Say a woman, Sarah, reads in the newspaper about Betsy Clarke, her former best friend from childhood. Say the article describes how Betsy has just won twenty-six million in the New York Lottery. What if Sarah hasn’t thought about Betsy in years? That they haven’t as much as exchanged a Christmas card in over two decades.
Suppose Sarah sets the newspaper down on her kitchen table, and thinks long and hard about Betsy, how way back when they did almost everything together, even swearing that they’d die for each other should the need ever arise. Say they loved to come up with more and more terrifying scenarios where just such a sacrifice might need to be made (for example Betsy rescuing Sarah from a burning house, and Sarah rescuing Betsy, as inept at swimming as she was at singing, from drowning.) They were “Betsy and Sarah,” incomplete without the other, and everyone from back then knew it.
Say they’d lived on the same street, attended the same elementary and high schools, and only parted ways when Betsy had traveled across the country to Penn State to earn a degree in biology. Say Sarah had remained on the West Coast, heartbroken, her hard-nosed parents insisting that she take the performing arts scholarship from UCLA. At first she and Betsy had exchanged letters and phone calls almost weekly, but as their course and workloads grew, and social circles widened, the contact lessened. Sometime in their junior year they’d lost touch entirely.
Say several years later, Sarah moved to Garden City, New York, with her husband, his brokerage firm having transferred him to their headquarters there. Say she’d remembered learning from a friend of a friend that Betsy, still single as far as she knew, was an elephant behaviorist at Central Park Zoo. Shortly after her arrival, she’d found Betsy’s number in the phone book, but somehow couldn’t bring herself to dial the number. Say she’d put on weight, and felt and looked so much older than thirty. She was also starting to think that maybe she’d married the wrong man.
Say several times over the next few months, she promised herself that she’d phone Betsy just as soon as she’d dropped those ten pounds, underwent a makeover, and sorted out her marital problems. But say she doesn’t do any of those things. Let’s go down the road where Sarah takes the Band-Aid approach to her marriage, and gives birth to a daughter, and two years later, a son. Say when the daughter is five and the son three, and her husband is on his third affair, only then does Sarah accept that the marriage is over. All that puts Betsy clear out of her mind for quite some time.
Say over the ensuing years, though, she’d thought again and again of Betsy, but somehow never did find the right mood or time to dial that number. And now Betsy shows up in the newspaper article, having had the most extraordinary of good fortune. Let’s have Sarah walk from the kitchen and upstairs to her bedroom closet. On the top shelf in her closet is a pink, floral-patterned hat-box. Inside the hat-box are all the letters and cards she’d chosen to keep over the years: the pile wrapped with the red silk ribbon are Betsy’s correspondences.
Let’s have her unwrap the red ribbon with shaky hands and, working from the bottom of the pile up to the top, read every card and letter Betsy ever sent. Say she’s flooded with memories and emotions, sometimes laughing aloud, and later crying. Best Friends Always, (no matter what!) Just what was it that had stopped her from picking up the phone all those times? How pathetic did all that seem now? She hadn’t felt such loss since her divorce, since her daughter, and just last year her son, had both left home to attend college. Say she can’t sit straight on her bed she’s so overcome. For, whatever about before Betsy’s windfall, Sarah can never phone her former best friend now, and most certainly can’t visit Central Park Zoo and pretend to “bump” into her.
Say, through the writing of this story, the writer has grown to cherish “Sarah and Betsy” and wants to give them a different ending, wants to reunite them? Then the writer would have to rewrite the story from beginning to end, making different choices next time around. For, the way the story is written here, the “says” taken, there is only one possible ending. |
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