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There were 7 of us in the old white house on a rock overlooking the Atlantic Ocean last week. We’d gathered because this is the year we all turn forty. We’d traveled from California, all over New England, a small town in Georgia and New York City to be together. We're single, married and soon-to-be single again. Some of us have kids and some don't. One of us is extremely pregnant. Some of us have high-octane careers. Others of us work at home with our high-octane families, a few of us do both. The majority of us have been friends since our elementary school days. Three of us carpooled to nursery school squished into the backseats of our mothers’station wagons. But we found each other as a group in the throes of junior high school angst and have held on to each other for dear life ever since.
We weren't the popular girls. We weren't the really cool girls. In junior high when other girls our age were out with boys, coming to school on Monday morning with stories about sneaking their parents’ beer over the weekend, we were still doing sleepovers, singing along to the Grease soundtrack and not understanding all the words. (Pussy wagon?) All the way through high school our activities included ice skating parties, constructing gingerbread houses at Christmas, playing charades at birthdays and miniature golfing outings. We were young for our age that way. And we weren't in a real hurry to grow up. The few of the 7 of us who did start going out with boys and experimenting with drinking…we counted on the safety of game night and Grease sing-a-longs to come back to.
Sure, there were other friendships for each of us growing up, some very close. But the 7 of us stayed connected to our group as life got more complicated even if, at times, it was only through one person in it. We donned the requisite bridesmaid sateen to be in each other's weddings. We flew and road-tripped to see each other in far-away states. We went on adventures in foreign countries together. We visited each other in hospitals through scary times. We’ve cheered each other on: degrees earned, Emmys won, children adopted, traumas survived. We’ve soothed each other's hurts: men who've disappointed, dreams that haven't yet come true, a marriage that seemed to crumble overnight, a longed-for child lost. And, this past week, listening to 7 voices talking about work, weight, love, family, money, hopes and worries it's clear that our friendship still is a safe place for us to rest from the world.
Still, I don’t think any of us were prepared for what happened after we’d cooked dinner one night in the house by the sea and were relaxing in the big, open living room. Lucy, who has always acted as the unofficial group historian, unearthed from her suitcase a videocassette tape of a Halloween costume party she’d hosted 25 years earlier in her parents’ basement. In school, the 7 of us had worked feverishly on drama club plays and we'd already laughed our way through the painfully funny results at earlier get-togethers over the years. This was brand-new material. Where had Lucy been hiding this one?! This wasn’t some of us in costumes reciting scripted lines while the rest of us toiled unseen backstage. It was all 7 of us in our awkward, unscripted, pubescent glory… We had to press play.
The giant flat screen television in the corner of the beach house living room filled with fuzzy images of all 7 of us and about a dozen other costumed high school sophomores in Lucy’s finished basement. One by one, our fifteen-year-old selves circa 1985 come down
