Remaking the lives we used to have

I still remember how the little silver hook lock felt between my fingers as I threaded it into its corresponding loop. The spare bedroom of my best friend Kayla’s childhood home had two doors, each outfitted with one of these locks. If we didn’t lock the doors at night, Kayla’s little brothers would sneak in and leap onto the bed in the morning, earlier than any pair of pre-teen girls wanted to wake up.

Thus secured against morning intruders, we snuggled down under spare quilts and listened while wind rocked the white farmhouse. Then, appropriate to best-friendship, we spun stories for each other. The heroines of these stories were, of course, us. The setting was the future. The plot invariably involved our husbands. Kayla wanted to get married in a field of clover. I wanted to get married in the woods. We found our selection of grooms severely limited by our locale. But what did that matter? It was just a story, and someday it would come true. Maybe by then two of our scraggly, teenaged male acquaintances would have rounded out into decent men.

We told these stories in every conceivable country circumstance: slicing strawberries while our mothers made jam, husking corn in piles so deep we could roll through the silk and shucks. We told them picking tomatoes and walking to yard sales and wading through creeks. Every version added a turret to the sky castles: We would have x amount of children, and marry x and live in x kind of house. My husband would be intelligent and like to garden. Hers would be chivalrous and game for every adventure.

These days I keep realizing with a start that the future has arrived. Last year, Kayla and I celebrated our weddings just two weeks apart. We got our first salaried jobs, our first cars, and our first apartments. Now even our phone calls grow harder and harder to squeeze into our lives and usually involve some version of the sentence, “Are we old enough to be doing all this?”

“I always expected we’d have husbands and babies,” she told me on the phone a few weeks ago. “But I never expected we wouldn’t do it in the same county.”

Now that the troubles of moving states away from home and readjusting have seized us, we suddenly realize how much time it cost our mothers to create the cultures we were born into. We feel lonely, in a sense, for the things that haven’t happened yet—for the big Thanksgivings and the steady networks of people and customs that may one day surround us after we’ve stayed in one place for a long time. But in the same way we could not imagine our actual grooms because we only knew a few adolescent boys, we find it difficult to imagine the futures that have not yet arrived. Can it really be possible that the new people who frequent our lives will become as dear to us as the old?

We wonder how we can remake the lives we used to have. Perhaps I will begin by buying two silver hooks.