In Hindsight

It was only in hindsight, from behind. After all the years of letters from her, just a few weeks ago she wrote: “ I love you Elizabeth and I always will.” I was touched, surprised, but not really. I let myself acknowledge that over all these years of letters, gifts, and then long silences, I had been there for her. I send her one of our holiday cards every year, so she can see my family. How we have changed, or not. I sent a special tea towel recently and periodically a birthday note …when I remember.

 For the first time, I felt a need, a desire, maybe even the necessity of writing about her. To make sense of this relationship. The distance and yet the closeness. We met in 1981 at The American Dance Festival in Durham, North Carolina. I was 31, she was somewhat younger. I was in between a divorce and a move and the beginning of something other than.

We lived on the same hall in an old, brick dorm. The heat and humidity were decidedly Southern and vastly different than the Western dryness. No air conditioning. Only large fans in the dance studios. I had never known such humidity and it was difficult to sleep.  Hot and sweaty, I would get out of bed to take a cold shower. Standing under the water until I shivered and was comfortable enough to fall asleep.

She was slim, lithe, light. She floated. Smoking cigarettes with a wide smile and a giggle. We took Kenneth King’s choreography class. I just looked him up. 74 now, to my 71. “King's work was both reflective and innovative in his time in that he developed choreography with generally non-technical based movement, unique to the 1960s post-modern era, King believed that a dance could still have content even without point of view, stress and emotion. His works are often considered to be very personal and an overall poetic experience.”

He seemed so wise then. I don’t recall the piece he created for us. I wanted structure and predictability as my first husband and I had separated and dance was the only thing I could love at the time. I hoped it would help me feel closer to myself as I moved away from him.

She and I became friends that summer in the steamy dance studios. We met Lucas Hoving whose devotion to the Sufi community in Marin lured him to San Francisco. Away from Graham and Limon. I followed  to make my new home back on the west coast near the ocean I had grieved since marrying only to find myself in rural Colorado. She also lived in the city, in my neighborhood.  At some point she acquired a boyfriend of the tall, dark and handsome type. I was envious perhaps. They lived together. Only in hindsight when she broke it off and said she was moving back to Wisconsin and to her mother did I realize and learn of her visions and wanderings. Of her conversations with Henri Bendel, a designer long dead. She had never met him. But he moved into her mind and there was no room for the boyfriend or much of anything else.

It made sense that she was in conversation with a fashion designer. She loved clothes and had a casual, bohemian style, but definitely a curated one with taste and individuality. I never saw her in tailored suits or the kind of 5th avenue fashion that Bendel’s department store must have featured. But Henri had lost his father when he was young, just 6 years old. And her father had also died when she was young. I wonder if she and Henri talked about their missing fathers and thus it was loss that drew them together? Even if he was only a voice inside her head.

I can’t recall if there was an exact moment when her mind began to unravel. She became distracted and spacey and always seemed to be somewhere other than the present moment. Her boyfriend was worried, but not entirely sympathetic. She was different and he was caught off guard.

 She left San Francisco and only later did I learn she was hospitalized once back in Wisconsin. She was very close to her mother who was committed to helping her daughter with whatever angels or demons lurked inside. She was one of 5 or 6, I believe, and her siblings were protective of her.

She was safe in Wisconsin, in a small town away from the fray of San Francisco. She has visited me twice since leaving the Bay Area. The first time to my tiny studio apartment. We sat at my round, folding table. She was wan, sitting with her legs crossed tightly. Maybe trying to keep the voices in her head at bay and out of my house. It was awkward for me. I wanted to be supportive, caring, kind. I was curious, but asked no questions. I didn’t want to intrude or offend. She stayed a couple of days and went back to Wisconsin.

Years later she returned once more. To my home on Fair Oaks where I lived with Nico. I had arranged a play date for him so he wasn’t home for her visit.  I wasn’t sure how my small, energetic, curious boy would respond. She had gained a lot of weight. From the drugs to keep the voices from getting too loud. The body of a dancer was hidden. I wondered how she felt about the changes, though as dancers we are at times too self-absorbed.

I drove her to Marin where one sister and her family lived. I was reassured by how she was embraced and accepted by this family. Their kindness and patience,  I wanted to feel comfortable in her presence, but I felt inadequate to understand.  She returned to Wisconsin after that brief visit to the ocean, and not long after, her mother died.

 Off and on she would talk about wanting to move back to California. Over the many years since her last visit,  she has written to me from one or the other of the group homes she lives in. She has beautiful handwriting. Each new residence is scrutinized by one of her brothers.

Sometimes she sends me something she has knitted. Not functional, but I know these pieces are from her heart. She refers to the aid who takes  her shopping. The banana  bread she is baking, the organic groceries, the beautiful, vintage flowered dress. Does she imagine dancing with Henri? Or Kenneth? She would like a partner, she indicates. I can’t respond. It makes me sad.

Her poems come too. And some drawings, always thin, wispy nudes. I think about hanging one up. Recently she wrote about the nurse who comes to administer her regular injection of Haldol. Robert said it is a strong Antipsychotic. I am of course reminded  of when Nico was taking a raft of pills to quiet his mania or the anxiety. So much his doctors were trying to keep at bay. But eventually his mind settled, the drinking stopped and he inhabits my heart like no one else. Sane and sober.

In the same letter in which she told me she loved me, she said she couldn’t believe she had been talking to Henri Bendel for the past 30 years. “He is so funny and I can hear his voice.” The “real” Henri died in 1936 and is buried in New York. I have never asked her how they met.

 I only recently understood that perhaps she is not alone or lonely. That her garden is familiar and comfortable. It is only in hindsight that I have come to know that my friend from the humid halls of Duke has a mental illness. And that in one way or another, I have been there for her. It is only in hindsight that I can acknowledge and  be grateful for her presence in my life.