Remembering Michelle McCarter

I had been meaning to write about Michelle since learning of her death but I was stymied by a lack of photos. I had once had quite a few of her, but my father threw them all away, along with nearly all of my childhood memorabilia, while in a confused state after my mother died.

There were several I had taken at Camp Sierra. She and I spent a week there at sleep away camp the summer after 6^th grade. So much of that week remains vivid in my mind. I can still sing the songs we learned there. That’s where I learned how to make not only s’mores but banana boats. Banana boats are fantastic (see below!).

Michelle was a sweet kid. I can’t remember ever getting in a fight with her. She always had a calmness and poise about her that can only come from being a very well-loved child.

One of the discarded pictures had been taken by my mom when we had just gotten off the bus, returning home from camp. I’m all gangly arms and legs and a pixie haircut, laughing at something off camera, and Michelle has her hand on my shoulder and is smiling at me.

For the remainder of the summer she and I called each other every day. One day I called her and she answered before it rang because she was calling me. All I really remember about these phone calls was giggling. I don’t remember what was so hilarious. I do remember my mother rolling her eyes at me and saying, my gosh you girls are silly. We would laugh so hard we couldn’t breathe.

Michelle as a child bore a striking resemblance to the child actress Hayley Mills. Since I don’t have any pictures of Michelle, you’ll have to look at her instead. Michelle had prettier hair that went down to her waist.

This was the age of slumber parties. I remember one particular one when a bunch of us were sleeping in her octagonal living room (her house, like many in the Oakland hills, was architecturally creative), and we were playing Big Brother and the Holding Company on the stereo (Janis Joplin!) and discussing The Big One – that earthquake they’ve been threatening would destroy California all these years. She emphatically asserted she had seen a UFO.

It was also the age when little girls turned into teenagers. Michelle and I started out walking around the school playground holding hands and messing around with a Styrofoam Tippy Tub at The Hills pool. Time passed, and as we headed into Montera Junior High I saw the handwriting on the wall. I said to all my friends, promise me that when we get to Montera you won’t get all boy crazy and stupid. Promise me you’ll still be fun and do things besides think about clothes. Promise me! They all promised.

The first one to cave was Michelle. I don’t blame her though, this was something that was done to her by fate. There was a special power bestowed upon her that stripped her of any power she may have had to resist it and remain just an ordinary kid.

Michelle became absolutely gorgeous. Her appearance changed from Hayley Mills to a young Brigitte Bardot (above - again, I have no pics of Michelle but this is a very close approximation of what she looked like). It didn’t matter what she wore. I used to have a picture of her in jeans and a blue workshirt looking like a movie idol. There was another picture I took of her at the pool. She was wearing a bikini and had turned her head to talk to someone behind her. At the time I felt like I was taking a picture of a unicorn, she was so perfect.

Everyone reacted in some way to Michelle. There was a group of girls at school who threatened to “cut her tongue out and stuff her mouth with sand” because they assumed she was a snob. She was no snob. She was very politically liberal, almost leftist. Fortunately that situation was resolved in the counseling office when they got to know her better. One of the teachers clearly had a crush on Michelle – when she was in 7^th grade! If people weren’t hating her for how she looked they wanted a piece of her.

Those of us who had been her friends since before her emergence as a monarch butterfly no doubt contributed to her feeling of being set apart. We made a lot of awestruck remarks about her appearance in her presence.

She began to work it more and more, in the sense of taking it as her due that she was the sexiest thing around.

I was horribly jealous. I wasn’t so much jealous of her looks as I was jealous of all the people who were gathering around her and receiving her attention.

Michelle had been born with a hole in her heart and this was when she had open heart surgery to repair it. The operation was a success but it left her with a dramatic scar down her cleavage. I know she was self conscious about it but her beauty was so powerful it almost left us wishing we all had scars too.

As junior high wore on I aligned myself with a different set of girls. They were brainy and cynical hippies who were not afraid to still be kids. (Except Renée Auker – you have to leave “cynical” out of her description and throw in some flip flops and aerials.) We rode bikes a lot, leaving me with a legacy of powerful thigh muscles, drank Koolaid, and wrote goofy stories. Some of them will probably read this.

One day I was listening to Judy Collins’ Wildflowers album, which has a lot of sad songs on it, and I started crying over losing Michelle as a friend. I wanted to call her but I didn’t do it. Several days later I ran into her and was surprised when, without me saying a thing, she volunteered that she had been crying about how we weren’t friends anymore. Me too, I said. But we both knew it just wasn’t going to work out for us to be friends right then. Maybe in a few years.

The last time I saw Michelle I was sitting outside eating lunch on that long plaza or whatever it is at Skyline High, and Michelle came walking down the sidewalk. There were perhaps fifty kids sitting around eating lunch and every single one of them stopped chewing, stopped talking, and just watched her walk down the long path, regally and serenely.

After that I found out she had moved to Europe. I think she married an Italian man and became a journalist, but I’m not sure about this. The next thing I know for sure is that her heart gave out a couple of years ago.

I have so many questions about her. Did she have a good life? Was she loved? Did she stay beautiful? I would have loved to be her friend again now that time has diminished the importance of physical loveliness. We wouldn’t be kids again. But I bet we would have done a lot of laughing.

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How to make a banana boat:

Take a banana and slit the peel lengthwise. Pry it open wide enough to tuck in pieces of chocolate, e.g., Hershey bar squares, and a couple of marshmallows. Wrap it in foil and place it close enough to a campfire to melt the marshmallows and chocolate, turning as necessary. Eat the gooey marshmallow/chocolate/banana right out of the peel with a spoon.