新編大學(xué)英語第三冊unit9 Text B: Friends, Good Friends - and Such Good
UNIT 9 AFTER-CLASS READING 1; New College English (II)
Friends, Good Friends and Such Good Friends
1 Women are friends, I once would have said, when they totally love and support and trust each other, and bare to each other the secrets of their souls, and run no questions asked to help each other, and tell harsh truths to each other (no, you can't wear that dress unless you lose ten pounds first) when harsh truths must be told.
2 Women are friends, I once would have said, when they share the same affection for Ingmar Bergman, plus train rides, cats, warm rain, and hate with equal ardor Newark, Brussels sprouts and camping.
3 In other words, I once would have said that a friend is a friend all the way, but now I believe that's a narrow point of view. For the friendships I have and the friendships I see are conducted at many levels of intensity, serve many different functions, meet different needs and range from those as all-the-way as the friendship of the soul sisters mentioned above to that of the most casual playmates.
4 Consider these varieties of friendship:
5 Convenience friends These are women with whom, if our paths weren't crossing all the time, we'd have no particular reason to be friends: a next-door neighbor, a woman in our car pool, the mother of one of our children's closest friends or maybe some mommy with whom we serve juice and cookies each week at the Glen-wood co-op nursery.
6 Convenience friends are convenient indeed. They'll lend us their cups and silverware for a party. They'll drive our kids to soccer when we're sick. They'll take us to pick up our car when we need a lift to the garage. They'll even take our cats when we go on vacation. As we will for them.
7 But we don't, with convenience friends, ever come too close or tell too much; we maintain our public face and emotional distance. "Which means," says Elaine, "that I'll talk about being overweight but not about being depressed. Which means I'll admit being mad but not blind with rage. Which means that I might say that we're short of cash this month but never that I'm worried sick over money."
8 But which doesn't mean that there isn't sufficient value to be found in these friendships of mutual aid, in convenience friends.
9 Special-interest friends These friendships aren't intimate, and they needn't involve kids or silverware or cats. Their value lies in some interest jointly shared. And so we may have an office friend or a yoga friend or a tennis friend or a friend from the Women's Club.
10 "I've got one woman friend," says Joyce, "who likes, as I do, to take psychology courses. Which makes it nice for me and nice for her. It's fun to go with someone you know and it's fun to discuss what you've learned, driving back from the classes." And for the most part, she says, that's all they discuss.
11 "I'd say that what we're doing is doing together, not being together," Suzanne says of her Tuesday-doubles friends. "It's mainly a tennis relationship, but we play together well. And I guess all we need to have is a couple of playmates."
12 I agree.
13 Historical friends We all have a friend who knew us when maybe way back in Miss Meltzer's second grade, when our family lived in that three-room flat in Brooklyn, when our dad was out of work for seven months, when our brother Allie got in that fight where they had to call the police, when our sister married the dentist from Yonkers.
14 The years have gone by and we've gone separate ways and we've little in common now, but we're still an intimate part of each other's past. And so whenever we go to Detroit we always go to visit this friend of our girlhood. Who knows how we looked before our teeth were straightened. Who knows how we talked before we lost our Brooklyn accents. Who knows what we ate before we learned about artichokes. And who, by her presence, puts us in touch with an earlier part of ourselves, a part of ourselves that's important never to lose.
15 Crossroads friends Like historical friends, our crossroads friends are important for what was for the friendship we shared at a crucial, now past, time of life. A time, perhaps, when we roomed in college together; or worked as eager young singles in the Big City together; or went together, as my friend Elizabeth and I did, through pregnancy, birth and that scary first year of new motherhood.
16 Crossroads friends forge powerful links, links strong enough to endure with not much more contact than once-a-year letters at Christmas. And out of respect for those crossroads years, for those dramas and dreams we once shared, we will always be friends.
17 Cross-generational friends Historical friends and crossroads friends seem to maintain a special kind of intimacy dormant but always ready to be revived and though we may rarely meet, whenever we do connect, it's personal and intense. Another kind of intimacy exists in the friendships that form across generations in what one woman calls her daughter-mother and her mother-daughter relationships.
18 Evelyn's friend is her mother's age "but I share so much more than I ever could with my mother" a woman she talks to of music, of books and of life. "What I get from her is the benefit of her experience. What she gets and enjoys from me is youthful perspective. It's a pleasure for both of us."
19 I have in my own life a precious friend, a woman of 65 who has lived very hard, who is wise, who listens well; who has been where I am and can help me understand it; and who represents not only an ultimate ideal mother to me but also the person I'd like to be when I grow up. It's another kind of pleasure playing wise mother to a questioning younger person. It's another very lovely kind of friendship.
20 There are good friends, and pretty good friends, and very good friends indeed, and these friendships are defined by their level of intimacy. And what we'll reveal at each of these levels of intimacy is determined with care. We might tell a good friend, for example, that yesterday we had a fight with our husband. And we might tell a pretty good friend that this fight with our husband made us so mad that we slept on the couch. And we might tell a very good friend that the reason we got so mad in that fight that we slept on the couch had something to do with that girl who works in his office. But it's only to our very best friends that we're willing to tell all, to tell what's going on with that girl in his office.
21 The best of friends, I still believe, totally love and support and trust each other, and tell each other the secrets of their souls, and run no questions asked to help each other, and tell harsh truths to each other when they must be told.
22 But we needn't agree about everything (only 12-year-old girl friends agree about everything) to tolerate each other's point of view. To accept without judgment. To give and to take without ever keeping score. And to be there, as Tam for them and as they are for me, to comfort our sorrows, to celebrate our joys.
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