Those Other Girls

In the past week, I reunited with two old and dear friends. One was a friend from high school, the other a roommate from college; one I hadn’t seen for over 30 years, the other for almost 40.

We all grew up in safe suburban neighborhoods and modest but lovely homes. Our parents drove us to music and art and dance lessons. We did not color our hair, except for an occasional lemon juice rinse, nor did we wear excessive makeup. We were raised to be “nice girls,” which meant the opposite of trampy. You know, those girls with ratted hair and raccoon eyeliner and skirts up to there. The girls who smoked in the school bathroom, snapped chewing gum, and went with boys who drove vans and station wagons that had curtains around the back windows.

Decades ago, I was jealous of one of these dear friends I recently met with because she had huge green eyes and attended every Beatles concert held at the Hollywood Bowl, and of the other because she was lithe and had a cute little candy apple red Fiat.

We went out into the world expecting it to treat us with the deference and care that our parents, in all good faith, led us to believe was our lot. We opened ourselves to love like corsage flowers.

Decades later, there are six divorces between us. We held on in our marriages until we saw we would die, either literally or metaphorically, if we stayed. We were lied to, bullied and betrayed in ways we could never have predicted back when we felt a young man breathing in our scent as though it were a blessing. Back when we believed it possible for him always to be charmed by the way we wobbled in high heels, or misplaced our keys, or smiled when we were actually upset.

There are daughters, sons, stepdaughters and stepsons, and we wish them well as they go out into the world. But we can’t protect them from the disappointments and cruelties of love any more than our parents could protect us, once we left their homes in search of our own.

I look at my friends in their fifties, and I want to weep because I still see the girls they were, the litheness heavier, the large eyes droopier. But beauty was never fully present till now—before it was merely freshness mistaken for beauty. We are beautiful today because we have been shattered, and we’ve repaired ourselves, like those other girls emerging from the curtained station wagons, smoothing their disheveled hair, opening their compacts to survey the damage.