My Dearest Friend

by Nancy Thayer

  “Oh”—Laura laughed—“no, not at all. Otto just enjoys eating and I love to cook. This is just stuff we have around. But of course for Christmas I always make lots of different cookies and breads.”

  It was a feast, and it was a delight to relax at last in this bright room, to laugh and drink a little too much champagne and talk and eat. Daphne and Joe stayed until four in the morning. Joe and Otto started talking college politics, college policies, and Laura moved close to Daphne, who sat with her shoes kicked off and her feet tucked under her. That night Daphne came under Laura’s spell. Laura that night became her inspiration and teacher. She had never met anyone like Laura, who was so beautiful, and who touched people when she spoke to them, and was always touching herself while she talked, stroking her long hair or twirling a curl around her finger or slipping her hand just inside the neckline of her black silk blouse and gently, absentmindedly stroking her collarbone or turning the rings on her slender fingers. Daphne was envious of Laura’s confidence about what was important in the world.

  “Do you have any children?” she asked Daphne as she leaned up against the sofa. Strong traces of her German accent ornamented her speech, and this made her seem mysterious and cosmopolitan and exotic. Whenever she said “were,” she pronounced it “wear”: “We wear happy.” Laughter always seemed to be underlying Laura’s words, laughter or song, for her voice was lilting. Her husband’s words plopped from his mouth, heavy pellets, each piece separate and weighty, but Laura’s speech was music; it flowed and dipped and thrilled; it was sexual.

  “No,” Daphne said. She was going to say that she wasn’t certain she even wanted children, but before she could speak, Laura leaned close to her and put her hand on Daphne’s arm, imploring, almost caressing. Laura’s hand was so soft and smooth and warm and her perfume was enchanting.

  “Oh, but you must have children,” Laura said. “Daphne, it is the most wonderful thing, you can’t imagine! You must come up and see our little Hanno while he is sleeping. You will see what I mean—we must have children, in order to believe in heaven and innocence and trust and love and all the good things, all the real things, to offset all the grisly dribble our husbands deal with, with all their ghastly never-ending words.” Laura rose and took Daphne’s hand and pulled her up. “Come up with me, come, you’ll see what I mean.”

  Daphne had her tall sliver of a champagne glass in one hand, and Laura had her glass in one hand, and, still holding hands, Laura pulled Daphne along through the house and up the stairs. The hallway was so marvelous with all its lithographs and black-and-white photos of the Kraft family at various places—Daphne glimpsed one as she passed in which all three seemed to be sitting on a beach completely naked—that only one fraction of her mind was able to point out that it had been years and years and years since she had held hands for so long a time with a woman. But Laura was both like a child, a childish best friend, and like some kind of fairy or witch or sorceress who was leading Daphne into sacred regions.

  And it was a sacred region, for as Daphne stood over little Hanno’s bed with Laura, still holding hands, she saw that what Laura had said was right. Here was what life was all about—the goodness of life, in any case. Here, on a small yellow wooden bed with a yellow cover that Laura called a “puffy-puff,” was an angelic-looking little child, a yellow-haired child with rosy cheeks, sleeping a pure and peaceful sleep. He was three years old. His room was gently illuminated by a glowing night-light of a little shepherd boy and two lambs. A brightly painted dappled rocking horse stood in one corner, and wooden soldiers, wooden trucks, fat furry teddy bears, lined the walls. A small yellow bookcase was filled with children’s books and wooden puzzles. It was a lovely nursery, warm on this January night with the thick white carpet and the curtains pulled shut against the cold and dark. And the little boy lay there sleeping, no angles or sharpness, all softness and curves and peace.

  Daphne realized that she was still holding hands with Laura, but it seemed appropriate somehow, for this was a moving moment for Daphne and it seemed to her that some kind of power and significance flowed like a warm current from her new friend into her own being. The little dark nursery was like a primeval cave, and Laura, standing so close to her that Daphne was embraced by her perfume, was the goddess of fertility and life and peace and domestic contentment. Here was the heart of the world, and Daphne came to know that profoundly, as any parent does when looking down on her sleeping child: here is the heart of the world.

  After that night Daphne didn’t let a day go by without at least talking to her friend on the phone. That night, after the two women tiptoed from Hanno’s room, they went into the kitchen, ostensibly to brew coffee but really to talk about gynecological things: Laura’s pregnancy, Daphne’s kind of birth control, and when Laura began to describe in detail Hanno’s birth (she had had natural childbirth and had nursed Hanno immediately), Daphne thought she hadn’t come across anything as violently, passionately bloody and frighteningly allegorical since she had read Spenser’s Faerie Queene. Something sprang up inside Daphne that night: an appetite for blood and gore and physicality that was related to sex but that was selfish and self-centered. Suddenly she could not get enough of hearing about being pregnant and having babies. Suddenly she understood that being a woman was a deliciously juicy and complicated and slightly underhanded thing.

  They shared so much, so effortlessly. It was as if they were sisters. By Thanksgiving of that first year, Laura had become the dearest friend Daphne had ever had. Laura was just a few years older than Daphne, and a few years ahead of her—she had decorated her house, she had gotten to know people in the town, she had had a child. But it wasn’t just that that made it seem natural for Laura to sweep Daphne off into real life; it was that Laura made ordinary life seem delicious, and Daphne wanted to learn to do that too.

  Laura knew of the fabric mills near Greenfield where materials for draperies or pillows or clothes could be bought at amazingly low prices. And she knew which materials would last and which would fade or tear or stretch out of shape. Even though her taste in furnishings was modern, she seemed to know exactly the sort of thing that would go best in Daphne and Joe’s house, which Daphne was slowly furnishing in pine antiques. Laura would put Hanno in his car seat in the back of their Mercedes (another gift from the wealthy mother-in-law) and stick a banana in his hand and drive Daphne up into Vermont, where they would spend the day looking in antiques shops and secondhand stores. “Look,” she would say to Daphne, pulling her over to a chest or dry sink that was layered and clotted and scarred with various coats of paint, “this is pine under here.”

  “Yes, but all the paint—” Daphne would begin, confused.

  “Well, we strip the paint off!” Laura told her. “Silly. Haven’t you ever stripped anything before? It’s a terrible stinky job, but you find treasures underneath. And it’s so much fun to stain it just the color you want, to polish it up.”

  Laura loved to sew; she helped Daphne choose materials, and helped her find patterns that were most becoming to her. It seemed to Daphne that Laura was brutally honest: “No,” she would say in a dress store, “you don’t look good in that. You have to be careful—big and white and freckled like you are—or you look like a peasant woman.” Once, early that first summer, when they were in the dressing room of an enormous cutrate clothing store in eastern New York State, trying on swimsuits, Laura put her arm around Daphne and pulled her so that they stood side by side staring at themselves in the wall-length mirror. “My!” Laura said. “Just think! If we had your breasts and my thighs, what a perfect woman we would be!” And she threw back her head and laughed.

  Laura loved to cook. Nothing seemed formidable to her. The first night that the Krafts had the Millers—and the Jenningses and two other couples from the college—to dinner, Laura served, among other things, a succulent Beef Wellington. Daphne had never eaten Beef Wellington before, and thought it was the most fabulous thing she’d ever tasted. She asked Laura for the recip
e, and the next day Laura brought it over—six typewritten pages of exacting notes.

  “I can’t do this!” Daphne wailed as Laura sat across from her in the kitchen, bouncing Hanno on her knee. “I can’t stand around twisting mushrooms in a towel—six cups of mushrooms! That would take forever!”

  “Oh, you are so American,” Laura said. “Everything must be quick and easy.”

  “How do you do it?” Daphne asked. “How could you have made this and taken care of Hanno too? It must have taken you all day.”

  “Oh, it took longer than that, of course,” Laura said, smiling smugly. “These things do take time. But I make Hanno some play dough so he is happy doing what Mommy is doing, and I put some Viennese waltzes on the stereo, and the house is full of music, and then it is a pleasant way to spend the afternoon.”

  Nothing seemed too much for Laura, nothing daunted her. She seemed capable of giving artistic attention to every dimension of everyday life. She dressed little Hanno, who was already a storybook child, in gray leather “lederhosen” with suspenders, and a thick pale blue sweater and exquisitely patterned socks she had knit herself. She crocheted an elaborate, dramatic black fringed shawl that, when wrapped around her shoulders, hung almost to the ground and made her look like a Gypsy, so sexual and exotic. Daphne admired it so much that one week later—just one week!—Laura presented Daphne with a shawl just like it, except in red, which Laura said would be better than black for Daphne’s coloring. Daphne in her shawl looked mythologically beautiful, a princess, a queen, a sorceress. There was something so ancient and eternal about the way she and Laura looked, wrapped in those shawls, which swayed gently when they moved and enclosed their bodies in color as if in a cocoon from which they might emerge as changelings. Daphne had never had any piece of clothing she looked better in or loved more than that shawl—even now.

  Laura made being a wife and mother seem luxurious. Over the weeks and months that Laura and Daphne talked, Daphne began to see why it was that Laura loved her daily life so much. Laura had been born in 1936. She had been a child during the war, not a baby, too young to appreciate what was happening, and not a teenager, when she would have been somehow involved, but a child of five and six and seven and eight, old enough to have some inkling of what was going on but no sense of control. She had lived in Hamburg, with her mother and father and sister Nikki. Her father was killed on the battlefield. Her sister was killed when a bomb fell on the city and Laura (then Hannelore) and her mother and Nikki were huddled in the basement of their house and the house from next door exploded into their basement, a section of wood falling onto Nikki’s head. (Nikki was three years old.) Laura could remember walking down the streets of Hamburg, holding her mother’s hand, saying, “Mother, I am hungry,” and her mother saying, “There is no food, we have no food,” and she could remember her mother quietly crying as she said that. She could remember chewing pages from books to still the pangs in her stomach. She was sent into the countryside to get away from the bombings, and also because country children were supposed to be better-fed since they lived on farms. But the farm was primitive and the outhouse smelled so foul that Laura secretly relieved herself in the bushes, and when the farmer discovered this, she was severely beaten. These were not atrocities she had lived through, but they were painful times, and the most heartbreaking, it seemed to her, was not that her father was sent to war and then was killed, for she had not known her father well, and not that her sister, whom she loved so much, had died, but that her mother would silently cry, standing outside a bakery window, because she could not buy bread for her one living daughter. Her mother had had everything taken from her.

  “Now I have a child, and I know that if I can manage to keep my child’s belly full every day, then my life is good,” Laura told Daphne. Daphne listened, feeling guilty, for her own memories of childhood and the war years were so different. Her father had been an officer in the army, but he had never left the United States. Daphne and her mother had lived with Daphne’s mother’s parents in their huge Victorian house in upstate New York, and her grandfather had been adoring and talkative and they had had a wonderful time.

  Now, from such different backgrounds, Daphne and Laura had met, and they had so much in common. They laughed at the same things, they enjoyed the same things, and most of all they found pleasure in each other’s company. Finally it came about that Daphne realized she had entered into a conspiracy against her husband—a delicious, wicked, thrilling conspiracy—and her life was radiant with dimensions she hadn’t thought of before.

  It wasn’t very far into their friendship before Daphne realized that Laura had been absolutely right: she should have a family, she did want children. But when she approached Joe about having a baby (they were still using birth control, or, rather, Daphne was—she was on the pill), he shocked her by saying adamantly, “No. Not yet.”

  When Daphne talked with Laura—the next day—she confided this to her friend, because she was very upset, she was hurt. But Laura surprised her by laughing. “Oh, of course he said no! Don’t you know that men are terrified of making babies? They don’t think of a baby, a child, they only think of years and years of endless bills. And your husband and mine, these college professors, they think they can control everything, they think they can do everything in some kind of sensible order. They will wait until they are certain they will be able to pay for everything, the child’s hospital bills all the way through the child’s braces and to the college education, then they’ll say, okay, let’s have a baby, except that by then you are fifty-nine years old. No, you can’t ask your husband for a baby, you have to sneak it out of him, which any woman can do. You just go off the pill sometime, and tell him that the doctor said you have to—and really, you know, it’s not good to be on the pill for a long time, it messes up your ovaries. So sometime, not when you are in bed or making love, but when you are eating dinner and then he must rush off to a college function, when you know that he will be preoccupied, you tell him the doctor says you must stop taking the pill. But that you will use other kinds of birth control—foam is good for getting pregnant with. Or get a diaphragm and poke a little hole in it. But listen, you shouldn’t do it just yet. He hasn’t been teaching yet a year here. Give him a little more time to get settled, to feel secure.”

  Daphne listened with boundless admiration and, at first, a sense of guilt. To be plotting about something so serious as a child, which would, after all, not affect Laura but would completely change Joe’s life! Even to be discussing something so private with someone other than Joe!

  Sometimes Daphne feared she and Joe were really growing apart. Had been growing apart for four years—at the same time, of course, as they were also growing together. But when they met, they had both been submerged in English literature—reading it, teaching it, studying it, living in it. Then, for four years, Joe kept at it, gradually sinking deeper and deeper into his work, while Daphne bobbed up to the surface and looked around and got a glimpse of the rest of the world. They loved each other, but she had stopped being his compatriot; his country was English literature, while hers was, well, the entire rest of the world.

  Before she met Laura, every time the phone rang in the evening it was for Joe, and whenever someone was late coming in, it was Joe, who had been asked for a beer by his students, for a drink by his colleagues. And in conversations at dinner parties she felt left out if she tried to join in a discussion about some fragment of the vast field of literature.

  “I’ve always thought Dickinson was too heavy-handed with her symbolism,” she might say, and before she could complete her thought or her sentence, the person listening (some poor professor who had gotten stuck next to her at a formal dinner table) would impatiently nod and look away and start a conversation elsewhere. What Daphne had to say now might be interesting—it might even be right—but it just didn’t matter, because she was officially “just a wife,” not an intellectual.

  With Laura she suddenly felt she had joined, o
r formed, her own little private and very exclusive club. She needed a friend, a colleague of her own. Besides, Laura was such fun, and Daphne had forgotten how much fun she could have with a woman friend. The Millers and the Krafts grew accustomed to getting together for dinner once a week, usually at the Krafts’ house so that Laura wouldn’t have to get a baby-sitter for Hanno. Daphne would surreptitiously study Otto. Really, she knew so much about him, and such intimate things!—how his father, a wealthy industrialist, had never embraced his son even when Otto was small. Otto and his brothers and sisters had been raised by a nanny, and the closest his father ever came to really touching his son was during his monthly inspections, when the nanny had the children bathed and shampooed and dressed in their finest, standing in a line in the nursery. Then Otto’s father would walk along, examining and evaluating his children. He would always pinch the lower flesh of their upper arms. “This one needs more food,” he would say to the nanny. Later, when the children were older, their father gave them brief mental inspections: “What is the capital of Greenland?” he would bark, and if they did not give the answer immediately, they were to be punished with a whipping in proportion to their flaw.

  No wonder Otto was such a rigid man. Sometimes Daphne would think about and compare Otto’s rigidity and Hudson’s. It seemed to her that Hudson’s carefulness always had the virtue of grace and elegance and lightness, like Hudson himself, a leanness about it, a slenderness, so that if he was rigid, it was like the string on a violin or an archer’s bow—taut, but one could touch it, pluck it, one could make it sing or send an arrow soaring. Otto, in comparison, was heavy and earthbound. His rigidity was like a boulder, or like a cannonball that had already been fired and now lay, immobile, yet remained a kind of weaponry, still capable of violence. No wonder he did not laugh easily, and when he did laugh, he sounded like a dog barking. He was handsome in a way, with his blazing blue eyes and that bald naked head. The baldness was aggressive; it seemed a kind of display. But he was not unkind. He was always pleasant to Daphne, and he did not intimidate Joe. Joe and Otto enjoyed getting together for dinner—there were always the college affairs to discuss, and then they both liked football. But Otto did love to follow rules to the letter, and according to Laura, even his lovemaking was scheduled. Daphne would never ever feel really comfortable with her best friend’s husband.