by Heldt,Dora
While Ruth looked on, baffled, Gabi started to laugh.
“That’s right; Christine got married in the countryside. Ruth, you’ll be able to get loads of tips on traditions and customs.”
Christine finished talking to Luise. She put her phone back in her pocket and said: “She’s coming.”
Luise worked for the same publishing house, but as a rep. She handled the bookstores between Flensburg and Göttingen, promoting new titles to them.
She had known Christine for a long time as a colleague. After Christine moved to Hamburg to get over her divorce, Luise had provided emotional first aid. Once Christine was through the worst, Luise separated from her boyfriend. By that time, they were well rehearsed in tackling the problem, and they’d been close ever since.
Ruth piped up again: “What is it that you find so silly about it? I mean, you got married once, too! Didn’t you celebrate and have a good time?”
Pictures ran through Christine’s mind. Her ex-husband, Bernd; Antje and Adrian, the witnesses; her in-laws; neighbors with schnapps glasses in front of the wreath-covered front door; the expensive jazz band, which had finally consented to play the old German folk song “Das alte Försterhaus” for the guests. She shrugged her shoulders.
“Sure we did, for three whole days even. We had a big party in the country. But it didn’t do much good.”
Gabi waved her comment away. “Whether a marriage goes down the tubes or not has nothing to do with the party. I’m sure it was really fun, the celebration I mean. What did the guests organize for you? Go on, just give Ruth a few ideas.”
“Yes, please do.” Ruth picked up her pen and looked at Christine expectantly. “For example, what did your best friend do?”
“Well, on that particular day, she hadn’t done anything yet.”
Christine swatted away an invisible fly and wondered if she should continue. Gabi made the decision for her.
“Doves,” she said dreamily. “Why don’t you arrange to have some white doves and release them in front of the church?”
“I don’t know, isn’t that a bit much? It’s not like she’s getting married in front of the paparazzi from People magazine.”
Christine laughed. “And there’s always the danger that the damn things will shit all over her bridal gown.”
Gabi shook her head. “You’re not taking it seriously, Christine. And besides, that would be good luck anyway.”
“And give you stains you’ll never be able to get out. Not that it really matters, because no one ever wears the dress again anyway.”
“Ladies, please, can I get one real idea from you? Christine, tell me what yours was like. You’ve done it all. And I’m sure you enjoyed the surprises your friends arranged for you. Did you have a wedding newsletter?”
Christine saw Antje in front of her. Antje in a lime-green outfit, the skirt a little too tight over the hips, a stack of wedding newsletters under her arm. That “I’m-your-best-friend” smile on her face.
“For God’s sake,” she said quickly. “They’re always full of silly recipes and botched crosswords. They’re not even funny anymore.” She thought for a moment. “At ours we had a song, they changed the lyrics of ‘On the North Sea Coast’ to ‘When Tina and Bernd kissed.’ That was the kind of thing our friends went in for. If you like your friend, then spare her anything like that. She’ll be eternally grateful.”
“Who will be grateful to whom?”
Luise had come up to the table without the others noticing, and was standing behind Christine’s chair. Ruth jumped up immediately to start the kissing campaign all over again. Even Gabi couldn’t restrain herself from joining in. Christine could, and watched with a rather mocking expression. One minute and six kisses later, all three of them were back in their seats. Luise put her hand on Christine’s arm briefly. She knew her well.
Ruth brought Luise up to speed on their conversation.
“My best friend Hanna is getting married; I’m the maid of honor and want to think of something fun to arrange for the wedding day. And our friend here, Christine, who had a three-day-long party out in the country and presumably a great deal of fuss, is just ridiculing everything instead of giving me some great ideas.”
Luise looked bemused. “But Christine’s been divorced for five years.”
Gabi rolled her eyes in mock despair.
“Yes, but to get divorced you have to have gotten married at some point. My dear, it’s not about the marriage, it’s about the wedding. The party.”
Luise still looked so confused that Christine had to laugh. “Come on, we’d need to explain the whole concept of country weddings to Luise before anything else. So where were you today?”
Luise pulled her cigarettes out of her enormous purse. “In Bremen, but I only had three appointments. It was good.”
She winked at Christine. Christine felt herself blush. Richard lived in Bremen. Luise was one of the very few who knew she was having an affair.
“What? What’s in Bremen?” Ruth rarely missed a trick. She looked at Christine curiously.
“Oh, nothing. It’s just that Bremen used to be my favorite when I was a rep. That’s all.”
She reached for her coffee cup, took a sip, put it down again, and managed to compose herself in the meantime. “So, back to this wedding. I don’t have anything against getting married in itself. But these made-up songs, sanctimonious speeches, and the games, it all seems, well…a little pathetic. And hardly any of it feels genuine.”
“But I mean it genuinely. I’ve known Hanna my whole life, I know everything about her; we’re soul mates. So, everything about it is genuine.”
Christine noticed Luise looking at her. She cleared her throat. “Then I’m sure it will be. Maybe my wedding was just organized by the wrong people. I’m sure you’ll do a great job. I really mean that, in all honesty.” She looked at her watch. “Right, I’ll have to make a move now, I have a hair appointment. Ruth, if I think of something, I’ll give you a call. And I’ll start on the column tonight.” She stood up and put a few bills on the table. “Don’t get up. See you on Monday, Gabi, and, Luise, I’ll see you soon.”
“Wait, Christine.” Ruth stood up anyway, suddenly seeming agitated. “About the column, I’d like to change the topic. For Hanna. Could you please write about ‘my best friend’? I think that’d be a good one.”
Christine wrinkled her forehead. Luise noticed that her shoulders had tensed up. She could imagine what Christine was thinking and tried to salvage the situation.
“Why, what was the first topic?”
Ruth waved her hand dismissively. “Oh, well first I was thinking about ‘first love’ because of it being spring and all, but somehow that seems boring. Most of our readers are women, and they can relate more to the best friend topic. After all, everyone has one.”
Christine looked unsure. “Well, I actually preferred the first love idea.”
Gabi looked at the others, noticing that Christine seemed to be struggling, and tried to suggest a compromise. “Then write about ‘my first friend’ rather than the best. That’s a nice idea, too.”
Ruth beamed. “That’s even better. Hanna was my first friend, too. Super idea, Gabi. So, Christine, what do you think?”
Christine nodded slowly. “OK, I’ll give it a go. I’ll mail it to you over the weekend, then we can talk about it. So, girls, I have to shoot off now, but have fun, and I’ll see you soon.”
Ruth watched Christine as she unlocked her bike, waved at them, and then pushed it over the footbridge. She turned back to the others. “Is she really so scarred by her divorce that she can’t even talk about her wedding day?”
Luise shook her head. “No, it’s not about the wedding, but the whole topic of best friends and honesty was a real faux pas.”
“But why? She doesn’t even know Hanna.”
“Her bridesmaid Antje was her best friend her whole life; she planned a lot of fun things for the wedding day, and then, four years later, she startin
g fucking Christine’s husband. And carried on for years before Christine realized.”
Gabi scrunched up her face. “That’s awful. And then what happened?”
“Well, it seems that Antje realized she’d rather have him to herself officially than keep her best friend, and pretty much put a gun to Bernd’s head. Either he had to separate from Christine or she would tell her dearest friend a few home truths. So, Bernd separated from Christine, using some pathetic explanation; she moved to Hamburg and he kept their house. Unfortunately the whole thing came out a few months later; too many people knew about it. Since then she’s had no contact with either of them.”
Ruth had been listening with a shocked expression. “Oh God, and I’ve been running off at the mouth about weddings and all that. And coming up with the idea for the best friend column. How awful.”
Gabi gave her arm a reassuring pat. “How could you know? I didn’t either, by the way. Only that she used to be married. And the fact that it fell apart because of another woman. Although I always got the impression Christine felt it was the best thing that could have happened to her. What an idiot he must have been. Did you know them?”
Luise shook her head. “No, we only got to know each other better after she moved to Hamburg. She sometimes talks about her ex-husband, but never about Antje. To start with I often wondered why Christine always seemed to be quite reserved. She never comes by without checking first and can be very distant at times; I always thought it was because of me. Until her sister Ines told me about Antje and Christine. For Christine, Antje was really her rock for thirty years. I think her betrayal hurt more than the end of her marriage.”
Gabi nodded in agreement. “That’s true, Christine can often be like that. For years a few of us from work have been going away in September for a long weekend in Nordeney. A real girl’s weekend. We’ve never been able to convince her to join us.”
Ruth had been listening silently and drawing stick men on her notepad. She looked up.
“But you can’t lose your faith in all future friendships just because of one bad experience. Nor your belief in female friendship in general!’”
Luise shook her head. “It’s not that extreme. She’s friends with Dorothea, after all; they live next to each other now. And then there’s Marleen, she lives in Christine’s old village and helped her a lot through the move and the divorce; she visits a lot. And I meet up with her quite often, too.”
Ruth interrupted her. “I met Dorothea once, she’s the costume designer who used to go out with Christine’s brother, right?”
Luise nodded.
“So she’s almost family. But doesn’t she have any friendships that go way back? Girlfriends she’s known since school?”
“We spoke about it once,” said Gabi thoughtfully. “Christine thought it would only make her realize how much older she was. She kept thinking about people she hadn’t heard from in years; they would just suddenly come into her mind.”
‘So why didn’t she keep in touch?” Ruth looked curious.
Luise answered, “If you divorce after ten years of marriage, you end up breaking ties with your circle of friends as well. Lots of people don’t know how to handle that. Besides that, Christine was an army child; her father was in the Bundeswehr and so they moved around a lot. That made holding on to friendships hard for her. It must have been difficult: she also said once that she had to leave almost all her friendships behind every time they moved. So it wouldn’t have done her any good to dwell on lost friends and memories. It must have been really tough.”
Ruth was thinking. “How old is she now, Luise?”
“She’ll be forty-four in November.”
“That’s nothing.” Ruth looked lost in thought. “It just seems so sad to me. Apart from Hanna I have three other girlfriends I’ve known for over twenty years. It’s wonderful. Why don’t we try to find Christine’s old friends, then invite them to her birthday as a surprise?”
Luise looked skeptical. “I don’t know. For one thing she doesn’t like surprises, and for another I have no idea how we would go about finding old friends that even she hasn’t heard from in years. I mean, maybe she doesn’t even want to see them anymore.”
Gabi, on the other hand, was quite intrigued by the idea. “Well, you know her sister really well, and she’s sure to have known them. Or we could ask her parents or her brother.”
Luise was still unsure. “I’m really not sure. It could backfire, and then she might break off contact with us, too.”
“Nonsense.” Ruth was in her element now. “I think it’s a wonderful idea. She said herself that she’d been thinking of old friends recently. It’s just that it’s hard to make the first move. Everyone knows that. After a while you feel like you’ve lost your chance; it gets harder and harder to reestablish links with people from your past. So we’ll do it for her.”
Luise gave in. “OK, fine, I’ll speak to Ines about it. We can see what she thinks of the idea.”
Ruth smiled contentedly. “Wonderful! I love this kind of thing. I think Christine will be pleased, and so will many of her old friends, wherever they are. We’ll send them an invitation and put a questionnaire in with it. We can ask when they met Christine, what their best memories of her are, what they like most about her, a few things like that to get people in the mood. I’ll put something together. It’ll be great.” She raised her coffee cup. “Cheers, girls, together we’ll make the world a better place. To us, and to female friendship.”
Luise’s expression was hesitant. Gabi smiled.
“My First Friend”
Nineteen sixty-eight was the year my life changed. It had nothing to do with all the attention on student-activist Rudi Dutschke, nothing to do with the Olympic Games in Mexico, and nothing to do with the fact that the FC Nuremberg became Football Champions in Germany or that eleven-year-old pop sensation Heintje released his first album. No, to me the most important thing that happened that year was something else entirely: I started school and three of my greatest wishes came true.
The first was to own a pair of red patent leather shoes, with little cutout patterns at the front and bows at the back. From the moment I saw them in a shoe shop I knew I couldn’t live without them. My mother didn’t agree. She placed a great deal of importance on sensible footwear: closed toes with a sensible sole. She had seen photos of children with deformed feet, and probably had nightmares about them. Her suggestion for a compromise was a pair of bright red lace-up buckskin Hush Puppies. I refused to try them on and started crying. She marched me from the shop, irritated.
My second wish was for a little sister. I already had a little brother, who unfortunately hadn’t lived up to the promises that had been made to me three years before. I found him unbearably boring and couldn’t do much with him. So I placed all my hopes on a sister. The odds stood at 50:50, because my mother was already pregnant.
I’ve never told anyone about the third wish. I wanted a friend, a friend I could call my own. My mother had one. She called her Inge Joan Garden Gnome, even though Aunt Inge was grown up now. There was a picture of them on her first day at school, in which they looked identical and were holding hands. I wanted that, too.
My first day was on the eighth of August, and three weeks before that the mood at home was reaching boiling point. I had a white pleated skirt and a dark blue blazer. They were beautiful, but I only wanted to put them on if I could do it with the red patent leather shoes. Especially since I had to miss out on getting a red satchel; mine was brown. My grandma said I couldn’t see it anyway when it was slung across my back. I could see her point, but the shoes were still an issue; after all, I could see my feet.
And so my pregnant mother marched her stubborn child into the Flensburg city center. There were six shoe shops, and the aforementioned patent leather ones were in the second. In the third and fourth shops I refused to try on a single pair, in the fifth I started to cry, and by the sixth I didn’t even want to start school anymore. Shortly before t
he shops closed we were back in the second shop, and with a tear-streaked face, I finally tried on the most beautiful shoes in the world. When asked if they fitted me properly, I lied: they rubbed like crazy, but I got them. I was on cloud nine.
The evening before school started I was horribly ill. Whether it was down to the excitement or the Hawaiian pizza, I have no idea, just that I was sick all through the night. In the morning I was exhausted, bad-tempered, and my shoes were hurting me. Once we were standing on the school playground and I saw all the other children, I felt even worse. Then my mother let go of my hand and pushed me forward. All the children had to stand in a row. I stared at the floor so no one could see my tears and noticed that all the other girls were wearing black or dark-brown shoes, with closed toes and normal leather. Scrunching up my toes so that mine didn’t rub so much, I felt distraught. After that we were separated off into our class groups. A small altercation on the steps unsettled the order we were standing in. My gaze was still fixed on the floor, when, suddenly, I saw them. Another pair of red patent leather shoes, just like mine. My heart started to beat faster. Above the shoes were white knee-high socks, then a white pleated skirt and a dark blue blazer. We looked identical! The girl looked at me, smiled, then waited for me.
Once we were standing next to each other, I noticed she was half a head shorter than me, and her hair was blond. But apart from that I felt we looked identical. In the classroom we sat down in the third row together. She said her name was Linda Love. I had never met someone with such a beautiful name. I was very happy.
Linda’s father was a butcher, she said. She came from the Rhineland and spoke differently to me; her accent sounded lovely. My route to school went past their shop, and every morning Linda would sit on the steps and wait for me. We told each other everything. She had a big sister who was really mean, and had to wear her hand-me-downs, which she hated. I gave her my yellow pullover. She had to roll the arms up because I was bigger than her, but in spite of that she looked very lovely in it. During school vacation I went to stay with my grandma while Linda stayed at home, and I thought I would die. By the time school was about to start again, I was beside myself with excitement. I had my first Barbie doll, and showed her proudly. But suddenly, Linda seemed to be different. She thought Barbies were silly and had a doll called Klaus, which I found a little strange. Klaus had pigtails.