Rules for Visiting

by Jessica Francis Kane

  Blake O’Dell isn’t particularly warm or nice, and he can be bossy when he needs to be—when landscapers mistreat the plants, or high school volunteers fulfilling some academic service requirement work harder on their tans than on the job at hand. But he is never loud, works at what appears to be a slow pace, and yet is so constant and steady, he always accomplishes more than anyone else. Years ago my father told me about walking in the Alps with my mother when they were young. They set ambitious goals and would head out from the mountain hut in the morning at a good clip, leaving the weathered, older crowd of Swiss walkers with their walking sticks far behind. In the afternoon, those walkers always passed them. Always. That was Blake. Of course, it’s the old tortoise-and-hare story, but isn’t it a little shocking when a myth shows up so clearly in the real world?

  Back in July, not long after the poetry prize was announced, Blake had made the case that as the planter and cultivator of such well-remunerated inspiration, I deserved something, too. Apparently the head of Landscape Architecture laughed, but a letter from the vice dean (a mathematician with the heart of a botanist; Blake said he’d often seen him admiring the tree) helped. It took three months to approve and Blake had kept quiet about it the whole time. Then one morning in October he told me that “in recognition of my service to the university and its historical gardens” I was being given one month of paid leave to use as I wanted over the course of the following year.

  The story made the paper. In a brief article mainly praising the university’s open-minded generosity, the female journalist pointed out that the poetry award had been given to male poets for five consecutive years, so it was nice to see a woman being acknowledged, no matter how tangentially.

  Blake, with the melancholy eyes and weather-beaten face, had done this for me. It was more time off than I’d ever had.

  Sue called it a minisabbatical.

  Leo said it might be life changing.

  My father asked if I was going to travel. He was using a single crutch, nursing a bruised hip.

  * * *

  —

  THE FIRST THING I did was reread all the posts about Amber Dwight. Several new ones had gone up since I’d last been on the site. The second thing I did was visit the yew. I brought a thermos and a blanket. I picked up a few red and blue plastic cups, no doubt dropped the night before by undergraduates between parties, and worked some fertilizer into the soil around the trunk. Then I sat with the yew and sipped my coffee.

  I was being given an enormous gift of time and I wanted to use it well. Fairly quickly I came to three conclusions.

  1. I was not interested in finding out who I was alone, which seemed to be the goal of many who explore the power of a year’s effort toward something. I knew that person and I was tired of her. I didn’t want to take her to Italy, or hike a long trail, climb a mountain, or camp in the woods.

  2. I was interested in figuring out who I was with other people, and why that person was hard to be. I remember my mother, not a great keeper of friends herself, used to say, “If you’re comfortable with yourself, you’ll never be lonely,” which didn’t feel like the whole story.

  3. A trip to the bookstore had suggested my choices were to run to nature (see number 1), disappear into books, or both.

  But I was beginning to have another idea. If “Friends are the family we choose,” as the adage goes, I was worried I hadn’t paid enough attention. Some people, like the Goulds and Amber Dwight, collect friends easily. Others get to midlife, look around—sort of the way you might reexamine your living room when you need a new sofa—and say, What do I have here? What is this room I’ve made?

  Halfway through life, I wasn’t sure what I’d made. I finished my coffee, rolled up my blanket, and went home.

  * * *

  —

  I BEGAN LOOKING for models to follow, women’s adventure stories, not war making or city founding, but friend gathering and family healing. But all I could find were what I began to think of as the Penelope model. While Odysseus roamed, Penelope stayed put. Her story was psychologically and emotionally challenging—she raised a son and fended off the suitors—but she didn’t go anywhere. She stayed in Ithaca and that seems to have set the tone for millennia.

  What if Penelope had left? What if instead of waiting upstairs in her rooms, she’d gone to stay with friends in other kingdoms? Trying to find a substitute family when yours is missing is as daring an adventure as any man versus monster. Leaving Ithaca, she might have had an epic in the domestic sphere, pullout sofas her Scylla and Charybdis, guest rooms her Cyclops’s cave. “Wily” Odysseus had to ask his various hosts for a lot of help getting home. Penelope, mindful of manners and, as a woman, trained to please others, would have remembered to ask after her hosts: How are you? How is your home? Do you find you are waiting for something, too? The course of literature might have been very different.

  I bought an anthology of writings on friendship and read it straight through. Afterward I was certain of only one thing: friendship is hard to define. Epicurus believed it was necessary for a happy life. Aristotle believed it was necessary for a good life. Cicero thought life wasn’t worth living without friends, but that they should be made slowly and cautiously. Montaigne thought friendship occurred once every three hundred years and he was, of course, one of the lucky ones. Oscar Wilde said a friend is one who stabs you in the front, and C. S. Lewis proposed ideograms: if lovers are two people facing each other enraptured by the other’s gaze, then friends are two people standing side by side, looking ahead in the same direction.

  I suppose today both figures might be looking down at their phones.

  In the scientific sphere, friendship is defined as time plus intelligence, and only a few species are capable of it: the higher primates, members of the horse family, elephants, cetaceans, and camelids. For cross-species friendship, three criteria must be met: the bond must be sustained for some period of time, both animals must be engaged, and there must be some sort of accommodation on both sides. So my love for my cat, Hester, who has certainly made no accommodations for me, doesn’t count. But the turtle playing ball with the dog, the ape cuddling the kitten? Unquestionably. The internet is full of videos of this sort because humans adore them. And yet how many of us can say we’ve made an accommodation, a sacrifice seemingly against our very nature, for a friend?

  On a walk recently in Duck Woods, I saw two women talking on a corner. They’d been for a run and were warming their hands around cups of coffee.

  “You make friends in your twenties and your sixties,” one of them said, just as I passed.

  I pretended to be curious about something behind me in the road so I could see the other’s reaction. She looked down. In my anthology, I’d read that F. Scott Fitzgerald thought it was the thirties and Thoreau was inspired by the forties. The day after his fortieth birthday, Thoreau woke up and made a resolution to celebrate friendship as the centerpiece of his life. “I sometimes awake in the night and think of friendship and its possibilities,” he wrote.

  But I kept walking. When it felt as if I’d gone far enough, I pantomimed having forgotten something and turned around and headed back.

  Now the first woman was saying, “I don’t know what I did, Bampf, but I miss you.”

  The name couldn’t have been Bampf, but that is what I heard. Both women were aging well; they might have been in their fifties, but I wasn’t sure. My pace must have slowed too obviously because Bampf frowned at me. I had to keep moving, so I don’t know how it turned out for them.

  My father told me once about friendship, “You have to decide if you’re going to take the bad with the good,” advice I did not find, then or now, especially helpful. It sounds as if you make that decision once, when in real life it can come up again and again.

  Day Trip

  On a bright October Saturday, I drove to a nearby town known for its Victorian architectu
re, duck pond, and miniature railway. I packed a sandwich and my thermos and drove the fifty-minute drive in thirty-five minutes. This was a day trip my family made often when I was growing up and I knew the road well.

  The day was cold but the shore of the duck pond was crawling with young families. There were six food dispensers around the water, each one with a line of parents helping overbundled toddlers reach for the pellets they were allowed to feed the ducks, one swan family, and a number of geese that probably weren’t going to bother flying any farther south because the winters here are warm enough now. The birds were so full they paddled near the center of the pond, seemingly conferring about what to do about the relentless children. The children, some of them trying out Halloween costumes a week early, crept closer and closer to the water’s edge, desperate for the birds to eat more. The feeders of birds are always children or the elderly. They are the ones who seem to want that windy feeling of needy birds swirling around, while those of us in midlife crave calm.

  The scene was entertaining but not what I’d come to see. I sipped my coffee and wandered toward the railway. Here was an attraction managed by the children themselves because the cars were too small for adults. The parents traditionally crowded the fence near the tiny station where the children boarded and eventually disembarked after a dozen loops of the little oval track. One distraught mother was trying to get on the train with her child, a notably calm boy of about four, but this was not permitted. I could see the conductor in his black-and-white cap shaking his head.

  The train whistled and started off, all the parents held up their phones, and all the little children—well, most of them—stared straight ahead, surprisingly stoic. I looked around and there, up the sloped bank, in a bit of sun near a stand of ash trees, was a couple looking toward the train but decidedly removed from the rest of the parents. This is what I’d hoped to see. The woman smiled and waved; the man stood with his hands in his pockets. Impossible to tell which child was theirs, but my question is this: Was that child any less adored because mother and father stood so far back from the rest of the crowd? All the rest of the parents were jostling to record all twelve, tired loops. The parents on the slope took no pictures at all but had a good view.

  I unwrapped my sandwich. As the ride finished and I watched one little girl in a white hat with a pom-pom disembark and look around on tiptoes until she spotted the couple on the hill, I felt a cramp in my stomach. The train whistle blew for the next ride and her parents waved down to her. The little girl dodged the next surge of parents to get up the hill to her own.

  Are they an unhappy family? Where’s your evidence? Her mother hugged her when she climbed up the hill. Her father gave her a snack. But it does teach you something. You grow up thinking it’s natural for the ones who love you most to keep their distance. Love stands apart; love lets you come to it. This isn’t wrong, exactly, but I wanted to learn how to stand closer.

  Peeps

  The week after my trip to the duck pond, I invited Sue to meet me at a restaurant for dinner. I told her I’d started thinking about using my leave to visit old friends.

  One thing that is a bit annoying about Sue is that what she is thinking plays out across her face.

  “You have peeps?” she said.

  “I don’t call them that, but yes. Why do you look so surprised?”

  “You’ve never mentioned them. Where do they live?”

  “I haven’t?”

  “Not once that I can remember. How long have we known each other? Ten years?”

  “I’m not for everyone, I know that. But I do have some friends.”

  “But you don’t talk about them. I’ve never even heard their names.”

  “I can tell you their names.”

  Sue smiled. “That’s not the point. Friends don’t have to be like seedlings placed at intervals along a border. It’s okay if they overlap.”

  I decided to change tack. “You’re good at friendship,” I said.

  “It’s my religion,” Sue said, and I nodded, for I had given her the opening. She was serene, pleased. I had the feeling she’d been waiting a long time to say these words in just this way.

  “What else is there?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. It’s not easy.”

  “Why not?”

  I sighed. Having begun this conversation, I nevertheless did not know where I wanted it to go.

  “Making or keeping?” she asked. “Which do you mean?”

  “All of it,” I said. “It takes a lot of time.”

  She smiled again, and what her smile said was, What is time in the face of friendship?

  “You were an only child,” I countered, holding her gaze. I just now saw the importance of this. “I think friendship is easier for only children. It makes sense. You needed friends more.”

  She raised an eyebrow at me. “And are you close to your brother?” she asked.

  We each took a sip of wine, eyeing each other over the rims of our glasses.

  “We’re not good at staying in touch,” I admitted. “But my whole family is like that. I have a couple of aunts and uncles and a few cousins, but we don’t gather. We don’t have reunions.”

  “Well, a lot of families don’t have reunions.”

  “We don’t celebrate milestones.”

  “None of them?”

  “Nothing.” Growing up, I knew people who always seemed to have family arriving for one reason or another: birthdays, Thanksgiving, the Jewish holidays. I remember my mother saying, “Centuries of persecution will do that to a people.” We were Episcopalian.

  “Maria thinks you’re afraid of being vulnerable,” Sue said, setting her glass down with exaggerated care. Maria was Sue’s partner. “I told her you’ve never seen May prune a climbing rose.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “But now I’m thinking about visiting friends, putting myself at their mercy. Maybe I’ll stay a fortnight.” I was thinking of Austen and her heroines. It was always the most vulnerable, the orphaned and unmarried, who went visiting.

  “You’re kidding.”

  “I’ve always liked the idea of them. Why not?”

  “I think the fortnight is dead, along with calling cards and letters of introduction,” Sue said.

  “No one has guest rooms or servants anymore, either. I’m sure that’s part of it.”

  She wasn’t listening to me. “This is a bad idea,” she said, shaking her head. “I hope you don’t mind. I think it’s the responsibility of good friends to be very honest and sometimes say hard things.”

  “No, it’s okay,” I said, mostly thinking I was glad Sue considered us good friends. Then she told me a long story about a time when she’d stayed too long with a friend of hers.

  Some people are good at telling stories about themselves. I know this is called sharing and it’s considered a virtue, but generally when I try to talk about myself the stories come out fast and abbreviated. I don’t know the word for this. Repressed, probably. But couldn’t it just as well be modest? “We gloss,” my father once said about the Attaways, which seemed about right.

  Sue’s visit was a disaster and the friendship was never the same. She finished by saying, “And a fortnight is two weeks.”

  “I know. I won’t. I guess I’m just thinking of a time when that’s what friendship was. Instead of texts and coffee dates, people stayed with one another, for a fortnight if needed. Can you imagine? Having friends who would take you in for that long. Fortnight friends.”

  Sue looked doubtful, but we shared a dessert, and she offered to feed Hester and bring in my mail whenever and for however long I went away.

  “Thank you,” I said. I hesitated, but then decided to tell her I’d thought of a name for her company, the one she’d dreamed about that brought streams through living rooms.

  She was surprised. “You did?”

  �
��Riverkeeper.”

  Sue raised her eyebrows. “I like it.”

  * * *

  —

  AFTER DINNER WITH SUE, I started noticing pairs of friends everywhere. On an unseasonably warm day in November, I ate my lunch downtown and watched two old men, one tall, one short, taking a constitutional around the perimeter of the square in front of the courthouse. They walked quickly and looked like they’d been friends for a long time, or at least they’d figured out how to perfectly match their strides, which couldn’t have been easy given their height differential.

  A few days later I was getting coffee at a café and noticed two women sitting in a corner, deep in conversation. They were older, and one was tall and heavy, the other short and thin. I don’t know why the universe was sending such fairy-tale-like pairs my way; I’m just recording what I saw. I must have been staring because as the young barista passed me my coffee, she said, “Aren’t they so cute? They come in every day.”

  “Every day?” I said.

  “Seriously. Every day. I mean, I talk to my BFF all the time, but we can’t have coffee. She lives in Maine.”

  “That’s too bad,” I said.

  “Oh, that’s okay. We Skype every day.”

  I tried to think of something I could say I did every single day. The only thing that seemed absolutely true was brushing my teeth.

  * * *

  —

  MY NEXT EL PUERTO NIGHT, a Monday, Leo ate dinner with me.

  “Do you mind?” he asked, one hand on the back of the chair, the other holding his plate. I was inside because the promenade was closed up for the winter season, the tables and chairs stored behind the restaurant. He’d already brought my order and was wearing a nice shirt and no apron.