The Collected Emails of Sylvia Plath; Situational Wives

I may be the world's worst dinner guest. I'd much rather prowl my hosts' personal effects than talk to the other guests.

I was staring at the plates, two limited editions from the Bradford Exchange circa late seventies – six scenes from the Wizard of Oz, six from Gone With the Wind. The _________ had them up along the wall overlooking the kitchen island.

Of course, I am the Kitsch Queen so I love stuff like this and it was all over the house, so much to look at – M's snow globe collection, another set of plates painted with circus scenes overlooking the bar, the most cunning little automated circus ring with elephants that danced and acrobats who did tricks. Framed photographs everywhere.

"They're something, aren't they?" My host. "I bought the first one before M and I got together. She thought it was something I should keep up."

My host, J, is a pretty fascinating guy. He was an entertainment impresario for many years, touring stage companies and the circus – he was Emmett Kelly's producer. After he and M had their first kid, he settled down on the peninsula and opened a popular restaurant. Which he had the presence of mind to sell shortly after 9/11: "I knew it was going to knock the bottom out of the tourism industry. Good time to cut and run. And anyway, I was tired of it. Restaurants are a lot of work."

He looked very tired tonight. I'm not sure how the conversation segued into the personal – we were talking offspring, we were talking the diminished expectations of a good time that attend middle age – when all of a sudden he began telling me about a friend, a close friend, who had died very suddenly that week, whose funeral had been that day –

"Septicemia," said J blinking furiously. "One minute he was fine, the next we were getting a call from the hospital. He was dead. Dead! Fifty-three years old. Dead."

"I'm so sorry. So sorry," I said, and I was. I put my hand on his arm and tried to will warm, radiant, sunshine-y energy through it.

I didn't succeed.

"I'm sorry, I can't talk about this, I gotta go –" J told me.

"What was that all about?" his wife M asked. She'd been standing in another corner of the kitchen putting the finishing touches on a chicken parmesan. She's a fabulous cook.

"We were talking about Roy," I said softly.

"Ah, Roy," she said. She shook her head ruefully. "You know, I just got back from visiting my mother. Her birthday. She turned ninety. Ninety.

"And I asked her, 'How can you stand it?'

"'How can I stand what?' she said.

"'Having your friends die,' I said.

""Well, there are always new ones,' she said. 'I just finished sending out sixty-five Christmas cards, each with a hand-written note.'" M snorted. "I doubt that I know five people I would bother to send hand-written notes on a Christmas card to."

"The nature of friendship has changed drastically in the last thirty years or so," I said. "Part of it is that our communication methods have become so ephemeral. Telephone calls, the Internet. No biographer is ever going write The Collected Emails of Sylvia Plath. And part of it, too, is that the distinction between situational friends and friends of the heart has become blurred –"

"Situational friends?"

I shrugged. "You know. People you meet because you work with them or you're on a committee with them, and you like them a lot – they're perfectly nice people – but you know that after you quit that job or drop off that committee, you'll see them maybe one or two times max and then never think of them again –"

"Situational friends, " M said drolly. "I like that. I'll have to remember that. I think maybe all my friends are situational friends. Which is why I don't like to go out much anymore. Except J. How long have you been married?"

"Fourteen years," I said.

"We've been married thirty years. And we were together for ten years before that."

This shocked me a little. I thought M was younger than me – she certainly looks it – but if she's been with someone for forty years, then she's got to be older.

"It shocks me when people I know get divorced," said M.

"That means you have a successful marriage," I said.

"Doesn't it shock you?"

I shrugged. "There's a point at which you start developing a private language, you know? You have nicknames for things that only the other person knows, you have all sorts of little in-jokes. It's a thing that happens over time. It shocks me a little when people who have that separate, I guess. I have to assume there's some other compelling reason. What trumps intimacy? Certainly not infidelity. Maybe money. But I also know how hard it is to develop that kind of bond. So if you're a certain age when you separate –" I shook my head. "Harder for a woman, of course. Men seem to do perfectly well with situational friends. Even situational wives –"

M pursed her lips and sighed. "I've stopped making new friends. It's too much work. And then the old friends I have die on me –"

We looked at each other and smiled.

Later that night as Ben and I were leaving, when M and I were both quite a bit drunker, she said, "Come here, you –" and grabbed me and hugged me. "You and I should really get together some time –" she said.

"We should!" I said. "We really should."

But I knew we never would.