Sue pointed to the corner
where we used to meet. She wore a pair of navy trousers, a short sleeved,
buttoned blouse. I wore my usual cropped trousers with a boxy top, an image of
funky irreverence. “The mailbox is gone,” she said. We were cruising in her
black Lexus sedan, two women in our early seventies, going back to the New
Jersey neighborhood where we’d grown up. I’d known Sue since I was twelve, the
new kid in town, taking a seat in Mrs. Murphy’s geography class. Sue collected
friends like charms on a bracelet. I was happy she’d scooped me up. We lived in
similar houses, small capes with one car garages on postage stamp lots, and on
that day in May, the houses looked remarkably the same. No McMansions. Yet, I
hardly recognized that corner where we used to meet every morning before
walking to junior high school, then to high school. I did recognize town, the corner
buildings that housed the drug stores, the banks, now selling clothing or
smoothies. Someone had turned my father’s camera store into a boutique wine
shop and wine bar. Main Street, USA was long gone.
In many ways, Millburn was
an idyllic place to grow up, neighborhood streets I roamed at will, the drug
store where after school, Sue and I bought ice cream cones, single or double
dip, the record store where Saturday mornings, we listened to 45’s before
making our selections. Later, when Sue got her Nash Metropolitan, we cruised
the streets we used to walk, looking for friends, then crossed what in that
town was a northern Mason-Dixon line, Jews south, WASPS north, looking for my
boyfriend’s car. He had friends who lived north. I felt that division, but I
didn’t ponder it, not then. I won’t now. What interests me is the way that
place held onto my adolescence, giving me back my teenage self, an image of a
pony tailed teenager holding her books to her chest, meeting Sue at the mailbox
that wasn’t there. This was the place of my deepest yearnings, my unbridled
passions. My dreams of escape. After college, I didn’t return, marriage my
ticket out.
Sue stayed. I think she knew
she would. She married a chemist, a demanding man who died young. But not
before Sue nursed him through heart surgery, diabetes, amputation, kidney
failure and dialysis. Sue confused love with obedience. I never did.
I may have left New Jersey,
but I didn’t leave Sue. That same adolescent connection that brought me back to
the old neighborhood tied me to Sue. She was the friend who knew me when I was
fifteen, full of myself and bubbling with life. Over the years, Sue has helped me
move backwards through my life, unraveling threads and trying to understand how
I, a middle class Jewish kid from Millburn, New Jersey, became a writer, a
teacher, a mother, a grandmother, a friend and dog lover, living on the rocky
coast of Maine instead of on a postage stamp lot in Millburn, New Jersey. Driving
with Sue, saw an essence of my younger self, that same essence I see, these
days, in my three granddaughters, all visiting and going to summer drama camp,
coming home, singing and dancing in my kitchen, in my living room, then later, after
dinner, swimming naked in the pool, unencumbered, new, forming and formed.