BEVERLY

I remember the dress that I was wearing the day that we met.  It was white cotton with lace embedded in the material, sleeveless and mini length.  We were in class but on a break.  "You are not fat at all, your brother said that you were fat!"  I looked down at myself and it was true, there wasn't much there.  She was twelve and I was thirteen.

I had spent the summer in the land of abundant and beautiful food.  Sioux City, Iowa.  I remember opening the fridge one day and there was a huge cheesecake that my aunt had made, a great rectangular thing piled high with homegrown strawberries from her little strawberry patch out back.  They drank milk with every meal and my cousin Ron sprinkled sugar on his pancakes.  I mean to say, poured.


At home in California there was no food.  At ten I had awoken one morning to an empty apartment with no food.  I found flour, sugar and water and mixed them together and ate it to end the empty pain I had in my stomach.

"She is a compulsive eater," my grandmother to my mother.  So I was... told.

When I returned home from Iowa, my mom got diet pills from the nurse that she worked with unbeknownst to the doctor. I began to thin down.  I did more than that, I became anorexic and stopped eating.  Mom took me to my grandfather in Palm Springs and he coaxed me back to life.  I never became fat again until I had my Olivia.

So began our friendship in 1963.  Beverly was my brother's friend to start out.  She was 12 and he was 16 but we shared her.  She had an IQ of close to 200.  She had written journals from childhood that she stacked in the bottom of her closet.  She had been belly dancing since a baby.  She was warm and empathetic, much like my Olivia,  and she seemed to collect people of all sorts and came to know just about everyone.

She had tried to kill herself before I met her.  I sat in the car one night with her parents waiting for her session with the shrink to be over.  She came out of the building, crossed the street and got into the car.  "What was it like?  What do you say?"  I asked.  I kind of could not imagine such a thing.  "Oh I just make stuff up.  I never tell him the truth."