My Unlikely Friend

By Lou Turner

 

 

 

 

She was an unlikely friend, this stooped old woman with platinum hair and bright red lips.   I met her one evening when she came to my door with a neatly wrapped square of aluminum foil.

“I brought this for your little dog.”  She smiled up at me with the glazed eyes of old age.

 I guessed her at near eighty, and my little dog was an overweight Yellow Lab who loved to wander into the front yard when I wasn’t looking.   At not even five foot tall, this woman most likely stood nose-to-nose with him.

“My husband and I usually share a steak on Friday,” she told me.  “We saved the bone for your puppy.”

I thanked her and started to close the door, then thought of my grandmother in her final years.  She took cookies and flowers to her neighbors, simply because she was lonely after my grandfather died.  I caught the woman at the end of my driveway.

“I’m sorry,” I told her.  “I didn’t get your name.”

That was all it took.  Her eyes brightened and she stood there on the curb for the next hour.   She told me her name was Jo, short for Josephine,  and she was alone most of the week because her husband traveled.  She had four cats, three were found along the road in South Carolina.  Her daughter, Rita, lived in California and was named after Rita Hayworth.  New York was her birthplace.  Peggy was the name of the girl who cleaned her house once a week, and she had once worked for the New Yorker, where she met her current husband, who was thirty years her junior.

“At first I thought he was a homosexual,” she blurted out.  “He was too pretty not to be.  You know James Dean was a homosexual.”

Without taking a noticeable breath she continued.

“I had the prettiest legs in New York.”  She pulled her oversized T-shirt up to her thighs and turned her still trim ankle.

“Clark Gable told me that once.  I was the cigarette girl at the Copa.  He was a regular.  Sometimes he had bad breath,” she whispered.

Mosquitos landed on my legs for an evening snack, but I was so mesmerized by this  woman I couldn’t be bothered to slap them away.

What a life she had led.  Such a gem, right there in my own neighborhood, and I almost let her slip away.  I silently thanked my grandmother.

The next day the woman called. 

“Do you get the paper?” she asked without saying hello.

“Look at the section for local stuff,” she continued, not waiting for an answer.

“There’s a story about a writer’s group that meets once a week.”

“I would love to go, but I don’t drive,” she said.

“It would probably be a lot of fun,” she screeched in her Brooklyn accent.

I finally got it and asked if she’d like to go together.   Before I hung up, I again got glimpses of her life.  She used to write short stories and had several published when she lived in California.  One of them was about the crush she had on her doctor.  She hated living in the South because of the heat and the bugs, and she was related to Don Ameche, the actor.  He used to make spaghetti in her small apartment on 57^th Street.  And her best friend was Darla Durbin who became a famous actress and always wanted her to come to Hollywood.

“Hollywood was too weird for me,” she said.  “I knew all about how it was out there, and I didn’t want any part of it.”

This was how our friendship went.  She talked.  I listened.  Sometimes she would ask me questions about my family, but always my answers would take her back to New York, or San Francisco, or some other part of the country where she and her young husband had lived. 

“I worked at the USO in Georgia.”  She told me when I said we’d have to miss class because I’d be in Savannah for two weeks. 

“The place had Christmas lights stapled all over the ceiling and it looked like you were  under the stars even in the daytime.  I would dance with soldiers before they were shipped over seas to fight in World War II.  I’m sure many of those boys that I held in my arms died over there.”

She said this as casually as when she told me her cousin April was a Jehovah’s Witness.

I picked her up on Thursday nights and dropped her off four hours later.  Usually I drove a red mustang convertible, but we couldn’t put the top down because she was afraid of swallowing bugs.

“My sister Evelyn knew a girl who choked to death on a June bug,” she said.

One night, she stood in her driveway wearing tan suede boots, a long yellow sweater over tight pink stretch pants, and beaded earrings that dangled nearly to her shoulders.

“Do you notice anything different?” she asked when she slid into the car.

I opened my mouth to speak.

“My hair!  Look at my hair!  It’s a different shade.  Isn’t it glamorous?”  She turned her doll-like head.

“My husband says it makes me look like Marilyn Monroe.”

I agreed and admired the pale whiffs of blonde that barely covered her baby-pink scalp.

“Marilyn was in New York for a while, you know,” she said.  “She would wear head scarves and big dark glasses so no one would notice her.  I saw her sitting alone at the café across from my office once.” She pushed at her hair in what I suspected was her Marilyn imitation.

“I whispered that I knew who she was but wouldn’t tell.  She lowered her glasses and winked at me.  The next day I bleached my hair blonde and it’s been that way for fifty years.”My interesting friend and I began to go other places together.  I took her to the grocery store on double coupon days, where she scrutinized every package and can. 

“I’m so allergic,” she told me.  “Some of the stuff they put in food can make me blow up like a Zeppelin.”

She flirted with everyone.  She told men in the produce aisle how to tell if a tomato was too ripe and the bag boy he should go to college.  Once, at the bookstore, she told a young man he looked like a movie star and should get to Hollywood right away. The tiny woman would bat her mascara thick lashes and swish her delicate hands through the air with the theatrics of a thirty’s film star.

One day she called and said, “Come on down a minute.   I’ve got something I want to show you.”

In her basement was a mass of metal and bolts that had been advertised on television as a Health Rider.  It was an exercise bicycle of sorts.  When you pedaled your feet, the handlebars moved back and forth.  The ad showed it being ridden like a mechanical bull.

“I can’t reach the pedals,” she said.  “Do you think you could look at it and see if they can be adjusted?”

It could, and in no time she was firmly seated and flailing around like a geriatric rodeo rider.

“I need to lose some weight,” she yelled over the squeaks and rattles.  “Look at my thighs!”  She patted her leg with one hand and held on for dear life with the other.