"Best" Friends vs. True Friends

Friday night is Girls Night Out for my coworkers and me. Well, you know, the cool ones. The unmarried, no-kids girls who still keep Friday nights open to go out drinking and having fun, despite the fact that most of us work Saturday morning. Of course, we’re female librarians and we’re the unmarried ones without kids, so we get the shitty shifts. What else is new? But we still make it work because Girls Night Out is important. It reconnects us.

Of course, these wild, anti-stereotype librarians are only going to Baker’s Square, but that’s beside the point. We’re librarians, so we’re a bunch of broke-ass bitches who can’t usually afford alcohol unless it’s a special occasion, and we’d much rather fill our bellies with food and pie while spending hours talking and giggling and having a good time.

On Friday afternoon, I’m going to have my hair redone in that awesome color that my best friend disapproves of so strongly, which I’ve come to realize makes it a little more endearing to me. Why I like her disapproval was a bit elusive to me until tonight during a phone conversation.

First she gave me a hard time for my hair color, comparing it with little old ladies and telling me that all I needed was an up-do and a housedress and I was officially ancient. I bit my tongue and forced a laugh, insisting that I’d yet to see a little old lady with hair like mine. She insisted that having a stripe of an unnatural color wasn’t even a fad in our youth, and she had no idea why I was reaching back further into the annals of fashion history to do this to my head. She just couldn’t understand the desire to be a little different.

Then she started laughing at our Girls Night Out at Baker’s Square, which didn’t make logical sense to her because Baker’s Square is a restaurant she doesn’t go to anymore now that she’s a grown up, and here we were planning a get together around it. Hardy-har-har, what a bunch of silly girls who refuse to accept their age and upgrade their taste and priorities. I was grinding my teeth by the time she finished.

When she asked me about work, I gave her a vague answer that it was okay, but I’m not sure I finished my reply before she started complaining about the library where I work and how much she hates it. Twice she’s called and been hung up on, twice they’ve screwed up her reservation for a private meeting room which she needs to do her contract work in, and she just cannot deal with the fact that she can’t trust anyone to do their jobs properly and not make her job harder. I agreed, suggested she speak with someone’s manager, even gave a name and extension number, but she refused to call because she said it wouldn’t change anything. She was much more content just hating the library and condemning it at every opportunity, as well as all the people who work there. I could not help but wonder how much of her rant was exaggerated.

She calls my friends The Scooby Gang, and though she hasn’t said it outright, I suspect, based on her attitude, that it’s because we all seem so juvenile to her.

No, we don’t make $150K per year, even if you added up all our salaries combined. No, we don’t think about installing track lighting throughout our homes to emphasize the artwork featured on the walls of our living room and hallways. No, we don’t record every Oprah show to watch over and over for all the excellent recommendations each show contains. No, we don’t have stock portfolios and mutual funds and our retirement funds are laughable because we will likely be even poorer when we retire than we are now.

So, no, she and I don’t pretend to understand one another anymore, but I always expect there to be a little consideration and respect, if not support. And lately, I can’t even get that.

This was when I thought that though we came from the same place in our youth, we ended up on opposite sides of the world but only 10 minutes away from one another. How could she have gotten to be so snotty and suburbanized in such a short amount of time? If she wasn’t in a teaching field and a minority race, I’d be waiting for the day she joined the Republican Party.

Then she told me she’s joined a group of canasta players in her neighborhood. I almost choked. Was she serious? Was she actually part of a club of parlor game players? Who is this woman and what happened to my best friend??!

Oh yes, canasta is all the rage in her subdivision, and the monthly parties are quite elaborate. The last party had a Hawaiian theme, and people came in grass skirts and leis were handed out to each lady in attendance. An elaborate buffet of foods made from scratch was available, and it was as much to show off baking skills as it was for culinary enjoyment. The women were all a bit older than her, having kids in high school and beyond, and right away I thought to myself that it was because my best friend is unusually wealthy and successful for her age, with a house worth about $400,000, yet she’s barely 34 years old. While that’s probably something I should be proud of her for accomplishing, it’s still a huge wedge between us because she cannot understand my lack of financial security, which she attributes to a lack of ambition. If I wanted a $400K house, I’d have one if I just had the drive. Anyway, she sees these canasta women as her equals and since the canasta game was a lot of fun, she intends to stick with this group of women and their “parties”. It’s a great form of entertainment and an opportunity to socialize. I suppose in her own way she’s doing the same as me with the Girls Night Out, just in a different universe.

We talked about the canasta because she said that coming from a middle-class white family, she expected me to have all kinds of canasta experience in my family tree. Um, no. I wasn’t even sure that it was played with cards until she told me. And for that matter, only by warped, college financial aid standards did my family qualify as middle-class when I was a kid, because we barely scraped by, had no money for new clothes, and ate a lot of junk food like spam and mac & cheese because they were cheap, but my dad’s income was more than $20,000 per year (though not by much), so I didn’t qualify for financial aid going to college. Middle-class my ass! We were poor. Maybe not homeless poor, but I spent my childhood being morbidly embarrassed about how poor my family was. Canasta was like something from another planet.

So, given how brutal she had been with me earlier, I lit into her about canasta. I told her it was very white-picket-fence-like to be a part of a neighborhood canasta group, and she had truly become a part of suburban Americana now. Jokingly, I asked if she even knew what Guitar Hero is, but didn’t give her a chance to answer. Congratulations followed, with a reminder that it was a straight trip to the retirement home and games of bingo and bridge would quickly follow. She laughed, but I could tell it was as strained as the one I’d given her just a half-hour before. She tried to regain some ground and say the canasta parties reminded her of a backroom scene of a bunch of mobsters sitting around tables gambling, but that’s when my genuine laugh came out a little too loud and a little too strong. It wasn’t long before she was telling me that this is a group that does many types of parties, not just canasta, and she had recently attended a candle party as well.

I didn’t say it, but all I could think was that the whole concept of candle parties being called a “party” was ludicrous. Who has a “party” where you all sit around handling products available for purchase, with inflated prices and questionable quality, and are then pressured into buying? Who considers this a “party”? And even more coercion is used to get you to have a “party” of your own! These are not “parties”, people! These are in-home infomercials. Anyone who thinks of them as parties is unclear on the concept! I don’t care if the topic is sex toys or Tupperware – that is not a party!

So, here I have my best friend, who is a housewife with a part-time job, PTA-member, classroom volunteer, Oprah-worshipping, canasta-playing, suburbanite woman, amassing a collection of cookie-cutter friends and she doesn’t remotely resemble the person I knew 20 years ago, or 10 years ago, or even 5 years ago. She thinks my job is a joke. She thinks my life is a joke. She even thinks I look like a joke. And she has no qualms about telling me as much. She’s not a competitive person, and I myself have absolutely no competitive spirit in me, but she looks down on me, and that I don’t like. While I feel like I try to understand her, I try to be a part of her world, it’s been over 10 years since she’s been to my house, and it’s even rarer for her leave the comfort of her own home to go have dinner with me or watch a movie. I make an effort to talk to her and she insults me, trying to inspire me to aim higher in my life, but her point is often lost in the critique of who I am and what I do. We have both lost touch with each other, even though we communicate frequently. I love her, I really do, and I wish we could be as close as we once were, but I don’t fit into her eerily nondescript life. Truthfully, I suspect she’s miserable, but she would never admit it to me.

And then I think about my fellow librarians. I think about The Girls and our Girls Night Out events, and I’m grateful to have people in my life who understand me, who don’t judge me, who don’t insult me, and who would never ever ask me to join a canasta group, watch Oprah with them, or tell me that I need to do something more with my life because what I’ve done isn’t good enough. The Girls, they’re all very different, too. We have a devout Catholic who attends Mass almost daily, an agnostic, an atheist, a Catholic who doesn’t attend church at all, and another who is undefined. We have one vegetarian and one recovering anorexic. Although we’re all practicing heterosexuals, we also have a former girl-kisser. We have three living at home with their parents still, four in long-term relationships, two in their thirties and three in their twenties, and our hair colors and styles range from tame to fairly wild. We all look like polar opposites and have incredibly differing personalities and tastes. But our differences don’t matter because there is a common denominator of love and respect. I find this a rare commodity among friends these days.

What cracks me up a little is that another close friend in a distant state started a conversation with me today by asking what was the kinkiest thing I’d ever done. That’s funny, and I’d much rather talk about that kind of stuff than what Dr. Phil said on this show today. I don’t fear her judgment and I answered her honestly. For a moment I thought about the day many years ago when I sat around a dinner table with my best friend, her husband, and a couple who are mutual friends of ours, and someone asked me who I was currently dating. Before I could answer, my best friend’s husband got preachy and started lecturing me about not giving away the milk for free, or no one would want to buy the cow. Seriously, these are the words he used. The discussion wasn’t about whom I was sleeping with or how many men were in my life. Simply, I was asked who, if anyone, was I interested in because I was the only unmarried person in the room, and the only one without even a boyfriend to bring to the gathering. Yet I was subjected to a male-delivered speech about promiscuity and my inability to see this as a guarantee of life as a spinster. Because I was 28 and I was not a virgin. Oh, the scandal! Fast-forward to today, and much relief is found in the giggling and revealing conversation two friends have about one another’s history and sexuality, with mutual acceptance and a lack of judgment. Sometimes it’s not your “best” friend who is truly among the best friends in your life.

I can’t help but wonder if librarians are better people than the rest of the world.

Certainly the ones I surround myself by are superior.