So I did the best I could. At recess, I’d stand miserably on the sidelines, trying to look as though I was a part of the linked fence, or whatever I was standing beside at the time, because I soon learned it was better to be ignored, than to be noticed and ridiculed. I stuck it out until just before Christmas break. I don’t know if I would have been able to force myself to return after the holidays, but that day a bunch of boys were teasing me and my eyes were already welling with tears when Gina walked up out of nowhere and chased them off.
“Why don’t you ever play with anybody?” she asked me.
“Nobody wants me to play with them,” I said.
“Well, I do,” she said and then she smiled at me, a smile so bright that it dried up all my tears.
After that, we were best friends forever.
5
Gina was the most outrageous, talented, wonderful person I had ever met. I was the sort of child who usually reacted to stimuli; Gina created them. She made up games, she made up stories, she made up songs. It was impossible to be bored in her company and we became inseparable, in school and out.
I don’t think a day went by that we didn’t spend some part of it together. We had sleepovers. We took art and music and dance classes together and if she won the prizes, I didn’t mind, because she was my friend and I could only be proud of her. There was no limit to her imagination, but that was fine by me, too. I was happy to have been welcomed into her world and I was more than willing to take up whatever enterprise she might propose.
I remember one afternoon we sat up in her room and made little people out of found objects: acorn heads, seed eyes, twig bodies. We made clothes for them and furniture and concocted long extravagant family histories so that we ended up knowing more about them than we did our classmates.
“They’re real now,” I remember her telling me. “We’ve given them lives, so they’ll always be real.”
“What kind of real?” I asked, feeling a little confused because I was at that age when I was starting to understand the difference between what was make-believe and what was real.
“There’s only one kind of real,” Gina told me. “The trouble is, not everybody can see it and they make fun of those who can.”
Though I couldn’t know the world through the same perspective as Gina had, there was one thing I did know. “I would never make fun of you,” I said.
“I know, Sue. That’s why we’re friends.”
I still have the little twig people I made, wrapped up in tissue and stored away in a box of childhood treasures; I don’t know what ever happened to Gina’s.
We had five years together, but then her parents moved out of town—not impossibly far, but far enough to make our getting together a major effort and we rarely saw each other more than a few times a year after that. It was mainly Gina’s doing that we didn’t entirely lose touch with each other. She wrote me two or three times a week, long chatty letters about what she’d been reading, films she’d seen, people she’d met, her hopes of becoming a professional musician after she finished high school. The letters were decorated with fanciful illustrations of their contents and sometimes included miniature envelopes in which I would find letters from her twig people to mine.
Although I tried to keep up my side, I wasn’t much of a correspondent. Usually I’d phone her, but my calls grew farther and farther apart as the months went by. I never stopped considering her as a friend—the occasions when we did get together were among my best memories of being a teenager—but my own life had changed and I didn’t have as much time for her anymore. It was hard to maintain a long-distance relationship when there was so much going on around me at home. I was no longer the new kid at school and I’d
made other friends. I worked on the school paper and then I got a boyfriend.
Gina never wanted to talk about him. I suppose she thought of it as a kind of betrayal; she never again had a friend that she was as close to as she’d been with me.
I remember her mother calling me once, worried because Gina seemed to be sinking into a reclusive depression. I did my best to be there for her. I called her almost every night for a month and went out to visit her on the weekends, but somehow I just couldn’t relate to her pain. Gina had always seemed so self-contained, so perfect, that it was hard to imagine her being as withdrawn and unhappy as her mother seemed to think she was. She put on such a good face to me that eventually the worries I’d had faded and the demands of my own life pulled me away again.
6
Gina never liked Christmas.
The year she introduced me to Newford’s gargoyles we saw each other twice over the holidays: once so that she could do her Christmas shopping and then again between Christmas and New Year’s when I came over to her place and stayed the night. She introduced me to her dog—Fritzie, a gangly, wire-haired, long-legged mutt that she’d found abandoned on one of the country roads near her parents’ place—and played some of her new songs for me, accompanying herself on guitar.
The music had a dronal quality that seemed at odds with her clear high voice and the strange Middle Eastern decorations she used. The lyrics were strange and dark, leaving me with a sensation that was not so much unpleasant as uncomfortable, and I could understand why she’d been having so much trouble getting gigs. It wasn’t just that she was so young and since most clubs served alcohol, their owners couldn’t hire an underage performer; Gina’s music simply wasn’t what most people would think of as entertainment. Her songs went beyond introspection. They took the listener to that dark place that sits inside each and every one of us, that place we don’t want to visit, that we don’t even want to admit is there.
But the songs aside, there didn’t seem to be any trace of the depression that had worried her mother so much the previous autumn. She appeared to be her old self, the Gina I remembered: opinionated and witty, full of life and laughter even while explaining to me what bothered her so much about the holiday season.
“I love the idea of Christmas,” she said. “It’s the hypocrisy of the season that I dislike. One time out of the year, people do what they can for the homeless, help stock the food banks, contribute to snowsuit funds and give toys to poor children. But where are they the rest of the year when their help is just as necessary? It makes me a little sick to think of all the money that gets spent on Christmas lights and parties and presents that people don’t even really want in the first place. If we took all that money and gave it to the people who need it simply to survive, instead of throwing it away on ourselves, we could probably solve most of the problems of poverty and homelessness over one Christmas season.”
“I suppose,” I said. “But at least Christmas brings people closer together. I guess what we have to do is build on that.”
Gina gave me a sad smile. “Who does it bring closer together?”
“Well…families, friends…”
“But what about those who don’t have either? They look at all this closeness you’re talking about and it just makes their own situation seem all the more desperate. It’s hardly surprising that the holiday season has the highest suicide rate of any time of the year.”
“But what can we do?” I said. “We can’t just turn our backs and pretend there’s no such thing as Christmas.”
Gina shrugged, then gave me a sudden grin. “We could become Christmas commandos. You know,” she added at my blank look. “We’d strike from within. First we’d convince our own families to give it up and then…”
With that she launched into a plan of action that would be as improbable in its execution as it was entertaining in its explanation. She never did get her family to give up Christmas, and I have to admit I didn’t try very hard with mine, but the next year I did go visit the residents of places like St. Vincent’s Home for the Aged and I worked in the Grasso Street soup kitchen with Gina on Christmas day. I came away with a better experience of what Christmas was all about than I’d ever had at home.
But I just couldn’t mainta
in that commitment all year round. I kept going to St. Vincent’s when I could, but the sheer despair of the soup kitchens and food banks was more than I could bear.
7
Gina dropped out of college during her second year to concentrate on her music. She sent me a copy of the demo tape she was shopping around to the record companies in hopes of getting a contract. I didn’t like it at first. Neither her guitar-playing nor her vocal style had changed much and the inner landscape the songs revealed was too bleak, the shadows it painted upon the listener seemed too unrelentingly dark, but out of loyalty I played it a few times more and subsequent listenings changed that first impression.
Her songs were still bleak, but I realized that they helped create a healing process in the listener. If I let them take me into the heart of their darkness, they took me out again as well. It was the kind of music that while it appeared to wallow in despair, in actuality it left its audience stronger, more able to face the pain and heartache that awaited them beyond the music.
She was playing at a club near the campus one weekend and I went to see her. Sitting in front were a handful of hard-core fans, all pale-faced and dressed in black, but most of the audience didn’t understand what she was offering them anymore than I had the first time I sat through the demo tape. Obviously her music was an acquired taste—which didn’t bode well for her career in a world where, more and more, most information was conveyed in thirty-second sound bites and audiences in the entertainment industry demanded instant gratification, rather than taking the time to explore the deeper resonances of a work.
She had Fritzie waiting for her in the claustrophobic dressing room behind the stage, so the three of us went walking in between her sets. That was the night she first told me about her bouts with depression.
“I don’t know what it is that brings them on,” she said. “I know I find it frustrating that I keep running into a wall with my music, but I also know that’s not the cause of them either. As long as I can remember I’ve carried this feeling of alienation around with me; I wake up in the morning, in the middle of the night, and I’m paralyzed with all this emotional pain. The only people that have ever really helped to keep it at bay were first you, and now Fritzie.”
It was such a shock to hear that her only lifelines were a friend who was hardly ever there for her and a dog. The guilt that lodged inside me then has never really gone away. I wanted to ask what had happened to that brashly confident girl who had turned my whole life around as much by the example of her own strength and resourcefulness as by her friendship, but then I realized that the answer lay in her music, in her songs that spoke of masks and what lay behind them, of puddles on muddy roads that sometimes hid deep, bottomless wells.
“I feel so…so stupid,” she said.
This time I was the one who took charge. I steered her towards the closest bus stop and we sat down on its bench. I put my arm around her shoulders and Fritzie laid his mournful head upon her knee and looked up into her face.
“Don’t feel stupid,” I said. “You can’t help the bad feelings.”
“But why do I have to have them? Nobody else does.”
“Everybody has them.”
She toyed with the wiry fur between Fritzie’s ears and leaned against me.
“Not like mine,” she said.
“No,” I agreed. “Everybody’s got their own.”
That got me a small smile. We sat there for a while, watching the traffic go past until it was time for her last set of the night.
“What do you think of the show?” she asked as we returned to the club.
“I like it,” I told her, “but I think it’s the kind of music that people have to take their time to appreciate.”
Gina nodded glumly. “And who’s got the time?”
“I do.”
“Well, I wish you ran one of the record companies,” she said. “I get the same answer from all of them. They like my voice, they like my playing, but they want me to sexy up my image and write songs that are more upbeat.”
She paused. We’d reached the back door of the club by then. She put her back against the brick wall of the alley and looked up. Fritzie was pressed up against the side of her leg as though he was glued there.
“I tried, you know,” Gina said. “I really tried to give them what they wanted, but it just wasn’t there. I just don’t have that kind of song inside me.”
She disappeared inside then to retune her guitar before she went back on stage. I stayed for a moment longer, my gaze drawn up as hers had been while she’d been talking to me. There was a gargoyle there, spout-mouth open wide, a rather benevolent look about its grotesque features. I looked at it for a long time, wondering for a moment if I would see it blink or move the way Gina probably had, but it was just a stone sculpture, set high up in the wall. Finally I went back inside and found my seat.
8
I was in the middle of studying for exams the following week, but I made a point of it to call Gina at least every day. I tried getting her to let me take her out for dinner on the weekend, but she and Fritzie were pretty much inseparable and she didn’t want to leave him tied up outside the restaurant while we sat inside to eat. So I ended up having them over to the little apartment I was renting in Crowsea instead. She told me that night that she was going out west to try to shop her tape around to the big companies in L.A. and I didn’t see her again for three months.
I’d been worried about her going off on her own, feeling as she was. I even offered to go with her, if she’d just wait until the semester was finished, but she assured me she’d be fine and a series of cheerful cards and short letters—signed by either her or just a big paw print—arrived in my letterbox to prove the point. When she finally did get back, she called me up and we got together for a picnic lunch in Fitzhenry Park.
Going out to the west coast seemed to have done her good. She came back looking radiant and tanned, full of amusing stories concerning the ups and downs of her and Fritzie’s adventures out there. She’d even gotten some fairly serious interest from an independent record label, but they were still making up their minds when her money ran out. Instead of trying to make do in a place where she felt even more like a stranger than she did in Newford, she decided to come home to wait for their response, driving back across the country in her old station wagon, Fritzie sitting up on the passenger seat beside her, her guitar in its battered case lying across the back seat.
“By the time we rolled into Newford,” she said, “the car was just running on fumes. But we made it.”
“If you need some money, or a place to stay…” I offered.
“I can just see the three of us squeezed into that tiny place of yours.”
“We’d make do.”
Gina smiled. “It’s okay. My dad fronted me some money until the advance from the record company comes through. But thanks all the same. Fritzie and I appreciate the offer.”
I was really happy for her. Her spirits were so high now that things had finally turned around and she could see that she was going somewhere with her music. She knew there was a lot of hard work still to come, but it was the sort of work she thrived on.
“I feel like I’ve lived my whole life on the edge of an abyss,” she told me, “just waiting for the moment when it’d finally drag me down for good, but now everything’s changed. It’s like I finally figured out a way to live someplace else—away from the edge. Far away.”
I was going on to my third year at Butler U. in the fall, but we made plans to drive back to L.A. together in July, once she got the okay from the record company. We’d spend the summer together in La La Land, taking in the sights while Gina worked on her album. It’s something I knew we were both looking forward to.
9
Gina was looking after the cottage of a friend of her parents when she fell back into the abyss. She never told me how she was feeling, probably because she knew I’d have gone to any length to stop her from hurting herself. All she’d told
me before she went was that she needed the solitude to work on some new songs and I’d believed her. I had no reason to worry about her. In the two weeks she was living out there I must have gotten a half-dozen cheerful cards, telling me what to add to my packing list for our trip out west and what to leave off.
Her mother told me that she’d gotten a letter from the record company, turning down her demo. She said Gina had seemed to take the rejection well when she called to give her daughter the bad news. They’d ended their conversation with Gina already making plans to start the rounds of the record companies again with the new material she’d been working on. Then she’d burned her guitar and all of her music and poetry in a firepit down by the shore, and simply walked out into the lake. Her body was found after a neighbour was drawn to the lot by Fritzie’s howling. The poor dog was shivering and wet, matted with mud from having tried to rescue her. They know it wasn’t an accident because of the note she left behind in the cottage.
I never read the note. I couldn’t.
I miss her terribly, but most of all I’m angry. Not at Gina, but at this society of ours that tries to make everybody fit into the same mold. Gina was unique, but she didn’t want to be. All she wanted to do was fit in, but her spirit and her muse wouldn’t let her. That dichotomy between who she was and who she thought she should be was what really killed her.
All that survives of her music is that demo tape. When I listen to it, I can’t understand how she could create a healing process for others through that dark music, but she couldn’t use it to heal herself.