The Five Strands of A Sedentary Empress

The Riding Center

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Of the three best friends in my life, Kim is the most aggressive. She can be confrontational, bitter, frightening and, the worst in my view, dismissive. Add vodka and you have violent to add to the mix. Of the three friends who each own a bit of my heart, she is the one I try to never irritate, not because I couldn't hold my own against her, but rather because I value her friendship too much to let something ridiculous come between us. I know that if I came at her with my trademark battle cries that it would undo twenty odd years of friendship, because she's delicate when it comes to personal relationships. Her pride often interferes with her good sense, and we all know it.

Her moods are legendary, in fact, I knew them before I knew her. I used to see those narrow green eyes in the hallway at high school and I decided that she might have been one of the most horrid people on the planet. She always appeared to be unimpressed and petulant, and being near her exhausted me psychically. As we shared some common ground, in that her best friend at the time was friends with my best friend, we often ended up sitting near one another during the lunch hour, or during spare. When her mood was up, she was hilariously entertaining, the one person in the group who could imitate anyone she wanted to, the most audacious when it came to flirting or catching attention. When her mood was down, no one could speak to her. If you tried, she'd only become angrier, her face clouding over as she sat with her back against a row of lockers, growing more and more irate. I used to watch the do-gooders of the group approach her with the simple and saccharine 'What's the matter, Kimmy?', and I'd brace for a earth-rocking scowl, followed by an acidic 'I'm fine, please stop bothering me'. I decided, more than once, that I didn't like her at all. I disliked her for being the most difficult person in my circle, and I disliked her for frequently making me feel like I was an annoyance by sheer virtue of the looks she'd give me. The deciding factor was the day I was walking toward the bus after school and saw her coming closer. I wanted to be friendly, making a last ditch effort to cultivate a friendship, so I said 'hello, Kim'. The response was icy, at best. In fact, she walked past me as though I didn't exist. Kyla, who had been with me, looked at me with shock and said 'what a supreme bitch!'.

And somehow we ended up friends.

What I learned soon after was that Kim had a very severe hearing problem, which explained the dismissiveness and rudeness we'd come to expect of her. She was embarrassed by it, had to wear a hearing aid which none of us noticed due to her longish hair, and very often this was the reason why she seemingly ignored questions or comments from people she wasn't looking directly at. It made her incredibly defensive and self-conscious, two attributes which make for all kinds of turbulence in a young girl's life. Also, as I slowly began to learn, she came from a family of alcoholics; mean, sloppy, warring drunkards. The fourth of five children, the youngest one ten years her junior, she was the child who was lost in the mix. It occurred to me rather late on that she was not only bitter, but she was depressed to boot. Here was a girl who was basically ignored at home, a girl who had been told by her intoxicated parents that if they died, her younger brother would get everything, a girl whose mother slipped a gift certificate through her slightly open car window in a parking lot as a way of wishing her a happy birthday. I started to understand why she couldn't explain to the do-gooders what was wrong on those days when she was propped against the lockers, seething. She didn't know what was wrong. Also, she had been disappointed by so many people in her life that she'd come to expect that no one was as good as they seemed, and the ones who tried to be happy or well-intentioned only served to irritate her. Once I figured out all her secrets, I was able to form a friendship with her, one based on mutual hatred of cheerleaders and people who wore Ralph Lauren shirts. We began to hang out when everyone else was busy, we would go for meatball subs during our lunch break or listen to music in her car in the parking lot when we didn't have class. She started to confide in me, and I felt privileged that she felt she could. Eventually, we found ourselves hanging out on weekends, talking on the phone for hours and walking the hallways together as though we'd known one another forever. I was absolutely stunned that I liked her, and I suppose she might have felt the same way about me.

Throughout the last twenty-one years, there has been maybe two disagreements between the two of us. The first was after a friend's funeral, when she had been looking at her car's engine when we were all supposed to be finding our seats in the church. We'd all gone in without her, traumatized as we were by the whole situation, and I'd held a seat in the pew for her. When she came in, she walked past us as though she didn't see us and moved toward the back of the church where she took a seat by herself. At first I thought she had honestly not seen us, but I soon realized that she was angry at us for not waiting in the parking lot until she was ready to come in. For three days she froze everyone out, leaving class as soon as the bell would ring and disappearing during the lunch hour, leaving everyone to wonder what her problem was. By day three, I'd had enough of this. I cornered her on our way to an assembly and gave her a tongue-lashing about how selfish I thought she was being, given that we were at a funeral, that we'd had to bury one of our friends (Sandra, leukemia). I could not believe, I hissed, that she was behaving this way over a seat at a funeral, one which I had actually saved for her if she'd bothered to look in our direction. I went on and on until she finally looked at me, defeated and said 'sometimes I overreact to things.' All was soon forgiven.

Then, there was the afternoon when she, Cathie and I were sitting around Cathie's kitchen table in her new apartment after getting married. We were eating cheesecake, gossiping about silly, useless things and Kim was speaking about something her new boyfriend had done which irritated her.

'...and then I decided right then and there to nick it in the butt,' she'd said seriously.

Cathie and I looked at one another, amused.

'You decided what?', I asked with a smile.

'To nick it in the butt,' she said again, taking a forkful of cheesecake.

I giggled and tried to shake it off.

'What's so funny?', she asked, tensing up.

'Nothing,' I shook my head lightly, 'it's just that that's not an expression.'

'Uh, yeah, I think it is,' she said angrily.

'It's really not,' I said, still smiling.

'I think I know what I'm saying, thank you,' she growled.

'Okay,' I said, shrugging my shoulders, sensing that things were going to get ugly.

'You don't think I'm right?' she narrowed her eyes, challenging me.

'Well,' I said slowly, trying to find the most diplomatic words, 'not really, but it's really, really close.'

'So, what is it, then?'

'Um, well, I think the correct expression is 'nip it in the bud', like cutting a flower early on, stopping something at the beginning.'

'I don't think that's right,' she shook her head, annoyed.

'Yeah, I'm pretty sure it is,' I said sternly.

'You always think you're right,' she said, exasperated.

'No, that's not fair,' I said angrily, 'but in this case, I am'.

'We'll have to agree to disagree,' she said angrily, jamming cheesecake into her mouth.

After a few minutes of silence, she began whispering to herself over and over 'nick it in the butt, nip in the bud, nick it in the butt... When she'd exhausted herself over it, she looked up at me sheepishly and said 'yours makes more sense.'

I loved her for that. Still do.

'If it makes you feel any better,' I said as I sliced at my own cheesecake wedge with a fork, 'I used to think 'fringe benefits' was actually 'French benefits'.'

'That doesn't make any sense!', she started laughing.

'Oh, and I suppose nicked butts do?'