A Barb(ed) Memory

I can’t explain what happened with Barbara; please just don’t ask.

Okay, that’s… not strictly true. If I really think about it awhile, I guess I do know what happened. I may still not entirely get the “why” of it, but I pretty much know the “what.” Maybe I just don’t want to talk about this. Do you really imagine I’m looking for yet more evidence of my own callowness, my life-long penny-wise, pound-foolish idiocy?

I will say that our eventual estrangement was not her fault. Barb tried, really tried for a time, to keep current with me. She would call and leave these phone messages in her cheery voice, trying to schedule an afternoon luncheon, or evening drinks and dinner somewhere or other after work, just to get together to let me know what was going on in her life and to find out what was happening in mine—her treat, even.

For some reason, I just wasn’t having it.

The first of these calls caught me completely off guard. I hadn’t seen or spoken to Barbara Peterson in years. Alright, my second lie; I’d seen her two or three times, bespectacled and tall as Colossus, striding purposefully through the neighborhood, usually not far from the street where she used to live with her husband Ronnie and daughter Rachel.

Each time, she was so obviously lost in thought that she didn’t see me—she once actually walked right past me, eyes peering toward some middle distance destination, seemingly totally oblivious of her surroundings. To my immense relief, I will admit.

In the beginning, ever my mother’s daughter, I would do the courteous, civilized thing and return Barbara’s calls (hoping against hope as I did so that her answering machine would pick up), tentatively agreeing to meet somewhere.

Barb would call back to confirm and invariably want to chat a bit. Feeling more than a little foolish, I’d nevertheless use an almost missed rinse cycle or a burning dinner as an excuse to cut the call short, with the promise that we’d “catch up” with each other when we met.

Then a day or two before the scheduled get-together I’d call to cancel (hoping once again to get her machine), offering hazy explanations of illness, overwork, or family emergency, promising to call soon to reschedule.

And then dra-a-a-ag my feet about doing so.

She would wait a bit to hear from me and then initiate contact again, still desirous to meet, eat, and chat. After a while—I am not proud of this—I would just not respond, not even to acknowledge the call.

Not understanding what was going on, Barbara would (apparently) shrug and try again at a later time, still wanting to share with me all of the latest changes in her life and learn what was new and exciting in mine. And I—exasperated, sometimes angry—Jesus! Didn’t the woman have any other friends she could do this with? Why keep pestering me??—would erase her self-amused, meandering messages.

Occasionally, we’d discover we were both passengers on the same southbound bus. This would usually happen as one of us was about to disembark, and through a swaying throng we’d smile and nod and signal and stage whisper up and down the aisle, the understanding being that we’d get together soon.

We didn’t, of course. Not if I could help it.

Eventually Barbara did stop calling, no doubt mystified by my unresponsiveness or perhaps simply tired of my evasive bullshit. Relieved, I nonetheless felt guilty about cold-shouldering her.

But not sufficiently motivated to rectify things.

We did actually meet for a mid-day breakfast once, maybe it was twice, and on an earlier occasion for dinner at a corner restaurant not far from my apartment. (I remember this restaurant as extremely noisy, splashy with color and specializing in French cuisine; it has long since gone to that great Failed Eatery Graveyard in the sky to be replaced by—you guessed it, all of you—a Starbuck’s.)

As I recall that dinner, Barbara was scintillating with excitement about her new job, her ongoing coursework, and her hopes, expectations and worries for Rachel, now very much the (nearly) grown-up young lady. And beyond a few twinges of garden-variety jealousy I had no problem at all with listening to this litany of good fortune, or so I thought. I smiled and nodded, murmuring approvingly between bites of spinach crepe.

I’d always liked Barb after all (though not, as long as I’m being honest here, as immediately as I’d liked Ron, her sardonically funny ex-), and was genuinely happy for her that her life, which had once seemed to me so constricted, had blossomed, becoming full and promising. I was also truly interested to know what Rachel, whom as a teenager I’d baby-sat for several years, was up to now.

So what went wrong? I think the trouble started at exactly that point in the conversation where, following her breathless recitation of the latest wonderful new chapters in her life, Barb smiled, fixed me with an expectant look and questioned me about mine.

This was bad. This was seriously threatening because either I had no news to speak of, good, awful or indifferent, or because the most recent changes in my life were not especially positive ones. I really didn’t want to talk about any of it, and felt horribly ill at ease under the microscope of Barbara’s schoolmarm scrutiny.

I felt, if you must know, unworthy of her company. I felt like schlump, a freak, a loser. As I stammered a halting, abbreviated, vaguely apologetic run-down of my nothing-much week, I could feel both Barb’s concern and her disappointment in me, which only made things worse. I’d wanted to spontaneously burst into flames, to vaporize and evaporate into the air. I’d wanted to disappear.

She’d showed me a letter once, pulling it from her purse and sliding it across the table at me like it was contraband. It was from a long time male friend of hers and Ron’s, written in an elegant longhand, and it had so baffled her that she’d brought the thing with her, wanting to know what I made of it. I recall now only the gist of the letter, which was that he—no idea of the writer’s name—preferred Barb not attempt further contact with him. In his view, their friendship had reached a dead end and (or) had never been all that strong to begin with. He wished her well in all her future endeavors, etc., etc., but please just… stay away.

I was startled, both by the letter’s content and by Barbara’s decision to show it to me. It seemed an awfully personal thing to share with anyone. Mostly though, I couldn’t get over the fact of it—that it had actually even been written, I mean. Imagine receiving—no, imagine sending someone a letter telling him or her that the friendship between you—not romance, mind you, but friendship—was probably never real and was, in any case, over!

In the face of Barb’s bewilderment and (I suspected) underlying anger, I struggled to offer a comforting, sisterhood-is-strong type response, telling her what I knew she wanted to hear, which was that the guy was an insensitive jerk and she was probably well rid of him and his strange, silly-ass issues anyway. A “friend” indeed!

A friend in deed.

Which—I know, okay?—was crap, because as I was reading that letter what I was really thinking was: Wow! How cool is this? What balls, to just flat out tell someone that this relationship of whatever variety is not working, so let’s just leave it at that.

What I couldn’t tell Barb was that where she was floored and disturbed by the writer’s action, I felt I completely understood it, and quietly admired the writer for having had the moxie to do it. I sure as hell didn’t.

I mean look, as hurtful as that letter must have been for Barbara, at least the guy was honest with her or trying to be. I’d said earlier that I was fine with listening to Barb’s bubbly updates, but that wasn’t really true.

Here’s what was true: I didn’t want to know this woman anymore.

I contemplated the Barbara I’d known during my schoolgirl years with her family, remembering the resignation and melancholy beneath her resolute cheerfulness. She had suffered years trapped in a frustrating, unfulfilling job and a marriage built primarily on someone else’s notions of freedom and equality. And, my affection for its occupants notwithstanding, the dynamics of that household used to make me a little uneasy.

To begin with, it felt a little weird that I’d connected first and so strongly with Ron rather than Barb. Not sure why, except that my mom and me were then deep in the muck of that parent-child/ mother-daughter mania, and from the first, Ron was warmly empathetic and supportive.

For all his kindness, charm and generosity, though, Ron Peterson had definite issues and his behavior could be seriously off-putting from time to time. He could be cutting, sarcastic, and unbearably condescending towards his wife.

He could, in fact, become a controlling monster (verbally, that is; I never saw any evidence of physical abuse) with what seemed to me the slightest provocation. And that Ron would think nothing of acting that way right in front me made his tirades that much worse. It was as though he didn’t respect Barb enough—or me either, come to that—to keep his conflicts with her a strictly private matter.

Whenever Ron erupted I would try, as quietly as possible, to remove myself. I was careful never to show open disapproval, my own household having instilled in me a near-Pavlovian instinct toward blank passivity in the face of adult invective. Frozen, I’d listen to Ron’s nastiness with an averted face and a churning stomach, silently enraged at his spewing cruelty.

And yet.

I didn’t want to be mad at Ron, and I didn’t stay mad at him, because—when his mood was clear—I liked him. A lot. I liked his witty conversation, his droll observations, his way of making me feel like a grown-up whenever we talked. He showed me a consideration that seemed beyond him with Barbara. I tried not to dwell on that, but the irony wasn’t lost on me.

I knew that Ron appreciated my nonchalance about his bisexuality and his and Barb’s open marriage arrangement, regarding it I supposed as evidence of an impressive maturity on my part—at least on matters of sexual complexity. In truth—naïve and inexperienced little Catholic girl that I was—I was floored by it, initially anyway, especially when I learned of these intimacies not from Ron or Barbara but from a very matter-of-fact Rachel, then about five and a half years old. I’d gulped down my astonishment, deciding it was politic or something to adopt a sophisticated “whatever” -type attitude about such things, whether I truly felt that way or not.

On the other hand, “gaydar” is real. Did Ron’s gayness—yes, eventually he did come out as gay (And do bisexual married men really exist? Or is the bisexual husband thing just some convenient construct, some psycho-social way station, until these guys figure it out, own up already and move on?)—in some way signal mine, making me more comfortable with him, making us “click” with one another? Possibly. Personally, I rather doubt it.

Ron may have sensed or suspected my queerness, buried as it was under all the usual debris of fear and denial. But I was so clueless at the time, willfully so, it seems to me now, that I don’t trust the “fellow traveler” scenario.

So much for my supposed sophistication.

I was appalled at the ugly displays of Ron’s darker side. The worst of my antipathy however, must have been reserved for his target, Barbara, whose habit, at least in my presence, was to smile weakly and make sotto voce little jokes or vague ineffective protests, weird counterpoint to Ron’s whiny, hyper-critical rants. I would try not to look at Barbara, try not to watch her swallowing whole her humiliation, her pain—and surely her own welling anger.

I’d walk home in the early evenings, seriously pissed off… at Barb. She deserved what she got. She was a spineless marshmallow who would go along to get along rather than stand up to a bullying, self-obsessed husband. She would slog on year after year in a job she’d come to hate rather than take a deep breath, roll up her sleeves, and do whatever it took to find her way to a more fulfilling life. She was a wishy-washy lump, Barb. She was a waste of space.

She was me.

And then one day, she wasn’t anymore.

Time passed, we all went our several ways, and for Barbara came expensive seminars, years of specialized training and the happy discovery of a facility for a technology that was just beginning to boom. The resultant career change (and impressive salary upgrading) must have been sufficiently empowering to prompt Barbara to re-examine other aspects of her life. Eventually, she ended the marriage, sold the house, and became her daughter’s hero.

I was truly impressed with Barb’s achievements, and I wanted to be happy for her, too. But in my own life I was (still) floundering so badly that I just couldn’t relax around the “new” her—I felt she must be judging me, and I resented my nose being rubbed in all her joyful life changes.

I hated the childishness of my behavior, knowing it was as destructive to me as it must have been hurtful to Barbara. I tried to put the brakes on, tried to head off this stubborn whatever-it-was that was compelling me to shun her. I even tried to snap myself out of it by resorting to the strictly mercenary, reminding myself that, if nothing else, Barb Peterson could be an especially valuable friend to have right now: she could be a mentor to me. She’d learned a great deal; I could, I should, try to learn from her. Avoiding her was, I knew, wasting a real opportunity for professional as well as personal growth.

So why did I continue to run from her? And if it had been Ron rather than Barb who’d sought me out, would I have responded similarly?

If it’s all the same to you, I’d rather not try to answer that one. Frankly, I don’t want to even think about it.

Alright, I’ll leave you with this: On the rare occasions when just the two of us would converse—as opposed to the three of us where Ron and I would do most of the talking and joking around—Barbara, with her direct gazes and attitude of serious listening, seemed to me to be paying closer attention to whatever I said and, I felt sure, whatever I didn’t say. I’d discovered I could snow Ron, at least about some things, most of the time.

I was never sure what I could get away with, with Barb