Meeting Ethnic Kin

M. would kill me if she found out I was writing this. I can say this for sure because when I wrote a fun piece about our friendship and tracked her down to ok it, she took months to reply and then told me that the reason she did was she was mad, because I was too clingy in writing something like this and I had always been that way. To which another friend, who never met M. (but shares her initial) replied with, “damn, I wish someone would write a piece like that about our childhood friendship.” You can’t satisfy them all, but that really made me think.

First of all, a comment like that really does sting. Everyone wants to be liked, or at the very least be safe in the knowledge that the people we consider close like us back, hopefully in the same way and in equal measures. But we’ve also all had our childhood and teen dramas of liking people less than they like us, and also being liked less than the love and admiration we poured into another human being. And at the age of 12, that’s pretty much everyone we admire. Especially someone slightly older (a year means a lot at that age, especially when one of you is already a teen) and pretty. Extra bonus for being from (roughly) the same region via ancestry. 

Other than when I was hanging out with my favorite cousin, I’d never been into my Polish roots. Sure, I spoke the language, and I’d been cautioned against admitting that, but I was also always on hyper alert whenever Poles were around, because except for a tall blond man named John who always had my back against the perv who made me fear the Polish picnics my mom always took us to in Chicago when I was nine, I hadn’t met any Poles I could trust. They all either wanted something, or were out to smear you. Or else they were besties with my arch enemy, who just so happened to also be Polish (with a Nazi father to boost, I’m not kidding, the man had issues and despite his dark hair and eyes, he was Aryan to the core). 

M.’s mother was from the region where mine had spent her childhood and coming of age years, which was a fact that registered without being properly taken on board. Because M. was the pretty girl I’d seen in choir practice, who always hung out with another girl (a bit dowdy, so there was hope in my eyes. You never feel pretty when you’re twelve, at least I never met anyone who did). When it turned out that she was my Math tutor’s daughter, I was on cloud nine. Especially since she was tutoring me on the side and that meant I had to go to her house. My mom had apparently either heard her last name, or else she had taken the trouble to somehow comb through the entire database of teachers just to see who was Polish, then reached out to her and they agreed on a deal, because Polka potrafi (which is pretty much the Polish version of yes we can! But far more toxic, due to its implication of fake positivity). 

Which resulted in mutual fascination. M. found out about me before I even knew I would get tutored in Math, since she had witnessed the conversation between our mothers. Mine wasn’t beyond breaking perceived social norms and going to places most people wouldn’t go (at least not uninvited), and if that meant showing up at someone’s house, then so be it. M. as she told me later was so polite and well behaved that she didn’t move once the entire conversation. Well-behaved my ass. She found the whole exchange so fascinating that she wouldn’t miss any of it for the world, so she sat there, taking the whole thing in. I know this for a fact because I’d have behaved in the exact same way, and I would have been praised for it like she was (although not by the same person), because without being self-deprecating, Gemini can give you exactly what you want to see while entertaining you to no end, and making you feel like you’ve just been revived for seeing a damn great show, which you did. 

A few sessions at her house, and a few shy hellos later (mostly on my part, since this was after all her turf, and she was a full year older), we became besties, inseparable, although – as she always reminded me – I was Best Friend B, since she already had Best Friend A, whom she’d known since they were two, but then she had moved one town over, so meeting often was hard.

M. and I mainly bonded over our mutual love for the same band (but not the same person), which also heralded our growing apart. The two band members couldn’t see eye to eye and while that might have been negotiated among us, political ideology was a whole other matter. I always blamed it on vegetarian bubble gum, but of course it went deeper. 

The Quick Story of Bubble Gum for Vegetarians

While we did talk about identity and how we felt vs, our parents, the thing that really bonded us was our desire to live in London. We both pretended to be there, even though we spoke German together, never English, and we rarely talked about our Polish identities or Poland. She did say that her parents were from Pomerania, which confused me, since my mother used a different name (essentially the Polish version), so to me – up until last year – M. was always ethnically from that mysterious region of Pomerania, wherever that was. We also tried to emulate the two band members, which accounted for our love of colors and in my case at least was the reason my parents could make me drink milk at all, despite it making me gag to this day. Being told by my parents that coal miners, like the singer’s father, drank two pints of that ghastly stuff was all it took in getting me to drink a glass.

M. went a whole other route. We’d scheduled our tennis classes so they followed on from each other, which meant, she’d come pick me up at my place, then we’d walk down to the tennis courts for thirty minutes, one of us would have her class, then the other one would follow on and whoever wasn’t playing pretty much became a one-person Waldorf and Stadler from the Muppets, then we’d head back home, making sure to take our sweet time and walk very very slowly. Leaving us with plenty of time to hash out the latest gossip of our favorite band and also some kids from school, with a few choice confidences thrown in here and there for good measure. 

It was also a time to create mischief, or rather an additional time, because Gemini are like little kittens, always getting into all kinds of scraps because they just happen to find us on our eternal quest of getting ourselves and those around us into trouble. On this particular Friday we were on a quest to find bubble gum for vegetarians, which we had just learned was something the singer really loved. 

Imagine a small town wherever you are, provincial in material and thought, catering to the bare necessities and not too much else. Vegetarians were so few and far between you had to set out with a microscope if you wanted to find them. Except for a few people showing up at the handful of natural food stores and one homeopathic-leaning pharmacy, the choice was beyond dire. But one determined preteen and her equally determined teenage bestie will not be deterred by a lack of variety. In fact, it made us get more creative. Such is the nature of the Gemini. We turned it into a joke, walking in and out of every store we thought might have anything even remotely vegetarian to ask that all important question.

“Do you have bubble gum for vegetarians?”

The third store had it. At least according to the 60-year-old man in a white lab coat, who was about my height. We both looked at each other, frozen in horror, because we were stumped. Because we hadn’t expected to find it, neither of us had any money. 

The store owner was nice about it (probably saw right through our little charade) and even sent us on our way with some samples of vegetarian food, which I gave to M. because I loved meat too much to give it up. My body probably needed it more than I (or anyone around me) was aware of. 

The Consequence

I always attributed that moment to us drifting apart. Because the first thing that M. did when she got home was to try those samples. And then she decided she loved them. And that she could probably live on them. So there was no stopping her from becoming a vegetarian. Which went down a treat with her mother, who never blamed me but told me that “she’s already so thin, now she might stop eating altogether.”

Looking back on it now, from a grownup perspective, I realize that chances are pretty high she already had an eating disorder long before we started off on our quest for vegetarian bubble gum. Socializing over food was not a part of the culture where we lived, so it never really came up. And no one was inviting anyone to their house to sit and eat. I’m pretty sure that M. mother always gave me something to drink, but even though she was super nice (and I secretly always wished she was my mother instead of M.’s who seemed intimidated by her, even though there was nothing scary about her other than her having achieved something by being a Math teacher and a damn good one at that), it just wasn’t a thing. Something tells me my own mother would have told her not to give me anything to eat, so I didn’t get fat, but even though I know we must have been given food when we hung out at M.’s place, it was never enough to raise any alarms, especially not as a 12-year-old who A) had no idea about eating disorders, much less how to spot them and B) wasn’t thinking along those lines in the first place, so her bestie saying “I already ate” wouldn’t send up any red flags. 

We drifted apart soon after that, which is why that particular prank stood out so strongly. We’d still run into each other in school, but eventually even the initial flippant hellos wore off and we walked the halls as two strangers. The following year M.’s mother was assigned to my Math class, which ended the private tutoring sessions but guaranteed me a pass, because M.’s mother would do anything legally in her power to ensure I didn’t fail. And I did feel more comfortable having her as my teacher. In many ways I believe that I related to her more than I did to her daughter. 

M. drifted into alternative lifestyles hardcore from what I picked up here and there (mainly her mother), but when I did track her down a few years ago, she talked of having lived in a commune and advised me to google it, and while it might not exactly give Uschi Obermaier’s life partner a good run for his money, it certainly came close. 

But at the same time, it also made sense. Maybe it was the fact that I’d been hearing things here and there, so it never came as a full surprise. Maybe it was that where we lived then, if you started eating vegan, there was no other alternative but to drift into commune living eventually, because that place operated on binaries to an extreme. Or maybe it was just a certain maturity, coupled with premonition that made it the logical step. She might have been thinking the very same about me, that whatever I’m doing now was a logical extension of what I was back then, and aren’t we both glad we drifted apart when we did, because look at where the other Gemini ended up (cue eye roll). 

It still makes me think though, if she’s anti vax, if she voted for that abhorrence of a German party that makes all the populists’ hearts sing over there. And which side she would come down on when it comes to the world’s current conflicts. And if my way of expressing my love for a fellow human being hadn’t torn us apart as besties, would it have been that? But on that note, even though she left that part of her life well behind her when she moved from the region a year before I did, she still carried that deeply within her heart into adult life. No one there was comfortable with an overtly exuberant expression of feelings. My touchy-feely friends would have sent them screaming and cursing for the hills.