Why Have Friends Who Aren't Friends?

It's difficult to say goodbye to friends you've known a long time. It's difficult to say goodbye to friends you've made in other countries, people who you perhaps worked with or mingled with at restaurants and bars and shared important events. Good friends support and listen to one another, help in times of need, share the good times along with the bad. However, with time, many friendships fade into oblivion, drifting on life-support with a sporadic email or two, until dwindling into nothing. On the other hand, there are those relationships that are formed and continue erratically, but from their inception, should never have developed.   

I met a woman two houses down from my own when I first moved to Courtenay, a young married woman with a 3-year-old girl and another baby on the way. Her husband, Nick, was a respected graphic designer with an office in town and she was a home mom and before you knew it, we were having coffee every morning in her kitchen while my daughter played with her daughter in the backyard. Babs was funny but difficult - her hyper behaviour, her inability to listen, her emotional ups and downs, her chain-smoking, her complaints about her husband and her recycling of the gruesome events regarding the cruelty of her adopted mother.
'Look at this scar on my neck,' she said, pointing to a 9-inch gash of nasty wound around her neck. 'I still don't know how I got this scar and my mother won't tell me. She says she got me that way.'

As time went on, we went to the same parties, the same bars and mingled with the same crowd, until I moved away to another community, at which time our friendship petered out and, when I moved out of the country altogether, we only sporadically communicated. On one of my vacations home, I discovered that her and the husband had parted ways and I phoned to see how she was doing. She asked me to stay with her next time and we'd catch up.

Next time was the following summer. Babs collected me at the bus terminal in Nanaimo, where I waited four hours for her, and drove to her condo in Comox, a little bit of a knock-down from the upper middle class home with acreage and pool where she had lived with Nick. She was distracted but talkative, oozing resentment through every pore.

The first night was okay. After a beer with dinner, she dragged out a magnum of wine and a pack of cigarettes and we sat out on the balcony and we drank and smoked and I listened. She regaled me with gossip about her job at the hospital, selling the house with Nick, buying her condo, her new neighbours, what her kids were doing and the ongoing problems she had with Nick. 'After he took up golf that was it. Golf, golf, golf. And guess who took care of the kids and the washing and the cooking and the cleaning?'

She took another drag of her cigarette and blew it off the balcony. 'He said he was tired of my drinking.' She rolled her eyes. 'And then because of him the kids got on my case. I'm not an alcoholic. Thank you. It was all the Nick show anyway.'

When she started in on Nick, there was no let-up. My ears got tired and I headed off to bed early, blaming it on the time difference. It was no surprise that she hadn't asked me one question about what I had been doing overseas.

The second night, she dragged out another magnum of red wine from the kitchen cabinet and as she pulled out the cork, launched into her problems with the neighbours. She brought two glasses and the bottle into the living room and sat down on the couch. A neighbour had for the second time called the building manager to complain about her smoking on the balcony and the manager called Babs to tell her smoke was drifting into the apartment upstairs. Babs said they were persecuting her because of her smoking. 'Can I help it if I'm addicted to cigarettes?' She wasn't backing down on her right to smoke on her own balcony and if they didn't like it they could 'close their effing windows. Or move.' 

One thing about Babs, when she started in on a subject she kicked it around for hours, sometimes days, before battering it to death. She finally launched into her favourite subject, Nick, the misogynist showoff. 'It was all The Nick Show. I got so sick of everybody asking about him. How important he was. I didn't matter. Then he took up golfing and he was never home. I did everything with the kids. Cooked dinner. Took care of the house.'

I tried to interject, add something, ask a question, or better, change the subject, but whenever I spoke up she would say either 'shush, you're not letting me finish' or 'you're always interrupting,' or best, 'you don't know how to listen, Nancy.' I gave up, but the next night, come seven o'clock and we hadn't eaten, I went into the kitchen and started to cook. 'Do you want something?' I asked. I could see her, I was steps away, but because I wandered off in the middle of her narrative, she was gobsmacked and suddenly confused me with Nick, the ex-husband who had tuned her out long ago.

'If you're bored or you just want me to wrap it up, you should say so, Nancy. That was pretty rude.'

'Okay,' I said. 'Why don't you just go ahead and wrap it up.' She mulled that over in silence.

'That was pretty rude.'

I found it odd she didn't pause to think whether she was rude to others, but does a dog care where he licks his balls?

By the next morning, I was feeling like a prisoner. Fortunately, her mood subsided and we went for coffee, but as we were sitting outside enjoying the breezy summer at an outdoor cafe, Babs was 'triggered' by someone who looked like Nick. Obviously, she was obsessed and it was beginning to wear, so, believing that couples inherit each other's traits both bad and good, I looked at Babs and asked, 'How do you think that you and Nick were alike?' 

I thought it was a harmless question and a subject I'd given some thought to pertaining to my own relationships and it was in this regard that I asked. Perhaps there was a subconscious dig. Her eyes narrowed and her mouth dropped open and she stood up, shocked at such a question, ranting and going off like a goat at a picnic, even apologizing to our coffee neighbours for her behaviour which was due to my insensitivity. We strode back to the car and once at her house I phoned my friend in Cumberland and asked her if I could bunk in with her until I left for overseas, which would be in another few days.

Ironically, Babs wanted to give me a lift to Cumberland, it was the least she do, she said. I gave her $30 for the ride. When we arrived at my friend's house, she gave me a surprise hug with which I limply complied. She said, 'don't tell anybody about this. I mean it, this is between you and me.' I even received a phone call from her the next day, which my friend intercepted, telling her to relay the message to me that I wasn't to talk about what happened. To. Anybody.