The Magic of Female Friendship
Fiction by Caris YeomanThe motto of the university, roughly translated from Latin, was ‘If you got it, flaunt it.’ So I basically tried to project my genius at all times, avoiding lame student mixers and racing around campus on my electric scooter, displaying no emotion. I forbade myself from blabbering on whenever I had a thought about anything, as was my habit. I tried to maintain an air of mystery. I could tell my classmates thought I didn’t deserve my place in our prestigious film program. They didn’t know that I had won a major prize, in high school, for directing a PSA on the dangers of drunk driving. I didn’t talk about it, because I didn’t want to be pigeonholed as some kind of propagandist.
Also, everyone kept saying my scripts didn’t make any sense. If only they could see the images that appeared inside my head. I’d space out on the metro and visions just came to me. Like: a dollhouse, floating down a river of wreckage in the aftermath of a hurricane. A vengeful orphan, soaked in rain. An army of thieves creeping through a dark forest, backlit by the moon and glittering with danger. I was told these things did not constitute a narrative. There was no beginning, middle, or end. I railed against my professors, those slobbish failures and their rules. They were so unimaginative, so ignorant of feminine sensibility.
The way I saw it, the creative woman ought to disobey the commands of conventional storytelling. It was her duty to absorb the violence of the world and channel it into a new form of expression. I was disappointed to discover that the other women in my program did not share these convictions. I was also disappointed to discover that they were all really beautiful. It was like a political stance; to be beautiful and lithe, and prove that one could be a woman in film without dressing like a teamster, or possessing the kind of build that meant you could carry lots of heavy shit around. They all immediately became friends and collaborators, and together they were always trying to raise twenty thousand dollars on Gofundme for a short film about a messy lady who gets her groove back. They said now more than ever, it is important to tell these stories. Fine. I didn’t want to tell women's stories. I wanted to push a ship up a mountain.
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It was supposed to be the best film school in the world, but none of us were learning anything. All we did was make terrible movies. People kept writing the same script, set in a future where someone’s dead relative gets uploaded to the Cloud. We learned, in theory, how to win prizes and solicit money. I’ll admit, I wanted this money desperately. I wanted to receive a grant from a major donor. I wanted to make a war epic, something that had never been accomplished by an undergraduate. I wanted to detonate a bunch of dynamite in a quarry. It seemed the university gave grants according to their own specific cultural aims: there was funding for movies about climate scientists, movies about the power of empathy, movies about Italian heritage. The only grant I might qualify for awarded twelve thousand dollars to a project that “amplified a unique perspective”; criteria so functionally meaningless I decided to ignore it entirely.
Unfortunately, every other student applied, too. We all gathered in the auditorium to pitch our unique perspectives. As I sized up my competition, I noticed a familiar seething feeling: a hostility that catches somewhere in the throat. This girl from my Genre Theory class, Polly, was already taking her position at the front of the room. She looked polished and hip, with large, billowing pants, many silver earrings, and a blunt bob that expressed academic integrity. She looked like the voice of our generation.
Polly was actually kind of famous: a former television actress who’d had an arc as the edgy younger sister on a popular teen show. Her character was a figure skating prodigy who trades her bright future for hard drugs, though in the skating scenes they used an obvious body double. That was what I remembered most clearly about the show, how bad the body double was. As a filmmaker, Polly fixed her gaze on the downtrodden; she often uttered the phrase reclaiming the lens. It was almost evil, the way this fortunate and attractive person acted like she was doing the world a great favor by making boring, earnest movies. In one of them, a sad old woman eats alphabet cereal. A close-up shot reveals the word LONELY, floating in gray milk. Was this the way to restore the full glory of humanity to the elderly woman, by depicting her as pathetic? With flat, pragmatic lighting, so each of her life’s disappointments are legible on her wrinkled face? Everyone seemed to think Polly was some kind of great talent. They applauded her realism, using terms like poetry of the mundane. I couldn’t stand her.
The room fell silent. Polly turned a projector towards the wall and showed us scanned photographs of herself, smiling with different haircuts. “In my newest phase of work, I’ve found it creatively fulfilling to draw from my own life,” she said, passing out hard copies of her proposal. “My next film is called Persephone.” My hostility intensified. It had become difficult to swallow or breathe. On the wall now was a faded Polaroid: young Polly in plastic pink sunglasses, beaming, her arm around an unfamiliar, stringy-haired girl. “It’s a deeply personal narrative,” she said, and turned to look straight at me. “About the magic of female friendship.”
At this, everyone fell all over themselves. To me, it sounded like a bunch of YA bullshit. I too used to fetishize slumber parties, nosebleeds, lockets and silk slips, clown makeup photoshoots, platonic hand-holding, performative witchcraft, competitive eroticism, and diet energy drinks. But I grew out of it. The girls who invented such things traded glances with each other when I went on fevered tangents during class. They mocked the way I laughed: by sucking air in and out through my teeth, like laughter was illegal. My mother was always bugging me to play well with others. She had this idea that I could trick these girls into hanging out with me, by luring them into a frozen yogurt shop or something, and a sense of community would develop organically from there. She didn’t understand how anything worked. She wanted me to bend the knee to my oppressors.
Polly won the grant, and for weeks I stewed in resentment. I wasn’t even sure she even knew my name. So I was surprised to get an email from her, suggesting we grab coffee and discuss a possible collaboration. Nobody had ever tried to network with me, so I told her I was free the next day at noon. Before the meeting, I stood by my window, eating slow handfuls of granola. I looked at myself in the mirror, examining the dent in my nose that gives my face a slightly punched-in vibe. I looked okay: thin-lipped and short, with slightly blue skin. A spectacular network of veins was visible through the thin, waxy area around my eyes.
My roommate’s makeup products were lined precariously on the windowsill. Her foundation came in a sleek bottle with a glass dropper, and to apply it you had to squeeze tiny, pearlescent dots directly onto your face. The glass dropper felt scientific, like a pipette of DNA, and I imagined I was applying an expensive, medical-grade serum. But once I began to blend, I saw that the foundation was too pale, and I had used a lot of it. My reflection became terrifying; I seemed to have no features, like a paper plate with faintly drawn eyes. In comparison to mine, Polly’s features were almost comically large. That’s why she was an actress, and also why people were inclined to give her money and positive feedback. That huge, expressive, Disney Channel face could be very convincing. I returned to the windowsill for eyeliner and blush. I drew some pointy, domineering eyebrows. I sprayed a mist of my roommate’s perfume into the air, walking into the falling vapor as if stepping through a doorway. Finally, I rummaged through her closet for the crisp gray suit she wore to conferences and internships. The sleeves bunched around my wrists. I smelled like a new car. I rode my scooter stoically to the coffee shop and found Polly waiting.
“I liked your presentation,” she said. “You have a lot of ambition.” She snapped her fingers several times, sort of threateningly, in my face. “Snaps,” she said.
My pitch had gone badly, met only with budget and safety concerns. I had no script, and in lieu of storyboards I had presented a series of ambient collages.
“Thank you,” I said. “I liked yours too.”
Polly laughed, a bitter little laugh.
“No, you didn’t,” she said. “You called me a narcissist. You said references to Greek mythology were hack. You said I weaponized nostalgia.”
I blinked. It seemed pointless to deny it.
“Luckily for you,” she continued, “I have thick skin. I think it's important to surround myself with critics, as long as they’re loyal. That’s why I want you to help me with Persephone. I want to be the best.” I winced.
“I can tell you think that’s vulgar to say out loud,” she said. “But isn’t that why we’re here?”
That fucking title still killed me, but her conviction was impressive. She looked out onto the quad, toward the statue of Douglas Fairbanks.
“It would be valuable,” she said, “To have your eye.”
I nodded, and instinctively ran a finger across my eyelid. Her own eyes, outlined in subtle brown mascara, seemed to emit light. Many years ago, I had spent several minutes mesmerized by a GIF of her face on Tumblr, blinking bewitchingly.
“Sure,” I said, casually. And then: “It would be a great honor.”
I sounded like a medieval knight. My voice was low and hoarse. We shook hands, and she leaned towards me, her teeth glittering.
“Let’s have girl talk,” she said. “Are you sex positive?”
I considered this. Was she hitting on me? It seemed unlikely. I knew that women often bonded over stories about sex. But I was basically a prude: shocked by the tamest of pornography, even the kind made especially for women where everyone is smiling. I’d lost my virginity, just to get it out of the way, with some film club nerd. Nothing to boast about. Since then, I’d been on a couple dates, but only ever with people who confused or intimidated me, so the whole time I was wary and combative. I could feel myself tapping the chess clock. If the conversation lulled, I’d crunch ice cubes noisily with my back teeth. I would probably never have sex again.
“I’m not sure,” I said.
“I’m sorry," she said. “Is this a difficult subject for you? You look weird.”
“No,” I said. “I mean, I don’t have any trauma about that or anything, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“You’re lucky,” she said. “I hope you’re being honest. If we’re going to work together, you need to express yourself freely. I got you a present, by the way.”
She handed me a copy of The Artist’s Way, a book I had sworn never to read. Someone was always trying to get you to read The Artist’s Way, but invariably it was a person who had no business making art.
“Thank you," I said. She started packing her things, and I wondered if the meeting was over. “Sensitive people are very loyal,” she said. “I can tell you are a very sensitive person.” There was something wild in her expression.
“So are you,” I said. “You’re very sensitive.”
Again, she laughed. “What makes you say that?”
“I saw your lonely old lady movie,” I said. “It was really good.”
She looked past me at the menu on the wall and smirked.
“Thanks,” she said. “I saw your stupid PSA.”
I did actually care about the issue of drunk driving. A few years ago, my mother was injured in a hit-and-run walking home from work. She got up, stumbled the last few blocks, and collapsed on our front porch, reaching up to hit the doorbell with the flat edge of her shoe. I was alone in the house, lying on the carpet and listening to the radio. I was sixteen. I’d gotten her in the passenger seat before it dawned on me that I should maybe call an ambulance. It was hard to tell how bad it was but she was pretty dazed and now the interior of her car was stained with blood. I guess it felt more productive to stay in motion so I drove to the hospital. A sour feeling kept me awake through the night. I sat on a plastic chair in the waiting room and kept my eyes fixed on the silent television that hung from the ceiling. It made me nervous to approach her bedside. We were rarely tender with each other. We never said stuff like “I love you,” which felt corny and obvious.
My mother was sort of blessed: the kind of person who could be hit by a car and abandoned, could walk bleeding through the streets of our neighborhood like a dark omen, and bounce back almost immediately. Her scars faded into faint patterns that were oddly beautiful, like embroidery. She suffered no head trauma and no lasting psychological damage, as far as I could tell. Her disposition remained serene and fixedly upbeat. This used to drive me insane. She had no idea what to do with me. The sum total of her motherly life advice was be nice, have fun, and follow your dreams. I would scream and cry, and she would sigh and say I had an artist’s temperament. My mother, my one true champion. I could be so cruel to that woman, but really I was desperate to prove her right. Sometimes, alone in my dorm, I would lie on the hard beige tile and gently knock my head against the floor, trying to coax it out: the brilliant idea that would justify my existence. When it came, it would wash over me in an unmistakable and holy wave of light.
Against my better judgement, I became invested in Persephone. She wasn’t exactly a strong female character, but it wasn’t her fault she was always depicted at her lowest moment, a hole opening up in the earth beneath her and her tunic falling off. I respected her ability to make peace with her plight, to take her place in the underworld without sacrificing her fundamental principles. I knew this aptitude was crucial to the endurance of life. However, the myth of Persephone didn’t really have anything to do with female friendship.This thought nagged at me, and I made a mental note to bring it up with Polly the next time I saw her.
But she didn’t show up to class. During the lecture, I found The Artist’s Way still lodged in my backpack, and thumbed idly through the first chapter. I had expected the author, Julia Cameron, to be annoying, and it did bother me how she harped on placating one’s inner child, promoting the kind of treacly, navel-gazing attitude I despised. I liked Julia more when she began inventing various phenomena and coining bizarre idioms to define them. 'Affirmative Weapons,' for example, referred to a kind of aggressive self-encouragement I couldn’t imagine Polly ever practiced, although it pleased me to imagine her alone, staring into the mirror, telling her pristine reflection that she was a channel for God’s creativity. However, these phrases often conjured unwelcome erotic imagery that obscured their intended meaning. I read that I might ‘dance the tortured tango,’ or meet a ‘poisonous playmate,’ as if Julia, too, had promised an artistic revelation, only to torment me with reminders of my own sexual incompetence.
Weeks passed, and I grew uneasy. I questioned her friends, the beautiful fundraisers, who responded cryptically. “Polly just vanishes sometimes,” they said. My work continued to suffer, while the swaggering boys in my production class received glowing reviews for a thriller comedy about some dude who tries to bake the perfect cake. Desperate, I began Chapter 2 of The Artist’s Way, and was troubled by the warm-toned, domestic life that Julia pictured me to have: constantly mending my curtains and suppressing a secret desire to learn Salsa dancing. Wasn’t I - twenty years old, peering through plastic, dorm-issued blinds - already behind? Make a list of all the friends who nurture you, she commanded, and with a pang of dread, I closed the book.
Our professors always told us to read the trades, so I subscribed to newsletters from Variety and Deadline. Every morning, I was accosted by headlines like George Clooney Says He’s No Longer ‘Kissing Girls’ in Movies: ‘When I Turned 60 I Had a Conversation With My Wife’. Sometimes, I learned that a big-budget drama about a man and his horse had flopped. One morning, I opened my email and there was Polly, looking uncanny in a milky headshot. I read the words Polly Perinetti is Ready to Reclaim the Lens and felt sick.
I scanned the accompanying article. Her movie had been picked up by an indie studio founded by a tech giant, and was set to film in Hungary. She was probably already there, drinking little cups of strong coffee and lording her genius over a non-union crew. And why not? This school, with its endless bureaucracy and statues of tycoons like Greek gods, was completely worthless to her.
For the rest of the semester, I smiled placidly at everyone. I gamely followed my peers to lectures and networking events at which industry executives told us, in solemn, helpless voices, to consider alternate career paths. I rode the Metro up and down the city, tossing The Artist’s Way onto the tracks of the Red line. I lay on the floor, imagining nothing. On my laptop screen, a girl who vaguely resembled Polly turned axels on the ice. I spent whole days this way, staring out the window, behaving languorously.
Caris Yeoman is a writer and photographer. Her work has appeared in Currant Jam and Architechtural Digest. She lives in Los Angeles, where she was born and raised.