Between Friends Read Free Page B

between believing them myself, inhabiting them joyfully and consciously, considering ways to expand them, and being irritated by others’ concentration on them when they’d developed, sometimes to my horror, without prior thought.
    Breaking into Carole King’s “I Feel the Earth Move” during a lecture at Cal State had been spontaneous, while ripping my shirt down the front in the wind tunnel in New Mexico had been planned days ahead of time as a joke.
    The first went over incredibly well, and I often got requests to reprise the performance. The second . . . well, that wasn’t considered eccentric or amusing so much as extraordinarily unprofessional, and I’d spent months rebuilding my credibility.
    Singing and funny clothing? Apparently acceptable. Brief nudity in a wind tunnel? Not the way to advance a career. I’ve learned lessons. There were always more to come.
    So I was a joke, to some. To others I was nearly mystical. Those were the ones I avoided. Because while I could live up to and eventually overcome a joke, I couldn’t ever live up to that mythical being the others want me to be: goddess of air, of wind, a pure element, a sacrament. They were looking for something to believe in and thought I was available for duty.
    The breeze picked up, and then I did turn, slowly, a solo waltz on the balcony, and as I did I saw Suyai, a student, one of those who lay in wait for me, like a child spying on fairies.
    I didn’t acknowledge her presence, and she pressed against the glass, her eyes intent, the scarf she had wound about her neck flashing with silver thread. I had little strength for a proper twirl, and ended with my hands clasping the railing again, the breeze a memory slipping past me.
    Suyai owed me nothing. And I’d asked nothing of her but a ride to the airport. There were others who owed me. But what currency were my notes written in? Some owed me money, some owed me appreciation, some owed me, at the very least, time, maybe a Christmas card. But nobody owed me what I most needed.
    Except, perhaps, Ali. Because Ali owed me everything. Or she always said she did. And she was the one person I couldn’t ask. So why Naples? Hurricane season didn’t start for months. And maybe, for me, hurricane season was a thing of the past.
    I needed to see Ali, certainly, always, but the person my thoughts kept coming back to was Letty. Was I not there when she was conceived, there when she was born?
    I was. I was there; I saw her wailing and infuriated, hauled from her mother who lay pale and exhausted on the table but clutching my hand with the inherent strength of motherhood already.
    And no matter where the wind took me, I went back to southwest Florida. I didn’t just keep the house for a base during hurricane season, a place to house the other researchers, my students. I’d kept it for Letty; for my friend, Ali; for the only connections that were family to me.
    So I’d seen Letty plenty, not every year, but sometimes more than once in a year. And, as if that angry birth had been brought about by my presence, I most often saw her mad. I saw her wailing and infuriated on her second birthday, flinging cake at the dog. Wailing and infuriated at six when her mother wouldn’t allow her out on the catamaran with me. Indeed, most of what I knew of Letty was her fury.
    Ali was never furious.
    I’d like to think she got all that anger from Benny, but that would just be convenient. Benny wasn’t an angry man, just a solid, slightly boring one. He wasn’t boring to Ali, though; I knew that. No matter how the idea of marriage and settling down bored me, the two of them were as strong an example of a conventional life as I’d ever seen. They were, always had been, kind to each other. They could have been poster children for an enduring marriage.
    So that left me as progenitor of that rage. How much more did Letty get from me? What had she inherited besides a weakness for anger? That was what really drove me to