In-Person

I see her as soon as I open the restaurant door, waiting politely in the queue for the hostess. “Linda!” I say warmly, and we share a heartfelt if a bit awkward hug. I extend my arms and we stretch back without letting go to take a look at each other. “You look great!” I exclaim at the exact same moment as she says “I love your hair!” and we laugh as we pull each other back into the hug. Linda’s shape hasn’t changed over the years, beautifully rounded. She had confided it made her feel self-conscious back in the 1980’s but it has always absolutely perfectly suited her larger-than-life personality. Now, her shape is basically what is expected at our age and my own form has conformed more than I liked to admit.

“How are you?” I ask with a roll of my head and a wry smile. Where would we even begin to catch up after all this time? “I’m good” she assures me with a little helpless shrug as we follow the hostess to our table. I remember so many times we’d met for dinner after work, one or the other of us always late, always rushing but making time to see each other even when we lived 30 miles apart. Now we live thousands of miles apart and were lucky to be able to arrange this lunch.

Never one to ignore the elephant in the room, she blurted right out with “I’m so glad you responded to my post. I am so sorry we never got together after Jim died and before I moved away”. “I know”, I replied, “there was so much going on and..” I trailed off, not sure how to end that. I knew that she never really liked Jim, he was so much older and she thought he was “slimy”. Years before she had broken the cardinal rule of not criticizing your best friend’s partners even when they are, because they will inevitably get back together and you can’t take back those words. I remember the phone call from her, when my sister and I were driving back from the funeral parlor. “Not right now” I had told her, “please call again”, but she hadn’t.

“How’s Jack?” I ask, thinking of the room he had occupied in their old house, with the unmade single bed and how she’d told me he sometimes snuck into their big bed, acting silently and leaving again when they’d finished. She accepted that arrangement and I was not one to judge, not having been married longer than 10 years or having had any children. “Good, she said, we’re happy”. I grinned and asked “Is he raising goats yet?”.

Years before, I had stayed at Linda and Jack’s house while I had multi-day meetings on the Peninsula and since I wasn’t a full member of the Academy my travel wasn’t paid. We had such a good time that we started planning our future aging in a communal house, where Jack would raise goats and we would grow our vegetables.  

Linda glanced at me quizzically, and I said quickly “Just something he said years ago”, realizing she didn’t remember that. That hurt a little, since I remembered those couple of days very fondly.  It’s funny how something that is so memorable to one friend will not even be recallable to the other, but I had experienced that so many times I let it drop, navigating to safe territory by asking “Keeping busy with the grandkids?”

She relaxed a bit with that, a huge smile showing that same adoration I seem to see on all my friends who are deeply interwoven with their grandchildren’s lives. Honestly, Linda was always meant to be a grandmother, even when she was an absolute technical legend in the microprocessor industry. Not only her grandmotherly shape, but her cooking and crafting and decorating seemed ready-made to step right into her 60s. I tell her “I bet you’re the perfect Grandma”, and she smiles, acknowledging. “It’s so great to be able to spoil them. I never felt I could with my own kids, I guess I was probably too tough on them”.

“No way!” I say. “You’ve been a great mother to them”. I remember babysitting one time when she and Jack had wanted to attend their big company holiday party. When I got there, her 5 year old daughter was in the bathtub, and Linda had said goodbye to her then, leaving me with a naked little girl who was trying not to cry.

I also remembered how she told me she wasn’t sure she even wanted a son who didn’t want to go to college, but I don’t bring that up. 

We update each other on what we know of mutual friends from long ago, illnesses, and former lovers. We discuss how we handled our parents’ estates and assure ourselves that our own estates will be easier for whoever is stuck doing that for us. I tell her about my life now, the plant nursery and the last few jobs I had before I retired. 

“Sometimes I think about all we endured as early women in technological roles and I wonder if things have gone backwards”, I offer.

“I know!”, she agrees. “But then again, the things we’ve seen and endured would never happen as blatantly as they did then.”

“Like someone hiring all the beautiful young college hires like that IT department manager did? It was like girlfriend tryouts for him.”

“Or some disgusting older man bringing unwanted romantic valentines to a married woman with a sexual innuendo, year after year?”

“How is it”, she asks, “marrying again? How much do you tell him about your other husband?”

“Ah”, I reflect, “Not as much as I’ve told you!” 

She laughs with a wicked grin. “OK so not about that afternoon with the colleague and the other woman then?”

“No. I mean I could, but I don’t want to give him ideas. I didn’t like it all that much.”

She laughs in agreement. “Yeah, I haven’t told Jack about that time with Stan, either”.

I pause. “I honestly think he’d understand, but at the same time it’s not only your story so it may not be fair to Stan or his widow”.

It’s always striking to me how I can share so many intimate details back and forth with someone for so many years, and then be completely out of touch for so long. It seems strange, yes, but it’s become a common thing with me. When I have a friend that I see frequently, we share everything, and when that changes due to circumstances, we just, well, stop until we are in person again. Most of the time it’s easy to pick back up when we do see each other again, but not always. Today with Linda, we jump right back into that intimacy, but what was it about that time that made it so easy to confide? How can this one lunch bridge 20 years when I haven’t had this kind of conversation with any of my newer friends?

I say “I wish we could keep in better touch”, and she gives me a kind smile. “Me too”. 

“Remember how we’d talk for so long on our work phones, office doors closed but still working, running test cases or code integration or whatever, but just staying on the phone?”

“I do! We just had so much to figure out, mostly about men as I recall”

“True! We couldn’t have those conversations anywhere else.” 

She tells me “When I think about it, I don’t know how we ever survived all that.”

“Right! I would never want to go back to being that age, would you?”

“Oh, God no, can you imagine?”

“No more than I could imagine being this age back then, I guess. I’m glad we’re friends, Linda, it was all a lot more bearable with you to talk to.”

We part with another hug, saying we’ll keep in touch and that we’ll be hoping for another in-person opportunity soon. “Ask Jack if he remembers about the goats”, I say.