I’d like to be gentle, approachable, sweet. But I can’t help myself: I’m always aware of how precious my existence is, and freshly determined to make the most of it, and I’m often the only person present who seems to even see the tasks lying on the floor before us like tackle for the horses, and who must therefore hoist the leather to my shoulders with a resigned familiar sigh, and saddle the steed, and ride.

It’s not so much that I want the work. I just understand that it needs to be done, and there’s no one else stepping up to do it.

My big question is: do the others see it and pretend they don’t, like when people cut into a line and act like others aren’t there? Or is the invitation to action really invisible to them?

“I’m so co-dependent,” my friend Lesley said sheepishly, confessing as if she understood the term. But she was referring to her custom of calling Ellie regularly, just to check on her. Lesley is the middle child in a large addictive family, and she has long habits of making excuses for her parents’ drinking and her siblings’ food and drugs. She is used to being accommodating and considerate. She’s a cream puff. But she resents it all a little. It’s gotten to where, whenever she gets no joy from doing something for another, she thinks it’s because of a failure in herself. She calls her old friend Ellie once a week but she gets no pleasure from the conversation. So she terms her act of calling “co-dependent.”

Lesley needs to be more selfish. She’s chronically depressed now, and variously medicated. But the world at large, the big audience, finds her attractive.

Her shoulders curve a little when she walks. It isn’t bad posture; it’s almost graceful, receptive. She’s pretty and she smiles often. She is quick to laugh at any joke and she tends to murmur at any narrative. Recently I’ve become aware that I wait for those responses when I make a pun or read her a story.

I worry a little that she might explode. She apologizes for the weather and the traffic. She makes the hotel bed before the chambermaid can get into the room. She bakes cookies and presents them to acquaintances on plates from Pier 1.

But she exhibits little criticisms of everyone. She smiles at strangers and then badmouths them, slightly, and she lavishes consideration on friends but afterwards makes cutting remarks, severely expressed. The strength of her criticism seems proportional to the depth of her love. I’ve seen her make hand gestures, middle finger upthrust or index finger aimed at a gagging tongue, while she’s sugar-sweet on the phone. I’ve watched her caress a visiting in-law and then, a second after departure, complain about the visit and the visitor.

Of course I wonder how deeply Lesley despises me when I leave the room. Who wouldn’t?

She lost a sibling when she was six. Her two-year old brother Will was run over in the next-door driveway. I can still see the harsh headline: “Neighborhood Nightmare – Teenager Accidentally Kills Toddler.” Both families, always friends, were thoroughly devastated (I know – I was there), but Will’s twin Benny was stricken, and in all the attention to him Lesley was overlooked. She suffered especially, because her busy mother had chased her out of the house when she complained of boredom, with a casual and careless assignment to look after the twins. Lesley hadn’t taken the command seriously, and her mother never regarded or remembered it, but afterward Lesley began to slump under the weight of her secret shameful responsibility. It didn’t matter how much we talked. She grew up fearful. She always follows rules.

And to hear her describe it, she and Sam were made for each other.

They met when they were 38. They have the same birthday – September 6th – and that was only one of the many qualities they shared. They both love to read, walk, and drink wine with dinner. They each hate jaywalking and littering, and like cats. They agree that astrology is worth study. It fascinated them that they share a passion for two mismatched vacation spots: Cape Cod and Disneyland.

Physically, though, they’re opposites. Although they are roughly the same five and a half foot height, Sam is slim and Lesley is solid. Lesley wears her dark hair cut short and blow-dried straight. Sam has long, classic, high-maintenance streaked blonde ropes down her back. Lesley is stooped and sedentary while Sam strides with obvious athleticism. Lesley’s face is naked; her nails are short and always clean. Sam is made up if she’s awake, and manicured every week.