I have been her kind

Rayanne Graff, a character on My So Called Life has been getting alot of chatter online lately. Maybe because MSCL is streaming on Netflix, maybe because of (gulp) ninties nostalgia (god I'm old), or maybe because we as a culture are more willing to look at previously marginalized characters. Whatever the reason I've also had Rayanne on the mind lately. Rayanne is both the corruptor and educator of the main character on the show, Angela Chase, who is that wonderful breed of innocent, with the lines of Eartha Kitt's "I Want to Be Evil" running through her head, "what ever I've got I'm eager to lose." Their sweet, obsessive friendship is archetypal, a phenomenon all women are familiar with (described far better than I could here by Emma Straub).

I've had many Rayannes in my life, wild girls who I worshiped, whose friendships I sought and cherished and lost. I have also been the Rayanne, I've been the slut and the betrayer, the bad influence, and the friend that brings voice to unspoken desires (or cosigns bullshit). But there was one girl, one woman, who was my true Rayanne, the first one, the one by which all others were measured. She gave me license to be someone I was petrified of being, to even consider it. She saw some force in me that I wasn't sure of myself. I was seventeen. I was afraid. But she helped me see that I was also strong and strange and full of fire. Her name was Clare Amory.

Clare, at eighteen, smoked Marlboro Reds. She read Anne Sexton and sang Roberta Flack. She was a dancer, a poet. She listened to Huggy Bear at eight in the morning at a volume that shook the clapboards of our dorm, audible from outside the building. She wanted nothing but heat, tank tops and swimming, and kept her dorm room sweltering, the radiators hissing and spitting, while she ran three seperate fans and had the window open. She made her two bunk beds into one double bed so that her room felt somehow more like a studio apartment. We would lie on that double bed leaning on elbows and discuss road trips, mix tapes, poetry, all boys, particular boys, including a boy she was stalking, physically stalking. Together we hid in bushes by the playing fields, loitered by his car in the parking lot. This was before cell phones and the internet, when someone's whereabouts were a mystery to be solved over the course of a day. We were gumshoes without the trench coats, we were partners in crime.

We smoked cigarettes together; we walked down Lansdowne street, got turned away from clubs; we slouched through shows at the Middle East; we drank wine; we took hot baths together, our legs tangled, our hair wet; we drove the dark roads of Massachusetts around reservoirs and through office parks. At night we would park in a lot frindged by woods and dance in the headlights to an 80's compilation she bought off the tv. The music would blare from the open car doors and we were demons pounding the asphalt with our hooves, we were selkies too far from the sea, hemmed in by our skin. We were in love with each other the way girls are, when they are young, when they want desperately to be sisters, when they are both strong and lost. Or at least I loved her, worshipped her. She was larger than life. She was the Hollywood sign and I was a starving actress fresh off the plane. We had art in our blood, and farms and Maine and oceans. And dead dogs and broken fathers.

I helped her dye her hair. She showed me how to steal a bra from a department store. We bought prom dresses together. She wore a short silver slip, it was petalled, winged. She was shimmering, lanky, her blond hair down her back. She was a nymph, a sprite, an etheral insect. But with mary jane clogs she spraypainted silver to match. She danced and danced and danced.

She needed me then. She needed a home. And while, the summer after she graduated she lived in my mother's house, I was never there. Always with the boyfriend, always turning away from her. I didn't even realize it, too much the self-involved teenager. Then one day she replaced me as, I'm sure now, she needed to. Maybe with her own Rayanne, though maybe she retained that role. We did not keep in touch, but I kept tabs on her over the years. She became a dancer, a rock star. She found a man to love who loved her back. I always assumed I would see her. I wanted to see her. We knew the same people, lived in the same city. I constantly mistook people for her, someone on the street, a long haired blond in my yoga class, a tall thin woman at the rail of the North Haven ferry.  This past winter Clare passed away. Cancer. She was thirtyfive years old. It had been seventeen years since I had seen her. I cried for days. For her, for her family, for never knowing the powerful, magical person she became.

Hemingway's Province

My hands smell of lavender, 

of verbena.

Hidden beneath the tufts of silk, the fur of a mouse,

a collapsed web, 

I found a kernel bound small and tight.

In it were things that I had been thinking for months,

for years.

In it, parched and withered, undernourished

looking for courage, waiting for harvest. 

How many miles runs the road south?

An invitation burned on palm leaves.

Palms burn, an invitation. 

Take my hand and I will no longer be a fern.

Not cold and bowed in the shade, 

but crisp, singed at the edges.