Happy Girls in Paradise

     In the middle of sixth grade I became best friends with Marcie. The Marcie she was back then had frizzy hair and cumbersome black glasses. She was the new girl at school, lost, with no road map to the land of cool. I didn’t have one either, so I guided her into my world.
      Soon we spent countless hours at each other’s homes. We made up silly songs and skits. We rode our bikes in Miami’s humidity to the Parrot Jungle, sipping Cokes as crayon-hued Macaws squawked overhead. We had slumber parties with our friends, did cheers on our front lawns, and flew in her father’s corporate jet to Disney World.
      During the flight we sat in the aisle and rifled through the guest bowl of two-pack Chiclets. We chewed and spit out as many flavors as we cared to try, just because we could. For the next several days, we stayed at the Polynesian Village resort, running and giggling in the lush greenery as waterfalls splashed around us. Unlike any memory in recent decades, I can’t recall a thing going wrong. We were happy girls in paradise.
      In seventh grade, Marcie stepped outside of my world by becoming interested in boys. She upgraded to contact lenses and straightened her hair.While I was experimenting with gooey smears of Yardley lip gloss, Marcie was wearing expertly-applied blush and mascara. “Joey is sooo cute!” she would say to me. “I have such a crush on him.” Though Marcie was only six months older than me, I listened like a younger sister might, vaguely curious. Later that Spring, Marcie shared news I was entirely unready to understand: she’d had sex with not one 8th grade boy, but two. They’d taken turns, she’d told me cheerfully. “Beep! My turn” said Harvey. I was bewildered. Where had she gone? My mother hadn’t even had ‘the talk’ with me yet. That came a few months later. I refrained from blurting out Marcie’s already doing it.
       Around the same time as Marcie’s sudden leap from the brink of discovery to deep in the jungle, we attended a much-anticipated David Cassidy concert. My shrieks were of simple, amusement park glee. Marcie’s yells were hormonal calls to the wild.When shaggy-haired Cassidy implored the throng of preteen girls to reach out and touch him, I laughed as Marcie reached frantically from the 25th row. It was clear what she felt was different, out of my reach. Still, we were the happiest of friends as we bounded out of the arena chanting “I love coffee, I love tea, I love David Cass-i-dy!”
      In 8th grade, Marcie was still enough of a dork to be my best friend. I loved being with her. We cracked each other up. We had our own lexicon of made up words: qua was gross, Good enough Chrissy meant great, and for the bride was tacked onto sentences for emphasis. One night we spontaneously collaborated on an ending for our phone calls. Our pets, famous dogs, and our Latin teacher were in the mix: Be be ba ba bo bo Baron, Mrs. Machado, Rin Tin Tin, Lassie, Betsy, Tweety, bye!
      By 9th grade we were in different schools, but we belonged to the same tennis club, where early in the year, we often played after school, sometimes seriously, sometimes just launching tennis balls into the sky from atop our racquets. That stopped when Marcie started wearing sophisticated tennis dresses with thin straps, and eyeing cute boys on neighboring courts. Still, our friendship was solid. A fact.
      When Marcie turned 16, her parents took us back to Disney World. We stayed in the penthouse suite of the Contemporary Hotel. Despite the luxurious accomodations, my memories of the trip are uncomfortable. I dressed all wrong, in rock concert t-shirts and baggy jeans. Marcie had worn tight little sundresses and short shorts. Sitting on the hotel balcony, overlooking the Magic Kingdom and Florida swamplands, I read a book about a girl losing her virginity, something I had no desire to do. In a video arcade that night, Marcie is happily playing pinball, unaware that a black man in his 30s is staring at her. The man approaches me. “Who’s your friend, Baby?”
      The next night, Marcie’s parents treated us to caricatures, and how I wish they hadn’t. A year later I was an eating-disordered size five, adjusting to leering stares from boys and men, but that night I was fat and unpretentious to a fault. Marcie was already several years into her celebrated beauty.
       The artist asked what her main interest was. “My parents would say boys!” giggled Marcie. Her sketch depicted her in a tiny bikini on the beach, holding a giant net, with a “Boys this way’ sign in the background. Her famous smile took up half the page. Starfish beamed rays of love at her.
      Then it was my turn. What was I into? British rock bands. Minutes later, the sketch had me running toward a record player, beads of sweat falling from my brow. I hadn’t realized I had a huge nose.
      By our senior year of high school, Marcie was dating a succession of University of Miami football players. She spent much of her time with a similarly hot girl who shared her new-found love of alcohol. We remained a fact, but more like cousins perhaps than sisters. In colleges across the country from each other, we wrote letters and talked a few times a year.
      In our early twenties, Marcie and I went back to Disney World. I was the thinnest I’d been in years, and felt attractive. Everything about the trip was pleasant- neither exhilarating nor disappointing. We were comfortable together, relaxed and mildly silly. In our hotel room, Marcie called her husband to say goodnight. “I loooove you” she breathed passionately into the receiver. Upon hanging up she laughed and said she knew that sounded obnoxious. I liked her for that. A year later her perfect son was born. Three years later, her family was complete when her look-alike daughter was born, a genius.
      In our late 30s, the great-looking husband Marcie “looooved” turned out to be verbally abusive and in a side relationship with a man. Her mother, always depressive, lapsed into full-blown mental illness. Still, I insisted on telling people Marcie’s life was perfect. She was brilliant, beautiful, rich, and popular. Perhaps what I envied most was that Marcie could hide her setbacks and smile her huge smile for whatever camera life aimed at her. I was often caught off guard, in photos too candid to display.
      I still feel Marcie is perfect. One look at her Facebook page and you’d agree. There’s a succession of hunky, type-A specimens proclaiming adoration for her. She zip lines in Costa Rica with Steve, skis in Vail with Mark, and parasails with Todd in Mexico. And check out all the birthday parties with her wealthy, blow-dried friends, the elite tennis ladies, the queens of hummus. “Sisters!” they disingenuously proclaim when Marcie posts photos with her 24 year old daughter.
      Um, no. Not quite. She is still pretty, but she looks like a tired version of herself; her tenacious grip on her youthful appearance loosening. From 2,000 miles away we exchange “We’ll talk soon!” messages. No we won’t. Worse, it doesn’t matter. Marcie is a ghost, running through the Polynesian Village, waterfalls splashing in the background.