked to women in a village in Kazakhstan about their friendships, they told her of women coming through with help when needed, and of sharing what little they had. One woman, Valentina, explained that she has a niece who is also a friend. When either visits the other, she always brings something, like candy for the children. And if her niece''s husband has gone fishing, she will bring Valentina a fish. When Valentina''s father died, her niece came over as soon as she heard, helped at the funeral, and helped Valentina cook for the many guests who came not only for the funeral but also for traditional gatherings on the ninth and fortieth days following her father''s death. Switching to present tense, Valentina explained that during that time, in order to be there for Valentina, her niece "leaves all her household chores. The only thing she goes home for is to milk the cow.
" "She was there for me" is something many women said when telling me about friendships they treasured. Some of the most moving stories I heard were of friends who came through in difficult times, and they spanned the ages and stages of women''s lives. One woman recalled how her friends rallied around her when she faced a challenging life circumstance--in the third grade. Her family was going through a difficult time that her classmates got wind of. Her close friends did not ask for details--that in itself was a gesture of friendship--and they worked as a team to protect her. If a too-curious classmate seemed poised to ask questions that might be hard for her to deal with, her friends would move in and encircle her, so the inquisitive intruder could not get to her--literally or figuratively. I heard many accounts of friends bringing over meals and providing rides to medical facilities when a friend fell ill. Several women told me of friends who lived in distant cities coming to help when they were recovering from surgery--and staying for a week or more.
A woman described how, following a painful divorce, her friends helped her turn the run-down condo she moved to into a home: "They came over with their rubber gloves and their buckets. It was like the maid brigade. They showed up to get down and dirty and gritty, because I was sort of dysfunctional at that point. I could do stuff, but I couldn''t organize it." On the other hand, a woman, Shirley, talked of an opposite experience. When her husband began showing the debilitating signs of Parkinson''s disease, Shirley said, "There were women friends--women I thought were my friends--who just disappeared." Particularly disappointing was the reaction of a couple who had been among their closest friends for years. As Shirley''s husband''s illness worsened, the wife''s visits became more sporadic, and her husband''s stopped altogether.
The wife told Shirley: "My husband can''t handle seeing your husband that way." The hurt in Shirley''s voice was evident as she said, "We had to live with his Parkinson''s every day, and she''s telling me her husband can''t stand it for an hour." The experience led Shirley to contemplate the meaning of friendship. "If a friend isn''t there when you need her," she mused, "what is a friend?" One woman answered this question by saying that a true friend is someone she could "call at three in the morning and say I need $100 for an airplane ticket." The same wee hour came to the mind of a woman who told me that if a friend called her at three in the morning and said, "I need bail," she''d reply, "Okay, can I come in my nightie? I''ll be right there." These scenarios were hypothetical, but I heard many real-life accounts of friends who jumped in a car or on a plane when a friend faced dire circumstances, such as that most unimaginable loss, the death of a spouse. One woman, when her friend''s husband died, flew across the country immediately and stayed to show her friend how to do the many things that he had done: write checks, balance a checkbook, shop for food and cook dinner. After returning to her own home, she called on the phone--and continued to call every day for a year.
Even when she was physically distant, she was there for her bereaved friend--through talk. The circumstances needn''t be cataclysmic for friends to come through.