Her given name was Penny, one red cent, officially on her birth certificate; she was born exactly two weeks before me, on a Monday in late June. We were best friends in our toddler years and I married her brother Chuck in our backyard on Main Street when I was four years old and he was six, the same age as my big brother. When we started school, we were in the same Kindergarten classroom; we even looked alike, two pale-faced little girls with brown hair and bangs, wide cheekbones, and freckles across our noses.
Her dad was a plumber around town and beyond, known for his drinking, running up tabs at bars, and for other bills he did not pay or paid down but never off, regardless of the week, or month. Her dad was also famous for fucking around, including his continuing to see a high school flame he could never quite abandon, even after Chuck and, two years later, my best friend Penny were born. His wife – their mother – was a stay-at-home mom; she hadn’t finished high school because she got pregnant with my pretend future husband.
Later on, she tried to work outside the home, leaving the few jobs she was qualified for because the number of people who hassled her for money her plumber husband owed them was too much for her to take. I think she was fifteen when they got married, delivering Chuck at sixteen, so theirs was not a match made in heaven, but was typical for our town in the fifties and sixties. Most of my classmates’ parents, I realized decades later, were teenagers when my peers were born; they ‘had’ to get married, and were at least a decade younger than my mom and dad.
My parents got married when they were both twenty-seven; they had bachelor’s degrees, and worked professionally in their respective fields of teaching and pharmacy. They knew Penny’s family well, as well as you do in a very, very small town, because my mom taught the J_____’s parents and kids, and I’m sure the J_______s family – families, as there was more than one – were customers of my dad. I’m also pretty sure my dad extended credit he shouldn’t have to Lee, Penny’s dad, time and again.
My dad did things like that; he had a whole file – twelve inches deep at least – of deadbeat customers whose back stories he knew because they’d all grown up together. He was a truly kind and decent man bent on doing favors for people, especially families with kids, giving necessary meds away on what he knew was bad credit in the years before prescription and medical safety nets were put in place.
Lee J_______s, and others like him, took advantage; Lee made my dad laugh, and was very charming, which is a kind of coin in small towns. Penny’s dad and mine were both charming, and they both married women named Dorothy. Dorothy, beloved of God. My mom was called Dot or Dottie; Penny’s mom was called Dee. Lee and Dee. Dick and Dot. They weren’t friends and didn’t socialize, but as children Penny and I thought they were friends, or at least, I did – which is just another way kids are designed to fool themselves, wish-casting, projecting. They were friendly acquaintances; my mom didn’t approve of Lee J________, even if she liked him personally. She believed that Dee, a former student, was smart and could have done more, and better.
My parents also knew Dee’s mother, Jessie, a short order cook at the Inn-Between, and they liked her a lot. The Inn-Between had a bowling alley game in the barroom, where we spent dimes from our dad while waiting for our meals. Whenever we went there as a family, Dick and Dot had us take our plates back to the kitchen to help out and to say thank you to Jessie for making our dinners. She was enormous (or seemed so to me as a little kid), very friendly, and kind; she also made a great club sandwich, my favorite, and I knew Penny adored her.
At the end of second grade, a special note in the office pulled me out of my classroom just before the final bell where I found my mother waiting for me, which meant, I knew, that something big and maybe even bad had happened, especially once I saw my sisters and brother weren’t along for the car ride home, which was an easy ten-minute walk from school. We got into the big red Buick station wagon, where, she explained, she wanted to see me alone in order to tell me the difficult, hard news, which was that my best friend Penny had failed second grade.
Years later my mother told me that she never seen anyone cry as hard as I did that day, sitting out at the picnic table in our yard weeping for my friend while my siblings walked home without me. I don’t remember crying, or sitting outside on my own – but I do remember the heaviness I felt in my heart. Failed? Failed? Penny failed? How could that even happen? And how would we stay connected, would we?
Penny, unbeknownst to me, was struggling in school, and at home; her entire little family was floundering in their tiny house just off the main road in Kelly Corners. This was obvious to anyone not seven-years-old, I guess, but I didn’t see it. The school administration and teachers in the elementary grades had decided to flunk an entire group of my peers, kids who were not thriving for various reasons, rendering them unfit for promotion, including Penny.
They did this to help the students, but they also did it, my mom shared with me a decade-plus later, because it evened the numbers. Our class was overlarge, this balanced things with the significantly smaller class below ours, and therefore was better, better for both grades, better for the teachers as well as the kids who had fallen behind.
Most of the children held back were from families my mom described to me as ‘working class’, which confused me. Didn’t all dads and most moms work? Wouldn’t that make everyone ‘working class’? The differences between my family, and that of Penny and the vast majority of my classmates, weren’t apparent to me as a child, and would remain so for many years, but Penny felt it, Penny knew. They all did, my peers, and I did not; that was and is the privileged, selective ignorance of having more, a childhood ignorance that included the privilege of having two college-educated parents who chose one another, no shotguns involved.
At the time of this mass demotion, only one set of parents objected to their child’s inclusion in the group failure, the Smalls. Their daughter Karen, they knew, was as bright as any other kid, and she wasn’t going to be held back, not by anyone. Lee and Dee, however, made no such fuss, and Penny was required to repeat second grade.
Penny and I tried staying friends but it was too hard; she had to find her way in her new class, making fresh bonds with other little girls, and I had to move on, trying to find another close best friend, or more than one, in my class, a search I struggled with throughout grade and middle school. Small schools are great unless you’re an outlier, and I was that, for sure. My friendship with Penny was also doomed because I reminded her of her failure, and of our differences, the ones I didn’t yet see.
We did, however, become close best friends again when we entered our teenage years, clinging to one another in our shared adolescent misery if for no other reason; misery that we attempted to heal by drinking as much and as often as we could. She moved up, working hard to graduate early and escape the continued chaos at home. Her Junior/Senior year in high school her parents lost their house, moving into a double-wide on a piece of property Penny’s paternal Uncle Linn gave or sold them on the cheap. During our freshman year in college at two very different schools, Penny’s mom made a bonfire out of every memento, photo, and souvenir of both her children’s lives.
The gap between us was widening, even if we could not see it, and we stayed friends for many years, with occasional breaks because it was too hard, too hard to support her poisonous, excessive drinking, the lies, the paranoia, the gossip, and endless, endless bullshit. She disappeared into rehab and came out sober, divorcing the husband she married only because she was actively alcoholic and had nowhere else to go, but even sober she was still crazy AF. She had multiple abortions, and okay fine, you go girl, but – birth control, maybe, after numbers four and five, or six?
After her divorce she met multiple, unknown men on line and brought them into a home with two young boys after breaking it off with a very nice local man who loved them all; I held my breath for what could have – might have – happened. She came to NYC to visit once when I begged her to stay away and used my computer to contact all sorts of men and women regarding sex as me, using my email address; I was hanging on by a thread at that time in my own life, and was furious.
She pleaded with me to call a man’s wife in Michigan? Wisconsin?, a man who had dumped her, a man whose soon-to-be ex-wife told Penny on another phone call I refused to make that they were bankrupt and divorcing because in the dawn of the internet age, with instant messaging and chat rooms spreading like wildfire, he’d wasted their savings and everything else flying around the U.S. to fuck women he’d seduced on line, including my vulnerable, unstable friend.
Our last communication was a brief yet pungent letter I sent her after my dad died telling her once and for all to fuck off. She’d written me a non-sympathy sympathy note, informing me that she’d heard about my father’s death, and that she believed I held a grudge against her for no reason, this despite the fact that I’d sung at her dad’s funeral only six or eight months before, and was happy to do so for his sake, and hers, and at her mother’s request.
I’d been pleased, then, to find a little peace with my oldest friend; we had a moment in the church (Lee got religion not long before dying), reaching across the pews to say we loved one another, because – once – we really did, and that feeling still resonated somewhere in both of us. Still, in the note she went on writing that we should be friends, that I had to be her friend, because loyalty was required of me based on our shared history as children in our small town.
No. The day before my father’s funeral she called my home twenty or more times, screaming into my answering machine unintelligible attacks, and I thought, deleting them all, ‘Oh goodie, now we’re really, really done’.
She was the cutest little girl. We both were.
