Memories to prove a friendship
We were best buddies for the shortest of times. Two years? Maybe 2 1/2?
And not exclusively best. We had other interests and other friends.
We didn't spend endless days together. We didn't talk constantly on the phone. Maureen was 13 and I was 14 when we met. She was a freshman and I was a sophomore.
We rode to school together with Chickie Fleming, Brenda Kelleher, and Anne Farrell, all of our parents taking turns driving us. Yet we don't have a single picture of this - of us in our ugly school uniforms, plaid, pleated skirts rolled above our knees, hair teased, lips glossed. We don't have letters, either, because we never went anywhere, or even a note passed in class because we were never in the same class.
The only proof that survives of our adolescent friendship are the words Maureen wrote in my high school yearbook: "I'll never forget you or your mother and father," she promised. And the fewer words I wrote in a Hallmark datebook in 1963. "Saw Maureen." "Beach - Moe"
Maureen and I spent an afternoon together a few weeks ago, after not being in touch for decades. And we spent it not just remembering the past, not strolling down memory lane, but in the past. The thin membrane that separates who we were from who we are, that divides yesterday from today, somehow dissolved.
It didn't happen immediately. We hardly recognized each other at first. I got out of my car and she walked from her backyard toward me and I said "Maureen?" And she said "Bev?" And then we were hugging each other and saying, "You look just like your mother!"
A while later we were gone, kids again. Physically, we were still with other people, in Maureen's backyard, part of a small reunion. But spiritually and emotionally, we were years and miles removed.
We were 14 and 15 and on a train to Boston, dressed to look 18, plotting and laughing and teetering on our mothers' heels, because you had to be 18 to see the movie "Lolita." So we hiked up our skirts and painted our faces and we fooled everyone and we got in.
We relived the day we got in to visit Father Finn, too, who was at a sanatorium in Mattapan. In quarantine because he had tuberculosis. "No one can see him. You're not allowed." That's what our parents said. We took a bus to see him, anyway. Walked down River Street, found him, stood by his door, then by his bed.
"Thank you for coming," he said. No one else had visited. We were the first. We smiled all the way home.
As our younger selves, we revisited the houses in which we grew up, small Capes our parents bought with GI loans. We slipped back into our mothers' and fathers' arms, into summer days at Sunset Lake, into the high school gym for a Saturday night dance, into our matching brown dresses, into a pew at St. Bernadette's for Sunday morning Mass.
And the day we borrowed bikes and rode to Paragon Park, all the way from Randolph. It took hours but we got there. The next day we rode these same bikes to Cambridge to surprise my grandmothers. But neither was home and we had just a quarter between us. So we split a vanilla milkshake at the S&S. Then pedaled back home.
Both days we got a ride from Alan Williamson, a boy who went to our school. One day he stopped his car on Route 228 in Hingham, stuffed our bicycles in his trunk, and drove us to my door. The next time we were on Route 28 in Milton when he rescued us.
"I can't believe he found us two days in a row," our adult personas said. "I can't believe all the crazy things we did."
How did it come back so easily? Without pictures? Without props? Without expectations? How did we get to come and go, to leave now and go back to then, to appear and disappear all afternoon?
I said goodbye before a wall came down and divided time again. I said goodbye while I could still see the young girls we were smiling.
There is no photograph of this, either, no proof that it was. But like our long-ago friendship, it was real and it was true.
Beverly Beckham can be reached at bevbeckham@aol.com. 