I ran into an ex best-friend today at N. Waterfront Park in
Berkeley. It was an unavoidable meeting, both of us walking different
directions on the same, rather obscure, path. I know it was unavoidable
because, in the past ten years that we haven’t spoken, if I saw her from a
distance, I would find another route to
avoid her. This time she came upon me fast. Worse yet, my partner, who is still
Facebook friends with her, said hello. So we all said hello and briefly compared notes on retirement and moved on. No
big deal. But it was painful nonetheless because of the cloud under which we
parted ways, the one that ended our friendship of thirty-three years.
We first met in a CR group at the Women’s Center on Brady
Street in around 1976. I was an emotional wreck just surviving after the
untimely death of my mother in 1973 and the suicide of my grandmother that
followed the same year. I was alone caring for my sister in a strange city.
Cathy wanted to be friends and I needed friends desperately. Although her class
background was similar to mine (lower middle class) she was very different. Her ethnic background was WASP and very self-contained. Especially so because her mother had
acute mental illness. She didn’t want to talk much about deep stuff and neither
did I so we were a perfect match.
We talked feminist politics which evolved into leftist
politics. I was careful with her as though I was walking on eggs. Instinctively
knew that my unleashed, assertive, blatantly Jewish-style of interacting would
scare her. So I kept it at bay. This took the form of censoring and toning down
my feelings and impressions. I don’t have to be tacky and uncouth just because
my family was, I told myself. Cathy was smart and loving when she decided to be
but her rules were strict and inflexible. She would counsel me on dating
situations telling me when to call a potential date, how many times to try,
when to send a card and what consists of an appropriate gift. These rules of
etiquette were helpful for me because they were so completely absent in my
coming of age experience.
Time may not heal all wounds but it does diminish them.
That’s what happened to me as the years passed. Partly it was because I was
meeting other lesbians of my own ethnicity who I related really well with. They
were proud of their backgrounds and didn’t hold themselves back. As I grew
freer, more secure in myself, I began naturally reverting to the style of
interaction in which I was raised. It’s more of an organically grown
conversation where one thing reminds you of another so you move on to the
similar thing and the other person responds with more information about their
experience and it builds organically from there. It involves both speaking and
listening. Just trying it out made me feel better immediately. For Cathy that
was not the case. She felt unheard, not listened to. Cathy believed that every
addition I made to the subject was a subtraction from her perspective. She
insisted that heavy exploration of a personal subject must consist of one
person holding forth while the other is absolutely silent. Of course I hoped that, after all those years, we could
work it out, that she’d realize it was just a difference in cultural styles not
in emotional worthiness.
Later, I would post articles on my Facebook page about
Jewish conversational styles and how the dynamics of social interaction are culturally
determined. But later was too late for Cathy and I. We made many attempts at
compromise and a number of aborted attempts at connecting. It would work for a
while and then I would slip back to my natural state. She blamed it all on me
and I took on that mantle too. After all, wasn’t I the one who changed? The
blunt truth was that she liked the person I’d pretended to be quite a bit more
than the one I actually was. And I could not settle for anything less than my
genuine self.
The last time we spoke was at her place, the very same
house I had convinced her to buy with a lawsuit settlement so many years
earlier. Before leaving I said, “Well, this is it. I guess that unless one of
us is dying of cancer or something, we won’t see each other again.” She said
nothing. We haven’t seen or spoken a word until today when I was filled with
that same old feeling of loss and sadness; a coming to terms with the fact that not all conflicts are reconcilable.
