FRESH YARN presents: Equator, Equator, You Said You Would Be There... by Cassandra Wiseman

FRESH YARN presents:

Equator, Equator, You Said You Would Be There
By Cassandra Wiseman

I seem to have misplaced one of my best friends. We have, it's true, misplaced each other before. When you have been best friends for thirty-five years, that's probably to be expected, but in all these years she has never once, before now, even when we weren't speaking to each other, never ever taken me off her Christmas card list. This is the second year that there was nothing from her. The cards I sent to her came back stamped returned to sender.

The Christmas of 2004 she sent me what was, I thought, quite a cheerful letter. Her second marriage hadn't worked out but she was happy and making money as a costumier in what was, she wrote, a thriving motion picture industry down in the bayous of Louisiana.

Enclosed in the envelope were three photographs. The first, a languid, beautiful candid, was of her smiling with two of her cats. The second pictured an array of the costumes she had made for the movie, O Brother Where Art Thou. In the third photograph she is posing in an ornately embroidered black kimono in the lush, sunny garden of the house she had just bought in New Orleans. Her blond hair is swept up in a French twist and adorned with two glossy black chopsticks, her long slender arms indicating where to look, like a model on The Price is Right; here are her string beans climbing up a trellis, strung along a fence, behind which, in the distance you can see water.

That was the last time I heard from her.

For two weeks after Hurricane Katrina, I left messages on her cell phone; her home phone was a busy signal for a while and then, it rang and rang until I gave up calling. Eventually even her cell phone wouldn't take my messages. One miserable day, I found both numbers disconnected.

I must admit feeling overwhelmed by a dazzling number of lists to help find where Hurricane refugees might be relocated, but none were cohesive and several seemed to be phishing for personal info. Still I put her name and address on every "Search for Hurricane Katrina Survivors List" that I was able to Google and when these became missing person's lists, I did that too, to no avail.

I went to my friend who was press officer for North America for Doctors without Borders for advice. Weary from trying to find missing doctors in Chechnya and lost humanitarian workers in Iraq and Afghanistan, exhausted by the Tsunami and Darfur, she didn't have anything promising to say other than the International Red Cross site was probably my best bet and there, while scrolling down a list of what was literally millions of lost souls from all over the world, I got the picture, but refused to give up hope.

Despite putting her name on every list I could, no one has responded to a single message I've left from any of the Katrina survivor sites. My boyfriend who works with satellites was pessimistic from the moment I gave him her New Orleans' address. When I didn't get a Christmas card, he was consoling. She would have contacted you by now, he tells me. She's gone. Let her go. You may never know.

The thing is all I want is to know what happened to her. Both her parents have passed away and I don't know where she could possibly be. And I want answers. How can a grown accomplished woman just disappear in a major city in the United States of America in 2005? A tall and willowy blonde, forty-five years old, who signs her Christmas cards with her middle school nickname which I happen to know is Sarsaparilla Mongo.

Why can't I find her?

It has all come down to this. I don't know her social security or any of her credit card numbers. And what I have been told is that without my knowing this vital information, nothing more can be done to track her down.

The thing is I know her real name. I know her parents' names and I know the place, date and time of her birth. I know her middle name. I know her rising sign.

I know, because I noted it in my diary, the day she first arrived at sixth grade at Martin Luther King School in Sausalito. I also note, with an exclamation mark, the day she first got her period. I know when and where she first saw snow, which was with my family up at our cabin on Donner Lake. I know the first thing she did. She lay down with me in the deep fresh powder and we made angel wings with our arms.

She slept in my pink canopy bed and I slept in her waterbed, and I know she secretly coveted my Peter Max psychedelic wallpaper. She slept in my tree house and we both slept at our band teacher's house, and I know that she didn't sleep with anyone at all during high school despite what certain people said.

I was with her so I could tell you when she first kissed a boy (also noted in my diary for that day, was that I too had officially kissed a boy). I noted the 'how' and the 'where' - we were playing spin-the-bottle in Danny B's basement. I even know the 'who' - Dougie F.

I still have the photographs of what she wore for Halloween every year of junior high and high school. I know for instance she loved practicing her clarinet in the bath so that nobody could hear her even if the steam was rough on the reeds. I know that we spent a ridiculous amount of hours writing stories together about strange little creatures that lived in the mud and sweet peas in the field above Bayside School.

And I was right beside her when we went with her other best friend -- the one who had the kind of father who would drive three thirteen-year-olds wherever they wanted to go --so I know that she went to a Star Trek convention in Anaheim dressed up as a Vulcan. I also know that she made me up as a rather stylish Klingon.

I know she loved The Sparks, Genesis, The Ramones, Tom Petty, and Sid Vicious. I know she hated Paul from the Beatles and didn't like the idea of cheerleaders even though she was friends with them. I know all the roles she played in the Tam High Drama department.

And although she hated cross country skiing and snow-shoeing, I know she joined the Mountain Club because of me. In exchange I marched with her to support the farm workers. During those years, in protest, we didn't eat a single green grape or drink Gallo wine and we spent our Sundays picketing the Safeway in Mill Valley across the street from our high school.

I know she didn't go to college but rather slept all day. At night she could be found dancing in the mosh pit at a notorious punk club in the City. Eventually she ended up in Seattle with an abusive alcoholic grunge rocker. She fled his violence to shelter in my Berkeley student apartment.

I know because I was there when that creep came after her, promising her everything and I know that she believed him. It was then, before they left together, that we had our first fight, so terrible we stopped talking for two years. But even so, we still sent each other Christmas cards.

I know that five years later, she phoned from a phone booth to say she was coming through town with a new boyfriend "in a Silver Stream, just like the one Lucy and Ricky Ricardo had in I Love Lucy…" and wanted me to join them for lunch to see it.

I know that within three days of rekindling our friendship, I couldn't handle her new and improved abusive boyfriend and found their druggy lifestyle overwhelming and scary. And when she suggested I join their fairy circle in some desert in Nevada, a place she described in ten pages of clear psychotic detail, I know I had reached the boundaries of our friendship. I wrote her an angry letter telling her that if she found herself without the guy and wanted to get help with the drugs, I was there. Otherwise, never contact me again.

It took us fifteen years to talk again. And yet, every year, even though we weren't talking, we exchanged Christmas cards. There were years when her return address was care of general delivery and there were years when I was a single mom with three kids battling a serious illness with no money and little energy to write. This is how you can lose some friendships. I know that too.

And then one summer, almost exactly a year before Hurricane Katrina, she called and left a message that she was flying out to Southern California for the weekend and would like to celebrate our birthdays. I got the message too late so we made plans over the phone to try again for next summer. It was our first conversation in fifteen years. I told her I was still living in the same house in Topanga Canyon, that I had just gotten out of the abusive relationship with an alcoholic musician and we laughed at the irony. I told her that I was dating a handsome rocket scientist. She asked me where she could find her one of those. That was the last time we spoke.

There were other summer days long ago. Her dad would take us on his yacht and anchor out on the bay near Angel's Island. He would tie thick ropes around our waists so we wouldn't get swept away by the strong current and there, we would float on the waves like mermaids, swimming in the deep rough water until our skin turned blue and when we sang, our teeth chattered.

I know that she drew a heart around a photograph of us in my high school yearbook and above the heart, she wrote

"Equator, Equator, you said you would be there…."

I just don't know where her there is now.