I recently received an e-mail that my friend Nicole was in town to plan her father’s funeral and that she would love to have lunch. This seemed odd and I read the email out loud to my partner. “Does she want to have lunch after the funeral?” I wondered. “Before the funeral?” He was as clueless as I was.
I emailed her and expressed my sympathy that her dad had passed away and said I’d see her at the service. She wrote back instantly. “Dad isn’t dead,” she wrote, “I am just planning his funeral is all.” Her dad is 82 and in good health but she decided to make preparations now. “Why wait?” she asked rhetorically, much to the poor old guy’s consternation.
Nicole and I were good friends in college. She was a dance major, but not a typical one: she had a squatty body and only one eyebrow; knowing that she was not prima ballerina material, her career goal was to marry well. She was always a trifle odd, especially when it came to her car, a cherry red Ford Torino that she named Charisse.
Charisse was the reason Nicole and I drifted apart. Charisse was an avid conversationalist who communicated by using a very peculiar language of staccato horn beeps and toots; not surprisingly, Nicole was the only person who could translate Charisse, who was very opinionated and somewhat critical.
Eventually Nicole met Will who was a psychology major and absolutely barking-mad because of the quantity of drugs he ingested. Whereas Nicole named her car, Will had named his, — well, use your imagination – which he referred to as “my best friend.” His best friend was named Hank and spoke in an unfortunately high, squeaky voice, kind of like a hamster. Like Charisse, Hank was also pretty chatty.
I will always remember a trip we all took to Key Largo with my friend Kelly, a phys-ed major, during our last year of grad school. We spent the afternoon at Alabama Jack’s where Nicole drank too much and Will was snorting coke through a garden hose. Things got tense when Kelly and I refused to get in the car if either of them was driving. “Charisse thinks you drive like an old woman,” Nicole told me repeatedly as I drove home, while Hank made leering comments about Nicole’s tube top. Then things got ugly: Charisse told Will that she thought Hank was a lecherous pervert and Hank accused Nicole of being a castrating bitch. Meanwhile, Kelly and I, in the front seat, wished we were dead.
I cut ties with them right after this trip but Nicole and Will made up, eventually married and moved to Boston where Will is a well-known child psychologist. I did not attend the wedding but sent them a very nice ceramic nut dish, which I thought was appropriate. Years later, when Nicole was in her early 40’s she unexpectedly got pregnant and gave birth to Tabitha, a stocky little girl with one eyebrow.
I was remembering all this now as I went to meet Nicole for lunch. She looked great, thanks to Pilates and a good eyebrow waxing, and she had planned a splendid send-off for her father. Charisse was long gone, of course, and had been replaced with a Lexus named Mindy. Hank was apparently just a shadow of his former self; “He’s pretty quiet these days,” Nicole said with regret.
“And how’s Tabitha?” I asked. Nicole sighed. “She’s four now,” said Nicole, “and she has this horrible blanket that she carries everywhere. She won’t even let me wash it. She calls the blanket Carly and thinks it’s her best friend. Do you think that’s weird?”