I’ve known the day of Richard Nixon’s birthday as long as I’ve known anything. Erin McCormick told me. She said Joan Baez and Richard Nixon were both born on January 9th. "How could anyone know that," she asked, "and still believe in Astrology?"

We were fifteen years old then, and she was peeling onions for potato salad. I spooned yellow stuff onto slick cooked whites of eggs. We were getting ready for the school band trip. Erin played the French horn. I was percussion.

"If you can’t believe in astrology..." she said, scratching an old mosquito bite on the back of her leg. "What’s left? Events spin out of control, no plan or reason."

I stood there, crunched on a sweet pickle and thought for a minute. It had been a rough year for me. The rest of the girls were preoccupied with boys. Pressure to fit in was tremendous. I was afraid that I wasn’t like anyone else on earth.

"What about God?" I started to say, then remembered a rainy day discussion on Nietzsche weeks before. Was everything in the universe random, then? Was there really no plan? Erin’s back was to me. The cold water was running in the sink. She was waiting for an answer. I shrugged and said, "No control sounds exciting to me."

She turned and faced me. "Does it?" she said. Her green eyes were glazed from the onions; a spray of moist freckles glistened on her nose and cheeks.

Later, I remembered that day. I see her standing in my mother’s kitchen, her eyes watery, commenting on irony and the universe. I remember the way she sniffed and wiped her eyes on her madras shirttail as I told her my theory that life was like a slot machine – you got what you got, and the only way to keep it from spinning was to not put your quarter in. I remember how beautiful she looked. The other girls were obsessed with boys. I was obsessed with Erin. I wanted her more than anything in the world. I told her all I knew about life; tried to impress her. I was fifteen, and I knew everything.

I broke my ankle doing a stupid stunt on my bicycle that evening after we made the food. I never got to go on the band trip. Later, I heard the potato salad was thrown out. Hardly anyone in the band liked onion.

Then on the late-night trip home, in the bright yellow school bus, Vernon Pratt somehow impregnated Erin. Vernon, sometimes a substitute triangle player, though usually on the pom-pom squad, didn’t merit band trips, but was playing the bass drum in my absence.

Talk about ironies. Talk about the spinning wheels of fate. Okay, okay, it wasn’t the first time they’d "done it." But Erin had said she’d quit.

For years, every time I heard Joan Baez I felt a twinge. Sometime later when Richard Nixon was in all the papers, I thought about Erin over my morning coffee and chocolate doughnut. Still wanting her, I couldn’t figure how Vernon and the kids fit in.

Erin and I had grown up together. We’d been best girlfriends since fourth grade when her father, who owned a fourteen-lane bowling alley, let Erin have slumber parties there. A group of five or six girls would spend the night, then have milk shakes and hamburgers for breakfast. I learned to play a mean game of pool there when I was ten years old, a skill that served me in later years.

When Erin’s father had his first heart attack, she and Vernon took over the management of the bowling alley. The place became the young couple’s life. They had three babies by the time I finished four years of college. Vernon’s’ hairline started to recede and his former flat stomach hung over his belt buckle. Erin had perpetual dark circles under her green eyes.

I had my coffee and doughnuts in the bowling alley on Saturday mornings that one summer. I was getting ready to start grad school. Erin worked the early shift on weekends because of Vernon’s part time job at a filling station. When business was slow, she’d draw a cup of coffee, light a filtered cigarette and slide into the booth across from me. One morning in July, she finally said it. "I hear you like girls."

I looked at her over the rim of my coffee cup. I thought she’d known. I guess I figured everyone did. I sat the cup down slowly and nodded.

"Is there anyone special?" she asked.

"Not right now." I answered. "In my junior year there was someone for a while; a pre-law student." I shrugged. "It didn’t work out."

We were quiet for some time. Sun filtered through the Venetian blinds. Cigarette smoke swirled around her red hair like a halo. Striped shadows fell across her ruffled uniform, and her freckled face. She stubbed out a cigarette. "Were you always like that?"

"I suppose."

"Did you ever think about me?" It was almost a whisper. Our eyes met. I nodded. She fidgeted with her lighter. I waited.

"Do you still?" she said at last.

I sighed, "Sometimes."

"Vernon and I do three-ways," she said quickly. "I really like the part with the women."

The last bite of my doughnut slipped from my fingers and splashed into my lukewarm coffee. I watched it float then sink into murky blackness. I looked at her again. My eyes were round. "You do three-ways?" I repeated at last. It wasn’t really a question. "You and Vernon?"

"Sure."

It was too much. I mumbled, "No thanks.." and got the hell out of there.

I would like to say I never thought about it again, though I actually thought about it a lot. I wanted her. But every time the fantasy got to the part where Vernon unbuckled his belt, I stopped. Erin sent me a Christmas card at school that year with a chatty letter and a picture of the kids. In February, at my mother’s funeral, she sat next to me and held my hand. Vernon sat in the back with a baby on each knee. When everyone went away, I was left to wander through the empty rooms of my mother’s home. 

Erin tapped at the front door.  I looked at her standing in the yellow porch light, gentle snowflakes falling behind her, a bottle of rum clutched in a fuzzy red knitted mitten. "I think we really need to get drunk," she said.

I opened the door wider and let her pass into the dim overheated living room. "Have you had supper?" she asked, throwing her coat across my mother’s rocker.

"Ham," I said. "Everyone brought ham. I’ve been serving and eating it for days. I’m sick of the stuff." I was looking at her coat across the chair. "I’ll probably never eat ham again."

"Here," she said from behind me. I turned. She was holding a glass up. "Drink this. It’ll make you feel better." I took it obediently. "Doesn’t Vern have to work tonight? Where are the kids?"

"I got a sitter."

"Just to come over here?" I picked up her coat and headed for the closet. "How about we order a pizza?" she suggested, following me. "Or I could cook a pot of chili?"

We ordered a large pizza with everything and got roaring drunk. Sometime around midnight, we ritualistically dumped twenty pounds of ham over the back fence to the neighbor’s grateful dog. We rested our arms on the chest-high cyclone mesh that separated the back lots and watched the huge mutt eat.

The night was cold and clear. Patches of snow dotted the lawn. I could see her frosty breath. Erin touched my arm; her red mitten looked bright and warm against my navy pea coat. For the first time in days, I started to cry. She pulled me into her arms and held me. I saw the nearly full moon over her shoulder. My tears caused the moonlight to waver and glow. There were just the sounds of the dog munching and growling and my icy sobs hanging in the night air.

I woke late the next morning to the smells of bacon and coffee. My stomach lurched. I moved my head and felt a tremendous pain. I opened my eyes. Erin stood framed in my bedroom doorway. Her yellow sweater was rumpled and her faded jeans were muddy around the bottoms. She held two glasses of tomato juice. "You have a choice," she said. "Bacon and eggs or cold pizza."

I moaned and pulled the covers over my head. I felt her sit on the edge of the bed and tug at the blanket.

"Come on. If I can move this morning, so can you."

I lowered the blanket. "I’m going to throw up."

"Drink this. It’ll help." She stuck the tomato juice under my nose. I pushed it away.

"As I recall, those are the words that started this. Did we really feed the neighbor’s dog twenty pounds of ham last night?"

She nodded. "He probably doesn’t feel much better than we do this morning."

I sipped the tomato juice. "Coffee," I said. "I need coffee."

To this day I have trouble believing that I downed a half of pound of bacon and four fried eggs swimming in grease that morning. I have more trouble believing that Erin asked me about sex again. And I turned her down again. But it happened.

"If you’re not interested in a three-way," she had said refilling my coffee cup as we lingered at the kitchen table, "then what about just me?" I looked at her. Her complexion was strikingly pale, due to the hangover. She’d pulled her hair back and held it with a green rubber band at her neck. Her eyes were puffy. And I wanted her.

"I’m in a relationship," I said. "It’s a committed relationship. I’ve promised not to sleep with others." I hesitated a second then added, "You’re married. But if we’re ever single at the same time, you’ve got a date."

She nodded, set the coffeepot down. "Okay."

Of course I was single a month later. I discovered that Letha slept with everyone while I kept my promise. The morning I was saying no to Erin, Letha was waking up under the flannel sheets of the woman who would be her next lover.

After the fight with Letha, I called Erin in tears. It was Easter Sunday. I hadn’t gone home because I didn’t want to deal with the empty house or my extended family, which felt obligated to include me. It occurred to me much later that things came to a head because Letha had planned on my departure over Spring break. By staying at school, I’d messed up my lover’s love life. We had a fight that started at breakfast and ended with Letha throwing her underwear and vibrator in a paper sack and slamming the trailer door so hard she bent the lock.

I could hear Erin’s children laughing in the background. I had my period and a bad case of cramps. I guess I’d taken too much Midol because I couldn’t stop crying, and I knew that if I slept with Erin the pain would go away, cramps and all.

"You don’t sound good," Erin said. "Are you all right?"

"Letha and I broke up," I sniffed. "She’s been fucking everybody."

"I’m sorry," Erin’s voice softened. "I know infidelity is bad for a romance."

"What?" I blew my nose. Had I heard right?

"Well, Vernon and I have decided that monogamy is the best way."

I was sure she knew why I’d called. That was the answer. "You’re not doing three-ways anymore?"

"We only did a couple of times." she said. "Vern couldn’t deal with it, even though it was his idea. He would mope around for days. Then he found out I saw someone else on my own and he suggested, after a two-day drinking and crying jag, that we close our open relationship. We both agreed to settle down. I think it’s the best way. Don’t you?"

"Yeah," I stammered. "Sure." I thought it was shit right at that moment. I heard one of the kids squeal in the background; then Vernon’s voice.  

"Why don’t you drive up for dinner?" Erin asked. "It’ll be just us. You’ll feel better being with friends."

"It’s two hours," I said. "Besides, I have plans." I was going to the bar. Shoot some pool. Find a woman."

"You sure?"

"Yeah. Thanks anyway."

"Look," she said firmly. "You’re someone real special. You just haven’t found the right one yet. You deserve the best there is."

"Sure. Right."

Then she said, "I love you."

"Huh?"

"You’re the best friend a girl ever had," she said quickly. "And I love you."

"Erin..."

"Why don’t you come to dinner?"

"No, I really can’t." When I hung up, I stared out the window for a long time. Letha and I shared a tiny trailer. I’d have to move or find another roommate. I couldn’t afford the place alone.

I played Diamonds and Rust on the stereo all afternoon. I sat in my bathrobe and stared out the window. For Easter dinner, I ate a one-pound solid milk chocolate chicken and several marshmallow eggs. I regretted not going to Erin’s. I wondered if they were having ham.

I left school early that Spring. I was so far behind in everything it was a nightmare. I couldn’t live in my mother’s home alone and, though I regretted it later, I sold the place and bought a condo. I got a counseling job at a battered women’s shelter. The pay was low, but I found the work rewarding. The women’s problems made my depression seem inane. If they could laugh and go on, I could too. No one cared that I was a philosophy major who’d dropped out when real life got too hard.

Once I was clowning around and mentioned Nietzsche in a staff meeting. The night shift counselor said, "Fuck him! He hated women too. He was just more eloquent about it than the bastards we have to deal with here."

I babysat for Erin’s kids and helped her celebrate when Vernon was finally made manager of the filling station where he’d worked part time for years.

I met Elsbeth, a round, earth-mother type, who ran a print shop. Her fondness for tribalism and dildos enthralled me. We dated. She moved in. We gradually settled into a routine. There were always plants and sleeping cats in our windows, pans left out from the night before soaking in the kitchen sink and smells of patchouli and baking bread in the air. It was a good life.

I was stunned when Vernon died suddenly. Everyone was. Oh, he was a prime candidate for a heart attack – a chain smoker, a heavy drinker and overweight. For the last several years he’d worked ten hours a day, six days a week at that filling station and helped Erin out at the bowling alley on weekends. One Sunday morning he simply slept in. It was the most graceful thing he’d done in his life.

I held Erin’s hand during the funeral. Her children, three young adults, sat on either side of us. We all wept together. I have to say that even I was pretty broken up. I looked from the casket to Erin’s profile. Not too bad for a substitute triangle player, I thought. He’d spent his life loving the most beautiful woman I knew. In a way, we both had.

A few days later, I took a fifth of rum over to Erin’s doublewide trailer. The kids were with their grandfather getting through the weekend at the bowling alley.

I poured her a strong drink and slid it across the kitchen table. "We need to get really drunk," I told her.

I watched her swallow the searing liquid. Her green eyes glazed with tears. I remembered when we were children – the band trip, the onions. I laid my hand across hers. "It’ll be all right. You’re going to be fine."

She sniffed. "My life is over. I’m forty years old. I haven’t even finished high school!"

"Erin, don’t..."

"I can’t help it." Her shoulders shook with sobs. "I don’t know how to be alone. I’m not a young girl anymore. I’m thirty pounds overweight, my hair is going gray and I’m scared."

"Erin, listen to me," I said. "You’re someone real special. You deserve the best there is. You’re going to be fine."

"Sure," she sniffed. "Right."

Then I said, "I love you."

She looked at me. "Would you hold me?” She said. "Would you make love to me?"

My head was spinning. What about Elsbeth? What about all the reasons I shouldn’t do it even though what Erin and I had been though had nothing to do with my lover of ten years? I pulled her close and hugged her. "Erin, I can’t".

"I understand," she said into my shoulder.

I squeezed her hard and kissed her moist neck. There was a faint taste of salt from her tears. I felt swept along like a leaf on a swift current. I kissed her lips. They were soft. Warm. My hands trembled as I unbuttoned her sweater. It fell off her shoulders exposing a lacy bra. A faint spray of freckles marked the way from her neck to the valley between her round breasts. I unhooked the bra and pulled it off. She leaned against the corner of the horseshoe Formica counter as I kissed and touched every inch of her exposed skin.

She pulled my shirt tail out of my jeans. Both of her thumbs worked at the buttons. Then she pushed my jeans down over my hips and they fell around my ankles. I chuckled. "Right here in the kitchen?"

"Not in my bed," she shook her head slowly. "Please."

I stepped out of my jeans and took her hand. "How about the couch?"

She followed me obediently into the living room. Leaving her own jeans in a heap by the coffee table, she stretched out on the couch and raised her arms over her head. I knelt beside her and ran my hands over her soft body. I kissed her nipples and stroked the fine moist hairs on her mound. She opened her legs, like we’d done this a hundred times. The room was quiet. I could hear her breathing. Shallow. Quick. I could hear the first heavy drops of rain on the trailer roof. Flecks of ice gently striking the aluminum window frame. I stretched out on top of her and moved in a gentle fucking motion.

From my own warm center I felt the most wonderful throbbing pain. She rested one leg over my back and braced the other on the floor. I moved down her belly and ate her slowly, lingering over the most exquisite meal. She responded to my tongue, gently rocking and whispering, "Do it. Oh, do it." She raised her head after a while and asked, "Is it taking too long?"

I stopped. I stroked her glistening vulva and pushed against the pink silken folds. She moaned as the warm flesh gave way and three fingers slid snugly inside her.

"I could do this forever," I said and returned to my dining. When she came, she cried out my name over and over. I held her, rocking her like a baby, planting small kisses on her face.

At last she said, "Show me what to do for you."

"Erin, you don’t have to do anything more," I said. I’m very pleased as it is."

"Come on," she coaxed. "If we’re going to do this, let’s do it right."

I was aroused. "Put your leg like this." I straddled her leg and rubbed myself against her. My pubic bone pressed firmly against her thigh. I felt a feverish friction.

"Does that feel good?" she asked.

"Oh, yes. Yes."

She kissed my face. I felt the tension build inside me, then burst with tingling waves that seemed to electrify even my fingertips. We lay naked pressed together.

At last she smiled. "This is better than getting drunk."

"It will feel better in the morning too."

She sighed. "Will it?"

"Hey," I said as love for her washed over me. "Nothing has changed here. We’re still best friends. Right?"

She nodded in agreement, but I was worried by the time my heart rate slowed to normal. I’ve heard that once you cross a line you can never go back. Was I being naïve thinking that things hadn’t changed? What I knew was that I knew a hell of a lot less than I did when I was fifteen.

"Remember when we were kids? I said tentatively. "And you told me about Joan Baez and Richard Nixon?" She frowned.

"Boy, lesbian sex is sure different than I thought it would be."

It had grown dark. The furniture cast long, soft shadows. The sound of rain was slow and steady. The room was suddenly cold. I pulled an afghan from the back of the couch over us and moved to a sitting position. It occurred to me that what I did and said in the next few minutes could alter my life forever. Events spinning out of control no longer held an allure. I didn’t want to make a mistake.

I pulled Erin close and told her, "If someone asked me what the most intimate, most meaningful relationship of my life was, I’d say it was with you."

"I know," she said softly. "Me too."

"Maybe random things happen. Maybe the fact that Richard Nixon and Joan Baez were born on the same day isn’t as important as what they did next."

She pulled away and looked at me. "What the hell are you talking about?"

"Choices," I said. "I think we have choices." She looked straight ahead. I guess she was letting it sink in.

After a while she said, "You mean about this?" It was almost a whisper.

"Uh-huh," I nodded, wondering if I was being a jerk.

"You’re still the philosophy major who thinks that how you look at things is all there is! That life can be summed up with fancy words." She sounded angry.

"You and I have never been about fancy words," I said. "Making love to you was very special to me." She watched me, listening. "You know," I said, "I always admired the way you took hold of life. You ran risks and took chances while the rest of us were making lists and weighing odds." I rubbed her back. I could feel her muscles relaxing. "I know you’re scared right now, but a little fear doesn’t make you a coward. Making love to you was the most courageous act of my life. I think this was small potatoes for you."

"You’re not small potatoes," she whispered. "You’re my best friend."

I nodded. "And whatever happens, I want that. I want it to last forever." I sighed. "I just couldn’t go on without it."

"Can’t best friends sleep together?" she asked, like she thought I had all the answers.

I started to say more, but her sobs cut me off. I held her. After a while I got up and made us both a stiff drink. Our naked bodies were warm under the afghan. The rum burned in my throat. The rest of the world was hard and cold. Around midnight, I tucked her in bed, told her I loved her, that I had always and would always love her.

That night when I went home and crawled into bed next to Elsbeth, I lay on my side staring out the rain-speckled window. I watched the cold shadows from the neighbor’s yard light reflected on the tree branches. They shone against the dark sky like a photo negative...like an image turned inside out. Elsbeth curled up behind me spoon-fashion and snored softly.

I didn’t sleep for a very long time.