It was inevitable that one day I would look up my childhood nemesis on facebook to see how she'd turned out.
The last time I had really thought of her was the last time I'd written about her, which was 1998 (according to google) — long before facebook, twitter, or instagram.
Today, I was reflecting on how our friendship might have turned out if social media had existed back when her family left our town behind in the 70s — if we hadn't had to rely on actual letters to exchange our adolescent barbs — with days and weeks stretching out excruciatingly between every assault.
The first volley was about their new house.
It turned out to be a modest three bedroom ranch in a solid middle class suburb on the outskirts of the large southern city they'd said they were moving to. (It would be as if someone told you they were moving to Atlanta, and then their return address said Alpharetta.) I know it turned out to be a modest ranch because my family spent many holidays at her family's house subsequent to the move.
An entire page of her pale blue monogrammed stationery was devoted, in carefully cramped but bubbly penmanship, to describing their "sunken living room," an architectural marvel I could scarcely imagine. It's where, she wrote, they had decided to put the piano. What I envisioned was something like the layout of a racquetball court, with an observation deck up top where people could stroll and exchange bon mots, before descending to the conversation pit below. (That's not, in fact, how a sunken living room works, but how was I to know?)
HGTV did not exist at the time, nor did Martha Stewart (at least not in her eventual incarnation), and even if they had, that would not explain why 12-year-old girls were exchanging letters with crudely sketched floor plans of subtle one-upmanship, but we were.
I was insane with jealousy.
I had spent many years of slumber parties and sleepovers at their last house, and nothing about it had suggested to me that they were the kind of people capable of the level of sophistication you'd need to possess a sunken living room.
In fact, their last house had been remarkable only for the occasional big-city affectation they had imported when they relocated to our town from Ohio.
For example, they had only one TV. It was located in the "family room," and it was placed inside an "entertainment center." It did not sit on top of another, non-functioning TV that had been draped with towels to keep from scarring the burled wood surface of the non-functioning TV (as a succession of TVs had done at our house).
As they lived in the heart of town, they had cable TV. We lived in what they jovially derided as "the boondocks," and had an exterior antenna that, on a good day, could tune in WBIR, which was CBS out of Knoxville. (ABC and NBC were for fancier households than ours. No Schoolhouse Rock for me unless one of my city friends had a sleepover. PBS? Other than The Electric Company at school, no. Although I knew what they were, I did not grow up with Sesame Street or Mr. Rogers or any of the other touchstones of my generation.)
They did not have HBO (that would arrive much later, at the homes of my high school friends, like the Andersons), but their TV did blare an array of "super stations," that would air late-night, sanitized versions of movies from theatrical release, like The Poseidon Adventure.
Their dad was an engineer (which I thought meant that he drove a train, a notion I stubbornly maintained for quite some time, despite their eventual explanations to the contrary).
Their kitchen boasted "a snack bar," which delineated the kitchen from the family room. They also had a "formal" living room, which was (as was true of the later house apparently), where they kept the piano.
In addition to my best friend/slash/nemesis, their family had a developmentally disabled daughter. We thought of her as what was politely referred to as "slow," at the time, though she cheerfully clarified for everyone she met, "I'm brain-damaged, not retarded."
Later, she would sometimes explain to other kids, in private, "I didn't get enough oxygen when I was being born. And that's why my mom hates me."
Possibly oversimplified, but very probably true.
Their mom suffered from what would probably now be characterized as auto-immune disorders.
What it looked like to us, as children, was what we guessed from the bible could only be leprosy, as her skin was an uninterrupted mass of suppurating sores. In public, she always wore long sleeves and long pants. But at home and at their camper on the lake, she wore t-shirts and shorts and skirts, to the dismay of both of her daughters.
Their dog once pooped on our sofa while they were on vacation and my Dad threatened to have her put to sleep. They always introduced her as a "Heinz 57," and paused as if that description had typically drawn such peals of laughter that they needed to wait for the chuckling to subside before continuing the conversation.
Despite their location in the middle of town, they had ponies. Literal show ponies.
Their backyard had a gate to a pasture they rented from The Catholics who owned the property on which our small private school sat.
(We had horses, but only in the offhanded, agrarian way that all people had horses at the time.)
That's how we met.
Catholic school.
Roughly grades 4 thru 7, which is when they moved away.
We attended the only school in town capable of "accommodating" their eldest daughter's academic challenges, which meant she mostly sat by herself and filled in kindergarten style workbooks while a nun peered over her shoulder and told her she could do better.
Their family was insistent on "mainstreaming" and the girls' parents often fretted aloud to my parents that once they were old, it would be up to the younger, popular daughter to take over their caregiving role. To which my Mom would say, bluntly, "don't kid yourself," or sometimes, "dream on."
It's a long way of saying, in hindsight, I suspect their family had some insecurities. And they manifested those insecurities with manners and behaviors that suggested they thought they were better than everyone else.
(I didn't necessarily disagree, but a grand piano in a sunken living room? Who'd they think they were kidding?)
So, today, I looked her up.
Despite our mutually advancing years, she has barely aged a day. Instantly recognizable, even if she hadn't hyphenated her maiden name with her married name, rendering her easily searchable.
Still sweetly pretty in the cornfed midwestern way she was when I last knew her, and wearing her thick chesnut brown hair the exact same way she wore it in grades four through seven. It was the exact same color as her pony's back then, and it's the same color now. I'm sure the pony is long since dead.
Most of her profile isn't public, but a few photos are. In one, she's belting out a tune in what appears to be community theatre. In another, she's cuddling in a quilted brown recliner with her soft, bald, bespectacled husband who has kind eyes.
In 2013, there's a photo of her mom, in long sleeves and long pants, with a banner attesting to her prowess as a grandmother.
In 2011, she appears to have found Jesus in some vaguely non-denominational way (as a child she was Presbyterian but that was only because our town wasn't large enough to have any Lutherans). She favors bold floral prints in her church attire, and has "checked in" at some point as listening to Rush Limbaugh.
Her few visible posts are articulate, and everything is spelled correctly.
She got married in 1989, around the time I would've been finishing grad school.
If she has, or has ever had, a job, there's no mention of it on facebook — no mention of where she works or if she works and what she did.
She has two beautiful daughters.
She and her husband appear to make an annual trip to a Big City (one year New York, another Chicago), augmented by an every-other-year vacation at a Florida beach.
She has 569 friends. Number of friends we have in common: zero.
She doesn't acknowledge being from Ohio, and, in fact, lists the town where she went to college as where she's from.
She seems to have remodeled her kitchen in 2016.
Her father posts blizzard photos on her wall and jokes, "where's the global warming?"
They all appear to live deep in the midwest now.
She favors wine-flavored organic gummy bears, and self-identifies as a foodie.
She watches Fox News, and in 2013 briefly flirted with Weight Watchers.
Sometimes she sits on an exercise ball.
There's no mention that she has now, or ever had, a sister.
