I have a friend who had a friend, way back when she was in college, who sat at a final exam for her, took the test, and signed her name so that my friend got credit for the course and graduated on time.
In those days, a requirement for every degree, no matter your major, was a foreign language. That way, any graduate school, professional program, or potential employer would know that an applicant with a Bachelor’s had some proficiency—for Doctorate dissertation research, say, or conversing with international clients.
My friend went on to get advanced degrees and then establish herself in her field with professionally framed credentials bedecking her office wall.
• • •
She told me this story last summer, as if there were nothing to it. She’d spent a lifetime helping people, after all. Even back in college, my friend was determined to become a do-gooder par excellence which, if you knew her, you would say she was.
We were on her patio nursing highballs while the kids and grandkids swam and splashed and laughed, paper plates with cake crumbs lying lazily about. What with mutual grandkids in all four years of high school, the conversation had gotten around to the current school committee, its Gen XYZ members, college preparation, college itself, and public education back in our day. The birthday boy had just gone to the kitchen for more ice for us—plus possibly a detour to use the facilities, which may be why he took so long that we forgot about him.
I’d tutored him in summer school more than a couple times. Slow but resolute and imperturbable, he was duly proud of hard-fought Ds and Cs. The work he put in—which he chose to put in—meant not having to repeat a grade. Last year I was present when he reported to my friend, unable to restrain himself, Grandma, I passed, I passed! His sapphire eyes glowed almost to the point of piercing, but gently, radiating wonder more than wounds. Look twice, though, and you’d know the wounds were there, beyond the smile and sunshine of his mild, well-mannered mien. In other words, he’s the kind of kid you cannot help but feel for, root for, like, or even love.
Anyway, the sliding glass door must have been left open when she told me her story, and he must have been about to head back to the patio, because right at that moment, almost as an interruption, he jiggled the ice tray, brought it out, and filled our bucket one cube at a time, each toss sharper, louder, quicker, more violent than the last.
As if he was having one of those pre-or-post-pubescent moments. Only he had never had one of those pre-or-post-pubescent moments.
Then he looked up at my friend and started to speak but stopped himself (forming just the Gr—as in Grandma or growl), scudded back inside, refilled the tray at the kitchen sink, slammed the freezer door so that the bottles in the refrigerator clanged, and came back out to the patio, sliding the door closed behind him with what seemed like tremendous care and deliberation—not quite all the way at first, but then all the way so that it latched with an almost cryptic click. But he kept one hand on the handle and his back to us as if frozen or unable to move. After a minute—though it could have been seconds—he turned, this time to me, and started to speak again, stopped himself, pivoted on a dime, ran to the diving board, leapt as high as he could, and cannonballed into the pool. The splash sprinkled my sandals’ soles and tickled my friend’s mauve toenails; a waft of summer chemicals twitched our noses like a spurt of Sunday-service incense.
Once he sank to the bottom, he stayed down, fetal-coiled, too long. Too long, as if he intended to stay there.
His older sisters, after a tense second minute, raised him up but, frenzied and fierce, he flailed and fought them every stroke and step of the way, hacking from pool to poolside. Supine, pale, and gasping, still convulsing as he cooled, the poor kid became the center of attention. When he caught his breath a bit, he sat up, looked around, and looked aghast that he’d become the center of attention. With one final clearing of his chlorine-coated throat, up he sprang and popped to his feet, manic as a mongoose, then ran off with a howl beyond the hedge and bine-stemmed bower to foreign neighbors’ hedges, lawns, and bowers. How he tore.
How he howled.
Meanwhile, my friend’s face turned from green to gray to white. The ice cubes in her highball glass rattling for attention, she deposed her drink oh-so-slowly down to the table top. The kids had quieted down; the pool managed to still; the exhausted silence of a spent summer celebration suddenly filled the air. Then, with an almost agonizing specificity, she did the strangest thing. So slowly as to be practically unnoticeable, as if possessed by a consciousness—or conscience—not her own, she turned her face away from me. For the rest of the day, for the rest of the summer, and into the fall.
I read in our hometown News that she has finally sold her practice. Gen X or Y or Z—all three have arrived.
• • •
Novembers and Decembers for the last few years I’ve worked part-time as a cashier at the local bookstore.
Yesterday I saw my friend again. She bought a home course—two courses, rather, Intermediate and Advanced: grammars, workbooks, CDs, sample tests—in French.
I asked, Gift-wrap them, Fran? This week it’s free.
She looked me in the eyes and shook her head, then said No thanks, Pat. This present happens to be for me.
And in a flash I thought I knew what she was going to do. . .
. . . and smiled.
James B. Nicola’s nonfiction book Playing the Audience won a Choice magazine award. Recent nonfiction can be found on-line at About Place, Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood, Unlikely Stories, and Lowestoft Chronicle; fiction, at Neither Fish Nor Foul, The GroundUp, and Sine Qua Non. The latest of his eight full-length poetry collections (2014-23) are Fires of Heaven: Poems of Faith and Sense, Turns & Twists, and Natural Tendencies. A graduate of Yale, he has received a Dana Literary Award, two Willow Review awards, Storyteller’s People’s Choice award, a Best of Net and a Rhysling Award nomination, and eleven Pushcart nominations—for which he feels both stunned and grateful.
“A Friend Makes Me Smile” was first published in Flora Fiction (Summer 2024).
[Editor’s Note: “A Friend Makes Me Smile” employs the style, grammar, and punctuation preferences of the author.]
Modern Flash Fiction 