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Authors: Emily Maguire
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the door. Dinner with Marsha.â
âI hate her. She always tells me she could do wonders with my hair.â
âYou should let her try. That mop of yours gets worse every day.â
âFuck you.â
âAnd you wonder why you donât have any friends.â
Aggie hung up. She and Mal met through his friendship with her mother and when he started running a homeless shelter he hired Aggie as counsellor. She hadworked for him ever since, following him from the lost cause of the shelter to the bureaucratic nightmare of hospital-based rehab to the freedom and stress of independent sexual health counselling. He was her first, best, only friend.
She didnât know why this was so. Throughout her school and university years she had envied other girls and women their friendships, blaming her mother for not passing on the seemingly secret rituals and traditions of women, the things that allowed them to bond and stay bonded. By the time she graduated she had accepted her inability to form close female friendships the same way she accepted that her hair would never look nice and her father would never come back to life.
But then something remarkable began to occur. Standing guard next to paper-draped examination tables, squatting in vomit-filled gutters, stroking sweat-soaked foreheads, Aggie began to love women. Holding the hands of women at their most frightened, most vulnerable, Aggie knew a closeness and kinship that could not be found in a thousand slumber parties or shopping excursions. But these were not friendships; the connection disappeared with the solving of their problems.
Aggie loved women, empathised with them and yearned to help them, but she could not be friends with them. She didnât know why, she just knew that when she tried to talk to a woman about anything other than how she, Aggie, could help her, she forgothow to be comforting, approachable and non-threatening. She saw the expectation of reciprocity in the other womanâs eyes and panicked. She never knew what to say if it wasnât âhow can I help?â She didnât know the language of female bonding outside of pain and tragedy.
Last week, standing in a bank queue, Aggie eavesdropped as the woman behind her told her companion about her upcoming henâs night.
Weâre renting an apartment in the city
, she said.
Weâve hired a bartender. We went shopping for outfits on Saturday
. It struck Aggie that she never used plural pronouns unless she was talking about work.
We
meant her and Mal, the clinic, the business.
We
never meant Aggie and a lover or Aggie and a friend or Aggie and her family.
Except, she closed her eyes and hugged herself, except tomorrow night,
we
are having dinner together. Luke Butler and I. We.
8.
Ordinarily, Luke enjoyed the state conferences; they gave him an opportunity to exchange worship inspiration and ministry plans with the other pastors, and they were a spiritual boost, feeling the joy and energy of all those servants of Christ crammed into one big room. He had been especially looking forward to this yearâs since he finally had a senior pastorship, even if it was of a youth centre and not a church. But no matter how hard he tried to concentrate on the presentations and follow the discussions, his mind drifted again and again to Aggie.
She was brand new to him, yet he felt he knew her deeply. She was as much an orphan as he was, withher tragic father and her deviant mother both abandoning her, leaving her to be defiled and discarded by some rough plunderer. Luke was heartbroken at the loss of that lanky, awkward, freckle-faced girl, whom he would have adored and protected. It was too late to save that child, but it was not too late to save the woman she had become.
During the dinner break, he tried to contribute to the discussion at his table. He ate, smiled, nodded, even offered up a relevant comment or two, but underneath it all he was thinking
she
.
âWell,
âI hate her. She always tells me she could do wonders with my hair.â
âYou should let her try. That mop of yours gets worse every day.â
âFuck you.â
âAnd you wonder why you donât have any friends.â
Aggie hung up. She and Mal met through his friendship with her mother and when he started running a homeless shelter he hired Aggie as counsellor. She hadworked for him ever since, following him from the lost cause of the shelter to the bureaucratic nightmare of hospital-based rehab to the freedom and stress of independent sexual health counselling. He was her first, best, only friend.
She didnât know why this was so. Throughout her school and university years she had envied other girls and women their friendships, blaming her mother for not passing on the seemingly secret rituals and traditions of women, the things that allowed them to bond and stay bonded. By the time she graduated she had accepted her inability to form close female friendships the same way she accepted that her hair would never look nice and her father would never come back to life.
But then something remarkable began to occur. Standing guard next to paper-draped examination tables, squatting in vomit-filled gutters, stroking sweat-soaked foreheads, Aggie began to love women. Holding the hands of women at their most frightened, most vulnerable, Aggie knew a closeness and kinship that could not be found in a thousand slumber parties or shopping excursions. But these were not friendships; the connection disappeared with the solving of their problems.
Aggie loved women, empathised with them and yearned to help them, but she could not be friends with them. She didnât know why, she just knew that when she tried to talk to a woman about anything other than how she, Aggie, could help her, she forgothow to be comforting, approachable and non-threatening. She saw the expectation of reciprocity in the other womanâs eyes and panicked. She never knew what to say if it wasnât âhow can I help?â She didnât know the language of female bonding outside of pain and tragedy.
Last week, standing in a bank queue, Aggie eavesdropped as the woman behind her told her companion about her upcoming henâs night.
Weâre renting an apartment in the city
, she said.
Weâve hired a bartender. We went shopping for outfits on Saturday
. It struck Aggie that she never used plural pronouns unless she was talking about work.
We
meant her and Mal, the clinic, the business.
We
never meant Aggie and a lover or Aggie and a friend or Aggie and her family.
Except, she closed her eyes and hugged herself, except tomorrow night,
we
are having dinner together. Luke Butler and I. We.
8.
Ordinarily, Luke enjoyed the state conferences; they gave him an opportunity to exchange worship inspiration and ministry plans with the other pastors, and they were a spiritual boost, feeling the joy and energy of all those servants of Christ crammed into one big room. He had been especially looking forward to this yearâs since he finally had a senior pastorship, even if it was of a youth centre and not a church. But no matter how hard he tried to concentrate on the presentations and follow the discussions, his mind drifted again and again to Aggie.
She was brand new to him, yet he felt he knew her deeply. She was as much an orphan as he was, withher tragic father and her deviant mother both abandoning her, leaving her to be defiled and discarded by some rough plunderer. Luke was heartbroken at the loss of that lanky, awkward, freckle-faced girl, whom he would have adored and protected. It was too late to save that child, but it was not too late to save the woman she had become.
During the dinner break, he tried to contribute to the discussion at his table. He ate, smiled, nodded, even offered up a relevant comment or two, but underneath it all he was thinking
she
.
âWell,
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