As Claudio had noted to Kitty one night about the four best friends, “You all have libidinous lips.”
“You can go without marriage, or justice, or honor, but friendship is indispensable to life,” gently quipped Myrna as she quietly tipped another long stem to its bottom.
“Do it again, Myrna,” said Sharon, and they all laughed.
They were used to the vodka. It would take quite a few martinis over a few hours to get them over the hump to reach out of touch.
“Friendship is the cornerstone of society; it spreads universal warmth,” joked Kitty.
“When women can’t have an honest relationship with men, they pour their hearts out to other women,” said Sharon, in all seriousness and they all looked a bit annoyed at her. The observation was too close, much too close to sobriety, draining a sunny afternoon of the jibe that called for a lot more handsome well chilled martinis.
“Words without vodka are never enough,” sneered Myrna and signalled for another round of clean vodka martinis.
“It’s unnatural to go without men,” Robin hid a slight slur beneath a deep sigh. “It’s in the risk of being denied that the sweetness of love lies,” she quickly recovered.
“Great emotions are felt only in the fear of betrayal by men,” sighed Sharon who then gulped down her chilled vodka, her rosy cheeks matching her violent lips.
“What the fuck is going on here?” said Kitty as she slurped another huge bite into her bloody thick Angus burger. “Let’s all get serious and enjoy our drinks as we discuss current events according to the UN.”
“Good one Kitty. The UN is an American joke,” said Robin, recalling her Current Events Middle School discussions.
The martinis were having their subtle rosy effect; not unusual for the Sooky skies to get a bit foggy on a weekday afternoon. There had always been familiarity between the friends and there was never any need to wean words. They had become accustomed to the sound of their words and there was no need to search their meaning. So they talked to each other with the ease of children: every empty thought was permissible because they weren’t there to solve the world’s problems.
“Kitty’s right,” said Myrna. “We all know and we all like a good lay. I mean a good man; and what’s a better lay than one with a friend? We all would like to share a friend … and that’s damn good friendship. Who among us wants to fuck an enemy?”
“Say what you mean, Myrna,” Sharon tossed down another one.
“She’s right, Sharon. Let’s all fuck our friends. Nobody wants to fuck her enemy?”
It must have been Kitty.
“There’s many ways of fucking your enemies, but only one way of fucking your friends,” said Sharon who had no sense of humor.
“The problem with American high schools is there are few true friendships …”
“You are so right, Sharon,” interrupted Robin. “In Ethiopia there are true friendships there because all the people there are friendly and they fuck each other without guilt.”
“Above all, friendship is a racist class line,” Myrna came back strong.
“Four coffees black,” said Sharon to the waitress.
“What do you mean, Myrna? I’m really curious. I’ve never heard you speak about race,” said Robin who was pissed at Myrna’s sudden interest in race and sociology. She looked probingly past the long stemmed glasses into Myrna’s words.
“You especially know what I mean, Robin,” and there was a sharp tone to Myrna’s voice that the friends rightly understood as unnecessarily aggressive.
“What’s up Myrna? Don’t hold back,” said Robin.
“You know, many white girls might have relationships with other classes or other races but rarely, if ever, do they have true friendship like ours, because we’re alike,” responded Myrna. “In all truthfulness I don’t think that I could have a true friendship with a girl of a different race. What would we talk about?”
“What about a man of a different race, Myrna? Do you think you could find something to talk about with an African-American male, for example?” said Robin.
“I know white men find a lot to talk about with black women,” smiled Sharon.
“I know you do, Robin,” said Myrna.
“You’re pathetic, Myrna. The least you can do is pretend, like the rest of us.”
It was too much for Robin who quickly shook off the vodka. Once again Ethiopian memories rotting quietly in the background of her once triumphant mind released their stink. How could she befriend a person like Myrna who had such racist thoughts?
Suddenly the air conditioning in Sooky’s felt frigid. Here was a definite break away from the teddy bear hugging friendship of moments earlier. It was one of those sobering moments that once traversed could never be recalled regardless of remorse or regrets. Myrna had overstepped the bounds of polite familiarity, even for best friends, and everyone there knew it; but she was tired of the baroque bullshit that all these years had passed for friendship; tired of relationships that could not withstand the inner cries of rage. She didn’t care; all good things have to come to an end sometime, she felt the moment’s rage, and screw Robin and her friends. There was no turning back; there was truth in the clarity of vodka. Flashes of her pain confused her personal misfortune amidst the runaway celebration. It was no use; the dam had burst; she was in no mood to plug up the hole with more social lies. She sipped her martini and all her best friends for a minute melted out of sight.
*
After her husband Phil had left her, (out of the blue; it was thought he had gone and joined some monastery in Illinois), she was no longer thrilled. She no longer had the dedicated desire to meet with her friends and partake in the weekly gin and vodka pickling that passed for renewal of girlhood friendship. The departure of her husband had been a personal funeral for Myrna. She briefly thought of suicide but knew she was made of weak stuff and what would her friends have said: that she was a coward, and rightly so. Ironically, she found warped comfort in the thought that there might have been another woman; it would have shown her friends that she had been married to a stud who sought out women; but she quickly remembered that Phil was simply a two-faced weasel, and that nobody who knew him would have believed the stud story. She could not suffer her snake-in-the-grass husband’s deceit even to her close friends. The shame of having to continuously make excuses as to why her rat husband had left her had become vile gossip in the mouths of all who at one time or another had envied her. The bastard monk Phil didn’t deserve the cover of white excuses.
Actually, she didn’t know why he had left her; to be a monk of all fucking things.
“It’s got nothing to do with you,” he had said huffing and puffing on his way out.
It was an ugly thing to say and an uglier thing to do, and it hadn’t stopped ringing lily-livered loudly in her head from the day the shithead left. It was hardly a reasonable explanation, “it’s got nothing to do with you,” for left-over conversation with her friends who most respectfully had found Phil’s abrupt departure most intriguing.
“So, why did your Phil leave you?”
“It had nothing to do with me.”
She would seek no pity, make no apologies about her not so huge loss, and she would accept no patronizing bullshit, ever, from her three more fortunate, still married, friends! No more commiserations about bad luck and fate, no more feelings of rejection, no more pretended humiliation from the loss of a weasel, for Myrna, she had decided; and with a sharp edged cut she had resolved to drop out of all the piss-eyed glaring society that sadly included her long-time best friends.
Fooling herself to a solitude away from people, to be left alone to her own coping, not to be disturbed by unhappy thoughts, Myrna initially found comfort in unrequited fantasies; she went from one to two packs a day, and drinking endless cups of dark coffee to wash down the tar in her mouth, but most appallingly, she a
lso took up drinking excessive amounts of gin daily. The gin was warm and relaxing and had the agreeable effect of emptying her previously complex life to its bare social necessities.
“It’s either gin or gardening, and I say fuck gardening,” she would say to herself after an early couple of gins minus the tonic.
*
Sitting at Sooky’s with her friends, somewhat inattentive to what she had been saying, not caring about her friends chatter, the sole concern that had remained a constant in her mind that afternoon that had started out with pleasure, and being a single mom, was whether her two beautiful daughters were still virgins, though, being a woman, and having been there, her daughters’ virginity was not a particularly heavy complication to her presence this vodka amiable afternoon with her friends. In her moments of booze clarity, ‘they have to get fucked sometime’, was a truth eternal. To be sure, she was motherly curious, but she didn’t particularly care to ask.
“They have to fuck sometime,” out of nowhere, she loudly announced to the friends in Sooky’s, and Robin opened her eyes wide and forgot her anger.
It was an embarrassing moment for everyone, especially for the smiling Mexican busboy bringing the black coffee.
“Myrna, be nice,” said Sharon. “After all, the good Lord doesn’t object to fucking. I know and I can assure all of you, if you don’t fuck here and now on earth, you’ll never fuck in Heaven.”
It was nice to have Sharon around because with one ridiculous comment she equalized everything. And the girls laughed in an attempt to regain the happy hour feeling of pre-Myrna sulking moments earlier.
“Give me a break,” insisted Myrna, almost looking for a fight. She didn’t like Sharon’s easy drunken fancy always turning toward religion. “I believe in Jesus and Santa Claus like anybody else, but beyond the seven day prologue to the grand opus everything else is beyond reason. Let’s face it, it’s all a mirage.”
“Well, I too grew up without religion,” Kitty tried to tone down the turbulence which was now violently churning Myrna’s stomach, “but sometime during my life, I opened up to Jesus and the rest; and good or bad, I’m now a believer. It’s nice.”
“Good or bad, or neither good nor bad, that’s the way it is,” said Robin, who showed great restrain in not taking offense at Myrna’s earlier attack, one way or another.
“What does she mean by seven day prologue?” Sharon asked.
“She means in the beginning,” Robin volunteered, and then, “… oh screw it.”
“Don’t mock the Lord, Robin,” said Kitty.
“The Lord is within everyone’s grasp after a few martinis,” said Robin, blinking her eyelids in Hollywood fashion.
“’I believe in every drop of rain that falls, a flower grows, a flower grows …,’” Kitty light-heartedly tried again.
“Lucky for Eddie,” Myrna cynically reminded Kitty, “and not so lucky for sometimes dopey what’s her name.”
“You mean Liz or Debbie?”
“Like there’s a difference?” Kitty pretended to be Jewish.
“We’ll have an eternity to stuff ourselves with spiritual love, but right now let’s drink to carnal love, the way the good Lord meant it,” said Sharon, which was unlike her.
Probably the Grey Goose, they all thought.
As if from some unconscious world, Sharon was suddenly overwhelmed by a mental infatuation of an image, an illusion, of beautiful Justine. It was pure magic.
What beautiful young breasts, and that perfectly firm ass, she secretly thought to herself, troubled that she wasn’t getting it right. Briefly alone among the friends, she imagined Justine bare assed and bare chested. Sharon’s face glowed with the same tint as she fantasized Justine’s ass. It was a glow that unglued Sharon from her friends.
Robin was the only one to perceive the strange fixation in Sharon’s eyes. For some time now she had noticed that Sharon out of the blue would become quietly removed from them. She didn’t care what the others thought of her and she spoke her slow mind as though she were in a prolonged dull-witted state of psychosis. Her eyes seemed to slowly drill into a distant space giving a dispirited sense of other worldliness. There were too many Biblical references carefully dressed as insights during her hypnotic states. Inhibitions, once Sharon’s hallmark, had slowly given away to pulpit like commands and weird repetitive pronouncements of hearty events and truths to be recalled from some distant era in the mind.
“To think that you know yourself is the same as self-deception,” said Sharon still focused on the holy Justine icon.
“Or delusional when you begin talking to Jesus and he to you,” said Myrna.
“Your personality is pretty much arrested in adolescence, either in junior high or high school, when you’re told to educate yourself to be what you will become for the rest of your life,” continued Sharon, smiling for relief from Myrna.
“I agree with you, Sharon,” said Robin. “Our corruption started in junior high.”
“I don’t feel corrupted,” said Kitty. “Do you Sharon?”
“Especially for young girls,” said Myrna, her tortured mind always on her daughters.
“Well, they say that education is the process of denouncing pleasure and happiness,” said Kitty. “So, until we do that, I suppose we’re all corrupt.”
“I wonder what people are saying about us now,” said Robin.
“Well, Robin, people will always talk about us but who cares anyway,” said Kitty.
“No, I mean people will say about us that even though we’re privileged, still, we’ve no careers, no children, nothing to show. Other women become doctors, lawyers, architects, yoga instructors, or even whores; but not us; we’re nothings,” summed Robin.
“Well, being nothing might be something sayeth the Buddha Sharon,” said Myrna. “Anyway, we’re happier than most.”
“Other women drop out of careers to have children, but not us … we’re barren,” continued Robin.
“Speak for yourself,” said Myrna.
“Look at it this way, Robin, no one can accuse us of having it all,” said Sharon.
“Hell, we do have it all,” said Kitty. “Rich young husbands, above all our friendship, which makes us well connected all the time – what do you mean not having it all, Sharon?”
“But we should have had children, if not careers,” said Robin.
“Yes, women are supposed to have children, otherwise they’re not natural,” said Sharon, sensing a familiar melancholia invading her heart. It was difficult to tell whether she was playacting in front of her friends, or she really felt the loss.
“We’re screwing up somehow, but not because we’re not having children,” said a thoughtless Myrna who, unlike Sharon and Myrna, did have two beautiful daughters.
“To that having it all, don’t forget to add ageing skin, alcoholism, and divorce,” said Sharon who was beginning to feel aggression towards Myrna whom she thought dishonest.
“You’re right Robin. Let’s face it, no career means never having amounted to much,” said Kitty. “We’ve never had to toil for a personal sense of accomplishment, which is a lot different than simply inheriting the wealth.”
“No children, no maternity leave for Dave, no school plays and parties,” laughed a faux wistful Robin.
“I say screw the children and careers; just give me my caveman quarterback,” jeered Sharon and the friends were lost in her irony.
“Without the children who will take care of us when we’re old,” said Myrna.
“You’re kidding, Myrna,” said Sharon. “Our money will take care of us much better than our children; just like we take care of our parents,” and again everyone laughed knowing that the money had come from the parents.
There was silence. It was the silence of truth, the time to recharge.
“Suppose one of us found out that the other is fucking
her husband. For example, you, Robin, fucking Hank; would that stop you from being friends with Sharon,” said Myrna.
“Bullshit, Myrna. We’re not capable of adultery; we’re not sexual adventurers; we’re not promiscuous predators, we’re nothing,” said a wound up Robin.
“We blur the line between sex and friendship,” said Kitty out of nowhere. “Sex for us is an expression of affection and of eternal friendship, and must be kept private.”
It was Kitty at her best: lovely words meant to reconcile but only in her mind.
“Is that what Claudio tells you,” said Sharon, “that he keeps it private?” and everyone had a hardy laugh again at Kitty’s expense for surely this time everyone understood the irony in Sharon’s words.
Kitty didn’t mind because she truly loved her friends.
“He tells me that we all want to be loved by all and not just by friends; which I really don’t understand what he means, but I do love him a lot,” said Kitty.
“Well, are we lovers or just friends,” asked Sharon.
“The blurring of friendship and love allows us to be friends forever,” smiled Robin. “Like flirting, there’s always some sex involved in friendship.”
“Some people can’t separate sex from friendship,” said Myrna, the beloved.
“We should intensify our friendship by having sex with each other,” said Robin.
“Including our husbands,” said Myrna.
They were all talking at the same time. As usual, what was registering was the happy chatter of their voices and not what they were saying.
“There’s got to be more to our lives,” said Sharon in an arresting tone.
“Be careful what you wish for, Sharon,” said Robin who was always attentive to Sharon. “The more you wish, the less you get, and when you don’t get what you wish, you go mad, bonkers, crazy, like lulu-head,” she made up the last word.
They all came to attention.
“So, let’s all of us be like the millions of other American housewives from all over TV-land. Let’s just pretty ourselves all day long and wait for our husbands to come home from work to screw us,” said Kitty with a silly smile.
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