Courtney Mitchell
The first time I met Daphne was in the fall of 1999 in her advanced creative writing class. She opened the class with a question that could have been a question, but also could have been a trap.
“What do we think of Oprah’s book club?”
No one answered, so she looked right at me and asked, “What do you think of Oprah’s book club?”
I was from a small town, very country, and not an English major. I loved Oprah’s book club. A Barnes & Noble had just opened in Winston-Salem, the closest city to my hometown, and they had all Oprah’s selections. Kaye Gibbons had an Oprah book. Anything that got more people to read books was a good thing, I said.
I said all this while everyone, especially Daphne, stared at me.
Later that day, I was walking home from my work-study job at the hospital and saw Daphne crossing Pittsboro Street. I walked her to her car, and we had our first real conversation. She told me that when she was my age, she’d been hopping trains across Europe. She wondered why I’d never done that. I don’t know, I told her; I had a work-study job and an internship and a lot of classes. I’d pieced together an entire college education with tiny scholarships and grants for which I had to reapply each year. That world she evoked seemed closed to me. I didn’t tell her that then, but I would, eventually. Over the years, over grilled cheese sandwiches at Swensen’s and burgers at Elmo’s and spaghetti in her kitchen, I’d tell her so many things, and she’d tell me just as many and more.
What I learned in my long friendship with Daphne was that she was very highbrow to my lowbrow, a snob, but never a snob to me. She was hard on me, and a champion for me, and she loved me, and she made me feel loved.
In the way she did for many students and friends, she wrapped me into her world. Each year, I pushed in the Scooby Doo style bookcase that revealed the ladder to her attic and went through her papers so she could do her taxes. I ended up with ticks in my hair. She’d repay me by taking me to Elmo’s where she’d present a tiny pencil to equally divide the check. Or, she’d pop open a tiny bottle of Miller Lite for us to split on the couch. One evening before I was due to help at her house, she called my college apartment where I was, inexplicably, watching The Exorcist with friends. On the other end of the line, she made terrible growling sounds and asked: “Is the demon girl spitting pea soup yet?”
She sent me long emails when I went away to graduate school and let me use her university office for work when I came to Chapel Hill on break. When I got married, my husband became her computer support, once summoned to her home to figure out what was wrong with her computer volume. Nothing was wrong – she just couldn’t hear. She once yelled at me for scraping into the trash two spaghetti noodles that she thought I should have saved.
I was waiting for her at Elmo’s when she had her first broken leg, and they brought the telephone to the table like I was in a soap opera. She loved that detail. I found out about her second broken leg when I was sitting on my couch, staring into space two days after my father died. I went up to the hospital to sit with her and told her about my Dad. She told me how much she missed her own Dad, her “Daddy.” I was so sad, but being with her that day was so much fun. I went to hospital PT with her, and she had me cancel appointments for her like a secretary, and she loved every minute of it. I did, too.
When she was writing “Chapel Hill in Plain Sight” she was searching for a photo of her friend Betty Smith, and she was distressed about its disappearance. I spent hours going through boxes and photos. We got nowhere because each photo summoned a new story – about her Daddy, about a Nicaraguan princess, about Max Steele. I really wanted to give up. Daphne was grumpy and demanding. I was hungry and tired. Late that night I peeled apart two old magazines, and there it was, the photo. She banged her cane on the floor and screamed, “Oh shit! Oh goody goody!” And went right to bed.
Daphne was tough, but so tender. During the years when I was struggling to have a baby, she was concerned and interested. We went out for Chinese when I finally got pregnant, and she pulled out my chair for me. She played with my baby and sang her the songs her parents had sung to her. I returned the favor by listening deeply when she was angry about her failing body, about the world seemingly moving on without her. She never felt old to me. And she never treated me like I was young. She wasn’t a grandmotherly figure to me – she was a real friend.
I cried so much when I heard she died. I still cry every time I think about her being gone, which she would think was very silly of me, but that would be okay.