I have a picture on my wall of about 30 smiling toothless six year olds, of which I am one. We had just made our First Holy Communions. It was May 21, 1961. I have kept in touch with maybe two of those girls, with the occasional Christmas card, and, in later years, e-mail, but I had not seen either of them since the 1970s, the end of high school and beginning of college. The rest faded into a sort of one-dimensional fragmented memory of the girls of the Mount in the Bronx before the 60s revolutions, before the Beatles, before Vatican II, before any of us were formed beyond reading Dick and Jane, trying to remember to bring our chapel veils for First Friday Mass and getting promoted to the next grade.
And then V said she was coming for a couple day trip to Long Beach, California, would I maybe come down and meet her for dinner? Over tapas, at Allegria's on Pine, 3000 miles away and 45 years later, the little girls took form again as we reminisced about our own lives and the tides and eddies of some of theirs, to the extent we could remember or had continued contact with them beyond those innocent days.
I hadn't known very much about V's background, and she regaled me with tales from getting herself locked in one of the yes, wooden, lockers on the first floor of the Mount during an air raid drill (I am from the generation that ducked and covered, under flimsy desks and heads in front of lockers that would likely have fallen on us as the fall out was wafting about us) to her father's two ended candle burning prior to his too early death in Vietnam to her third marriage to truly her best friend. And then we remembered moments with each of the girls who had been our first friends in life, tried to remember some last names, and wondered what had become of them. I told a story about A, well it was really about me, but A had played a significant part. It was forbidden for the first graders to speak in the girls' bathroom, then discretely denominated the "lavatory". I think it was forbidden right through grammar school. I never thought to ask why. If Mother Ursula said it was forbidden, it was, and probably for biblical reasons harking all the way back to Adam, Eve and the apple. I was washing my hands after my visitation, when a voice came from another stall. It was A. I was too nervous by the fact of the broken silence to dare even to hear what she said. Did I answer her? Did I abide by authority and remain silent? Was it my job to remind her of the mysterious edict that applied within and without the stalls? I was a rigid, unrebellious little girl and I responded with something along the lines of "Shhh, we'll get into trouble", which was precisely the moment that Mother Ursula bounded in like James Bond catching a cold war spy. She had not heard A, nor what I said, but only, that I said it. There was no ambiguity or mitigation in those days. And as I tried to avoid the flat of her hand directed at my rump, I samba'd out of the room to the surprise of a janitor, choking tears. A, safely and smartly still ensconced in her stall was spared as Mother followed me to the classroom. My mother was to be informed. My mother would not be amused by my rule-breaking and I had no chance for explanation in the face of Mother Ursula's condemnation. But my terrified tears flowed sufficiently and loudly behind the textbook in front of my face, that Mother Ursula relented.on the threat of notification.
V knew A a bit past that time, their families friends as well, but not much. V told me that, like myself, A had not married, so I thought to google her when I got home. And there she was, her picture, the woman she had become, looking at me, the present catching up to the long past' footsteps. That erstwhile six year old is an artist, a well known one in Michigan, sculpting and teaching others to sculpt.
I e-mailed her, and she e-mailed me back and I have e-mailed her back. I don't know if this is a beginning or that we have anything, other than that one intersection at a girls' school in the Bronx in common, but I felt a sacred sense in having had more of her revealed to me because of V. On the other hand, that intersection of our lives, that connection, somehow seems unbreakable, irrevocable, and ordained, and requires my reverence.
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