The other day I was walking down an aisle in the grocery store when “Mimi’s” phone number popped into my head.
It has been over 30 years since I dialed it. She and I were once friends, part of a posse of 13-year-old girls my parents dubbed the Rat Pack.
“Hello, rats!” they’d say to us, as I cringed.
I can’t know what watershed adolescent experience my own sons, 15 and 12, will someday cite; my brother, Ted, had one at 13 that was mixed but vital. If I were to name such an experience, I know what it would have to be, and it was tough.
Ted’s emergence was at a six-week wilderness summer camp. My mother put him — spindly and irascible, intimidated by bigger boys — on the bus. As it pulled away, Ted turned and through the window gave her a long, somber look that still haunts her.
Having been on Outward Bound myself, at 15, I had given him one piece of advice: not to complain. At that time Ted enjoyed his fretting; but when he returned, it was with a new demeanor, a new voice, and this report from his counselor: I never heard a serious complaint from or about him.
Ted says the tenet has served him well ever since (and he is now a diplomat).
As for me, life got more complicated in fifth grade, when the girls started banding and expelling. I hung on to the corps diligently, and was retained.
At 13 we all had the same hair, jeans and laugh. I remember how a “boyfriend,” such as they were in eighth grade, once broke up with me, saying (through an emissary, naturally) that I had “no personality.”
I can’t say I did. I mostly emulated the assured Mimi and “Beth.” And we three, plus two other girls at different times, had fun: many, many days of swimming, waterskiing, watching late-night monster movies, playing endless games of spades, and talking about everything.
The junior high that we all went to was overcrowded, resorting to “split sessions”: you went to school from 7 a.m. to noon, or noon to 5 p.m. In what had seemed a catastrophe to me upon entering seventh grade, the kids from our tiny elementary school were split up, with me on the opposite session from the only girls I knew.
The situation, as it played out, was untenable in many ways.
I made a new friend in my class, “Darcy,” but over time Mimi and Beth resented that I spent too much time with her. For her part, Darcy eventually grew bewildered and irked that I was never free on weekends. And then as I hit ninth grade, my parents, fed up with my overcrowded school and my doing nothing in it, yanked me and put me in a private school.
Within two months of entering the new school, I was out of the pack. Gone, dismissed and disbelieving. Beth and I had been friends since third grade. Life, it seemed, was over. What would I ever do on Friday nights? Saturdays?
For a teen, it is hard to think beyond the present, or consider that your current peers might not be those who are important to you all your life. You only dread feeling left out.
Yet within a short time I realized something unexpected, a sense of liberation. I could make any friends I wanted at my new school. I could pursue other interests; do whatever I wanted. I played field hockey, entered school plays; grew avidly interested in some (not all) school subjects.
Over the years, I bumped, separately, into Beth and Mimi, who’d eventually fallen out; we always had friendly conversations.
Then at 17, I saw Mimi at a party downtown. I think it was St. Patrick’s Day. She and I talked at some length: animatedly, easily. Then she said, “There’s something I want to say to you. That was really crappy what we did to you. I’m sorry.”
I told her it didn’t matter at all, that it was fine. And it was.
Years later I was much struck by a passage in the Anne Lamott novel “All New People,” in which the adolescent narrator, Nanny, was befriended by two girls, Gigi and Pru. They smoked (so did we), did sleepovers, talked and listened to music.
At the end, Nanny has not seen Pru in many years but cries inconsolably to find out that she has been killed at 21. She remembers a chance meeting when they were 15: “I cried after she got on her bus and I started to think of what a great friend she had been, of what a stroke of luck it had been to find her . . . with all that that meant: it meant I belonged.”
Maybe I had Mimi and Beth when I needed them.
In our early 20s, Mimi and I worked together at a job and became friends again. She was lovely, funny, full of panache. A few years later, my father suddenly died, and within a week I opened the mail to find a note from Beth. After the memorial service, I saw Mimi’s name in the registry.
Alison Osius lives in Carbondale and can be reached at aosius@hotmail.com.
