Anne Anderson was magnificent. The shock of wavy blond hair. The high-rise platform shoes. The rock-star swagger that made you want to stare and look away all at once. "Suuuuupersexy," she would have called it. To Anne, things weren't "cool" or "cute"; they were always "supersexy."
We met at a Casbah party, where she came dressed like a stripper in a corset and fishnets, waving a bottle of Goldschlager like an elegant accessory. I hated her then, because I had a beer belly and thighs, because I was wearing clothes from The Limited, because I was used to being the center of attention and had been, quite frankly, out-diva'd. But late that night, full of Keystone Light and boozy affection, I found her in my bedroom performing the soundtrack to Grease, a handful of gawking men surrounding her. I was beyond envious. But you know what they say: If you can't beat ‘em, sing back-up.
After that, Anne and I became a duo. We made a regular bordello routine out of Gloria Gaynor's "I Will Survive," Alicia Bridges' "I Love the Nightlife," and our piece de resistance, "Dance 10 Looks 3" from the Chorus Line soundtrack. (Could we get dorkier than performing showtunes? Try Jesus Christ Superstar.) Like me, Anne was conflicted about the attention—she craved it and then batted it away, she courted it in stilettos and then wondered why it turned its head—and I think we understood this about each other, understood that if we performed together, we would not stumble and fall. Well, we fell—but come on, we were wasted.
The next year, Anne moved into the apartment across from me. We spent evenings together drinking beer and gorging on take-out. We gained weight and tried to disguise it with jeans and baggy shirts. We talked about diet and exercise, but it was all so much smoke. Oh yes, we did that too. Friggin' chimneys. We were terrible influences on each other.
"Come on, have a beer."
"Come on, eat Taco Cabana."
But that was secondary to the friendship that developed between us. Our lives, which once seemed so vastly different (hers: brilliant; mine: not so much), had begun to run parallel. Party girls plagued by insecurity. Wanting men we could never have, shunning the ones we could. Looking at old pictures and wondering what had been so wrong with our bodies back then. We were a mouthy pair who loved to shock. At a party for entering freshman, she demanded money for a keg collection while I trailed behind her shouting, town-crier style, "Give money to the mulatto! Free your white guilt!"
When I told my mother that story, her lips tensed. "You really should say 'half African-American.'"
Ugh. She'd never get it. How we didn't care, how Anne's color didn't matter, how words like "African-American" felt stiff and clumsy in our mouth. But by then, our vocabulary (and that of our friends) had been reduced to inside jokes and the emphatic use of the word "dude." In retrospect, it was very obnoxious, very secret society. But we needed that clique. All of us had spent so many years not belonging; we had to flaunt it while we could.
Most of our stories about Anne will follow the same arc. The revelation of meeting her, the giddiness of being around her, the confusion and helplessness we felt watching her slip away. I don't have much more to add, except that I know Anne had been sad for a long time, sad in a way few people saw, because she preferred to dance and giggle. At least, until she stopped doing both those things, when it became very obvious how sad and lonely she had been all along. Years later, when they found the tumor, she worried that she'd die before she ever truly fell in love, worried that she wouldn't reconnect with the friends who had drifted away. None of that happened. Before the tumor came back, she was happier than she'd ever been. That comforts me, sometimes.
A few weeks before she died, I drove out to her house with some old CDs. Pulp Fiction, James Brown, Aretha Franklin, Priscilla Queen of the Desert. At that point, she was bed-ridden and blind. She tried to smile but it came out a sneer, the right side of her lip just trembling. But when I pressed play on "Dance 10, Looks 3," she started mouthing the lyrics right away. "Dance 10, Looks 3 / And I'm still on unemployment / Dancing for my own enjoyment / That ain't it kid. That ain't it, kid!" Her right index finger moved up and down, as if – being unable to spin and shake it, unable to high-kick and growl – her body refused to sit this song out. That's when I knew she was in there, and I wasn't afraid anymore. I held her hand gently. I noticed, out of the corner of my eye, that her fingernails still looked better than mine.
When the song was over I leapt up for the jambox. "Okay, okay now this one's a classic," I said, filling the silence as I cued up the next CD. "This one will take you right back to those glory days of the Casbah."
A dramatic arpeggio followed by the familiar voice: "At first I was afraid, I was petrified. Kept thinking I could never live without you by my side."
Oh, shit. How had this happened? The song we had adored was suddenly full of awful double meaning. I started to panic, wondered if I should turn it off: Did she notice? Did she care? Not knowing what to do, I simply sat down beside her, and slid my fingers into hers. Maybe she squeezed my hand. Maybe I just wanted her to. But I do know what happened next: she stared straight ahead, whispering the words. "I've got all my life to live / And I've got all my love to give / And I'll survive. I will survive. Hey-hey."
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