When faced with the description of a person whose memory is long like an elephant’s, all I wonder is what one might call the opposite. Would it be another animal? “Ah, that Arielle, her memory is short like a cow’s.” Because even when I squint hard and only the past ten or so years come into a foggy focus, while beyond that the images dull and fade to almost transparent. And to think there are people who remember not only the story but also their exact age, their teacher’s first and last names and the clothes worn by the boy who sat next to them in class. Against theirs, my own childhood memories are a tumbling wash of single socks and holey t-shirts, a censored book with more chapters cut out than left in.
All this to say that when I sat down with my childhood best friend Lizzie a few years back and was told a story about us, dripping in detail, that I had no recollection of, I was not surprised. Rather, I happily took my place as the honored guest to a movie screening about my own life, waiting on the edge of my seat for the finale.
Elizabeth Rose Quinn lived across the street from me on Middlefield Rd. in the Berkeley hills. Her large Catholic family had been there years before and remained years after my mother and I lived in the white house with the Japanese Maples kitty corner from their house. My first impression of this small girl was that of a wild animal pacing between the zoo’s fences.
The Quinn residence was loud and full, with kids in and out all day long, good Biblical named children who were beautiful and confident. From Joseph I learned about The Artist Formerly Known as Prince. From Mary I experienced my first love of musicals during her high school production of Bye Bye Birdie. There was an omnipresent father - the deeply intellectual and brightly witty UC Berkeley professor and author Arthur. But best of all there was Barney. A woman as no nonsense as only a mother of four rambunctious children can be. The way she talked to me was a revelation: “Oh honey, I can’t see your face. Let’s pull those bangs back. And do not chew that gum with your mouth open my dear.”
Barney was different from my mother Suzanne in every way I could think of - my beautiful mother with the big smile, dimples and radiance, my mother with the little BMW and the George Michael cassettes, my mother of StairMaster and Lean Cuisine, my mother of Maharishi, meditation and always searching, my mother of PhD and books, my beautiful mother. Across the street from all this floaty beauty I reveled in Barney’s sharp tongued critiques, hard and fast rules, etiquette lessons paralleled with an ease of attention for her youngest who was bound to survive as the other three had and so running free on our safe streets was better than being inside underfoot. When you got a chuckle or a pat on the back from Barney, you felt like a peacock with its feathers all out.
Lizzie took refuge in my quiet home as much as I did in her boisterous one. There she didn’t have to compete to be heard or for her favorite TV show. Hers was the loudest voice in our house and my mom and I both delighted in the noise. Sitting together all these years later near her bungalow in Hollywood, where she works as a comedy writer, I felt for maybe the first time how important we were to her in those days.
“When you were gone in the summers visiting your dad, sometimes your mom would let me come along as she ran errands, just the two of us cruising around Berkeley together,” she said between chopstick bites of green scallion pancake.
“She never told me that! That’s a sweet image.” The two of them were close, separate from me. Without any siblings it had been a foreign feeling at first and I harbored bits of jealousy for my small blonde friend who was scared of nothing. Did my mom prefer her boldness to my shyness? But I loved Lizzie so much that my envy didn’t really have teeth, and left no marks.
“The best was the afternoon that I crawled in through an open window and she came home to find me in the TV room just having a ball,” Lizzie said. “I was flipping around the stations, talking to myself. I could watch anything I wanted! No haggling over the remote!”
“You gotta be kidding. You broke into our house?” I said.
“You don’t remember that? Oh man your mom laughed so hard I think she peed her pants. That great big laugh of hers and tears streaming down her face.”
I settled back in my chair and squinted. Nope, nothing. I could see our TV room, with the floppy couch and the Stairmaster in it. It would have been our guest room but I don’t think my mom liked having house guests. I saw the small lock we put on the bottom of the door so that my stepdad wouldn’t get sucked into the tube and stay up all night watching who knows what. I saw little me transfixed on Bewitched and Mr. Ed, glimpses into homes that resembled the Quinn’s a heck of a lot more than they did mine. I did not see the memory that Lizzie spoke of.
“Yeah,” she said, “Barney was not very happy with me about that little episode. Apparently she wanted to ground me for it, but your mom wasn’t having it. Suzanne told my mom that I was welcome to crawl through the window any time.”
“Those two really had a nice understanding,” I said. “I can’t imagine two women more different, but they sure loved their time together. Remember them trailing after us on Halloween, chatting for hour after hour in the darkness? For probably ten years in a row!”
Lizzie sat across from me, twenty-five years older now but somehow with that same mischievous glint in her green eyes. As a kid she was athletic, wiry and always moving. Now she claims to be truly sedentary, as much sleeping and as little exercise as possible. I was the one who got chubby around 9 years old, so in adulthood embraced the “healthy lifestyle” filled with movement and eating green things. It is the first time I have seen her since high school. After my mom died freshman year things were never quite the same. Her dad passed not long after. We were teenagers and no longer lived in the same town; even lives as intertwined as ours could separate just like that.
“Your mom loved us together so much,” she told me. “Jelly Bean and Lizzie Bear.”
“The Bean and The Bear. She gave us those nicknames, didn’t she?”
“Yup!”
“Thank god you lived across the street from me,” I said.
“You mean kitty corners?”
“Yeah, kitty corners. Where the hell did that saying come from anyway? What I mean is, even though I didn’t have any siblings it’s like you were one, because you shared her too. I’ve always been jealous of families who could reminisce together, build on each other’s memory gaps and fill in the holes. It’s been hard remembering so little of her, constantly questioning my memory. Lucky for me we wound up across the street from you. Because now I can make you tell me all the stories I can’t seem to remember…”
We sat finishing up our dumplings and the last dregs of wine as the meal had already stretched late into the afternoon. One of those warm Los Angeles afternoons where you really have nothing to do and nowhere to be.