The Comfort of Friends
I collect quilts not only because of their beauty but because of their history, or what I imagine their history to be. There is one here, lying on the couch, a satin crazy quilt with spiky silken stitches holding its parts together. In one corner is a flower and the initials EK in purple embroidery floss, in another a whimsical owl done in green crewel work, in another the name Sara in silky red script. When I look at it, I see a circle of women, building it bit by bit, block by block, and as they do so, talking to one another, about their days and their disappointments, their husbands and their children, the food they cook and the houses they furnish and the dreams they dream. There is a kind of quilt called a friendship quilt, but I imagine all of mine, no matter what their pattern, are emblems of female friendship, that essential thread that has so often kept the pieces of my own life together and from time to time kept me from falling apart.
I can imagine my own circle in these pieces of bright fabric. The striped patches are the West Coast friend who called today to ask about my work and to tell me about hers, to compare notes on our adolescent sons and our burgeoning books. The bits of deep purple represent the Washington friend who danced at my wedding and held my babies, as I did hers, and with whom I can always pick up as though we talk every day instead of every other month. That patch of bright color is my closest friend in elementary school, and that one my matron of honor, and another is my doctor friend, who checks in from her car phone, static punctuating our plans. And all through is my closest friend, to whom I talk every day. “Where were you?” she says if she gets my machine, and “Where were you?” I say if I get hers, and when we find one another, we move on to gossip and news, soul-searching and support. I can tell her anything, and she me, but most of the time we don’t have to. Most of the time we already know everything we need to know.
“Write about what you and your friends are talking about on the telephone,” an editor told me when I was given the assignment of writing a personal column a decade ago. That wasn’t all I wrote about over the years, but I probably could have gotten a column out of nearly every phone conversation. On the other hand, if my husband had to rely on his phone conversations with friends for column ideas--well, you finish the sentence. Whenever I’ve used that particular comparison, whether I was talking to female friends at lunch or speaking to a group of women in public, they’ve always burst out laughing before I got to the end of the subordinate clause. It was an immediate, visceral recognition of what seems to be a central fact of human attachment: that what men call friendship is often skin deep, while what we women make of it is something probing and intimate, an emotional undressing, something akin to an essay every time we sit down to lunch or pick up the phone. As Anais Nin wrote, “Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.”
Simple gender distinctions are probably too broad a brush for these more egalitarian days, in which more men have intimate friendships, more women have less time for them, and more men and women have relationships that transcend both sex and romance. But the truth is that most of the women I know, in the midst of hectic, confusing and sometimes disappointing lives, find one of their greatest sources of strength in a circle of female friends. It’s why the movies “Waiting To Exhale” and “The First Wives Club” did so well at the box office--not because they were about women trashing men but because they were about women finding their greatest solace in the love and support of other women.
Harvard professor Carol Gilligan, an authority on the behavior of girls, says that the emotional connections that make intimate friendship possible begin early. “People used to look out on the playground and say that the boys were playing soccer and the girls were doing nothing,” Gilligan says. “But the girls weren’t doing nothing--they were talking. They were talking about the world to one another. And they became very expert about that in a way the boys did not.”
Naturally, this is not always so. There is a kind of woman, usually called a “man’s woman,” who always seems to see other women as competition or furniture, whose orientation is always toward the XY chromosomes in the room. Maybe all of us become that kind of woman for a time; I can certainly remember years, stretching from puberty until I knew better, when I would have blown off any of my girlfriends for a guy. And sometimes it is only maturity that allows us to be vulnerable, to trust and confide in the way real friendship requires; we can all remember the cruel vicissitudes of elementary school friendship, which often seemed like a game of musical chairs--four bars of tinny music and then suddenly no place for you in the magic circle.
Perhaps that’s why, in the diary she received for her 13th birthday, Anne Frank wrote, “On the surface I seem to have everything, except my one true friend. All I think about when I’m with my friends is having a good time. I can’t bring myself to talk about anything but ordinary everyday things.” Instead, she told her diary what many of us tell our friends--about her romantic yearnings, her self-doubts, the differences with those closest to her. It’s a model of female confidences, the immortal diary. “Dearest Kitty,” begins one entry, “Mother and I had a so-called ‘discussion’ today.” But there’s a certain poignancy in the fact that Anne’s closest confidant is paper and cardboard, incapable of reciprocal conversation. Of course, the diary is in many ways a vehicle, a way for Anne to know herself, which seems to be the end result of our closest friendships after all.
There were times, particularly when I found myself in a new and difficult role, when I practically went trolling for “one true friend”: in the largely male newsrooms where I learned to be a reporter, the playgrounds where I first took my toddlers while trying to figure out how to be a mother, the hallways at school. Book groups and play groups: we cleave together. I only really understand myself, what I’m really thinking and feeling, when I’ve talked it over with my circle of female friends. When days go by without that connection, I feel like a radio playing in an empty room.
By circle of friends I don’t mean a group of women all connected to each other--but all connected to me. It’s the same with most of us, I think. Last month I went to a birthday lunch for one of my close friends; ranged around the table was a group of women, many of whom I’d never met before but all of whom I’d heard about many times. It was a meal of discovery--”Oh, that’s her, and her, and her, too.” They were friends of my friend from different times of her life, as I have mine, from school and work and my children’s schools and my husband’s work. In our constantly shifting lives, our female friends may be the greatest constant and the touchstone not only of who we are but who we once were, the people who, taken together, know us whole, from girlfriend to wife and mother and even to widow. Children grow and go; even beloved men sometimes seem to be beaming their perceptions and responses in from a different planet. But our female friends are forever.
Professor Gilligan says she thinks the women’s movement had something to do with this, that it was when we began to value what it meant to us to be female that we were most able to be open with one another about our real lives, not the Hallmark card version, to reveal the aches beneath the apron, the bruises beneath the business suit. “For a long time our conversations focused on relationships with men,” says Gilligan of her own circle. “But soon we were talking about everything: our love lives, our work, our angst. Times of crisis but also just ordinary times and good times. It’s true closeness, true intimacy. The conversation lays the groundwork for a deeper connection.”
But I suspect that sort of intimacy predates the newest wave of feminism, going back far further than we think. I remember my mother and her cousin Gloria, my grandmother and her friend Marion. I remember as a child thinking, seeing those women in conversation with one another, that it was like seeing an iceberg, knowing that so much was going on, had gone on beneath the surface of that moment, the years, the tears, the confidences. I read the letters of Victorian women, who, unencumbered by the sexual subtext that would accompany it today, spoke the language of love to one another and even shared the same bed in what was most often a gesture of emotional, not physical, intimacy . The historian Carroll Smith-Rosenberg says that close female friendships were taken for granted a century ago as a source of succor superior to the joining of two disparate parts in marriage. “Women,” she wrote, “who had little status or power in the larger world of male concerns, possessed status and power in the lives of other women.”
The first time I met Hillary Rodham Clinton, during the 1992 presidential campaign, she showed me a bracelet that she had just been given for her birthday. Her nine closest women friends had bought it for her, and the initials of each were engraved on the links. Later, during the president’s first term, I asked how she managed to survive the maelstrom and continual scrutiny of life in the White House, and she showed me the bracelet once again. It was her circle of friends that kept her equilibrium constant. They were the people, she has said, to whom she sent the manuscript of her book to figure out how it could be improved. “Hillary,” one said, “this is like a beautiful garden with some weeds.” In a world in which she could never tell whom to trust, or how much, she knew her circle of friends would be honest. She also knew they would be kind. And she knew that when the going got rough and tough, she could call one of those women and get, not an instant analysis of how she should remake her image, but first and foremost a sympathetic ear.
Joanna Bull, who runs Gilda’s Club, the support organization for people living with cancer and their families, says many of her support groups try to teach the men who participate to learn intimacy and openness in a way that is intuitive for many women and that comes from, and feeds, female friendships. “When I was diagnosed with leukemia,” Bull recalls, “it meant everything in the world to me that there came from across the country 10 women who just nurtured me for the weekend. Some of them I rarely saw in person and mainly kept in touch with by telephone. Most of them had never met one another. But all of them wanted to come right away, and they came to my house in California and we sat in the hot tub and we ate and drank and laughed and cried and talked and talked and talked. I don’t think 10 men would do that. Which is sad for them.”
As the mother of two sons, I wonder if our world of increasing gender equality will change that. My daughter has already begun to repeat the patterns I remember so well from my own girlhood: the little knot of girls in one corner of the schoolyard, trading sentences as though conversation were a contact sport; the cycle of best friends and betrayal, complete with tumultuous tears and favorite possessions gladly given away; the constant analysis of classroom personal relations, as though between math and reading she had also studied group dynamics. And my boys? Well, when the eldest is on the phone for a long, long time these days, chances are that he’s talking to a girl friend. Maybe the friendship circles of years to come will be more polyglot than those of my friends. Maybe he will never say to his wife, “What do you two find to talk about every day?” because he will have learned what there is to talk about from his own circle of female friends.
What do we find to talk about? Well, let’s see: Kids. Hormones. Living room drapes. O.J. Simpson. Madonna. Movies. Books. Clothes. Politics. Men. “Melrose Place.” Sadness. Happiness. Aging. Loss. Breast cancer. Cosmetic surgery. Black bean soup. Pot pie. Love. Piece by piece, we stitch the world together into something we can work with, something with which we can cover ourselves against the cold nights. I don’t know what in the world I would do without them, for advice, for comfort, for simply knowing that there is someone out there who knows me as I am and loves me despite and because of it. I’ve never been in therapy, and maybe they are the reason why. We talk, therefore I am.