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We sit and drink, two good friends, in our forties now. We usually drink on Fridays after my husband has left our summer cottage on the island to take the ferry to the bus to the car to drive back to D.C.<\/p>\n
Diana is my best friend on the island. On an island, you need a best friend. You need a best friend because islands are isolated and claustrophobic\u2013difficult to get off, and everyone is in your business.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
I drink wine, white, pinot grigio. Diana drinks gin. Neat.<\/p>\n
\u201cDo you miss him when he leaves?\u201d Diana asks.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe is a good husband,\u201d I say, \u201cbut he\u2019s dull.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cDull?\u201d Diana asks and quaffs a shot.<\/p>\n
Dull? He is a tidal bore. But I do not say this. My in-laws also have a summer home on the island. Diana knows them. Well. She is a year-round resident and knows everybody and everybody\u2019s story. That\u2019s island.<\/p>\n
\u201cYes, a little dull.\u201d<\/p>\n
Diana gets up from her Mission chair and pours herself another gin. Her cottage retains the early details from when it was first built in the twenties, the Arts and Crafts woodwork and the later Deco cabinet pulls. Change is slow on an island; people tend to make do.<\/p>\n
She sloshes some gin on her denim sleeve and laughs. \u201cWere you attracted to Neil right away?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAttracted? No, he looks like a cupboard.\u201d I laugh. He does, actually. He is rectilinear like a refrigerator box with feet. Solid, though.<\/p>\n
She nestles back down in her Mission chair. \u201cDid you ever have a major crush?\u201d She smirks as she asks this, a little coquettish.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn high school, maybe. There was this kid who shaved his head. We thought he was cool, but he was just bald.\u201d<\/p>\n
Diana snorts gin and wipes her mouth on her cuff, widens her eyes at me.<\/p>\n
I realize I am supposed to ask her the same question. \u201cYou, did you ever have a mega crush?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cLillian,\u201d she says, \u201cmy psychology teacher.\u201d<\/p>\n
Diana is gay\u2013which we established the first summer we became friends after she tripped over her pronouns for an hour.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat happened?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cNothing. I graduated. She and her son moved to California, I heard.\u201d<\/p>\n
I nod and sip my wine. \u201cShe had a son.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cSingle mother, divorced.\u201d She slugs some gin, then asks, \u201cAre you close to your in-laws?\u201d<\/p>\n
They live four houses up Foreside Road. Too close. But again I do not say this. \u201cClose enough.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cSalt of the earth,\u201d Diana says.<\/p>\n
Salt clogs your arteries. I do not say this, either.<\/p>\n
T<\/p>\n
his is how we spend Friday nights. We drink. We talk. Sometimes we sing. Diana favors old Judy Garland songs. Sometimes we do not sing, and sometimes the talk is desultory like the movement of stars. Sometimes we are silent. Silence on an island is different from silence in other places. Not total silence\u2013the elegies of foghorns. The bong of a rolling bell buoy. The shuck shuck of tides mucking over mud flats and rarely, very rarely, a passing car, some old heap with shot pistons chugging past.<\/p>\n
Diana says, \u201cLet\u2019s sit out on the deck.\u201d<\/p>\n
And we do, in Diana\u2019s Adirondack chairs. They have broad arms, perfect for holding drinks. By daylight they are covered with rings overlapping, rings within rings. But it is dark now. Stars winkle. The light sifts like halfhearted snow. Diana is half humming, half singing. A-tisket, a-tasket, A green and yellow basket. As if to herself.<\/p>\n
A sidereal solitariness.<\/p>\n
\u201cColor Me Barbra,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
\u201cJust don\u2019t color me late to dinner?\u201d I ask.<\/p>\n
She tilts her head back, staring straight up into the sparkling sky. \u201cDid you ever want to be famous?\u201d she asks. \u201cI mean really famous.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI used to paint a little bit. But I didn\u2019t have any expectations. I was about as effective as a comb-over on a kite.\u201d<\/p>\n
Diana doesn\u2019t laugh. She says, \u201cBig famous, like Barbra Streisand famous.\u201d<\/p>\n
I spill some wine on the front of my shirt. \u201cNo, not really.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI did. I got close once. Once The New Yorker<\/i> almost took a poem of mine. I got a personal letter. I framed it. I haven\u2019t seen it in years.\u201d<\/p>\n
She bolts from her chair, a sudden bustle like cats when they try to spook you, like cats when they are on an important mission\u2013Step aside, man. I am a busy, busy cat. Catnippy cats.<\/p>\n
\u201cI am going to find it right now. Let\u2019s open it up.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cLike a time capsule?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWhy not?\u201d She flips on the porch light as she goes inside the cottage.<\/p>\n
Diana returns with a frame and aims the glass at me. It\u2019s an old photo of Streisand, 1960s or early seventies. She has a sock monkey mouth and red carpet hair, what used to pass for glamour. Too much red lipstick and an updo.<\/p>\n
Diana flips the frame over and peels back the brown paper as if she were opening a gift. She squints at the poem fixed to the back by imperfect light.<\/p>\n
She reads, \u201cB is for the beauty of your voice. A is April, your birth month. R is how really rare you are.\u201d On the second B, her shoulders start shuddering. \u201cB is Broadway doesn\u2019t deserve you. R is for Rosen, your mother\u2019s maiden name. A is amazing; that you are.\u201d She repeats, \u201cThat you are,\u201d choking now as she readies for the finale, the big flourish.<\/p>\n
\u201cBarbra,\u201d she says, \u201cwith a B.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat else would it be with?\u201d I ask. \u201cBarbra with a Z? Hey, Zarbra.\u201d<\/p>\n
But I cannot get very far; we are both laughing. Laughing hard.<\/p>\n
Diana stammers her way through the rejection letter: Thank you for sending us your poem. Although we cannot publish it, we want to encourage young writers. Keep trying.<\/p>\n
\u201cKeep trying,\u201d Diana says. Then, \u201cDamn. In my memory it was really good.\u201d<\/p>\n
And I am still laughing, and she is still laughing. But she is crying, too.<\/p>\n
P<\/p>\n
erhaps Diana never should have peeled that paper back. That was over ten years ago. I no longer spend summers on the island. I left the cupboard husband. I followed a job to the Midwest. For a while, Diana and I stayed in touch. Late-night phone calls, the sound of ice clinking in a glass. Gradually the spaces between calls lengthened. Satellite calls, intermittent. No less love, just less and less to say.<\/p>\n
Feint of heart.<\/p>\n
I wrote a letter to my love and on the way I dropped it.<\/p>\n
Maybe stellar movement is not random. Maybe stars have intent. Maybe it is only the earth\u2019s rotation, prestidigitation. It gives the illusion of motion. Proper motion. Radial Motion.<\/p>\n
Or all arbitrary. Barbara Streisand dropped the A from her name. Arbitrary. It could have been the first R. Babara. Or second B\u2013Barara. She suffered agonizing stage fright. Rare, beautiful, amazing. Still she suffered.<\/p>\n
Our sad and solitary but somehow sublime spirals.<\/p>\n
We twirl and swirl, island universes all. n<\/p>\n
Joan Connor is a professor at Ohio University and a former professor at USM\u2019s Stonecoast MFA program.\u00a0 Her short story collection, History Lessons<\/i>, won an AWP award and a Pushcart Prize. She lives in Athens, Ohio, and Belmont, Vermont.<\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Winterguide 2016 By Joan Connor We sit and drink, two good friends, in our forties now. We usually drink on Fridays after my husband has left our summer cottage on the island to take the ferry to the bus to the car to drive back to D.C. Diana is my best friend on the island. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":12121,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[112],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12120","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12120","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12120"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12120\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12136,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12120\/revisions\/12136"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12121"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12120"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12120"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12120"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}