LINDA

As I mentioned in my vignette ”Haven,” Linda was my friend from my first day of eighth grade, when she introduced me to her friends Daryl and Nikki at lunchtime—and they became my “gang” for a number of years, though I put the word in quotes because my feelings of belonging were qualified once Linda had supplanted me as Daryl’s best friend. When I search for a more accurate term than “gang,” the best I can come up with is “tribe,” if you can call a unit of so few a tribe.

Like me, Linda had a younger brother, though unlike the rest of us, she lived with her dad. What strikes me suddenly as another thing the four of us had in common was the fact that our “other parent” wasn’t in the picture. If anything, my friends seemed to have even less contact with their absent parent than I did. In any case, Linda, being raised among males, had a mannish stride and a great boisterous laugh that caused heads to swivel wherever we went. Her father was a high school teacher, while she was the self-appointed little wife and mother around the house—until her father remarried and was prepared to pack her off to that home for delinquent girls. (Little did I imagine at the time that she was the one I would remain friends with over all the turbulent years to come.)

Actually, I’m surprised that I have so little recall of the time I spent with my tribe. I remember a day we all took the bus to Chinatown and got caught in a rainstorm—that we did the Hora down a steep hill, and I bought a silk painting a of bird among cherry blossoms in one little shop and a mirrored box showcasing a small geisha doll in another, which strikes me as odd now. Why would shops in Chinatown carry Japanese memorabilia?

I also recall a couple of short camping trips together—going skinny dipping at night and being on a river, where I felt—briefly—a transcendent sense of peace.

I have more specific recollections of times I spent with Daryl before she invited Linda to live with her: for one, a trip to Tahoe to ski the winter of eighth grade. When we shopped for a jacket for her, she chose a moss green windbreaker with embroidered leaves that I thought was beautiful. We took a skiing lesson together and learned how to do the snowplow to stop, but I couldn’t get up the rope tow. I tried and failed once, and, realizing I’d created problems for the people behind me, didn’t dare try again—which meant I had to sidestep up the hill after each downward foray on the bunny slope. Back in our cabin, we listened to Ray Charles singing: “You give your hand to me and then you say good-by; I watch you walk away beside that lucky guy; and anyone can tell, you think you know me well, but you don’t know me”—a song that broke my heart.

In our Sunday school class at the Unitarian Church in Kensington, we learned about other religions, and at the end of the year, we each spoke to the whole congregation. From the pulpit, I read an excerpt from the poem “Mending Wall” by Robert Frost:    

I went on to say that one of the first things that struck me when I moved to California was all the fences between the houses—that where I came from there were no fences and we children ran freely from yard to yard.

Another recollection: Daryl and me on a beach, singing the current hit ”We’ll sing in the sunshine, we’ll laugh every day, we’ll sing in the sunshine, then I’ll be on my way.”