Chapter 11
Lesson 11: Not all meaningful friendships take a lifetime to build.
Bridget Jones Tally:
sore hearts—1
petits fours—enough for all of Yorkshire
We spent our afternoon in York, and I chose to wander the city on my own while the other ladies broke off in groups to explore,
trading recommendations on their favorite shops and cafés, maps clutched in their fists. I heard several of them remark delightedly
at how the wind of the moors had been masterfully effective at volumizing their hair: “Better than a day at the salon!” They
elbowed each other, cackling merrily, as I slung my headache over my shoulder and strode in a quieter direction.
The city was enchanting. I couldn’t help but take photos as I wound my way along its alleys and streets and walls. Every view
was a postcard, but my focus was lackluster. My head was home in DC, trying, fumbling, and failing to untie and set straight
all the knots and loose ends of my life.
I ambled through the Shambles and found myself at a picturesque little tearoom out of the way. The ceilings were low, and the walls were papered with a linen print of roses, framed by painted wooden paneling. The tablecloths were crisp, white, embroidered linen, showing off a hodgepodge of perfectly mismatched teapots, cups, saucers, and polished silver.
The warm, sharp scent of fresh tea mingled with a swirl of baked goods. I could almost taste the butter just from breathing
in. A fire crackled behind a tiled Victorian grate, and there, taking advantage of the best spot in the room, was a picture-perfect
English rose, perched upon a dainty perfusion of chintz, entirely at home.
Helena peered at me over her gilded teacup, a soft smile curling from her lips like the steam from her tea, and she nodded
to the chair across from her. I had ducked in here to sit alone and quietly ruminate over the splintered wreckage of my life,
but I could hardly refuse, particularly not when I was so grateful to her for looking after me the night before.
“Alice, how lovely. Will you join me, dear? This is my favorite café in York, and try as I might, I simply couldn’t prevent
myself from ordering a tower of petits fours, as well as scones and cream. I need to recruit help if I’m to make even the
slightest dent.” Helena’s was a soothing voice, and I was comforted by the sound of it. That and the promise of hot tea and
cakes.
“Thank you, Helena. I think this is just what I need.” And maybe it was.
“Undoubtedly. The healing properties of piping hot tea is widely known throughout the British Isles. I’ll never understand
why you Americans haven’t caught on.”
I smiled. “I think after we dumped it in Boston Harbor, we never looked back. But my grandmother was English, from Lancaster,
so I grew up with a teacup in my hand.”
“Did you really? She sounds like an upstanding woman.”
“She’s probably the reason why I’ve always longed to be here. Her stories made me feel homesick for a place I’d never been.”
A warm smile spread across Helena’s face, and her voice changed to honey. “Then you are right where you need to be.”
I grimaced. Nothing in my life was right where it needed to be. I hid my deflation in a sip of tea until I could muster a
wobbly smile. We sat quietly for a moment, and I selected a few petits fours from the lacy tiers of the silver stand.
“So. Are you feeling better, dear? Would you like to talk about what has been creasing that pretty brow of yours? We can’t
have you making wrinkles, now can we?”
“Uh.” I focused on my tea and thought over how to respond. I wasn’t in the habit of unburdening myself to strangers. I wasn’t
even in the habit of unburdening myself to my loved ones. Typically my way of handling hardship was to grit my teeth and get
on with it. But to my surprise, I felt like maybe I did want to share my troubles with this woman. The fact that she was a relative stranger made it easier somehow.
“Are you sure you know what you’re getting into?”
“Oh, I’m quite sure I’ve heard far worse. Let’s see if you can shock me.” She wiggled her bottom in the chair and leaned back,
as if tuning in to a juicy soap opera.
“I’ve just...” I sighed heavily. The weight of the words pushed at my chest. “Always had this plan for my life. You know?
And I worked hard for it.” My nose prickled. I stopped.
“Tell me.”
“I used to be proud of myself. I had a good job doing things that mattered. Last spring I got engaged to my college boyfriend, Hunter. We’d been together for seven years, and we knew we would eventually get married when the time was right, so it was no surprise. The venue was booked. Invitations were sent. We were also apartment hunting to buy our first place together. Or at least I was. I did all the organizing and planning. I suppose I should have seen the red flags.” I tried at a crooked smile. “When the shackle on the ball and chain began to close, Hunter started going out every night to ‘blow off some steam,’ and before I knew it, well... I was the one he was blowing off.”
Helena laughed humorlessly. “Men.”
“It all just fell apart, Helena. For two months, I dragged him to couples counseling and pleaded with him not to throw away
the years we had spent together, the beautiful future we had been building. That didn’t work, obviously. I found out later
that he had been seeing a girl named Misty and her enormous breasts for months.”
“What a tiresome cliché. Can’t they at least get a little creative once in a while? I am sorry, dear, but good riddance, I’d
say. Better to find out now.”
I let out a long breath. “I suppose. But I’m about to turn thirty, and I wanted children by now. I’m going to have to start
building something from scratch with someone new. All those years wasted.”
“Oh, I disagree. Years are never really wasted. This seems like a good time to take a moment to focus on yourself and make
yourself happy with friends, new hobbies, in your work.”
I grimaced. “I have a little confession to make. Turns out it was a poor time to let my relationship woes distract me from
work. I’m sorry for the lie. I couldn’t bring myself to tell everyone the first time I met the group.”
“Oh, Alice.”
“Yeah. Before the end of the month, I had lost my fiancé, my job, the ring, the wedding, the apartment, my entire life, and
my future, and I was sending out cards to inform all our wedding guests that we would not be getting married anymore, thanks
for all the toasters.”
With a soft smile of consolation, Helena served me another petit four. “Poor dear. When was this?”
“About six months ago now.”
“And what have you been doing since then?”
I hated that question. The answer was such a painful, humiliating admission to make. I didn’t want to be this person—a person
to be pitied. All the same, I opened my mouth and let the truth out.
“Sleeping, mostly. You know things are rock bottom when your daily wardrobe consists of only daytime pajamas or nighttime
pajamas.” I laughed—dry, humorless, forced—and ducked my head. “At first I tried to fix things. I started looking for a new
job immediately and went to as many interviews as would have me, but my heart wasn’t in it. All I got were rejections. I decided
that I needed time, so I took a little sabbatical of two months to regroup and pull myself together, which just spiraled into
a six-month period of full-on depression. A couple of weeks ago, I was making some headway. I’d started making to-do lists,
cleaning the apartment, and scheduling job-hunting tasks. Then I got a phone call from a mutual friend—Hunter had proposed
to the woman he had cheated on me with, with my ring.”
“He didn’t! The cad.”
I took another sip and shrugged. “Thanks. It’s fine, actually. I think I’m more jealous that they have the things I wanted
for myself than jealous that another woman has Hunter.” It was true. I was glad of that, at least. “Anyway. I’ve been, well,
pretty down. I think this trip is probably the first time I’ve left the apartment in months. If Hunter and I had ever gotten
around to adopting any pets, they would have given up and eaten me.”
She chuckled. “I see. So this little trip to Britain... it’s to shake off the cobwebs?”
“Exactly. I’ve never been a wallower. I’ve tried to pick myself up and get my life back on track, and it just hasn’t worked. I’ve just lost...” I felt tears sting the back of my eyes and worked to swallow them down and keep my voice steady. “Everything. All my hard work. All my careful planning. I feel like I’m left with nothing. And the longer this goes on, the harder it feels to get my life in order again.” We sat in the quiet while that statement resonated, but Helena didn’t move to pick the conversation up. “This trip... I never do things like this. It was spontaneous and unplanned and expensive. But I didn’t know how else to break free of this funk I’ve been in. I came here to center myself, to force myself out of my comfort zone and get into the right headspace to fix my life.”
I squeezed my eyes shut a moment. It was always more difficult to speak your fears aloud—it put meat on their bones somehow.
“But now I’m here, and I think maybe it’s all just been a big mistake. Don’t get me wrong—I love it here, and the trip has
been amazing so far... well, mostly amazing. Last night’s plans for a sophisticated and educational evening may have gone
very slightly awry.” We both laughed a bit at my expense before my smile faded. The soft look returned to Helena’s face, and she topped
up my tea, urging me on in her quiet way.
“The thing is, I feel even more lost and confused than before. I’m afraid to face going home, because I’ve still got to start
my life all over again, and I know when I get back everything will be just the way it was, only worse.”
I stopped for a breath and crammed a chocolate petit four in my mouth to stem the tide of despair. Tears blurred the edges
of my vision, and I tried my damndest not to let them fall. Helena seemed to think for a moment, sipping her tea.
“Life is... very hard on women, Alice. Don’t make it any harder than it already is. Be patient with yourself. Good things
will come.”
They were nice words, but they were just platitudes, weren’t they? “But everyone I know is moving on with their happy families
and glittering careers and beautiful homes. And it’s going to take years and lots of hard work to get back to where I was.”
“Then perhaps you shouldn’t be trying to get back to where you were. Perhaps it’s time for something new. Find things that make you happy. A new job, a new place, a new man—or woman, for that matter. Why not see where the wind blows you for a little while?”
“I can’t do that.” She didn’t understand. She couldn’t. “I can’t just throw all those years of hard work away and become someone
I’m not.”
“Even the most dedicated plans and heartfelt ambitions are still vulnerable to the whims of fate. Life does not always take
us from point A to point B. It follows its own course. The sooner you can learn to accept this, the better.” She took another
sip of her tea, and when she spoke again her tone had changed. “Life is sometimes random and unexpected, and even cruel—it
can give things, and take things away.”
She softened then, pouring more tea for both of us before settling back into her chair. I wasn’t sure what to say, so I stirred
another sugar lump into my cup.
“I felt the same once, when I was young. I was very ambitious. I had a fire in my belly. It was the late seventies, and I
had gotten a place at Cambridge, reading art history. I wanted to become a museum curator. But then, after my second year,
I was offered a modeling contract. I didn’t even think about it. I left university and began living for what felt like the
first time.”
“Wow.” Cambridge and a modeling contract—I was impressed, but not surprised.
“I knew that fashion was what I was made for, and I must have had the right look at the right time, because before I knew it, I was
traveling for fashion shows in Paris and photo shoots in the Mediterranean, and I was in magazines and a few television commercials
for a new makeup line.”
“I can only imagine that kind of lifestyle in the seventies. I’m sure you’ve got some amazing stories to tell.”
“Oh, a lady never tells, Alice,” she said, completely deadpan. I couldn’t help but laugh. “But I also had my feet on the ground. I knew even then that youth and beauty fade quickly, so I took every job I could, collecting business cards as I went. I was making a name for myself. I wanted to start my own fashion magazine. By my midtwenties, I had it all very neatly planned and had recruited a partner and a group of investors.
“So focused was I, that when a man whom I was seeing at the time... oh, such a terribly handsome man he was. And powerful,
and so very rich. An American business tycoon. One weekend he flew me to Paris, told me that he couldn’t live another day
without me, and asked me to marry him.”
“Paris! How romantic.” I crammed more cake into my mouth. “What did you say?”
“I turned him down. I think I could have loved him; I probably would have been very happy. But getting married wasn’t part
of my plan yet. I was free and ambitious and enjoying the sexual liberation of the seventies—we all were. I thought that marriage
would mean that I would have to make room in my life for someone else’s plans and ambitions, and that it would mean children
and giving up everything that I had worked for.”
“I can understand that. A family always means a career setback for a woman, no matter what they say.”
“And that’s today. I’m sure you can imagine what it was like in the seventies. The thought of pregnancy terrified me. It seemed
like a life sentence... servitude by a sweeter name. And it would have ruined my body for modeling. I would have to give
up everything I had earned and worked for, all of my dreams, to focus on my child’s life instead of my own. My own life would
be over.”
I knew these thoughts as intimately as if her words were mine.
“I broke his heart that day and never saw him again. That same week I was off to a photo shoot in India, and I didn’t look
back.”
I nodded. I could see where this was going. Choosing one’s career over love, and then looking back with regret. A painful story perhaps, but not a new one.
“By the end of that year, my career was going splendidly. Then one day, I was in New York for a job when I got a phone call.”
She stopped and stirred her tea, and I saw a flash of pain wash across her face. She cleared her throat, sipped, and went
on. “It was my sister. She had gotten a cold, and the next morning her little girl found her dead in her bed—meningitis. Just
like that. No warning, no explanation, just a senseless waste.”
“My God.” I was completely stunned. “I’m so sorry, Helena. How tragic...”
“She had two little girls—one was four, and the other was in her terrible twos.”
“And the father?”
“He hadn’t been on the scene since the divorce and had made it clear that he didn’t want them, and my mother wasn’t well.
There was just no one else. It had to be me, and none of the railing and bargaining that I seethed with those first few months
could bring her back or change a thing. I flew home the next day, and my life changed forever.”
“Was there no way to keep modeling? Or get the magazine up and running?”
“I tried. I simply couldn’t figure out how to salvage my career and still provide a normal, happy life for the girls. So I
did the only thing I could do. I gave up everything and became a mom. I took the money I had put aside and left London for
a cottage in the country. I gave myself over to raising those babies for my sister.”
My mouth was open. I closed it. “How did you manage it? How did you let go of everything?”
“At first I was bitter—and furious and desperate and depressed—but of course I had to keep moving for the girls. They still had to eat and get dressed and go to school. They had to play and be happy. And they needed me. Before I knew it, I wasn’t pretending anymore. Being a mother is hard work, believe me, and I simply didn’t have any time to feel sorry for myself. But—and here’s the thing, Alice. I want you to listen carefully.”
She paused a moment. I couldn’t help but lean in across the table.
“I didn’t just manage. I flourished. I was wrong when I thought I had been happy before. Maybe this doesn’t sound terribly
feminist or modern, and I know it’s not right for everyone, but for me, I had no idea what joy and fulfillment were until
I was a mother. And it was a thing that had always terrified me, something I had never wanted for myself. I would give anything
to have my sister back, but if I hadn’t lost her, I may never have been a mum, and that would have been a tragedy too.”
“Wow. Did you do it all on your own?”
“Oh no. Well, I did at first. But I met a man a few years later, and we had three more children of our own. I simply couldn’t
get enough of them!”
I blew out a lung full of air and sat back in my seat. “But what about your magazine? All your plans? You don’t ever regret
what you lost?”
“Not for one second,” she said with slow relish. “I did build another career eventually, after all the children had left home.
I had become such a happy homemaker, I opened my own little interior decor shop. I love it. Everyone needs different things,
and what I needed found me. I wasn’t open to it, but it bulldozed its way into my life anyway. My point, my dear, is that
life is chaotic and unpredictable, and sometimes through pain and tragedy we can be given something beautiful. Maybe instead
of focusing on what you lost, you could focus on your newfound freedom.”
I shook my head for a moment in awed disbelief and finished my tea. “I don’t... I wouldn’t even know where to start. I
wish I had an ounce of your fortitude.”
“Oh, you do. I know you do. I just wish you could let go of the reins a little bit.”
“I’ve always been on this track. Frankly, anything else seems like failure.”
“It sounds like you’re so focused on what you think that your life is supposed to be that you’re not giving yourself the room to find out what you could be. Your anxiety is calling all the shots.”
“I thought that was how everyone lived.”
She smiled and pushed the plate of scones nearer to me.
“It isn’t fair to put yourself under so much pressure. Maybe you’ll do exactly as you always planned, or maybe your life will
take an unexpected course, but either way, you should be in control, not your anxiety.”
I took a moment. I wasn’t sure I agreed. If you just let your life blow around with no plan or control, then what you ended
up with was a fun, relaxed life, perhaps, but nothing substantial.
“What do your family say?” she asked.
“Well, my parents have always been very career-driven. When I was a child, they uprooted us and moved across the state to
get me into a better school district. When I got into Yale, they cried and threw me a massive party. My education and career
are what they lived for. They want to see me back on the horse yesterday. Hell, they’d like to see me president yesterday.”
“Mm-hmm...” She nodded, popping a petit four neatly into her mouth and looking unsurprised. “And what did they think about
the fiancé?”
“Well, they cared for Hunter only as far as they assumed he made me happy, but I think they secretly thought he was a bit
lazy. They’d be just as pleased to see me with someone else, or going it on my own, for that matter.”
“Not a bad idea, actually. Some time to focus on yourself might be just the thing.”
“Yes. Apparently I thought the focus would be much clearer here in the British countryside, but I think the only thing clearer is my bank account,” I said with a wince.
“Don’t be hasty, dear girl. You’ve only just arrived. Did I not just tell you of the miracles that can be worked by a pot
of strong English tea?”
Helena and I spent the rest of the afternoon meandering around York together, enjoying the sites as much as we enjoyed each
other’s company. In the late afternoon, we met the others for a guided tour through the city. I enjoyed myself quietly but
was withdrawn, and I turned in early afterward. The tour guide made a face at this, but there were many things left heavy
on my mind, so I decided to skip dinner and be by myself for a while.
Unfortunately, sleep did not come willingly, and my mind grinded on like a set of gears that refused to stop turning. Talking
about my life had been a strange sensation. My parents knew what had happened, but apart from “Are you alright?” and “Is there
anything we can do to help?,” we didn’t talk much about feelings. This was the first time I had really discussed it with anyone,
and it felt painful, vulnerable, but also freeing. It felt like a move in the right direction.
This made me realize that I had let my friendships drift away from me. I had strong friendships during my college years, but
after graduation, I suppose I had spent more time focusing on my career and building a life with Hunter, because those two
things were vital to achieving my goals. I had let my friends sort of slip away without even noticing. I had some work friends,
of course, but that wasn’t the same. They were good for having a drink with after work and venting about deadlines, but not
so much for crying on when I hadn’t showered in five days.
Helena’s advice confused me. I wasn’t sure I could adapt the way she had. But it felt wise. She was a woman who undoubtedly knew more about life than I did. And when my problems were viewed from her side of the table, they didn’t look quite so insurmountable.
Yet as the sleepless night wore on in a haze, things looked different, and I felt unaccountably blue. I chided myself for
having run from my problems rather than face them. Was that what I’d done? I didn’t even know any more. Was Helena right?
Should I rethink what I’d always wanted and maybe move somewhere else, try something new? Not everyone was Helena. Maybe I
wasn’t as resilient or adaptable as she was.