Snaggled

My oldest friend, my best friend when I was growing up in Queens, now lives in Frankfurt. 

The last time we saw each other, nearly a decade ago, we met for lunch at a restaurant on the corner of 39th and Madison. She had kept her childhood apartment in Kew Gardens and was back for a visit.  

We grew up together, on the same floor of a building, racing in our socks down the hall between our apartments.  Tall and blond, she wore clothes that no one else did and in a way that made her look unique. 

Other kids picked on her for it, but for me it had the opposite effect.  I wished her clothes were mine.  When I took guitar lessons at our school on Saturday mornings, her dad enrolled her, too, and we shared my father’s guitar.  I took up ballet, and there she was in Mildred Roger’s Dance Studio on Lefferts Boulevard, doing pliés by my side.

Her parents were European, and she was trilingual.  I admired her for her sophistication, yet it was her silliness that matched my own. We made each other laugh so hard that no sound came out of our mouths.  I didn’t have that with anyone else.  

I don’t remember our first meeting:  She was always in my life.  I loved her dad’s Italian cooking; she loved the lebne and pita my mother prepared. 

I was astonished by the orderliness of her home, and she thrived on the constant activity in mine.  I loved how she spoke in Italian with her hands, how different she became when she spoke German. How easy she was to be with all the time. 

How the more myself I was, the more she seemed to adore me.  I felt such love, like we belonged with each other. 

When we were older, we both found jobs in midtown Manhattan. One day I suggested we call in sick. I didn’t have to convince her: “Let’s go to Jones Beach!” she said. We ran in and out of the waves, taking pictures of each other in action, and later we sat back to back on a towel, me in a pink polka-dot Fiorucci sundress, so happy that we had this day to ourselves instead of being at our jobs. 

Occasionally, we would meet for a quick lunch at the rooftop dining area of a two-story building on Third and 40th, basking in the sun, eating our sandwiches, catching up.  “Can you believe we’ve known each other so long?” she would say. “I would be bonkers without you.” And I felt the same.  I would return to my office feeling as if I’d had a shot of adrenaline, revived, fresh. 

Time passed, and I married and had two sons; she remained single. I left Queens for the suburbs. Life was busy, and we saw each other less frequently, but I always looked forward to being with her again. I still yearned for those moments where we lost ourselves in laughter, even if it was only once or twice a year.

Just before she moved to Frankfurt, we went to see the second “Sex and the City” movie at the Ziegfeld.  It was a sea of women, groups of besties, and I was glad she was mine, sitting there beside me. Over dinner at Il Circo, where she knew the owner, I gave her a present, a ring, for her 45th birthday. She had complimented mine, so I got her the same. 

The stone looked like a solitary diamond, but it was fake.  I watched intently, waiting for her reaction. “Oh my god, I love this!” she said, and I bounced in my shoes with excitement as she put it on.  We lay our hands side by side. “This is perfect for the subway,” she said, and then she swept her bangs out of her face with her ringed hand for effect, her green eyes flashing at me. 

Shortly after that, she was no longer a New Yorker.Of course I knew our friendship would change with her move to Europe.  But she would have her place in Queens, and I could visit her in Germany, couldn’t I?

When I thought about it, many of my friends had moved out of the city – Michele to Mexico, Belinda to California, Christine to Seattle, Leslye to her country house upstate. I kept in touch with all of them; sometimes we became closer over the years.Up until that lunch on Madison, I hadn’t seen her for a while. 

In anticipation of our meeting, I made my day free for her. I took the afternoon off from work. I arranged for my teenage boys to be picked up from school.  I dressed with care, more care than usual.  I made sure to wear our ring, and I twirled it around my finger.I stood outside the restaurant and saw her approaching, ever so punctual. She was walking down Madison, wearing a longish cotton striped dress and sneakers, a big bag on her shoulder, waving at me. When our eyes caught each other’s, I saw her smile, and I felt my own, so glad to see her.

Right away we fell into the old rhythm of our conversations.  We laughed with little provocation and with an abandon I didn’t know was available to me anymore.  In her open mouth, I saw that her tooth had become a little snaggled: a snaggletooth. 

“What the heck?” I said.  “I know,” she said.  “I should get it fixed.”  “How is your mom?” I asked. “Good.” When I asked her about her friends in Germany, she said, “Aw Les, you know you are my best friend!”“Do you ever hear from Michael?” I said.

She had dated Mike D. from the Beastie Boys for two years.  “No, but I hear that he is happily married in California.”

 “How’s your job?” I continued and then, before she could answer, “Oh, I just finished a book you would love: ‘The Nazi Officer’s Wife.’”“Shhhhh. Don’t say ‘Nazi,’” she said.  

I didn’t understand.“It’s illegal to say it in Germany,” she explained.

“What fucked up country are you living in?  Do you have any Jewish friends there, I hope?”

Not one, she told me.

And then, “There’s a great Lebanese restaurant in Frankfurt that I love.”“Do you remember when we each bought the same exact scarf from Bendel’s without knowing it?” she said.  “Uncanny,” I said, and we laughed again. 

After lunch she said she was heading uptown. “I’ll walk with you,” I said. I didn’t consider that she might not want me to come along.

The building next to Grand Central had been razed to the ground, and the station stood in all its glory, magnificent, like it was supposed to have looked 100 years ago.  “Here,” she said, “let’s take a selfie.” And on the corner of 42nd and Madison, with the station in the background, we huddled close, trying to fit in the frame.  We fumbled with the phone and the angle and getting out of people’s way. 

In the end, when we finally snapped the photo, we were laughing so hard you could almost hear the picture.  Maybe she hoped I would leave after that, get on a train to go home to Westchester, but that didn’t occur to me then.We walked a little more, sat on a bench in front of Barnes & Noble on Fifth and 45th.  I wanted to see if they had the book about the Nazi officer’s wife.

When she said she was going to Anthropologie, there was something about her demeanor that told me I wasn’t invited.  She took a cigarette from her purse and lit it. She didn’t normally smoke in front of me; it was something I knew she did in secret.  But now she sat smoking brazenly, and I noticed she wasn’t wearing the ring I got her. 

I said, “What are you looking for at Anthro?”  

“Nothing in particular. I just have some things to do.” She stubbed her cigarette out on the pavement, beneath the twisting toe of her white sneaker, and got up to kiss me goodbye.  She crossed Fifth Avenue before the light changed. I turned and headed back downtown to Grand Central to catch my train, feeling like I had a crush on a boy who wasn’t interested in me and whose cues I had misread. 

I had been deliriously happy, and suddenly I wasn’t.  With each step I became more and more deflated. I felt exhausted, as if my life, which I thought was a good one, was missing something vital, a color maybe, like electric blue.  I wished I could have spent the day with her, doing nothing, walking in the city, stopping into shops we liked, like we used to do when we were young.  

On the train, I looked at the picture we had just taken. I examined her tooth that was sticking out in a funny angle and realized that my bottom teeth weren’t so great either.  They had shifted into the beginning of a jumble.It was still early. 

I stopped at the grocery store on my way home to buy things to make dinner. I ran into a friend, another mom, in the frozen aisle. We had the usual conversation – kids, varsity soccer, the glorious weather, blah blah blah.  “Don’t forget tennis tomorrow and Mother’s Day brunch at the club,” she said over her shoulder.

When I got home, I took off the ring.  I was alone, and no one needed me for the moment.  I drove into town and poked my head in at the local orthodontist, the one who had put braces on my boys.  “Can you fix my teeth?” I asked.  “Sure,” he said. “Hop in the chair and let’s take a look.”