What I was wearing...when I met my best friend.

…was a tee-shirt over my bathing suit. I was 16 and it was summer on Fire Island. 

I’d just lost my job as a mother’s help. The family who fired me – a humourless couple  and the two-year-old I was meant to keep fed and occupied for eight weeks – was renting a small cottage on the wrong end of the island. They seemed to resent my being there. They expected me to eat separately, keep to my room when I wasn’t tending to their daughter and, if one of their friends came to stay, made me give up my bed and go sleep on a cot in the laundry shed out back.  

It was a relief, then, the night they caught me making out with a boy on the side porch.  It was my day off, which should have been a mitigating factor but they, the Beckers, cited their objection to what they called male followers and told me I had to go. I spent one last night in the laundry shed and left in the morning before anyone was awake.   

When you’re young you don’t have much of a sense of doom, but even I – a remarkably heedless 16-year-old – was frightened about what to do next, where to turn. I had barely enough money for a ferry to the mainland, never mind the train back to my parents in New Jersey. It did not occur to me that my ex-employers had an obligation to keep me safe, that I could have demanded my fare home. Even if it had, I would have been too embarrassed to go back to the cottage and ask. The problem was I didn’t know anyone else on the Island except Mr and Mrs Becker and the boy whose kisses had landed me in this situation. He was a waiter at a bar near the surfing beach and he’d told me, when his tongue wasn’t in my mouth, that the male staff slept in a kind of barracks off the kitchen. 

I made my way there and banged on the door, rattling the line of surfboards stacked against the wall.  The boys were just getting up, and when I told them my sad tale they served me a consolation breakfast on the deck. We sat around in the sun, maligning the people who paid our wages, and then someone mentioned a girl he’d met, another mother’s help, who’d just been fired from her job. It was with a family living one town away along the beach. Everyone knew the house, a rambling Victorian with gables and a widow’s walk.  

I walked there after breakfast, keeping to the packed sand above the surf line. The house was just past the rocky groin that marked the township boundary.  

It was big and homey, a summer residence from another era, the grey walls sun-bleached to white, a porch with rocking chairs and a cushioned swing seat. I knocked on the door and then stood back on the boardwalk so they could see me. A window opened on the second floor and a woman, thirtyish, leaned out over the sill.

   “Yes?” 

   “I heard you might be looking for a mother’s help.” 

A second window shot open and a girl my age with shiny brown hair leaned out and said, not to me, but to the woman at the other window, “You’re already looking for a new me?”  

   “A different you,” the woman said. “A happy you. 

   “Don’t go away,” the woman told me. She withdrew her head but the girl stayed where she was, her arms folded on the sill. We looked at each other for a few seconds and then she said, without resentment, “They’re really nice but it’s too much work. For me, at least. Maybe it’ll be okay for you.” 

   “I just got fired from my job, too. But they weren’t nice.” 

   “I’m June,” she said. 

“Ellen.” 

The woman came out onto the porch.  She was pretty and finely made, but so enormously pregnant she looked like a beach ball on legs.  

   “Come in,” she said. “June can tell you how awful we are and why you’d never want to work for us.” 

Of course I took the job. She and her husband were actors, familiar faces if you watched the soaps. They had a robust, cheerful three-year-old and it was due to inexperience rather than malice that they’d overworked June. Having learned their lesson with her they bent over backwards to accommodate me: a decent salary, afternoons off, dinners with their amusing actor friends and – an unexpected plus – a big house to throw parties when they went back to the city for rehearsals and doctor’s appointments.  

They had arranged for June to work for friends of theirs, and she and I agreed to meet up with ‘our’ children that first day. 

We fell into a routine that quickly locked in place. 

Mornings, we took the children to the bay. While they paddled in the calm, shallow water, we talked about boys and books and our parents. My angry mother. Her cold stepfather. Afternoons, free of our charges, we hung out at the ocean-side beach, body surfing and talking to our favourite lifeguards. The nights we didn’t have to babysit we went dancing (the Island bars took a relaxed view of the legal drinking age) and when the bars closed we ran down the sandy slope of the beach, pulling off the clothes we’d sweated through on the dance floor, diving into the oncoming waves.  

Sometimes a kind of entourage followed us out of the bar and into the sea – lifeguards and other mother’s helps – but more often it was just the two of us.  There was a baptismal edge to our immersion, a sense, never acknowledged, of having reverted to our younger less knowing selves. 

Also unspoken was the fact of our instant, elemental connection the morning I stood on the boardwalk and she leant out over the sill. A jolt of recognition, a tacit understanding we would always be in each other’s lives.