The Actress stood barefoot in the hallway, discoursing on what great respect she had for me even though we could no longer be friends. I leaned against the door frame, tugging at a pair of too-short shorts I would not have been wearing had I known she was going to be on the other end of the knock at the door.
We were friends and had been writing a play together. A play that imagined the conversation Jackie Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe might have in heaven. What we were learning now, as The Actress fumbled with her exposed bra straps, was that it wouldn’t work. There are women who simply cannot be friends.
What it all comes down to, if we’re looking for some great moral truth or reductive kernel of universal wisdom here, is this: don’t buy leopard print skirts.
The Actress had bought a leopard print skirt. Several months later, I bought this same skirt. An impulse buy that didn’t seem so bad until, upon hearing about it, The Actress reeled back in horror, whispered something about Single White Female and scurried away.
Thus, the leopard print skirt sat in the furthest gloomy closet corner for five full months, a reminder that I had wandered into a friendship of murky parameters. A friendship where things were off-limits- important things, like leopard print.
I did not wear the leopard print skirt until The Actress stood barefoot in the hallway and friend-dumped me with the line, “And then there was that business with the leopard print skirt.”
Yes, clearly the fault for the demise of our friendship lay neither in The Actress’s quixotic temperament and intellectual insecurities nor in my inability to trust people and suffocating fear of being found inadequate. Clearly a $24.95 article of clothing from H+M’s spring 2006 line was entirely to blame.
I immediately did what every girl would do—I wore that skirt.
That’s not to say I was brave. I crept in and out of the apartment through the back door, ever fearful that The Actress might suddenly materialize, claws out, to pull my hair.
I did not see her until one day several months later but, when I did it was, of course, a leopard print skirt day.
This was not the image I wished to project. I’d been doing well in her absence, but was attired in such a manner that one would assume I was pining away. But I was determined to be dignified.
And I might have been had the heel of my left shoe not forsaken me at that moment, breaking with a loud crack as I exclaimed “SHIT!”
The Actress shot me a murderous glance. I hobbled, humbled, home.
As I did, the leopard print skirt danced in the wind, tickling the backs of my knees like the boys used to do in preschool to get back at me after I bit them. Don’t buy leopard print skirts, girls. But if you do, by God, wear them.
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If Jackie O and Elvis ever had a love child, Oline Eaton would’ve been that kid! A graduate of the University of Chicago with a Master’s degree in writing biography and a concentration in tabloids, Oline has written extensively on the subjects of celebrities, gossip and adventure. Her work has been featured in LineZero, on Jack Black’s Body, CheekyChicago.com, TheGloss.com and Contrary Magazine. She is currently writing a biography of Jackie Onassis.
