Kinsey

     We were finally on the phone and my voice was reverberating off the walls, loud, shrill, and happy. Your voice, rising and falling in the most familiar, unlyrical way, planted me firmly back home even though I was in my bare, Tacoma bedroom and you were in St. Louis, both of us far from our stomping ground. I hadn't seen you in a year and a half, and I was beginning to forget which shade of pink your cheeks turned when we laughed and how exactly your fingers moved when you flipped through the pages of my magazines. I had to muster all my powers of memory to recreate the rambunctious, grating quality of your laugh. But your drawn out “aaaa” sounds and sharply punctuated sentences brought everything sliding back into focus. I could suddenly remember your multitude of white tank tops, how each one fell against your sturdy torso. I remembered how that particular wash of jean looked stretched around your thighs. I wanted to look like that: solid and unshakable without even trying. My body was waifish and uneasy in itself, tipped over with the slightest push. I pined for the thickness, the immovability you possessed.

When Mac would lift you up by the armpits you would not give him the satisfaction of a playful shriek and enticing wiggle. You were not coy. You dodged and scolded. You were mad. When Mac did the same thing to me all I could do was laugh and grab him playfully around the neck, ultimately leading to confusion and kissing. I regretted my malleability, wishing for arms more muscled, and a mouth more determined, like yours. But you never saw me like that. Once, while we drove through the fall leaves in my car, backseat bouncing wildly, stereo crackling, you told me “You're the nice one. I am the big bitch everyone hates.” Really I knew I was just weak. You were the cool one, the one with talent and ideas and a way of speaking that no one else had. I mimicked your patterns, placing long “aaaaaaands” that moved through different pitches at the beginning of all my sentences, making my other words clipped and evenly weighted. I wanted to inhabit your voice, to make it my own, take a piece of you for me.

But we hadn't spoken in months by now, and our phone calls were irregular and not long enough. I had shed my weakness for the most part, packed pounds around my own torso. I had found my own rhythms and words, fallen out of sync with our old language. We were on the phone and you were so drunk and had to pee, but I made you stay, even though there was nothing new to talk about. It wasn't just our language that changed, every other piece of our lives had. It was frustrating re-explaining each person in my life, their weight, their role. It amounted to a lot of “How is school?” “Hard. And awful.” “Ugh. Same.”

I have five big posters on my bedroom wall, their size marking important moments and people. Three of them were made by you. The quality of their lines and color clearly announce your life as an Art Student. Each one is the same concept: a massive list of our favorite memories and jokes to incessantly repeat, a self-referential reminder of our friendship. The moment we became “best friends” figures prominently in all of them, a demarcation line between “separate” and “together.” In your posters this episode merely consists of the bare bones dialogue, a brief and abbreviated summation. But I remember exactly how we huddled in the dark front seat of my car, the night outside lightened by the reflected whiteness of crispy old snow. We were parked outside Anna's yellow house, watching her spidery legs move through the night up to her doorstep, then disappear inside. Her door shut and we faced forward, looking at the fogged up windshield and the remnants of our words and jokes carved through the condensation weeks and days ago. “Jacob Oeste,” “Love M.F.” “Mac and Cheese” and millions of other private references stood out in watery letters against the snow, another living record of our friendship. Our breath crystalized in midair for a brief moment before you whipped your face towards me and urgently demanded to know “Are we best friends?” This is the one time I remember your eyes searching me, almost pleading and apologizing, waiting for some kind of approval. I was usually the one asking, the one waiting to be corrected. “Um....YES” I bellowed, inappropriately joyous. I was genuinely taken aback by your evident need for me, but immensely relived it was finally mutual.

I met you because of our last name, a secret shared heritage that neither of us know anything about. Where do Lundquists come from? I can't say, but here we are on in the same Boise School District roster, next to each other because of an arbitrary seating chart. One day I will buy a membership to one of those ancestry websites and finally plumb the shadowy waters of our common history. We have been the “Lundquist Sisters” since tenth grade when we took history with Mr. Blackburn who refused to call his students by their first names. Instead, we were both “Ms. Lundquist,” a name that refused to differentiate us, causing endless confusion in class. Blackburn ended up always calling on both of us at once: “Okay, one of the Lundquist sisters!” After that class on Thursdays we would pile into Bridget's green Honda and listen to embarrassing Tech Nine songs. Her car smelled almost new, except for a lingering hint of McDonald's fries, chemically and stale. I always got the backseat, clambering over the passenger’s side, tangling my ponytail in the seatbelt as I heaved my enormous blue backpack through the tiny space. As we drove our familiar, well-travelled streets, your curly head would poke around the passenger seat to look back and grin at me, maybe ask me a question about Anna or Mac. You got the privilege of shotgun because you weren't afraid to screech out warnings to the inattentive Bridget. When she accidentally turned the wrong way into oncoming traffic, it was you who grabbed the wheel, wrested it from Bridget's clammy hands, and brought us bumping over a curb into the safety of a 7-11 parking lot.

    Once we went cruising through the streets of downtown Boise, even though it was wintertime again and the streets were patchy with ice leftover from the snowplows. By this time, the days of driving endlessly with Bridget were over. Her Honda had been inevitably totaled, and we didn't see her anymore after your fight by the lockers anyway. So we were in Alex's car, but still sitting in the same places, me in the back, this time with Mac, and you in front, peeking around the chair so we could exchange skeptical looks. Everything that came out of anyone's mouth was subject to your intense scrutiny. That night the Boise blocks were electrified with pink and gold signs, welcoming the Saturday night crowd in from the cold. Instead of piling into the well-lit theaters and restaurants as we first intended, we drove in Alex's gold Eldorado, winding our circular way through the knots of bundled up pedestrians, passing under the same street lights over and over. It is nearly impossible for me now to capture the giddiness that filled the car and ballooned against the cold windows. The air around us was saturated with brash jokes and sloppy flirtations. We rolled down the windows sticking our pink faces into the brisk night, boldly catcalling to strangers. Alex careened down side streets, and you scolded like always, but this time everyone laughed and scolded you back. Mac's hand kept grazing my knee. We shouted about everyone we hated and loved, talking in circles and over the end of each other's sentences. Judgments were passed about purpose and meaning that laid out our lives in understandable, mappable ways. I reached for your shoulders every time I thought of something funny, searching for approval, pressing the pads of my fingers into your coat. Pieces of your face, wide open with exuberant laughter and jokes, were softly illuminated by the shifting street lights as we drove in circles for hours.

     After we went to art school for the summer of sophomore year I thought I would never be able to see you again. Sharing a room was almost impossible, first because you were constantly stressed out about your classes, grumpy and hostile. Second because you were so much better than me at everything. Your dresser was clean, your meals always contained vegetables. My food and my closet were not good enough. And your lithograph was perfect. In that one print you captured the way a poster peels away from the wall when someone strides quickly past, and the way a telephone pole looks splintered and gray after a winter of snow and rain. There was an actual message, fun and enchanting, in the swirling hand-lettered banner: “Print ain't dead yet!” My print was my own plain handwriting, dutifully scrawling out a “personal creed” of patience and understanding over and over again. Much less profound. Much less dynamic. And it didn't even ring true because I had no patience. You were driving me absolutely insane. You spent hour upon hour holed up in the print shop, while I sat lonely on my bed, unproductively reading novels, until you came home and told me to do my dishes. You turned the level of our mini fridge up to ten, freezing my yogurts and forcing me to eat cereal with ice chips instead of milk for breakfast. Your long, curly hair clogged our shower drain until one morning it overflowed into our room, making us both late for class. I cried in my underwear, revealing that spindly, breakable body I hated so much, while we sopped up dirty shower water with our bath towels. But then, a few days later, we called Anna, and she was different. “We smoked with Alex's big sister,” she purred slyly over the phone, “We got drunk too. Mac especially.” This was at the time in our lives when we were still so naïve, in disbelief when anyone did anything illegal or even against the rules. I was still scared in class when boys talked about drinking on the weekends. I didn't even know what smoking weed entailed. All of a sudden our friends had grown up, taken a leap forward in to adulthood without us. They had waited to be rebels until we were firmly out of the picture. We were left behind together, distinctly separate and distinctly uncool. The dishes and the shower didn't matter very much anymore. I think you cried, hard tears from your strong center.

     But now it is six years later and we are on the phone and we have been drunk and we have smoked weed and we are different like Anna was. There has been more kissing and sex, and Anna and Bridget, Mac and Alex don't even matter any more. I would never drive in circles around Boise now, and I would never wish for my shirts to fit the way yours used to. I haven't seen you in years and I am afraid of how we would act. We are on the phone and I am so happy, even though we have left each other behind. Our old friends don't mean anything now, but we talk about them because it is all we have left in common. “Did you know Anna unfriended us on Facebook?” “Did you know Mac is dating a girl from his floor?” “What is Alex even doing at UBC?” There is no more camaraderie of being the last ones to grow up, of being artists, of speaking the same language. All our jokes, all our self referential bits are in a past that is becoming more remote with every day I don't call you. They are still on my walls, immortalized in the posters you diligently crafted, but now they are more like relics, saints' bones, rather than living bits of our friendship. They are reminders of what we once had and how different that is now.

You didn't come see me last time you were in Seattle, even though I was only a short drive away. I cried and called my mom after you texted me the curt “Don't think we can fit it in the plans.” You were the best friend I ever had, the best person I ever knew, but now we are on the phone and after fifteen glorious minutes there is a lull in our conversation and you confess, “I don't have anything else to say” and hang up on me.