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Meeting of Minds
Listen as Mitchard talks with Senior Staff Editor Maureen Mackey about how the two friends met, how they maintained their friendship through some pivotal life events, and then endured a dramatic breach that ended up taking years to mend.If you have that one friend, you're rich. That one friend is different from all the others, dear as they may be.I met Jeanine on my first day of high school, more than 35 years ago, at the age of 13. Painfully shy, I had signed up for student council because I thought it might save me from wandering around a huge high school shamefully alone. It was still early in the day. I'd already lost my new green trench coat and couldn't remember which building my locker was in. Standing there in the office, miserable, I wanted to vanish into the paneling.
I heard a girl's voice: "Do you have a lot of friends?"
When I saw her—tiny, delicate, with beautiful eyelashes—I smiled and answered, "Are you kidding? I'm the girl nobody knows."
"Well, I'm nobody," Jeanine said.
That was it. The two of us were instant friends. For the next six years, Jeanine and I spent hours on the phone each weekday and virtually every weekend night together. As boys came and went, we drowned our sorrows in tomato soup. In my mother's old Chevy, we cruised the West Side of Chicago. We sat on Al Capone's grave one Halloween night. Lying on blankets under the stars, we'd talk of our dreams, pouring our hearts out.
Jeanine wanted to sing on the Broadway stage. I wanted to write a novel. "Why not two? Why not five?" she pressed me.
As high school progressed, I became a student council officer and made friends by the score. Jeanine? She preferred the sidelines. She was like the angel in my pocket. I never forsook her, never excluded her. Other friends could not understand our devotion, because we seemed like such opposites. But we weren't.
Neither of us got much attention at home. Jeanine's parents worked long hours. Mine had other fish to fry, and those fish swam at the bottom of a highball glass. I don't think my parents ever attended a single high school event of mine, though my mother made sure I dressed well—she wanted me to be the prettiest girl (and the thinnest).Jeanine and I remained a sorority of two, and even college didn't intervene. Neither did Jeanine's early unplanned motherhood during our freshman year. After her daughter, Gemma, was born, Jeanine moved back home. My mother, I'm proud to say, offered them both love and support.
Unfortunately, Mama didn't get to play grandma for real. After she was diagnosed with brain cancer and given just a few months to live, I married a boy who was only a pal so she could see me in a wedding gown. When my marriage was quietly annulled, I came home for good, finishing school and working as a waitress to help my younger brother get through high school.
Jeanine and I were together again, this time with a baby seat in the back of the car. We picked up where we left off, the Beach Boys on the radio as we cruised familiar routes.
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