Grown-Ass Ladies Gone Mild From the start of our grown-ass ladies' trip to Panama City Beach, aka "The Redneck Riviera," Paige and I could see that Vicki was having a hard time. Days before, she'd dropped her eldest off at college and gotten a bad mammogram. Her follow-up biopsy was scheduled for the week after our reunion with two other childhood friends, and until then, all Vicki wanted to do was stay in her room, sleep late, sit on the condo balcony, sit on the beach, drink white wine out of a Chardonnay glass or drink white wine out of a one-liter sippy-lid souvenir cup, and catch up. The last time we'd gotten together as a group was ten years ago--my four childhood friends carpooling over from Atlanta and Athens, and me flying down from New York City--so we respected Vicki's wishes. As we respected Ellen's wish to run on the beach at dawn like she was reenacting Chariots of Fire (which nobody else did). And Heather's wish to play Cards Against Humanity (which four out of five of us did). And Paige's wish to wear matching woven friendship bracelets (which we all did). And my wish to go to a water park (which two of us did). When Paige and I arrived at Shipwreck Island, we were self-conscious about barefooting around in our one-pieces in the broadest of daylight, but then we saw a nine-months-pregnant woman in a bikini, and her meemaw in a thong. Awash in a sea of botched tattoos and bullet wounds, third-degree sunburns and cellulite that made our cellulite feel good about itself, we stood up a little straighter and wore our particular brand of sunscreened and soft-cupped middle age like Bob Mackie gowns. Braving the Raging Rapids ride, we sat ass backwards into inner tubes held by beautiful bronzed teenagers. I said to one good-ole-boy Adonis: "You're gonna have to push me." He said, "Yes, ma'am," and shoved me over a waterfall like a sack of dirty sheets down a hotel laundry chute. I screamed. And Paige screamed. Because she too is a screamer. And Paige's screams have always enabled my screams. Ever since elementary school. Paige and I met in the 1970s Alabama gifted program. I don't know why we were pegged as gifted, but I'm pretty sure I scored high on the IQ test because when I was asked to name all the words I could think of in sixty seconds, I read every word I could see on book spines behind the test giver's back. "Dictionary, encyclopedia, parachute, penguin." From then on, one day a week, me (and another kid from Alberta Elementary School) and Paige (and another kid from Arcadia Elementary School) went to gifted school at Northington Elementary with twenty other kids from around Tuscaloosa. Here's what I remember about being gifted: logic puzzles (whodunit spreadsheets), Chisanbop (finger math), and our teacher's belief that we, a bunch of fifth graders, could put on a show (three acts from, you guessed it, Evita, A Chorus Line, and The Crucible). Paige remembers: "I was one of the extras, and I think my one line was 'It's up there, behind the rafters,' pointing at a witch or a bat." It was my line too. For Arthur Miller's big courtroom scene, Paige and I played Puritan schoolgirls. But we didn't point at a bat. Costumed in black dresses with white collars and bonnets, we cowered on a cafeteria stage screaming and crying and accusing another girl of turning into a yellow devil bird that wanted to tear our faces off. Vicki, who's known Paige since kindergarten, attended that show with her mother. She remembers thinking "Whaaaaat?" Paige and I still don't know what. All we remember is that we got those parts because we were the best screamers. Looking back, "the best screamers" might have been our teacher's southern lady way of saying that we were the worst actresses. Regardless, one good screamer holds tight to another for life. At the water park, Paige and I screamed flying down the rapids, we screamed bumping into each other, we screamed seeing each other scream, and we screamed getting stuck and spiraling in whirlpools. Every fifteen feet, another good-ole-boy Adonis unstuck us and slung us along. We screamed, "Thank you!" They said, "Yes, ma'am." And shook their heads in what I am sure was marvel over never having seen grown-ass ladies such as ourselves having more fun than little girls pumped up on 16 Handles fro-yo chasing Taylor Swift through a shopping mall. Paige and I drifted along the Lazy River, congealed with season ticket holders. We got in the Wave Pool and gripped the sides like castaways. We climbed what I believe was in fact a rickety wooden stairway to heaven to ride White Knuckle River, which is four people in a big inner tube going down a 660-foot twisting snake of drainpipe. And we debated the Tree Top Drop, which is a seventy-foot slide down an XXXL human-size straw. I asked a woman who'd just finished it, "Should we ride the Tree Top Drop?" She said, "If you wanna taste the crotch of your own bathing suit." We did not. So instead, we went back to the Raging Rapids and rode it twenty-eight times in a row. At some point, I asked Paige about the tattoo on her shoulder. Paige's tattoo is of what I would call three "M" birds. Three birds that look like the letter M. Inked in black without features, as if seen from a distance, flying high, maybe over an ocean. One is the width of a nickel; the other two, the widths of dimes. Mama bird and her babies. Soaring to safety. Paige said, "I just came to the point where I felt really free. I felt free and thankful that me and the kids were in such a better place. I'd never even thought about wanting a tattoo before." Paige got that tattoo after she left her first husband, who we'd all known was a problem since high school. Paige never spoke of what went on in her house when she was married to him, but she speaks to me of it now. And there are two things I am certain of: I will never forgive that man for what he did to my friend; and if Paige's father hadn't stepped in and saved her, my friend would not be here. When Paige's children were six and nineteen months old, her father, who was perfectly healthy, sat her down in a restaurant and said, "I will give you your inheritance of thirty thousand dollars now, if you leave him." Within a month, Paige hired a moving company and got out while her husband was at work. The divorce was finalized a year later. "Best decision ever," she says. Paige never looked back. And neither do we. * * * Let me give you a little rundown of who we are now. Paige is a survivor. Vicki is a caregiver. Heather is religious. Ellen is such a feminist that when she married a man with her exact same last name, she insisted they hyphenate. At least, that's what I told my husband, who having met Ellen, believed me and still calls them (and here, I will substitute a generic last name for the sake of their anonymity) the Doe-Does. Me, I'm the funny one. My friends say that I have a special way of saying things, which means that when we're together I revert to my adolescent ways of Shock and Aw-no-you-didn't! No matter how old we get, we see each other like we first saw each other: young. We forgive each other like we did when we were young: easily. We lean into every story because no story is too long, or too much, because we come together so rarely to share. We don't judge each other's baggage, and we don't pack light. To be continued... Excerpted from Bring Your Baggage and Don't Pack Light: Essays by Helen Ellis All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.