They appear.They disappear

by Lauren Kessler

They appear. They disappear.

I have always envied women their friendships. It’s not that I don’t have friends. I do. But I don’t have a friend I’ve known since first grade , someone I could call at 4 a.m. who would hop on the next plane to come hold my hand through disasters great and small. I don’t have a friend I’ve known for so many years that I can’t remember life without her. I don’t have a friend who knows all my secrets.

I know of such friendships. We all do. They are the stuff of fiction and melodrama: the YaYa sisterhood, Judy Blume’s “summer sisters,” Bette Midler and Barbara Hershey on the beach. But these are not real women, women, like me, who have moved eight times and lived in six different states since graduating high school and with each move have shed more people from the past; women who have had to trade friends for kids because there wasn’t time to be good and true to both; women who have mostly kept their own counsel.

But it’s hard to be jealous of fictional pals.

Then I read a story in a magazine about five women who have been meeting for dinner once a month for twenty-seven years, and I was, for a moment, truly envious. These were real women. I cannot imagine the stability of a group friendship like that, the sense of history — the marriages, divorces, births and deaths, toddlers and teenagers that must have come and gone — the ease, the comfort, the fullness of time. I will never have that.