mallorys_camera | The Third Call (Reply)

Every time I think about cleaning—all right, all right: I don’t think about cleaning very often—I always have to think about those boxes and boxes of unsorted photographs living in my closet.

It would take me several lifetimes under strict quarantine—Covid, bubonic plague, maybe an Ebola strain specially adapted for life above the equator—to sort through them all.

But, of course, I can’t throw them away.

In the early years of my first marriage, I gave a lot of parties.

I loved giving parties. They would start out with elaborate dinners served on my wedding china, which was a Villeroy & Bosch pattern called Amapola, and then metamorphose into fascinating conversation and intensely competitive games of charades. I loved cooking; I loved charades.

Gentleman in the picture above was the uber-neurotic but lovable Bob Benjamin who was Bibbit’s housemate in the house next door. Before my marriage, Bob, Bibbit and I were a kind of Adventure Pod who used to do all sorts of wacky things together, wayyyyy weirder than the occasional midnight showing of Rocky Horror, though, of course, Bibbit was my main girl for wacky adventuring.

My main girl Bibbit her own self!

Bibbit was my main bicycling buddy, and I’ve written many times that the One Perfect Moment of Happiness in My Entire Life was an afternoon I spent cycling with her when I got a flat on Grizzley Peak Road, and we’d forgotten the puncture kit, so we spent an hour sitting at the side of the road, yodeling Some Day My Prince Will Come and laughing.

Bibbit had one of those life stories that while tragic to her was kind of a who-cares yawner to me: Cold father, emotional abandonment, Pebble Beach, yada, yada, yada. But that was the reason she couldn’t do anything with her life except cycle and go on wacky adventures. Brooding about her cold, abandoning father as well as the gentle, unworldly Ron with whom Bibbit was madly in love but who did not return her affection, took up at least eight hours every day.

I am suddenly remembering the time we went to see a revival of Lawrence of Arabia at the Northpoint in San Francisco. T.E. Lawrence was a great favorite of ours; we’d each read Seven Pillars of Wisdom at least five times. We both loved the movie.

We put together Bedouin costume out of sheets, pillow cases and beaded curtains; hopped the AC transit box, and tromped the two miles into North Beach, chanting Aqaba, Aqaba, Aqaba! at the top of our lungs. Then we stood on line for an hour chanting Aqaba, Aqaba, Aqaba! Such fun!

We drifted apart, though.

I had a baby and more-or-less simultaneously enrolled in an extremely grueling concurrent Master’s program at U.C.—health policy and public health, which together were supposed to equal a health economics degree—and I had no more time for friendship.

This is just one of those unalterable facts of life: Babies change things. Your friends understand this, or they are not your friends.

But Bibbit—one of the only people to whom I confided the unsettling dream I’d had the night before my wedding: Bill and my mother were waltzing. The music was Saint-Saëns’ Danse Macabre—was neither a big fan of my marriage nor of my subsequent entry into the breeder ranks. She liked Bill well enough. But...

She had a horrible bicycling accident: She fell from her bike and instinctively put her arms out to brace the fall—which you are never supposed to do—and shattered both her wrists.

I have this sort-of memory of visiting her in the hospital, but I don’t think I did. I think I just superimposed all my many, many nurse memories onto a mental photo of Bibbit, looking small and helpless and alone in a hospital bed.

About a month after that, she tried to kill herself.

Bob Benjamin told Bill; Bill told me. By this time, Bob Benjamin was a closer friend to Bill than he was to me.

Then Ron decided he was madly in love with Bibbit, and, of course, she rejected him. I learned this some time after Bibbit and I had fallen out of touch, in one of those Whatever-happened-to… conversations. Bibbit had become just another one of life’s ellipses.

Life has so many ellipses!

I’d give anything to find Bibbit again.

But I don’t think I ever will.

It was Bibbit who passed on a piece of wisdom that I still value though my life these days is so undramatic, I have little opportunity to use it: Everybody gets two calls at three o’clock in the morning. But that third call? You don’t pick up the phone.

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This is one of my favorite photos of my first husband and the infant Ichabod: