New School, New Friends

In 1959, my family fled from the changing demographics of north St. Louis to a parish in the southwest corner of the city. I was eleven and faced with making all new friends. 

In the beginning there was Susan F, a petite redhead whose mother Gertrude went to high school with mine. Our moms got us together. They tried to teach us canasta one afternoon, I remember, but it didn't catch on. Mrs. F complained about arthritis in her hands, I remember.

I was introduced to "Charlotte" (I'll call her) because my cousin hung out with her sister Karen. She was labeled a tomboy and I was intrigued by the idea that I too could become a tomboy. She was nice enough to me but quickly picked up the habit of calling me four-eyes. When I complained to my mother, she said the next time Charlotte called me 4-eyes, I should call her jelly belly. Worked like a charm. (My mother didn't necessarily believe in "turning the other cheek.")

I longed to be Charlotte's best friend as the years rolled on but, though we went through a spell of walking home from school together and she spent one Saturday morning patiently teaching me to make a lay-up shot at a basketball hoop down the alley, our best-friendship was never to be. First, I didn't have it in me to be a tomboy. Despite my efforts to get a ball through a hoop, I went through my sole season of intramural basketball making a single 1-point foul shot and was so flat on my feet that my glasses were broken when a basketball smashed into my face. I preferred playing paper dolls with Susan F.

My best set of paper dolls were the Maguire Sisters (a quartet of singers discovered by Arthur Godfrey -- after the Andrews Sisters, before the Lennon Sisters). At Mrs. F's suggestion, Susan and I advanced from cutting out the packaged clothes to designing our own — browsing through fashion magazines, tracing the doll's outline, filling in our own designs and coloring them with pencils. (I could do that endlessly, long after I was supposed to be too old to "play with paper dolls." If someone had given me the words fashion designer, I might never have stopped. But maybe the hand-drawn clothes were clumsy and awful… I don't remember getting encouragement from anyone.)

By sixth grade, Susan had transitioned to Frances, who also loved to draw. Frances was blond, Italian, and neat as a pin. Her family lived on an embankment next to a filling station at a busy intersection. They watched Sing Along with Mitch and said the Family Rosary on a regular basis (a ritual my mother resisted despite my hinting that it would help toward our family's salvation).

We sat at the kitchen table or at a table in their basement/garage and drew pictures of women with oval faces and big hair and breasts and horrible hands because we couldn't figure out how to draw them. In the spaces surrounding these figures we wrote the stories of their lives. They all came from big families with melodramatic histories. I loved to make my women one of triplets named something like April, May, and June.

Frances was a better artist than I was. Her lines were as squeaky clean as she was. She carried around a magazine because she liked the effect of the soft surface under her writing paper. In the fall of sixth grade Susan F, Frances and I were chosen to participate in the St. Louis Christmas Carol Association poster contest sponsored by AAA. We spent days in the school cafeteria drawing and painting. We all drew clusters of carolers with O's for mouths and labored endlessly over the block lettering. Frances won first prize. I got an honorable mention. Susan F misspelled Association.

We did another art project together, sitting at Frances' basement table. The assignment was a presentation on careers. I don't remember what she filled her poster board with, but mine showed a cool home interior with big windows and open staircases to demonstrate my ambition to be an architect. The drawing was meticulously copied from an illustration in Readers Digest.

What happened to our friendship? She began to hang out with Pat K — who didn't even draw. They became best friends and went off to the same high school together.

Charlotte went with them. Charlotte had a crush on Pat, who had boobs beyond her years and wore stylish clothes and had been a pom-pom girl in the Drum & Bugle Corps. It was a period when Charlotte wanted to be called Chuck. We had a pajama party at her house and spent the evening dancing the Hully Gully and the Mashed Potatoes. There were slow dances during which Chuck would take one of us to a dark corner of the basement and cuddle cheek to cheek. After a while, she really only wanted to take Pat into the corner. Later, she said dancing with Pat made her feel like a really handsome boy. None of this added up at all to me.

I don't know what happened to Frances or Susan — Susan's family moved away and Frances lost touch once we went off to high school. In her twenties, Charlotte committed suicide.

[See also the short radio production "Remembering Charlotte, in the Rain" (2008).]

3.14.2000