I remember being so excited when I first heard that a girl my age was going to be living only three houses away! Until that point, I was relegated to hanging around the neighborhood with my little brother and the four McAllister boys next door. The only other girls on our street were Flora and Phoebe Kopinsky who were just babies at the time.
It’s not that spending my formative childhood years around all those boys was all bad. I am an excellent kickball player and have been known to throw a mean whiffleball curve from time to time. To this day, I still retain the ability to scale a fence without breaking a sweat and I think my tolerance for pain is probably a little higher than most girls I know.
Looking through the family albums, I can count on one hand the number of pictures of me that don’t include scraped knees or a Band-Aid somewhere on my body. Even my First Communion photos show an otherwise unassuming little girl, hands folded innocently in prayer, dressed in a frilly, white dress... and wearing a cast on her forearm. I won’t get into the whole story here, but the particular circumstances in which I broke my wrist that spring involved a Wonder Woman costume, an invisible airplane and the roof of the McAllisters’ garage.
Lisa, on the other hand, was always more of a “real girl” than I was. I hadn’t realized I was such a tomboy until I went to her house for the first time.
Upon entering Lisa’s room, I was immediately informed of the fact that her mother had let her decorate it almost entirely by herself. It was actually painted pink and there were white, eyelet curtains at the windows and a rainbow comforter on her wicker bed. My only attempt at decorating at that time involved a Scooby Doo blanket that I had won on the boardwalk. The pictures on her walls were of David Cassidy and Scott Baio and Donny Osmond, a bit of a departure from the Burger-King-issued, 1978 Yankees and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band posters that hung on mine.
In spite of our differences, or maybe because of them, Lisa and I have been best friends ever since. It seems that it was within ten minutes of our first meeting that she taught me how to feather my hair, make braided ribbon barrettes and draw a proper unicorn, necessary survival traits for any girl in the late seventies.
Over the years, she has dragged me to the mall repeatedly, making me buy Jordache jeans, parachute pants, Guess denims and ultimately, to my enduring mortification, ZCavaricci’s. She ran me through the gauntlet of makeup and clothes enough to help me get my act together in time for high school.
Prior to that, I was sort of clueless. I used to play football with the guys at recess and spent more time climbing trees than playing dollies. That tomboy stuff was fine during elementary school, but by sixth grade, my body had begun to sprout boobs and that’s when all the boys started looking at me a little funny.
All the boys except the one I’d started to really like, however.
I had the hugest crush on Brian Hollander during that time and I just couldn’t understand why my superior athletic ability wasn’t helping to catch his eye. Lisa stepped in and gently explained that boys liked girls who were, well... more like girls, and I’d have more of a fighting chance if I started acting like one right quick.
It was the summer between seventh and eighth grade when Lisa went into full-on Frankenstein mode with me. She armed me with a bottle of Love’s Baby Soft and a tube of Zinc Pink lipstick and gave me a complete beauty lesson, showing me how to put on makeup to suit my “season”, and went clothes shopping with me to find outfits that would best show off my new boobs without making me look trashy. When all was said and done, I was surprised to find the girl looking back at me through the mirror. Until that moment, I had no idea that I ever wanted to be... pretty. But there I was, all made up, hair done and dressed like a real, live girl, and I realized that Lisa’s description actually held some truth.
The makeover did wonders for my self-esteem. Not that anyone would have mistaken me for the most popular girl in school (that distinction belonged exclusively to Lisa), but I was confident that I was going to be able to carve out a nice little social status on my own, even without the fact that I had hitched my wagon to her star.
I couldn’t wait to run into Brian and his friends at the lake or the park or something, envisioning myself making a smash as big as Sandy’s at the end of Grease. I would walk onto the playground or someplace where all our friends would be hanging out and I’d snub a cigarette out with my high-heeled shoe. Every guy’s jaw would drop and then we’d all break into “We Go Together”.
That fantasy was squelched, however, when my father refused to let me buy a pair of black spandex pants that I’d found at the nearby Clothing Town. Plus, there was a slight problem with the perm that I had gotten, because it made me look more like Little Orphan Annie than Olivia Newton-John.
Lisa spent her allowance that week to buy me a home permanent kit, explaining that if we just brushed it straight through my hair and let it set for a few minutes, the afro on my head should relax.
She turned out to be right, because the treatment ended up giving me a decent head of soft waves. Thank God, because otherwise, I would have spent the summer looking like Weird Al Yankovic.
Throughout our relationship, Lisa has always loved the challenge of introducing me to a new movie. She’s responsible for some of my all-time favorites, including the aforementioned Grease and The Outsiders, where my girliness finally kicked in enough to swoon over Danny Zukko and Sodapop Curtis, before graduating to actual films like A Streetcar Named Desire and A Place in the Sun, where our crushes matured enough to include Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift on our wishlists.
She knew everything about everything and tried to impart her all-encompassing wisdom to me on a daily basis. Such relevant bits of knowledge on topics ranging from fashion to mascara to French-kissing etiquette. The latter of which led to my first real kiss with Brian Hollander in the basement of Lisa’s house during a game of Spin-the-Bottle.
It was a setup, for sure, because lucky Brian was the only boy in the room at the time she suggested the three of us play. We agreed, and Lisa, ever the best friend, argued the direction of the pointed bottle any time it landed in her vicinity. On the two times she wasn’t able to dispute the call, she merely pecked old Brian on the lips, allowing me to be the only one to swap actual spit with him. Of course, Brian’s joy in the revelation that I was the easier conquest prompted him to lead me into the bathroom for a real makeout session. I even let him put his hands into the back pockets of my jeans! It was quite a memorable afternoon.
Even though kissing Brian should have been unforgettable enough on its own, there’s another reason that notorious day sticks out in my mind.
It was the day my mother left us.
After all these years, it’s still difficult for me to flat-out make that statement.
When you’re a child who’s been abandoned, it’s the very center of who you are as a person. It’s like having a parent die, but without any sort of finality. You suddenly turn from being a regular, everyday person who nobody blinks an eye at into That Girl Without A Mother.
To make matters worse, while there are the multitude of questions swirling around in your own head, there are the inquiries from friends and acquaintances and people you barely know. You try to be polite and accommodating toward anyone who asks about the situation, but really, you just want to slap them and tell them to mind their own business.
But worst of all are the people who don’t bother asking anything at all. They are the ones who think they’ve got it all figured out and don’t need to bother finding out the real story. They’re the ones who will say pitying things behind your back like “Oh, that poor, little girl” or “The man aged ten years overnight when that woman left him”. Sometimes, I’d overhear someone say something about “that Kate Warren woman”, which always made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.
There was a lot of talk that summer but mercifully, I wasn’t privy to the majority of it until my teen years. I think I was so caught up in my own feelings on the matter to have been aware, or to have even cared, about what anyone around town may have thought. I was too busy dealing with it myself, trapped in my own head for the weeks following her absence.
Ultimately, I had a pretty bad spell at one point that summer, and I credit Lisa as being the one who brought me back from the edge. It seems she has been there for every single moment- whether epic or trivial- throughout my entire life.
One of our more monumental moments was that I was due to turn seventeen about a month into our senior year, lending even more distractibility to my mind on that particular September day back in 1990.
It was a beautiful, sunny day outside and my head was consumed with thoughts of my impending vehicular freedom.
Therefore, I was ill-prepared for the bomb that was about to hit my English Lit class on an otherwise unremarkable Monday afternoon.
Chapter 2
TRIPWIRE
I was sitting in Mrs. Mason’s fifth period English Literature class when it happened.
It was only the second week of the new school year, my senior year (finally!) at über-prestigious St. Nicetius Parochial High School- since it was the only Catholic school in town, it was less formally referred to as “St. Norman’s”- and already I was counting down the days until graduation. Five down; one-hundred-and-seventy-five to go.