I Thought She Was Who She Said She Was

Forty years later I'm finding out she wasn't.

Photo by Kyle Sudu on Unsplash

In the mid- to late-80s, for three or four years in a row, I spent two deliriously enjoyable weeks in the spring doing a residency at a beautiful colony in the Midwest. It was far removed from New York City and the East Coast, both in distance and in flavor, but East Coasters flocked there for some reason, and, to my surprise, many of them carried huge amounts of writer’s angst, didn’t drive, and were so provincial they gasped at the size of Lake Michigan, never imagining they wouldn’t be able to see across it.

They were the curious creatures, not me, and, I admit, after my initial terror at living amongst them for two weeks, I felt a tiny bit superior, me in my own element and they trying to navigate the ‘boonies’ just north of one of the country’s largest cities.

Maybe I relaxed, or maybe they relaxed, but I met some wonderful people there, along with a few real shits, as you might expect in a colony where you had to prove your writing worth in order to take up space there. Those few made it all too clear that the rest of us were an insult in a place that should only have been reserved for the likes of them.

I didn’t have much under my belt that first year, so they may have been right. Maybe I shouldn’t have been there. I was working on a novel I sincerely wanted to finish and for which I’d received a grant from the state. I was doing feature work for Detroit’s biggest paper, plus I had a column in a large suburban chain, but I realized right quick that I was a peanut among giants, and, if the people in the office didn’t know it, the giants certainly did.

Some of them (but not all) scared the hell out of me. It started within the first minutes of my first stay, when I couldn’t find my room, the office was closed, and the map I was looking at made no sense. The place was eerily quiet. I wandered around until I saw an open door and heard typing. I called out, ‘Hello?’ A book slammed shut, I heard a faint mutter, and when I drew closer and saw an actual person, she glared at me and said through clenched teeth, “I’m in the middle of something. WHAT!”

OMG, I completely forgot the instructions said we were never supposed to interrupt the writers during their working hours. I tried to apologize, but she sighed, looked up at the ceiling as if there might actually be something up there, and said, '“Just. Go. Away.”

I finally found my room—it wasn’t in the same house as the semi-famous ceiling-starer, thankfully—and as I was lugging my stuff in, including my entire PC, a woman almost as small as I was walked up and offered to help. She was a writer from Manhattan, and we hit it off immediately. She was there for the same two weeks and, along with another friendly female human being from somewhere close to NYC, we spent a good part of our free time together. (I’m going to be vague here; no real names or identifiers because you might know who I mean and that’s not my intent.)

My new friend told me she was an American, but her British phrases and lingering accent were there because she’d spent a year in London after her divorce. She was lovely and petite and loads of fun. She told me her brother was an actor whose name I recognized because he’d been one of the lesser leads in a movie that had been a huge hit. She told me he’d altered their last name slightly, accounting for the obvious difference, and I chalked it up to their need to be seen as themselves. It seemed to make sense at the time.

The next year we arranged our stays so we could be there at the same time. We wrote back and forth, each of us just too witty for words. We fed off of each other and made each other laugh. I thought I would never forget her, or any of the others I met and liked during those years, yet, except for a few who made literary news, I rarely thought about them again.

I think I Googled her name once, years later, but didn’t find anything. That’s not to say it wasn’t there. Whenever I Google I find a hundred different roads to take so it’s possible I stopped looking because I found something else that caught my eye, and as so often happened I forgot what I was looking for.

At any rate, she was out of my thoughts until the day before yesterday, when I saw her name and clicked on a picture of a woman who definitely wasn’t her. This woman with the same name was a distinguished poet who had recently died, so when I typed in that name, Google was filled with news about her.

Still, I was curious, so I dug a little deeper—and could find no mention of my friend. I Googled her brother, the actor, and found he had died. When I checked his obituary, I saw he had a sister, all right, but it wasn’t my friend from the colony.

Now here’s where it gets spooky: His real sister turned out to be someone else I had known in those early writing days. I knew her in Detroit, but not well enough that we might have talked about her brother. But there it was—brother and sister. Those two.

So, my friend had lied. LIED. But why?

Had she really lived in London? I don’t know. Had she published mostly in Europe, as she told us? I don’t know. Did she really have an agent? When she had to hurry back to meet with her publisher, was she really meeting with her publisher? I don’t know.

But there seems to be no question she lied about her actor-brother.

In her last letter she wrote that our mutual friend from the colony had died. The letter looked hurried and wasn’t on her usual elegant, perfumed stationery. It was on cheap yellow paper and her lovely even handwriting was a scrawl. She said something about finding a new life, hoping this was finally what she was looking for, and I wrote back with condolences for our friend. Then I wished her the very best in whatever it was she had found so exciting. I asked her to tell me all about it, but of course I never heard from her again.

I should tell you, when I started this I had just about given up on finding anything about her, but yesterday I decided to try again. I dug deeper into Google and this time I found her picture first, then her obituary. The obit said she’d been a travel and feature writer for various magazines. She was best known, her obit said, for a short manual she co-wrote for teenagers on a controversial topic near and dear to my own liberal heart, and I had to smile at that. I remembered that we had been on the same political wavelength, all three of us, and we were still new enough at it to believe we were going to make a difference. She believed hard enough to act on it.

The obituary said she had a brother, but not the one she claimed. She had three sons, one of whom had the same first name as the actor-brother. She lived long enough to be a grandmother and I’m happy to report she was loved.

So there, I thought, was the end of the story. Not much of a mystery, it turns out, but I can’t get over that lie. Why was that supposed relationship important to her? The actor she claimed as her brother wasn’t famous enough to be a household name. Why him?

Oh, but wait! In a different bio, I found another clue: The actor had, in fact, changed his name somewhere along the way. His real name was the same as hers.

My head is spinning. I should be doing anything else but this. But if you’ve read this to the end I have to imagine you’re wondering, too. If I were writing this as fiction I would want this to be the tale of a woman who rewrote the story of her life for no other reason than to have fun with it.

Did it hurt anyone? I don’t think so. Did it hurt her? I hope not. Did it leave me curiouser and curiouser?

Sure, but isn’t that what any good story should do?

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