5th grade friend

5th grade friend

In fifth grade, my best friend was Wendy Wilkes. I think we were friends because we had so much in common---Wendy and Gwendie, for instance. Plus we were both shy girls who made good grades so the teacher liked us. We both played the piano, and sometimes played duets on the old upright in our living room. We both had stamp collections, both were the oldest child, both wore training bras and had started our periods. We both had mothers who were resourceful and could stretch a nickel to six cents. Our mothers dominated our families and so our fathers were mostly in the background. My father didn’t hang himself, though, as Wendy’s did a few years after we were in 5th grade. We had sleepovers, at least a few, and I remember that Wendy had a room of her own that her mother had built onto the back of the house—not had it built, but built it herself, including installing bookshelves and cabinets in addition to the closet. I was so impressed. I shared a small bedroom with my sister and there was never enough storage space.

After fifth grade, we were never best friends again, although I knew Wendy and saw her at school. She wasn’t in advanced classes, and I was. She played clarinet in the marching band, I played the piano to accompany the glee club. She got shyer and shyer and I got more outgoing. But in our junior year, something happened. At first I noticed that Wendy hardly spoke to anyone in the hallways. Then one afternoon my mother gave her a ride home when she came to pick me up at school, and Wendy barely responded to my mother’s questions. Shortly after that, we had an assembly program—maybe it was a pep rally, and Wendy sat with the band in their section of the bleachers. Just sat, with her clarinet upright between her knees, and a soft smile on her face. She never looked at anyone, or spoke to anyone, or played a note during the whole program.

Within a day or two, word came around from Mrs. Davidson, our Dean of Students, that Wendy was in the hospital in West Palm Beach—a psychiatric hospital. They thought she was schizophrenic, and no, she wouldn’t be coming back to school.

Twice over the next year or so, Wendy came home for a visit and would give me a call. Once I remember we went to the beach with some other girls, and Wendy was cheerful and animated and playful and seemed to be having a wonderful time. But then on the day she went back to the hospital, her mother brought her by my house to say goodbye, and Wendy was silent again, staring and smiling.

Every time I think of Wendy it worries me that we had so much in common, and then one of us developed a mental illness. Was this something I should worry about, too? How does one know, from the inside of yourself, that you are getting less and less normal? For me, who had never felt really normal, not at all a typical girl, this early and first exposure to a mental illness was confusing and alarming. Although I felt sad, very sad, for Wendy, I was also concerned about myself. And even today, after a few days alone, I begin thinking that it’s not healthy to be too much of a hermit, too unsocial, too much inside myself. It’s Wendy, memories of Wendy, pushing me to be more “normal.” It’s fifth grade all over again.