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There are always pictures in the clouds, but it was too dark to see them the night I kissed another girl on a Sydney beach.
We’d been friends for years but hadn’t seen each other for a few. As luck would have it, though we’re Canadian, we happened to be in Sydney at the same time. Our dads, old friends who flew together when they were our age, attempted to handle public relations for us, but the phone numbers they gave us mixed up the local and international dialing codes.
I waffled around, enraptured by the Bondi beach backpacker lifestyle for a while. I was, possibly for the first time in my life, free, and I had no idea what to do with the freedom. I booked a plane ticket to New Zealand for Christmas. I saw some of the city sights. I had lamb and eggs for my first breakfast. I made a vague plan to head up to Alice Springs, sometime. Before Christmas. When was I leaving? My left shoulder shrugged involuntarily at the question. My answers were vague and uneasy, directionless. Then one day an e-mail connected.
I stayed in Sydney for a girl.
I walked home with her hand in mine and her lipstick on my neck the morning after. We tumbled in the sand after wading in the ocean while the sun rose.
But after we shared a shower and went to bed, it was over. By mid-morning’s sunlight, beating cruelly on our hangovers, we returned to discussing boys.
Joan showed up in the lobby of my hostel looking grown up. Who is this woman waiting for me? Who is this woman I am drinking with who reminds me that we once shared a bathtub naked before our first birthdays?
I remembered going out for dinner with our families once in Toronto, we couldn’t have been more than 10 or 11 at the time. Joan wore a plaid skirt, her hair cut in a short bob, and makeup. I remember the makeup because I think Joan being allowed to wear it was what convinced my parents to allow me to wear it too.
Summers at her cottage on Wabamun lake dot my little girl memories. I remember the waterslide that had been constructed down a hill and all the way into the lake, and going back to her room that night to listen to Glass Tiger on her cassette player, a small black ghetto blaster. It's funny now to remember those little things that defined growing up in the 80s – changing out of our bathing suits and into mismatched fluorescent slouch socks.
The camaraderie didn't always extend to her birthday parties. She had a best friend who lived with her in the city – I grew up in a town about 20 minutes drive from the city. I felt like I was second best. Her city friends, while they never went out of their way to make me feel unwelcome, left me feeling like an outsider. It was the same in Sydney when we went out with her friends – they were nice to me but I never got the feeling that they actually liked me.
Younger than that even, one of my earliest memories is of a sleepover at her house. We kept trying to sneak past her parents' bedroom so that we could go outside and play in the front yard. We were little – I can't remember how old but I remember doorknobs being about eye level. Sometimes we'd get as far as the living room but usually we'd get as far as her parents' bedroom door before her dad's voice would be raised, sounding like he really meant it, telling us to get back to bed. But we kept trying until we were too tired, the cool outside night tantalizing and magical.
The summer I was 17, I visited my grandmother in Toronto, and I arranged with Joan's mum to have dinner at her house as a surprise for Joan. I have never been so warmly welcomed. It was the last time I saw her mum before she died.
Joan and I sat up in her room and listened to Tori Amos. It seems so long ago now, like somehow there was a Before and an After to our friendship and that was the end of Before. The music was the only thing we had in common. The visit was almost ethereal; our lives removed themselves in completely different directions. I remember her mum's china set, patterned with herbs and their Latin names, because it was what I focused on when I made the mistake of bringing up our parents' divorces at the dinner table. Her mum was quiet. That was the night I found out her dad had left them for another woman. I never knew that part of the story.
In Sydney, everything was released. I asked about her mum because I had to. I didn't feel obligated; I felt like a distant Aunt had died. I was sorry that there was no way I could have made the funeral. She spoke without crying and I was drawn back to the memory of the night I heard that the cancer had won. I had sat on my bed in my basement room, walls painted electric blue, and cried. The hotel pub on the beach was far from that night, the cool breeze flaunting the scent of culture shock under our noses. I brought an old picture of our mums in Hawai'i. They were dressed in pretty sundresses. They had only wanted to wade into the ocean, but the ocean had other plans in mind, soaking them. In the photo they are hanging onto each other for balance, completely drenched. She had it in her back pocket when we re-enacted it mere hours later.
I saw our connection then, as we shared our first beer. Hell yes we're going for a beer, we've never done that before. When we were with her friends, our worlds had been very different. But one on one our bodies remembered those summers on the lake as forest princesses. I won't go as far as saying we were tomboys, although we certainly leaned that way more than the direction of pretty skirts and lipstick. We wore it growing up the same way hoods wore leather jackets. I suppose the correct term is with attitude; I don't feel that I can say that about her for sure because I've only known such small parts of her life. But that night in the pub we pounded back drinks and shot pool like the blokes.
For six months in Sydney we talked about boys, specifically how much we liked to sleep with them, punctuated by the occasional, “Oh but don’t cheat on your boyfriend! Be strong!” followed the next morning by the sly, “So, I noticed someone didn’t sleep in the girls’ room last night…” Every now and then an email from the other arrived when either of us were on the road about some random bloke and a great night but never any emotional stuff. Never any thought of love. Love was never asked about, never implied – not with boys or ever with each other. Was it part of the tough girl image? Was it because she was scared of dying of cancer and refused to let anyone love her because she knows how hard it is to lose someone from that terrible disease? Was it because I had a boyfriend?
The morning after we kissed on the beach I loaned Joan some clean clothes while we washed the sandy wet ones. We’d forgotten to get dry clothes when we stumbled back from the beach, instead heading directly to the shower we shared. We ran back from the shower not all fitting in my one small towel. We ran down the hallway thankful no one was up yet, a mixture of giggles and horrified exclamations (“Jennifer Rae Barrett, I am naked! I am in the hallway and I am naked!”) while I fumbled for my key in the sand encrusted pocket of my pants.
I still remember how she looked standing on the sidewalk in the morning sun, hungover, smoking. I remember the softly curved shape of her breasts unbound by a bra, accentuated by the blue weave of my favourite shirt as she inhaled while I hid behind my hair and tried to obscure my staring.
That was when I realized we would never talk about what happened the night before. How would we ever tell our fathers? What on earth did we have in common? She wanted to drive fast sports cars with loud stereos and well-groomed men. I was engaged to be married and not a full hour ago had gotten off the phone with my betrothed. Morning was tense, but we didn't acknowledge the tension. There were no soft girlish tendencies that usually follow such a night. No soft caresses from gentle fingers moving each other's hair from our eyes. No tears. No words of promised love. Nothing said to deny, because that would also acknowledge. We were just two young women bold enough to face up to a lifetime of infrequent incidences of friendship.
When the tension ran too deep, I reminded her that we had made plans to get our navels pierced. As luck would have it, we'd heard of a piercing place not too far from where I was staying. Phoebe, my travel mate, was up by then, and decided to come along and get her tongue pierced. I was thankful for the distraction she provided.
Joan left me on a street corner, turning toward the direction of her bus stop. I paused to watch her go. I watched her pull her short hair back into a stubby ponytail, listened to her say that she needed a haircut. All her life she'd had short hair but I'd never known until then that she chose it because she liked it that way. I remember the place on her back where her skin came out from under her shirt and disappeared with the curve of her spine into the top of her pants, her mostly bare shoulders brown from the sun. She walked without looking back. My hand reached out. I wanted to call out, to ask her to wait, “But what about last night on the beach, Joan Dupree? How can you walk away like it never happened?”
I said nothing. I will never know if things would have been different if I had said anything. If I had made a squeak in the back of my throat and she had turned. If she had been waiting for me to say something because she couldn't. If she didn't know how to explain to her friends like I didn't know how to explain to the man I was supposed to marry.
How could I just let her go? I don't know her demons or the inner gallows she was facing. I know our families. I know how shocked they would have been. I know the atmosphere I grew up in, it framed my thoughts. My culture had been one where women didn't have nights together on beaches. It wasn't so much that it was taboo, it just wasn't done.
I wanted to cry because neither of us had voices when we parted. I want to think now that I would do things differently, that I'd say or do something, but watching her back walking away from me in my memory I am slowly accepting things for what they were, not what I wanted them to be.
