Parcheesi

She was always red and yellow; I was always blue and green.  We played on her back porch, no matter the weather, her transistor radio tuned to WIFI 92.  We played through the summer in cutoff shorts and striped t-shirts.  We played through the winter in our parkas, fake-fur-trimmed hoods extended to protect our faces from the wind.  The porch was our place, light filtering in through the green corrugated fiberglass roof.  

She won.  She always won.  Actually, that’s not entirely true.  She only won 489 games.  I won eleven.

She won because she believed in winning.  I lost because I was an idealist. 

Parcheesi, at least the way Wendy played it, included a rule that went like this: if you landed on a space occupied by another player’s token, you sent that player’s token back to Start. As if that were not enough, you also got to advance 20 more spaces.

I was incredulous. How is that right?  If you are a race car driver, and you purposely knock another player’s car into the wall and it explodes into a ball of fire, do they shave 30 seconds off your time as a bonus?  I think not. 

I protested.  Wendy gleefully showed me the rule sheet in which this gross breach of decency was printed in black and white.  I sulked, but I did not refuse to play.  We kept playing all that year, carefully lifting her cat, Nightlight, from the board whenever he began batting the tokens with his paw.  We sang along at the top of our lungs to “Billy, Don’t be a Hero,” and “The Night Chicago Died.”  We popped popcorn and experimented with putting food coloring into the melted margarine.  Not surprisingly, her addition of red turned out a pleasing orange, while my addition of blue made my popcorn an unappetizing olive drab.

When it was my turn to roll the dice, sometimes I had the option to land on a space occupied by one of her tokens.  I made a proposal that I thought was a brilliant compromise: what if I were to send her token back, but forgo the extra 20 spaces?  I argued that it was like usury, that Biblical law that prohibits charging interest on a loan. Wendy, a Lutheran, flatly nixed that idea.  It was against the rules. 

There was only one ethically upright thing to do, and I did it.  I moved a different token.  I never sent her pieces back to start, not even if she were about to win.  I thought it was rude and wrong, and I refused to do it.  “Suit yourself!” she said, cheerfully.  “Look—one of my guys can make it into home.”

So I lost.  A lot.   I was completely cognizant of the fact that all that it made me was a sucker, but I had dug in my heels.  You might even wonder how it is that I won those eleven games, and I have to say that even the obstinately deluded are occasionally granted some luck.

The next year, when her interest in boys overcame her interest in anything else, I was not sorry to see the Parcheesi board relegated to a high shelf in her bedroom closet, replaced by racy novels, a coded diary, and the fabrication of a library of highly creative lies to tell her parents. 

Wendy had moved in next door when I was in first grade and she in fifth, daughter of a just-retired career army man, the youngest of four children.  The oldest girl was already out of the house and married by the time they moved to our street; later I would babysit her boys in the evenings after school.  In that first year, though, Wendy set her mind to the task of making me into a viable friend.  The age difference at first seemed a barrier, but as an otherwise solitary and socially awkward child, I was happy to aspire to early maturity, to emulate her worldly ways.  I learned to swim when her mother invited me to go to the swim club with them.  I didn’t want to miss whatever exciting thing Wendy might do on the other side of the pool, so I went from dog-paddle to a messy but effective freestyle in a matter of hours.

My mother and I had a swim membership at Westtown School Lake, a large pond on the property of a Quaker school about half an hour’s drive from home.  It was a lot less expensive than the swim club, and it had trees and woods and picnic tables and outdoor bathhouses that smelled bad and were infested with daddy longlegs. 

The water in the lake was not clear; it was varying shades of brown, and if you dove under the water you were likely to come up with seaweed—pond weed—draped over your head.  Still, the ancient wooden dock wrapped in sisal was cool, and we were allowed to run the length of it and take a flying leap into the water.  There was a floating dock, too, and once I truly learned to swim with Wendy, I could swim out to the dock at Westtown.  I could drag myself up onto it—even though that made it rock wildly—if  I could brave the slimy green substance that coated the sides.  Wendy did not come with us.  She thought the whole seaweed situation was gross. 

Some days, the four years between us seemed like nothing, but when it came to boys, she had a line of drooling suitors wrapped around the block while I was still a tagalong little kid. I had three useful skills, however. I could make up stories, write excellent essays and other papers (even four grade levels ahead of my own), and decide things.  Widely considered to have power to obtain wisdom from the shadowy realms beyond human logic, I was consulted when Wendy needed wise counsel.  Matters of the heart were particularly needful of this sort of input.  What logic is there in dealing with a teenage boy, anyway?

The summer that Wendy was fifteen, she attended a dance at Walber’s On the Delaware, a restaurant that was, in fact, situated on the shores of the Delaware River.  The Delaware at this point was not exactly a tourist magnet.  Essington was most known for being bordered by the Philadelphia airport, a highly polluted marshland, several factories, and the oil refineries of Marcus Hook.  There was, however, a tiny park next to Walber’s commemorating early Swedish settlers or something similarly historic. Growing up on the outskirts of Philadelphia had the effect of developing in me a violent distaste for the period of colonial and early American history that lasted several decades.  If I’d had one more field trip to Betsy Ross’s house, I might have tried to smuggle in some matches and lighter fluid.

It was in that little park that we were able to access the actual water’s edge.  Almost.  First, though, we had to bicycle for several miles on Route 291, the aptly named Industrial Highway.  Sandwiched between the interstate and the factories that lined the banks of the great gray expanse of river, it was primarily used for commercial traffic between those factories and the airport. Wendy had a three-speed bike, but I didn’t have one of my own.  I rode her last bike, a single-speed model, not flashy but serviceable. 

As I rode behind her, trying to take advantage of her wake, we careened down the shoulder of the highway.  The hardest part was staying upright when the eighteen-wheelers roared past, kicking up bits of gravel and glass and belching diesel smoke.  More than a few of the truck drivers sounded their bone-rattling air horns, whether to warn us of their approach or to express appreciation for Wendy’s curves.  Occasionally they might have sounded them in indignation or horror at the abandon with which we crossed lanes of traffic in our quest to get to the water, the right water, the significant water, the water across which Wendy had gazed on her first real date.

That was really why we went to Essington.  It was a pilgrimage, of sorts, a wish to remain connected with the magic of a certain evening, although the boy was long gone and had been mostly a prop anyway.  She had already assembled a list of the qualities most desirable in the next boyfriend, but I was ready and willing to soak up whatever reflected happiness might have been available at the place where it had all begun.

            Toxic sludge was what greeted us at our destination.  Once we’d run the gauntlet of internal combustion peril, our eyes took in the view.  In most weather, there were fifty yards of black mud between us and the water.  We scrambled down to what should have been the water’s edge—was, I suppose, at high tide or after a few days of rain—and sank to our suntanned knees in muck.  Wendy’s determination was unmatched by the unpleasant sucking sensation of the oil-laced mud, and we struggled out to where the opaque brown water began.

            Then we could say that we got what we came for: to wade in the mighty Delaware, the boundary between dull, everyday Pennsylvania and exciting, ocean-lapped New Jersey, where all vacation dreams were born.  We could see New Jersey, but the closest we would get to being there was to be surrounded by that water.  Massive tankers steamed past, gestating great swells of brown water that slapped our waiting thighs.

            Our mothers had no idea.  It was years before they found out how far we’d gone, and by what hair-raising route.  It’s not that we were hiding it from them; we just found them to be irrelevant in everyday matters.  Their province was dinner, bedtime, and shopping.  The days were ours, and they stretched from horizon to horizon.

            Wendy was a woman of action.  She had ideas, and she made them happen.  She taught me to do some basic gymnastics, taught me to be her assistant as she pounded the pavement for school fundraisers, determined to be the highest seller in her class. We participated religiously in charity walk-a-thons and bike-a-thons, singing One Hundred Bottles of Beer On the Wall as we slogged through mile after mile of puddles.  Each year, the organizers of the twenty-mile March of Dimes Walk-a-Thon promised that this year we’d have sunshine, but we rarely did.  At mile marker ten in 1975, I wondered what happened if people couldn’t go on, just sat down and couldn’t move.  Wendy grabbed an apple from the refreshment stand, slapped it into my palm, and said cheerfully, “We’re making great time!”  I took a bite of the apple and put one foot in front of the other.

We roller-skated to the candy store, skate keys around our necks on strings, slinging our skates over our shoulders to tiptoe in and dally over the jars of penny candy, shoelace licorice and pixie stix.  We watched The Mod Squad and The Rookies on the black-and-white television in her basement, crunching popcorn doused in margarine, pleased to be breaking my mother’s rule about avoiding violent shows. We watched The Six Million Dollar Man and then The Bionic Woman, and we wondered why Jamie Somers always seemed to need Steve Austin to rescue her, even though she had her own super strength and super speed.  We acted out scenes from Land of the Giants, a late-sixties sci-fi classic about the crew of a spaceship who landed on a planet on which they were as tiny as dolls in relation to the planet’s inhabitants.  This would have been great except that she insisted on being the man in charge and his young protégé, while I had to be the missy-prissy ladies and the kid.  I mumbled under my breath that someday I would play the good parts.

In high school, I did play the good parts in school plays, and I attribute my ability to do that—despite my shyness—to Wendy’s example, to what I learned in following her through the adventures of her life.  She joined an Explorer troop in her fifteenth year, one whose primary mission was to serve refreshments to volunteer firefighters at fire scenes.  When she returned from a fire, she would tell me stories about the drama, the dashing exploits of the firefighters, and the coffee and doughnuts that she was able to provide to sustain them during their heroic activities.  On weekends, we’d ride our bikes back and forth in front of the Woodlyn firehouse, hoping to be flagged down and chatted up by some of the younger firefighters.  If that failed, we’d ride back and forth in front of the young men’s houses, transistor radios strapped to our handlebars with duct tape.  We got a lot of exercise.

Friendships at school came and went, but Wendy was the constant.  An intercom in her bedroom was connected to an intercom in mine by a long, thin wire strung across the side yard and all along the eaves of her house.  Her room was on the far end of her house, facing, as mine did, the white dome of the observatory on the roof of the junior high school.  At any hour, the battery-powered call button would give its wavering chirp, and Wendy’s voice would crackle through the evergreen tree and over the roof of the Pontiac in the driveway.  “Come over!”

I always did.  Decades later, when my daughter and the girls next door ran a rope and pulley system across the walkway between the houses, sending messages back and forth from her bedroom to theirs, I thought of Wendy, and I smiled.  It’s good to have a friend whose messages you can’t wait to get.