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Home / Etcetera / I Wish I’d Known

I Wish I’d Known

Etcetera

I met Coretta T. when we were both in the fifth grade. She told great jokes, had a typical Italian family and an enormous pantry filled with Little Debbie snack cakes. I’d moved to Chicago the year before, as little girl lost, it was nice to find a friend who adopted me instantly.

 

Together with a few other girls, we formed a group that lasted through the eighth grade. All of us were creative, silly and eccentric in our own ways, and I never felt more in my element. We shared a lot of good times: me practicing “She’s Got a Way,” while badly playing Gen’s piano, the girls singing back-up, planning post Friday night dance sleep-overs, traveling downtown to lunch with Coretta’s attorney father in the John Hancock building.

 

We became the “smart girls,” all of us making honor roll every quarter, writing for the newspaper and forming the yearbook committee. Those days, I felt a part of something, not just a member of a group, but a cog in the wheel of the daily goings-on of a school, a city. I belonged. For once.

 

Coretta’s mom also adopted me and sucked me into their family. i watched arguments, sibling rivalries and a frustrated housewife up close and personal, and I grew as close to them, as to my own crazy family. Mrs. T. filled the Sicilian wife role nicely, shoving manicotti down her guests’ throats until they popped buttons, wearing blue eyeshadow for her husband, and populating her cavernous pantry. I loved her dearly. Same with Coretta’s dad, who, while his commanding presence scared the beejeezus out of me, was a teddy bear at heart. Coretta’s two sisters, both younger, drove her crazy, but they did our bidding, and so we let them hang around.

 

I still see Coretta hiding out in the space she’d carved for herself in her closet, doodling on paper, strumming a guitar, writing poetry. She covered her morose side well, but I saw it often, after all, I spent nearly every minute with her. In those times, I glimpsed pain, if not a darkness, certainly a gray, that I never quite understood.

 

Soon enough, we went off to high school. Me, to the public school in my neighborhood, she, to a girl’s catholic school. I spent the first semester, miserable, and my loneliness from all those years of moving, of being “the new kid,” struck me anew. I couldn’t hack it, or rather, didn’t want to, and soon transferred to the same school as Coretta, much to my mom’s disproval. My new school cost thousands of dollars a year, money we didn’t have, money Coretta’s family spent easily.

 

i assimilated in an instant. Coretta wielded her new popularity benevolently and I was accepted into her brood. Those years, she really was the big fish in a small pond, friends with everyone, including the boys behind the glass doors separating our side from theirs. She dated everyone, and we spent those years at parties, in the malls, at football games, dances, and concerts.

 

Coretta and I were always close, but I had other friends, too. Best friends. Although Coretta took the number one position, and she knew it. Sometimes, when she got dark, she’d target someone — not overtly — but she’d withhold affection, attention, and act indifferent toward them. One of my very close friends still talks about how Coretta ruined half her junior year with this persecution. I never experienced it, instead Coretta treated me as little sister, someone in her thrall, a bird too fragile to break.

 

I took her moods in stride. She ran artistic, and I expected artists to be melancholy, pouty even. And most of the time, she thrilled — she reminded me of Robin Williams — prone to manic outbursts of hilarity, humorous tangents she rode for long minutes, hours. She wrote me often, poems, skits, letters with bits of conversation she found funny. Today, when I look in my old Chandler’s (Franklin Planners for the Catholic high school girl), I see it peppered with her funny illustrations and quotes.

 

Those high school years make up some of my best memories, and I still talk with many of my friends from those days. Most of them. But not Coretta. No, something happened there that I still don’t quite understand.

 

[To be continued]

 

Part II here.

 

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May 9, 2008 · 11 Comments

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Comments

  1. Cheri says

    May 9, 2008 at 3:14 pm

    Oh, well, H-E-double hockey sticks. You left me hanging.

    Excellent piece. I’ll be hanging for the “continued.”

    Did I mention I’ll be hanging?

    Yes, hanging.

    Reply
  2. Jenn @ Juggling Life says

    May 9, 2008 at 3:19 pm

    I love “to be continued” stories. As long as I don’t have to wait tooooo long!

    Reply
  3. myra says

    May 9, 2008 at 3:48 pm

    waiting with bated breath. dang, i wanna know what happened!

    Reply
  4. Steph says

    May 9, 2008 at 5:27 pm

    To be continued…whaaa? TO BE CONTINUED?!?! TO BE EFFIN’ CONTINUED?!?!

    And St. Phanie, patron saint of bloggers, weeps a tiny tear.

    Reply
  5. matteroffactmommy says

    May 9, 2008 at 5:37 pm

    GODDAMMIT!

    great post… and i think this story rings true with so many of us. having close friends… nearly losing them with the move to high school… coming screaming back when it was “just too much to handle” to be without them.

    i am sorry that you lost touch with coretta. you should reach back. maybe you did. guess we’ll know when we read the “…continued from previous post…”

    Reply
  6. BOSSY says

    May 10, 2008 at 4:29 pm

    Bossy will be sitting here with her kleenex until you continue the tale.

    Reply
  7. kendra says

    May 10, 2008 at 5:47 pm

    That hurts. What happens with these relationships? I don’t even talk with the girl who was my maid of honor. Nothing bad happened, just life. But Coretta, there was something to her. Like she needed be alone, needed something….

    Reply

Trackbacks

  1. sandiegomomma.com » Blog Archive » I Have Plans, Many Plans says:
    May 12, 2008 at 10:37 am

    […] I’m perfectly aware that PROMPTuesday is tomorrow and we all need to know what happened with Coretta (note: It’s not at all what you think. Also, not her real […]

    Reply
  2. sandiegomomma.com » Blog Archive » 1001 Things says:
    May 27, 2008 at 7:29 pm

    […] I never continued my story about Coretta. And I need to, I know. Because it needs to be told. Man, I’ve got stories. Stories that […]

    Reply
  3. sandiegomomma.com » Blog Archive » Now I Know says:
    May 28, 2008 at 2:50 pm

    […] a story to be completed. But hypocrite much? Nearly three weeks later and I’m finishing the Coretta story. (Not that you even know who Coretta is, or care for that matter, it’s not like Roots or V, […]

    Reply
  4. San Diego Momma » Blog Archive » Emerge From the Mist says:
    May 12, 2011 at 10:11 am

    […] You made me laugh in that rollicking, raw way. Day after day, minute to minute, we riffed on each other’s fledgling jokes and took them to dizzying heights. It felt like we boarded a rocket together, blasted off and shot straight to the big sky, snickering the whole way because we got away with it. […]

    Reply

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