Rescuing Elena
by Mary W. Bridgman

Elena's father shot himself during our senior year in high school. The brief account that appeared in the local newspaper said he’d been cleaning his gun when it accidentally discharged. I didn’t buy it then and I don’t buy it now, more than 30 years later. It happened during the wee hours of the morning. As far as anyone knew, he hadn’t had a hunting trip planned. No one could explain why he chose that particular time to clean his rifle.

I met Elena when we were in the fifth grade. My family had just moved from a small country town to a larger city where I felt like a fish out of water. While the kids made jokes about LSD and marijuana, things I knew nothing about, I made no
effort to hide my conservative Christian beliefs, which had been unquestioned where I’d come from. My new classmates
called me a Bible-thumper. Not surprisingly, I found it difficult to make friends. I vacillated between fantasizing about blossoming into a pretty, popular girl and hoping I would someday gain acceptance through wit and intellect, despite my homely appearance and lack of social skills. Fat chance.

Elena was oblivious to the cliques that were the bane of my existence. She was the shortest girl in the class, which certainly made her stand out. She had dark, lovely hair and skin that bespoke her Latin heritage. Even though pretty much every other kid in the school was a WASP, richer, and made better grades, none of this seemed to bother her. Almost every other kid also had a mother at home. Elena did not—a fact I quickly picked up, although not from her. One of the girls who lived in my neighborhood told me Elena’s mother had died of breast cancer about a year before I met her.

Elena’s motherless status, her small stature, and her exotic heritage intrigued me. The motherless part really puzzled me. I could not conceive of life without my mother. She was like the sun in our family, with all of us suspended in orbit around
her. Just one day with Mother sick in bed and everything fell apart. Yet, here was Elena, apparently happy, the bubbliest person I had ever encountered. Elena was the only kid I knew who ignored the rigid social strata of the kid world. I figured she must have gotten some kind of special dispensation because her mother was dead.

Elena knew everybody in our school and seemed to know everything about them too. She loved to talk about the other kids, always happy to relate whatever she knew with plenty of giggles included in the telling. We made a Mutt-and-Jeff type
pair. She was short, plump, and vivacious and I was tall, skinny, and dour.

We were really just school friends—we didn’t do things together after school or on weekends—until her father killed himself. I heard about it from my father, who was principal at the middle school that Elena’s younger brother Rudy attended. Someone, probably a police officer, called Daddy at home early that morning to let him know. Daddy told me about it before breakfast. I didn’t ask questions, just tried to absorb the news. We decided we would go over to their house after school to offer our condolences.

When we arrived, the house was packed. I had always known where Elena lived, but had never been inside. Rudy spotted us, ran over to Daddy and wrapped his arms around him. Rudy was short like Elena, and his head came only a little above
Daddy’s waist. His arms were not long enough to encircle him. Daddy was not a demonstrative person, but he put his arms around Rudy and held him tightly for awhile. I felt sorry for Rudy; I wanted to share my father with him, even though I knew it could never make up for the father he had lost.

We didn’t go to the funeral; it was during school hours. But in the days that followed, I stuck to Elena like glue. If she wondered what I was doing or why, she never said so. She just accepted me and my efforts to help her. I don’t know why I
thought I could help—I had no firsthand experience with death or the grief that goes with it. Everyone in my immediate family, including my grandparents, was still alive.

On some level, I was trying to be a parent to Elena, to make up for what she had lost. I never considered the absurdity of the idea—I just wanted to fix things for her, even though anyone could see that what was wrong couldn’t be fixed. After Elena’s father died, she was pretty much on her own. The live-in housekeeper moved out, and the only adult left in the home was Elena’s older brother. He wasn’t in college and didn’t have a job. As far as I could tell, his main pastime was harassing Elena and hanging out with his girlfriend, who was younger than Elena and I. I thought Elena would have been better off if she had been alone.

I’m not sure whether anyone was ever legally appointed guardian for Elena and her younger brother, but a friend of their father’s who had no wife or children of his own took over management of their finances.

I tried to do things with Elena that a mother would do, even though I hadn’t done them before. I had never made Christmas cookies without my mother’s help, but Elena wanted to do it so we did. I had never had a piano student, but Elena wanted to learn, so I tried to teach her. We never got beyond “Teaching Little Fingers to Play”—probably because Elena didn’t have a piano so she couldn’t practice at home. I knew our lessons weren’t going anywhere, but I plodded on for about a year.

Elena never spoke to me of all the sadness and hurt she must have felt over the loss of her parents. She never mentioned her mother to me at all. She mothered her younger brother as best she could, with very little help.

Elena and I started college together at the local university. It was huge and I didn’t have any hope of becoming a part of the social life, student government, or prominent clubs. Elena was un-fazed by all of it, applied for several of the prestigious clubs, didn’t get accepted by any of them, and didn’t seem to care. I applied at her urging, didn’t get accepted, and couldn’t help but care.

One Christmas, Elena gave me a pair of pierced earrings. Even though I was nineteen years old, I still wore clip-ons. Elena’s ears had been pierced since she was a baby. “Let’s go to the mall in Orange Park,” she said. “There’s a store there where you can get your ears pierced.”

Orange Park was located on the fringe of the big city of Jacksonville, a ninety-minute drive from our town.

“Uh, I’m not sure I want to do that,” I said.

“How come? It’ll be fun!” she said. Of course she said that. She thought everything was fun.

“You don’t understand,” I stammered.

“Don’t worry, it won’t hurt!”

“That’s not it, Elena.” I took a deep breath, horribly embarrassed by what I had to say.

“I’m afraid I might pass out. Needles make me faint.”

Elena told me not to worry, she would go with me, and everything would be fine.

When we got to the mall, Elena decided to use a pay phone to call a friend who lived in the area. The conversation dragged on and on, so I decided to go get my ears pierced by myself. Elena didn’t seem to notice when I left.

When I got through, Elena was still yakking away on the phone. I tried to get her attention by waving my arms, but she was oblivious. I started to feel lightheaded and made a dash for the restroom. I sat on one of the toilets with my head between my legs until the feeling passed. After lots of deep breathing, I staggered to the lavatory and splashed cold water on my face.

When I returned to the mall, Elena was exactly where I’d left her, still jabbering away on the phone. After several minutes of standing around on one foot and then the other, Elena finally hung up. She turned to look for me and said, “Oh, there you are. Ready to get your ears pierced?” she asked.

I brushed my hair away from my earlobes, which were beginning to throb. “I already did it, no thanks to you.” I filled her in on what she had missed.

Elena just laughed, even though I was clearly put out with her. She hadn’t even noticed that I had left, returned, turned white, and fled to the restroom. Despite my irritation, I had to admit I never would have had my ears pierced without Elena, even though I pretty much did do it without her.
 
Elena moved away when we finished our undergraduate degrees. I stayed in town and went on to law school. One summer, I took a temporary job near her new home and invited her to come visit me. She had car trouble, or so she said, and never made it. We kept in touch sporadically after that, but she wrote me the Christmas before I took the state bar exam to let me know she had married and had a baby girl. The bar exam was given in the city where she lived, so I arranged to see her and meet her baby daughter, who looked like a miniature Elena, all dark hair and eyes, plump, and happy. I couldn’t help but notice that the baby’s ears were already pierced.

After a while, I stopped hearing from Elena. I tried to track her down, but that was before the Internet, and I didn’t have any luck. I hoped to see her at our 30th high school class reunion—in fact, she was the only person I truly hoped would be there, but she wasn’t.

Looking back, I think Elena understood more about me than I did about her. I remember one conversation in particular, probably one of many we shared about various people we knew who were attractive, popular, or accomplished. She mentioned someone by name, and I said I didn’t like whoever it was. Elena must have heard that type of comment from me one time too many. She paused, and without letting any hint of irritation creep into her voice said, “You don’t like more people than I know."
 
It stopped me cold. Elena had a wide circle of friends and acquaintances—and she knew I knew it. She must have known that I, like many teenaged girls, wanted to be normal, accepted, and popular. Somehow she figured out that I coped with my shortcomings by criticizing or judging others before I gave them a chance to prove they weren’t the shallow, thoughtless people I wanted to believe they were.

How had I become so judgmental?

The answer to that was pretty clear. 

I had let it happen. Elena’s guileless comment stopped me cold and changed my outlook. From that point on, I tried to give everyone the benefit of the doubt.

Elena had more reasons than I to resent the good fortune of others, but she didn’t. She assumed good intent on everyone’s part and responded in kind. Despite all her disadvantages, she had much more self-confidence, more self-respect, than I did. Those qualities freed her to be more concerned about how she treated others than how they treated her.

Eventually, I stopped trying to help Elena. I finally figured out she didn’t need or want to be rescued. Although I didn’t realize it until many years later, I’d been the one who’d been drowning, sinking in a morass of teenaged angst, self-pity and jealousy. Elena, the orphan with no one to care for her, threw me a lifeline.

Thank goodness, I caught it. I’d wanted desperately to rescue Elena, but in the end, she rescued me.