What You Have Tamed : a memoir (multigenre project)

“Don’t you understand that somewhere along the way we have gone astray? . . . we lack something essential, which we find it difficult to describe.” – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, 1939

We met dressing Barbies one afternoon at a mutual friend’s. I thought Frances was funny, plus she had really crazy outfits for Skipper and a Han Solo doll instead of a Ken. Sometime soon after a Troop 144 meeting or at recess on the monkey bars we decided Frances should start sleeping over at my house on weekends. Or rather, her mom would drop her off, we would eat pizza, watch Nickelodeon, my dad would tuck us in, but then by morning, the sleeping bag beside me lay empty.  So I just started sleeping over at France’s instead.

Seven years passed. I was still sleeping over at Frances’s. Sometimes even on school nights, which wasn’t a big deal by then.

Next we were fifteen and it was summer time. In just our swimsuits we draped ourselves across couches in somebody’s basement whose parents were away for the weekend. Frances, with those collarbones like handlebars and a smile that turned boys to putty, had been the one to set up the transaction with somebody else’s college-aged brother.

Here, his eyes sparkled in the gas station parking lot, handing her the bottle. He looked at her in a way that made the other girls and I effervesce with giggles, the way only young girls can.

Graduating high school, Frances came back special from studying abroad in Amsterdam to walk and go to the all-night graduation party sponsored by the school.  She’d put on weight, and there were rumors of her exchanging V-cards with some boy from California, who had also been studying abroad at the same time. I don’t know, she never told me. But by then I was going places. State school. Partial scholarship.  I’d heard about her and this California boy from one of our other friends, and was surprised I was surprised by it.

Freshmen year Frances continued to call to check in just about every month or so. She had picked an almost-Ivy league school somewhere in Ohio where the kind of jeans you wore mattered.  She drove to my dorm first thing coming home for winter break and we drank champagne from plastic cups and sucked on Sour Patch Kids sitting on my roommate’s futon. But like clockwork and the years before, once anything had passed her lips, she was up and out of the room. Frances had just broken up with her boyfriend who wanted to be a cop and had cheated on her with some haughty linguistics major from Connecticut.

Miss me? she asked, her breath now cool and sweet.

I rested my head back in her lap and imagined what a kiss from a boy felt like.

And soon I found out, underneath the spotlight of astreet lamp during a February snowstorm.  I found out what it was like to make out, to not care, to skip class. I find out what it felt like to throw myself down a mountainside and into the disgusting dorkiness of young love. And I knew that somewhere in Ohio, Frances was nodding in approval, with a hint of mischief in her eyes. So I transferred schools and followed him. For the first time I moved away from the hometown I had always shared with Frances.

The following summer at David’s funeral I realized we didn’t get to pick; I was stuck with Frances. Our friend had died from carbon monoxide poisoning, just weeks after the end of our freshman year. He was camping alone near the Boundary Waters, waiting for his summer job to start as a park ranger’s assistant. He died because his space heater malfunctioned. Factory recall. I didn’t see Frances until later at the church’s luncheon. She was wearing a long strand of yellow pearls that matched her teeth, and black stilettos. She looked like she was trying too hard to be at somebody’s funeral. For the first time, it was obvious to anyone. She looked too thin. That night at a house party we had a big fight outside in the driveway.  I chucked her car keys into a cornfield and stumbled back inside. The next morning I called France’s mom and told her what I hoped she knew already about her own daughter.  

After that, Frances didn’t speak to me for three years, during which I experienced, in parallel, the second heartbreak. Outside the karaoke bar, I slung up the boyfriend by his armpits, with his roommate’s help, and the three of us stumbled home.

Dude, I know you can’t hear me, the roommate was saying, but you’re going to have to marry this girl someday.

My sundress was stiff with spilt beer and somebody’s (probably the boyfriend’s) half-digested bacon.  In the bathroom I dabbed at the boyfriend’s forehead and tried to see myself as tender as the roommate had painted me. But this tenderness had run its course. So in the months to come, and in later versions of this story (no doubt the version I would tell Frances) I rewrote history as a way to pass those sleepless nights, the nights that claim the acme of our clumsy courtships, friendships and all selfish disasters, to which every later example we endlessly compare and measure.

Then a year after college Frances decided to offer to pick me up from the airport. I had spent the summer working as a counselor at indoor-kid camp all the way out in Amish country, Pennsylvania. Summer is a liminal time, where anything is possible, where grudges can dissipate in the humid midwestern air. Over sushi, we were careful with each other. Extra polite. For a moment, she became her mousy nine-year-old self, but then quickly flagged the waiter down to bring her a glass of red wine. She went on to talk about yoga and groundedness, and something called a vegetable spiralizer that could trick your brain into thinking you were eating pasta when really it was just slimy strings of zucchini. After a few more silences, I signaled for the waiter too.

We haven’t really changed, she said. She closed eyes and face sunk into that wide, wild smile.

A few days later my grandma suggested I bring Frances to our family reunion as my date. We might as well have been related, or married, anyway. Frances and I sat in a hot tub together sipping drinks made with too much juice. We bobbed in the tub with our chins cresting the water, giving us foamy, chlorinated beards.

 I never thought my problems would affect you so much, Frances said. Besides, we were too close as kids. It was pretty unhealthy.

But we were children, I defended.

A few hours later after a buffet dinner with my entire extended family, Frances and I drove to a townie bar downtown.  The bar tender presented her with a pitcher of Leinie’s and me a diet coke.

Why won’t you drink, she asked.

Because I don’t wanted to, I said.

We headed back to the hotel and slipped into the double bed we shared beside my grandma’s.  The next day driving back home from the water park there was yelling over something, then no talking for at least 100 miles. Tom Petty cooed and crackled over the radio speakers.  

By 26 I moved back home and briefly but Frances and I barely met up, even though we still spoke of each other to acquaintances as each other’s potential maids of honor. Six months later she supposedly moved away for good and fell in love. I still have their housewarming gift hanging wrapped on my living room wall.  In the famous Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s novella, a fox explains to a lost boy that the time you spend loving, so widely and so deeply, is what has makes your beloved unique.  The lost boy has tamed his rose, and now he is responsible for her, and forever.   Tu deviens responsable pour toujours de ce que tu as apprivoisé.   To me, Frances Theresa will always be the gymnast, the fragile ballet dancer, the wild child wise beyond her years, the social butterfly, the bar tender, the software engineer, my one true unconditional love, with conditions.  




It is what it is.

"Cease, cows, life is short.” ― Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

"They are lost, but also not lost but somewhere in the world. Most of them are small, though two are larger, one a coat and one a dog. Of the small things, one is a certain ring, one a certain button. They are lost from me and where I am, but they are also not gone. They are somewhere else, and they are there to someone else, it may be. But if not there to someone else, the ring is, still, not lost to itself, but there, only not where I am, and the button, too, there, still, only not where I am." --Lydia Davis, "Lost Things"

"The light is the truth and the truth is the light." --Ralph Elison, Invisible Man

“The Church says: the body is a sin.
Science says: the body is a machine.
Advertising says: The body is a business.
The Body says: I am a fiesta.” ― Eduardo Galeano, Walking Words