Les Kay

Monica Jacobe

Three-Legged Race

With the hard annunciation of organ notes, we all stand. I turn from my place on the aisle, near the back and see Diana filling the church doorway in white satin and lace. Saturday afternoon sunlight pouring through the open door makes her glow. She is radiant. The wedding march plays as she steps carefully down the aisle on her father's arm. She smiles at eyes caught in passing. She smiles at me and waves the fingers tucked in her father's elbow. Her eyes are bright and wet with tears.

It is the same church we have always been in-trooped over for high holy days from school in blue plaid jumpers and knees socks, lined up for every religious sacrament of our lives. And now she was without me in a new one.

I stand tall in my red suit, looking older than I think I should. My feet are square on the floor, and I am too aware of them-like I could topple over at any second. I hold myself like this and watch the dress's train slide with a gentle wisp down the aisle behind her.

I do not expect the flat empty feeling in my gut in the moments to follow. I am surprised when everything in the long Catholic ceremony-the songs, the readings, the vows-is a blur. All I remember is staring at the latticed walls and the tall, pale crucifix mounted behind the altar. I also do not expect my tears as the priest presents Mr. and Mrs. Brandon Healy. I wonder if this woman is the same Diana I have always known.

*****

Diana and I met in kindergarten. That first day, our desks made a huge circle around the room, and I spent most of my time looking at the dangling feet that couldn't touch the blue carpet from the plastic seat. Diana's shoes, being the first thing I noticed, were tan like the flesh-colored pantyhose my mother wore out to dinner. They had shiny gold buckles and a few cut-out shapes around the rounded front. I didn't know then that these were Mary Janes. Above her shoes, a white ruffle of lace held the same shape as the hem of her dress, and it was in this dress that pulled me away from shoes and the carpet and my first-day-of-school fears. Even with the bottom ruffled, the cotton being thin, and her position on the other side of the circle, I could make out the map of Winnie the Pooh's Hundred Acre Wood that wound around her. On white cotton, thin, brown dashes traced a pattern between exes, and every now and again, a brightly colored character could be found next to a destination. I was in love with this dress and the girl who wore it. I followed her with my eyes all day and traced the circular routes of the map with careful precision.

I didn't think I was like her but immediately wanted to be. She seemed so calm, hands folded on her desk watching the teacher with calm, hazel eyes that seemed too big for her face and yet lost under the gold-colored bowl of her hair. I didn't think I was like her until Mrs. Kennedy mixed us up, calling me Diana and her Monica as we lined up after recess. That was the first time she noticed me, and she smiled with tiny, square teeth. I remember this smile from the hallway outside our classroom as though I were taller. I picture her face tipped up with a triangle of forehead showing where her bangs fell back. I remember that my feet tingled and couldn't feel the floor change from linoleum to carpet as we went into the room.

Somehow, she became my best friend. We were in the same reading group and both liked to jump rope at recess, but I don't know how it evolved. The next year, we exchanged identical Care Bear figures for Christmas and traded ornaments made in class because her mother had said she didn't like "X-mas" for "Christmas" and Diana had painted it on a glittery bell. By second grade, she rounded off my lumpy circles for art projects while I neatly glued both our pieces together.

*****

Diana is the only friend who met my mother. Most of my classmates saw her in carpool line, but they hadn't met her. She wasn't a room mother and didn't come with us on field trips. When my mother was alive, my siblings and I didn't even get to be in the annual Christmas play, where each class had a special section.

Somehow, Diana got into our world. She even spent the night at our house and ate my mother's specialty-hamburger-noodle casserole. Simple and tasteless, it was just hamburger, egg noodles, and Campbell's cream of mushroom soup with a sprinkling of pepper before the final stir.

My mother had pulled one of the good chairs in from the dining room for herself and put two kitchen chairs side-by-side at our small kitchen table so Diana and I were next to each other. My sister sat across from us, my brother at the end. We ate in silence because we knew that's what we were supposed to do. The less talking, the less chance Mom would get mad, and no one wanted to see the screaming, crying, and leather belt with a guest in our house.

"This is really good, Mrs. Jacobe," Diana said, her dimples appearing over a forkful of casserole and a smile now missing a few teeth since I first saw it.

My mother glowed in the praise, returning her own dimpled simple.

"Thank you, dear."

"Maybe you could give my mom the recipe?"

Diana's parents and mine had becomes friends, the way parents do when their kids are friends-no long phone calls and secrets revealed but a friendly chatting when they got together.

"I'll remember to do that."

My mother took a few more bites of her dinner before getting up and opening the fridge. I was surprised when she got out the gallon milk jug because four full glasses were already on the table. She got a glass from the cabinet and filled it full of milk. She took a sip before returning to the table. She looked around at us and alternated casserole with milk. I tried to stare at my plate and had the feeling Steph and Jesse were doing the same. Diana was looking happily around. That was the first and only time that, instead of beer, my mother drank milk.

*****

For Field Day at school, Diana and I were obvious partners-same height, same size, same hair. After 1st place blue ribbons in kindergarten and first grade, I didn't have to ask her to be my partner. We spent many recesses during our 2nd grade spring practicing the three-legged race with a black and white jump rope dragging behind our tied legs.

That Field Day was a sunny Friday. We had spent the morning making Mother's Day cards for the weekend's holiday and one final practice for our collective First Holy Communion the next day. Diana helped me cut the o's and round the p and the c out of blue paper to spell For A Peach of A Mom on the orange construction paper I had chosen. To the right of the words, I glued down one of the peaches out teacher had made-flesh-colored paper with a green and brown top and pencil marks for fuzz. They were all fruit slogans; Diana had chosen the apple that had a rectangle of shine drawn on one side.

That afternoon was reserved for the silly games of Field Day, like the egg and spoon relay and balloon pop. Every team entered every event, grouped by class, and most of us spent more time laughing than competing. The team that won the most events in each class took home the blue ribbons. Our favorite-and best-event was the three-legged race. Even without practicing, we ran like one person, and after many practices, we were unstoppable. Two legs tied together to lead off, then the separate, outside legs. "One-two, one-two," we counted aloud. We could have run real races like that.

That day, the whistle blew and we ran. The wind blew my hair back as we moved across the flat, green grass. No one was beside us. There was just sunshine and wind roaring in our ears. We crossed the finish line easily ahead of the other struggling teams and collapsed on the ground to untie the rope above our identical navy blue knee socks. We sat in the grass, smelling like dirt and sunshine, cheering until everyone had finished.

We took home 1st place blue ribbons again. I held mine with my Mother's Day card. I was proud. But my mother never saw my blue ribbon and never got her Mother's Day card. That was the day she died.

*****

The next morning—for my First Communion—I put on my sister's hand-me-down dress and veil. I also had to borrow stockings and her old shoes. My own new, beaded white patent leather shoes and thick white tights were in the trunk of my mother's 1986 Mercury, and I don't know what happened to them after her accident.

Instead, I wore grown-up, flesh-colored knee-highs that went all the way up my legs and old Easter shoes my sister polished that morning to try and hide the creases and cracks.

In the rectory, waiting to line up with all the other girls in white and the boys in suits, I sat in a chair our teacher had brought over. The only chair. In the middle of the room. My class made a circle around me, silent. Mrs. Kinney whispered to my father and kept looking over her shoulder at me. They all just looked.

Diana was the only one who would touch me. She came and stood behind me, put her hand on my shoulder, and stood up tall. She stared back at everyone staring at me and didn't seem to mind the eyes that must have been on her back.

"Just follow me," she said, holding my hand as we lined up, "Jason will be behind you. He'll watch out. Just follow me."

She had a crown to hold her veil on and a white rose in the back of her hair. I couldn't feel my feet on the ground, but I stayed steps behind that white rose the whole way into church, through the whole processional to receive communion. I only remembered to say "Amen" after the priest's "Body of Christ" because I heard Diana say it before me. When we sat down again and knelt to pray, Diana put her hand in mine, and we prayed together.

*****

I saw her next at the funeral. She was at the back of the church-in the same blue uniform I wore most days-holding a gold chalice, carrying the gifts to the altar for Mass. I was in my father's lap wearing a sailor-suit dress that had been my sister's years before. It was the only dark thing that fit me and wasn't a jumper for school.

When we first sat down, a woman from the church came to ask my father if my sister, my brother, and I would carry the gifts. He stared at her, his eyes looked like stones, blank and hard. She walked away without an answer. Diana and two boys from my class, one of them the Jason who had walked behind at Communion took our places.

Diana walked up the aisle with her eyes down, like she was watching her feet and concentrating. They must have played music, but I don't remember hearing the song. I only remember her walking. Her face was gold from the reflection of the chalice.

At the foot of the altar, the chalice handed to the priest, she turned and finally looked at me. Her forehead scrunched in thought. I don't think I smiled, don't think I could. She held my eyes with hers until she turned to take the side aisle back to her family.

*****

We stayed in the same schools together through high school, walking together then in black robes down the burgundy-shrouded aisles of an auditorium instead of a church. Somehow, our friendship was never the same. It changed the day I came back to school after the funeral. It was silence, like the morning after, waiting to line up in the rectory. Then, she had given me the strength I didn't have, but now she was one of the staring, too quiet mass of classmates watching the little girl with no mother like it was something they could catch. The next year at field day, I was the last one to find a partner-a new girl whose name I don't remember.

To teachers and our parents, it probably seemed like we just grew apart as we grew up, making new friends and developing new interests. To me, it felt like a break that was quick and went unhealed. Diana wasn't among the classmates who told me in un-sad voices they were sorry my mother had died, but she was one of the ones who never said anything.

*****

At the wedding reception, Diana moves constantly. She walks between the tables talking to relatives; she slips back to the head table for a few bites of food. Her whole life is in that room-old friends, new friends, newly merged families. I don't think she has time for me.

I sit at a back table near the food with Jason, the boy who walked behind me for First Communion and carried a gold chalice at my mother's funeral. We talk about the years between then and now. We talk about Diana being the first of us to get married.

After all the dances and toasts and food, I wait behind a group of college friends hugging Diana and her new husband. They move away, and she sees me.

"You look beautiful," I say.

"So do you. I am so glad you're here."

She takes both my hands and squeezes them tight.

"I wouldn't miss it for the world."

I pull her in and hug her. The satin of her dress is damp and clinging to her back. I don't want to let go because we feel like one person again and I can almost hear the roar of the wind from the three-legged race in my ears.

"I missed you," I say over her shoulder.

"Yeah," she says still hugging me, "It's been a long time."

Monica F. Jacobe earned an MFA in creative writing at American University with a concentration in creative nonfiction. Her creative works have appeared or are forthcoming in Crosscut, apt, RY-K-RY Quarterly Literary Journal, Prism, and The Ampersand, among others. She is also the founder and organizer of A Space Inside, a multi-genre literary reading series for Washington, DC, writers that focuses on small press authors and those in the early stages of career. In May 2007, she will be a resident fellow at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts.

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